7 #2
He’s very much afraid this is insanity. Which would, of course, be one more reason for the powers that be at Langley to lock him up.
You can’t have disaffected analysts in possession of state secrets running mad in the streets.
And Nathaniel knows a lot more secrets than what’s inside the manila envelope.
“Your whole body just went rigid,” Susan says.
They’re in her apartment, the baby asleep for once in her life, as he and Susan attempt to turn a perfectly decent folk song into the kind of music that’s one step removed from inciting a riot.
He’s considered telling her that the government—he can blame the FBI—is fixated on celebrities, but that would probably only encourage her.
In those files that he destroyed his life over were pictures of her at enough protests that it’s a wonder she found time to do anything else.
She apparently spent the entirety of 1967 at anti-war protests and the previous eight years at civil rights protests.
The fact that Nathaniel is going along with this is only more evidence of insanity.
She lights a joint and holds it out. He takes it, because it’s one of the only things that keeps the panic at bay and the abyss at a comfortable distance. He’s adopting a comprehensive approach to moral degeneracy, it seems.
He takes a hit and passes the joint back to her, not bothering to put the violin down.
When he first came across it in the kitchen, he hadn’t even hesitated before picking it up and tuning it.
Fifteen years should have been enough to get him out of the habit, but here he is, like the intervening years never happened.
Perhaps that’s the appeal—the sense of turning back the clock to a time when his hands were clean, his future safe and certain.
When he looks at Hector and Iris, he envies the blank slate in front of them.
“Oh brother,” Susan says and hands him back the joint. “Whatever you’re thinking about, either get it off your chest or think about something else. It isn’t doing you any good stuck in your head.”
“Take your own advice, madam,” Nathaniel says, because the woman hasn’t said a single word about her dead husband.
It had taken Nathaniel weeks to figure out the man’s name.
Sometimes, Nathaniel can tell when a conversation is drifting too close to the subject by the way Susan and Patrick slam on the brakes.
But their grief is still there, right on the surface, nearly a palpable thing.
Nathaniel remembers taking his own grief and tucking it away, far out of sight, never looking at it and certainly never letting anyone else see it.
It’s fossilized now, the hardened remnants of the place grief used to be.
“We’ll play something cheerful,” Susan says, and proceeds to sing a happy little song about overthrowing the government.
* * *
“We need ground rules,” Susan says after they’ve spent a few weeks doing what she charmingly calls dicking around with music.
Now, evidently, they’re doing something more intentional—premeditated, even—and this requires rules.
“No songs Dylan ever covered. No songs I ever covered. And none of those ballads about men on white steeds going off to war.”
That’s all perfectly unobjectionable but Nathaniel doesn’t have the disposition to enter a negotiation without making his own demands. “No hand claps,” he says.
“Nothing about falling in love.”
“No tambourines.” Nathaniel has nothing against tambourines in other people’s music, but he needs to draw a line. He’ll associate freely with long-haired radicals, but the tambourine is a line he won’t cross.
“I’m so insulted that you think I own a tambourine,” Susan says.
“Darling,” Nathaniel says, “you have a harmonica. Get off your high horse.” He’s flat on his back and alarmingly high, high enough he can say things like darling and not worry about anything other than how he’s ever going to get off this sofa.
Somewhere else in the room, Patrick laughs, thrilled as ever by Nathaniel’s bitchy turns. He’s a terrible influence.
“What’s even left for the two of you to play?” Patrick asks.
During Nathaniel’s first year of undergrad, his roommate—currently an executive with an insurance firm in Hartford—had a collection of folk music records that Nathaniel was rather appalled to discover he enjoyed. He suspects Susan had many of the same records.
“Murder ballads,” Nathaniel suggests.
“Murder ballads!” Susan agrees. “Oh my god, murder ballads.”
“Do I even want to know what a murder ballad is?” Patrick asks. Nathaniel forces his head to turn to the side. Patrick is sitting cross legged on the floor, the baby chewing on his sleeve.
