In the Flesh

by Hilma Wolitzer

  “Don’t go,” I said, recognizing with horror the words I had said so often on lazy mornings when he first drew his body heat away.

  “I can’t help it,” Howard said. What did that mean? That wasn’t what he was supposed to say. It was so difficult to concentrate. Everything interfered: the pattern of the wallpaper, the voices of the children, street noises.

  “Why?” I asked then, Jason’s favorite question, to which he often didn’t want the answer either.

  “How should I know?” Howard cried, distracted, as if he were only an innocent bystander to this mad scene, instead, of the romantic lead.

  “What do you mean? Howard, what are you saying?”

  “Oh, Jesus, I don’t know. I don’t even know what I’m doing. I didn’t plan on this, Paulie, believe me. It only happened. But I have to. I have to go away.”

  “Why? It’s only in bed, isn’t it? That isn’t going to last. What does she do, anyway? Tell me what she does, what you do together.”

  “Paulie, what kind of a bastard do you think I am? Do you want me to give you the details? All right! Okay! I can only tell you that it’s wonderful, special, that I can’t do without it, without her, that I can’t even think about anything else, that I’m screwing up on my music, on everything.” His voice was hoarse and broken with anguish.

  The effect was worse than a physical blow. Graphic details would have been far better: words from a sex manual, the things that were done on page 48 or 49, meaning it was all only something that could be learned. And I was such a fast study, and willing.

  But this meant he had an obsession, didn’t it? My very own disease that had begun in the back seat of a car, with wings stretched open, in a symphony of cries, a disease that had spread and become our whole lives.

  “Is it this?” I said, gesturing toward myself. “I tried. Mayo. Weight Watchers. The Diet of the Month. You can’t even stop smoking for a day. I saw her, you know, with her hips, with that hair …” The words bubbled out.

  He rushed across the room and embraced me. “Oh, Paulie, love, it has nothing to do …” He groaned and pressed me to his shirt front with its beating heart. Then he began kissing me and tried to prop my listing body against the bedroom wall.

  But I pulled away and ran to the other side of the room, to the children. “He’s going!” I said. “Say goodbye to your father. He’s leaving us!” I grabbed Jason’s shoulder.

  “Ouch!” he complained, wrenching free.

  “Stop it!” Howard commanded. “What are you doing?”

  But I couldn’t, I wouldn’t. Who was he to give orders? “Time for lunch!” I barked, with the authority of a drill sergeant. I picked the baby up so abruptly that she screamed and then held her breath. Jason and Howard ran behind us into the kitchen.

  “It’s impossible,” Howard gasped. “Don’t you know I don’t want to hurt you or the children? But all of a sudden … everything … Listen, I feel as if I’m living someone else’s life.”

  “Hey,” I said. “Do you think it’s a bed of roses around here? Do you know that I haven’t finished a poem in ages? Do you even care? All my energy, all my poems go into the oven, into the washing machine!”

  “I care,” Howard said, “I care. But this is what you wanted, isn’t it?” He swept his arm at the whole familial burden: Jason, the baby rigid in her high chair, curtains, linoleum, kitchen cabinets jammed with the stuff of survival.

  I was stunned. What was he talking about? We were surrounded by his mother’s discards, the junk she didn’t take to Florida. I hated it all. I hated her. Who had wanted any of this? Did I want that high chair, that butter smear on the wall, that little boy blinking nervously at his reflection in the toaster? Maybe I could have been an astronaut, a movie star, the prime minister of Israel.

  And then I understood. He meant that I had chosen this life when I decided to keep that first pregnancy. The onus was on me then, for disappointments, for damaged dreams, for all the ugly furniture we had known and might know in the future.

  “Not fair!” I shouted. “Two! It takes two!”

  “Don’t yell!” Jason said, and he put his hands over his eyes.

  “I can’t help myself,” Howard said. “Try and understand.” I thought he was going to come close again, to try and rescue himself in the crush of an embrace, and I felt all the muscles of my body tightening in union, bracing themselves against the insult of such a cruel seduction.

