She would have lapped me up, turned me topsyturvy (as Penny can do), spilled me head over heels into a sea of winy, rippling vibrations, whirled me backwards quivering into a hailstorm of palpitating infancy and insanity, sent me scrambling up the walls with sensation and rocketing through the ceiling like a surface-to-heaven missile with the flaming tip of her crimson, naughty tongue. I would have begged for mercy as soon as I recollected who I was and found myself able to speak again. (I do that with Penny now. I do it with my wife.) And she would have looked lovingly at me with sated sweetness afterward, resting on her knees between my own, satisfied herself by how beautifully she had done, how prodigiously she had pleased me. I'd like that now.
"Isn't he jealous?" I had to ask. "He can see us right now."
"He wants to leave his wife and marry me. We go to empty restaurants and have drinks and dinner. He likes the way I kiss."
"So do I."
"So do I. It took a lot of practice for me to get it just right. You should try me when I'm all naked and really feel in the mood. I don't know what you're waiting for."
I lowered an accident folder over my groin (in case another one took place). "Come outside."
"I see, said the blind man. Something's happening."
"Is this case yours?" I inquired boldly. "I bet I know the cure."
"Meet me?"
"Did you ever go to bed with a stiff problem and wake up with the solution in your hands?"
"You made it hard for me but I can't hold it against you."
"Go first. I'll meet you."
"I'm coming, Virginia."
"Do it to me like he does to Marie," she sang back softly, as I moved past her out into the hallway.
I was Captain Blood the pirate on that staircase, a dauntless freebooter. I bore the accident folders before me prudently like a gallant shield. (I had something to hide.) I was carrying hot pellets.
I always yearned to take it out and ask her to hold it a little while. I didn't dare. Mrs. Yerger was in charge before I was able to, and I quit soon after. I practiced the words but couldn't say them; interchangeable first ones jammed in my larynx and pharynx; there was a multitude of syllables with which I might have begun:
"Will —»
"Take —»
"Would —»
"How about —»
"Don't be —»
"I —»
"Please."
I could not speak any of them. I did not know what pose to adopt. (I had no choice.) Now I know it would not have mattered. (She either would or wouldn't. The thing to have done was to whip it right out, mumbling anything. Please would have done fine.) How I wanted her to. It would have been laden with need almost beyond endurance, swollen to bursting with tenderness, gone lunging off rabidly like an epileptic relative I would soon attempt unsuccessfully to repudiate, self-centered, an embarrassment, a connection of some distance I might have to mutter an apology for. I don't get that hot anymore. Apathy, boredom, restlessness, free-floating, amorphous frustration, leisure, discontent at home or at my job — these are my aphrodisiacs now. I never got that far. It ended before I learned how. "All that's required is one or two years of specialized training," say the military recruiting posters. I got that specialized training in the armed forces. I came out of the army a handsome captain, and Virginia was dead. I was glad. (I was surprised I was glad, but that's what I was.) I tried to make a date with her from a telephone booth in Grand Central Station and failed. It's hard to succeed that way with someone who's dead. I liked hearing her tell me about sex. (It was like watching a dirty movie.) It was hard picturing someone as gentle, moderate, and considerate as Len Lewis being incited by her in a restaurant, movie, or automobile.
"I make him," she boasted. "I lead him on slowly. I know how."
"How?"
Her father had killed himself too. "We never knew why. We had lots of money. He was a quiet man. Like Mr. Lewis."
"What does he do to you?"
"Whatever I ask him to. Or show him. He isn't sure how far he can go with me yet. He can't believe it," she praised herself with a grin. "He's very sweet. I like to make him happy. He's easy. You're easy too."
"I'm hard."
"Easy."
"See?"
"I see, said the blind man."
"You're making things very hard for me."
"Should I meet you?"
"Hurry up."
"I can only stay a second."
"Hurry up."
Her face wreathed in pink, blissful smiles of contentment whenever she saw me get an erection. (I think I got more hard-ons from her in my twelve months at that automobile casualty insurance company than I've had in the twenty or thirty years since.) I wish I had her smooth, round cheeks in my hands right now. I would stroke them languidly with pinky and thumb, stimulating her slowly, instead of grabbing and racing. (I know how to do that now.) It would be I who picked the mood and did the delectable tantalizing.
"Cover up," she'd say.
"Come outside," I'd beg.
"You won't have time," she'd laugh. "Better shoot to the men's room."
"Meet me there."
"I've got no key."
"I'll sneak you in."
"I've never done it in a men's room."
"You did it in a canoe once at Duke University."
"I did it in a men's dormitory once also at Duke University. With five football players. They made me. I was expelled. The one I liked so much brought me there. They sent me home. I was afraid to go. I never found out if they told my father."
"Did they rape you? Is that what happened?"
