BETWEEN EARTH AND JUPITER

Arthur Mansoni walked along the beach.  He walked in his usual manner, seemingly unaware of where he was, unselfconscious, lost amid the busy traffic of his thoughts.  The beach was very much like him, a place where life teemed under its surfaces but which to the eye was monotonously unvarying.  The two seemed to belong together, the man and the beach--a long stretch of bright sand and noisy water, distant from the clang and bang of human commerce, with nothing to take notice of but seagulls lazily floating out beyond the breakers and sandpipers scurrying on the sand as waves rolled up, and Arthur. 

     There was much turmoil in his mind this morning, for he was struggling with three experiences which cast him into a grave mood, and when he felt like this, he liked to walk on the beach, very early in the morning, before people rose and got about their daily business.  There was the unexpected death of a colleague and friend, a man only a few years older than Arthur, who was hale and robust but who dropped on the office floor one day and died of a massive stroke on his way to the hospital.  Everyone was shaken by the event.  But now, almost a year later, a new man long since on the job, everyone seems to have forgotten.  But it was not the forgetting that weighed so heavily on Arthur, nor was it even the death itself that disturbed him just now, but something else, something that Arthur couldn’t define but which sat on him like a depression and nagged him. 

     And then there was the discovery of a gene in his sister’s twin boys--who were participating in a research study at the National Institutes of Health--that the researchers believed was a marker of homosexuality, both boys being gay.  It was not the fact they were gay that troubled him, for he had long known of it and loved them nevertheless, and they were loving in return and always respectful.  It was something he only dimly glimpsed and didn’t understand, something connected to the death of his friend, but it was beyond him to say what it was. 

     Often of late he would notice things that he had never paid attention to before.  He noticed, for example, that couples announcing their weddings in the local newspaper often looked alike in their photos.  He seldom saw two young people announcing their nuptials whose faces were strikingly different.  This was true even of himself and his wife.  People say that couples who have been married a long time grow to look like each other.  The truth is they looked alike from the beginning.  Why? 

He began to notice all sorts of things like this.  There was a woman in his office who wore rings on each of her fingers, and on some of them several rings.  With dyed hair and a face covered with makeup, she could ill afford all that gold.  Once he asked her why she had so many rings on her fingers, and she answered, in her hoarse smoker’s voice, that she didn’t know, she just liked gold.  He took it for the truth.  So he began to notice women and over the course of months he spotted many of them who wore multiple rings.  What did it mean?  And then there was another office worker who carried an umbrella to work everyday, summer and winter, wet and sunny, windy and calm, it didn’t matter.  He wanted to ask him why he always carried that umbrella but supposed the man would only say, “Why not?”  What else could he say?  People do the things they like to.  Arthur worried why it bothered him.

     Was it the meaninglessness of it all?  It mystified Arthur--wearing rings, carrying umbrellas, choosing look-alikes as spouses.  He began to notice all kinds of inexplicable behaviors.  His neighbor drove a hunter green minivan and had dark green carpets in his house.  When Arthur became aware of this combination, he noticed that his friend never wore red, even in his ties.  At Christmas time, he hung a string of blue lights across the front of his house.  And then there were the people who poked their pinkies out when they lifted a cup or glass to drink.  And the people who stooped to pick up pennies from the sidewalk.  And the pack rats—he knew many of these—whose garages and attics and basements were stuffed with things they would never use again.  And then there were his cousins—Josephine, who would rather die than spend her money, and Francis, who spent every dime she ever had and who now lives in penury.

     “It’s absurd!” he thought.  “Meaningless!  We live our lives as though someone else were in our bodies!  Someone we don’t even know!”  As for his cousin Josephine, no amount of reasoning could persuade her to spend her money on a vacation.  She couldn’t be made to see that her money was useless to her.  The idea wouldn’t get through.  She would sit, heavy from overeating and inactivity, and say with a knowing smile that always raised his blood pressure, “Why do you think I have my money?”  “Good, good,” he would say, “thinking about it is vacation enough.”  And he would end the conversation, walking away exasperated.  But she was like his neighbor, exactly like, only it was money instead of a preference for green and blue and avoidance of red.  It’s all so stupid! he would rant to himself.  Stupid! 

