The Summer He Didn't Die

by Jim Harrison

  Part II Frances

  “JESUS, YOU’RE DISGUSTING.” THAT’S WHAT I SAID WHEN Martha opened the door looking like a sweaty ghost. She smelled like rum in the heat emerging from the room and the ceiling fan had a cracked paddle that rattled. I flicked on the air conditioner while Martha sat on the bed’s edge, her face in her hands.

  “Shirley missed the connection in Houston and won’t get here until morning. Daryl’s still alive. Let’s send him a nice card.”

  One of the many things people don’t like about me is my sense of humor. Martha peeked up from her hands with the usual smile. Her perpetual smile is a nasty habit I’ve lived with since we met at age seven. She got this nitwit smile from her mother who was a Grosse Pointe belle though her own mother came north from Mississippi. Martha can’t accept that much of life is to eat something you wish you hadn’t, so she leads with her chin and a smile that Daryl said was only a mask she’d still wear if shot in the heart.

  “What else?” Martha said.

  “I pretended I was his sister on my Houston layover which I thought I should take to make sure of things. He’s in a light coma, on IV, and has to be catheterized which I thought was funny considering his flat-out dick pride. He’ll live which is the important thing. The police haven’t decided yet what to charge you with. Did you meet him in Houston to kill him? I mean, you said in Chicago you wanted to kill him.”

  “No. He called and I went down there to make sure I didn’t love him despite what he did to me. We made love and then he told me everything that was wrong with me. He wanted to borrow money from me to go live in France for a while. He denied he sent the nude photo to Jack.”

  “Of course he did.”

  “But I wondered if he wanted money why didn’t he try to use the photo for blackmail?”

  “That would be too normal for Daryl. If he was going to blackmail someone I’d be the likely prospect. Sammy flipped my photo at me during breakfast. His secretary opened it at the office. As you know Sammy is mostly concerned about germs. Had I passed him a social disease? He actually had a private detective find Daryl in New York and asked him to be tested for AIDS and venereal diseases. Daryl refused. And that’s that for the time being.”

  “You don’t think your marriage is ruined?”

  “My marriage was always ruined. What’s important to Sammy is that our son is a good athlete and that I behave well at fund-raising dinners. We had dinner with President Bush. It only cost Sammy two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. But he’s a kind soul. He knows I’ve had other affairs but again he’s concerned with what he calls ‘health issues.’ He’s a snoop but infidelity isn’t a big number with him. He believes devoutly in the polished surface. Our daughter, who’s now seventeen, thinks I should leave him and take up with the happy carpenter she knows I had an affair with. He’s actually a cabinet maker who redid our kitchen. My daughter thinks she’s a lesbian.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “I don’t think so. Why should it be? Look at us. She’ll miss out on a Daryl?”

  “I don’t know. She won’t give you any grandchildren.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake. Take a shower. Get dressed. I’ll be downstairs having a big drink. Call down and get your ceiling fan fixed.”

  Martha got up from the bed and walked toward the bathroom with the gait of a child rather then a forty-two-year-old woman. I’ve always envied her dancing abilities but they aren’t apparent right now. At Ann Arbor parties even black guys used to line up to dance with her. It was as if there was no connection between her dancing body and her social body. She actually electrified us and there was the inevitable question, “Why can’t I dance like that?” One night at a Detroit blues club she did a dirty dance with a Detroit Lions defensive back and two bouncers had to hang close to protect her afterward. There she sat between these two black behemoths with her chirrupy smile with our dates desperate to get us back to the safety of Ann Arbor.

  My margarita is delicious, made with those sweet little thin-skinned limes. There are very old photos of Douglas Fairbanks and Fidel Castro in the bar, a truly odd couple. I’m wearing darkly tinted glasses to avoid making eye contact with anyone. This situation is too serious to flirt. You wonder what it is in us that makes us think we deserve romance? I mean, how many romances do you want in life? Is it a biological imperative that we continue to dress in fancy costumes? For instance, Martha’s quite intelligent but there’s so much she doesn’t wish to know. The true nature of everyone including herself comes as a surprise. She wants to think everyone is good and any trace of evil is a simple glitch. That’s why she was so slow in catching on to Daryl’s behavior. During our not-very-honest rendezvous at the Drake we were having drinks in the downstairs bar and when I asked Martha if Daryl had tried to organize her making love to another man while he watched she burst into tears. Shirley chided me for being “cruel” as she dabbed at Martha’s tears with a tissue. I wondered at that point if either of them wanted to understand anything. I joked that as many men get older they’ll simply do anything to become sexually excited. Shirley and Martha didn’t see any humor in this and I realized again that since we were little our culture had shoved us into a consensual box from which most of us don’t want to be liberated. Our captious sexual natures must be contained at all costs for the good of society and, more so, the good of our class. Shirley at least had the advantage of her private religion, no matter how goofy.