Susan’s strums a few chords and begins singing about a murderer who lives in the moss and whose gruesome misdeeds are meticulously detailed in rhyming couplet. Nathaniel’s never heard this one before.
“There’s blood in the kitchen. There’s blood in the hall,” Susan sings. “There’s blood in the parlor where my lady did fall.”
Nathaniel listens as Susan sings through a few verses, then picks up the harmony. It turns out he can play the violin while lying down. Every teacher he ever had would weep at the sight of him, but he isn’t playing for the Philharmonic, and everybody who isn’t in this room can rot.
Susan plays the song through, then makes an infinitesimal change that transforms the ballad into something deliciously creepy. Nathaniel gets goosebumps.
When he saw Susan’s name on that file, he never wondered what her music might sound like.
The only songs of hers that he’s heard are what Patrick played for him on the jukebox.
The music she’s playing now is the chiaroscuro counterpart to those bright, sunlit songs.
It takes all his meager skill just to keep up with her.
Frankly, he’s a little starstruck. At least once a day he wants to tell her that she might be a genius, but she plays like someone who already knows.
Over the next hour, Susan replaces half the original lyrics with her own grisly descriptions of what some elfin troublemaker called Lord Lankin will do to you if you chance upon him in the long grass or let him into your mead hall.
Her voice—ethereally lovely, clear as a bell—contrasts eerily with the gruesome murders she’s singing about.
The ballad shifts from folk music to protest music.
“He’ll burn up your bones and he’ll cut off your head,” Susan sings. “He’ll scoop out your eyeballs and…” She strums along, obviously trying to come up with a rhyme.
“And leave you for dead?” Nathaniel suggests.
She sings it again with the completed verse while Nathaniel fiddles along, as softly as possible.
“And the thing is,” Susan sings, reaching the chorus. “You don’t get to complain.”
“Well, no,” Nathaniel adds, his bow still moving, “you’re dead.”
Susan laughs, then writes something down on the pad of paper she keeps on the end table. Nathaniel takes advantage of the pause to reach for the joint that’s balanced on the edge of an ashtray on the coffee table.
Nathaniel’s started writing things in his own notebook, one of those ten cent affairs you can get at any corner store, but which Patrick had to buy for him because Nathaniel can still barely leave the fucking building.
The most recent page reads: Frosted Flakes, Eleanor’s little shoes, Captain Kangaroo (in color), pizza.
It’s either a list of things Nathaniel likes enough that he won’t deliberately fling himself into the abyss, or it’s a list of pleasures Nathaniel in no way deserves.
Sometimes he pores over list like he’s cracking a code, trying to decide which it is, but the key is his own warped psyche.
“Let’s do the song about the nightingale,” Nathaniel says.
Patrick hauls himself to his feet, keeping Eleanor against his shoulder.
Nathaniel misses a note, momentarily flustered by the sight of the tiny baby cradled in huge arms, one of Patrick’s big hands on the back of her head.
Since when does Nathaniel even care about men’s hands?
(Since 1945, if he’s being his most truthful self, which, unfortunately, seems to be the case these days.)
He lets himself watch as Patrick fixes another bottle. When Patrick returns to the living room, Nathaniel bends his knees, making room on the sofa. Patrick takes the hint and sits. The cushions shift under Patrick’s weight. Nathaniel can feel it, the next best thing to actual contact.
After a lifetime of extinguishing that kind of thought, he feels a nauseous little thrill letting it linger in his mind.
It’s a lit match, but instead of dropping it to the ground and crushing it underfoot, he’s holding it between two fingers, watching it burn.
He keeps waiting for something terrible to happen.
All that happens is that Patrick looks at Nathaniel’s sneaker and sighs. “Tie your fucking shoe,” Patrick says. “You’re high as a kite and you’ll break your neck.” When the baby is done with her bottle, Patrick lays her across his lap and ties Nathaniel’s shoelace himself.
* * *
“You still shouldn’t have thrown it back!” Iris yells at her brother. “We could’ve got arrested .”
