by T. C. Boyle
Naturally, the inn at Bagneux was considerably less than what they might have hoped for, and Stanley’s mother, crusty and outraged, was the principal soloist in a chorus of complaint. Katherine was testy herself, and at dinner that night, after they’d staggered up three narrow flights to rooms that were like pigeon coops, she found herself drawn into a ridiculous argument with her mother-in-law over the French pronunciation of “orange.” They’d all changed and freshened up and settled themselves in the dining room with a decent sparkling wine and a consommé madrilène that was really quite refreshing, and the waiter had just taken their orders, when Nettie, grimacing sourly under the baggage of a bad day, leaned toward Katherine and said, “You pronounce that like a foreigner.”
Katherine looked to Stanley, but he was studying the wine list so earnestly you would have thought he was going to be quizzed on it, and then looked to her mother, but Josephine could only shrug. “Pronounce what? ”
Nettie drew herself up, her tongue working behind her teeth to produce a nasty mincing parody of Katherine’s French: “Canard à low-ron-zheh.”
“And how, pray tell, am I supposed to say it?”
“Like an American. Because that’s what you are, despite all your Geneva airs, and you should be proud of it, like Stanley is—aren’t you, Stanley?”
Stanley gazed up from the wine list. He looked mystified and vaguely guilty, as if he were being punished for something he hadn’t done. “I—well—I, yes,” he said in a low voice.
“I’m sure it’s just a matter of—” Josephine began, but Nettie cut her off.
“Decent people,” Nettie hissed, “do not talk like”—and here she paused to glance round the table, stern, pampered, autocratic, an empress of money, McCormick money—“Frogs. ”
Katherine was so outraged she wanted to smash every bit of crockery on the table and walk out the door and never come back, but she restrained herself—for Stanley’s sake. “Yes,” she said, barely able to conceal the contempt in her voice, “and how do you pronounce it then?”
All eyes were on the old woman in the adamantine hat, and she savored the moment, held it just a beat, and said: “Awwrenge. ”
So it went for the three and a half weeks it took them to get to Nice. They were constantly thrust together, exposed to all sorts of weather and every conceivable type of roadway, from cobbled village streets to cartpaths that began in the middle of nowhere and wound up at the end of it. Everyone was irritable, even Katherine’s mother, who was the gentlest, most even-tempered woman alive, and by the end of the trip they were taking their meals in a brooding silence broken only by the occasional murmured request for salt. or vinegar to rub into their wounds. It was an unmitigated disaster. Hateful. Utterly hateful. And Katherine, the scientist, always alert for unusual specimens, was ready to write all the major journals and testify that she’d discovered the single most horrible and irritating member of the human species, and to name her too so there would be no mistake about it: Nettie Fowler McCormick.
And then, miraculously, Nettie threw in the towel. She’d had enough. Her kidneys were scrambled, her sinuses clogged with dust and dander and dried horse feces and all the rest, her feet were dead to all sensation and both her legs and the small of her back were separate crackling bonfires of unadulterated pain. At Nice she announced that she would be boarding a liner for London and thence for the United States of America and Chicago, Illinois. She made Stanley suffer for it, there was no question about that, and they were closeted for hours at her hotel before she decided to go, and on the day she left he was so consumed with guilt and fractured loyalty he could barely speak, but to Katherine’s mind it was worth it: she was gone. The ogre was gone. And now the rest of their lives could begin.
“Mother,” she said, sitting with Josephine in the hotel lobby the day Nettie left, “I don’t know how to say this—and I hope you won’t take it the wrong way—but I wonder if you might not be feeling a little home-sick yourself? For Prangins? Or Boston, maybe?
Josephine was in her late fifties then, a compact lively woman dressed in her eternal black, her hat mad with feathers, her eyes too small for her face. She cocked her head and smiled. “I understand you, dear: you need time alone with Stanley. I can take the train for Geneva tomorrow. ”
“You don’t mind?”
Josephine shook her head. “No, of course not. I remember how it was with your father”—and she looked down at her hands and then gave Katherine a guarded look—“on our honeymoon, I mean. You know, we had a big wedding—half of Chicago was there—and when we finally got off on our own, that first night in the hotel ...”
