by C. P. Boyko
“I know exactly what you mean!” he cried. “‘Doing your part,’ ‘pitching in,’ ‘contributing to society’ is not necessarily a good. If you don’t believe that society is good, then it’s actually better morally to do nothing.”
“I know exactly what you mean!” she cried. “We’ve got to remake society from the ground up, using the new principles, the new morality. It’s got to come from the people, and reflect their actual needs.”
“Exactly! How much do people actually need? A house, a car, three meals a day? They could get all that in a two-hour workday—but they wouldn’t know what to do with their free time. They’ve never heard of Philosophy or Art. All they know is Boredom and Status. Well, work then, if you must—but give that extra money to someone who could use it!”
“Exactly! The future is as near as tomorrow, but we’re not going to get anywhere just sitting around philosophizing and navel-gazing. We’ve got to act, we’ve got to work to bring it about. But try to tell that to them!”
“I know!”
“I know!”
Their happiness was suffocating; they had to turn away. For the first time, they noticed their surroundings. It was dusk, the flagstones were wet though neither of them recalled rain, and the trees lining the boulevard were in rampant blossom. They remembered that it was spring, and that the world was a very large place. The street they strolled down was not the usual expedient patchwork of their perceptions, but existed independently of them, seamlessly and luminously, like a scene in a lucid dream. They gazed in awe at Fairyland, and drifted closer together. After several minutes of effervescent silence, she took his arm—firmly, as if afraid he might run away.
“I don’t usually hit it off this well with people,” he confessed later, when their emotions had ceased to embarrass them so acutely. “In fact, I hate people.”
“Me too, I hate people too.”
“No you don’t. Really? No. You wouldn’t have agreed with me so quickly. If you really hated people, you’d have told me I was full of shit and that people are great.”
“All right,” she said, “you got me. I secretly love people.”
“I knew it!”
“I’m a closet philanthrope.”
They suppressed their laughter, as they had suppressed their joy, and felt funnier for it, like professional comedians.
Their opinion of “people” played a large part in their progressing entanglement. People, they agreed, were bland, timid, and drearily conventional—everything that Terence and Madison were not. They saw evidence of their own uniqueness everywhere. Other couples were shy and awkward, or else they were tired of each other and hardly spoke. Indeed it seemed probable that no other couple in the world had ever been so honestly interested in each other, so minutely compatible. Other lovers had been goaded by loneliness and duped by their hormones; this alone was real.
They did not use the word “love,” for the same reason that they avoided the word “God”: they had seen it too often in print. As radicals and innovators, they deplored clichés and waged battle against all things hackneyed. They took nothing for granted, received no wisdom second-hand, but argued every issue out from scratch. Thus, for example, they decided that although a personal, human-sized deity was quite incredible, one could not rule out the possibility of a creative force in nature: something that would have about the same relation to an individual human as one person’s hunger or sex drive had to an individual cell in their body—and which could therefore, for all practical purposes, be disregarded. They also concluded that finding the one person on the planet who best suited and complemented you was a mission of extreme importance but astronomical improbability—and that somehow they two, perhaps alone in history, had defied the odds and won the lottery.
The uniqueness of their feelings for each other demanded unique expression. They became of necessity poets, breaking new ground. He told her that everyone wore a different mask for different occasions, or in front of different people; perhaps they weren’t strictly speaking masks at all, but aspects of their total personalities. With her, he said, he felt for the first time like all his masks were on at once, all the facets of his self active at the same time. She told him that with every other boy, she had felt reluctant to introduce him to her friends or her parents; she wasn’t sure what they would think of him, or whether they would like him. With him, she said, she felt for the first time that it didn’t matter what they thought; she was afraid, on the contrary, that he wouldn’t like them.
He knew exactly what she was talking about. Always they seemed to be saying the same thing, in slightly different words.
They celebrated their singularity by emphasizing it. They made fun—of advertising, Hollywood, ungrammatical signs, Aunt Agony columns, and the way people walked; they deplored—patriotism, drunkenness, television, etiquette, and public transit; and they flouted. They did not give thanks on Thanksgiving Day, and elected to do their remembering on every day of the year but Remembrance Day. They did not tip unless the service was exceptional (it was never exceptional). They only held doors for the downtrodden. They jaywalked. Sometimes they just stood in the middle of a crosswalk and kissed—making benevolent, edifying gestures at cars that honked.
They would have done more in this line if they could have; but Madison still lived at home, and Terence suffered from roommates. There was no place they could be alone. It was frustrating. How could they show the world to be a repressive, joy-killing place if they could not flout it by having sex?
They had both read and thought a great deal about sex, but neither of them had yet achieved it. They were now eager to rectify their negligence. Of course, they did not use the word “sex.” Instead they spoke—or more often wrote, in long, allusive letters to each other—of the “dissolution of ego boundaries” or the “transcendent expression of an absolute sympathy.” This lapse into almost mystical circumlocution was not, of course, the result of bashfulness, but of grappling with novelty. What they had in mind was unprecedented. What they were planning was not sex, but ecstatic physical and spiritual union.
