“We don’t have a preacher,” she says. “He wouldn’t of wanted one. So is there anything you’d care to say?”
I glance around at the few others, who seem to be waiting, expecting some sort of obsequies from me. The old woman’s eyes are kind with sympathy. She knows too well the experience of death, and knows even better the futility of words. Had she known my father, ever? I wonder. On July 18 and January 18 there were always postcards waiting at the post office from him, which were repetitious, almost identical, slight variations on two themes: first, how wretched his “rest home” was, and second, what kind of idiot was I, anyway, living alone way off in the woods?
“Well?” my sister says. “Caint you think of anything nice to say about your pore old daddy?”
I notice that his grave has been dug directly beside my mother’s. I wonder if she would have wanted that. There is so much about them that I never understood. My mother had died in a traffic accident in which my father was not involved, but had he been indirectly involved? I should have been old enough, at seventeen, to fathom what sort of relationship they had had, but I did not.
“Brother dear,” says my sister, the “dear” dripping raindrops and sarcasm, “if you aren’t going to say anything, say so.”
“Farther along we’ll know all about it,” I say, “farther along we’ll understand why.”
The few others present, taking this as a suggestion, turn it into music, singing the funeral song. Because there are not enough voices to make a full chorus, the singing is somewhat restrained. My brother-in-law’s bass voice is loudly off-key and he has forgotten some of the words and has to hum through them, “Cheer up, my brother, dum dum de dum dum…” At least that’s better than my dog, whose attempt to join the singing is very much off-key. Everyone is thoroughly wet from the rain. All that keeps me from draping a sheet of tissue over my comb and playing it, in honor of my dead father, is the driving rain.
When the singing stops my sister points at my dog, who has stopped attempting to sing and is lying at my heels, whose wetness—his, not my heels—has greatly increased his odor. “Dogs don’t belong at funerals.”
“It’s over, isn’t it?” I ask. “Or were you about to say something?”
My withering glance, perhaps more than her grief, gets through to her and she loses her cool disdain and begins crying. She leans her face into the hairy deerskin of my robe, and blubbers. The others drift away, the men first shaking my hand. I wonder what I am to be congratulated for.
When I am alone with her and her husband, she raises her face and says, “Well, show us where you live.”
“It’s quite a hike,” I declare, in warning.
“We got nothing better to do,” she says.
So, somewhat reluctantly, I take them up the mountain to my home. They are both out of breath and panting hard when we arrive. Immediately I build a fire to dry their clothes, or dry them in them. They prowl around, inspecting all my gear, prying into every crevice of my cavern. Except for the pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses, they are my first visitors.
My brother-in-law says, “Looks cozy,” the only comment from either of them. I offer them drinks of moonshine.
“Haven’t had any of this stuff for years,” my sister says, coughing after her first swallow.
I lend her a chair of my own manufacture, the only chair: her husband sits on the chopping block; I hunker on my heels.
Chapter seven
My chief disappointment with my “doll wife” was, eventually, that she was permanently on the wagon and could not share a drink or two, or ten, with me. I never regretted having declined the upholsterer’s presumptuous offer to furnish her with a vagina, because, as far as sex was concerned, the auction groupies were becoming increasingly available and numerous, more than I could handle, and when I overheard one of them telling another, whose bed I entered a few hours later, “Just watch for the one who wiggles his ears,” I knew I was a marked man. The difference between rock groupies and auction groupies is that while the former were enticed by fantasies of getting their strings plucked as adroitly and wildly as the musician plucked his instrument or performed cunnilingus on his handheld microphone, the latter were enticed by fantasies of having a man who knew a beautiful object when he saw one and was willing to raise his offer steadily until he procured it. Then, too, a rock groupie was happy if she could get a quick hump, irrumation and/or autograph, whereas the auction groupie expected a dinner at the best restaurant, then ballet or opera or theater, and, after a Saturday night and Sunday morning in all of the positions of Tantric Yab-Yum all over all the furniture of her apartment, even the bed sometimes, a Sunday afternoon personally guided tour of the decorative arts wing of the museum, and finally the address of, and even a key to, one’s apartment. The only time I acceded to this last request, because the uncommonly attractive young lady had shown me Yab-Yumb variations I’d never dreamed of, I waited for weeks afterwards for the sound of her (my) key in the door, and, unable to stand the waiting any longer, brought my doll out of the closet, seated her on the sofa, in candlelight, turned her on, and commenced a long series of conversations with (or rather monologues to) her, interrupted eventually one night when my gorgeous groupie unlocked the door, leapt into the room with her arms outthrust, but froze and flushed at the sight of the doll, and mumbled, “Oh, excuse me. I should have knocked.” That’s all right, I said, she’s only a doll. “Well, aren’t we all?” she said, retreating into the hall. I followed her into the hall, closing the door on my doll, and saying, No, seriously, she’s not real, she’s only kapok and latex, silicone and