Dying Inside

One summer when I was eight or nine — it was before they adopted Judith, anyway — I went with my parents to a resort in the Catskills for a few weeks. There was a daycamp for the kiddies, in which we received instruction in swimming, te

Then it was my turn. My opponent was a boy named Jimmy, a few months younger than I but taller and heavier and much more athletic. I think the counselors matched us deliberately, hoping Jimmy would kill me: I was not their favorite child. I started to shake even before they put the gloves on me. “Round One!” called a counselor, and we approached each other. I distinctly heard Jimmy thinking about hitting me on the chin, and as his glove came toward my face I ducked and hit him in the belly. That made him furious. He proposed now to clobber me on the back of the head, but I saw that coming too and stepped aside and hit him on the neck close to his adam’s-apple. He gagged and turned away, half in tears. After a moment he returned to the attack, but I continued to anticipate his moves and he never touched me. For the first time in my life I felt tough, competent, aggressive. As I battered him I looked past the improvised ring and saw my father flushed with pride, and Jimmy’s father next to him looking angry and perplexed. End of round one. I was sweating, bouncy, gri

Round two: Jimmy came forth determined to knock me to pieces. Swinging wildly, frantically, still going for my head. I kept my head where he couldn’t reach it and danced around to his side and hit him in the belly again, very hard, and when he folded up I hit him on the nose and he fell down, crying. The counselor in charge very quickly counted to ten and raised my hand. “Hey, Joe Louis!” my father yelled. “Hey, Willie Pep!” The counselor suggested I go over to Jimmy and help him up and shake his hand. As he got to his feet I very clearly detected him deciding to butt me in the teeth with his head, and I pretended to be paying no attention, except when he charged I stepped coolly to one side and banged my fists down on his lowered back. That shattered him. “David cheats!” he moaned. “David cheats!”

How they all hated me for my cleverness! What they interpreted as my cleverness, that is. My sly knack of always guessing what was going to happen. Well, that wouldn’t be a problem now. They’d all love me. Loving me, they’d beat me to a pulp.

Judith answers the door. She wears an old gray sweater and blue slacks with a hole in the knee. She holds her arms out to me and I embrace her warmly, pulling her tight against my body for perhaps half a minute. I hear music from within: the Siegfried Idyll, I think. Sweet, loving, accepting music.

“Is it snowing yet?” she asks.

“Not yet. Gray and cold, that’s all.”

“I’ll get you a drink. Go into the livingroom.”

I stand by the window. A few snowflakes blow by. My nephew appears and studies me at a distance of thirty feet. To my amazement he smiles. He says warmly, “Hi, Uncle David!”

Judith must have put him up to it. Be nice to Uncle David, she must have said. He isn’t feeling well, he’s had a lot of trouble lately. So there the kid stands, being nice to Uncle David. I don’t think he’s ever smiled at me before. He didn’t even gurgle and coo at me out of his cradle. Hi, Uncle David. All right, kid. I can dig it.

“Hello, Pauly. How have you been?”

“Fine,” he says. With that his social graces are exhausted; he does not inquire in return about the state of my health, but picks up one of his toys and absorbs himself in its intricacies. Yet his large dark glossy eyes continue to examine me every few moments, and there does not seem to be any hostility in his glance.

Wagner ends. I prowl through the record racks, select one, put it on the turntable. Schoenberg, Verklaerte Nacht. Music of tempestuous anguish followed by calmness and resignation. The theme of acceptance again. Fine. Fine. The swirling strings enfold me. Rich, lush chords. Judith appears, bringing me a glass of rum. She has something mild for herself, sherry or vermouth. She looks a little peaked but very friendly, very open.

“Cheers,” she says.

“Cheers.”

“That’s good music you put on. A lot of people won’t believe Schoenberg could be sensuous and tender. Of course, it’s very early Schoenberg.”

“Yes,” I say. “The romantic juices tend to dry up as you get older, eh? What have you been up to lately, Jude?”

“Nothing much. A lot of the same old.”

“How’s Karl?”

“I don’t see Karl any more.”

“Oh.”

“Didn’t I tell you that?”

“No,” I say. “It’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

“I’m not accustomed to needing to tell you things, Duv.”

“You’d better get accustomed to it. You and Karl—”

“He became very insistent about marrying me. I told him it was too soon, that I didn’t know him well enough, that I was afraid of structuring my life again when it might possibly be the wrong structure for me. He was hurt. He began lecturing me about retreats from involvement and commitment, about self-destructiveness, a lot of stuff like that. I looked right at him in the middle of it and I flashed on him as a kind of father-figure; you know, big and pompous and stern, not a lover but a mentor, a professor, and I didn’t want that. And I started thinking about what he’d be like in another ten or twelve years. He’d be in his sixties and I’d still be young. And I realized there was no future for us together. I told him that as gently as I could. He hasn’t called in ten days or so. I suppose he won’t.”

‘‘I’m sorry.

“No need to be, Duv. I did the smart thing. I’m sure of it. Karl was good for me, but it couldn’t have been permanent. My Karl phase. A very healthy phase. The thing is not to let a phase go on too long after you know it’s really over.”

“Yes,” I say. “Certainly.”

“Would you like some more rum?”

“In a little while.”

“What about you?” she asks. “Tell me about yourself. How you’re making out, now that — now that—”

“Now that my superman phase is over?”

“Yes,” she says. “It’s really gone, eh?”

“Really. All gone. No doubt.”

“And so, Duv? How has it been for you since it happened?”

Justice. You hear a lot about justice, God’s justice. He looketh after the righteous. He doeth dirt to the ungodly. Justice? Where’s justice? Where’s God, for that matter? Is He really dead, or merely on vacation, or only absent-minded? Look at His justice. He sends a flood to Pakistan. Zap, a million people dead, the adulterer and the virgin both. Justice? Maybe. Maybe the supposedly i