  Martha’s social and marital life were a paint job. My first real insight came when I was a senior at U. of M. and had gone to a concert with my graduate-assistant lover. My dad found out about this and was so enraged that his little girl was having an affair with her teacher that he called his friend the governor of Michigan who calmly told him that I was twenty-one. Anyway, at Rackham Auditorium that spring evening David Oistrakh was playing Mendelssohn on the violin which put me in a particular but beautiful trance. I was exhausted from writing a term paper in a hurry but the music entered my brain in a peculiar way and I was never again able to carry so heavily my often pathetic life and behavior. It was probably the feeling a snake has on shedding its skin or something like that. Anyway, I learned that when I was generally suffocating myself music, art, and somehow literature could save my neck though literature was less directly operable. The problem with literature became evident in my affair with Daryl.

  Actually, the end of my escapade with Daryl came easily. I made him furious with a single question. Daryl met my plane at Teterboro in New Jersey where private jets land. One of my husband Sammy’s scams which I cooperate with because I’m self-indulgent was to put me on the board of a small company in New York City and thus he can deduct the cost of my flying his plane to a fake meeting. By horrible coincidence we saw Martha waving for a cab in front of a hotel on Irving Place when we came in from the airport. It made me feel ill. We picked up a notebook at Daryl’s place a block or so away, then drove up to an apartment Sammy keeps at the Carlyle. Actually the location of the apartment was my choice but then the local bookstore closed and I was bereft. It was a little blatant for me to use the apartment for a lover but then I don’t care. We fooled around, made love, had lunch sent up, and fooled around some more. For a radical left-wing writer Daryl adores luxury. Early in the evening we went to a dreary literary public reading at which Daryl introduced four young poets and then to an equally dreary party in SoHo where I felt miserably overdressed which was Daryl’s fault because I let him choose what I would wear. He captured the audience at the party, his favorite thing, and we missed our reservation at Esca where he likes me to take him so he can sit outside, drink expensive wine, and chain-smoke. Anyway, we got back to the hotel at midnight with Daryl a little drunk and unable to make love because he had snorted cocaine at the party. While we were eating a late supper I asked him an innocent question, to the effect that I had noted in my reading and also the literary parties he took me to how writers think they’re serious just because they deal with serious subjects. They
think their subjects give them high marks. How does that differentiate them from the man on the street who deals mentally each day with the eternal woes of poverty, runaway daughters and sons, a marriage that has become a flat tire? Isn’t it all in the performance?

  Daryl flipped. He threw his flan across the room and shattered the dish against the bathroom door missing my minor Matisse by a few feet. How could I impugn his work? Well, of course, I wasn’t, but he thought I was referring to a long poem he had written about the death by drowning in February of his adoptive mother. She had fallen through when she brought out lunch to her husband who was ice fishing on Bay de Noc. I tried to reassure him that his own work was critically established but then saw in him the characteristics of my mother after a single drink when she became entirely self-referential. At that moment after the shattered flan dish if I had said, “The night is dark,” Daryl would have asked, “What are you saying about me?” Instead, he walked slowly out the door and I enthusiastically went to bed by myself after laughing a bit while I cleaned up the flan mess. Before seven A.M. I was awakened by a bellhop, Sean to be exact, bringing up an “urgent” message, a five-page fax from Daryl fully defining my many deficiencies. He had heroically walked the “hundred blocks” (really about sixty-five) home to regain his balance. I reflected on how much easier it had been to get along with him out in San Francisco and Berkeley when he was out of his paranoid milieu.

  Martha finally came down when I was relaxed into the middle of my second margarita. She was wearing the usual smile which immediately irritated me more than the sentence in Daryl’s fax where he said I was “the moral equivalent of a show tune.” Martha was apologetic about her tardiness which I waved away. Both her husband and father had called and she had hung up on Jack when he speculated how her “scandal” would affect their lives. Her father called to see how she was holding up. The man was such an austere old pro, a last gentleman in a world that made him appear antique. By comparison my own father was a slob, albeit intelligent, who still whined about quitting the diplomatic service to make money. In the past few years he has lost enough money on real estate speculation that he couldn’t afford to contribute enough to the party to secure the ambassadorship he longed for.

  “I’m wondering what that women’s prison will be like,” Martha said taking a big drink of her Cuba libre.

  “Worse than Bloomfield Hills,” I quipped. “Even more intrusive.”

  “I’ve watched some of those late-night movies. Everybody has to take a shower together and some of the women are overfriendly.”