"No. They didn't have to. I didn't want to. But they made me. They just held me down and kept talking. I knew them all. But it was fun once we started and I stopped worrying about it. I would have told the other girls. I think I hoped we'd get caught. I think I'd like to do something like that again sometime soon. It's exciting."
"It's exciting me right now."
"I see, said the blind man."
"Come outside."
"For a minute."
"On the staircase?"
Sometimes she'd give me about three and one third seconds.
"Someone's coming!" she'd hiss with vehemence, and tear herself away. "Let me go."
I should have guessed from her educational curriculum at Duke that she was a little bit nuts and would probably kill herself sooner or later. I am able to spot propensities like that in people now (and I keep my distance). A friend in need is no friend of mine.
I envied and abominated those five football players at Duke. They thought so little of her. They treated her like crap. And she did not mind. There were days I found myself detesting her on my long, drab subway rides back and forth. There were mornings I would not talk to her and could not force myself to look at her, she seemed so foul. (I was betrayed. She was trash, that fatal kind of trash that can make you want to die. I'm glad I didn't die. I'm glad I outlived her.) I felt — and knew I felt correctly — that she still would have preferred them to me.
I am gifted with insights like that and able to prophesy with conviction in certain morbid areas. I know already, for example, that my wife (as she foresees also) will probably die expensively of cancer (she'll need a private room, of course, and private nurse) if she doesn't outlive me and we do not divorce because of drunkenness or adultery (hers, of course). If we're apart, or if I'm already dead, who cares what she dies of? (I'll probably miss my boy every now and then for a little while if I do move out for a divorce. I like it so much when he smiles. I'll have to leave so many things behind. My golf clubs. How can I rationally make time and room for my golf clubs and new golf shoes when I am breaking away from home and family in an irrational rage?) Will I be happy when my wife is dying of cancer? No. Will I be sorry for her? Probably. (Will I be sorry for myself? Definitely.) Will I still be sorry for her after she's gone? Probably not.
I am especially good on suicides and breakdowns. I can see them coming years in advance. Ka
gle is close to his breakdown now; his God won't save him, but maybe his boozing and whores will (supplemented by fortifying compounds of vitamin B-12 and self-pity mixed with self-righteous claims of mistreatment. If nothing else, everybody will agree he has been a nice guy). Kagle won't kill himself; he'll enjoy his wronged status too much for anything like suicide (he'll enjoy smiling gamely, forgiving generously). I'll have to get rid of him. I try to help him now. He grins incorrigibly (and I want to kick him in his leg). I know something he doesn't know, while Green, Brown, Black, and others watch mistrustfully and theorize (I feel. I know I don't feel honest with them). I want Arthur Baron to note my efforts to aid Kagle. Kagle's job will be given to me; it's all but inevitable now. Kagle welcomes my criticism (and ignores it. It's the attention he welcomes. If I threw spitballs at him he'd be just as grateful). He thinks I am a doting parent fussing over an appealing child. It does not cross his mind that I am a zealous heir grown impatient to supplant him. (I'd like to spit in his face. Won't he be surprised?) Martha, the typist in our department, will go crazy eventually (probably in my presence. I'll get rid of her deftly and be the talk of the floor for a few days), and I won't lay Jane, although I'll continue to flirt with her (fluctuate and vacillate, hesitate and saturate) and ferry the prurient interest she stimulates in me home (like melting ice cream or cooling Chinese food) to my wife in Connecticut or uptown to old girl friend Penelope, my weathering, reliable Penny, who still studies music, singing, and dance diligently (while working as a cocktail waitress in one place or another) and still likes me better than any of the younger men she successively falls in love with for a few months three or four times a year. (She should like me better. I am better. They're jerks.) My wife loves doing it with me in Red Parker's apartment in the city, and I like doing it there with her too. It's different than at home. We go at each other full force. I have grim premonitions now for Penny, who traveled through her thirtieth birthday still unmarried (with much deeper emotional changes than she seems to recognize) and is not as jolly as she used to be. I've known and liked her now for nearly ten years. I don't know what will become of my daughter. I make no firm predictions for teen-age girls today. (The boys, I know, will all fail. They've failed already. I don't think they were given a fair chance.) She'll want to take driving lessons even before she reaches sixteen. Then she'll want a car. She'll have duplicate keys made and steal one of ours. I wish she were grown up and married already and lived in Arizona, Cape Kennedy, or Seattle, Washington. Someone older will advise her to steal our car keys and have an extra set made. She steals money now from my wife and me to chip in with friends for beer, wine, and drugs on weekends. I don't think she uses the drugs. I think she's afraid and I'm glad. I'm glad they seem to be going out of fashion in our community, along with spade boyfriends. I'm glad she's afraid of Blacks too.
"If you'd give me my own car, I wouldn't have to steal it," she'll argue when we catch her, and believe she's right.
I'm in the dark:
(My lucid visions bleed together.)
