WALTER FALLS
Steven Gillis
Dzanc Books
Dzanc Books
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Copyright © 2003 by Steven Gillis
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Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the excerpt from “Before the Deluge” by Jackson Browne. Copyright © 1974 Swallow Turn Music. All rights reserved.
Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, Florida 33014.
eBooks Published 2013 by Dzanc Books
A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection
ISBN-13: 978-1-938103-36-0
eBook Cover designed by Steven Seighman
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
For Mary
WALTER FALLS
PART I
“Where were the trout streams of my youth, and other innocent pleasures?”
JOHN CHEEVER
The Housebreaker of Shady Hill
CHAPTER I
I screw things up sometimes.
My wife, Geni Sharre, lovely Gee of the long-legged and red-haired Boston Sharres, professor of sociology and writer of many exemplary articles published in a host of scholarly reviews, used to provide my gaffes with liberal excuse. (She doesn’t anymore.) When I stumble now—at work or play—and make an ass of myself, offering up some unintended imperfection, a careless malapropism, inappropriate sentiment or unsound judgement, injecting the wrong name into a conversation, investing client’s funds into stocks I researched as thoroughly as any senior account executive at Porter and Evans only to have my forecast fall short of expectation—or blow up in my face—she no longer musses my hair and laughs in the same way she used to, but simply sighs, fatigued, and lets me know what once amused her fails to do so as before.
My doctors at Renton General are all well-intentioned specialists in long white coats and deep winter tans who come separately and together to steal a peek at me; shining flashlights into my eyes and ears, jabbing sticks down my throat, pricking and poking me in the legs and arms and up the ass. They occupy my time yet dismiss all symptoms that don’t emerge for their convenience from my blood work, a sampling of my stool or scraping of my colon. After lengthy consultation, they insist my condition is a severe bout of asthenia. (Extreme exhaustion is how they refer to my collapse.) I’m too weak to protest, and while I endure their exams as best I’m able, I know their findings are false, and eventually implore them to, “Please! Forget about my blood and stool, my liver and kidneys and other tender viscera, and ask about my heart!”
They refuse me this, however.
Laid out on my bed, a flaccid stain of lumpy pudding, I try and diagnose the revolt of my once healthy constitution. Those who know me are surprised by my breakdown. (Walter Brimm? No, not him!) As part of the modern pantheon, investing large sums of money for the movers and shakers, I’ve acquired a reasonable amount of success and—until now—a reliable reputation, and was not supposed to succumb in such an inglorious fashion. As a child, the conduct that brought me here had defense. As a boy there was always excuse, but as a man the consequence of my indiscretions—the betrayal of Philos and Eros, charity and integrity, with faith turned to fear and pettiness inviting false promise—all crashed down hard. Friends believe my breakdown was sudden, but they’re mistaken. Few people ever collapse just like that—snap!—and more often than not we give way in stages, like stone worn by the lapping of the waves, or the outer shell of a once sturdy house deprived of bricks and wood, until slowly the walls become hollow and little of the original frame remains.
It is in this way the measure of my dissolve can be marked, by the faintest hints found in the briefest moments.
CHAPTER 2
The spring before it all began, Gee published her latest article in Tod Marcum’s Kerrytown Review under the title “Deconstructing Middle-class Mores While Redefining the Family Unit in Terms of the New Millennium.” (A mouthful to be sure, and enough to confuse me even after I read her treatise.) As owner of the Review, Tod met often with Gee on nights a new article was nearly complete, editing and advising, encouraging and cajoling until the work went to print. All such meetings were conducted downtown with my full knowledge, yet far from where I might otherwise observe them.