  But he just stood there. “We have to talk,” he said. “We have to make some arrangements. Paulie, be sensible.”

  The baby had roused, was banging her spoon for service on the high chair tray and I raised my voice over the din.

  “We’re all going to die, Howard! You’re not the only one!”

  He knew what I meant and he looked at me in acknowledgment. But knowing isn’t everything. He went back into the bedroom for the suitcase anyway. He put on his jacket in the doorway of the kitchen and I watched him, dumb now and slack with misery. Ends of clothing hung from between the hinges of the suitcase.

  “Byebye,” the baby crooned, and even Jason waved, the small limp flag of a paper napkin in his hand.

  “If you go, don’t ever come back!” I hissed but he was already down the hallway, hustling off to his new life, and the urgency of his footsteps broke my heart.

  25

  EVERYWHERE I LOOKED, PEOPLE walked arm in arm, two by two. The whole awful world was a tilting ark of couples. It was something I hadn’t really noticed until Howard was gone. Teenagers walked by, entangled like jungle vines. Movie stars changed partners, but managed to be paired with somebody by press time. Even my mother and father, survivors of a hundred-year marital war, were still together. Sometimes they hardly spoke to one another. As a child I was sent back and forth between them bearing secondhand questions and answers. “Daddy, Mom says do you want pot roast or chicken? Baked potatoes or mashed?” Dragging my feet, a grounded carrier pigeon for the code words of their anger.

  But at night they always lay down side by side, their weight balancing the mattress, their shoes scattered in the shadows under the bed.

  I thought that there ought to be an annual parade honoring the veterans of bad marriages. Battered wives and castrated husbands could ride bleeding on flower- decked floats, their spirits buoyed by ticker tape and the cheers of the crowd. There could be a marching band banging out the love songs of each generation. We celebrate everything else in this country. Why not couples, the miraculous endurance of legal coupling?

  My own children had become a couple, of sorts. Before, they had often been enemies, quarreling over toys, competing for my attention, or for Howard’s. But now he had left and I had become an unreliable stranger, subject to dangerous mood changes. I was a wallflower, an outcast, a one-legged bird staggering for balance. I certainly didn’t act like Mommy anymore, that grown-up who was to be trusted.

  Sometimes I hugged them in a smothering and painful embrace that belied mother-love, and other times I crept under the bedclothes and hid there, talking to myself and waiting for solutions in the darkness. Was I crazy? Who was to say?

  I did other suspect things: ate weird combinations of food, stuffing myself with sweets, snacks, the junk meant to lure the kiddies on television commercials. I even laughed at some of the shows, when Popeye gave Bluto his comeuppance, when cartoon cats were flattened by cartoon mice. Take that, and that, I thought, thinking, of course, of Howard and that woman, but reduced to infantile symbols.

  “Who wants to give Mommy a big juicy kiss?” I asked, holding my arms open.

  The children stared ahead of them at the television set.

  “Come on,” I said. “First come, first served.”

  This time Jason looked up warily and he blinked, that new habit of his. Primed by fairy tales, he knew a witch when he saw one. He sidled closer to his baby sister on the floor.

  Go ahead, Sweetheart. Drop your eyes. Get into practice for when you grow up and screw around.

  I go
t up, whistling courage, and went into the bedroom to look at myself in the big mirror. Maybe I could let my hair grow. And I could have it straightened. As soon as things settled down around here, I was really going to go on a diet, a sensible one this time, with eggs and fish and stuff like that in it. I could exercise too, and set definite goals for myself; a certain weight, certain measurements before the first signs of spring. I began to jog in place right then, my reflected image blurring in front of me. But my breasts bounced and I felt a touch of vertigo.

  “Whew!” I sat down on the edge of the bed, suddenly enervated. A huge yawn rose in my throat. God, I could hardly stay awake. But if I fell asleep then, right in the middle of the day, I’d be up all night again in that lousy silence.

