In the Flesh

by Hilma Wolitzer

  The dead eye of the television set faced me. If I turned it on, perhaps I would find old movie stars carrying on business as usual, stranded forever in time with their dated hairstyles and clothes. There would be a comedy to distract me, and I would laugh, taking deep breaths. I would grow sleepy, child-sleepy, milk-warm and drifting. Maybe there would be news, even at this hour. Wasn’t it daytime in China, midnight in California? Surely there would be bad news and the commentator to intone it. Ladies and gentlemen, here is some bad news that has just come in … Howard would wake, the children would cry out in their sleep, and the old lady downstairs would bang on her ceiling with a broom.

  I walked to the window again and there were other lights on in the complex, but not many. At a party Howard and I went to, everyone complained of being an insomniac. I had never believed them before this. Women confessed they hadn’t slept in years. One man walked the room, repeating, “Three hours, three hours,” to anyone who would listen. He had a built-in alarm system that never allowed him to sleep a minute longer. That’s too bad, said the women who never sleep, but they were insincere. Another man suggested it was guilt that wouldn’t let them sleep, but the insomniacs united against him. Guilty? The truly guilty sleep to escape their guilt. Ask the ones with old mothers in nursing homes. Ask the ones whose children wet their beds. Ask Howard.

  Howard’s breath was even and untroubled. He was sprawled in wonderful sleep.

  I sat on the floor and placed myself in the half-lotus position and clasped my hands behind my head. I drew my breath in deeply and then slowly let it out, lowering my right elbow to the floor. Then the left elbow. There was a carpet smell as I lowered my head, but it wasn’t unpleasant. I looked under the bed and saw one of the baby’s shoes lying on its side. I crawled there to get it, and then I lay on my back, watching the changes in the box spring as Howard shifted his weight. From my position under the bed, I could see beneath the dresser and the night tables, where there were glints of paper clips and hairpins and other lost and silvery things. There was a photograph that had fallen from the frame of the large mirror, and I crawled across the floor and reached for it. It was a picture of a group of friends at a party. We were all holding cocktail glasses and cigarettes. The women were sitting upright to make their breasts seem larger and one of the men had his hand across his wife’s behind. Oh, fools in photographs! We are all going to grow old. The men will have heart attacks, the women will lose the loyalty of tissue in breasts and chins.

  I went to the mirror and raised my nightgown for reassurance. It was such a familiar body, the skin white and smooth, a mole under the left breast just where I remembered it. Childbirth had softened me in places, and the flesh near the waist came away too easily in my grasp. But it looked like a knowledgeable body, memories hidden away behind every curve, in every opening. Didn’t that count? Was novelty everything?

  I lowered my nightgown and walked into the children’s room. Jason was asleep on his youth bed, and he slept well, but I was filled with sorrow at the sight of him. The baby was in her crib, legs and arms opened, as if sleep were a lover she welcomed. The Japanese mobile over her crib trembled a warning of my invasion, and I tiptoed out and went into the kitchen.

  I chose soft, quiet foods that wouldn’t disturb the silence: raisins, cheese, marshmallows. I put the last marshmallow on the end of a fork and toasted it over the gas jet. I told myself I would be able to sleep better with a full stomach. I took my mother’s advice and drank a glass of milk.

  I thought—if we had a dog, if Jason wasn’t allergic to animal dander, the dog might have been a companion when I couldn’t sleep. I had a dog when I was a child. When it was a few years old, I realized with horror I had established an irrevocable relationship with it which could only end in death. From this grew the knowledge that it was true of all relationships, friendships, marriage. I began to treat the dog more casually, even cruelly sometimes, pushing him away when he jumped up to greet me. But it didn’t matter. The dog died and I mourned him anyway. For a long time I kept his dish and a gnawed rubber bone.

  We had a bowl of goldfish in the kitchen. There were two, one with beautiful silver overtones to his scales. There was a plant in their bowl and colored pebbles at the bottom. The fish swam as if they had a destination, around and around and around.

  I shut the kitchen light and went back to the bedroom. I yawned twice, thinking, well, that’s a good sign. Sleep can’t be very far away and the main thing is not to panic. I climbed into bed and Howard rolled away to his side.

