The Tunnel of Love

by Peter de Vries

  “Yes,” Phoebe said, “it’s a filthy habit.” Showing that she can make breakfast conversation when she wants to.

  When Maude and Marco arrived we were discussing why cats don’t come when you call them, the way dogs do. Now, at one stage in the getting-acquainted scene of my Moot Point fantasies—where the girl is wearing my pajamas and sipping hot tea after the thundershower which had driven us to refuge there, you will remember—at one juncture she tells me that she is fond of cats. I reply with a sort of quip which struck me as apropos of what we were talking about here at the breakfast table. So I threw it into the family discussion.

  “Cats are merely live bric-a-brac,” I said. My wife gave me a shake of the head to tell me not to confuse the children. I returned to my coffee. Maude tried to call the cat: “Here, Figaro! Here, Figaro!”—with no results. Marco piped up, “Maybe he’s another one who doesn’t like his—”

  “That’s enough of that!” I said. I stamped my foot, starting the oil furnace. “Children today are let speak their piece about everything,” I complained to my wife. “They’re pampered and indulged and kowtowed to. Back in the great pioneer times of our country, people had names like Cotton and Increase. Those were the days of stamina.”

  In the midst of minding all the children while my wife cleaned the house that morning (with no help, the cleaning woman being sick), I took time out to deal with the rats. I had seen no more since that evening, but my wife had sighted “something” running behind the Bendix in the basement. I went down there toward noon with a broom and a BB gun, and with bicycle clips fastened around the ankles of my pants. After clattering about behind boxes and barrels, flushing nothing, to my considerable relief, I got Nebuchadnezzar aside as I had before. I took him to our bedroom closet. I got down on all fours and showed him the hole there. Then, pointing alternately to that and to the picture of a rat on a box of poison, I went through a series of sounds and motions, which would elude reproduction here, by means of which I tried to drive home the fact that, rather than the footwear which it was his wont to chew, here was his rightful foe, whose challenge was his birthright and whose prompt and faithful dispatch was essential to the preservation of my esteem. Then I wedged back into the hole the beer coaster with which I had been keeping it stopped up.

  By this time the children were boiling to some sort of climax. They had been listening to records under the supervision of Maude, the oldest, who had set their backs up by insisting the music played be “good.” She had going the Magic Fire music from Die Walküre, the story of which I had related to her. “There’s the fire,” she explained to the circle gathered round on the floor. “Hear the crackle of the flames.” She said this so prissily that I could not resist telling her, “No, that is needle scratch.” This put her out of sorts with the enterprise as such, and she began to practice a piano piece of her own with the phonograph still going. Above the whine of the vacuum, this was an interesting phonic experience. It seemed as good a time as any to give the girls the shampoos which had been decreed.

  I obtained some rather unique effects. In calling out instructions for rinsing, my wife told me to use the juice of half a lemon for each, diluted in a little water. Pouring this over the head was the penultimate step—I got that. But I understood her to have said a cup of lemon juice for each. In addition, nobody said anything about straining the juice (though I did flick the pips out with a spoon), and the resulting pulp in the tresses was more than a simple rinsing could handle, and my wife had to wash the girls’ hair all over again. It wasn’t till I was drying their locks with an electric blower that I noticed the resemblance to clotted straw, and turned them over to their mother. I stood in the bathroom doorway as she lathered the heads anew, doing my best to keep up everyone’s spirits.

  “I should think you could spare me at least this,” my wife said, “with my back. Yesterday I got another of those twinges driving to Bridgeport. But driving the car,” she puzzled. “Must be some nerve.”

  “Possibly involving the motor area. What,” I went on, leaning against the doorjamb with my hands in my pockets, “did you go to Bridgeport for?”

  “See about musical instruments—where you’re not much help either. What did you suggest to Ralph he take up a shoehorn for? Now the child thinks you can play on one.”

  “You can—footnotes.”

  You can understand my surprise at the irritation with which these attempts to lighten the burdens of the morning were met, likewise those I made in the living room from which I called over words of encouragement, advising her to avoid all agitation and to keep calm in the teeth of adversity, which would soon enough be got through. “Oh, go find Ralph and give him his bath,” she said.