The Valdez twins walked out of school to protest the war. All spring, kids have been walking out of high schools and colleges across the country and around the world.
“This wouldn’t have happened a year ago,” Susan says.
It’s the third or fourth time she’s said it, and she’s probably right.
It seems that, finally, the doomed nature of this war has become glaringly obvious, even to people who initially supported it.
Patrick says that every time he walks past Washington Square Park, somebody’s burning their draft card.
Just last month there was a big protest at NYU against Dow Chemical for manufacturing napalm. Last week, Columbia students held the dean hostage, although Nathaniel thinks that had more to do with racism than with Vietnam.
Every time Nathaniel looks at the newspaper, there’s a protest in Detroit or Paris, Los Angeles or Mexico City.
The entire world seems to have taken to the streets to protest a host of wrongs, and while Susan and even Patrick see this as a promise of change, Nathaniel’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Every protest reveals the opposition more clearly: people who want war and bigotry, who want teenagers to be shot in the street and Vietnam burned to cinders.
None of this is a surprise to Nathaniel; he worked for that opposition, even when he didn’t want to acknowledge it.
It’s the widening divide that worries him now.
He’s seen what happens in countries where there are irreconcilable factions.
Soldiers with machine guns were stationed on Capitol Hill during the protests after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed.
The National Guard drove tanks through downtown Memphis.
It would have taken nothing at all for one of these soldiers to pull a trigger.
It would have taken nothing at all for a cop at today’s school walkout to have grabbed his billy club and put it to use.
Nathaniel likes these children; some tired and cowardly part of himself wants Iris and Hector to have stayed safe inside their classroom, even though he realizes this is impossible. The entire point is that they aren’t safe.
“It really wouldn’t have happened a year ago,” Susan repeats.
“Wait. Who threw what?” Nathaniel asks, catching up. His gaze roams over the twins, looking for signs of damage.
“A counterprotester threw a rock into the crowd,” Iris says. “Hector threw it back, but nobody saw. At least I don’t think anybody saw.”
“I didn’t throw it back. I tossed it aside. Underhand.”
“Who the fuck throws rocks at children?” Patrick asks.
Everyone stares at him. Patrick is not a man who swears in front of kids.
Iris recovers first. “The same people who want to bomb children and burn down their homes,” she says, with an implied obviously. “And now Hector’s going to get an FBI file and Mami will kill him.”
“Nobody’s getting an FBI file,” Susan says. “You aren’t getting arrested. There are probably five hundred other people they’d need to arrest first.”
Nathaniel makes a choked sound, because he thinks Susan might be delusional. Patrick evidently agrees with him, because he catches Nathaniel’s eye and winces.
Everyone falls silent, the only sound a Doors album playing in the back of the shop.
“Tommy DeAngelo enlisted,” Hector tells his sister. “Remember him? He graduated last year. Glasses, stupid haircut?”
Iris is momentarily speechless. “Why?”
“Said he was going to get drafted anyway, and this way at least he could pick the navy. Navy’s safer.”
“But,” Iris starts, and she’s obviously going to start in on all the very good reasons nobody should enlist in this war or possibly any war, and how the government is lying and the war was ginned up by profiteers. She’ll be right on all counts, but there’s nobody in this room who needs to hear it.
Besides, Nathaniel has spent the last two months listening to people act like not dodging the draft is effectively a war crime.
Maybe they’re right—at this point, the one thing he’s sure of is that he’s the least qualified person in this building to make any kind of moral judgment.
But he thinks it’s missing the point to blame the men who either enlist or comply with selective service.
“Some people enlist,” Nathaniel snaps. “Some people will always enlist,” he repeats, a little less testily.
“There will always be true believers. There will always be people who trust their government not to be embroiled in a gigantic, evil conspiracy or to be tragically incompetent. If the president says we need soldiers, the people who believe him are the optimists.”
“They’re wrong,” Iris says.
“Of course,” Nathaniel says, trying to remember that he’s dealing with children, not jaded CIA analysts. “But I want to live in a world where the true believers are right.”