I have these perfectly controlled conversations with Arthur Baron about Andy Kagle and with Andy Kagle about Arthur Baron, and I find myself wondering even while they are taking place, just what the fuck I am doing in them. (Is that really me there talking and listening?) I'll float away outside them a few yards to watch and eavesdrop and begin to feel I am looking down upon a pornographic puppet show of stuffed dolls in which someone I recognize who vaguely resembles me is one of the performers, and I have no more idea of why I am taking part in them, even as this separated spectator, than I do of these weird melancholies, tensions, and arid impressions of desolation that come upon me when they choose in my spare time.
"I have nothing to do," I whimper also in my spare time.
I have too much spare time. The same thing often happens with sex. I like to try to move outside our bodies and watch me. I go blind. I allow myself to be obliterated and am resurrected so slowly it takes a while to remember who I think I am and resume the role effectively. (It's all so silly it can't really be me.) I used to be able to watch me all the way through. That was nice too. Am I demented already, in what I genuinely feel to be the prime of my life? Or maybe I am that somebody else Ben Zack keeps declaring I am.
I feel strange.
"You look strange," my wife says, trying guardedly to draw me out.
"No, I'm not."
"Funny."
"You are."
"You've got that funny look on your face I can never figure out."
"Why aren't you laughing?"
"You look depressed."
"I'm not."
"Is anything wrong?"
"No."
"I'd love to know what you're really thinking," she hazards with a frowning smile.
No, you wouldn't.
(I'm thinking of death and divorce.)
Today at lunchtime a man fell dead in the lobby of my office building as he was coming toward me. He was a large, portly, elderly man with woolly white hair and a gray pinstripe suit, and he was carrying a slim, black umbrella in one hand and a brown attachй case in the other. He was a majestic, attractive figure who looked great enough to be president of General Motors until his face hit the floor. He was too old to be me.
I don't think I feel different now than I've ever felt. She's the one who seems to be changing: she fidgets more noticeably when I'm silent and she thinks I am angry or dissatisfied. (Am I silent more often? She is afraid of me.) She is rattled when I'm feeling too good. (She thinks I harbor secrets. I do.) I'm glad I've got golf to turn away to now. I want a hole in one someday so I can talk about it forever. I don't want to go to movies or plays, and my wife concludes I don't love her anymore. I don't even want to go to parties. We see the same people. I wish I had an interesting friend. My wife is bored too. My wife likes variety and movement and would prefer to mix around her different kinds of boredom. I'm content with the boredom I have. (If I kill my wife, who will take care of the children? If I kill my children, my wife can take care of herself. A prudent family man must plan ahead toward possibilities like that in order to provide for his loved ones.) I almost wish my wife would go ahead and commit adultery already so I can get my divorce.
(I'm not sure I can do it without her.)
My wife is at that stage now where she probably should commit adultery — and would, if she had more character. It might do her much good. I remember the first time I committed adultery. (It wasn't much good.)
"Now I am committing adultery," I thought.
It was not much different from the first time I laid my wife after we were married:
"Now I am laying my wife," I thought.
It would mean much more to her (I think), for I went into my marriage knowing I would commit adultery the earliest chance I had (it was a goal; committing adultery, in fact, was one of the reasons for getting married), while she did not (and probably has not really thought of it yet. It may be that I do all the thinking about it for her). I did not even give up banging the other girl I'd been sleeping with fairly regularly until some months afterward. I hit four or five other girls up at least once those first two years also just to see for myself that I really could.
I think I might really feel like killing my wife, though, if she did it with someone I know in the company. My wife has red lines around her waist and chest when she takes her clothes off and baggy pouches around the sides and bottom of her behind, and I would not want anyone I deal with in the company to find that out. (I would want them to see her only at her best. Without those red marks.)
My wife is not as wanton and debauched as most of the young girls and women we're apt to find ourselves with today (and I would not want any of the men I work with to know that about her, either. I don't want anyone I know in the company to be able to blab to anyone else I know that my wife has red marks on her body and just might not be the most versatile piece of ass in the world), although I like that about her — I would not want her the other way — and repay her virtue and restraint with frequent overflows of affection and esteem and frequent acts of kindness. (I'll take her to church.)
Sober, my wife is a lady (and makes me proud). Especially when we entertain. She does that beautifully. (We had Arthur Baron and his wife to dinner once last year and she was superb. Everyone there had a good time.) We do not entertain as much anymore because of Derek. (He produces strain. We have to pretend he doesn't.) I used to like him when I still thought he was normal. I was fond of him and had fun. I joked with him. I used to call him Dirk, and Kiddo, Steamshovel, Dinky Boy, and Dicky Dare. Till I found out what he was. Now it's always formal: Derek. (You prick.)
(Why won't you leave us alone?)
My wife is happiest of all when I'm simply relaxed and kind, and responds to my acts of consideration with lively gratitude and astonished gaiety. It is so easy to make my wife happy it's really a crime we don't do it more often. (She's even prettier when she's feeling good, her face lights up. She doesn't hide it.) I try. When I can. (It isn't always easy to want to.) I'll make the children come along with us to church when I go, and we'll generally have a joyful time. (It isn't always easy to want to be kind and make her happy when I'm thinking of death, murder, adultery, and divorce.)