  He was found, easily enough, in the proscribed barn, and was such a mass of filth and bruises that the one could not be told from the other. Nor did I eliminate the one without adding to the other, so brisk was the drubbing I administered in the tub. Tearful howls attested the thoroughness of my efforts, and a faint smile my satisfaction with the results.

  I had not been in the children’s bathroom for some time, and now found scraps of paper glued to the enamel of the tub, which I paused from time to time to scratch at with my nails.

  “What is all this you’ve got stuck to everything? Are these stamps?” I said.

  “You told us to keep our Christmas seals in the bathtub—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!”

  Fatherhood is an art, and it took as much tact and beguilement as it did muscle to get both the premises and the children spic and span by two o’clock, but we did. I trust the caseworker was well struck by the tableau we presented at the picture window where, in addition to the faces I was making at my family, I believe I also had my thumbs inserted in my ears and was comically waggling my fingers. My wife answered the door, wearing a blue housecoat and leisurely dropping a magazine to the coffee table as she rose to go to it, smiling at the scene we made. “I’m Miss Terkle from Rock-a-Bye,” said a resonant voice.

  Miss Terkle was a woman of fifty in tweeds the color of summer sausage and with straight brown hair drawn into a yam at the back. She glanced round the living room with what appeared to be approval, and then beamed at the children. They were radiant, and there were glints in the girls’ golden hair, undoubtedly the remains of citrus mash.

  “Now then,” she said, settling into a pull-up chair. Now then indeed.

  There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you. It never seemed to me more so than that afternoon. Phoebe, who knew she had us, led off with a request for eating matter. Which I met by reminding her that, on that head, she had done nothing with her lunch but rearrange it on her plate.

  “Sounds familiar,” Miss Terkle laughingly remarked. “I guess all parents have different ideas how to cope with the food rebel, but none of them appear efficacious. What do you do when a child won’t eat its food?”

  “Send him to bed without any supper,” I said.

  I felt a pressure on an already aggrieved bunion, applied under the coffee table by my wife’s foot, as she smiled at Miss Terkle and said, “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “A cup of tea would be fine.”

  “I hope you take cream,” my wife said, rising. “We haven’t a lemon in the house.”

  “Are you going to give her cookies?” Ralph said.

  “If you’re good,” I answered, meeting his ellipsis head on. I glanced quickly at Miss Terkle to see if I’d made another gaffe by thus laying down a pragmatic, or “reward,” basis for morality; but her expression told me nothing, that being rather a matter of watching with interest as Ralph’s hand advanced toward a bowl of nuts on the coffee table in front of her. The hand closed on a fistful of them, and mine on it. I tried to make him yield his booty, but the hand was as hard to pry open as a clam. I prised a finger at a time away, the nuts dribbling back into the bowl and onto the table. Miss Terkle sat forward, as if witnessing some prolonged and misbegotten act o
f legerdemain. “Lick the problem not the child,” I panted with a smile. She nodded, watching intently. Rather than the principle I had enunciated, I longed to illustrate that more venerable one of “knocking some sense into them”—though if I’d got started on that boy just then I doubt if I’d have been able to stop short of knocking it out of him. I got his hand open at last, but in a final lunge of resistance he stumbled against the coffee table, overturning it at Miss Terkle’s feet and emptying the bowl of nuts in her lap.

  “Can we go now?” Marco asked, when Miss Terkle had been tidied up.

  “You not only can but you may,” I said. “Out in the relative sunshine with you! Play nice together, all of you, and when we have tea maybe we’ll give you cookies and ginger ale.”

  I was convinced now that the caller felt herself to be slumming. In the need to recover status, I studded my conversation with as many terms like “substitute situation” and “plastic suggestion” as I could, to show that I was familiar with the latest terrain on child guidance; but I felt her expression to be deteriorating steadily, as though, that is, it were now no longer a question whether I should have had children but whether my father should have. A sudden vibration of withdrawal, a lowering of my eyelids, signalized a dangerous glut on my part with this subject, which I now left to the women. Vaguely I heard them talk about the Period of Protest (when the child throws dishes on the floor), then about the Period of Co-operation (when he insists on carrying them in from the dining-room table). I was in my Period of Resignation (the realization that the adults sweep the fragments into a dustpan in either case). Then Miss Terkle was recommending what she considered the definitive volume on dealing with children from five to seven. “I think five to seven is the most crucial period in many ways,” she said.