     People doing things they hadn’t the least idea why!  Once he became aware of it as a problem, he saw it everywhere.  One Saturday, he noticed an old white-haired man feeling peaches at the supermarket.  Arthur was fascinated as he watched.  The old man felt one peach and put it aside, then felt about twenty more and came back at last to the one and put it in a plastic sack.  Then he repeated the whole process and went on and on in this manner until he had selected half a dozen.  Satisfied, he moved to the plums, where he systematically searched for his half dozen of those.  Arthur pretended to busy himself as he watched the old man until it occurred to him that he was just as obsessive and stomped away in disgust, ruing the half hour he had wasted. 

     But the occasion that precipitated his walk on the beach that Monday morning was the stargazing he had done the night before.  Arthur had never looked through a telescope, so when his neighbor, he of the green carpets and blue Christmas lights, told him he had bought a Stars-splitter Dobsonian scope with a fourteen-and-a-half inch mirror, Arthur asked if he couldn’t join him one night when he set it up to view.  His neighbor, delighted to have company, said he would be glad to show him around the skies, and they did their first viewing together that Sunday night, which was a crisp, clear, moonless night of the kind that stargazers wait months on end for. 

     They went out just after Saturn rose above the eastern horizon and put the scope on it first.  Arthur was profoundly moved.  Then, in quick succession after Saturn, they viewed Jupiter and its moons, the Lagoon Nebula, the nebula in the constellation Hercules, the Ring nebula, the Dumbbell nebula, and the Andromeda galaxy.  After a little more than an hour, they concluded their night by returning to Saturn and Jupiter for a last look.  Arthur went to bed and found himself unable to sleep.  The image of Jupiter, especially, loomed in his mind, seeming to sit on his eyes, even when he opened them.  The planet shone a brilliant white and had two tawny streaks across its face, and three of its moons shone like golden drops in the inky dark of space, two on one side and one on the other, arranged in a diagonal, with the lone moon a greater distance away from the planet than the other two, which seemed to orbit together like companions.

     The vision was so like what one imagined the solar system to be that Arthur had the distinct impression he had been viewing the solar system itself, as though from outside, like he was some vast and knowing cosmic consciousness, and then that impression faded and was replaced by an even stranger one--he felt as though he had looked through the telescope into a cosmic mirror and was seeing back upon the perspective that contained him.  Impressions and feelings struck across his nerves all that night, and, unable to sleep, he had gotten up before dawn, made coffee, and after two cups, left for the beach, where he hoped to sort out all these things, for, during the night, he came to believe they were all connected and the key to understanding them lay in the image of Jupiter.

     He walked on the wet sand, hardly noticing the water, cold as it was, running up over his bare feet.  He sloshed through it as it rolled back down the slope, his mind elsewhere.  His friend who died from the stroke died so suddenly and quickly, with so little forewarning his life was in danger, that he certainly was never aware—even that he had a stroke!  His mind and life were just instantly gone, as though they vanished, and he himself never even knew it happened.  This is what mystified Arthur.  He wondered about it and wondered about it, for he saw a genuine mystery in it.  When he thought about being aware and what it meant, he suspected that in some ways we aren’t aware at all.  We seem to be, like the old man feeling fruit in the supermarket or his cousin Josephine sitting heavily at the kitchen table, moved by something that isn’t us.  And then there were his nephews.  Were they really gay because they had some little packet of chemicals passed on to them by someone else, like a two-dollar bill in the drugstore? 

     Arthur was walking on the beach in an old pair of suit trousers rolled up over his shins and a long-sleeve white shirt buttoned at the cuffs though open at his chest, where his graying hair curled out.  The endless seawind blew against him, and the surf splashed and hissed and grated so that he ceased to hear and feel.  What does it mean to be aware one minute and then to not only go blank but to be unaware that you did?  Just ceasing to be?  Why?  And again, Why?  As he walked, he gazed out upon the ocean, unconsciously aware of how its gauzey horizon hinted at the infinite and, at the same time, contained him as a kind of clinical wrap.  The sandpipers ran before him and chased the retreating surf, spearing the sand with their long beaks and gobbling up the little white sandcrabs.  These live in the sand at the edge of the surf and are the creatures that leave those little air holes out of which water bubbles for an instant when the surf soaks into the sand after the wave passes.  Arthur had stopped walking and, his hands in his pockets, stood looking at the sandpipers, which had also stopped their forward motion along the beach a few feet in front of him.   