I feel tense, poor, bleak, listless, depressed (and she calls that strange). I have jagged, wracking inner conflicts filing, slicing, hacking, and sawing away inside me mercilessly like instruments of bone, stone, glass, or rusty, blunted iron butchering their own irreducible muscular mass, and so does she (but won't acknowledge it) almost everywhere we go now but church, which is one reason she might be so eager to go. (The world just doesn't work. It's an idea whose time has gone.)
My wife is a cheerful Congregationalist now (when she isn't getting drunk and crude at parties or humping me on floors or against the butcher-block table in the kitchen or outside at night on our redwood patio furniture). My wife is a devout and cheerful Congregationalist now because the building is airy and the people friendlier than the Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians she has gotten to know since we moved from the city to Connecticut.
"Episcopalians," she has told me, "are the ones who go shush in movies."
And I laughed.
(My wife can often make me laugh.) She will bake for cake sales. She will even stop drinking in the day-time well in advance of church socials, and she will grow more reserved in bed. (I can almost always tell when some spectacular social gala is in the offing at church by the waning initiative in her sex drive.)
I am a registered Republican (who nearly always votes Democratic sneakily) and believe I am nearer to God than she.
"The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want," says the new minister, who has been with us just about a year and seems to want a good deal more than he has in the way of social contact and community influence. (He strikes me as a man with his eye out for a better job in a growth industry.)
No registered Republican would go quite that far. We'll let the Lord be our shepherd readily enough, but
there's plenty we'll want, no matter how much we've already got. Otherwise we'll fire Him, retire Him, or ease Him aside.
I'll let my wife drive us to church some Sundays when I'm feeling especially benign and charitable (the children exchange cryptic, supercilious signals during the service but do so inconspicuously, because they do not want to embarrass my wife) and then, often, feel like breaking her neck afterward for making me go and ruining my whole day. (I could have slept late, or phoned around for golf invitations. After all, how many years' worth of Sundays do I have left? Thirty? Two?)
"That new minister of yours," I might announce sonorously on the way back, pausing to make certain the two children in the rear of the open convertible are brought in as accomplices, "gives me a sharp pain in the ass."
The children crane forward delightedly.
My wife purses her lips with a sidelong smile and decides to pretend to whistle. It will take more than a little routine baiting this fine sunny morning to crinkle the state of euphoria she's in as a result of having shown up in church with her husband and children. At moments like this, we are suddenly very close. (They don't last.) My wife even had the hope not long ago of walking unashamedly into church one day with Derek too. I killed that one quick.
"What say, Dad?" inquires my daughter, to help things along, when she sees my wife intends to remain silent.
"I really don't think," chastises my wife amiably, going along with the game against us in a manner of placid contemplation, "you ought to say things like that in front of the children."
"Like what?" I am all contrived innocence.
"If you don't know."
"Minister?"
"No."
"What then?"
"You know."
"I've no idea."
"What?" demands my boy, bouncing on his haunches in anticipation as the three of us close in on her.
"Donkey," exclaims my wife in triumph, evading his snare nimbly.
"No fair. He didn't say donkey."
"I know, dear."
"He said ass," says my daughter.
"I know, darling. And I think he's depraved."
"And I'm inclined to agree," I second immediately. "And his English is terrible. And I don't think it's healthy to bring the children to church to listen to a depraved minister."
"I'm not talking about him!"
"His vocabulary's pretentious and his syntax is frequently wrong."
"I'm talking about you. I'm not talking about his language. I'm talking about yours."
"Well, it is."
"And yours?"
"All right," I yield, with a gesture of liberal acquiescence. "I'll change the subject. What do you think of the rectum as a whole?"
"That's even worse!"
"I don't get it."
"Don't you get it?"
"Now I get it."
"Pretty shitty, huh?"
"I thought we agreed," says my wife, with an exaggerated politeness that sometimes gets my goat, "to try not to disagree anymore in front of the children."
"A-men," says my daughter sarcastically, and claps her hands.
"That's the kind of remark," I reply good-naturedly, because I really do not want to upset her, "that can only lead to a disagreement. But, I surrender. I yield. That new minister of yours doesn't give me a pain in the ass."
The children explode with laughter.
"You show me one doctor," says my wife, when she can be heard, "who'll say it's healthy to use such language in front of your own son and daughter."
"Name one we've seen who'd say it isn't."
"I thought you agreed," interjects my daughter cynically, "not to fight in front of us anymore."
"We aren't fighting," my wife responds automatically.
"I know," scoffs my daughter. "You were discussing."
"With emphasis," adds my son in friendly mockery.
All of us smile but my wife, who nibbles on her lip in distracted gloom. She is extremely uneasy.
"What's wrong?" I inquire softly.
She is silent a moment, seems burdened with a knowledge almost too enormous to express. "He's coming to the house," she blurts out sheepishly.
"Who?"
"Him."
"When?"