  “Remember when we were twelve and practiced kissing on each other?” I teased.

  “You’re just awful.” Martha grinned. “I thought you came down here to help me.”

  Martha had been concerned about what she called my “dark side” since we were teenagers and she began reading mental self-help books and the magazine Psychology Today.

  “Full consciousness is the help you’re going to need the most. If our collective efforts beat the legalities I bet Daryl files a civil suit to collect a bunch of money. I’m sure I can help there.”

  “Why would Sammy give you money for me?”

  “That’s all that’s there. I’d say, Fork it over or I’m moving to Italy.”

  Tears were forming so I suggested we get something to eat. Martha wanted another drink first and I couldn’t blame her. It occurred to me suddenly that she grew up with her fictional heroes and her noble father and life gave her nitwit Jack as a husband and Daryl as a lover. This had been a fall from a considerable height. At Cranbrook she was always beaming at the boys then surprised when they tried to take advantage of her. Daryl told many stories about his childhood and liked to quote a German poet who said, “What is fate but the density of childhood?” but then I would quip to his dismay that when you have explained things you only have an explanation.

  “Not for you, dear.” Martha’s eyes had been following the movements of our especially handsome Mexican waiter.

  “Oh my God, I’m hopeless.” Martha blushed and laughed.

  “Normal is closer. You’re just looking and speculating without words. No words need be attached. It’s how people look at each other even when it’s nonsexual.”

  “If I was as smart as you I wouldn’t be in this mess,” Martha said with a trace of the maudlin.

  “I think that technically you’re smarter but you don’t have the good sense of your daughter.” A few months before I’d flown to Detroit to see my parents but didn’t want to stay in their house. Jack was in the Bahamas at some sort of investment meeting so I bunked with Martha. One evening when we were watching The Gladiators on television Martha’s daughter, Dolly, who is some sort of seventeen-year-old feminist radical had come home from a meeting wearing her cute little nose ring and said to us, “Why don’t you women do something?”

  “Do something?” we asked in unison.

  “I mean, your kids are pretty much grown up so you should do something with your lives more than that simpleminded stuff you’re already doing. It doesn’t have to be a job, just something solid.”

  We were mutely nervous there on the sofa with our bottle of white wine. I was struggling for something funny to say while Martha pretended to be attentive to men hacking each other to pieces on television. Dolly flounced off, stopping at the door to say, “I mean anything. Save trees or the green turtle. Anything but sitting around feeling your asses get bigger and your skin droop.”

  “It’s going to get worse isn’t it?” Martha asked after a long interval.

  I wasn’t going to let that little bitch Dolly send us to bed early in despair so I attempted to make a recent European trip into an amusing story, a hard job since travel in a narrative sense is usually inconclusive. Sammy has only gone to France and Italy once with me. He doesn’t see what he calls “the point.” He just sat there in various hotel suites watching the international CNN business news though in a trattoria in Rome he rose to the occasion to say, “First-rate spaghetti.” Sammy is brilliant on the computer business but since our courtship rarely pretends that we have shared interests.

  On the way to get something to eat with Martha, Dolly’s accusatory statement came up again and though the restaurant was only a few blocks away we stopped a half dozen times on the sidewalk to talk. Martha said that just because your life at forty-two seems empty doesn’t mean you should expect any sympathy. I agreed but then I’ve always thought sympathy was beside the point. Put sympathy in a shoe box and see how much it weighs. “Wealthy woman’s life lacks content” is not an interesting advertisement. I told Martha that after Dolly’s imprecation I had checked out environmental issues including the green turtle on Google and spent a couple of days reading up but decided that due to my aversion to the outdoors I better stick to art museums. My idea of nature is a vineyard while Sammy’s is the golf course at Pebble Beach.

  Martha thought this was awful but admitted that earlier in her marriage she had started a vegetable garden in the backyard but Jack had browbeat her because a vegetable garden was so messy. We agreed that a good thing about Daryl, however irritating, was the manner in which he refused to put things in safe stacks of boxes. For Daryl time itself was a collusion of dozens of circumstances that you wove together in an effort to make life fascinating. Unlike our husbands Daryl never ate or slept at regular times. He hadn’t accepted life as a tiny stall in a barn where you had to cut off the horse’s legs to fit him in. Daryl’s own analogy was life as a zoo where the cages so tightly surround our bodies that only our faces and limbs can emerge a little. We make a lot of noises but our happy home is a zoo.

  Martha didn’t want to eat until she showed me this crucifix in a cathedral across from the restaurant. I wasn’t at all prepared for the apparent cruelty of this immense statue pinned to the wall. I actually felt frightened and turned around as fast as possible to exit, but Martha hung in there, though without her silly grin.