  “Right,” I said, sliding up in my chair. “That’s the cocktail hour.”

  Miss Terkle glanced at her wrist watch. “I won’t keep you any longer than I have to,” she said. “This has been very interesting. Now, what about the Pooles?”

  “The who?” I said.

  “The Pooles. Your friends.”

  “Oh, yes.” We gave our view of the matter, the gist of which was that, yes, we thought it would be fine for the Pooles to have children, whom they could give a good home. What else was there to say? What else was there to think? The Pooles were an intelligent young couple with means, with enough money for a nurse. . . . So we gave our recommendation, and Miss Terkle took her leave, shortly before four o’clock.

  “I’m sorry about the nuts,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s all right.”

  “No, it isn’t,” I said, and meant it: The nuts that had been swept up and thrown out were roasted almonds costing a dollar and a half a pound, which I had looked forward to nibbling on with my imminent Martini.

  I was setting about the concoction of that when the children came tumbling back in, offering to tired spirits a burst of animal health. They talked about Miss Terkle, and I felt there must surely be some substitute situation for this. At last I hit on one. I put on my hat and went out to a bar instead.

  The upshot of everything was that the Pooles appeared to have been turned down. Oh, not in so many words of course; they just didn’t get any child. By the end of the summer the implications were clear. I took the disappointment resentfully to heart, feeling it one in which I personally shared by having failed to come up to snuff as part of somebody’s environmental picture.

  “It’s hard to tell why agencies turn down couples,” my wife said. “It could be some one thing in the Pooles’ setup, or a little bit of everything in it. The Hurlbutts haven’t been able to find out to this day why they flunked.”

  “How did it all happen? Where did we go wrong?” I went on, flapping my hands at my sides.

  “Don’t let it get you down,” Isolde said, taking my arm one afternoon as we were leaving their house to go for a drive. “We’ll try another agency.”

  “You’re damn right we will,” I said. “The hell with Rock-a-Bye.”

  But Isolde was by no means in perennially level spirits. When October came and they were given neither a child nor a reason for the refusal, she stamped her foot furiously at her home one evening and said, “Why not? What’s this all about? Is there some skeleton in our closet or something? That we don’t even know about ourselves? How do caseworkers find things out?”

  “They snoop,” I said. I remember that my wife was watching Augie, who was mixing drinks at the bar.

  Snooping is probably the term for what I now undertook myself. For as the Pooles plunged doughtily into a fresh try with another agency, one in New Haven, I thought about them, listened to things about them, asked about them—bent on finding out what I could. My curiosity was thorough and it was systematic. I became a caseworker.

  Six

  FOR months there was no data—the mystery seemed unsolvable. Then suddenly it poured in from all directions and without my prying for it.

  Rather than merely at dinners exchanged in one another’s home, we now began to see the Pooles at parties everywhere—the parties I have come to think of as “those Saturday-night strip teases.”

  How well I remember those Saturday-night strip teases that were such a cardinal part of Avalon social life, yet how they all seem to blur into one: I mean those gatherings at which familiars favored one another with something of the nature and origin of their personality structures, revealing stage by stage the libido or ego or inferiority drives that made them what they were. The next morning they might shudder a little at the intimacy of their disclosures, but not while they were at it; I was often detained by total strangers with accounts of their complexity. “Did I ever tell you about my aberration?” would seem to be the latter-day variant of an old gambit. Women, I think, made freer with themselves than men, stopping short only of some ultimate secret suited to the analyst’s ear alone—indeed like dancers one garment short of final revelation, deterred, perhaps, by a warning frown from a husband across the room. At such times it was often all I could do to keep from clapping my hands and yelling, “Take it off!”