On the part of the rest of us, there is massive shock.
"Today."
"Today?"
"I invited him for lunch."
"You're crazy!"
"I'm getting out!"
"I don't want him."
"And I," announces my wife in an expansive bellow of glowing self-congratulation, turning pointedly to gloat at each of us, "was making that up! Do you think," she continues in her rare flight of exultation, "I would expose a respectable man of the cloth to a gang of idiots like you?"
"Oh, Mom!" My daughter flings her arm around my wife's neck and hugs her from behind. "Mom, Mom, Mom. I just love her when she kids hike that. Don't you?"
"And so do I."
But it doesn't last, not on a Saturday, Sunday, or holiday, unless all of us have already made plans, for Derek is waiting at home.
He is still there. He grows older every day.
"Can't she take him out some place?" my daughter objects. "He's always home."
And so is his quacking, ill-visaged, overweight nurse with her rinsed white hair and offensive scent of bath powder, whom I've ordered my wife to get rid of once and for all, even if we have to take care of him ourselves for a little while. (It might do us some good.) And the maid can go too, for all I care. (I can't feel at home when she's tiptoeing around.)
"Get a German, for Christ sakes," I barked at my wife. "Import a Dane."
"Where will I get them?"
"How the hell should I know? Other people do."
"I get embarrassed when my friends come over."
(So do we.)
"There's no need to," I tell my daughter gently.
"I knew you'd say that," she sulks in disapproval. "I knew you wouldn't understand."
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself for saying anything like that," my wife says to her in reproof.
"Leave her alone."
"She ought to be glad she's not that way."
"She is."
"You always take her part," my wife accuses. "The doctors said you shouldn't do that."
"She thinks I take yours."
"Why does she always have to bring him in?" my daughter protests. "Can't she keep him in his own room when my friends are here?"
(We wish she would keep him out of sight also when our friends are here and have told her so. She parades him through anyway, gabbling loudly at him and pointing to our guests to show him off, or to inflict a penance on us.)
"You shouldn't mind it that much," I counsel.
"You do too."
"He isn't that bad."
"He makes us uncomfortable."
(He makes me uncomfortable too.)
"You shouldn't be," I tell her. "It wasn't the fault of any of us. It could have happened in any family."
But it happened in mine.
"We have another child also," I have been forced to reveal time and time again in ordinary social conversation to people I barely knew, "who's somewhat brain damaged. It was congenital," I add. "He's retarded."
"We also have a child who's retarded or very seriously emotionally disturbed," couples who knew about us have sought me out to reveal (as though we had something I wanted to share).
It's a club I don't want to join, and I find those clannish parents repellent. (Their suggestive intimacy makes my flesh creep and I want to shake them away from me as I would flies. I detest clannishness of every kind. It boxes me in claustrophobically. Or shuts me out. I don't like to feel boxed in.)
I saw it happening to Derek long before anyone else did (boxing me in) and said nothing about it to anyone. (Later, when others began to notice things and make hesitant, fearful observations, I denied them with emphasis. I didn't want it to be true. I had nightmarish warnings. I saw the realit
ies assembling themselves ahead of me in mapped-out phases. I still do. I felt if no one talked about it, it would not be true. I was wrong.) He sat late, stood late, walked late, ran late. Even to a father's doting eye, his coordination was poor. We thought him clumsy and cute as a newborn puppy or foal as he staggered, stumbled, and fell. There is not harmony in his movements now. He makes no effort to open his jaws wide when he tries to speak — he does not seem to associate mouth with speech. He looks like lockjaw when he tries to talk. (Tendons stretch and bulge and I wish he'd stop.) He can open his mouth wide enough, though, when he eats or laughs or just wants to make noise. Though what he's got to laugh about I don't know, except when I offer him things in play and snatch them back, and then he's just as apt to cry.
(You can't even play normal infant's games with him anymore. I feel worthless when I try to play with him and he cries. I slink away in rejection. I am furious with myself and with him. The least he can do, it seems to me, is be decent enough to laugh when I try to play with him.)
"Is having Derek for a brother," my daughter wants to know, in a manner that is somewhat demanding and somewhat abject, "going to make it harder for me to find a husband?"
"No, of course not," we lie.
"Why should it?" my wife flashes at her belligerently. She is shocked and outraged by the directness of the question. (And now it is I who must shield my little girl against her.)
"Leave her alone," I request softly.
My daughter turns to me for the truth. "Is it?"
"Are you thinking of getting married?" I gamble in a pleasant rejoinder.
"See how he tries not to answer me?"
"You should be ashamed of yourself," my wife says to her, "for even thinking like that."
"Leave her alone," I repeat.
"Will people think my own children will turn out the same way?" my daughter persists.
My wife gasps. "That's a terrible thing to say!" she rebukes her with emotion. "He's your own brother."
"That's why I worry about it. Can't I ask?"
"Leave her alone, for Christ sakes," I shout, and whirl upon my wife to glare at her. "I worry about the same thing."
"She's the one who should be ashamed."
"And you worry about it too. For Christ sakes, stop blaming her for him."
Something Happened Page 50
