Scumbler

by William Wharton

  “And then, Scum, you and I were together. For the first time, I was with a man and wasn’t afraid. You really turned me on as a woman to a man for the first time.”

  She pauses.

  “After you left, Matt and I fell into each other. At first I made love to him, because of his back; at first I was pretending he was you. Then, as his back got better, he made love to me and it was a whole new world.”

  My first thought is, I don’t know why she needs to tell me all this. What good does it do? I stand, waiting for her to leave. She lingers in the doorway watching my face. I don’t look away but it’s tiring.

  “You know, Scum, this should have been our baby.’

  She smiles, reaches out a hand, touches my beard, kisses me lightly on the lips, then starts tripping carelessly down the stairs. I have a hard time restraining myself from telling her to take it easy; after all, she is pregnant. But that doesn’t make sense, even to me. Not much of anything is making sense. Can the world really be as senseless as it seems sometimes?

  WILLFUL, LAST-DITCH WANDERINGS,

  UNFILLED PROMISES LIE HEAVY IN MY SOUL

  BRAIN-FILLED EYES NOT SEEING, NOR KNOWING

  THE BLUE OF CLEAR AND CLOUDLESS SKIES.

  I sit around our apartment all that evening mulling it over. My family is accustomed to living with the mad artist, so they leave me alone when I’m moody. I hate being like that but sometimes can’t help myself. I’ve tried several times explaining it to Kate and she still doesn’t understand, but she puts up with it most times.

  I keep thinking of that little baby, maybe a Sweik-Sandy baby in there, with no idea of what’s about to happen. Maybe it’s a Lubar-Sandy baby, a wild combination, but I’d love to see what it would grow up to be. Maybe half bird, half dolphin. I hate to think of Sandy under the knife of some French butcher. Our civilization certainly does get us into the craziest binds.

  MY FLOWER BEGS BEES TO INVADE AND TASTE

  ITS POLLEN, SWOLLEN STAMEN, EXPECTANT IN

  THE SUN. A SMALL TRAGEDY, MY SEEDS NOT TO

  BE BEGOTTEN, NOR GERMINATED FOR A COMING

  YEAR. NON-FOLIATE, PRISTINE, INSECTLESS,

  I TWIST MY FACE SLOWLY TO THE STERILE SKY.

  We’re in bed when Kate kisses me and asks what’s the matter. I’m about ready to put her off with something general but I want to talk with her. At first I’m afraid to, but then I work my way sideways into the story. I tell about Sandy, how she’s one of the ones who came down to Spain. I tell how she came to the house today.

  This is dangerous territory; Kate doesn’t care too much about the people I kick around with in the streets but definitely doesn’t tolerate them mucking up her nest. Witness when Lubar came and slept on the floor. Kate enjoys a sense of normal progression; the ragged twentieth century is definitely not for her. I tell how Sandy is going to have a baby and came to tell me about it this afternoon. I tell her most of what Sandy said, minimizing my part in it all. The line between honesty and hurt can be hard to draw.

  There’s a silence. I wait. Then I let it all out. I’ll never learn when to stop. I always expect too much of people, especially the ones I love.

  “Kate, I know it’s crazy, but I can’t think of that baby being killed. Would it be all right if we offer to pay the hospital bills and help with the baby till Sandy’s ready to handle it herself”

  This has got to be one of my most crackbrained ideas. I wait there in the dark on my back. I’m expecting anything from a nightlong silence to a quiet departure.

  Kate lays a hand across my eyes.

  “Are you the father?”

  It had to come. It’s a good question, a natural question. Kate always knows the right questions.

  “No. I’m not, but I know within two who is.”

  She keeps her hands over my eyes. I lie perfectly still, waiting.

  Kate’s quiet a long time, then she kisses me. She takes her hand from my eyes, looks down from over me; I can just make out her face in the dark.

  “Too bad, in a way; it would’ve been nice having half of one more like you around again. But no, I don’t want to help bring this baby into the world. We don’t have that kind of money and, from what you say, this girl doesn’t sound stable enough to mother a child. We could wind up with it ourselves and we’re too old.”