Katherine had been leafing through a book of poems, but now she quietly closed it and gripped its leather covers as if it were alive and wriggling in her lap. Her heart was pounding. “Yes?” she said.
“Well, it was a real adventure for us both, because we’d never been alone together in that way, and your father was”—she looked down again—“he was very amorous.”
There was an awkward silence. After a moment, Katherine cleared her throat. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that, Mother, just that subject—about marital relations, that is—because Stanley, well, he—”
“Oh, dear,” her mother cried, “will you look at the time? It does fly, doesn’t it?” She looked as if she were about to leap from the chair, dash across the strand and plunge headfirst into the sea. “I did want to get up to my room for a nap before dinner—it’s all this sun, it’s positively draining.”
“Just give me a minute, Mother,” Katherine persisted, “that’s all I ask. Will you, please?”
Her mother’s head moved just perceptibly, the faintest nod of that feathered hat. Her eyes were pinpricks, her mouth a slash of distate and disapproval.
“Stanley doesn’t seem—” Katherine began, and then faltered. “He doesn’t act as if he—” She reddened. Her voice wadded up in her throat. “Intimacy, I mean.”
Josephine looked startled, and her face had colored now too. She made as if to get up, then thought better of it. “Katherine,” she said finally, in the tone of voice she might have used to scold the servants, “there are things one just doesn’t discuss—or one isn’t comfortable discussing.”
“But I need to discuss them, Mother,” Katherine said, and all the pain and confusion of the past weeks stabbed at her, goading her on, “because Stanley isn’t my husband, not, not the way I thought he would be, the way everyone ...” She trailed off.
“Not your husband?” Josephine had put a hand to her mouth, and she shot a quick glance round the room. “What are you talking about?”
Katherine was miserable, she was abject, she was a little girl all over again, and all her scientific training, all her understanding of what men thought and knew about the systems of life and reproduction availed her nothing: her mother knew what she didn’t. “He won’t ... perform.”
It took Josephine a moment. She sat there rigid in the chair while the Mediterranean moved luxuriously beyond the windows, and she had the look of a torture victim, a woman whose nails were being prised from the flesh, one after the other. “Get him out of doors,” she said finally. “Fresh air. Meat. That sort of thing.” Another pause. “Why not take him skiing?”
The place Katherine chose was St. Moritz, in the Rhaetian Alps, not far from the Italian border. They booked rooms at the Grand Engadiner Hotel Klum, an immense and charming old place with snow-sculpted roofs, great roaring fireplaces and a Viennese quartet playing at dinner and tea. In the mornings they went for long walks through the snow-bound village, all the houses and shops decorated for Christmas, the air fragrant with woodsmoke and the smell of roasting chestnuts, and after a leisurely lunch they took to the slopes. Katherine was an accomplished skier, but Stanley was nothing short of magnificent. Graceful and adept, he moved across the unblemished hills like a line drawn across a blank page, tackling even the most daunting trails with a confidence and elan that bordered on recklessness. She’d neve
r seen him so exuberant. Or physical.
By the end of the first week he was a new person altogether, utterly reborn, and Katherine kicked herself for not having gotten him away sooner. He laughed at the slightest pretext—an open, cheerful sort of laughter and not the startled hyena’s cry that seemed to burst out of his mouth when his mother was around. He grew reminiscent over dinner. He was soft-spoken and confidential. He anticipated his wife’s every need. This was what Katherine had been waiting for, the slow sweet unfolding of the days, each one opening on the next like a vase of budding roses ... and yet still the nights remained problematical. And chaste. Maddeningly, insufferably, heartrendingly chaste.
But what to do? She had plenty of time to turn it over in her mind—a surfeit of time, nothing but time—lying awake at all hours, sitting over breakfast, lunch and dinner with her grinning husband, schussing down the slopes while he cavorted round her, launching himself dizzily over every hummock and mogul as if his legs were coiled springs, the silence of the mountains absolute, the sky a vast empty ache. Her muscles firmed. Her appetite grew. She felt vigorous and young and so wrought up with frustrated desire she couldn’t have slept if she’d wanted to.
