Other Men's Daughters

by Richard Stern

  “’Cause we’re not genitally fixated. I heard a whore on Dick Cavett say she reserved a place between her shoulders for her real lover.”

  “A woman?”

  “What’s that matter, creep?”

  “‘O indiscreet little breast, can you now allow us to hover over you, calling up visions of pulpy fruit, rosy dawns, snowy landscapes?’ Who’s fixated?” He opens the quilt, he loves the look of her, the boy waist, short full breasts, the centime navel. Small scream, “I’m frizzing.” He rolls over on her, rolls her back over him. Pillows and Colette are pushed to and over the edges of the double bed she has inherited (along with a dresser, chairs, kitchen equipment and assorted junk) with the lease of this students’ apartment.

  She keeps talking. “I read in Mademoiselle—huff—emission rates are très modestes en France.”

  “Très modiques, tu veux dire.”

  “French uninterested if—yes—you—oh—can’t put book jackets on it.”

  “What’s that mean? Yes?”

  “Wait. Yes.” Pause. “Fewer pens, more penises. Jiggle. Preserve—hff—the trees. Ohh. Soo sweet. I love you.”

  Two days a week, Cynthia goes into Boston to the therapist, Dr. Monahan, a severe little woman she doesn’t “take to.”

  “I don’t think there’ll ever be a transference. Whatever that is.”

  “You’ve just started,” said Merriwether. “There’s tons of crud to come off before you even see the surface of the mine.”

  “How would you like to have to spill your insides twice a week?”

  “Too late for me,” he said. “My trouble’s calcified. I’d need a million volts just to get started.”

  “What defenses.”

  “Granted. Anyway, I can’t afford it.”

  “The main thing is you want me to fit around you. I’m the one who has to change.”

  “You’re still malleable.”

  “Just less sure of what I am.”

  It may be. Merriwether feels the evidence of his rigid imperfections: Sarah, Cynthia. Yet he cannot see his way to a Monahan. Even at night, alone and baffled on the third floor, he feels things will somehow work out.

  Cynthia fills her days with routines, rituals. Many have to do with making up or maintaining her person: hair-washing, exercising, eyebrow-plucking, self-inspections; many are study habits: bottles of soda water and lemon juice by the bed, notecards and colored pencils on the table, a special pair of red and green woolen socks up to her knees, her Teddy bear, one-eyed, earless Muggsy, set between Japanese-English dictionaries in the bookshelf. Preparation for sleep is also complicated: the alarm clock has to be set and placed, a regiment of pills to swallow—Gelusil, Andrux, multi-vitamins, tons of rose hips (vitamin C) when colds threaten; even the method of taking pills (the pill put halfway down the tongue, a swig of lemon juice, a gargle of soda water, a grimace).

  Cynthia is a magnificent preparer. She will not be tested without preparation. This has led to triumphs all her life. She is too smart, too competitive, too fearful for off-the-cuff engagement. Yet most of what she enjoys comes from spontaneity: love, charm, gaiety. For examinations or paper-writing, she goes into St. Anthony-like solitude, the note-cards in piles, the marked books assembled; the night hours become the fortress from within which she attacks the enemy, the paper, tomorrow’s exam.

  For love too, there is preparation. She sees Merriwether’s need (sometimes before he has it), she strips, she softens the entryway with lotion, flops mockingly, open-armed-and-legged, and awaits the mechanics of arousal. (Even these times of obligation can lead to pleasing climax.) Sometimes Merriwether’s mind drifts, he labors not over Cynthia but other bodies, sometimes in multiple junction. He has never bought a pornographic book, but Cy McTier has a shelf-full in the laboratory and Merriwether has taken one—the first act of theft since childhood swipes from a candy store—brought it home and stuck it behind medical texts in the study where, now and then, he takes it out for embarrassed peeks. The picture-excitement doesn’t last; couplings become as familiar as the wall paper. Cynthia cannot bring herself to think of anyone but Merriwether. In reveries, yes, she imagines others, men, women, relatives, classmates. She has recently—a late discovery—learned to masturbate to climax; she also has multiple orgasms, some lightning-fast and radiant over the surface, some rumbling and revolving deep within her, almost unendurable. Now when she hears or reads of women who have no orgasm, she tells Merriwether she’ll write and tell them how—“Cynthia’s Guide to Sexual Bliss”—or send him on a mission of mercy. “I don’t like that, Cynthia.” Actually he does. (Though he and Sarah were happy sexually, their mode was never low comedy. It had been quiet, loving gratitude in the first years, a form of aggression—not unexciting—in the last.)

