Dance the Eagle to Sleep Read online

  Of course they weren’t going to ship him off to Guatemala to stand guard over the embassy and United Fruit. The Coming Thing were assigned to the Youth Services Bureau in Philadelphia, which meant they played for teenage functions at schools, settlement houses, or in the park, and got sent to other cities for similar use. They played at the big assemblies where spokesmen (called pigeons by the kids) from the different forces made pitches. He had to put in an appearance at the bureau five days a week. He was supposed to punch in and punch out for a nine-to-five day plus performances extra—they were big on discipline—but the office manager was a good scene, and after a while she took care of that.

  Mrs. Kapp was twenty-six. She’d been married and divorced, and running an office full of privileged kids made her nervous. Mostly, they treated her like a warden or a piece of nasty equipment. She wasn’t pretty—she had a small, pug-nosed face, and she wore glasses too big for it—but she had good solid bouncy breasts and her hips curved out like a cello. He saw right away that she was shy of him and expecting to be ignored or put down. He sprawled in the visitor’s chair, while she gave him those quick looks and went on stabbing at the blotter with a letter opener. “A woman my age trying to manage this circus,” she said about five times until he gave her his slow grin.

  He picked her out to spend time with because she gave off unhappy vibrations but not hard ones. Most of the kids were on jackhammer ego trips of their own. The only other human in the place was a black girl from a trio, The Sharmonts. She was their lead singer, a little girl with a big sexy voice. She cried a lot, and she was bitter and mean as a fist. Her whole family had been wiped out when the Army shelled Bedford-Stuyvesant during the bloody summer of the last year of the King of Clubs, when the president had announced his policy of “limited disciplinary retaliation” for uprisings. She hated whites and she let him know it.

  Mrs. Kapp, he found by looking in the file, was Denise. He began calling her that when they were alone. He stopped by her office when he was bored and asked her questions and made her talk till she opened up like a daisy. He wasn’t out for anything, except maybe to keep himself as comfortable as he could, to ease the bite of discipline on him. And he had to stay human. So he made her talk. First about the office and then about herself and her bad marriage and her crappy family and her loneliness. He liked to watch her come slowly to life. She showed him pictures of her kid, Stevie. Did it shyly. She had to be asked everything twice, because she didn’t believe anybody could be interested. They had really got to her and begun to grind.

  Shawn was bored for the first time in his life for most of every day. He felt cut off from the kids they played for. It had been their thing, and they did it because it felt good. Turning people on. Now their group was part of the pacification program—caught themselves. They even had to have their programs approved beforehand. So they stayed cool and detached.

  Frodo said that it was no different, that they had always been selling something, or what did they think was the name of the game anyhow? Frodo affected a sudden severe cynicism. The only thing that bugged him, he said, was that they were being taken. They could be making piles, and instead they were being used to sell somebody else’s product. Yes, they were used. Rock meant liberation. It meant opening up your head to those sounds. It meant blowing their minds. It meant rebellion, freedom, sex. Now they were selling Today’s Swinging Army. The coming thing for these kids was being channeled into servicing the empire and then back to school for training and then into a niche. It meant co-optation, manipulation: it meant the rest of your life doing Their Thing. It meant, if you don’t fit we’ll snip off the pieces that stick out, baby, and then you’d fit just fine.

  So there they were, they played the music, and the kids screamed in sort of the same old way and shouted for their old songs. But it felt meaner. It felt like the kids knew they were being conned and were even more determined to rip off a piece of flesh. The Coming Thing were organ-grinder’s monkeys, but the organ-grinder was the state, and they were showing the other little monkeys how groovy it could be to work for the organ-grinder, too. They all felt the pressure, the deadness, and they shrank from each other.

  Her eyes were hazel, sometimes brownish, sometimes greenish. He would sit on the desk while they talked. Shyly she would touch his arm, retreat. Nothing more. It was taking forever, he thought, then listened to himself and realized he had decided to go to bed with her. Why? Why not? Because she wanted to and never would. Because he wanted to take off her clothes. She would look better that way. It seemed like something nice.

  So one afternoon he slid off the desk, picked her up out of her swivel chair and kissed her, taking off the owl’s glasses. She went soft and woozy in his arms and then grabbed him hard. Let go all at once. Stared at him with her mouth slightly open. He reached for her again. “Not here.” she said.

  She gave him her address and instructions. She had to draw a map for him. She was flustered and clumsy. She would not look at him and then she would stare hard, her glasses back on, trying to read his face. Are you fooling? Are you teasing me? What do you want? Aw, come on, Denise. He felt gentle and sure with her. His big soft goose.

  He was a ridiculously long time driving around and around before he could park his Porsche. Dingy narrow noisy streets. A little three-room walk-up flat over a drugstore. He could hear kitchen noises from the next apartment. There was a lad, a real live lad—Stevie, aged five. They sat at a metal table in a corner of the kitchen and ate hamburgers and instant potatoes and overcooked frozen beans and store-bought layer cake. Denise was embarrassed and tried to make Stevie mind his manners at the table.

