334
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Oh, come on. You know they don't remember me."
"Are you kidding? Of course they remember you."
He grinned again. We got into a taxi. We had a lot to say to each
other, far too much to know how to begin.
As
the taxi began to move, I asked, "You still want to go to
India?"
He laughed. "You still remember that. Hell, no. This place
is
Indian enough for me."
"It used to belong to them," I said.
And he laughed again. "They damn sure knew what they were
doing when they got rid of it."
Years ago, when he was around fourteen, he'd been all hipped
on the idea of going to India. He read books about people sitting
on rocks, naked, in all kinds of weather, but mostly bad, naturally,
and walking barefoot through hot coals and arriving at wisdom. I
used to say that it sounded to me as though they were getting away
from wisdom as fast as they could. I think he sort of looked down on
me for that.
"Do you mind," he asked, "if we have the driver drive along–
side the park? On the west side-I haven't seen the city in so long."
"Of course not," I said. I was afraid that I might sound as
though I were humoring him, but I hoped he wouldn't take it
that way.
So we drove along, between the green of the park and the stony,
lifeless elegance of hotels and apartment buildings, toward the vivid,
killing streets of our childhood. These streets hadn't changed, though
housing projects jutted up out of them now like rocks in the middle
of a boiling sea. Most of the houses in which we had grown up had
vanished, as had the stores from which we had stolen, the basements
in which we had first tried sex, the rooftops from which we had
hurled tin cans and bricks. But houses exactly like the houses of our
past yet dominated the landscape, boys exactly like the boys we once
had been found themselves smothering in these houses, came down
into the streets for light and air and found themselves encircled by
disaster. Some escaped the trap, most didn't. Those who got out
always left something of themselves behind, as some animals amputate
a leg and leave it in the trap. It might be said, perhaps, that I had
escaped, after
all,
I was a school teacher; or that Sonny had, he