  “Sexual street repairs, that’s all. Creep.” Kiss on his limp parts.

  But he feels the hook even in comedy. Not that sex is sacred ground, but it is not easy for him to think of Cynthia doing her own repairs. “You’re not a sexual drug store.”

  “If someone I like is desperate, why should I hold back?” Comedy, but a corner of truth, and it keeps Merriwether’s love up to snuff. Yet she knows how tight he is about it and avoids what will turn his ever-ready worry into fury.

  Still, now and then, they quarrel; they grow numb to each other, or work love’s see-saw, one up, the other down. Around exam time, anything can set them off. He can correct a pronunciation—“I believe it’s har’-ass,”—or make a joke about lawyers—she wants no one but herself to hint of imperfection in her father—“I wasn’t thinking of him.” “That’s what you think.” He stupidly responds to her anger, and they inch toward, then slide into rages of exchange. Cynthia’s intelligence challenges him, he’s always liked argument. A foolishness. For her, argument with him is rejection, hatred. Her face turns stony, her lips curl wolfishly from the gums. If she could see herself, he thinks, vanity would push her from the edge. But she doesn’t, she can’t. The whole world is rock, she feels herself a rock of ugliness. Fury, hatred, despair. It’s prison. She screams, she shrinks into a fetal ball. “I hate you. Don’t you see what you do to me?”

  If they’re in the car, she kicks at his legs, at the windshield, she hits out at him. She can hurt, he flinches, he drives toward a parking place.

  He turns furious, he cannot bear her like this, pulling, spoiled, miserable, self-pitying. He thinks. “You can control yourself. Stop this now.” (She can’t. She won’t. He will not feel with her, he is glacial, he cannot wait to leave her.)

  He starts the car. They drive and drive, down the Avenue, along the river, back the other side, down again, sometimes into Boston, or toward Concord, toward Lincoln, Cynthia weeping, screaming, until “Take me home. Now.” Coldly, he does. “Go away,” she says, but she knows no one she can call, she’s alone, he is her only human contact. There’s nothing she can do. She doesn’t even have an errand today—sometimes she can buy groceries or take the MTA to Dr. Monahan—there is nothing but bed.

  Half an hour later, from his office, he phones. Her voice is rigid with hatred. “What dyawant?” His voice is twisted by artifice, false, sweet, a horrible voice, persuading, talking. Words. She hates him, but she can’t hang up, she won’t. There are long silences. He’ll say, “I can’t say anything to help you, you hate the words, you hate the silences, you hate me.”

  Silence.

  “I’d better hang up,” and hangs up.

  He comes to her place. Usually she unlocks the door, then runs to bed; already self-hatred is replacing hatred of him, but what she needs is touch. He kisses her. In the days before he understood her weakness and need, he didn’t know this formula. She told him all she wanted was to hear “I love you” said right, with kisses. Against his glacial disinclination, he has learned to do this.

  In this second year, their quarrels are fewer; they are more an equilibrium of love. He does not turn as cold, though he still fears and hates the unreason of her bad times and what he calls
her “Glamour Mag rhetoric.” “Don’t fit me into your Glamour Mag vocabulary. Stop this shit about ‘wanting to be a complete person’ or ‘You are treating me like a walking cunt.’”

  She has her own vocabulary of abuse: “You and your mean little burgher life.”

  “You know nothing of its sweetness.”

  “Well, go back to it. You’re so smart, you know every fucking thing. You’re so damn wise, and I’m nothing.”

  “Get off, will you. Quit telling yourself these Glamour Mag fables.”

  “I hate you. You are the absolute worst.”

  Silence. He is emptied, or looks it; or tries to look it.

  “Quit making me feel sorry for you. I’m sorry, Bobbie, but I just can’t manage to work up any sympathy for you at this moment.”

  They have each other’s number, and, in bad times, dial frequently. She talks about handsome men, about boys with large, hairless chests, though, days later, praises his hairy one, praises his body, and believes it.