They discarded several solutions to their problem as tawdry and temporary. What they needed was a room of their own, a place that only they would be allowed to enter, a place where no one could see them if they didn’t want to be seen, a place where they could give their thoughts free expression, a still, safe, firm ground from which they could push off, reach out, and act. (They did not use the word “home.”)
Terence did not believe that such a place existed—unless one had money; and he wallowed righteously in the indignity of their situation. Madison’s bent was more pragmatic. She recalled that rents were cheaper outside the city. But what would they do there?, Terence wanted to know. How would they eat? Madison added up all their savings (so to speak), liquid assets, and hopes of credit, and concluded that they could survive for five months in the countryside, without having to do anything at all.
Terence’s restlessness battled his laziness—and lost. “But then what? We’ll just be in the same boat again—but with less freeboard.”
The answer came to them the next day, at a book shop. They browsed the stock with sad antagonism, like soldiers charged with selecting prisoners to be shot. “Have you read this one?” “Oh God. He’s got more love of letters than of language. Have you read this one?” “Oh God. He’s like a lion-tamer with his vocabulary. Okay, so you can control them—now what? Have you read this one?” “Oh God. It’s a disgrace to the memory of Johannes Gutenberg.” There were some books in the shop that they liked, but they avoided discussing these; it would have hurt too much to find their enthusiasm unshared. They also passed over in silence obscure authors, with whose failure they felt a certain solidarity. Instead they restricted their contempt to popular and canonical works, which apparently only they two had the clarity and originality of mind to find flawed. Scornfully they read aloud excerpts from various classi
cs till the proprietor browbeat them from the store.
“I could do better than that,” said Terence.
“Heck, I could do better than that,” said Madison.
These words expanded to fill a hiatus in their conversation as they climbed aboard a bus, flashed their passes with sardonic formality at the driver, and sat as near the back as a group of gobbling adolescents would permit. When they reached their stop, Terence resumed: “You should.”
“We should.”
“Why not?”
“Well, why not?”
So they decided to become novelists. In five months they could write a novel each, if not two. Then, even if only one of those four novels became a bestseller, they would still earn enough to live on for another five months—if not a year or two. Soon their names would become known, and they would not need to write so much. They could take holidays; they could travel. Terence confessed that he was dying to see the world, that he was burning to experience life. Madison, in different words, said the same thing: She still had much to learn about the socioeconomic conditions of underprivileged people in other countries. Once equipped with this first-hand knowledge, she would write even better, even more devastatingly persuasive and improving novels. Ever since the advent of Terence in her life, Madison had found school rather—academic. She was tired of endlessly discussing what should be done with the world; it was time to take action; it was time to tell people what should be done with the world. Terence knew exactly what she was talking about. Novel-writing appealed to him for the same reasons: it was artistic, it was easy, it was lucrative, and he would be his own boss. He hated bosses. He did not believe in being told what to do. Even in the matter of press-cuttings, he believed in following one’s own daemon. He was ready to leave immediately—tomorrow, if possible. He seemed eager to burn as many bridges behind him as possible. His example was exciting, his enthusiasm contagious. So, to prove to her professors, her parents, and her friends the strength of her conviction, Madison dropped out a mere three weeks before graduation. She forgave them their dismay, realizing that guilt and envy had made them defensive of their own safe and stodgy lives.
They packed everything they needed into two suitcases and caught a train south. The world seemed to sit back and stretch its legs as grey tenements and smoking factories gave way to rolling hills and fields in flower; the very birds in the trees seemed to sing tribute to the young couple’s courage. They had escaped. Terence stuck his head out the window to inhale the fragrance of freedom and received instead a swarm of insects like a fistful of gravel in the face. The pain and embarrassment soon faded, washed away on the wave of their happiness, though the welts lasted several days.
When at last they had reached their destination and found themselves alone in the cabin they had rented by the lake, their triumph was too palpable; it made them giddy. So they walked into town and busied themselves with grocery shopping—“stocking the pantry,” they called it. But even this simple domestic ritual seemed on this day freighted with symbolism, charged with an almost erotic significance—which they attempted to defuse with mockery, by parodying the stereotypical male and female. Terence hitched his thumbs on imaginary suspenders, nodded authoritatively, and called Madison “Mother” in a condescending drawl; while she became flustered, hectoring, and house-proud. They kept it up all the way back to the cabin, where she squirreled away their purchases while he lolled patriarchally, muttering advice from an armchair.
The game fizzled out over supper. They ate in silence; their gazes were skittish. Finally they laughed at their shyness and took it firmly in hand.
“Why don’t we take off our clothes?,” Madison asked in the same practical tone that Terence had once used to suggest they pee behind some bushes in the park.
“Well, why not?”
They did not watch each other undress, but presented a finished nudity, which proved all the more overwhelming.
Terence, trembling, said, “Why don’t we have a bath?”
“Why not?”