I’d not met Tod prior to then and was introduced for the first time at a party given by Jay and Andi Dunlap. Ordinarily, such an encounter would not have fazed me. I’m not by nature a jealous person and have met any number of Gee’s male friends over the years: journalists and college professors, social activists and graduate students, politicians and writers, musicians and actors, doctors and lawyers, and occasionally a businessman or two like me. My wife’s affinity for keeping a healthy stable of male friends as comrades and mentors, sparring partners and flirting companions, pedagogical and spiritual advisors, was something I’d grown used to and I rarely thought twice about it. (One such aged professor, a well-known scholar in the field of ancient aboriginal cultures, had taken Gee under his wing in the time just after we married and liked to sit beside her in his small apartment, stroking her neck and hair in something less than an avuncular fashion, while reading aloud from the early works of Margaret Mead as his wife cooked stuffed cabbage and lentil soup in the kitchen. The man is dead now and I mention him only as an extreme example.) My wife is a vibrant woman, entitled to her friends, and if I once wondered how she managed to settle into marriage when her younger days involved something else altogether, I avoided voicing my concern and evaded raising the issue with her.
Before Tod, that is.
More than once I was told what a keen and clever man he was, an inscrutable and enlightened presence, liberal in thought and deed, unpretentious, ambitious and enterprising, a rabble-rouser and social reformer, the author of several seminal essays and distinguished articles of his own which were anthologized and won awards. (“It would do you good to read them, Walter,” my wife exhorted.) A supremely confident yet modest fellow, self motivated and plain spoken, amiable and warmhearted, possessed of wry humor and a sincerity of purpose. Two years ago, Tod wrote a piece criticizing the ineffectiveness of social services within Renton entitled “Lazy Fare and the Republic of Indifference,” which won three prestigious prizes and led to the journal being sued for libel by six city officials. The complaint was subsequently dismissed—with cost to the plaintiffs—and Tod wrote a follow-up piece about the ordeal, which was made into a documentary and earned him $600.
Tod’s one flaw—and Gee insisted there was but this—revealed a total lack of business savvy. Despite his talent as a publisher and writer and how well received his journal was in certain arcane circles, the Kerrytown Review spent the last ten years in a state of fiscal instability. Struggling to keep his journal solvent, Tod employed an intricate system of robbing Peter to pay Paul, borrowing against projected sales and the full extent of next month’s earnings in order to pay his writers. And yet somehow, through a mix of luck and pluck and shrewdness, the Review survived.
Tod Marcum then. Let us praise his excellence and ambition, his sagacity and resourcefulness. There is a glorious sense of uniqueness about him—or so Gee is convinced—a way which suggests here is someone of significance, a decent and dependable fellow, noble in his pursuits and generous in his ideals. Over the years he’s been an aggressive spokesman for the community, cham
pioning children’s rights and women’s shelters, health-care reform and Dr. Janus Kelly’s free medical clinic. He organized marches protesting racist policies in the Renton police department, in favor of same sex marriages, against discriminatory housing practices, and advocating strict gun control. He promoted rallies for dozens of charitable causes, wrote and spoke on issues of education, AFDC and affirmative action, social accountability and political fraud, and was it any wonder then my wife found him so appealing? Weren’t they though but birds of a feather?
As parties go, the Dunlaps supplied an evening of endless possibility. Jay Dunlap was a heavyset man with short quills of argent hair, wide eyes, and a defect in his left hip that corrupted his stride with imbalance. (“I was born to walk in circles,” Jay made a habit of joking.) He owned a chain of dry cleaners, nine stores inherited from his maternal grandfather, all in and around Renton. Commercials ran on local radio and TV under the slogan “Drop ’em at Dunlap’s where even the dirtiest come clean.” Andi McMillun-Dunlap was a junior partner at Likmee and Benofer, a corporate firm of forty attorneys specializing in mergers and acquisitions. Blond and blue-eyed, tall and large-breasted, she embodied a Nordic preeminence; her well-toned arms and shoulders making her the sort of woman one could imagine being favorably crushed by in bed.