     “Funny,” he thought, “those sandcrabs get gobbled up by the zillions, day after day, year after year, century after century.  They live in the sand.  Are they self-aware?  Do they know about sandpipers, and are they afraid?  Of course not.  Who could imagine the fear of a sandcrab?  And if it’s true, what’s the difference between being a sandcrab and being a pebble?  No awareness on either count, no fear.  Is the difference merely that if you are a sandcrab something eats you?  Wouldn’t it have been better to have never been?  He tried to imagine what it would be like to have been born a body without a mind, and he realized his question was pointless, for it occurred to him that, from the point of view of a sandcrab, there really was no difference, no difference at all, except for reproduction, which is what makes having been a sandcrab possible in the first place.  And over that the little creature probably had no control and no idea what it was doing.  A pebble knew as much.

     “But what about me?  I suffer.  I feel joy.  Is that all?  Is that enough?” he thought, shrugging, as the sun, high enough above the ocean now to make it gleam like a fragmented mirror, obliterated his vision.  “What do I want? God?  I want heaven?”  He felt only turmoil in response to these questions.  He turned away from the gleaming, brimming ocean and started to walk into the dry sand when his view of Jupiter in the telescope came back to him.  It was like a solar system, a great ball of light radiating heat and God knows what else with planets orbiting it, all devoid of life, not dead, but lifeless, a symbol of. . .what? Arthur arrived at no answers from his walk, except, perhaps, to begin to see a connection between these gloomy thoughts and the image of Jupiter.  But what this connection might mean, he lacked the capacity to understand.  His feelings in this matter were his guide, and what he felt was a sense of ominous revelation that he could not quite break through to because it was shrouded in some darkness that he had no means to dispel.  And so he trudged heavily through the dry, morning-cool sand to the boardwalk and made his way to the parking lot where, when he came to his car, he put on his shoes, rolled down his pants legs, and drove home.

     He turned off the Meadowbrook Parkway onto Sunrise Highway and, inching through the construction where the Sunrise was being rebuilt, came at last to Union Street where he lived.  His wife Iole heard him enter and hollered out that she was in the kitchen and where had he been?

     “Out for a walk,” he said from the bedroom. 

     “Did you go to the beach again?” she shouted up the hall.

     “Yes, yes, I went to the beach,” he replied, knowing that she didn’t like his doing that for fear he’d catch cold in the damp morning air and worsen the arthritis in his back and knees.  And he knew her next question before she asked it.

     “Did you wear the sweatsuit I bought you?”

     “No,” he shouted back.  He didn’t like the heaviness of the sweatsuit and felt too wrapped up in it when he wore it.  He liked the feel of trousers rolled up and the open shirt.  It made him feel young and free.  But Iole always complained.  She complained about everything he did, and it drove him crazy.  When he asked her why she complained so much, she always got offended and fell silent, and within sixty seconds complained that he never listened to her, turning her back to him and walking away with an air of wounded pride.  And then he would look at his wristwatch, as though he had been timing her. 

     He came into the kitchen dressed for work.  He was an assayer for the borough of Brooklyn, where he spent his life assessing the values of commercial and private property.  A mid-level functionary, he thought of himself, a faceless member of a horde of such, putting in time amid endless routine until retirement, at which time he would be free to become a sandcrab, he thought.  He loved the beach in the early morning because he had it all to himself.  Why would he want to protect himself against it, go out there wrapped up in that blanket-like sweatsuit?

     Iole toasted an English muffin for him and put a jar of marmalade beside the dish and poured coffee for them both.  He sipped the coffee, hot and sweet, and tasted the marmalade before spreading it on his muffin.  Holding the spoon and pointing it at Iole, he asked, “How are you different from a sandcrab?”

     At first she laughed, then seeing that he wasn’t smiling and was waiting for an answer, she said, “Are you serious or are you trying to insult me?”  They sat for a moment looking at each other, and then she said, “What’s the matter Arthur?  Why are you asking me that?  Is that a real question?”  Then she pulled on her robe and tightened it against her chest.

     Seeing that she was hurt and feeling badly, he said, “I’m only joking.  I was digging sandcrabs on the beach and was playing around with them and they were on my mind, that’s all.”

     “And what were you wondering?”

     “Nothing, nothing, they were just on my mind, that’s all.”

     “That’s not true, you were wondering something.  Am I a crab?  Is that it?”

Iole was always quicker then him.  Her wit was one of the things he most loved about her.  With her humor she took the edge off of most unpleasantnesses, and that made her a family favorite.  But now, her graying hair unbrushed and her face bare of makeup, she looked pitiably old.