They studied each other surreptitiously as Madison opened the faucets and Terence attended to the water heater. Terence had seen breasts before, but never so closely or so uninterruptedly. Each time a girl had taken her shirt off in his presence or field of view he had felt towards her breasts the way he’d felt as a child towards other children’s birthday presents. Now he felt as if he’d been told that it was really his birthday after all. His internal organs swelled with gratitude. Madison meanwhile was overcome with awe at the casual, indifferent way that Terence flung his naked body about. Her own body was of course insipidly familiar, but it seemed inconceivable that anyone could ever come to take for granted such a strange, hairy, bony miracle of biological engineering as Terence’s. His skin next to her bland smoothness seemed amazingly coarse and textured, almost iridescent, like the skin of a lizard.
The bathtub, which was hardly big enough for both of them, overflowed when they squeezed themselves in. The water was freezing; apparently the water heater, though noisily and dangerously lit, did exactly nothing. They climbed out, ran slipping and shivering to the bedroom, and jumped into the bed to get warm.
The rest came easily.
Madison felt as if she were remembering something important, something she had forgotten she had even forgotten. Terence knew that he had found home. He vowed never again to leave—and promptly fell asleep.
TERENCE AWOKE TO PARALYSIS. Something vast, conscious, and malevolent was crouching on his chest, pinning his arms and legs, and sucking the air from his lungs. He struggled, as vainly as an ant crushed beneath a boot. His heart thudded as if intent on escaping this dying body. He shouted, but no sound came. He kicked and flailed, but could not move. It was exactly like a nightmare: he stomped on the brakes, but the road was icy and sloped downhill.
Then it was over. This happened most mornings lately, but he never remembered this at the time, and when the ordeal was over he no longer needed reassurance. Almost instantly he began to forget what it had been like. He was inclined to treat the whole thing as a metaphor. He turned onto his side, and, as usual, found Madison’s side of the bed as cold and unrumpled as a reproach. If he felt sometimes like he was being crushed, he knew who was to blame.
He lay in bed a few minutes longer. He was not tired at the moment, but knew he would be soon. He was sleepy all the time these days. No amount of sleep or sleep deprivation seemed to have any effect; but sleeping through sleepiness was easier than fighting it, so he spent as many hours in bed as possible—despite Madison’s silent, indirect reproaches.
He supposed that she supposed he had writer’s block. But he was far too clever for that. He never faced a blank page directly. Instead of wrestling inelegantly with what words to write, he fenced with the question of whether or not to write at all. There were excellent reasons for waiting. But some people did not understand the concept of gestation. If he was not putting pen to paper, he was nevertheless writing. Thinking about what to write and planning how to write it was the biggest part of the work; writing was ninety percent inspiration and ten percent perspiration. Once he had his novel laid out in his mind, he could transcribe it to paper in a week or two. Madison couldn’t understand this because she was a hack. She had to think in ink. She used her pen like a walking stick, staggering blindly up the rocky hill of her ideas. He, on the other hand, soared high above his mountain, sketching the most propitious route. A walking stick at this stage would only impede him. And to set out too early, before the map was finished, was foolhardy and counterproductive. He would laugh when Madison encountered a wall or crevasse and was forced to turn back. And she supposed that he had writer’s block!
In fact, Madison supposed no such thing. On the contrary, she assumed, whenever he was not actually in sight, that he was quietly producing in another room. And because her own production felt so slow and so faltering, she assumed that he was effortlessly prolific. Sh
e resented and envied and loathed his productivity—but not half as much as she loathed her own constipation. She worked—if you could call it work!—eight to ten hours a day, every day, till her mind became inflamed and allergic to language; and still she had so little to show for her efforts. A thousand words, six hundred fifty words—two hundred words! One day she had actually crossed out more than she had added. This was not work; this was an illness.
She felt that she was the only person in the world not working—probably the only living creature. Her writing table stood under a window, and outside that window there unfolded, for her moral instruction, a daily pageant of industry. Honeybees plied their routes, jackdaws built their nests, ants did with relentless purpose whatever it is that ants do, and next door the neighbors weeded, hoed, mulched, and pruned their perfect garden into perfect order and fruition. Madison and Terence’s cabin had a garden too. But theirs had been neglected and gone to seed—hideously, crepitatingly to seed. It was like a single organism now, a leafy, tangled, almost visibly breathing organism, bursting perpetually from the pod of its own rotten carcass. It was a living rebuke; she could not have felt more ashamed of her indolence and neglect if that garden had been her own bruised and starving child. She could not show her face to the neighbors.
That was another reason she envied and resented Terence: he mingled effortlessly with the locals. At least she assumed he did. She had once seen him sprawling naturally over the fence and chatting to the gardeners next door, and she had often seen him strolling lackadaisically in the direction of town; her imagination had filled in the rest of the picture with convincing detail. Terence liked it here. Terence fit in here. She loathed him for that.
But not half as much as she loathed here. There was no hot water. Instead of a toilet there was a hole cut in a splintery piece of plywood and a bucket. The electricity was temperamental. The food was strange—the produce sweet and crisp and disconcertingly flavorful—so they subsisted on canned foods or ate at the restaurant in town. She did not trust the water, which tasted funny even after ten minutes of boiling. She knew she was malnourished, if not actually poisoned, because of the strange compensating cravings that came over her; sometimes she just had to eat three soft-boiled eggs slathered with corn relish, or a pot of pea and ketchup soup, or a bowl of salted uncooked oatmeal swimming in vinegar.
