was not just a beach, the beach at Joe Pool Lake, a Beach Boys beach, a Debbie Reynolds beach, but something vast and mysterious and threatening. “Who are you?” asks the knight. “I am Death,” says the man.
“I am Death.” In the hundreds of movies he had seen, in the thousands of cartoons and news broadcasts and TV shows, Arnold had never heard anyone say, “I am Death.” Six words, “Who are you?” “I am Death,” and the so-called real world forever after dissolved to background. The old saga rose up in Arnold’s Texas world, an ancient structure of wood and flesh and iron and stone, of wind and wave and light and shadow, to speak of our true condition, ominous and loveless, no matter that his hand was in her lap, and warm. This was it.
But it was not the opening of The Seventh Seal that most moved him, though it was those initial moments that set him up to be hyper-present throughout. It was not the gorgeous and frightening end, the silhouetted dance of death of people he had grown to love. It was the burning of the witch that stayed most painfully with him, lodged in his throat and chest for years, the gamin on the pyre, her wide eyes filled with smoke, seeing.
For Arnold there was no riding away from this horrifying scene. In her own pain, Billie Jo squeezed his hand, but she found it limp, as powerless to help as those of squire or knight. Arnold knew only that he loved the witch more than he loved Billie Jo, whose hand lay in his, more even than he loved Mia, the juggler’s wife, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, the first woman with whom he had been unfaithful—only forty minutes before.
If Billie Jo was Arnold’s gateway to the world of Art, Arnold was hers to the world of politics. Not that he was any expert. But he had been baptized at school with the politics of hate, confirmed at ten with the poisoned policy toward Cuba, and bar mitzvahed at thirteen by vultures coming home to roost on Dealy Plaza. She, on the other hand, had been so protected by wealthy parents that her naïveté was comical. Arnold realized the extent of her ignorance during an Inwood screening of Pabst’s Der letzte Akt, a recreation of the final days of Hitler. During the first ten minutes of the film, Billie Jo leaned over to him three times to whisper, “Is that Hitler?” Though he whispered back, “No, not yet,” he was astounded, and then astounded again, and then again that she didn’t know what that Hitler looked like. When he appeared on the screen, he poked her.
“That’s him.”
“Ah,” she said.
When he read that Alabama governor George Wallace was to give a speech in Dallas, he suggested they go. Billie Jo had heard of Wallace, knew he had tried to block black students from entering the University of Alabama some years before and was running his wife as candidate for governor to replace him. She was game to go. They arrived at the VFW Hall ten minutes late, as the governor of Alabama was intoning a litany of crime in the streets, of courts coddling criminals. He assailed the pinkos undermining U.S. efforts in Vietnam, and the attack on property rights and free enterprise. He zeroed in on the constitutional primacy of states’ rights.
“I have never,” he insisted, “I have never made a racist speech in my life. I mean I never talked against niggras as people. I got nothing against niggras. Southern folks had the most practical approach ever devised for this race business. What good are equal rights if it gets folks killed and ruins everything? Why, you’re safer in the worst part of Montgomery than on the New York City subway. We got less integration but more mingling, and more law and order. And what most folks of all races want is law and order.”
“Thas what we want, George!”
“You know, people keep tryin to polish me up. Course I talk like we all do down South. You know—ain’t got no, he don’t, and all that—I know better, but it’s just comfortable. So I went up and was on television with Martin Luther King, and I talked like I always do, and there he was with that grammar and those big words. And they quoted me in the paper the next day to make it look like I don’t know anything, and then they quote a fellow like that that don’t even know the origins of the English language. . . .”
And so on. Billie Jo found it fascinating, better than Shakespeare, not as good as some films but better than most, with the unmatchable immediacy of a live event steaming in real passion. On the drive home, she was quiet.
“So?” prodded her teacher.
“So let’s stop eating meat.”
“What?”
“How can any sensitive person accept that in order to feed ourselves we should kill all those animals, especially when the earth gives us so many different treasures from plants?”
“What has that got to do with tonight?”
“You want to?”
“No. I like meat. I need it to play football.”
More silence.
“Arnold, could you ever imagine forcing a woman to do something sexually she doesn’t want to do?”
“No, of course not. What’s wrong with you?”
“You wouldn’t ever rape me.”
She took his glare for a response.
“Do you like the way I look?”
“I love the way you look.”
A mile of silence.
“Do you like the way I look because you are socially conditioned? I mean what if I were fat and ugly? Would you still like me?”
“Sure. You’re likeble. I’m not just interested in . . .”
“Would you like the way I look? If I were fat and ugly?”
They arrived home before this aporia could propagate. She wouldn’t kiss him good-night at her door—“I’m tired, and I just want to go to sleep”—the unpredictable response to a loss of political virginity.
But George Wallace was not enough to break them up. She called the next morning, Saturday, chipper as usual.
“You get the Best Cheap Date of the Year Award for last night. Please report to my house at 7 tonight for the presentation. I’m off to piano lesson. Bye.”
Mom was in Dallas, and Chris was at a birthday party and would be delivered home at 9. It was time for a treatment with some special “anthroposophical” massage oil she had bought in a head shop in the city.
“What did I do to deserve this?” her boyfriend asked.
“You don’t deserve it. It’s a gift of grace. Just shut up, take off your shirt, and lie down.”
“Where?”
“On my bed, silly. Where else would you like to lie down? On mom’s bed?”
“No, I . . .”
She warmed the oil between her palms.
“Are you aware of the healing properties of arnica with rosemary?”
“Not exactly.”
“Quiet. Just relax.”
She spread the oil over his back and moved her hands up and down along his flanks as if she were molding an exquisite form.
“Arnica is the master remedy for shock.”
“But I’m not in shock.”
“You will be.” She reads from a sheet that came with the bottle. “‘The patient is bruised, sore, tender, and resents being touched.’ That’s you. ‘He is in a stupor, but answers correctly when roused.’ That’s you for sure. ‘Nervous, cannot bear pain, whole body oversensitive.’” She runs her hair up his bare back to test.
“‘Useful remedy for sprains, concussion, and aftereffects of blows or falls. Useful for all pains anywhere, rheumatism, or any condition where “as if bruised all over” is a major symptom.’”
By this time Arnold had entered the alpha state of the deeply massaged.