  Afterward, she gave Stevie a bath in a tub full of sailboats and submarines and a red and blue Noah’s ark that floated. Stevie slept in the box-sized bedroom. When she had put Stevie to bed, she came back and turned on the television. They sat on the couch staring at it. Funny how he could hear people stirring all over the building. He put his arm around her, and she began to tremble and look suffocated. He pulled her onto his lap. At once she began to kiss him back passionately and all her soft full flesh to move against him and quiver.

  “Let’s get undressed,” he said.

  “This opens up.”

  They pulled the couch out into a double bed, and she unrolled the bedcovers from the closet. Then they both very rapidly undressed and got in. Her skin was soft, plushy. He felt as if his fingers left prints. Her hands on him were avid and yet gentle. She was easy to please. She started coming almost as soon as he entered, yet she kept her head and moved with him. It was nice, very, very nice. They watched a movie on television and then got back into bed. He fell asleep in a relaxed coil and spent the night.

  She rose early and put on her clothes and tried to get him up. He did not feel like budging.

  “Stevie will be getting up.”

  “But not me. Not yet. We can’t go into the office together anyhow, right? So sign me in, and I’ll mosey along by the middle of the morning,”

  She was nervous and hurried the kid through his cereal and milk. But she had already lost the ability to fight Shawn. Too insecure, too nice, too genuinely soft. He went back to sleep in spite of the building noises.

  When he got up, there was a ticket on his car and a brand-new scratch on the street side. Two kids were climbing on it. Damned nine o’clock side-changing. She didn’t have a car.

  “That’s a hell of a neighborhood for parking,” he told her in the office.

  “But it’s convenient on the bus to work … Maybe you could come on the bus? Your car looks a little conspicuous.”

  It was a blue Porsche, the color—as many girls had told him—of his eyes. She was still watching, holding her breath to see if he was in fact going to come again. He laughed and patted her fanny. Not that night. He had a concert. But the next. When the next night came, he took a cab.

  He spent two or three nights a week with her, then three or four. His parents did not like it. Tough. Very tough. She was a
lousy cook—partly because she was tired when she got home and partly because she didn’t buy good ingredients. She was always adding up bills. He was getting her in the habit of punching him in and out and covering for him, so he took to making dinner the nights he stayed. She would sign him in to a practice room at the bureau and lock the door. Jesus, if he spent one third the time practicing he was signed up for, he would have made a one-man technical revolution by now. He’d buy a steak or chops and put together a salad. And fruit, lots of fruit. Not like suppers at home, but not bad. He learned to make spaghetti.

  He had never shopped for food. He had never cooked. He had never washed dishes. Food had been something that came on a plate. But this was how people lived. They kept house. It was part game and part nuisance and part voyage of discovery. Tripping into the ordinary.

  Stevie was in kindergarten in the morning and a playschool in the afternoon. The woman who ran the playschool drove a VW Microbus and delivered the kids home. Stevie had his own key. He could just about reach the lock. Shawn had his own key, too, now. Stevie was glad to see him when he got home. Sometimes Shawn would wait to do the shopping until Stevie could come with him, because they both enjoyed that. Stevie really dug being asked what they should have for supper. Denise had a whole set of muddled guilts about being a bad mother because she worked. She would read some idiot in the Sunday papers about how to raise kids and go into a dither that she was doing something wrong. He could not understand how she could let the Sunday paper make her feel guilty.

  She bought his records. He couldn’t stand to hear music on her diddly little phonograph. It was a pain in the ears. He bought some components and put together a decent hi-fi, working all day. Turned it on to surprise her when she got home, and in ten minutes the neighbors were pounding on the walls.

  “It’s a shitty apartment, you know? Not even a bedroom.”

  Roaches in the sink. She had a can of bug spray she was always using, but all it did was give him a sore throat and roughen his voice. Roaches ate it up like candy. Probably got high on it.

  “It’s only a hundred and ten a month and it’s right on the bus line to the office.”

  It all came down to money. Everything in her life had price tags hung on it. Cash register whirring away all the time. She got forty bucks a month child support. Jesus, she couldn’t keep a dog on that. Stevie wanted a dog, too, by the way. Then the playschool and bus fare and utilities and the dentist and she was taking the pill now and everything went jingle, jingle on that cash register in the closet. They did not pay her enough. Yet she was frightened of losing her job. She saw it as great security and she clung to it with her nails and teeth, even though she hated every minute. She had a terrible drone of fear going on all the time that she would lose her job and Someone (the State, her exhusband) would take Stevie away. It was the best-paying job she had ever held. Shawn used to spend as much as her weekly paycheck in an evening and not think twice.

  Stevie was a funny kid with a shock of brown hair, already wearing glasses that looked big on him, too. He met the world with a nervous but enthusiastic giggle. He liked school pretty well. He liked most things that a kid could be halfway expected to like. He didn’t get much. A hotbox to sleep in. A plastic Noah’s ark that floated. Magazine pictures of dogs taped on his wall.

