Eastman Was Here Read online

  The current situation in his study was Eastman himself. It was now Thursday. He had been in hiding for four days’ time. He had eaten very little but wasn’t yet hungry. He looked down at his worn pants, he could smell his odor, his rank. Each day he got older, his odor became more prominent, more unpleasant. It shed itself upon his reading chair, stuck itself to the wallpaper, stained sheets, folded itself into the closing of books. There was a time when he admired the way he aged, but now that he was alone, and could very well be alone for an undetermined amount of time, there was a panic apropos of aging. How would he attract another woman of Penny’s stature? Who would accept his phallus, love his belly, crave his scent, which was quickly souring into a stench? No one, not in his state. He had spent his forties, his most attractive decade, with the love of his life. Now he felt old, fat, tired. His body was put aside for the sake of his marriage and children. Who would love him now? Who would bear him more children? Not that he could afford more. Eastman caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror above his desk. Shameful.

  He waddled back to his reading chair. At his feet he found the book, The Metaphysical Poets, facedown on his Oriental carpet. He bent over to pick it up, feeling the age in his knees, and that’s precisely when a most livid pain entered the small of his back. It felt as if he had been struck by a billy club. A club swung by Penny, this unforeseeable turn of events, and Broadwater, too. “Oh, fuck it!” he said as he toppled over onto the carpet. His arms were still taut and quick enough to prevent a head injury in the fall. Eastman slowly turned on his back, which was now riddled with pain. He was helpless and knew he hadn’t the strength to move. After a few deep breaths, Eastman settled down. He reached for the book of poetry next to his head and found it opened to a most unfortunate poem (“Mortification”), which began with a most unfortunate phrase.

  How soon doth man decay!

  2.

  Eastman had purchased the Oriental rug on the Upper East Side of Manhattan from a private dealer. This was before they were married, when they were moving in together after an eight-month courtship. Penny, a PhD candidate in psychology at NYU, and Eastman, ten years her senior. He was a free-floating journalist, public intellectual, accidental cultural critic, and author of several books about America. For the book about war, which made his reputation in 1953, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer. (It went to his rival, Norman Heimish, a complete downer for journalism.) When he met Penny, he was still disillusioned about marriage from his first outing with Barbara. His daughter Helen’s childhood had been ruined. But with a woman like Penny, a poisonous divorce would never rear its head.

  Who was this woman of vibrancy and intelligence and sensuality? Her presence was that of a savior to him, for his finances were in turmoil, his first marriage was in the dumps, and with too many awful affairs behind him, he thought of love as a disadvantageous chess game where men were pawns to be sacrificed. For the rest of the fifties life took on a tinge of complete unfairness. Then he met Penny, a thirty-two-year-old brunette of Polish heritage, a quarter of that Latin, barely noticeable except in the summer, when she bronzed exceptionally. She was on the tall side and thin, quite the opposite of Eastman’s tight-end flank. She was Penelope Domowitz. Once they were married, she was happy to take his surname. She even considered replacing her maiden name with King, from her grandmother’s name Krol, all because Eastman had read in Life magazine that “Krol” meant “King” in Polish. He thought it would make her sound more dignified. “Oh, you don’t think Penelope Eastman will sound dignified? Try it with this at the end.” And she wrote out for him on a scrap of paper, Penelope Domowitz Eastman, PhD. “It’s just a silly idea,” he said to her. “Besides, it comes from a true place. You’re a woman of immense power and I want my wife to be seen as such.” “Well, you hold the chalice for the both of us, hon. I’m quite proud of the Domowitzes of New Jersey.”

  Still on his back, Eastman thought of the day he had gone with Penny to purchase the Oriental rug. This was how memory worked. One had to fall facedown into an object such as a dusty, worn carpet, and soon the unconscious, the navigator of the mind, automatically recalled how it all came to be. The carpet, too, not just the man lying on it.

  The lovers, then unwed, had borrowed his cousin Sy’s Volkswagen van in order to transport the rug.

