by Herbert Gold
“Just now?”
And the hairbrush was cracking on my arm because I refused to understand.
“Just now,” she said.
* * *
The routines of sudden departure, in my case, did not send me to an all-night movie or a hotel. I spent the night in Alfonso’s high-rise in the Western Addition. Then I found a room. Then I started looking for a place to live. Sometime soon I would learn to sleep alone. So far I was just learning to sweat and turn alone, stare into the unfamiliar black ceiling above me, hurtle toward nonsleep in a place where unfamiliar house creaks and appliance noises seeped through unfamiliar walls. I shuffled toward dawn. It didn’t help when Alfonso advised me that all this was normal, a stage. I had difficulty understanding the drill.
The drill would be an uncharted path except that so many have walked along it, worn down the territory, that only the tops of heads are visible.
A week later Priscilla surprised me with a telephone call, nothing on her mind really, just a suggestion: “Want a cup of tea?”
“It’s late.”
“I know.” She waited. “Everyone’s asleep.”
Well, maybe herbal tea, a mouth-refreshing Mint Medley, would be a good idea. So I spent an hour in her bed, which used to be our bed, and then got up because I didn’t know how Jeff would understand it if first I was gone and then I was there, first I was moved out and then I was waking him for breakfast. He could pronounce Daddy perfectly now. “Daddy? Daddy?”
As I got up to dress in the dark, she was saying sleepily, “You going?” I wondered if she would add “Stay.” She didn’t.
Here was the table, here was the chair, here was the things in our bedroom. This was the bed where Jeff’s brother or sister might have been created; this was the bed Jeff used to climb into for a hug when he had a bad dream. I moved clumsily, still sticky, as silent as a burglar in my former house.
I was lacing my shoes. Priscilla sat up and she was whispering to me in the dark. “I can’t imagine,” she said.
“I can’t hear you.”
“I can’t imagine not ending our lives together.”
My hands shook on the laces. I wanted to hurt her. I pulled a knot. I’d have to cut the lace later. I said, “That’s only the movies.”
“What?”
“Where people separate, get divorced, and then after many years, when they are elegant and old, no else is in their lives, time has stopped, they are beautiful, the same as before because they’re stars, not people, only there’s a little gray in their hair … That’s only the goddamn movies!”
She sat there naked, a pillow held to her chest for warmth, and said, “You mean it stops?”
She was shaking her head helplessly. She was crying. I left in the middle of the night and looked back to see her face at the unlit window as I started the motor. A neighbor kid, cruising, looking for a parking place, was glad to see me go.
Chapter 11
Therefore it was a miracle Priscilla worked in her heart, something even better than separation, annulment, or divorce—the forward progress of forgetting. History could be wiped away, bringing a new chance for a woman who was young enough to be still greedy for her future, not her past. “Do you remember spotting Jesus Christ Satan on Polk?” “Sort of. The crazy.” “Do you remember when we…” “I don’t have a good memory, Dan.” And the eyes ruefully smiled.
How alert she was to her own beauty. How wondering and shy in herself because she didn’t know why she did what she did, knew she had to do something, whatever it happened to be—an impulse welling up in her like groundwater flooding out all at once, eroding the foundations, a force of nature, the rushing underground stream refusing to be dammed. Something wanted her to end her marriage, which also happened to be my marriage and our marriage, and she assented to this something almost joyously. Even if it hurt her, made her feel alone, lonely, tearful, offering no explanations except the one she suggested through clenched, denying teeth: “I thought it was only my period. It’s never only my period.”
She didn’t have to believe anything she said. It was others who seemed to need words. She adapted to their habits. Out of innate courtesy and good breeding she could be persuaded to provide words. She didn’t have to believe them, not this wife and mother. Not Priscilla with the eyes that gave blue certainty back to a needy and uncertain world.
