Jonathan Lethem - Men and Cartoons

“Of course.”

“We. . love. . jazz. .”

I wondered whether he meant my father or, somehow, me. I had in fact over the years come around to my father's love of jazz, though my preference was not so much Ornette Coleman and Rahsaan Roland Kirk as Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson.

“. . poker. .”

“He cleaned you out,” I reminded him.

“Yezz. . good times. . beautiful women. .” He struggled, swallowed hard, blinked. “All this controversy. . not worth it. .”

“My father was never involved in any controversy,” I heard myself say, though I knew Super Goat Man was speaking only of himself, his lost career.

“No. . absolutely true. . knew how to live. .”

Angela had leaned back, pursing her lips to savor the cigar. I might have noticed the room's gabble of conversation had dampened somewhat — might have noticed it sooner, I mean.

“So. . many. . hangovers. .”

“But you and I have something in common besides my father,” I told Super Goat Man.

“Yezz. . yezz. .?”

“Of course we do,” I began, and though I now understood we had the attention of the entire room, that the novelty of Super Goat Man's reminiscences had drawn every ear, I found myself unable to quit before I finished the thought. Further, having gained their attention, I allowed my voice to rise to a garrulous, plummy tone, as if I were starring in dinner theater. Before the line was half out of my mouth, I knew that the words, by airing the sort of laundry so desperately repressed in a community as precious as Corcoran, damned my candidacy. But that was a prize I no longer sought. Broader repercussions I could only guess at. My wife's eyes were on me now, her cigar's blunt tip flaring. I'd answer to her, later, if she gave me the chance.

It was the worst thing I could think to say. The impulse had formed in the grip of sexual jealousy, of course. But before it crossed my lips I knew my loathing had its origins in an even deeper place, the mind of a child wondering at his father's own susceptibility to the notion of a hero.

What I said was this: “I once saw you rescue a paper clip.”

1/12/03

Dear M,

Our long letters are pleasing to me, but they do come slowly. Lulled by the intrinsic properties of e-mail, I've been willing to let most of my other correspondence slide down that slippery slope, into hectic witty ping-pong. But our deep connection, for twenty years or more now unrefreshed or diluted or whatever it would be by regular communications in person or on the phone, is precious to me, and demands more traditional letters, even if those mean long gaps. I suppose three-month breaks are not so much in a friendship once treated so casually that we let nearly a decade go by, eh?

You asked about A. We've finally broken it off, the end of a nearly three-year chapter in my life, and a secret chapter as well. For, apart from you, safely remote in Japan, I've confided in no one. Her horrible marriage survived us, a fact that would have seemed absurd to me at the beginning, if some time traveler had come back to whisper it in my ear. The break was mutual — mutual enough to give it that name — and I'd be helpless to guess who is the more scarred. We won't be friends, but we were never going to be. Dissolving a secret affair is eerily simple: A and I only had to quit lying that we didn't exist.

Did I tell you about “The National Anthem”? I don't think so. This was the first night we stole together from her husband, the first intentional rendezvous, at a bed-and-breakfast outside Portland, Maine. A always traveled with a Walkman and a wallet of CDs, and that night, as we lay entwined in a twee canopy bed, she insisted on playing me a song, though there was no way for us to listen to it together. Instead she cued it up and watched me while it played, her ungroggy eyes inspecting me from below the horizon of my chest, mine a posture of submission: James Carr singing “The Dark End of the Street.” I recognized it, but I'd never listened closely before. It's a song of infidelity and hopeless love, full of doomed certainty that the lovers, the love, will fail.

“I've got a friend who calls that ‘The National Anthem,'” she said.

I gave her what was surely a weak-sickly smile, though likely I thought it was a cool and dispassionate one, at the time. She didn't elaborate, just let it sink in. I didn't ask who the friend might be — the unspecificity seemed as essential to the mood between us as the dual rental cars, the welcoming basket of cookies and fruit we'd ignored downstairs, or the silent fucking we'd enjoyed, our orgasms discrete, in turn. To press one another back into the world of names, of our real individual lives, would have seemed a rent in the shroud of worldly arbitrariness which enclosed our passion. Of course this was morbid, I see it now.

“There's a Bob Dylan song,” I said then. “‘Ninety Miles an Hour (Down a Dead End Street).' I think it's a cover, actually. Same thing: We're on a bad motorcycle with a devil in the seat, going ninety miles an hour down a dead end street. . ”

“Yes, but this is ‘The National Anthem.'”

By refusing the comparison A put me on notice that this wasn't a dialogue, but a preemptive declaration. She'd be the one to manage our yearnings, by her foreknowledge of despair. Fair enough: her jadedness was what I'd been drawn to in the first place.

Of course you know, M, because I've told you stories, how we rode her jadedness — our bad motorcycle — down our own dead-end street. It wasn't kept anonymously cute, with baskets of cookies, for long. The perversity of the affair, it seems to me now, is that under cover of delivering her from the marriage she claimed to be so tired of, A and I climbed inside the armature of that marriage instead. By skulking at its foundations, its skirts, we only proved its superiority. However aggrieved she and R might be, however dubious their prospect, it wasn't a secret affair, wasn't nearly as contemptible as us . Certainly that can be the only explanation for why, in a world of motels and with my own apartment free, we so often met at her place — at theirs. And I think now that though I mimed indifference whenever she predicted imminent destruction, I'd lusted to destroy a marriage, that I was far more interested in R than I allowed myself to know.

But I don't want to make this letter about A. You've written at length about your uncertainties in your own marriage — written poignantly, then switched to a tone of flippancy, as though to reassure me not to be too concerned. Yet the flippancy is the most poignant of all — your joshing about your vagrant daily lusts in such an unguarded voice makes them real to me. Having never been to Japan, nor met your wife and child, I've been guilty of picturing it as some rosy, implacable surface, as though by moving from New York to Tokyo and entering a “traditional” Japanese marriage you'd migrated from the complicated world into an elegantly calm piece of eighteenth-century screen art. I'm probably not the first person guilty of finding it convenient to imagine my friends' lives are simpler than my own. It's also possible I began this letter by speaking of A in order to discredit myself as any sort of reasonable counsel, to put you in mind of my abhorrent track record (or maybe I'm just obsessed).

Let me be more honest. I don't spend all that much time imagining Japan. However much you and I speak of our contemporary lives, I picture you as I left you: eighteen years old. You and I were inseparable for the first three years at music and art, then distant in our senior year, then you vanished. Now you're a digital wraith. What would it take to displace the visceral daily knowledge of our teenage years — how extensive would the letters have to be? When I try to think of your marriage I instead tangle, helplessly, in the unexamined questions surrounding our first, lost friendship. I don't mean to suggest anyone doesn't find a muddle when they recall that year, launching from twelfth grade to the unknown. But it is usual to have you lucidly before me, daring me, by your good faith in these recent letters, to understand.