  The fear of losing her sometimes overcomes him. He will not easily find someone who can laugh right, see right, remember so well, be so precise, so amusing, also so fine-looking, though he already finds many other girls pleasing in his sight now, and a few words exchanged with a graduate assistant in a lab will show him how many fine girls there are in the world. He had hardly noticed them before. (Cynthia feels the same, but has been careful to censor temptation.) “Cynthia, this is where age tells. I’m not interested in this hunting and pecking. I’ve learned to type. I just want a fine girl, the same one forever. You, in fact.” And she feels and says the same thing. “I only want to be yours. I’ll never love anyone else.”

  “Do we seem like ones who lose or ones who win?” (They have read at Dante together in the little gold and blue Temple Classics edition he’d bought himself for an eighteenth birthday present, three years before her birth.) They didn’t know. Up and down, these two oddballs of love drag their own channels of habit.

  He sometimes comes by for her in the old Dodge, lets her off, watches her run across to the Yard. She wears flopping hats, old furs, blue jeans. Head down, her beautiful face cleared of the tiniest “imperfection,” she is off, “not like one who wins.” Even when there is little but stone in his heart, this view of her, leopard and blue under the great hat, carrying her satchel of texts toward the seminar room, softens him into love. The melancholia, the fears, the tantrums, the hatred for life, for doing anything but huddling in her room begging for proofs of love—“Please, write me a letter.”—these are gone as she runs through the lace of falling leaves, through the iron gates with the Latin mottos, along Boylston’s gray wall into the Yard.

  “When is a person most himself?” The Dodge starting up, no trouble except when the battery clots with acidic discharge around contacts. (“Comme nous, comme nous,” said Cynthia.)

  What a burden the self was. Jesus was the great therapist: Bury the self, and begin to live. Didn’t he, Merriwether, secular Jesus, do his best work when he was self-oblivious, say helping students, discipuli. Not worrying that they were going to steal his discoveries, his data. Stu Benson hardly opened up to his students, only pointed here, hinted there: “They’ll steal me blind, look at Chambers.” (One of the brilliant rodents, a rumor of greatness for forty years, “passed by” because his students published all his results.) Prodded by Sarah’s harshness, Dr. Merriwether sometimes felt he had to cut himself off from his students on the one hand, from competitive or dominating scientific intelligence on the other. But that boy’s competitiveness which shone so comically in Jim Watson’s book was just that, boys’ stuff. It carried a man in the early years, but the great workers were those who kept on for twenty, thirty years, often better working out other men’s notions than thinking up their own. Rutherford, Bohr, the Oppenheimer of Los Alamos, the Fermi of Chicago, and now Jim himself on Long Island would count as much for that as for what put the laurels on their heads.

  The same with Cynthia. To worry that he was being done in by her, mastered by her ups-and-downs, was terrible, New England narrowness. Fear of the Indians which led to killing them. And what Lasswell called “self-fulfilling prophecy.” Think small, become small.

  Falling in the old Yard, the leaves arthritic with color. Age’s rending beauty. Somehow an easement in his own bafflement.

  eleven

  Within the small system of Dr. Merriwether’s life, almost everything altered. The ac-and-decelerations were not those anticipated, his life-schedule shifted, his awareness, his feelings for places, objects, people. A year ago, the schedules of love-by-phone-and-letter and love-on-the-wing dominated his life; then, with Cynthia in Cambridge, the day’s clock changed, he discovered the world of late night and early morning. Out of Acorn Street at ten or eleven, he returned—comfortable in his home, wanting to breakfast with his children—at three and four A.M. In the cemetery stillness, his was sometimes the only moving car. Sometimes a police car approached, whirl-light dazzling, sinister. He rehearsed menacing interrogations: “Something wrong there, buddy?” “Just taking a little drive, officer. Couldn’t sleep.” He was careful to wear his sartorial visa to safety, coat, tie, fedora, and the ID which, at worst—he hoped—would label him professorial kook, restless after battling theories the long day. Merriwether was one of many people who’d never had anything to do with police, lawyers, courts; he’d never even had a traffic ticket. He’d heard and understood stories of police harassment, but knew less of them than he did the interior of his salted rats. Nor did he realize police views of normality were not his own: few would have failed to place this midnight cruiser.