When we arrived Andi was circulating through the main room, directing the caterers toward whomever needed another drink. Trays appeared with stuffed artichokes, imported cheese, Atlantic shrimp, miniature crab cakes, and vegetarian egg rolls. Gee went to say hello to our hosts while I moved to the bar and got myself a whiskey. Several people were out on the patio and I took my drink and followed after them. The night was warm, the scent of juniper and rosebud mixed with cigarette smoke, aftershave, perfume, and liquor. Gee had mentioned earlier that Tod planned to be at the party, his friendship with the Dunlaps dating back several years to when Andi first helped him iron out the purchase of his Review, and standing some twenty feet from the house, I surveyed the faces of men passing by, trying to spot someone who fit Tod’s description.
I looked for a man about my age, thirty-seven, with slightly long, raven-black hair—Gee’s word—casually dressed in a T-shirt and jeans as contrasted to my neat slacks and a button-down collar. Where I have olive skin, Tod was said to be fair, and while I’m tall and almost broad through the chest, Tod was described as “willowy”—another word Gee chose which I found peculiar. I remained outside for several minutes, was twice approached by people I knew coming up for a quick chat—“Hello, Brimm.” “Hello.”—and with no sign of Tod, turned back in the direction of the house where I searched for Gee through the sliding glass door.
Perhaps it was all only nonsense, but I began fantasizing then about my wife. I’ve heard of men in party settings slipping their hands beneath the clothes of women, and where slightly drunk—and non-drunk—wives find stolen moments in darkened bedrooms, bathrooms, and even closets, undoing belts and placing more than a Chekhovian kiss upon the quivering sex of some equally non-drunk other husband. Not that Gee ever would, but I quickly imagined her in compromising places and positions, in tenebrous rooms and strange apartments, in expensive hotel suites strapped down on hands and knees, or naked in some specially equipped dungeon. I often like to visualize situations where she is a bad girl and I am the source of her fulfillment, and also to dream of watching her with different men, though the arousal I experience from this bewilders me, for such is without question my greatest fear and fills me with a sadness so sudden and devastating as to bring me immediately back to my senses.
All things told, I suspect my conduct is only natural and harmless, and believe there is something healthy and refreshing about a husband continuing to be aroused by his wife after nine years of marriage. I love Gee absolutely and have never once cheated on her, adore equally her physical strengths and weaknesses, her intellect and ambition, self-assuredness and emotional center. (Her heart is fearless while I tend to quiver at the slightest trace of doubt or challenge.) Aware of my needs, I’ve been known to suffer distraction when Gee comes home exhausted from work or slightly under the weather, when she’s preoccupied or annoyed with me or Rea, our daughter, for whatever reason, and rather than help resolve the problem, I focus first on the prospect of being denied sex that night, or knowing I’ll have to be extra clever to get some. I’m not proud to think this way—sex alters my rational core even when I realize it shouldn’t—and I’ve tried more than once to improve my conduct, all with limited attainment.
I first met my wife several years ago when a client passed on an extra ticket to an exhibit of the Spanish painter Joan Miró at the Modem. I arrived late. (My ticket was good from eight until ten p.m. and I didn’t reach the first painting until almost nine.) The exhibit was spread out through several rooms, and with the rest of the evening’s crowd already far up the hall, I proceeded at a pace which brought me rapidly from the first room to the second, and from the second to the third. Despite such haste, I enjoyed myself a good deal, taken in by the playfulness, the inventiveness and sensuality of. Miró’s creations, the colors and shapes found in such beautiful works as “Portrait of Madame K.,” “Blues I, II, and III,” and “Birth of the World.”
I had just entered the fourth room at the start of the second hall when I noticed a young woman sitting on a bench, staring quietly at a work entitled “The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Couple in Love.” The canvas was large and filled over every inch with a series of intricate lines and shapes, abstract figures, floating eyes and faces. A brown and beige backdrop gave life to black spheres, triangles and stripes, ovals and dumbbells and hourglass patterns done up in yellows and blues, reds and green. I didn’t plan to stay, but something about the woman and her attraction to the piece intrigued me, and I was still standing there at ten o’clock when a guard came and informed us it was time to close.
