Adler, Warren - Banquet Before Dawn Read online

  It wasn't until Alby came home from Harvard in his junior year and had to room with him during the Christmas holidays that he was initiated into what happened in "real life."

  Alby, skinny, pimpled, and tall, was so self-assured that he seemed arrogant. To Aram, he was awesome, especially in his articulate put- downs of almost anything that had any currency in establishment thinking.

  "I believe Kennedy was shot by only one man- Oswald — but that Oswald was hired by someone."

  "Like who?"

  "Mafia, perhaps."

  "Why?"

  "Bobby wanted to bust them."

  "Then why not kill Bobby?"

  "They will."

  It was the time of Martin Luther King and the black awakening.

  "What do you mean we'll have to give them what they want?" Alby demanded.

  "They're entitled to it."

  "Only power gives you entitlement. You get it by power and you hold it by power."

  "What about the moral issues?"

  "Horseshit on moral issues. The country will move only if we shove it to them hard enough."

  Aram thought then that Alby was a snotty, elitist bastard, hard as ice. Sharing the little bedroom on the second floor, they found themselves talking long into the night. Aram, mostly listening and questioning, Alby, disgorging ideas in an endless stream.

  "The whole process of life is an endless search for awareness. We are evolving into greater and greater knowledge, into pure mind. All else is trivial."

  "What about God?"

  "God is irrelevant."

  "You don't believe in God?"

  "I didn't say that. I only said it was irrelevant. It could be that some God thing started the process of life, started the big bang that made life out of matter. But that's where it ends. No, I don't believe that there is an all-seeing God who knows our every action, who can see into our brains and watch what we do. That's religion. I definitely don't believe in religion. Not in anything that cannot be scientifically proven."

  Alby was particularly venomous when it came to politics. When Aram said he was studying political science, Alby said, "That's horseshit. Politics is not a science."

  "And social science?"

  "Not a science."

  Alby was majoring in mathematics and minoring in physics, chemistry, and biology.

  "What the hell are you studying to be?" Aram asked.

  "A literate scientific generalist."

  "What the hell is that?"

  "That's everything."

  Alby was never at a loss for words, always ready with an elaborate explanation of every phenomenon with a mind that absorbed facts like a sponge. At first Aram thought it was simply smugness, a desire to show off a good brain, to exercise superiority. But lying there in the darkness, listening to Alby's flat, unemotional voice, Aram began to see Alby as almost self-contained, an end in himself. He barely needed Aram's responses. Sometimes Aram would shiver beneath the covers at the sheer power of Alby's knowledge or the phenomenal intricacy of his self- constructed theories.

  "All politicans are scientifically illiterate. Their only skill is the craft of persuasion. How the hell can they make decisions for us in this complicated technological environment? They're too ignorant."

  "Don't they hav e advisers for the technological stuff?"

  "The decisions are still made by them, and they usually respond to the best salesman in the room at the time."

  And so it went, on and on, exciting, mind-boggling, mysterious, as if the ideas were coming out of a disembodied voice, a recording embedded in a human being.

  But there was a body connected to that brain. Marian Delaney proved it.

  She was sixteen and lived next door. Overweight, she had a huge bottom that inflated the back end of her jeans as if she were hiding two round watermelons. She was a teenager incarnate. They could hear her stereo blaring Beatles records and loud rock and roll long into the night, and her mouth never stopped chewing gum.

  Hardly a sex object, she would have remained anonymous if she had pulled the shade one warm spring night. It was late, and Alby and Aram had been slicing through intellectual thickets as usual when Alby got out of bed to open the window wider.

  Hands on the windowsill, Alby froze, sucked in a gulp of air with a noise that indicated to Aram something unusual was taking place outside. Joining Alby at the window, he saw, not fifteen feet away, the bovine rian in the altogether, heavy-breasted with huge puddles of nipples, a rounded belly still uncreased and a pretty dark triangle under which she was pulling a pink towel back and forth like a two-handed saw and liking every stroke. Faint strains of rock music to which she was keeping time filtered through the quiet of the night, and she was lost in the rhythm and the titillating friction of the towel on her clitoris.

  Aram felt the surge in his balls and felt his prick stiffen and throb with tension. Looking down, he saw Alby's similar reaction, a reassuring sight to Aram, who had long associated such reactions with secret fumblings in the dark.

  "That hot little bitch," Alby said. "Who would have thought it?"

  But someone from inside the Delaney household shouted obscenely about too much noise, and Marian broke the rhythm of her buzz saw and stepped out of vision, leaving them contorting to get a peek beyond what their own window could provide. Soon the lights were out, and each crawled into his own bed. For Aram, a few hand motions were all that was required.

  If Aram had been alone, he would have retained the image of Marian Delaney only for a sexual recall and certainly would never have attempted to speak to her. But Alby, with his rational approach to life, had other ideas.

