MY FOUNTAIN PEN

Abstract

5 R M Y F O U N T A I N P E N J . D . M c C L A T C H Y I hesitate before starting with this particular detail. I want to begin with what for me was a simple fact but what to others may seem a tiresome metaphor. The psychiatrists didn’t invent this metaphor, but I suppose they helped popularize and therefore trivialize it. Psychiatrists have never done me any good, so I’ll hold my present hesitation against them as well. As I said, for me it was simply a fact: at about the same time I discovered my penis, I started writing with a fountain pen. It was the most sensual thing I had ever held or used. Just to touch it excited me. It was an Esterbrook. The casing was of a ravenswing purple, with flattop ends and a budded clip. On the side was the silvered lever my fingernail would catch behind and slowly pull to draw the ink upward. I loved dipping it into the little glass mezzanine of ink inside the Skrip bottle, listening to the faint guttural sucking and then gently wiping o√ the sad excess with a tissue. Why did the whole ritual make the ink seem like blood – blue blood, at least? I would sometimes imagine the squattish ink bottle to be a disgraced but noble Roman senator in his tub. And the nib! Once filled, the capillaries of its ribbed, bee’s-body underbelly ached beneath the 6 M c C L A T C H Y Y pewter fleur-de-lis. The airhole was a moist miniature of the ink bottle itself, the pen’s own private well, in love with the long slit of the nib’s bulbed tip. Down that slit, out from that tip poured the permanent black-and-blue of my early lessons. I didn’t admire this pen as much as my mother’s Shea√er, and I used often to take hers from her desk to rub my hand over it. Along with her schoolgirl toothmarks, there was the white mole and tooled clip on its cap, and a gold band around its lacquered barrel, itself an iridescent length of striations all black and eelgrass green, like the shadowy reeds among which a baby in a basket might be found. The nib was two tiers of fogged copper and iridium, the airhole was a tiny heart, and the point was sharper. My Esterbrook was what you would call a starter pen: blunt, cheap, dispensable. It cracked. It spattered. It leaked. It left an archipelago of small blots on my thumb and middle finger: the faraway islands of desire. If there was little to admire about it, there was everything to love. Long before I was given that fountain pen, of course, I had learned to hide things. Childhood’s true polymorphous perversity, its constant source of both pleasure and power, is lying. But that pen helped me discover something better than the lie. Almost as soon as it was given to me, I learned to hide inside the pen. Or rather, the pen allowed me to learn the di√erence between hiding something and disguising something – that is to say, making it di≈cult but not impossible to see. Even when I knew the di√erence , I couldn’t always keep myself from confusing them. Once for instance – this would have been about 1956, and I was eleven – I was hopelessly in love with my counselor at summer camp. His name was Red. It was Red I saw first each morning, shaking me awake, and Red’s drawled fireside stories to which I fell asleep each night. But it was naptime I liked best; through the eye I pretended was shut I gazed – like some chubby, crewcut, pimpled Psyche – on Red sleeping: his stubble, his sweatband, the nipple pressing through his T-shirt, the dream-drool on his chin. On a shelf over his bunk he had taped up a snapshot of his girlfriend , who stared down at him with a vacant smile that had none of my cunning, my ardor. When I asked for...