  They arrived at the address of a townhouse on East Seventy-seventh Street, an inconspicuous home that had been turned into a private showroom. Carpets were rolled and piled in every room of the townhouse; others were stacked and laid out knee high, smaller Afghani rugs adorning the walls. Eastman’s allergy to dust had kicked in and right away he left the decision making to Penny, the soon-to-be woman of his house. They were rug shopping because he had just asked her to move in with him, and she expressed her feeling that his brick townhouse was too cold and bare for her taste. He’d buy her anything she wanted to make her comfortable. She would be giving up her small, sun-filled studio in Greenwich Village, and Eastman had lamented the moments he would dearly miss, the mornings bathed in bright light, feeling her hand slipping below the sheets to wake him. Those open-mouthed kisses, Penny’s salt-lick skin, her small breasts, the musky scent of her cunt. Eastman knew how lucky he was to be with Penny. She was his unicorn, an intoxicating creature of myth. Before him, she had been engaged to a linguistics professor, Don Bradford. She was, in fact, still engaged to Bradford when she met Eastman at a Vietnam protest in Washington Square Park. Though Eastman wasn’t aware of the engagement until after they’d slept together. First he followed her to a café, then they had a drink at a bar she liked, then a slice of twenty-five-cent pizza. The next night he called her and they met again. He spent that night at her apartment, which smelled to him of night creams and laundry detergent. “I have to tell you something,” she said. She was sitting up in the moonlight with one foot on his bare chest. “I’m engaged to a man named Don. He’s a linguistics professor.”

  He took in the information while trying not to show a flicker of jealousy. She looked to him for a reaction, some sign of how they were to proceed. As she awaited his answer, he thought that she was not only beautiful and brilliant, but that she had gotten herself into some hot water by going to bed with him and she was trying hard to be fair, which told Eastman that she was not confessing to being a liar but was looking to him for guidance. She wanted to be true. So he said back to her, “You want to invite me to the wedding,” which took some air out of the situation and Penny let loose a big relief-filled laugh.

  She didn’t marry Don Bradford. She left Bradford for him, and soon enough Eastman was coming around daily to spend the night with her.

  Those morning romps in her Greenwich Village apartment usually lasted just a few minutes before Eastman burst inside of her with the intention to impregnate, to own her forever through some biological promise, a child, even though he already had one from his previous marriage and couldn’t bear to take on any more debt. It was on one such morning, the two of them lying bare in the sun, spooning postcoitally, that Eastman snuggled his nose into the crevice of her neck and asked Penny to move in with him.

  So they chose the rugs together, Eastman with his handkerchief over his nose, sneezing as if he were in a field of pollen, and Penny searching the townhouse decisively. She was adept at making good decisions, and this is what he felt he needed as he watched her through his glassy, allergic eyes. She lifted the heavy carpets around and spread them out with help from the dealer, a Russian. Eastman knew the accent well. It matched his mother’s Russian-Jewish inflections. Then Penny found what she was looking for. “This one.” She turned to Eastman, who was cowering a small distance away. “What do you think? For your study.”

  “Is it expensive?”

  “I give you good deal,” said the old Russian. “For this price you won’t find better.”

  “Then we’ll take it,” Eastman said. Penny smiled delightfully at her lover across the room. It was a smile to make a man f
eel a sense of accomplishment. God, he loved her taste for the finer things, something he knew he lacked.

  He’d like to say that it was precisely at this moment that he loved her, but he had loved her before then. Eastman couldn’t say when he first knew he loved Penny. Wasn’t it days or weeks or months before one confessed to being in love that one knew?