I smiled at the woman, thinking I should apologize for intruding on her moment alone, but could only manage to mumble some innocuous observation about the size of the canvas and the flight of the birds. “Miró saw them as he looked out the window of his train,” Gee said, “on his way from Paris to Varengeville in the spring of 1940. He was going through a period of self-doubt, unsure about the direction of his art, and spotting the birds inspired him. He later wrote of the experience: ‘Whatever happens, I will follow my own trajectory. No person or thing will cause me to lose my way. I am alone and mad, but only madness rings true. It links me to the cosmos.’” She returned my smile, and before I could speak—without missing a beat—added, “I appreciate the sentiment.”
We became lovers soon enough and enjoyed an uncomplicated sort of courtship. Eventually our affair turned more serious and we monitored our involvement to make sure we could manage a prolonged commitment, gauged our fundamental differences and found we were nonetheless happy in one another’s company. Our passion acquired a healthy permanence, our sex an earthy vitality which I tried to maintain over the years. I bought a print of “The Beautiful Bird…” for Gee’s birthday which she hung in the front room of her apartment, and later in the main room of our house where we lived together for six months and married in the spring. Gee seemed to delight in our togetherness, and while her writing and teaching and volunteer work took up much of her time, she was still a patient and supportive spouse, and later a tender and giving mother to Rea. Her honesty, intelligence, and sensuality were all indivisible parts of her nature and I was convinced—as a consequence of ignorance and having never lived with a woman before—that the trajectory of our relationship was hale and sound and would continue on this way forever.
But who can know for sure what path a marriage wilt take, or predict when fissures will form and no particular act of healing will be enough? Having believed mine was a perfectly favorable union, I assumed the emotional lethargy which grew between us after those first few years was a momentary blip, a commonplace and transient condition bound to pass, though Gee’s view was something entirely
different. As a social scientist, my wife is a classical theorist, her opinions on the evolution of social behaviors rooted in Locke and Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Milt, her office shelves stacked high with dog-eared copies of Margaret Mead, James Clifford, and Louis Dumont, along with Geoffrey Barraclough’s The Times Atlas of World History, Barzun’s The Modern Researcher, and Gould and Kolb’s UNESCO A Dictionary of the Social Sciences. Her specialty is the social connectives in modern communities, and for a brief period last year she experienced a measure of notoriety when the SubEcco Quarterly published her article “The Normalization of Sociopathic Behaviors in Contemporary Teens.”
On love, Gee borrowed liberally from the laws of physics to suggest, “All forces lose steam after a certain distance is traversed. Passion is all well and fine,” she wrote in another article, “Debunking the Myth of the Modern Marriage in an Age of Social Disenfranchisement,” “yet no relationship survives for long without a practical level of compromise and cooperation. Marriage succeeds or fails by the ability of each partner to pull their weight, to take phone messages and manage their dirty laundry, cook and shop, balance the bank accounts, wash the windows, and service the car. Punctuality and the proper positioning of the toilet seat, agreements over what to eat, when to retire, and when to wake are all important to how spouses establish and maintain lines of intimacy, and it’s this very sense of contentment and order which we eventually come to confuse as love.”
I remember reading the piece with some anxiety and being left to feel puzzled about the underlying implication of Gee’s thesis. I appreciated her rational assessment of how relationships required a balance of sensibility and similitude in order to survive, and was also impressed by how artfully she delineated between the pure spectacle of romance—Venus in the moonlight dancing naked for Eros’s pleasure—and the more efficient and economical love between a husband and wife, and still the upshot did not seem promising. I tried to ignore my concerns, but couldn’t help sense in Gee’s writing more than a measure of skepticism, how extracting passion from the equation allowed her to call attention to love’s absence; the efficiency she wrote about in the marital mix a convenient front. “What are you saying?” I asked her one night in bed. “Are you suggesting couples gravitate toward efficiency at the expense of actual emotion?”
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