  Leaving Cynthia’s place was terrific relief: out of “the love nest,” safe, in the cold air, and what joy to be in his old Dodge, driving the streets he’d walked in light or civilized dark for forty years. The glittering civic jewelry was put away, only here and there a student’s night light, a lover’s. By the high iron paling of the Yard, the spook lights of the Square—the cafeteria open for the night people—into the depths of country stillness, Ash Street, where, turning into Acorn, he doused the car lights and glided into his driveway. He entered his house with a quiet meant to erase the hour, as if he’d come back after a walk. Up the stairs, each creak a lash, till in the cold guest room, safety, peace, a kind he’d never known. The night noise of the house was precious now, the stirrings below, the children’s breath which collected in the halls and made the atmosphere of his home. He was there, if something happened, fire, burglary, sickness, he was there to help. His own breath met his children’s.

  One morning, coming back with his mind full of ache for Cynthia, her loneliness, her sweetness—he often spent the last minutes talking her away from fears into sleep—he found the house door chained. He went around to the back door. Latched. Locked out of his own house. Should he throw a stone at Sarah’s window? He remembered the cellar window, went around, got it open and forced himself through like a load of coal.

  “Don’t ever do that again, Sarah.”

  She was in the breakfast room, eating Cheerios, reading the Times, wearing one of her school outfits, a long-sleeved blouse, a blue smock. There was desolation, ice in her face. The black eyes glittered at him, outraged. “How dare you?”

  “This is still my house. I don’t lock you out. Don’t lock me out.”

  Even in his fury, he could see the valiance of her overcoming her fear of his severity, but, this morning, it was not enough for words. She slammed the paper, the coffee jounced in her green GOOD MORNING mug and wet James Reston, she threw one imperial stare at his exploitative leisure—he left half an hour after she—and took off to drive the children to school on her way to Boston.

  Even strung on the barbs of her hatred, he could pity her. She had no Cynthia. She spoke about her life to the Calenders and the Bowens, but she was not a woman who opened up to people. She would be ashamed to tell the whole story. (Of course, he didn’t either.) He pitied her, yet felt she was stronger than he, that she
’d been boiled hard by her hatred for him. She remade herself using hatred of him for strength. She needed the hatred. Who knows if that wasn’t the source of everything? (The greatest theories showed wider gaps between effects and causes.)

  Even now, Dr. Merriwether could see the jetsam of the decent, honorable, good-humored woman he’d married; never, really never complaining, never asking; exceptionally virtuous. He’d loved her decency, her looks, her gifts, the French poems twirling in her mouth. She’d made a literary space for him; never had he enjoyed poems as much as when she read them aloud. Or music. No virtuoso, she played with taste and feeling. Upstairs, marking his journals, something she played below would break in his heart with loveliness. Nights on Duck Isle, when rain thumped the panes and timbers of the house, she played Bach and Schubert. Had he ever been happier than those nights, the children asleep upstairs, when over the rain and fire noises, she’d played something that melted the difference between out-and-inside. Sublimity. What was anything else in life next to it? He owed that to her. Fine little stump of a wife, lifting fingers up and down on the sea-stained keys, round back, square flanks—no hourglass there—rocking, arcing, evoking that sublimity.

  As French country families still keep the pot-au-feu simmering, always adding, taking out, adding more, so Merriwether somehow or other always kept up his mental life, and took in, day after day, the journals, the books, the reports which came in with the mail. At home or in the office, they came in, the technical journals, the general magazines whose subscriptions he alternated year by year, the New Yorker with Harper’s or the Atlantic, Time with Newsweek, Encounter with Commentary. The world simmered away. In a single Rockefeller Foundation report, he read of reversals of the agricultural crisis by “multiple cropping,” of new methods of financing ghetto business, of brave new theaters, of conferences in which doctors, lawyers and philosophers worked out new meanings of death and life—what was prosthesis? what was death? who should decide about “termination,” who about genetic engineering (the social peril of the XYY male with the criminal valence in his cells). Intricate human activities that were, Merriwether believed, the proper activity of such privileged humans as himself. Sometimes, he gorged on this authentic news of the world. Along with love for his children, and his own soundings in the cells of his rats, it seemed the essence of proper earth-time; the rest was lotophagous indulgence.