Something terribly tragic is going to happen to my little boy (because I don't want it to) and nothing at all will happen to Derek. Police and ambulances will never come for him. I see no future for my boy (the veil won't lift, I don't get a glimmer, I see no future for him at all) and this is always a heart-stopping omen. When I look ahead, he isn't there. I can picture him easily the way he is today, perhaps tomorrow, but not much further. He is never older, never at work or study as a doctor, writer, or businessman, never married (the poor kid never even goes with a girl), never in college or even in high school; he is never even an adolescent with a changing voice, erupting skin, and sprouts of sweating hair discoloring his upper lip and jaws. I mourn for him (my spirit weeps. Where does he go?). He doesn't pass nine. He stops here. (This is where he must get off. Every day may be his last.) Either he has no future or my ability to imagine him present in mine is blunted. I view the empty space ahead without him dolorously. Silence hangs heavily. I miss him. I smell flowers. There are family dinners, and he is not present. What will I have to look forward to if I can't look forward to him? Golf. My wife's cancer? A hole in one. And after that? Another hole in one.
"I made a hole in one," I can repeat endlessly to people for years to come.
When obscurity and old age descend upon me like thickest night and shrivel me further into something small and unnoticeable, I can always remember:
"I made a hole in one."
On my deathbed in my nursing home, when visitors I don't recognize arrive to pay their respects with gifts of very sweet candy and aromatic slices of smoked, oily fish, I may still have it in my power to recall I made a hole in one when I was in my prime — I'm in my prime now and I haven't made one yet. It's something new to start working toward — and it may cause me to smile. A hole in one is a very good thing to have.
"Will you believe it?" I can say. "I once made a hole in one."
"Have another piece of smoked fish."
"A hole in one."
I don't know what else one can do with a hole in one except talk about it.
"I made a hole in one."
"Eat your fish."
"Hello, girls."
"Did you ever hear the one about the amputee without arms and legs outside the whorehouse door?"
"I rang the bell, didn't I?"
I can picture such scenes of myself in a nursing home easily enough. I can picture Derek out front easily too, slobbering, a thickset, clumsy, balding, dark-haired retarded adult male with an incriminating resemblance to a secret me I know I have inside me and want nobody else ever to discover, an inner visage. (I think I sometimes see him in my dreams.) I bet Arthur Baron doesn't suspect he's there (that I have the potential for turning myself inside out into a barbarous idiot) or that I am stricken chronically with a horror — a horror so acute it's almost an exquisite appetite — of stuttering (or experiencing a homosexual want. Perhaps I already have) or having my tongue swell and stick to the roof of my mouth and be unable to talk at all. (No wonder I am terrified of being condemned behind closed doors, without my even knowing sentence has been passed. Perhaps it's already happened.) But not one day more of life can this fertile imagination of mine provide for my poor little boy.
(What work will he do? What clothes will he wear? Oh, God, I don't want to have to live without him.)
And Kagle's job will be proffered to me and I will accept it. By now, I want it. (By now, I no longer misrepresent to myself that I don't.) Kagle is an enemy: he is blocking my path, and I want him out of my way. I hate him. The need to kick him grows stronger every day, to yawp with contempt right in his hollowing, astounded face. (It would turn to a human skull. I would steam the flesh away in a second.) I'll never be able to do that. Civilization won't allow me to. But I might kick him in the leg if the temptation persists and my self-control flags. I will kick him before I can stop myself. I will be at an utter loss afterward to explain. I might want to die of embarrassment (and I'll feel like a caught little boy).
"Why did you do it?" people will demand.
I'll have to shrug and hang my head. I'll weigh eighty-four pounds.
"He kicked me in the leg," Kagle will protest to everybody.
"He kicked Kagle's leg."
"Did you see that?"
"He kicked Kagle in the leg."
There's nobody else whose leg I want to kick except my daughter's ankle at the dinner table at times when it would be easier for me to do that than reach out to smack her in the face. She flinches as though I already have as soon as I feel I want to and raise my voice. My wife makes me want to hurl her back a foot or two to give me room to cock my arm and punch her in the jaw at least twice with my fist. I shake my finger at my boy. Derek I smother with a huge hand over his mouth to stifle his inarticulate noises and hide his driveling eyes, nose, and mouth. (It is not to put him out of his misery that I do it; it is to put me out of mine.) He's a poor, pathetic, handicapped little human being, but I mus
t not think about him as much as I could if I let myself, and I hate his nurse, whom I propel over the threshold — throw her out of my house — bracing her below with one arm to prevent her from falling to the ground and suing me. She falls anyway and sues me. The repulsive woman exudes an unpleasant odor of rancid grease mixed with dust and perfumed bath powder. She bathes mornings and evenings. Her hair is ghastly white. Her cleanliness is reproachful. I can't bear her intrusive familiarity. She treats me with no more solicitude than I get from my family, and she's a salaried employee.
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