“You think I nag you and crab about everything, that’s it, isn’t it?  Why don’t you say so!”  She was insulted.  She felt his question as a criticism, and she hated to be criticized.  She got up then and busied herself at the sink, trying to ignore him.

     He thought she was being oversensitive, but the idea that he was calling her a crab struck home.  Was that what he really intended?  He felt certain it was.  He was amazed.  And again that sense of ominous revelation came over him.  It scared him.  He got up and put his arms around Iole and pressed himself against her back.  She went limp and let him hug her.  He said, “Forgive me.  I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to imply any of that, really.  It’s all very funny when you think about it.”

     She broke lose from his hold and turned round and said she was hurt and why did he do it?  She didn’t think it was funny at all! 

     “I’m sorry, really,” he apologized.

     “All right,” she said, “I’ll try not to nag and complain so much.  I can’t help it, you know.  It’s not like you tend to my every whim.”

     “I know, don’t worry.  Tonight I’ll make it up.”

He finished his coffee and put the cup on the table.

“We’ll go out to diner, OK?  You pick the place.  Tonight is yours.  We’ll do what you want.”

     He loved Iole.  They have been married for thirty-six years and the thought of living without her was impossible to him.  He had gone quite gray, much more so than she.  But she kept herself well dressed and still had a fine figure and complexion.

     That night they went to Manhattan for diner, to an Italian restaurant called Carmine’s.  While they were walking there from the parking garage, they came across a young man on the sidewalk who was handing passersby a small playing-card size slip of paper.  As they approached, Arthur noticed that the young man was pierced all over and hanging with rings—he had them in the nose, the ears, the lips, and even one in each of his nipples, which showed through holes cut in his T-shirt.  He politely accepted the slip of paper as he and Iole passed, and when he glanced at it, he saw a drawing of some kind which he didn’t make out.  As they neared the middle of the block, however, he glanced at it again, trying to make out what it was before tossing it, and again he was stymied by the image.  Turning the piece of paper over he saw another image, and this one was more puzzling yet.  He could tell from the print that he was holding it right side up, but the images on both sides eluded him, and he stopped to look at them more carefully.  He turned the slip over and back again and said to Iole, “What am I looking at?”

     She took the slip and studied it a moment and said, breaking into a broad smile, “Can’t you make it out?  Read the print,” and handed it back.  Whereupon he took the time to read the ad that seemed to be illustrated by the drawings.  But he still didn’t understand.  So Iole pointed to the drawings and explained, “That’s the head of a penis with a ring in it, and on the other side is a vagina.  It’s an ad for piercing your genitals.”

     “What?” he nearly shouted, amazed, shocked, bewildered, but curious, fascinated.  “Why would anyone do that?” he exclaimed, looking at the slip of paper again and making out quite clearly what he couldn’t see before. 

     “C’mon,” Iole said, “we’re nearly there.  I’m hungry.”  So they continued on and got themselves seated, Arthur hanging on to the slip of paper still, reluctant to let it go until he was satisfied he understood what it was all about.  They ordered and had their glasses filled with wine, and were sipping it, when Arthur took the slip out of his shirt pocket and looked it over again. 

     “Do people really do this?” he asked, as if Iole knew all about it.  In answer, she only raised an eyebrow.  “Why would anybody do it?” he said, still amazed, looking intently at the drawings.

     “Arthur,” Iole whispered, “forget about it, please?  Put that thing away.”   She resisted the impulse to look around, for she felt self-conscious and didn’t want to be overheard talking about such a thing. 

     So Arthur contained himself, and after a while their meals came.  But while they were eating, he let out with, “Don’t they have to put a hole right through it?  I mean, a pretty big hole to get such a ring through it?”

     “Shh, please, Arthur, let it drop.”

     “But Iole, does it make sense?”

     “I don’t know, what do I know?” she said, laughing.  “Have you ever seen me with a ring down there?  Stop it, Arthur.”

     He went back to eating, but she could see that he hadn’t left off thinking about it.  She smiled thinking of his questions—like he thought she could answer, as though she were a specialist in piercing vaginas and penises.  She tried to get him thinking of other things, and said, “Why don’t we go to Montauk this Saturday?”  Their daughter had a vacation condominium in Montauk and they often went out on weekends, whether she was there or not, just to get away and do something. 

