My Life As A Man

without inhibitions-for her to fall into the appropriate posture or turn up with the necessary equipment. “Tell me what you want me to say, Nathan, tell me what you want me to do-“ As Zuckerman was a highly imaginative boy, and Sharon so anxious to please, there was, that June, very nearly something new and exciting to do every night.

The sense of adventure that surrounded their lovemaking (if such is the term that applies here) was heightened further by the presence often of the four parents in some other part of the house, or out on the back terrace, drinking iced tea and gabbing. While buggering Sharon on the floor beneath the ping-pong table in the basement of her parents’ house, Zuckerman would call out from time to time, “Nice shot,” or “Nice return, Sharon” -even as the feverish young girl whispered up from the canine position, “Oh it’s so strange. It hurts, but it doesn’t hurt. Oh Nathan, it’s so strange.”

Very spicy stuff; more reckless than made him comfortable (Al Shatzky hadn’t risen to the top of the zipper industry by being a gentle or forgiving fellow), but irresistible. At the suggestion of the adults, they would go off to the kitchen late at night and there like good little children eat oversized syrup-covered portions of ice cream out of soup bowls. Out on the terrace the adults would laugh about the appetite on those two kids-yes, those were his father’s very words-while beneath the table where they sat, Zuckerman would be bringing Sharon to orgasm with his big toe.

Best of all were “the shows.” For Zuckerman’s pleasure and at his instigation, Sharon would stand in the bathroom with the door open and the overhead light on, performing for him as though she were on a stage, while he would be seated in the dark living room at the other end of the corridor, seemingly looking in the direction of the television set. A “show” consisted of Sharon unfastening her clothes (very slowly, deftly, very much the teasing pro) and then, with the little underthings at her feet, introducing various objects into herself. Transfixed (by the Phillies game, it would appear), Zuckerman would stare down the hallway at the nude girl writhing, just as he had directed her to, upon the plastic handle of her hairbrush, or her vaginal jelly applicator, or once, upon a zucchini purchased for that purpose earlier in the day. The sight of that long green gourd (uncooked, of course) entering into and emerging from her body, the sight of the Zipper King’s daughter sitting on the edge of the bathtub with her legs flung apart, wantonly surrendering all five feet nine inches of herself to a vegetable, was as mysterious and compelling a vision as any Zuckerman had ever seen in his (admittedly) secular life. Almost as stirring as when she crawled to him across the length of her parents’ living room that night, her eyes leveled on his exposed member and her tongue out and moving. “I want to be your whore,” she whispered to him (without prompting too), while on the back terrace her Mother told his mother how adorable Sharon looked in the winter coat they’d bought for her that afternoon.

It was not, it turned out, a complicated sort of rebellion Sharon was engaged in, but then she wasn’t a complicated girl. If her behavior continued to exceed understanding it was now because it seemed so pathetically transparent. Sharon hated her father. One reason she hated him-so she said-was because of that ugly name of theirs which he refused to do anything about. Years and years ago, when she was still an infant in the crib, all five brothers on the Shatzky side had gotten together to decide to change the family name, “for business reasons.” They had decided on Shadley. Only her father, of the five, refused to make the improvement. “I ain’t ashamed,” he told the other four-and went on from there, he informed his daughter, to become the biggest success of them all. As if, Sharon protested to Zuckerman, that proved anything! What about the sheer ugliness of that name? What about the way it sounded to people? Especially for a girl! Her cousin Cindy was Cindy Shadley, her cousin Ruthie was Ruthie Shadley-she alone of the girls in the family was still Shatzky! “Come on, will you please-I’m a trademark,” her father told her, “I’m known nationwide. What am I supposed to become all of a sudden, Al ‘the Zipper King’ Shadley? Who’s he, honey?” Well, the truth was that by the time she was fifteen she couldn’t bear that he called himself “the Zipper King” either. “The Zipper King” was as awful as Shatzky-in ways it was worse. She wanted a father with a name that wasn’t either a joke or an outright lie; she wanted a real name; and she warned him, some day when she was old enough, she would hire a lawyer and go down to the county courthouse and get one. “You’ll get one, all right-and you know how? The way all the other nice girls do. You’ll get married, and why I’ll cry at the wedding is out of happiness that I won’t have to hear any more of this name business-“ and so on, in this vein, for the five tedious years of Sharon’s adolescence. Which wasn’t quite over yet. “What is Shatzky,” she cried sorrowfully to Zuckerman, “but the past tense of Shitzky? Oh why won’t he change it! How stubborn can a person be!”