  I’m pretty sure Kate can only say that first part because I’m not the father. She knows I might not tell her everything but she also knows I don’t lie to her. I stay still trying to put it together and at the same time to let go. I’m feeling torn apart. I pull Kate down to me and hold her tight, search her mouth for a hard, strong kiss. Then we share the blessed act by which we’ve all become.

  BECOMING AS ONE WITH ANOTHER.

  BEGETTING IS FORGETTING.

  As we curl into each other, I know I need to tell her my other big secret; it’s been burning holes in my mental side pockets.

  “Kate, there’s something else I have to tell you.”

  Quiet again. I can feel her body tighten inside mine.

  “You really are the father, aren’t you? You lied to me!”

  “No, nothing to do with that business at all—not directly anyway.”

  So I tell her about the eight-thousand-dollars-an-acre, three-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-dollar offer for the forty acres.

  Gradually Kate untangles herself from me; she turns and gets up on her knees in bed.

  “You mean you’ve known about this for weeks and you didn’t say a word?”

  “I’m sorry, Kate. I’m so afraid of that money. It could ruin everything, the kids, us, the way we live, our life, the way you feel about teaching. I know I couldn’t think of one thing I wanted to do with the money and so much of it would go in taxes to build more atomic bombs to kill more people. I needed time to think about it.”

  “So you kept it to yourself. I know you bought that crazy mountain but it was our money. You have no right not to tell me, to make a decision like that yourself without even mentioning it. How do you know what I want? Maybe I want to take a leave from teaching, go back to America, live in a real house, be near my mother for her last years.”

  “I never thought of those things, Kate. You never said anything.”

  She’s still on her knees. In the dim light I can see her fists clenched on her knees at the ends of her stiff arms.

  “You never think of anybody but yourself. You treat everybody and everything as if we’re all part of one big painting, a painting of your life, a self-portrait, a selfish portrait, and we’re all only background. I’m sick and tired of it!”

  Kate slides down on her stomach with her head turned away from me. Even I know sometimes when to keep my mouth shut. Even if I opened it, I wouldn’t know what to say.

  Kate will never agree to helping Sandy; I’ll have to do that on my own.

  There are all kinds of ways to kill. The most obvious is to do it yourself, the second is to force someone else to do it for you, like Stalin, or Johnson. Then there’s the black-angel way, to encourage another. But the most common way is the teddy-bear way, letting somebody else die when you can help, by ignoring or panicking or pretending it doesn’t matter. I guess by that last one I’m living with a killer. Since apparently my own son’s a killer already, I should relax. I get in my own way too much.

  But I will offer money so Sandy can have that baby if she wants. I can’t stand by and see a thing like this happen just for economic reasons.

  I lie there in the dark beside Kate, stiff and awake, breathing, thinking about this baby, our baby, Sandy and (should’ve been) me together. She probably won’t take the money anyway. How close could you come to being born and get sideswiped?

  YET, TO RESENT NON-BECOMING POLLUTES THE

  FOUNTAIN AT ITS SOURCE. THERE IS NO FORCE

  MORE THAN KNOWING OF KNOWING. THE SLOW

  FALLING SNOW IS MORE VISIBLE THAN THE

  DRIVING RAIN.

  My mind is spinning in twenty directions. Ideas are bubbli
ng in every combination imaginable. I’m being father, brother, uncle, mother, sister, aunt, grandmother and grandfather to that baby. I’ll never get to sleep.

  I think over what Kate’s said. She’s right, I’m always trying to design my own life. Life is so important to me it has to be lived on purpose with purpose. Most people seem to be just slipping along, sneaking through life without waking themselves. I can’t be that way.

  At the same time, I’ve got to quit designing everybody else’s life. God, I’m pushing Sweik into Lotte’s arms, Sandy into Sweik’s, Traude into Clement’s, even poor Sasha into his Arab bed. I’m like an old-time Jewish matchmaker.

