Love and Glory

Chapter Thirty-One

Jennifer and I didn’t speak of love again. As long as she took courses, I’d take courses. I was her friend. We went places. In spring of 1968 a group of graduate students had a party in a second-floor walkup off Magazine Street in Cambridge.

“John doesn’t feel that it is appropriate for a professor to mingle socially like that with the grad students,” Jennifer said.

I nodded.

We were sitting cross-legged on the floor in the living room drinking mulled cider with cinnamon. The stereo was playing something that sounded like the oriental music I used to pick up on the radio in Korea. One string being plucked lethargically.

“I guess they’re not having anything to drink,” Jennifer said. She wore a lavender dress and beige high-heeled shoes. Her gold earrings were big loops and her lipstick was glossy and her eyes shadowed dark. In her honor I wore my blue blazer and my polished cordovans and my rep tie. Our hostess wore a flowered ankle-length dress and bare feet. Her boyfriend wore sandals and cutoff jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. The air was thick with marijuana smoke. Two graduate students sat silently on the couch. The boy in paint-stained jeans and moccasins and a collarless green-striped shirt. The girl had on hiking boots and Swiss army shorts and a blue denim shirt with the sleeves cut off. They moved their heads slightly in what might have been time with the one-stringed noises that came from the stereo.

In front of the couch was a coffee table made from an old cable spool. A big yellow tiger cat uncurled and jumped down from it.

“Hey, Jane,” I said to the hostess, “what’s the cat’s name?”

Jane looked startled, as if I’d just awakened her.

“Hester Prynne,” she said.

“Cute name,” I said.

She nodded. Jennifer murmured to me, “Boy, you are some conversationist.”

“If they had a black lab they’d name it Othello,” I said.

“Oh, now,” Jennifer said, “they’re not so bad.”

“Like hell they’re not,” I said. “They are more predictable than Prussian noblemen. They dress the same, they talk the same, they are cute in the same way, they have the same furniture, the same attitudes. All the women look the same: No makeup, pseudo-proletarian clothes, granny glasses as needed.”

“God,” Jennifer whispered, “they must think I’m a whore.”

“No booze,” I went on. “A lot of grass. East Indian zither music or whatever the hell that is. Bookcases made with bricks and boards.”

“You’re so absolute, Boonie. You’re scary sometimes. Hard to live up to.”

“I’m thirty-six years old,” I said. “I’ve done a lot of things and I’ve thought about all of them. Sometime in life you have to stop speculating and start deciding. I’ve done that.”

“You’ve had more experience than most of us.”

“It’s not the experience,” I said. I wanted her to understand. Maybe I even wanted to instruct her a little. “It’s what you do with it. It’s what you turn it into.”

“Why turn it into anything,” Jennifer said. “Why does it have to be systematized?”

“So you won’t kick around like a grasshopper on a hot afternoon,” I said.

Our host in the tie-dyed T-shirt said, “Boone, you were in the army.”

“Yes.”

He shook his head. They had been talking about Vietnam.

“How’d you let them get you?”

I’d had the conversation before. I knew how it would go. It was like talking sex with a virgin. I sighed softly. Jennifer looked at me.

“They were going to get somebody,” I said. “I didn’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be me.”

Jane said, “Wow, they had you brainwashed, didn’t they?”

“A different time,” I said. “For a lot of us then it was a rite of passage. Now resisting it is a rite of passage.”

“That’s all you think the antiwar movement is?” the host said.

“Barry,” I said, “I don’t think about movements any more than I have to. Trying to assign a single motive to a movement is like trying to catch minnows in your fist.”

“It’s that attitude that permits it,” Barry said. “People that don’t concern themselves. Easy for you, Boone, I suppose. They can’t draft you.”

I smiled at Jennifer. “At least I understand that,” I said to her. “I can identify with not wanting to get drafted.”

“That’s a legitimate concern, Boonie,” Jennifer said.

Barry was inflamed. “That’s not it,” he said. “That’s not where it’s at. That’s not what it’s about. Our commitment is to change. The world’s gone too long this way, the masses like cattle herded into the military to be massacred in wars of imperialism. People who serve in a war are traitors and it’s themselves they betray.”

For the first time since 1961 I felt like I needed a drink. “Mea culpa,” I murmured.

“It’s Standard Oil that wants this war. It wants the oil in southeast Asia.”

I could feel myself going. “Standard Oil isn’t anybody,” I said. “It’s like the peace movement. It’s an artificial entity made up of lots of people who are not entirely interchangeable.”

“Boone, that’s an incredibly naive view of society,” Barry said.

I nodded. Jennifer put her hand on my arm.

“Some of the sons of some of the people who work for Standard Oil are at this moment getting their balls blown off in Vietnam,” I said. “I don’t suppose their parents are fully consoled by corporate profits.”

Jane leaned forward, her hands clasped in her lap. “Boone. It’s hard for you to understand, I know. It’s hard for you to oppose the war. You’re older and...” She hesitated, trying to think how to say it. “Well, look at you, I mean you lift weights and...” She let the rest hang.

“Despite having a thick neck,” I said. “I think the war is wrong. I think it’s a mistake. But I’m not sure everyone involved in it is evil. I’m not even sure the world would run better if you took it over, Barry.”

Barry shook his head with dogged passion. “Things can change,” he said. “And people willing to make the commitment can change them.”

“I can agree with that,” I said. Jennifer sipped at her mulled cider and watched me over the rim of the glass. I smiled at her. “And I believe in commitment,” I said.