Reluctantly she sat with her husband at the kitchen table while Jeff finished his nap. He would wake eventually, but her husband refused to climb out of his own sleep. I knew it did no good, but incomprehension kept me asking the questions again and again, clutching the coffee mug I had used for breakfast since we started living together. Dutifully she tried to give me words, since I seemed to require them; refilled my cup; left her own filled and untouched.
“You know yourself and you’re lonely,” she said. “I don’t waste time knowing myself and I’m no more lonely than you, so what’s the difference? Who has the advantage around here?”
She grinned. She liked winning the discussion if I insisted on having one. She listened, hoping that Jeff was stirring or the phone or doorbell ringing, anything to end unnecessary post-conjugal explanations.
“We could keep each other company.”
“About what?”
“You said about loneliness.”
“Oh. I did. Okay, we could infect each other. Hey, that’s how different diseases all get to do their stuff, isn’t it?”
Maybe the disease was just being human. But her patience for remarks, for intimate remarks, the disease of remarkism—for what lovers tell each other—was strictly limited these days.
No soul union these days. “Maybe it’s just hormonal right now,” she said, “comes after mother’s milk.” She took a deep, relieved breath when the good news arrived for her from elsewhere in the house. “Can’t be bothered, things to do. Okay, I hear Jeff calling and you don’t even hear, he’s up from his nap,” and with a blessing in the form of uplifted hands, a shrug, a grin, a click of her lips, she was gliding away to pick up our son. He too needed to be eased out of sleep into the world.
Sometimes it happened that she thought other people might have a point. They said things, they repeated things; things that were not her concern seemed to matter a lot to other people. She might try thinking of what others expected, such as explanations, justifications, afterthoughts, remembering. She knew folks did these sort of things. When they drank coffee in the afternoon, they had to do something besides drink the coffee. She wasn’t really sure why, but she was willing to take heed and give thought before she dismissed the idea. She didn’t mind being a puzzle to others and to herself. Perhaps it was courteous, though, to think things through or along, since it seemed to matter to them.
So there were these afternoon visits, at least until she would have to put a stop to them, and there was her husband again sitting opposite her at the kitchen table, hand grabbing his coffee mug, asking and asking at her. She shrugged. There’s something that’s real, clear, traditional, and well understood: shoulders hiking, then relaxed; pale eyebrows lifting, then back in place; ironic smile playing on lips. An intelligent woman had no prejudice against the futile exercise of her intelligence if people didn’t drive her too far. So she finished the gesture with shoulders, eyebrows, smile, and then said: “Freedom belongs to not being in love.”
“Are you sure you’re not in love?” (asked jealousy, asked rejection, asked hope against hope).
“I get it, Dan. I’d figure it out even if you didn’t get that shrewd, angry look in your face. You think it’s something about self, yuchh, esteem. Well, no. Okay, maybe, but I don’t think about myself any more than I think about anyone else. I don’t like to think about myself. I don’t like to think about freedom, either. I just want to be it—free, okay? Okay? Are you satisfied?”
That wasn’t the word for my condition.
“You’ve got responsibilities as a father and you’re willing to let them float by. That’s not my idea of
freedom.”
“Are you saying that I neglect Jeff?”
“Why don’t you listen? I think you like him a lot. But you think your way is good enough for other people. Well, I want more for him in the way of schools and everything else. I take being a mother seriously. Maybe I personally, myself, want more, too.”
“My income isn’t good enough. Is that it—income?”
She was exasperated by my pigheadedness. “For you it’s good enough. For Jeff, for me—”
“It’s not anymore?”
She shrugged. “Some people change. Some people don’t.”
I was changing fast now. “I haven’t moved along enough for you?” I asked, which is not at all what I wanted to say (desperation may have been hinted in passing).
“Some people learn,” she said softly. She was thinking out loud. “It’s not just about Jeff. Dear, I really want to be honest with you, but there’s a limit. I hope you can understand that.”
“Understand what?”