  Then there are all my nests: birds’ nests, rats’ nests, nature nests, family nests, artists’ nests. I’m trying to design everybody’s life, how they live, where—everything.

  I don’t really know how I got started being the way I am. I might be one of the only people who was expelled from kindergarten. I don’t think I was a troublemaker, anyway; I never wanted to be. My usual way then, and I guess even now, has been constantly to try smoothing things out; or, if that didn’t work, to run away.

  I’d run away from home five times by the time I was sixteen; then I took early graduation from high school and left home for good.

  The strange thing is that I had loving, wonderful parents and I loved them. I loved my brother and sisters as well. The problem is, when you’re a child, people—even, maybe especially, good loving people—think they have a right to run your life for you; that they know what’s best. My sweet, beautiful mother would always say, “Yes, but I’m the mother,” and that was supposed to be a good enough reason for her to run my life.

  I slowly shift my weight and ease myself to the side of our bed. Something big is happening inside me and I feel I might break out bawling any minute. I sit there with my bare feet on the floor to see if Kate is going to say anything more; I can’t tell for sure if she’s asleep or not.

  My getting through college was a classic case of the upside-down way I’ve lived my life. I started a laundry for the students at the University of Pennsylvania. I bought a beat-up old truck and developed a pickup route. Mostly only rich kids went to college in those days. I found a broken-down store I rented for fifteen dollars a month. Down at the shipyards I bought some old used boilers as scrap metal and hauled them to the store. I fired up those boilers with a wood fire from wood I’d pick up at building or demolition sites.

  That first year I washed those clothes old-style, stomping them with my bare feet. My only cost was soap and the electricity I used for my iron. I’d iron all day and sometimes all night. My store was in a solid black neighborhood of southwest Philadelphia; this was 1937 and I was all of seventeen years old. But I was making it, making it on my own, and that’s just about all that counted to me then.

  I carefully ease myself off the bed and stand up. I walk through the kitchen and into the bathroom. I close the door and turn on the light. I stare at myself in the mirror. God, I look awful! I don’t even look alive. I look like a corpse nobody cares about enough to bury. I’m definitely more frazzled, worn-out-looking than usual; my face is so gray, along with my white messed-up twisted beard, I look like a black-and-white photograph of myself. I look like the face in a group photograph in a newspaper clipping with a circle around it to indicate the person who’s just been killed in a plane crash.

  By the time I was nineteen, I had two real laundry machines, three pickup trucks, five employees and was enrolled at Penn on a scholarship, living illegally in the attic of the physics building. I’d gotten into the sex part of life early and met my wife just before I graduated as an engineering student. In 1939, everybody with any brains at all was supposed to be an engineer.

  I was married to Jane and became a father the first time two days after my twenty-first birthday. It was the way I wanted it. I was already designing my own life like a madman. I wanted at least ten kids and I wanted them all before I was thirty-five. I wanted to play with them. Jane was still going along with me in those days; I don’t imagine I gave her much chance. I wasn’t listening to anyone else. I guess I’m still not.

  I look at my hands. They’re filthy with paint and with just plain dirt from climbing around up there on the lofts arranging painting storage. Sandy upset me so much with her story I even forgot to wash before I went to bed. I sniff my armpits; I stink. Not only do I stink, but I stink like an old man, a stale alkaloid kind of smell, the smell of something live becoming inorganic. My sweat used to have a good animal smell, like a clean cage for a tiger in a zoo, but not anymore. I guess the old metabolism’s changed.

  I really don’t know how much longer Kate will put up with it; it can’t be much fun living with a decaying animal. The only compensating factor I’ve had to offer her all these years has been vitality and now there isn’t much of the vital “vita” left. That is, except for the paintings, which are probably slipping along with everything else.

  Much of what I am, most of the way I live, what I do, is an insult to everything she values, the whole rest of her life.

  I know it sounds like sour grapes, but, usually, the so-called cultured people I’ve met love art, whether it’s painting, music, sculpture, literature, what have you; but they don’t want anything to do with real live artists. The only good artist to them is a dead artist, like Indians—and look at all the Indians we’ve killed in the name of civilization; makes Adolf look like a raging humanitarian. Of course, there are always “good artists,” “tame artists,” like good, tame Indians, who will slip on some feathers or a beret and do tricks for the people.

