Middlesex

Impossible to imagine my father weeping from a broken heart. Impossible to imagine him refusing to eat. Impossible, also, to imagine him calling the boardinghouse again and again until finally Mrs. O’Toole said, “Listen, sugar. She don’t want to talk to you. Get it?” “Yeah”—Milton swallowing hard—“I got it.” “Plenty of other fish in the sea.” Impossible to imagine any of these things, but they are, in fact, what happened.

Maybe Mrs. O’Toole’s maritime metaphor had given him an idea. A week after Tessie became engaged, on a steamy Tuesday morning, Milton put his clarinet away for good and went down to Cadillac Square to exchange his Boy Scout uniform for another.

“Well, I did it,” he told the family at dinner that night. “I enlisted.”

“In the Army!” Desdemona said, horrified.

“What did you do that for?” said Zoë. “The war’s almost over. Hitler’s finished.”

“I don’t know about Hitler. It’s Hirohito I’ve got to worry about. I joined the Navy. Not the Army.”

“What about your feet?” Desdemona cried.

“They didn’t ask about my feet.”

My grandfather, who had sat through the clarinet serenades as he sat through everything, aware of their significance but unconvinced of the wisdom of getting involved, now glared at his son. “You’re a very stupid young man, do you know that? You think this is some kind of game?”

“No, sir.”

“This is a war. You think it is some kind of fun, a war? Some kind of big joke to play on your parents?”

“No, sir.”

“You will see what kind of a big joke it is.”

“The Navy!” Desdemona meanwhile continued to moan. “What if your boat it sinks?”

“You see what you do?” Lefty shook his head. “You’re going to make your mother sick worrying so much.”

“I’ll be okay,” said Milton.

Looking at his son, Lefty now saw a painful sight: himself twenty years earlier, full of stupid, cocky optimism. There was nothing to do with the spike of fear that shot through him but to speak out in anger. “Okay, then. Go to the Navy,” said Lefty. “But you know what you forgot, Mr. almost Eagle Scout?” He pointed at Milton’s chest. “You forgot you never win a badge for swimming.”

NEWS OF THE WORLD

Iwaited three days before calling Julie again. It was ten o’clock at night and she was still in her studio working. She hadn’t eaten, so I suggested we get something. I said I’d come by and pick her up.

This time, she let me in. Her studio was a mess, frightening in its chaos, but after the first few steps I forgot about all that. My attention was arrested by what I saw on the walls. Five or six large test prints were tacked up, each one showing the industrial landscape of a chemical plant. Julie had shot the factory from a crane, so that the effect for the viewer was of floating just above the snaking pipes and smokestacks.

“Okay, that’s enough,” she said, pushing me toward the door.

“Hold on,” I said. “I love factories. I’m from Detroit. This is like an Ansel Adams for me.”

“Now you’ve seen it,” she said, shooing me out, pleased, uncomfortable, smiling, stubborn.

“I’ve got a Bernd and Hilla Becher in my living room,” I boasted.

“You’ve got a Bernd and Hilla Becher?” She stopped pushing me.

“It’s an old cement factory.”

“Okay, all right,” said Julie, relenting. “I do factories. That’s what I do. Factories. These are the I. G. Farben plant.” She winced. “I’m worried it’s the typical thing for an American to do over here.”

“Holocaust industry, you mean?”

“I haven’t read that book, but yeah.”

“If you’ve always done factories, I think it’s different,” I told her. “Then you’re not just glomming on. If factories are your subject, how could you not do I. G. Farben.”

“You think it’s okay?”

I pointed to the test prints. “These are great.”

We fell silent, looking at each other, and without thinking I leaned forward and kissed Julie lightly on the lips.

When the kiss was over she opened her eyes very wide. “I thought you were gay when we met,” she said.

“Must have been the suit.”

“My gaydar went off completely.” Julie was shaking her head. “I’m always suspicious, being the last stop.”

“The last what?”

“Haven’t you ever heard of that? Asian chicks are the last stop. If a guy’s in the closet, he goes for an Asian because their bodies are more like boys’.”

“Your body’s not like a boy’s,” I said.

This embarrassed Julie. She looked away.

“You’ve had a lot of closeted gay guys go after you?” I asked her.

“Twice in college, three times in graduate school,” answered Julie.

There was no other response to this but to kiss her again.

* * *