Sweet Reason (9781590209011) Read online

“Communicate?”

  “You heard me. Communicate. As my communications officer, you communicate for this ship, don’t you? And you do it efficiently too. You don’t pull the trigger or give the order, I’ll give you that. What you do is advertise you have a conscience by hanging photographs over your bunk. And when you go back to civilian life you’ll boast that you didn’t pull a trigger. You leave the dirty work to people like me who have always been there when the country needed them. Of course you’re a fake, Mister Joyce. You receive and decode the messages that tell us what target to shoot at, and you make sure that I see those messages. You’re part of the system and it’s time you realized it. Do you know why I called you up here? Because for a moment there I actually thought you might be Sweet Reason. But you don’t have the guts to be Sweet Reason, Mister Joyce. You’re not worried about the people on the shore; all you’re worried about is what people will think of you.”

  Jones waved a hand toward the door. “That’ll be all, Mister Joyce. Just make sure you keep on communicating. And one more thing. Get those goddamn dead people off your bulkhead and put up some good, clean tit pictures, eh? You can consider that an order, Mister Joyce.”

  Boeth Peels Away a Shell or Two

  “Tit pictures?”

  “Tit pictures. He sat there playing with his phallus-flashlight and ordered me to put up tit pictures.”

  “Jesus, he’s incredible,” Boeth said, and he shook his head sympathetically and turned back to the hardboiled eggs that the Poet had swiped from the officers’ pantry. He rolled the first one against the side of the computer until the shell was completely cracked. Then he began picking at it with his thumbnail. The bits and pieces of shell that came away he laid out neatly on the deck — almost as if he intended to start in where all the king’s horses and all the king’s men had left off.

  In the background the allegro from one of Bach’s Brandenburgs rippled softly through the small room from Boeth’s tape deck.

  “Maybe you should feel flattered,” Boeth said, his mind more on the egg than the conversation.

  “What do you mean flattered?” Joyce challenged. Obviously in a black mood, he sat with his back against a shore fire control console, his sloping shoulders hunched forward, his legs thrust out in front of him. “This neonautical John Paul Jones insults me and you think I should be flattered. Some logic.”

  “You don’t understand.” Boeth shrugged his heavy shoulders. The shrug was his way of giving ground during a conversation. It was something he did grudgingly, but his friendship with Joyce was what made life on the Ebersole bearable. “He’s trying to track down the one man on this ship with a conscience and you’re the first suspect he comes up with. So you should feel flattered. That’s all I meant.”

  Joyce drew his knees up to his chin, exposing thin, hairless ankles. He reached over quickly and jerked up his socks, which were green. “Wallowitch says conscience is an inner voice that warns you when someone is looking. Out here” — the Poet waved his hand to take in all of Yankee Station — “nobody is looking, so there is no such thing as conscience.”

  Boeth finished peeling the first egg. He put it aside, took up the second and rolled it against the side of the computer. “You know something, Poet, the more I know you the more I realize how innocent you are.”

  Frown lines formed around Joyce’s eye sockets. He remembered that Mariana had accused him of being innocent too — though she had been talking in a sexual context.

  Boeth saw that the Poet was annoyed and shrugged again. “I’m not saying that innocence is anything to be ashamed of. I’m not saying that. It’s only that the world equates innocence with profundity, and you do too. But innocence has no depth. It doesn’t respond to the complexities of life with complexity of thought.”

  “But you haven’t said why the shoe fits me. How am I innocent?”

  Boeth looked up from the egg. “No offense intended —” he said with a smirk.

  “— none taken,” Joyce laughed. He had told Boeth about how the expression was bandied about in the wardroom and it was a joke between them. “No, listen, seriously, this is straight talk. Say what you think. How am I innocent?”

  “Well, for one thing you have a very innocent idea about morality. You think morality consists of taking moral positions, when what it really involves is defending them. What I’m getting at is that you’re basically a passive moralist. You wouldn’t knowingly kill someone. But you wouldn’t go out of your way to prevent someone from being killed either.” Boeth bent his head toward the egg and began peeling again.