  They ended up buying three rugs, in fact. Two more than expected. One for the upstairs bedroom and another runner from Turkey for the downstairs hallway. Once home, they rolled out the rugs in their respective places, the largest in his study. Penny tackled him atop the rug and they tumbled around the floor in each other’s arms with dust from another continent peppering the air. He was a virile man then, strong, able to make her happy. Penny got on top of Eastman, kissed his forehead sweetly, his cheeks, then his lips. He sensed her playfulness turn into desire. She called to him with her tongue, her breath. Aroused, Eastman slid his hands beneath her summer dress, felt the smoothness of her hips, her sides, her whole body. Her scent filled his belly. She continued to kiss his mouth and he moved to rubbing her dark bush through her panties. He found her clit, how it easily soaked through the fabric. Penny unbuttoned his shirt and hiked herself up so that he could slip off her underwear. Like a gymnast she elegantly moved out of them. With his one hand beneath her dress he massaged her cunt. Penny called his name and hoisted herself over Eastman’s face for him to perform cunnilingus, her knees on the carpet, her crevice over his face. She came easily. He wanted only to give her pleasure and let her rest, to lie in satisfaction. Penny was always a most considerate lover, and he drove her wild with desire. Unbuckling his pants, she asked if he had a preference. Would he like to come in her mouth or inside of her? He didn’t know, he simply wanted to make her happy. “This will make me happy,” she said, and brought his hard phallus into her mouth, returning a most delightful orgasm.

  They were married within a year of moving in together.

  • • •

  Another call came, thank heavens. It broke his fantasy and he wouldn’t die on the carpet after all. Though if he did, he’d want Penny to find him lying on a memory they both shared. The phone continued its toll. If it was Penny, she would come to his aid. But he wouldn’t call her. Never would he admit defeat. Pride was too purposeful in a breakup. He didn’t want to appear before her on his knees, begging, but as the attractive man she had fallen for.

  Eastman rolled onto his stomach, forgetting to buckle his pants, which had come undone during the thought of the rug purchase and the frolicking they once did on this very floor. His calloused elbows to the floor, Eastman willed himself across the study. He did a crawl just like he had learned as a young marine in Texas, crawling forth under barbed wire through dirt and dust, cradling his rifle. The pain, excruciating. The phone hung on and Eastman, red faced, vein protruding through his neck, hurried his snail pace to his desk, where the phone was. “Don’t hang up, you son of a bitch.”

  He made it across the carpet all the way to the foot of his desk. The phone, still ringing, couldn’t be reached from his position on the floor. He put out an arm along the desk’s side and attempted to grasp the phone wire. He had short, albeit muscular, arms, and at moments like these they made him feel castrated. He reached out in pain along the desk’s depth until he could feel the phone’s cord. Now in his hand! he pulled gently, moving the phone to the desk’s edge. Pain is a state of mere discomfort, Eastman scolded himself. He knew this through his military training. He was still in top command of his mind, at least he had that, and all the lower back pain in the world couldn’t stop him from getting something done. Eastman took in a deep breath on his stomach. With his belly out, he rolled from side to side. The pain worsened. Using the roundness of his stomach as a ramp, he excruciatingly turned over onto his back. It was a small victory. Beads of sweat dripped down through the thicket of his eyebrows along the contours of his face, stopped by his handsome, prominent nose, the one he got from his dear mother. The ringing continued.

  He once again took the phone wire in his hand and devised that he would pull the cord off the edge of the desk so that as the phone fell he would catch the receiver and the box separately, answer the call, and save himself from dying on the Oriental carpet. And if it was his unicorn on the other line, his one true love, he would tell her: Look. Look what you’ve done. Here I am on our carpet. The blue-hued one in the study. Don’t you remember, my dear?

  At the ready, Eastman gently tugged the cord off the desk. Now! He timed it correctly, the receiver he answered midair with his hand. However, the female part of the contraption, the box, came down and struck him direct in the eye. He tried to shield himself; his back seized. How could he have been so slow to defend himself against an appliance?

  Nonetheless, the phone had been answered.

  “Eastman? Are you there?”

  It wasn’t Penny. It was the sound of a man who had been recently neutered.

  Eastman breathed a heated breath into the receiver. “I’m here.”

  “Eastman, now let me apologize.” Again it was Baxter Broadwater. “I think we both lost our cool there and I want to be the first to say I’m truly sorry. I am truly and deeply sorry and I just feel terrible about it.”

  “Broadwater, listen to me.”