“That’s what I mean. You have your way and I have mine. There’s a time just to be happy. I had that time with you. It’s nice, probably very nice as I sort of remember, but it’s a short time. Then there comes a time when it’s just routine and I’m afraid that’s the rest of life unless you take chances, and even then—”
“You want to be restless.”
“Want, a nice choice of word. Okay. I don’t know if I’m doing it right, but I’ve got to do it now. Something besides wife-slash-mother.”
“You could go back to school. Maybe we could work out something like that—”
As inkiness spread over the Priscilla-colored eyes, the face changed virulently. “We? We could work it out? Hey mister, how about I figure out my own plans and projects—”
I couldn’t look at her now. “You’re figuring them already.”
“—like maybe flat-out making some space in my life and money, there are ways I know about—”
“What ways?”
“I’m exploring, dear. I don’t have to tell you.”
“What ways?”
She didn’t answer for a moment—it seemed she was thinking—and then she did. “Yet,” she said, “being in love is nice sometimes.” And then hastily, stopping me before I had a chance: “Hey! Not that I’d recall.”
* * *
Sometimes she recalled.
Sometimes, at the stage of general human hunger and monkey need to scratch, stroke, tickle, or cuddle, and behind her brilliant hard-and-soft blue eyes—at the moment of fading light, maybe, or late in a glass of wine—she expressed a symptom of memory without needing to dwell in it. “Come here. Let me pull that down. No, me. I want to do it. Let me. Let me run things for now, lover.”
Former lover. Former husband. My pants.
It was evening. I had given Jeff his bath, put him to bed. I didn’t know what book she was reading while she waited. Maybe she found an idea in her book or was just bored with it.
“No, no, just relax. I’m in charge.”
She was. I had no choice. I didn’t mind.
This graceful modern woman, this woman of today with a good appetite. Let her study running things, it’s her turn now. Hook the belt back and let her unhook it, beginning to end. Zipper. Shorts. “Those Jockeys stick when you’re up like that, how can you walk, Dan?” A hilarious wonderment. “Why should my hand there change everything, that’s what I want to know.”
I might answer at another time.
“That’s what I’ve always wanted to know, lover.”
She would still be a great slayer of mine enemies if I needed a few enemies handily slain. And she might choose to hold my hand if I were slipping away into oblivion—a brain tumor, say, or some other tasteful disaster—provided she didn’t have anything better to do that day.
No, even if better entertainments were offered, she would nurse me. Convulsions would not terrify, nor diapers repulse, even if the day were perfect for a bike ride out to the windmills at Ocean Beach. When certain things needed to be done, Priscilla did them in good spirit. Offered a task and accepting it, she performed better than anyone. Those blue eyes would fade and swarm at the biologic turmoil on my gurney, no sphincter control, no bladder limits, just as her eyes swarmed over me when we made love, she came, another biologic turmoil, and then we made love again to the sound of tennis balls plopping against a hotel court practice wall at dawn. And she would clean up after me if that were the program (contrary to fact thus far). Whatever was called for in this life.
And what a warm breath she had. I decided not to try for incontinence and paralysis as a test of her decent regard for duty. I’ve decided to live forever because God wants her kisses to be remembered and I don’t trust anyone else to do it. I have my orders. Remembering Priscilla is my job, Jeff.
My mind wandered because she wanted me to do nothing while she was of service. Sweetly smiling, she explored this way and that, brushing fingertips and lips here and there. She put her finger on my mouth.
“Shut up, lover. Let me. Don’t think. Let go. Let me do everything.”
* * *
I was desperate to change the history of the future. If it were someone else’s, I would know how this story unfolds. Inevitability is hard to avoid, even for the stupid and self-pitying. But since it was the story I didn’t want for myself, I poked at the air, failed at the simple task of sleeping, learned about abjectness.