The solution came to her one afternoon just before Christmas—the day before, in fact—and it was so clear and self-evident she almost gasped aloud. They were skiing the runs at Pontresina at the time, high above the village, out of sight of their guide, the peaks rising up around them like the white walls of the earth, and she’d broken the heel binding of her left ski and Stanley had knelt before her in the snow to repair it. Even through the integument of his gloves and the insensible thickness of her boots, she could feel his touch. That was what set her off, that touch, that lingering humble subservient gesture of love, her husband there at her foot, and in that instant she knew what she had to do: she had to take charge.
It was so obvious it was ridiculous. Though it violated every notion of the woman’s role—the pure vessel, the passive partner, sex an onus—she had to take charge, seize the initiative, go where no wife had gone before her. Stanley was a special case, and no one would know what happened between them in the privacy of their bedroom—and there was no shame in that, none at all. She was determined. She would come to him in the night—that very night—and use her hands, her mouth, any means necessary to excite him to his duty. Of course. Of course she would. It was either that or die a virgin.
They dined that night in a restaurant not far from the hotel. Katherine had made herself up, a red-and-green bow in her hair, a new dress, the tourmaline bracelet Stanley had given her sparkling on her wrist. She encouraged him to drink—a Grignolino that smelled potently of the earth—and she drank two glasses herself, for courage. When they got back to their rooms, she submitted to his stiff nightly kiss and then told him she was worn out from skiing and thought she’d retire early—If he had no objections. “Oh, well, yes—sure,” he said, jerking each word out as if it was fastened to his teeth, his eyes running up and down the wall behind her. “Well,” he said again. “So. Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night.”
She waited till the light had gone out in his room—the very moment; she didn’t want him drifting off—and then she padded across the floor, perfumed and naked, and she could have been anybody, any wanton, any whore, and tried his door. It was unlatched. And she pushed it in with the breath caught in her throat and every nerve strung taut. “Who is it?” he said, and she could see the dark form of him sitting up in bed in the cool blue light the snow threw at the windows.
“Hush,” she whispered, “it’s just me. Katherine. Your wife.”
“What are you—?” he began, but then she was on the bed, naked in the frigid light, the springs jostling, the mattress giving, naked and on all fours, the chill sweeping over her breasts and her navel and groin till she was all gooseflesh.
“Don’t talk,” she said, “don’t say a word,” and she found his face and his lips and she kissed him, a wet kiss , a true kiss, the heat of their bodies conjoined, she poised there atop the covers and Stanley forced back into the headboard and no place for him to go. He fought away from her mouth and came up sputtering like a diver, his nightcap knocked askew, the blue light in the window as solid and tangible as a block of ice. “I’m not,” he said, “I—I—I—”
“Shhhh,” she hushed him again, and in the next moment she was beneath the covers with him, her toes seeking his, her breasts tender against the fabric of his nightshirt, her head cradled under his arm, and she just held him for a long while, an eternity, till she felt him relax—or begin to. She kept kissing him, kissing the side of his face, his throat, his fingers, and then, after another eternity, she worked an expeditionary hand up under his nightshirt till she found what she wanted.
His penis was limp. Or not limp, exactly, but by no means was it stiff either. It was the first penis she’d ever held in her hand and she was amazed at how small it was, at how she could cradle the full length of it in her palm, but she knew enough to rub it, stimulate it, make it swell, and all the while she was kissing his throat and breathing hot endearments into the collar of his nightshirt. At first he stiffened—in every place but one—and tried to move away from her touch, but after a time (five minutes? ten?) she began to feel something, a definite movement, a twitching, a palpable thickening. Encouraged, she brought her other hand into play, rubbing furiously now, rubbing Stanley’s awakening member between both palms with all the intensity of a red Indian rubbing two sticks together to produce fire.