  It wasn't long before Marian was lured into the Winters' living room to listen to some new rock records Alby had borrowed for the occasion.

  He insisted that Aram stay, perhaps out of some deep macho need that even he could not yet explain scientifically.

  "Hey, that's real groovy," Marian said in the prevailing teenage-ese. Up close, she had a wonderfully smooth skin and complexion and looked better than her pudginess might have indicated.

  "Show us the steps?" Alby asked, and she began gyrating to the rhythm, her tits swinging in their loose bra as she moved. Soon Alby, the bulge in his pants expanding, was persuading her with flattery and attention to drink a preprepared concoction of Southern Comfort, gin, and lemonade. At the first sign of giddiness he moved in on her and felt her tits and roamed with bony fingers over her huge behind. He kept complimenting her on her complexion and hair, and after two more of his concoctions, he was alluding to her more secret charms, using Aram for confirmation.

  "Here, feel this, Aram."

  "Great."

  "Never saw anything so beautiful. Bet they don't stand straight out."

  "They do."

  "G'wan."

  She let them remove her brassiere but balked when they tried to get her Donald Duck sweat shirt off, but she soon enough let them roll it up and suck at the already-hard nipples. Alby practically poured the next drink down her gullet and started working his hand around her crotch. Holding back at first, she soon gave up under the staccato pressure of his words and fingers.

  "Bet you never saw a man before."

  "Did so."

  "Bet you didn't."

  "Did."

  "I'll show you mine if you show me yours."

  "No."

  But then she was unzipped, and Alby had his hand on her bare crotch, rubbing up and down and winking at Aram, who knew he could barely stand much more before he would come in his pants. By now Marian's eyes were closed and she was sinking further into a private world of sensuality, submitting to the onslaught of her senses. Aram helped remove her jeans, and there she was spread out wide with a huge, gaping beautiful red gash, pouting and swollen. Alby unzipped his pants and dropped them to the floor and, positioning himself at the edge of the couch, rammed his prick into her. Eyes and Adam's apple bulging, he came quickly, while Marian still undulated, eyes closed, mouth open, moaning unintellig
ible sounds.

  Alby, sated, looked at Aram and motioned him over, which he did, shamelessly, dropping his pants and swiftly moving into Alby's vacated position. Marian didn't miss a beat, but Aram's excitement exploded almost on contact and desire seeped away like melted snow. As the quickly dimished size of his cock began to embarrass him, he withdrew and hurried directly into the bathroom to soap himself thoroughly, wondering vaguely if they had got her pregnant or caught something, the twin fears of coitus in those days. He stayed in the bathroom, dawdling and wondering why it all had happened so fast, wondering if all that masturbation had somehow injured him, feeling inadequate, not in the least like maleness described in fiction.

  When he returned to the living room, Marian and Alby were dancing together stark naked, eyes closed, undulating to the slower rhythm of an old Glen Miller record. Their eyes were closed, and he never quite got over how silly they looked, she with her bovine ass shaking like gelatin at each step, Alby with his skinny little bum lost in her bigness like an oar on a rubber raft.

  Later, in the quiet of their room, Aram admitted to Alby that he was scared, that the whole scene bordered on rape.

  "Rape? Are you kidding? She was the aggressor."

  "Aggressor? She was seduced."

  "My foot. Did you think she was a virgin?"

  "I don't know."

  "Have you got a lot to learn about women!"

  "About everything."

  "About everything."

  But even though the sexual mystery was somewhat unlocked and he had, at last, seen the inside of a live woman, he did not find it any easier to make relationships. He chalked it up to simply not being any good at small talk, not now, after that spring vacation with Alby, who said there is no occupation so useless as small talk, trivia.

  Aram had by then, that day in Jacob Riis Park, moved out of the Winters' home. Alby had returned from Harvard, magna cum laude of course, and was taking his master's in both mathematics and physics at Columbia while Aram was plodding through Brooklyn Law School, the lawyers' mill, as it was called. Aram was driving a cab at night and living in a furnished room off DeKalb Avenue. He hardly noticed his surroundings then, since study crowded his time and the distraction of earning a living was beginning to panic him.

  "That's what I call concentration," she said. He always remembered those first nosy yenta words. She couldn't simply be satisfied with the ambience of the lazy beach-strewn crowd and the so-called relevant lyrics of the guitarist.

  He looked up at her. He was squinting into a lightly freckled face, big brown eyes, thin lips tightly grinning, a straight, too straight, nose.

  "Torts," he said, swallowing hard.

  "Ah, the law. I'm a student of that myself," she said, her big straight orthodontist-nurtured teeth glinting in the sun.

  "You're kidding." He was sincere, finding fellowship in her comment.

  "Law of averages. Murphy's law. Law of the jungle."