  The main thing was to keep myself busy until I could make plans. I picked up a magazine from the night table on my side of the bed, but there were only money-saving recipes and stories with poignant, but happy, endings. Those liars.

  It had been a long time coming. It was something I knew as well as my own mortality, and was just as unwilling to accept. Of course it wasn’t fair. I had children for him, that family man. Never mind how it all began. I gave up college to become the cheerleader for a losing team. And somewhere in the confusion my own poetry had been lost.

  I yawned again. Move, I told myself. Get moving before the blood freezes going upstream.

  I went into the living room and switched off the television set. The children continued to look at the gray screen, following the pinpoint of light to its diminished flicker.

  “Hey!” Jason said.

  “Guess what?” I shouted. “We’re going out!”

  Annie frowned, a signal that I was too loud.

  “We’re going to Grandma’s,” I announced in a softer voice. “Hurry up and get your jackets. Jason, don’t do that with your eyes, lover, okay?”

  My mother said, “Well, do you hear from h-i-m?”

  “Mother,” I said, “why are you spelling? Yes, of course I’ve heard. You know Howard. He speaks to the children on the hour, so he won’t miss a single nuance in their development. He’s with h-e-r.”

  “Don’t be wise, Sis,” my father said. “You always were a headstrong girl. You always knew everything. Someday you’ll slow down and listen to an older person.”

  “Yes, Dad. Thanks.”

  “It’s not thanks we want,” he said. “It’s respect.” He went into the bathroom and closed the door.

  “Nerves,” my mother said. “It goes to his prostate. We didn’t need all this.”

  The children climbed on the plastic-covered sofa and it crackled and wheezed like Saran Wrap.

  “I’ll pick them up before supper,” I said.

  “I hope you won’t let him get away with this,” my mother said. “When he comes back.”

  “When he comes back? How do you know he’ll come back?”

  “Leave them alone and they’ll come home, wagging their tails behind them,” she sang.

  My father flushed the toilet and opened the bathroom door. “Do you have a joint savings account?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Do you have a joint account with him? Either/or signature cards?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “She asks why,” he said, in an aside to my mother, who only rolled her eyes heavenward.

  “Because,” my father said, “if you’ll take my advice this time, you’ll go down to the bank and take out your share, which, considering you’ve got the children, should be way more than fifty percent.”

  “Why should I do that?” I asked.

  “Because if you don’t, he will. It’s a question of whoever gets down there first! He’ll clean you out, finish you off.”

  “Howard would never do that,” I said.

  “Listen to her! Oh, you’re a babe in the woods. Still wet behind the ears. Women like her aren’t in it for the fun of it. It’s dough they want. Gifts. Furs. The night life.”

  Howard and I had about twelve hundred dollars in that account. What was he talking about?

  My mother shuffled up to me. “Lincoln Savings on Queens Boulevard is giving out premiums this month. Get yourself a four-slice toaster by the by or a nice electric blanket.”

  I edged toward the door.

  “Where are you going now?” my father asked.

  “Nowhere. I don’t know. I just need time to think.”

  My father prepared his face to tell me what he thought about thinking, but my mother saved me. “Don’t get started, Herm,” she said to him. “Take it easy and you’ll last longer. Put the set on for the children.”

  They were already gazing dutifully at the blank screen, Jason’s lids fluttering, baby Ann loving her thumb. They’ll probably be blind before they’re teenagers, I thought. But I took the opportunity to make my escape.

  Thinking didn’t really appeal that much to me, either. Hadn’t I always acted best on impulse? Ask anyone. Ask Howard. Ah, back again, full circle.

  I walked without destination in my parents’ neighborhood. There are ways to get men back, I thought. I had just passed a newsstand, its racks loaded with women’s magazines. Any one of them probably had an article listing ten surefire methods.

  I had a few of my own: seduction, threats, complacent waiting. And there were the children, of course, my little aces in the hole. Howard was the most devoted father in the world and he suffered the historical guilt of all fathers since Abraham.