  It seemed strange for such a soft silly woman to be part of the apparatus of the state for controlling its restless members. In some ways she saw the apparatus clearly enough. “Well, you see, this way there’s a pool of labor available for all manner of social service, and it tends to stabilize the kids,”

  “Social service: like policing. Like municipal strikebreaking”

  She shrugged. “It’s supposed to stabilize the rest of society too. I mean, it seems to be working. Since they rounded up the militants and the agitators and started this, everything’s been quiet. So they must be right.”

  She did not want to talk about the Nineteenth Year of Service. More than anything else, she was afraid they would find out about Shawn and she would lose her job. She could not manage to save anything, and whenever she thought of the future, she shut her eyes and turned her face and shivered. Money had been an ambience to him. But to her it came in little miserly clumps—never enough, never enough. It was finite and each dollar could be spent only once and for one thing, and always there were other needs and bills. It gave money a totally different character. It made money skinny and shrill and always butting in.

  The first time Shawn took a bus to her apartment he couldn’t believe the trip. People crammed against each other, poking into each other, sweating and heaving and blowing and pushing like they’d all have heart attacks on the spot. All taking it.

  “That’s just rush hour. That’s the way it is.”

  “Every day? But it’s insane. Why don’t they run more buses?”

  She shrugged. “It’s rush hour. I don’t know. I guess it would cost too much.”

  The daily cattle drive. He learned to avoid those hours, but he could call up the physical sensations at will. He puzzled about that endurance. Somehow she was trained to endure. Maybe it started very early, with school. In the schools most kids went to, they learned to shut down, shut up, sit still.

  Lots of old people lived in the neighborhood. When the sun shone at all, they would bring out folding chairs or kitchen chairs and sit by their stoops staring at nothing, hoping to talk. Yet when he came by, they sniffed and gave him the cold eye of fear. People were afraid here. Denise was scared silly when she had to come home late and alone. She had been followed on the street several times. Once, her purse had been snatched. When she had to walk on the streets at night, she scuttled along thinking about being raped or beaten or hit on the head or cut up with a knife.

  The city smelled bad. Kids screamed all evening in the street, because they had no yards. Stevie played awkward catch with him in the living room until they broke a lamp. He got an air conditioner, and that helped sleeping. But the fuses blew once a week. Fucking archaic wiring. Whole place could go up like a kerosene-soaked rag. When he took Stevie to F. A. O. Schwarz and picked up a train that hooted, there was hardly room for it to make a good circuit on the living room floor.

  It all came down to the damned apartment. The city pressed in on it and sweated on the walls. The street was shabby, the paint peeled in the hall under the wee myopic bulbs, the doors did not shut right, nothing was light-proof or impermeable to sound. Everything leaked and creaked and sagged and shifted uneasily. Even the newer pieces of furniture were already seedy.

  The water made him gag. It was the ordinary city water, but he had never had to drink it before. It tasted like a rat had died in the pipes. Half the time the water wasn’t hot enough to shave with. He liked to shave. He shaved slowly, grinning with clenched teeth into the mirror, using a straightedge razor. It was his major affectation. He liked to strop the razor. One of the few things Denise ever insisted upon was that he keep the razor on top of the bathroom cabinet, out of Stevie’s reach. The bathroom opened on an airshaft, and as he sat on the toilet he could hear a dozen other people flushing and running showers and yelling at each other.

  “Well, this is just how people live!” Denise said waspishly, and then got apologetic. They climbed into bed. Soft against him, bouncy under plush. “You’re so big,” she would say and suck on his prick till he moaned. “You’re so beautiful.” She would run her hands over his long body again and again. She would fondle him with that soft avidity and stare and stare into his face. Then she would get on top and start almost at once, Ooooh ooooh oooh, and squeeze it out of him. It was nice, it was nice and easy, and it went on.

  But the bed was something else. Not a proper bed at all. A couch lumpy and bumpy with a canyon in the middle between the two halves. He liked to sleep all wound around her, but there was that canyon gaping. The bed had metal sides he barked his shins on. He hated bruises. Like mushy spots on fruit.

  He decided to move her out of that open sore, into a pl
ace with a yard and thick walls and a bedroom with a door and water that was hot and wiring you could plug things into without everything going black. It’s true that what fascinated him was the ordinariness, the sense that he had penetrated into The Way People Live, but there was no point overdoing it. It had been very interesting, rush hour and fuses that blew and roaches, but enough was enough. She argued with him, scared. He took off her clothes and shut her up. Then she argued more. He sulked for a week. Laid other girls and waited. When he came back, she wept and clutched him. Through the filmy layers of argument, he read her fear. He would buy something outright. See? She’d own it for a change. No sweat, right? For the kid. It was easy to be crafty with his plump goose.

  An agent found them a duplex, the left half of a house with an upstairs and a downstairs and a slot of yard, real rooms and doors that shut. It was a fine toy. Everything was somehow miniatured, but after those stinking three rooms, why, they’d have a room just to stand and yell in. $22,500. Cash, he said. Then the gears stopped meshing and the machine ground to a halt on his hand. Because he had only just turned twenty, and the money had come in and gone out to make more and always it had been managed, and now he found how little he controlled—all that invisible money he had raised strutting and shouting for hot squealing audiences. Somebody had it. Lawyers, his parents, trusts. But not Shawn.