In her denunciations of the family name, Sharon was as witty as she would ever be-not that the wit was intentional. The truth was that when she was not putting on a three-ring circus for him, Sharon was pretty much of a bore to Zuckerman. She didn’t know anything about anything. She did not pronounce the g in “length,” nor did she aspirate the h in “when” or “why,” nor would she have in “whale” had the conversation ever turned to Melville. And she had the most Cockney Philadelphia o he had ever heard on anyone other than a cabdriver. If and when she did get a joke of his, she would sigh and roll her eyes toward heaven, as though his subtleties were on a par with her father’s-Zuckerman, who had been the H. L. Mencken of Bass College! whose editorials (on the shortcomings of the administration and the student body) Miss Benson had likened in their savage wit to Jonathan Swift! How could he ever take Sharon up to Bass with him to visit Miss Benson? What if she started telling Miss Benson those pointless and interminable anecdotes about herself and her high-school friends? Oh, when she started talking, she could bury you in boredom! Rarely in conversation did Sharon finish a sentence, but rather, to Zuckerman’s disgust, glued her words together by a gummy mixture of “you knows” and “I means,” and with such expressions of enthusiasm as “really great,” “really terrific,” and “really neat”…the last usually to describe the gang of kids she had traveled with at Atlantic City when she was fifteen, which, to be sure, had only been the summer before last.

Coarse, childish, ignorant, utterly lacking in that exquisiteness of feeling and refinement of spirit that he had come to admire so in the novels-in the person-of Virginia Woolf, whose photograph had been tacked above his desk during his last semester at Bass. He entered the army after their feverish, daredevil month together secretly relieved at having left behind him (seemingly as he had found her) Al and Minna’s five-foot nine-inch baby girl; she was a tantalizing slave and an extraordinary lay, but hardly a soul mate for someone who felt as he did about great writers and great books. Or so it seemed, until that day they issued him his Mi rifle, and he found he needed everyone he had.

“I love your prick,” the girl wept into the phone. “I miss your prick so much. Oh, Nathan, I’m touching my cunt, I’m touching my cunt and making believe it’s you. Oh, Nathan, should I make myself come on the phone? Nathan-?”

In tears, in terror, he went reeling from the phone booth: think of it, both he and his genitals would shortly be extinct! Oh what if just the genitals went, and he lived on-suppose a land mine were to explode beneath his boots, and he was returned to a girl like Sharon Shatzky, a blank between the legs. “No!” he told himself. “Stop having such thoughts! Lay off! Use your brains! That is only irrational guilt over Sharon and the zucchini -it is only fear of punishment for buggering the daughter right under the father’s nose! Casebook fantasies of retribution! No such thing can happen!” To him, was what he meant, because of course in warfare such things do happen, they happen every day.

And then, after the eight weeks of infantry training followed by eight more at MP school, he was assigned as a clerk-typist to a quartermaster unit at Fort Campbell, in the southwestern corner of Kentucky, sixty miles east of Paducah, eight thousand east of the land mines. Lucky Zuckerman! Beneficiary of one of those administrative errors by which doomed men are suddenly pardoned, and the happy-go-lucky are, overnight, earmarked for death. These things also happen every day.

Zuckerman could type only with his index fingers, and he knew nothing about filing or making out forms, but fortunately for him, the captain in charge of the supply room to which he was assigned was so pleased to have a Jew around to bait-and that too has been known to happen-that he was willing to make do with an inept assistant. He did not-as the inept assistant continuously feared he would-report the error in classification that had sent Zuckerman to Fort Campbell instead of to his bloody demise in the mud behind a brothel in Seoul, nor did he request a replacement for him from personnel. Instead, each afternoon before departing for the links over by the air base, Captain Clark would tune up for his game by driving cotton golf balls out of his office in the direction of the cubicle occupied by the clerk-typist manque. Zuckerman did his best to look unperturbed when the golf balls glanced off his shirt. “On target, sir,” said he with a smile. “Not kwat,” replied his superior, all concentration, “not kwat…” and