  Disappointed and ashamed that he had been naive, he felt his throat tighten, shyness coming, a frown descend. She saw through it immediately. Her perception was ultrasensitive, a magnet that picked up the most microscopic filings.

  "I was only kidding," she said, falling beside him on her stomach, staring into the ocean. He tried to read his book, but her presence near him blurred the words.

  "I was interested in your aloneness," she told him later, as they sat in her little Skylark at the roadside hamburger place. "And I liked your tan."

  He kept his eyes averted, not understanding it. He had never played roles, and she seemed so affected. Her beautiful long, thin white fingers held a cigarette, tentatively, as if it could be carried away by the lightest breeze. Her hair was brushed back tight and clear off a smooth, shining forehead, gathered behind by a brown clip, cascaded into a ponytail. He remembered liking the way her hair pulled up at the base of her head. It seemed like such a secret place.

  "I was listening to Hal's music, and suddenly the whole thing wasn't touching me anymore. Like the curtain came down and the show was over." They were the bunch from Pratt, where she had just graduated. "And there you were so hand"

  "I suppose I should be flattered," he mumbled.

  "Did you see the boy in the red-flowered bathing suit?"

  He didn't recall, but he said he did.

  "For a whole year I couldn't breathe a breath, eat a morsel, sleep a sleep that he didn't affect the process in some way." She shook her head. "Now it hardly matters."

  It didn't touch him until later, when he was kissing her in the darkness, still in the car, in front of his building, an old brownstone

  with crumbling cement steps. He remembered being nervous, because he knew that people were sitting on the stoops cooling off. She had literally pried his lips apart and rolled her tongue around his and pressed her body up against his erection, holding him tightly. He had never, ever, kissed a girl, nor had he dared believe it possible to kiss like that.

  He knew she had felt his body shudder and, worse, had felt the seepage around his crotch that grew cold against her thigh.

  "My God, you're wound up like a violin string," she said, still not disengaging, commenting, he knew even then, because she had to verbalize everything. He also knew that she knew how he was feeling, bumbling, inadequate, but he was certain that she did not know that his meeting her was as if someone had suddenly showered him with wealth.

  He did not know her monetary status at the time, or for months after, even when they had begun seeing each other almost daily. (She worked in the art department of an advertising agency; he was always forgetting the name.) But not knowing she was wealthy did not mean that he didn't know anything about her. He knew, for example, that she was a mass of commitments to the new thinking that was taking hold, the peace movement, women's liberation, the blacks.

  "I'm a social yenta. I leak blood for the fucking injustice of it." She was also into cusswords, part of the trappings of the new thinking. (_He_ rarely said "fuck.") "Twenty years ago I might have been a Communist, but even that revolution was betrayed. It's people that screw things up. Marx had a beautiful idea. It was based on justice and equity."

  "Noble concepts. Pie in the sky, unworkable. It was Kennedy who said that 'life is unfair."'

  "Kennedy. You mean you actually quote Kennedy. My God, Aram, nobody quotes Kennedy."

  "I do."

  She had become sensitive to his pride, and since she surely loved him, she watched her words carefully.

  "I suppose Kennedy is worth quoting. Somehow being assassinated gives him a special aura, a special meaning to his words."

  "Life is unfair, Sandra. It really is."

  "I suppose so."

  "It's a truism. It's a fact."

  "Maybe that's what I don't accept. Because we have got to work through our system to make life fairer. That is the whole basis of being a liberal. It is the essence of liberality. It's the only goal of a political orientation."

  He told her of his political ambitions, and yet he admonished himself for being both adolescent and too tentative in his craving. "Ah, it's just an impossible dream," he said.

  "The hell it is," she replied.

  "It takes money, opportunity, talent, knowledge. It's too formidable for this son of a candy peddler."

  She hugged him tightly, making him feel overwhelmed like a small boy in his mother's arms.

  "Such an ambitious boy. You sound almost Jewish."

  "The geography is similar."

  "But not all the details," she said, moving her hand over his uncircumsized penis.

  He was in the winter of his last year at Brooklyn Law when they moved in together, the second floor of an old three-story in Cobble Hill. They had been playing house across the river for a year, and the inconvenience was a bother, mostly to him. Until moving day, even though he had "lived" with her in the sense that they shared her bed and space, he had never perceived that her possessions seemed more than usual.

  "Christ, you've got things."


  "A lotta shit."

  He was essentially a qui man, and she was noisy, wordy. They were opposites attracting. He had learned from Alby to be a good listener, and since she was in many ways really in the mainstream and he really out of it, he was fascinated. Politics continued to be a shared obsession, but from wholly different points of view. Its power, the dynamics of that power, became his interest. His fantasy was that it was he in that motorcade in Dallas and he was sitting there and waving, but the bullet was always wide of its mark, killing someone else, probably Johnson; it was never really clear.