  God, it was the silence, the large silence and the small, distant sounds. If I could speak, even shout, I knew I’d feel better. “I can’t sleep and life stinks on ice,” I whispered. Silence. I raised my voice slightly. “I can’t sleep, and tomorrow, today, I won’t be able to stand anything.” Silence. “Howard, my mother and father didn’t want me to marry you. My mother said you have bedroom eyes. My father said you were not ambitious.”

  A song I hadn’t heard in years came into my head. I mouthed the words soundlessly. I tried to whisper the tune, but my voice was throaty and full.

  “Shh,” Howard warned in his sleep.

  Oh, think, think. Come up with something else. But the song was stuck there, a stupid song, one I had never really liked. I tried to exorcise it with memories of other music. So this is what I’ve come to, I thought, and the song left my head like a bird from a tree. Instantly other things rushed in: shopping lists, the twenty-twenty line on the eye chart, a chain letter to which I had never responded. (Do not break this chain or evil will befall your house. Continue it and long life and good health will be yours to enjoy and cherish. In eight weeks you will receive one thousand, one hundred and twenty picture postcards from all over the world.) Would I?

  Learned men wear copper bracelets to ward off evil. My mother weeps over cracked mirrors while Sherry looks upward to the heavens. Hearts are still broken. They shatter in the silence of the night.

  Mrs. X wandered in a one-hundred-years’ sleep in Building C. If I had a lover, he would probably be asleep somewhere too. He would sleep in a Hollywood-style bed. He would talk in his sleep and his wife would wake immediately, thin-lipped, alert. In a careful whisper she would question him. “Who?” she would ask. “When? Where?”

  My lover would mumble something she couldn’t make out.

  She would pluck gently at the hairs on his chest, in shrewd imitation of my style. “Who?” she would ask again.

  In Howard’s dream he was in the war again. His eyes rolled frantically and his legs braced against the sheets.

  I whispered, “We’re pulling out now, men.”

  His head swiveled.

  “For Christ’s sake, keep down.”

  His hand groped at his sides, slung a rifle.

  “Aaargh,” I said. “They got me. Die, you yellow bastards!”

  The bed shook with his terror.

  “Shhh,” I said. “It’s only a dream. Only a dream.”

  But he’ll die anyway. See if he won’t. In this bed perhaps, or in hers. Howard in a coffin. Howard in the earth. Good-bye.

  He sighed, resigned.

  I walked to the foot of the bed and stood in a narrow block of moonlight. My white nightgown was silver and my arms glowed as if they were wet. No tap-dancing moppet now, Howard. Look at this. And I grasped the hem of my gown and twirled it around my body. Then I lifted myself onto the balls of my feet and turned slowly, catching my reflection in the mirror, spectral, lovely, incredibly seductive. I dipped, arched, moved across the floor in a silent ballet. “Hey, get a load of this,” and I did something marvelously intricate, unlearned. My feet moved instinctively, like small animals. Wow, I thought, and Howard flung himself onto his stomach in despair.

  I was breathing hard by then and I sat in the rocking chair and thought of my lover again. His wife had given up the inquisition, but now she couldn’t sleep either. She went to the window and looked bitterly at her property, at her pin oaks and hemlock, at th
e children’s swings hung in moonlight, at telephone wire that seemed to stretch into infinity. She patted the curlers on her head and went into the next room to look at her children.

  Across town, my father walked to the bathroom.

  “What’s the matter?” my mother asked.

  “Nothing. What do you think?”

  Before he came back to bed, she was plunged into sleep again.

  Howard, Howard. Prices are going up. The house is on fire. My lover is dying of cancer.

  My lover was dying, his wife at his side. She was wearing a hat and a coat with a fox collar. She leaned over him. “Who?” she whispered and her fierce breath made the oxygen tent rattle like dried leaves.

  “Howard, my lover is dying. No one cares, Howard.” Real tears filled my eyes and rolled down my cheeks.