  “No, now you listen to me, Alan. I lost my cool there, and I want you to know that I apologize. Vietnam aside now. I’m being sincere. The fact that you humiliated me, I’m willing to put that aside.”

  “Broadwater, will you shut up for a minute and let me speak.”

  “Yes. Now go ahead, Alan, I’m listening.”

  “I need you to come over here.”

  Broadwater squirmed on the other end. “Oh, I don’t know about that, Alan. If this is another one of your tricks, well now, I’m just not going to fall for it.”

  “Broadwater, shut up. I need help. My back has gone out and I’m laid out like a goddamn cripple on the floor. I’m in pain, you understand?”

  “Now, Eastman, I’m not going to fall for any of your deceptions when I’m sincerely apologizing here. I’m being real now. All I ask is that you be real.”

  “I’m not deceiving you, you son of a bitch. I’m laid out on the floor of my study. I can’t move. I’ve thrown out my back.”

  “That sounds terrible, Alan. I wish I could help.”

  “What do you mean you wish? Wish? I’m asking for your help, Broadwater.”

  “When is your wife due home? You must have someone coming.”

  Eastman was at a loss. There was no one coming for him, no one returning home. He had driven his unicorn away four nights ago and had been dwelling in his own misery. He had trouble answering Broadwater because the question was new to him. He hadn’t a response, and on a whim, he had to create one.

  “Broadwater, if you must know, my family is out of town.”

  “Where?”

  “My mother-in-law’s. I can’t call there, they’ll panic.” It wasn’t untrue.

  “Well, Alan, you’ve caught me at a bad moment, I’m afraid. We’re in the midst of preparing for the Watergate hearings.”

  “Up your ass, Broadwater.”

  “Now that’s uncalled for, Alan.”

  Eastman knew he needed Broadwater’s help. Anyone’s help, and Broadwater was the only person who had the mind to call Eastman in four days’ time. Maybe this was a sign that whatever was between them should be patched up. His back struck pain once again and it did not recede. Tears began to form in Eastman’s eyes. He let out a whimper.

  “Jesus, Alan, are you in that much pain?”

  “My unicorn,” he sobbed. “Baxter. My unicorn.”

  “What on Earth are you talking about?”

  “She’s gone.”

  “Alan, get ahold of yourself, will you?”

  Broadwater stifled his laughter at the offices of the International Herald. T
hat’s when Eastman, laid out on his back, broken, defeated, really began to sob.

  “Hold on, Alan,” Broadwater said. “I’m sending someone straight away.”

  It was approximately two hours before Broadwater arrived with Dr. Wilhelm Spritz, a general practitioner who gave shots to the reporters at the Herald before they were due overseas. Spritz had just finished his rounds at the office, pricking various correspondents with needles, when Broadwater was able to persuade him to make a house call. “For whom?” Spritz inquired. “Alan Eastman. We’re trying to get him to Vietnam. He’s having some kind of nervous breakdown. Though I’ll warn you. He could be full of shit.” Spritz had read The American War in his native German (Der Krieg im Pazifik), a book based on Eastman’s experience in the Pacific during the Japanese occupation. It was published when Eastman was just twenty-six, and it announced the emergence of a new talent. The book was a precursor to a new type of journalism: a novelistic history, full of character and voice and color and movement like the Russian novels Eastman so admired—Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov, et cetera. His literary reputation was solidified, at least for the rest of his twenties, where the book sat on the best-seller list for fourteen consecutive months.

  It was in the opinion of Broadwater and most of the American reading public that Eastman had squandered both his gifts and reputation in the intervening decades. But it was not an opinion shared by the good doctor, Spritz, a German by way of Dusseldorf, who came to aid a fallen American hero.

  The two men, doctor and nemesis, hustled into the house, where they found Eastman at the foot of his desk, next to the phone, on his back. His pants were down around his ankles, his hair was wild, his odor was rank.

  “Jesus, Alan,” said Broadwater. “You need a bath.”

  “Are you here to help me, Broadwater?” Eastman said.