The Stardust Lounge_ Stories From a Boy's Adolescence - Deborah Digges [12]
As he speaks, the cops size him up. Stan's reading glasses hang around his neck, Bate's biography of Keats under his arm.
I think we end up again in our living room, the police, the kid, Stan, Stephen, and I. The cops take the gun, yes, but the kid vanishes from my recollection. Does he go with the police? Does he simply walk out the door?
And where is Charles in all of this? Among us? In his room? Not for the first, or the last, time, his brother's troubles eclipse him.
Then, when everyone leaves, the cops, the kid, I think we sit down to dinner.
Christmas Eve dinner, damn it.
And then Christmas day. We open gifts. Stan keeps the fire going. No one takes pictures.
And then we are relieved of the holiday.
Stephen flies with his brother to Missouri on the twenty-sixth “to celebrate the New Year.” We are living inside pat cultural cliches these days, newspeak, huge warehouse phrases that are cold and empty.
The truth is that Stephen's father intends to keep him in Missouri. He will live there with his father and stepmother. Stephen's father and I have argued about the issue of how long Stephen will stay in Missouri. In the end he gives me an ultimatum: Steve goes to live with him for good. Or not at all.
Of course Stephen doesn't know this. He thinks he's going for a brief visit. If he knew the truth he would run away.
I watch him board the plane through the glass partitions at Logan Airport. I'm crippled by my betrayal, glad that his brother is with him.
Once the boys have boarded, Stan and I walk to his flight, boarding now, back to Maryland. We say good-bye. He hugs me, as is his way, firmly around my shoulders, kisses me. All gesture, all simple cultural convention. I don't ask why he's leaving early.
February / March, 1992
Alone in Brookline, I've gone to bed. I nearly sleepwalk through the teaching of my classes at the university, make short trips to the grocery for soup, bread, coffee. But the rest of the time I stay in bed with the electric blanket turned on high. It's February now. Stan stays on in Maryland. Charles is back at school, and Stephen is living with his father and stepmother in Missouri.
He's wreaking havoc on their household—sneaking out at night, inciting new friends to trouble—while I'm burrowed under, lost for a while, sad. I'm translating Dante.
I've accepted the assignment from an editor to take on the thirty-second canto of the Inferno, the Ninth Circle, Hell's basement, in which those who have betrayed family and culture are locked in ice.
So far I have written, Were there a language dark enough to speak / truly of that hole harrowed by crags / gravity itself could not fall through to…
The original begins with S'io avessi—Had I. Sinclair's translation begins If I had. But I take liberties. Just now I am more likely to side with those poor traitors stuck in the ice than with Dante.
For the past semester Public Enemy is what I've heard coming from Stephen's room, Public Enemy crowding me, crowding the spaces of this huge apartment while I wore headphones, the big kind that hug the entire ear. I listened to Beethoven's Opus 57, the Appassionata sonata, beginning to end. The little anthem with which the piece commences felt near to me even as the booming of open rebellion vibrated under my feet.
Stephen would have laughed, disgusted with me, if he knew what I listened to. He would judge me as irresponsible, an ostrich, pathetically middle class, a white chick wearing blinders—or in this case, earphones—against the social and political chaos he recently discovered in his young life.
Never mind my feeble offerings about growing up through the sixties, the marches I participated in, the protests. “I went barefoot,” I heard myself absurdly reporting, “in winter. I hitchhiked. I had a boyfriend who quit school to protest the war. What do you want from me?”
Stephen wouldn't have it. “What about now,” he'd say. “What