  I climbed into bed again. Not to think, not to think. I yawned, lowering myself carefully to the pillow. Ah, almost there, I told myself in encouragement. I could tell. One minute you’re awake and the next thing you’re in dreamland.

  I shut my eyes, thinking, here comes Sandman. Here comes dreamdust. My eyes were shut tight. My hands were clenched. I heard something. There was a noise somewhere in the apartment. Maybe I was half-asleep already and only dreaming noise. Maybe I heard the goldfish splashing in their bowl. My eyes opened. What was that? What was that? Oh God.

  The whole damn world slept like a baby-Howard and Mrs. X, my Anonymous Friend, the superintendent of the building, the new people on the tenth floor, old boyfriends and their wives, their mothers and fathers, their babies and dogs. All the bastards at that party were liars. They slept too, secretly, cunningly, maybe with their eyes wide open, for all I knew. They slept, gave in, went under, into the blue and perfect wonder of sleep.

  21

  I COULDN’T HELP THINKING, if our situations had been reversed, Howard would have been doing something about it, instead of mooning around, speculating, and hoping for the best. He had always been a jealous and possessive man. Sometimes he even pretended there were rivals for my love, to justify his jealousy.

  But aside from inconclusive adolescent groping, there had been only one other man in my life, and that was before Howard. I tried to talk about this predecessor in one of our earlier night sessions, but Howard became gruffly non-directive, grunting out those little Rogerian “Mmmm’s” and “So?’s” that I couldn’t stand.

  “It isn’t fair,” I protested finally. “After all, you were married before.”

  “Men are different,” Howard said.

  “What? What? How can you say that? I mean, even if you believe it, how can you say it?”

  “Because I’m basically honest. Because this relationship is based on that honesty. I’ve told you absolutely everything about Renee and me, haven’t I?”

  Oh God, yes, indeed he had. Everything. So realistically, with such allegiance to accuracy and detail, that I began to hear it in her voice too. That insidious whine. Her voice and then his voice, and then both of them together in a rising aria of complaint and misery. The sympathy and the interest I had once felt began to wane. It was no longer an education in the tragic history of marriage. I hated the whole opera by then, the dated theme of falling out of love, those sad stage sets of furnished rooms, and the sound effects of their lives together: toilets flushing, cigarette ash falling softly, blurred radio music behind everything.

  “That’s the whole point,” I said. “Now I’m trying to tell you about me.”

  “Men are different,” Howard repeated, his voice a threatening bass accompaniment to the reasonable expression on his face.

  Men are different. What was that supposed to mean? That he wasn’t interested, that the subject bored him? Or that his interest was so enormous that it couldn’t be controlled within the strictures of sane behavior? I opted for the latter. So be it. Nobody says that analysis, either classical or original, has to be chronological. Right? I dropped the subject and skipped back to childhood, the place that Howard liked best for me to be. With a couple of sentences I won him over again, softened that gruffness, soothed his fear. I even lied a little, inventing passages from another life, threw in scenes from books he hadn’t read; a little Jane Eyre, Mrs. Wiggs, Rima. Howard moved closer and closer on the couch, hugging me, giving physical support to the lie.

  Now, in the heat of my own torturous suspicions, I was ready to use that earlier man again, happy that he had been stored away unused, for a while, and could reappear—presto!—like fresh news.

  But Howard didn’t want to talk at all, not even about himself. For a couple of days he even had to be coaxed into the living room after dinner. He feigned fatigue, indigestion, nerves, even pretended once to be asleep. But I know his breathing. It’s my private science, my specialty, so to speak.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “Hey, are you terminating?” Professional jargon was always good, at least, for a laugh.

  But Howard barely smiled. He seemed sorrowful and terribly remote.

  The anonymous notes crackled in memory. Who was this anonymous enemy who pretended to be my friend? If the notes were true, if there was a Mrs. X, why didn’t Howard charmingly cover it all up the way the magazine articles say that erring husbands do? Where were the little extravagant gifts of atonement, the too-hearty demonstration of his affection, and that willingness to please?

  He stood just outside the room, framed in light.

  “Lie down next to me,” I said.

  Silence.

