Jonathan Lethem - Men and Cartoons

Do you remember my obsession with Bess Hersh? Do you remember how you played the go-between? That was junior year, just before the breach between us. Bess was a freshman, a ninth grader. You and I were giddy dorks in rapidly enlarging bodies, hoping that being two years older could stand in, with the younger girls, for the cool we'd never attained. I'll never forget the look on your face when you found me where I waited, at the little park beside the school, and said that Bess's appointed friend, her “second,” had confirmed that she liked me too .

Bess Hersh saw through me shortly after that. I hadn't known what to do with this coup except bungle it when she and I had a moment alone, bungle it with my self-conscious tittering, my staring, my grin. I tried boy jokes on her, Steve Martin routines, and those don't work on girls in high school. What's required then is some stammering James Dean, with shy eyes cast to pavement. Those shy eyes are what give a girl as young as that breathing room, I think. You mastered those poses in short order — I'd wait until college.

Soon, agonizingly soon, Bess was on Sean Hyman's arm, and I felt that I'd only alerted the hipper Sean to her radiant presence among the new freshmen. But I still cling to that moment when I knew she'd mistaken me for cool, before I opened my mouth, while you were still ferrying messages between us so that she could project what she wished into the outline of me. I still picture her, too, as some sort of teenage sexual ideal, lost forever: her leggy slouching stride, the cinch of worn jeans over that impossible curve from her narrow waist to the scallop of her hips, her slightly too-big nose and fawny eyes. I wonder what kind of woman she grew into, whether I'd glance at her now. Once she gave me boners that nearly caused me to faint. Just typing her name is erotic to me still.

Funny, though, I don't remember speaking to her more than once or twice. I remember speaking with you about her, chortling about her, I should say, and scheming, and pining, and once, when we were safely alone in the Sheep's Meadow in Central Park, bellowing her name to the big empty sky. I recall talking this way with you too about Liz Kessel, Margaret Anodyne, and others. I recall the dopey, sexed-up love lyrics we'd write together, never to show to the girls. You and I were just clever enough, and schooled enough in Mad magazine , Woody Allen, Talking Heads, Frank Zappa, and Devo, to ironize our sprung lusts, to find the chaos of our new-yearning hearts bitterly funny.

When, six months on, you first began combing your hair differently, and when you began listening to New Romantic bands, and when you began dating Tu-Lin, I was disenchanted with you, M. Violently disenchanted, it seems to me now. I felt all the music you listened to was wrong, a betrayal — you'd quit liking the inane clever stuff, and moved on to music that felt postured and sexy instead. I felt you'd forgotten yourself, and I tried to show you what you'd forgotten. When I'd third around with you and your new Vietnamese girlfriend, I'd seek to remind you of our secret languages, our jokes — if they hadn't worked on Bess they should at least still mean something to you — but those japes now fell flat, and you'd rebuff me, embarrassed.

Of course the worse I fared the harder I tried. For a while. Then that became our falling-out. I must have appeared so angry — this is painful speculation, now. Of course, what seemed so elaborately cultural or aesthetic to me at the time — I faulted you for hairstyle, music, Tu-Lin's Asianness — all appears simply emotional in retrospect. I was threatened by the fact that you'd gone from pining for girls to having them, sure. But I'd also invested in you all my intimations of what I was about to surrender in myself, by growing up. By investing them in you I could make them something to loathe, rather than fear. Loathing was safer.

Oh, the simple pain of growing up at different speeds!

A page or two ago I supposed I was going to build back from this reminiscence, to some musings on your current quandary, your adult ambivalence about the commitments you entered when you married (I nearly wrote entered precociously , but that's only the case by my retarded standard). But I find I'm reeling even deeper into the past. When I was seven or eight, years before you and I had met, my parents befriended a young couple, weirdly named August and Sincerely. I guess those were their hippie names — at least Sincerely's must have been. August was a war resister. My parents had sort of adopted him during his trial, for he'd made the gesture of throwing himself an eighteenth birthday party in the office of his local draft board, a dippy bit of agitprop which got him singled out, two years later, for prosecution. Sincerely was a potter, with a muddy wheel and a red-brick kiln in the backyard of her apartment. She was blond and stolid and unpretentious, the kind of woman who'd impress me now as mannish, a lesbian perhaps, at least as a more plausible candidate for chumming around than for an attraction (I felt she was a woman, then, but she must have been barely twenty, if that).

We'd visit Sincerely often during the six or eight months while August served out his sentence, sit in the yard sipping iced tea she'd poured with clay-stained hands, and in that time I very simply — and articulately, to myself — fell in love. I was still pre-sexual enough to isolate my feelings for Sincerely as romantic and pure. In stories like this one children are supposed to get mixed up, and to imagine that adults will stop and wait for them to grow up, but I wasn't confused for a moment. I understood that my love for Sincerely pertained to the idea of what kind of woman I meant to love in my future life as a man. I promised myself she would be exactly like Sincerely, and that when I met her I would love her perfectly and resolutely, that I would be better to her than I have in fact ever been to anyone — than anyone's ever been to anyone else.

So my love wasn't damaged by August's return from jail (he'd never gone upstate, instead served his whole time in the Brooklyn House of Detention, on Atlantic Avenue). I didn't even bother to resent his possession of Sincerely, which I saw as intrinsically flawed by grown-up sex and diffidence. August wasn't a worthy rival, and so I just went on secretly loving Sincerely with my childish idealism. The moron-genius of my young self felt it knew better than any adult how to love, felt certain it wouldn't blow the chance if it were given one. Not one day I've lived since has satisfied that standard. Of course, it is strange and sad for me now to see a shade of future triangulation in that emotional arrangement — I'd cast August as an early stand-in for R, a man I would pretend was irrelevant even as I fitted myself into his place in life.

What I'd promised to hold on to then, M, is the same thing I'd raged against losing when you began to grow away from me, when I failed the test presented by your sultry new self that senior year. How ashamed that promiser would be to learn — had some malicious time traveler drifted back to whisper it in his ear — about the pointless ruin of my years with A. Those promises we make to ourselves when we are younger, about how we mean to conduct our adult lives, can it be true we break every last one of them? All except for one, I suppose: the promise to judge ourselves by those standards, the promise to remember the child who would be so appalled by compromise, the child who would find jadedness wicked.

Yes, my childish self would read this letter and think me poisoned with knowledge, but the truth is that what I flung against A so recklessly was my innocence, preserved in a useless form. The revving heart of my hopefulness, kicked into gear anew, is the most precious thing about me, I refuse to vilify it. I hope I fall in love again. But it's a crude innocence that fails to make the distinctions that might have protected me from A, and A from me. For by imagining I could save her from her marriage, by that blustery optimism by which I concealed from myself my own despair at the cul-de-sac lust had led us into, I forced her to compensate by playing the jaded one on both our behalves. What I mean to say is that I forced her to play me that song, M, by grinning at her like a loon. Like the way I grinned at Bess Hersh. I gave A no choice but to be the dark lady, by being the moron-child who thought love could repair what love had wrecked. A motorcycle that's gone off a cliff isn't repaired by another motorcycle.