  There was one other alternative. I could just let him go. That idea left me so breathless that I had to stop and lean against the window of a pizzeria. I shaded my eyes and looked inside. The pizzaman stared back at me, his floured hands at rest on a circle of dough. There was a telephone booth in the rear of the store. I had the number where Howard could be reached in case of an emergency. All his life he had been readied for emergencies.

  I turned and looked down the street. A young couple embraced in a green car that was parked just a few feet away. That’s how it all begins, I could have told them—in cars, in the mystery of the flesh.

  Jason had been begun in the back seat of a Chevy. If he ever happened to ask about it though, I would lie. I would tell him it was in an oversized downy bed, canopied and draped, with gilded cupids and swans looking on. It might as well have been for the way I had felt.

  I went into the pizzeria and called the number Howard had given me. What was I going to say? Come back, nothing is forgiven? Or, good riddance to bad rubbish?

  The telephone rang three times and then Howard answered. “Hello? Hello?”

  Improvise, I told myself, but instead I breathed, huh, huh, huh, like an asthmatic dog. This is an obscene phone call, I thought.

  “Say something,” Howard commanded. “I know it’s you. Is there something wrong, Paulie? Will you answer me?” Then, “This won’t get us anywhere, you know.” He sounded as kind and righteous as Perry Mason.

  I hung up.

  The pizzaman was still looking as I came out of the phone booth. How many women and men came there for desperate phone calls, the steam of their passion and discontent fogging the glass door? He looked disapproving, as if he knew about Howard and me and the disorder of our lives. I slipped out and went next door to a novelty shop. I’d bring something home for the children, a souvenir of this new phase of our existence. But the atmosphere was unsettling, and I chose quickly: a rubber bath toy for Annie and a wooden backscratcher for Jason, in the shape of a hand.

  Back home again, we were bravely three. The rubber fish eluded them in the tub, was defective and took water and sank. I toweled them dry before the soap could be completely rinsed off. “Bed, bed, beddy-bye,” I sang. The telephone rang, and as if we had an unspoken agreement, no one answered it. Jason raked the backscratcher across the velveteen of the sofa, leaving a furrowed trail. Then he moved it against his legs, giving himself pleasure. The baby played for extra time too. She called for water and for kisses. But, finally they went off, sleep overtaking them like a highwaym
an.

  I went into my bedroom, our bedroom, and stood in the quiet, in the pink bedstand light, waiting for something to happen. The telephone didn’t ring again. Even the heat had been turned off for the night. All the noises of the world were remote and muted.

  I walked back to the children’s room and replaced covers that had been flung off. The backscratcher was in Jason’s shoe on the floor near his bed. I took it with me, idly scratching one arm and then the other. Then I took off my clothes and climbed into bed. I pulled the wooden fingers of the backscratcher over my body. Slowly, slowly, in the same gentle rhythm. I felt lulled, sleepy. If Howard was there in the room with me, I could probably seduce him, I thought. How could he resist, in that same room, in that same bed, seeing those familiar blurred images through his eyelashes as he turned to me? With the backscratcher I satisfied one place and aroused another. How could he do without me? How could this happen?

  I sat up and pulled the backscratcher across my chest, and I saw the pink line of the scratch fade and then rise in the pallor of a welt. It was as if I had pierced through to the heart itself.

  26

  MR. X CAME TO the door wearing an apron sprigged with violets; he held a wooden spoon in his hand. What was this? I wondered.

  I was expecting a rage and anguish to match my own, some senseless, unshaven man surrounded by overturned chairs, cigarette butts, and the wreckage of his feelings. But the place was as neat as a model home. Maybe I had the wrong apartment. He was certainly all wrong, not just the apron or the absurd domestic symbolism of the spoon. It was everything. He was too slight, too short, too shy and too eager at once.

  But it was Apartment 10J in Building C, the original love nest, the very scene of the crime. He probably thought I was collecting money for something. The spoonless hand was reaching toward his pocket even before I spoke.

  “No, wait,” I said. “I’m Howard’s wife.”

  He just stood there. The spoon dripped something pale between us onto the carpet, but he didn’t seem to notice.