  “You’re a goddamn Jesuit,” Joyce said lightly. “You’re hairsplitting —”

  “I’m not hairsplitting —”

  “You’re attacking me —” Joyce was agitated now.

  “I’m not attacking,” Boeth protested. “Don’t be so fucking sensitive.”

  “Okay, criticizing. Is that better? You’re criticizing me for renouncing the use of force as a means of persuasion —”

  “As a means of defending morality —”

  “Well, I admit it,” Joyce said. “I admit it openly. I renounce the use of force because I can’t be sure — nobody can ever be sure — to what end it should be applied.”

  “But don’t you see, you’re being innocent again,” Boeth said excitedly. “That’s not it, that’s not it at all. You renounce force because you think the world is in order —” Now Boeth leaned forward. “Think back, Poet. Do you remember the last contact we had with the big wide world outside the Eugene Ebersole?”

  “New York. Christmas in New York.”

  “And do you remember anything being out of order in New York over Christmas?”

  “I remember the sewer — the water gushed out of it and flooded the street. I remember the neon sign sizzling during the day and snapping off at dusk just as the other signs flashed on. And the stoplight. I remember the stoplight frozen in go and everyone fighting to cross the intersection at once.”

  Boeth shook his head. “That’s not what I had in mind when I said the world is out of order. What I had in mind was Mariana.” Boeth looked hard at Joyce. “You remember Mariana, don’t you?”

  Joyce remembered her very well.

  Ensign Joyce’s Curriculum Vitae

  She had a boyish face that looked handsome in shadows but pale and puffy in bright light and short dark hair that she kept fluffing with her fingers when she was nervous. She was nervous now. “I was born on a Tuesday, but I’m Wednesday’s child,” Mariana said.

  “Wednesday’s child?”

  “Wednesday’s child is full of woe. I’m full of woe. That makes me Wednesday’s child,” she explained.

  “Are you going to cry?” he asked.

  “We’ve been through that,” she said, annoyed.

  “You looked like you were going to,” he insisted.

  She winced and put a palm flat against her chest and swallowed hard. “What’s the matter?” Joyce asked.

  “Something’s stuck.”

  “What?”

  “How the fuck should I know — maybe an emotion,” she said.

  They fell asleep for a while, or at least Mariana did; the Poet lay there staring at the high ceiling trying to remember what it had been like. Thinking about it gave him an erection. In her sleep she turned toward him and felt the erection and folded her hand over it.

  They hadn’t been able to find her until the night of their last day in New York. Boeth had been telephoning since they arrived, but there had been no answer. Once he got a busy signal, but when he dialed back there was no answer and he assumed someone else must have been calling at the same time. Then on the afternoon of their fourth day in New York she had picked up the phone. “It’s me,” Boeth had said, and she had quickly agreed to meet them for a concert that night. When they met, Boeth and Mariana did most of the talking; the Poet watched them, trying to figure out whether there was anything between them. In the end he wasn’t sure.

  At the concert she sat
with Boeth, and Joyce had to settle for a seat two rows in front of them. When he turned around she looked at him without smiling, almost without recognition. Below them, standing alone in the middle of a large stage, his eye sockets wide open but his lids closed, an ear cocked, the violinist listened to his own music like a blind man. The only tenseness visible was around his mouth; his lips were pressed together as if there were no teeth behind them. Beads of sweat glistened on his sideburns during the saraband.

  Afterward Boeth, Joyce and Mariana drank beer in a bar a few blocks from her apartment and she told them about the abortion. There was no transition; she just started to talk about it.

  “The worst part was the cops. When I told them I’d been raped, they smirked and asked me if I’d put up a fight. How could I put up a fight with a switchblade pressed against my stomach the whole time? The cops were sicker than the guy who raped me. They asked all kinds of questions. They wanted every detail. Like did I spread my legs or did he force them open? Every time I answered they looked at each other and smirked. Later one of them asked me if I wanted to go out and have a drink with him — to unwind. That’s what he said. To unwind.”