  No, I guess today the public artists are supposed to wear designer jeans with patches, or overalls, and split tennis shoes. They’re supposed to take up drugs, alcohol, politics and give up working, sleeping, washing. But they don’t count; they’re just part of life, decoration to hide the cracks in things, amusement-park people, merry-go-round people.

  I should take a shower but it’d make too much noise and wake everyone. Besides, I don’t think I have enough energy to climb up and balance myself in our elevated shower. It’s truly amazing the things Kate has to put up with just living with me. I wonder how I can possibly suggest to her she’s free to go off on her own, without hurting her feelings or just doing some more “life designing” again. Then what about Sara and Tim?

  The psychiatrist in prison said I was a psychopath. He insisted I was masking as a benevolent psychopath but there was no such thing. I’d laugh in his face and he’d go on insisting my pacifism was actually based on a deep hostility and distrust toward all people. He said I separated myself, insisted on my uniqueness and had a strong disrespect for human beings. He told me this was typical of psychopaths; in fact, probably the definition. This alienation, separation, sense of superiority, is what makes psychopaths so dangerous.

  God, I thought that was ridiculous then. I’d try to tell him how all I wanted to do was live my own life my own way and I definitely didn’t want to hurt anybody. That’s when he laughed and brought up the divorce and how I’d hurt Jane and the kids, my parents, that whole business. He’s the one who put psychopath on my record so I had a terrible time getting a job teaching again after I got out of prison. That’s what the U.S. government calls rehabilitation.

  But now I know, how, in a way, that psychiatrist was right all those years ago. I have hurt a lot of people just by being alive and trying to be myself; I’m still hurting them. I don’t want to hurt anybody but I’m doing it all the time. I think I hurt people by living; that my maniacal insistence on living my own life is in itself a terrible violation of everybody else; that I’m denying an important part of the human condition, human expectations, by aiming my life at unpredictability.

  I suspect I’ve spent the greatest part of my life in a flight from boredom.

  Now, I know that dependability, reliability, consistency are all part of that ultimate positive value for almost any society: responsibility. If life scares you, then any sudde
n unpredictable change is trauma, hence evil. The unpredictable person is ostracized, classified as pariah for the good of the group.

  Perhaps unpredictability is the nature of the creative personality. I’m not necessarily talking about being an artist or a scientist, any of the creative activities, but just the way one goes about living. A creative human has a desire, an almost inhuman yearning, for uniqueness. This urge is probably the source material for most of our mental institutions. Also, it must drive everybody else crazy being around these characters who won’t relax and accept things the way they are, are constantly trying to change, juggle everything so it’s different, or, worse yet, if they can’t change things; they’re reconstructing, reinterpreting the so-called REALITY to make it fit.

  I know that’s what my paintings are. I don’t exactly make them up out of whole linen and, at the same time, I don’t even try to paint things the way they seem. I paint the world the way I want it to be.

  And this story, this book: sure, there are people like Sweik and Lotte, Kate and Sandy; sure, there are tunnels under Paris and clocks, ugly orgies, motorcycle clubs, all of it; but I didn’t tell it the way it was-is. I’m not a reporter, a recorder. I’d be bored out of my mind writing an accurate account about a whole bunch of mere facts, events, things, happenings, people. It’d probably bore you too, so you wouldn’t even be here with me in my mind for the end of this tale. Maybe you aren’t. Too bad.

  But these feelings I’ve written here are true, true as I know how to be. They’re my feelings.

  Now the scum that should float on top has sunk to the bottom, become sediment. Maybe sediment is culture. I’m afraid that’s what happens if you scumble too much. I should have known.

  I turn the water on and fill the sink. My hands are shaking. Sandy upset me with all those babies; possibles, impossibles, probables, improbables. Then there’s just been that whole shoot-out with Kate. I’m definitely running down; something like running away.