  “Lover,” I said. “Come on.”

  Slowly, slowly, he moved into the room and finally he heaved his sighing bulk next to mine.

  I opened his shirt and stroked his chest hair. “There, isn’t that better?” But it was only a rhetorical question, and no real comfort to either of us. “Well, my turn, isn’t it?” I said brightly, and then began, expecting an immediate interruption. “It was a chance meeting,” I said. “One of those things that happen.” I paused, giving him every opportunity to protest, but he was silent.

  Feeling desperate, I decided to plunge right in, giving up the romantic notion of a prelude. I had sorted things out first in my head. The man’s name was Chester and I had met him in an all-night cafeteria after a big fight with my parents.

  Thinking that over, it didn’t sound very impressive, or even interesting. The name Chester, for instance, or the all-night cafeteria. The place had been full of loners and rejects, each one staring down at the unaesthetic arrangement of his supper. The lighting was as subtle and romantic as that in an operating room.

  “His name was Steve,” I said. “We met in a bookstore.” I paused again, feeling very pleased with myself. Steve was a terrific name, masculine and casual. Chester sounded too much like an anti-hero.

  Howard still didn’t say anything.

  “We went back to his place.” I waited, giving him time to digest that. His place. It sounded wonderful, and the comparison with the back seat of a Chevy was inevitable. My own creative power under stress surprised me.

  Of course Chester had really lived with his parents, a religious elderly couple who were out that particular evening at a fund-raising dinner.

  But who needed them in my story? Out they went for good, taking their third-floor walk-through, their gargantuan wedding bed, their doilies, their gallery of framed sepia photographs.

  Instead it was Steve and me, sprawled recklessly in his pad on a tatami mat.

  But oh, that aged bed had shuddered, its springs twanging with buried memories, aroused. It had to be on their bed, even though Chester had a hi-riser of his own in the living room. More room, more comfort, more privacy. He sang out the reasons with every piece of conquered clothing. But I knew anyway, saw that thin spot on the crown of his head as he bent in lamplight to begin at the bottom, knew that he was really too old to live with his parents, even in those more filial days. Like a bad and vengeful dog, he would leave them our scent, the sheet creases, and the disarray. Take that and that. He was getting even with them for s
cenes that had happened way before my time.

  And I, giving in, adding my small portion of blood, was getting even with my parents. Two for the price of one. And it was all so appropriate. The thing we had quarreled about that very night was my so-called wildness, that incipient sexuality they couldn’t keep tied to my narrow and virginal bed. So here I was, fulfilling their lousy dreams for spite, without fulfilling any of my own. In a dry rot of agony and regret. “Hey, you’re killing me, you bastard!” I hollered, but he kept humming or something, some tuneless murmuring sound in rhythm with his relentless motor.

  “I was only a kid,” I told Howard. “He was much older, more experienced.” Let him use his imagination. Let him think of Cary Grant, of Jean-Pierre Aumont.

  Were those Chester’s baby pictures on the wall overhead? That brown-tinted baby in an ancient pram, that styleless, anxious mother, that slouch-hatted father looking like a hit man for Murder, Incorporated. And were those their footsteps and their voices coming up the stairway of the six-family Brooklyn building? Only sounds of other lives in progress, as it turned out, but they seemed to cheer Chester on in his mad, heart-banging race to finish.

  “He was a schoolteacher,” I told Howard, because he respected education and because it was the truth.

  Howard shifted on the couch then and rubbed his leg, as if it had fallen to pins and needles under the weight of mine. Still, he didn’t respond to my story. It was almost as if he hadn’t heard anything I’d said. What if all my suspicions were untrue, if Howard was only having a little private crisis that he’d simply snap out of after a while? Would all this confessional stuff spring from his memory later and cause trouble between us?

  “I didn’t enjoy it very much,” I said, covering all possibilities. “First time and everything. Fear, pain, guilt, all that jazz.”

  Howard scratched his leg.

  “We had a little midnight supper afterward. A post-coital buffet, ha ha. We ate with our fingers, as I remember,” I said, hoping to evoke an erotic vision where sex and food become interchangeable.