Robert Coover - Public Burning

We broke at last, gasping, groaning, sucking our battered lips, clutching each other desperately. She buried her head on my shoulder, nibbling frantically at my neck. “Oh, Richard!” she moaned. “You’re so strong, so powerful!” She tangled her fingers in the matted hair on my chest. “I feel so weak!”

I could hardly breathe for the need to, I was afraid I might have an attack of hay fever (girls’ hair often set me off), but all in all I was feeling very good, I won’t say I’d never felt better in my life, because I was already beginning to have worries about how the hell I was going to get out of here and hopefully get her out as well, but I was feeling very good. That she had called me Richard and not Dick moved me deeply. I thought: if I’d taken this direct approach more often, I might have had a lot more fun in life!

My mouth was near her ear. I realized she was waiting for me to say something. All I could think of were some lines from a play I was once in long ago: Gentlemen of the Jury! In a few moments you will be called upon to decide the fate of a woman! Is it in you to understand her? Is it in you to understand the man she loved? Who is on trial in this case? And they weren’t even my lines! “I always… I always used to admire Judge Brandeis!” I gasped. Jesus, where the hell had such a thought come from, I wondered? “And Justice, uh, Cardozo!”

“Oh, Richard!” she cried, and kissed me again. Apparently, I could do nothing wrong. Again our hands roamed, again our tongues played. I was beginning to feel at home in there, beginning to discover some tastes for the second time, and I found I enjoyed this even more than the first. She was panting hotly down my collar, clawing at my shirt and pants, ripping away buttons and safety pins, shredding what was not already shredded. I’d found the slit in the dress. Even in a struggle as clear-cut as that between tyranny and freedom, I thought, there are gray areas. “Oh, Richard! You don’t know what it’s been like for me, these two years here…and…and the years before…”

“I know, Ethel. Believe me, I know…”

She gripped me tightly, rubbing her body rhythmically against mine, as though to bring to life that cabbie’s story of her Morse-code bumps and grinds. “I’m not like this! You won’t believe me, but I’ve never kissed any man but Julie in my life! Not seriously!”

“I believe you,” I whispered. “I… I haven’t either!” I pulled her close to me. “Kissed a woman, I mean.”

“Oh, Richard! What’s happening to us?”

I remembered crossing upstage a step, then again facing the jury. This was not The Trysting Place or The Dark Tower . It was not The Little Accident . This was the Night of January 16th and I was the Prosecuting Attorney, kindly in appearance but shrewd in manner. Backstage, Pat was watching me. A few months ago, that well-known figure stood with kingdoms and nations in one hand and a whip in the other. Then why should he commit suicide?

“It’s so strange…waiting to die,” Ethel said softly. It was incredible this rapport, this perfectly reflected image, it made shivers run up and down my spine. Or maybe that was her fingernail. But there was another, one whom fate had sent him for his salvation …. “I never dreamed…anything like this…”

“Listen, Ethel, maybe we can still—”

“Did you think you’d be Vice President of the United States one day?”

“What?”

“When you were a little boy, what did you think you’d be when you grew up?”

“Uh…a railroad engineer. But, Ethel—”

“I thought I was going to be a singer. A famous singer. I really believed that!”

“Yes, I know,” I said.

“You know?”

“Yes. Later I wanted to be a lawyer in New York and I was in New York the night you met Julie. I was looking for a job. We might have found each other that night. Things might have been different.”

“I wouldn’t want you to be anything but what you are, Richard! I envy you your power. Your majesty. You are a great man, and I…”

“But I always wanted to be free. I wanted to be a bum.”

“I wanted to be a great actress. I dreamed of going to Hollywood. I would have had to struggle, work in soda fountains, take bit parts — but in the end everybody would have loved me. We might have met there. I might have got a job in your home town.”

“I… I gave a speech in Hollywood once. Darryl Zanuck said it was the most tremendous performance he’d ever seen.”

“Yes. I know,” she said.

“You know?”

“I was accepted for the Schola Cantorum. I was the youngest voice the choir had ever had. But I couldn’t go on tour because I couldn’t leave my job, my mother wouldn’t—” Suddenly, she burst into tears, began weeping helplessly on my shoulder.

“Ethel! My God! What is it?”

“Somebody…somebody came…” She could hardly get it out, she was breaking my heart with the struggle: “…to measure me today!”

“What? To measure—?”

“They said… they said it was for a wax museum! Oh, Richard!” She was sobbing uncontrollably now, trembling violently all over.

“Ethel…that’s…that’s terrible!” And I began to cry as well. Real tears!

“I don’t want …I don’t want to die!”

“I don’t want you to die either, Ethel!” I sobbed. It was like a dam-burst, all falling out of me. We were clutching each other desperately, completely dissolved in tears. I don’t know how we stayed on our feet. “It’s terrible! I can’t stand thinking about it!”

She squeezed me more tightly than ever. “You won’t die, Richard! Don’t be afraid!”

“Two of my brothers died!” I bawled. “I always thought… I would be next!”

“Oohh!” she wailed. “Brothers! Don’t talk about brothers!”

“It nearly killed my mother, trying to keep my brother alive! And then he died anyway!”

“My mother made fun of me! She said there was no place in life for arty people! She sent me out to work!”

“She was cruel to you!”

“She took my money! She hated me!”

“My mother sent me away to live with my aunt! She — she didn’t want me!”

“Oh, Richard!”

“Once I went all the way to Arizona to — to clean the horsepoop out of stables just to be with her and she didn’t appreciate it!”

“My mother wouldn’t let me take music lessons!”

“I nearly died of pneumonia!”

“I have terrible backaches!”

“I get hay fever in September!” We looked into each other’s faces. Tears were streaming down our cheeks. “Oh, Ethel! You’re so — so understanding!”

“Hold me close, Richard! I feel cold! Warm me with your warmth!”

We kissed again. This time languorously, purposefully, intently. The sweet salt of tears mingled with the now-familiar taste of our lips. I thought: all strength lies in giving, not taking. I wanted to serve. We held each other’s hands. In this long chaste embrace, I felt an incredible new power, a new freedom. Where did it come from? Uncle Sam? The Phantom? Both at once? From neither, I supposed. There was nothing overhead any more, I had escaped them both! I was outside guarded time! I was my own man at last! I felt like shouting for joy!

We separated. We stared at each other through our tears. We laughed. We hugged each other, stared, laughed again. We pecked playfully at each other’s lips. We patted each other’s bottoms. We rubbed noses. It was a bit prominent her nose. Of course. I liked it though: so different from Pat’s.

She cocked her head to one side and grinned. “You’ve got a funny nose,” she said. We laughed and laughed.