  Mariana sipped her beer. “I guess I didn’t resist the raper enough to convince the pigs I was raped. And since it wasn’t a rape, I wasn’t eligible for a legal free abortion. They were going to make me have the fucking baby. Well, fuck them. I heard about this doctor in Queens. Five hundred bucks for five minutes’ work. You know what he did with the fetus. He flushed it down the toilet. That’s what he did with it.”

  Mariana collected the moisture from the side of the beer glass on her fingertips and then rubbed them across her forehead. “I stained again this morning and ruined my last pair of underpants. Fuck!”

  After a while Boeth asked: “Where’d you get the bread for the abortion?”

  “I borrowed it from a bank — I told them it was for home repairs.” That brought a laugh.

  “How do you feel now?” Joyce asked.

  “Empty,” she said. “I feel empty. How do you think I feel?”

  Joyce looked for the waiter and caught his eye and ordered three more beers. Then he looked back. “You must have cried a lot,” he said.

  Mariana looked at him strangely. “What makes you say that?”

  “I don’t know. It’s normal for people to cry after something like that, that’s all.” He studied the bubbles rising in his beer.

  “Well, it’s not normal for me. I don’t cry.”

  “Why?” the Poet asked. When she didn’t answer immediately, he said: “What do you have against crying?”

  “I don’t have a goddamn thing against crying,” she said. “I don’t cry for the same reason all people who don’t cry don’t cry; I’m afraid if I start I won’t be able to stop.”

  They walked down Saint Marks Place through the slush, past a Salvation Army band surrounded by a group of hecklers, and turned right on Second Avenue. Two teenage girls, one carrying a sleeping baby propped on her shoulder, stood on the corner next to a snowbank panhandling, and Joyce gave the one with the baby a quarter. The traffic light on Second Avenue was frozen on green and cars and people were jammed into the intersection. They crossed in single file with Boeth leading the way and Mariana sandwiched between them. In the middle of the next block Mariana stopped to talk to two men shivering in a doorway. She handed one of them some bills and he handed her an envelope. When she came back to Joyce and Boeth, she was angry. “Fucking inflation,” she said.

  She lived in a fourth-floor walkup in an old brownstone just off Second Avenue. The front door to her apartment had three locks on it. Inside there was a living room with a kitchenette on one end, and a bedroom. The bathroom was off the bedroom. Boeth and Joyce sank into chairs in the living room; Mariana went to the bathroom and then came back and put on some Vivaldi.

  They sat for a long time rolling joints and smoking, listening to records and talking. Boeth, fondling one of Mariana’s two cats, described the race riot on the mess deck. He told about Ohm’s daily betting pools and about how everyone smoked pot on board and about how Captain J. P. Horatio Jones made it his business not to find out about it. He described McTigue, who was his immediate boss, and Lustig, who was McTigue’s boss, and told about the night baker, he didn’t know his name, who played Nat King Cole cassettes all the time, and about Tevepaugh’s single solitary one-man band. Joyce asked Boeth if he had heard the one about Wallowitch reporting aboard and demanding a transfer to a ship, and Boeth laughed and said no he hadn’t heard it. Then Joyce told about True Love putting the sweepings in the XO’s urinals.

  Mariana asked if they liked the navy and they both said no, but Boeth said it was changing, said he had heard about a destroyer skipper who had sideburns and allowed his men to grow beards.

  “It figures,” said Mariana. “The strength of America is its ability to co-opt everything that’s not in the mainstream. The kids wear long hair so the officers wear long hair and suddenly you think there’s been a qualitative change. Are the guns on a ship more humanitarian because the men who shoot them have long hair?”

  “The guns aren’t,” said Joyce, “but the bureaucracy is. Sideburns and long hair do something to the people who wear them.”

  “Bullshit,” said Mariana. “A bureaucrat is a bureaucrat is a bureaucrat. The world is one big bureaucracy. If there were two men left in it one would ask the other for a government job.”

  Joyce said: “We wouldn’t need governments if people loved each other — really loved each other.”

  “Oh we love each other all right,” said Mariana, “but not at the same time. That’s the trouble.”

  It was close to two A.M. and Mariana yawned. “It’s late, and I’m stoned,” she said. She looked at Joyce. “You want to get laid?”