  There were at these strip teases specialties to suit all tastes. One woman I recall analyzed the whole of her foliation in terms of erogenous zones. This was more interesting to an advertising executive who was present than it was to the rest of us because he listened to the entire story under the impression that erogenous zones were red-light districts. But under whatever skies their peculiarities had burgeoned, in whatever family bosoms they had been separately irked, these people together formed an aristocracy of ills; nor was membership in it to be had merely by being in possession of the glossary, as the ranking neurotics soon gave me to know. There was an implication quite deeply rooted, namely that discomposure is the price of civilized subtlety, and freedom from it the boon of less evolved types. The neurotics were those oysters, so to speak, in whom the abrasive grain of sand had produced the pearl, Sensibility. I myself took this on faith; so that when the neurotics slung an arm around my shoulder, as they often did, and said they envied me my untortured simplicity, I had a feeling of resentment and chagrin. And when they referred to me as “levelheaded,” “steady,” “a good sort,” it was like a goad in my side, for it amounted to being called names. None of this would have carried the sting that it did were it not for a certain professional aspect to this whole matter, which involved a man’s pride.

  Avalon is full of artists and intellectuals. They set the social tone in the circles in which I found myself afloat. Since artists were so numerous, the connection between neurosis and talent was widely aired, and the view of a genius as someone not accountable to normal standards highly thought of. I found Augie very vocal on this subject.

  “Name me one genius who wasn’t a son of a bitch,” he said one Saturday night at the Blooms’. He was standing at the mantel, waving a highball in one of those gestures that seemed always so patently to typify the Eastern seaboard. “Name one. A son of a bitch in his domestic life, or hi
s sexual conduct, or money matters, or his relations with people at large.”

  We sat a moment in thought, as if playing a game.

  “Plato?” I said at last.

  “Very little is known of Plato. Socrates? He wants to know about Socrates,” Augie said humorously. Since this mere mention seemed enough for most of the others I didn’t ask for particulars, not wanting to appear an ignoramus.

  “Shakespeare,” I gave him next off the top of my head.

  “Shakespeare he says. He wants to know what kind of a bird Shakespeare was. Well we don’t really know—luckily for him!” Augie said, smiling at those in primary-colored shirts and wool ties, who smiled back. “Coleridge caused his wife constant embarrassment. Who next? Dickens did I hear somebody say?” He hadn’t, certainly not me, but he singled me out as the target of these apparent ripostes because I had sent the goat eating Duncan Hines back to him. “Dickens turned his wife out of the house,” he affected to fire back at me. “Gauguin told his family to go to hell. Flaubert had intercourse with a courtesan with his hat on and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.”

  “What for?” I asked.

  “To show his contempt for bourgeois standards. Wagner had three children by another man’s wife, while he was working on his best operas. Byron was a son of a bitch. Smollett wrote all over the walls, or was it Trollope? No, you can’t ask a man to be a good artist and a good human being both. The artist is a washout as a husband,”

  Isolde smiled admiringly up at him during the bulk of this speech.

  “And the better he is the worse he is,” he finished, and drank. A man in a primary-colored shirt nodded.

  “He’s right about that,” said the man, a painter whose canvases were dubious, but whose inability to get along with other people was monumental.

  Now all this began to get to me. Little by little, as the mosaic of implications completed itself, I acquired the sense of lacking caste among subtle and gifted spirits, many of whom were validly that, though with the most articulate it was of course often a case of “howling loudest who had drunk the least.” All the artists and intellectuals I knew personally and dealt with editorially had periods when they didn’t do a tap of work, which they called, as you know, blocks. Then they would have to go see their psychiatrists, or blockbusters. They frequently interpreted these blocks as sexual, just as they had their drive to produce. It was enough that the real painters talked about their blocks, but when one afternoon at a cocktail party I heard a commercial artist going on about having one, I thought that was a bit thick. This commercial artist had done a series of posters for a chewing gum which were outstanding of their kind. On top of him bragging about his block, his wife chimed in with something about his being “all tied up in knots lately.” That did it. I figured if he could have blocks and be tied up in knots, anybody could.