     And he replied, putting his fork down and making a ring with his thumb and index finger and sticking his other index finger through it, “Is it possible to do it with a ring attached like that?  What’s it like?  Wouldn’t it hurt?  I mean, both parties?  I don’t understand, Iole, why do they do it?  Don’t the people who do those things have sex?”

     She couldn’t help looking around to see if anyone was listening.  Then she leaned across the table and said, “If you don’t stop talking about this, I’m leaving!”

     “OK, OK,” he said, quieting down, resuming eating, but just boiling away with curiosity.  Again, Iole had to smile, for she hadn’t seen him so provoked in a long time.  Then she saw him put his hands between his legs, and he said, “God, it must hurt.”  Then holding his hands up, he said, “That’s all, that’s all, I won’t mention it again.”

     “You better not,” she said sternly, squaring her shoulders and giving him her hard-eyed look, which usually was warning enough to get him over whatever he was pestering her about.

     “Just one more thing,” he said, holding his hand up again, as if to hold her off.  The waiter came and took their dishes and their order for coffee and pastry, and when he was gone, Arthur resumed, “Do you remember this morning when I asked you the difference between you and a sandcrab?”  She shook her head, and said “Of course, that’s why we’re here.”  “Well,” he continued, “I meant not you personally but you as a human being, like what’s the difference between you as a human being and a sandcrab.  Well,” he said, holding up and waving the slip of paper, “this is the difference.  Sandcrabs don’t stick holes in their you-know-whats.”  He said that with a certain eloquence and a tone of indignation. 

     “Why do you suppose that young man gave this thing to me, to us?  Do we look like the kind of people who would go to this place and have that done?  I mean, do we?”

     “Maybe he did it to see if you would take it, and then laughed his head off when you did?” she said, to make him shut up.

     But at that he became thoughtful, and when their coffee came, he let her steer the conversation, and they spent the rest of the evening pleasantly enough, sipping an after-dinner cordial, and walking back to the car, arm in arm, well fortified and ready to go home and turn in.  Arthur now had another experience to account for, another mystery, and it nagged at him just as irritatingly as the others, and he was sure it was connected, for everything in life is connected, in one way or another.

     He thought, as he rested his head on the pillow and settled the sheet over him, that the penis and the vagina were sacred objects and were kept out of the public eye for reasons--they were the links between generations, and they were, just as importantly, the links that bound people together within generations.  They were not to be offered up to scrutiny or ridicule, to be made light of, become the subjects of comparison and of conversation.  He saw that young man again, hanging with rings, one through his nose, several in each ear, one through his lower lip, and one in each of his nipples, and he was horrified.  None of this was new to him, but it never pressed upon him before.  Why? he said to himself.  Why?  This was not like the old man picking fruit.  This was something different.  Was it the answer to what he had been asking?  This morning at the beach, he almost came through, the revelation was so close, he felt he was on the edge of understanding and he merely needed to take one more step, but he couldn’t take it. 

     And when he fell asleep, he immediately dreamed of a drill and could feel its vibration, and he woke with a start and sat up.  Then he lay down again, and soon fell back to sleep.

     And again he dreamed.  This time in his dream he was floating in space, and as he floated he felt joyous, happy as he had never been in life, and all around him were stars, and one of those stars was the planet Jupiter, for he was nearing it, almost as though he was willing his movement towards it.  And he saw, when he got close, that between Earth and Jupiter there was a kind of road, or, rather, a ladder, that bent with time and distance and motion this way and that, and curled round, and turned in on itself and came out again, and eventually, in constant motion and change, reached the giant planet.  This ladder seemed to be made of light, and all of its rungs were people, and people also were climbing, endlessly climbing, one behind another.  These people were all different, but, strangely, he couldn’t help feeling that he knew them, knew them all, even though some were Asian, some were black, and some were white, and some wore suits and ties, like himself, and some wore pantaloons and buckled shoes and ruffled shirts, and some wore cone-shaped reed hats under which their pigtails hung down, and some wore miniskirts and platform shoes, and all had hard faces and fear in their eyes.  On and on in an endless stream they went.  And then the climbers imperceptibly turned into combers on the beach, and they became wave after wave, washing up on the shore and over Arthur’s feet, and the sun shone bright over the ocean, flickering a million gleams of light into his eyes all at once, and he suddenly knew, he dreamed the answer, the shroud had been pierced, and the revelation stood revealed.