  Joyce looked at Boeth, who smirked and waved his hand toward the bedroom and said, “Be my guest.”

  “But I —” Joyce said. His face turned beet-red. “I mean I thought —” He was embarrassed at his embarrassment. “What I mean is I thought you just had an abortion.”

  Mariana laughed and told him he was innocent. “There are other openings in the female body,” she said, and she led him by the hand into the bedroom. From behind them came the excruciating sound of a phonograph needle being scratched across the grooves of a record.

  Afterward she disappeared into the bathroom for a while and Joyce heard her brushing her teeth. When she came back she propped herself up on some pillows. That was when she told him about being Wednesday’s child.

  A little after four in the morning she went to the bathroom again, and the sound of the toilet flushing woke Joyce and so they talked for a while. At one point she cupped her breasts, which sagged more than they should have for a girl her age. “Do you like my body?” she asked.

  He said yes he did, yes he liked it very much.

  “Shit you do,” she said. “Well, I like my body. I like everything that’s biodegradable.”

  Joyce laughed. “Everybody likes his body,” he said, “and not because it’s biodegradable.”

  “You are innocent,” Mariana said. “He doesn’t like his body.” And she motioned to the next room where Boeth lay stretched out on the couch. Suddenly Mariana saw that Joyce didn’t know what she was talking about. “I thought you knew — about him, I mean. I thought, you being friends and all, he would have told you. Shit, that was pretty stupid of me—”

  “You thought he would have told me what?”

  “About it.” Again she jerked her head toward the living room.

  “What is it? What are you talking about?”

  “Shit, why do you think you’re in here and not him? Because he can’t, that’s why. You understand? He can’t. He was born with a deformed penis. He was in and out of hospitals for grafting operations until he stopped growing. He’s perfectly normal now physically, but he’s convinced it’s not normal, he’s convinced it’s ugly and deformed. He’s been going to psychiatrists off and on for
ten years, but he’s never had a hard-on in his life.”

  “My God, he never told me — I didn’t know —”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have either. I found out by accident. I met him at school. He was getting a master’s in physics and I was in comparative history. We hung around together for a while, you know how it is. I was pretty active politically and he sort of became active too, more or less to keep me company. One day at a sit-in in front of the dean’s office — we were protesting against the university accepting government research grants — I asked him if he wanted to go to bed with me. It wasn’t something we’d talked about, but it never occurred to me anything was wrong. Anyhow, I asked him if he wanted to make it with me. All of a sudden he got furious and told me to fuck off. Then he jumped up and ran over to the first cop he could find and kicked him in the shins. You should’ve seen it — he just hauled off and kicked. Wow! There was a photograph in the papers the next day of him being dragged away by two pigs. I guess the draft board took one look at the picture and that was the end of his student deferment.”

  Mariana asked Joyce if he wanted another joint and when he nodded she rolled one and lit it and pulled in the smoke and passed the joint to him. They smoked and talked for a long time. When the joint was gone the Poet looked around the room. “Who owns all this …” he motioned to the furniture.

  “Not me. I rent the apartment furnished. I’ll always rent furnished. I never want to own anything more than the clothes on my back. Property is theft. That’s Proudhon.”

  “Well, I don’t mind owning things if they’re beautiful. A thing of beauty is a joy forever. That’s Keats.”

  “You’re a babe in the woods politically. In industrial societies, or their sequels, postindustrial societies, things aren’t supposed to be beautiful; quantity is king, not quality.”

  “I don’t know,” Joyce said. “There must be a point where quantitative change becomes qualitative change.”

  “Shit, do you really believe that? That’s what’s known as the big lie. They’d like us to believe that. They’d like us to believe that if you make enough boob tubes and cars your life will change. But it just isn’t so. You know what Lenin’s last article was called, the last thing he wrote before he died? It was called ‘Better Fewer But Better.’ God, you really have a lot to learn. No wonder they made you an officer in their navy. You’re brainwashed, you’re propagandized, you’re part of the Establishment, you’re part of the problem. Maybe some day you’ll do something to cut the umbilical cord. Maybe.” And Mariana snapped the light off and went to sleep with her back to the Poet.