And she did produce fire—of a sort. He was erect now—or nearly erect; she was no expert—and she lifted his nightshirt and rolled atop him, rubbing now not with her hands but with her own groin, and the sensation was intoxicating, like nothing she’d ever known, except maybe for Lisette and her precocious forefinger, and “Stanley,” she whispered, “Stanley, I’m ready. Make a baby for me, Stanley, make a baby. ”
But he didn’t make a baby. Didn’t even try. As soon as she spoke he shrank away to nothing, less than nothing, the softest, smallest, most irritating little thing in the world, all coiled up in its nest, and when she reached for him again he pushed her away—and with more force than was necessary.
There was a shock of cold air, a great flapping of the covers, and suddenly he was standing over her in the glacial light of the room, and she could just make out his face, the lips curled in a snarl, the wild glint of his eyes. He was trembling. “You whore!” he shouted. “You dirty whore! ”
3.
ON SHAKY GROUND
Dr. Kempf’s time began in 1926, but the need for him—for direct action, for hope, for change—had been a long time coming, as O‘Kane would have been the first to admit. And it wasn’t just that everything fell to shit and ruin under Brush and the new estate manager (a grubbing incompetent multiple-chinned little fraud of a man by the name of Hull), it was Mr. McCormick himself. Very gradually, day by day, in a way you might not even notice, he began to withdraw into himself again, as if he were slipping back into the catatonia of the early days, and O’Kane was afraid they’d have to break out the sheet restraints and the feeding tube all over again. Mr. McCormick was torpid and morose, barely articulate, and there were days at a stretch when he didn’t want to get out of his pajamas—even the prospect of a drive in the country didn’t seem to get much of a rise out of him. And of course it was always unpleasant to have to force him to undress and get into the shower bath, much less try to get him to put his feet into the legs of his trousers if he was fundamentally opposed to it.
O‘Kane was no psychiatrist (even if he did have more experience in the field than half the headshrinkers running around the country with their dabbed-on beards and Krautish theories), but he was finely attuned to Mr. McCormick’s moods and he was worried. As far as he could see—and he’d discussed it with Mart time and again—Mr. McCormick’s present decline was traceable to a series of traumatic events over the course of the past few years, the first and most devastating of which wa
s the loss of his mother. That was in 1922 or ’23, and it was followed by his brother Harold’s divorce and remarriage and the hullaballoo the papers made over it, which to Mr. McCormick’s mind was a shame and a blot on the whole family and the Harvester Company too. Then came the news that Dr. Brush finally had to commit his wife because she was parading naked through the streets and setting trashcans afire; this seemed to disturb Mr. McCormick on all sorts of counts, from his sheer horror at the notion of aggressive female nudity to the sad contemplation and reevaluation of his own hopes for cure and release into the world of men and women. And finally, just when it seemed as if he were coming out of it, making his little jokes and eating his meals calmly and nicely, there was the earthquake that knocked down half the city of Santa Barbara and gave Riven Rock such a rattling that all the windows broke out, the piano wound up on its back in the middle of the music room and the garage fell away into a random-looking heap of stones with a dozen cars crushed like salmon tins in the middle of it. Any man would have been hard-pressed to remain cheerful and forward-looking in the midst of all that, but for a man in Mr. McCormick’s state of mind it was like putting up walls on top of walls.
Indeed, when the old lady died, O‘Kane braced himself for a major outburst at least equal to the business with Dr. Hoch and the gopher, but if Mr. McCormick was anything, he was unpredictable. He barely blinked, and officially, for Dr. Brush’s records, he said all of seven words. He was playing a game of solitaire when O’Kane broke the news to him. (Brush had thought it would be best that way, for the main and simple reason that Mr. McCormick was more comfortable around his head nurse, who had, after all, known him longer, and the news was bound to be traumatic, for the main and simple reason that Mr. McCormick was so pathologically attached to his mother, though of course he hadn’t actually seen her since nineteen-ought-seven, and he was very likely to give vent to his grief in a volatile way and to resent the bringer of the news, which for obvious reasons shouldn’t if at all possible be his attending psychiatrist for the main and simple reason of the risk of alienation.)