I stood in the kitchen. She listened politely. The lip that curled was not her doing; it belonged to nature. If a person waves at a fly or twitches an eyelid when a speck lands on the conjunctiva, it’s not a moral flaw. She didn’t choose to sneer; her upper lip was an independent contractor.
“We talk and talk and talk and talk,” I said, “and when we finish talking, we’re a little older, and then the words go walking around us, we remember so much, I do anyway. So everything’s the same.”
She considered what she had heard. My speech. This walking around of mine. “You talk so much,” she said, “yes, dear, you are a little older.”
I waited.
She grinned. “But I’m not.”
Not talking, not getting older?
Not so much as anyone could notice. I noticed that I was older: the spots on the hand, the shaking of my limbs when I wanted to say, Please, please. And I noticed her, she was right, she didn’t change; she was on the long plateau.
Please, please.
She looked solicitously into my face. She didn’t want to be unkind. She was still smiling. She turned to her book but didn’t say, Let me read now, I’m in the middle of my chapter.
Then she did.
“I’d like to finish this one tonight,” she said.
Leaving her book with a marker in it, she followed me to the door. She was polite, solicitous. She was a responsible ex-wife who understood that a person might feel lonely in his new dwelling without the familiar household things that make a man comfortable. “Here, why don’t you take your mug”—and she put it in my hands, shining and clean, coffee stains scrubbed out—“take it to your new place so you’ll feel at home. Anything else you need just now?”
Chapter 12
Jeff didn’t say much when I moved out. He tried to help pack clothes in suitcases and boxes. He found a new game, handing his father things—socks, shoes, ties—saying, “This. This. This.”
This is what parents do, this is what a father did, this is how it was. Son joins dad in the rhythm of leaving. His earnest, plump-lipped child pout was the same when we threw a ball or worked a puzzle. The way of the world was to learn new games.
By mutual agreement we left a few socks in the sock drawer, examples of Jockey shorts in the Jockey shorts drawer, samples of Dad planted here and there in the house. I put a pair of Priscilla’s panties in a drawer along with my shorts. This sort of confusion happens to the clothing of married folks. Maybe things would breed together. I wanted to believe in magic.
Now I was living in the earthquake cottage I found on
Potrero Hill behind a row of houses leaning at odd angles, their foundations protruding. Behind a real house, Poorman’s Cottage seemed to have been born in seismic shiftings like a rock out of the hill; the street had been forgotten by the city, so that the gravel-based cement was crumbling and it was gradually becoming a dirt road again. My original prefab, a room added with siding, was historically valid, one of the shacks rushed up after the earthquake of 1906 to get survivors out of tents. I believed in history; liked it. The extra room, joined illegally, demonstrated that some people had hopes of nailing up improvements in their situation. I could be their heir. On its hillside above the former meat-packing plant and not too far from the Projects, my new home had recently been occupied by coyotes, wild dogs, rats, field mice, and a family of raccoons. In the corners, tiny waify mouse bones and piles of hair indicated a struggle for existence, but not being a zoologist I wasn’t sure who had crunched up whom. These days I had my own problems.
The owner hadn’t really thought he could rent this property. He struggled to control his joy when I said, “I like it, I like it, I’ll take it.”
“Price I quoted, rock bottom, it was a slip of the tongue, you’ll have to clean up the shit around here. We don’t supply cleanup.”
“With pleasure,” said Kasdan without pleasure.
“You’ll have to…” The landlord’s voice trailed off. A wistful property-owner regret crinkled up the skin around the eyes where smile lines might be located in a person who had taken up a different line of work. Instead, destiny had given him slum real estate. “You’ll have to,” he said with greater conviction, thinking at high-interest, high-taxes, high-risk speed. Since this was a death-eyed loser he had in hand, it was a duty—these are the rules—to take him. Cat got his tongue, temporarily. The place was so hopeless, leaky, shaky—a falling-down outhouse that only regular inspection payoffs kept legal—that he couldn’t think of how to pull something else from a stone asshole tenant.