eiderdown. “Am I ‘real’?” she asked, laughing, but then she seemed to become irritated, and delivered herself of a minitirade, “All your women are dolls, darling. Don’t you know that? It’s what they say of you behind your back. You simply don’t know how to relate to us as human beings. You can only communicate genitally. You externalize us, as you would externalize a sought-after chest of drawers, or a rare chair. You open us, or sit on us, or have us sit upon you, and have us, and forget us, to move on to some other object. I wish I could warn that poor creature in there—” she gestured toward my door, “—but I can’t, or won’t. One thing I came to tell you is that I’m not going to any more auctions. The other was to ask you for a job at the Foundation, but you wouldn’t want me after what I’ve said, would you? And I suppose you treat all your employees like objects, also. I think I’ll go teach school somewhere. Good-bye…and try to be kind to that poor thing.” When she was gone, I sat with my doll wife, holding her hand in one hand, my glass of scotch in the other, getting up from time to time to refill it, and I really tied one on, wallowing in self-pity and lovelessness, and when, a few days later, I was sober enough to play back the tapes of the pathetic jeremiad I had sniveled and whined at her that night, I was disgusted with myself, and resolved to attend no more auctions, delegating this job to my associate curator, who had coveted it for years, and who, I learnt eventually, began to make out quite adequately with the groupies. More and more of my duties I delegated to associate and assistant curators, and spent my afternoons, after a four-martini lunch with one trustee or another, one patron or patroness, sitting alone on a bench in the Public Garden, watching the swans and pedal boats. At dusk one afternoon, a woman passed, pushing a perambulator, and it was my “real” ex-wife, with her first-born, born less than nine months after the divorce. We exchanged polite greetings, and I was permitted a brief glance at the baby boy, who looked too much like his father.
Often thereafter I would see her pushing the pram through the Garden, at the same dusky time each day. Late one afternoon, before the time she would appear, I summoned a taxi, took it to my apartment, told the driver to wait a minute, and fetched my doll wife, who staggered to the taxi with both my arms around her. I asked the driver to return us to the Garden. I mumbled something about her needing some sunshine to sober up, although the sun had gone down. He helped me seat her on a bench in the Garden, and I gave him a ge
nerous tip. Then I sat on the bench with her, in a conversational attitude, and waited. In fact, I turned her on and actually began talking to her, with my arm across her shoulders and her hand gently on my knee, and her face all beaming smile and rapt attention. I waited. Eventually from the corner of my eye I detected my ex-wife pushing the pram up the path, but went on talking to my doll wife, pretending to be unaware of my ex-wife’s approach. Ex seemed about to go right on past us, but suddenly stopped. I could feel her eyes on us, but went on talking: “…and so, you see, the root dilemma of my existence is that while I have had such poor luck in living with women, I have had even worse luck trying to live without them…” I pretended to be suddenly aware of an eavesdropper, and abruptly looked up. “Why, hello! Speak of the devil, we were just talking about you,” and my arm across my doll wife’s shoulders caused her to turn her head and flash that lovely smile at my ex-wife, who was not smiling; her mouth was all agape, and her eyes were wide open. I introduced them to each other by their identical names. “How do you do?” asked my ex-wife hesitantly, and of course my doll wife only continued smiling, saying nothing. I have to run, my ex-wife apologized, and shoved the pram onward, but she telephoned me that same night and, after inquiring if I were alone (so it seems, as it were, I said) beseeched, “Where did you ever find her?” She was born just across the river, I explained, and one of our upholstery contractors introduced her to me. “But my exact duplicate, ma semblable…” she babbled needlessly. I told you once, I told her, that if you ever left me, I would scour the ends of the earth for your twin or clone. How fortunate to find her so close to home! “I feel as if I’ve been Xeroxed,” she said. “I hope I don’t have to meet her again. My first thought was to invite the two of you to dinner, but when I told my husband about it he suggested that that would be very awkward, although of course he’s extremely curious to see her himself…but I would be jealous of that. She is my twin, but she’s prettier than I, don’t you think?” Not at all, I said; I said that as far as I could discern, there was no difference whatever, not a trace of dissimilitude, between them. “Well,” she said, “is she smarter than I?” No. “Wittier?” No. “More fun in bed?” No. “A better cook?” No. “Does she do your laundry for you?” No. “Massage your back?” No. “Well, darn it, does she darn your socks?” No. “Does she remember your birthday?” No. “Does she flirt with other men?” No. “Does she bleach her hair?” No. “Will she give you a child?” No. “Will she go to your hometown with you?” No. “Well, God, does she vociferate at climax, or something?” No. “Then what do you see in her??” she demanded. You, I said, and hung up.
Chapter eight
It is late afternoon and dusk is coming on. The rain has stopped; our garments are reasonably dry, but my sister is getting drunk and unless I expect to put them up for the night I had better lead them back to their car; if I did not they would become lost in the woods.
“Pore Daddy,” my sister says.
“Poor old guy,” her husband says. He too is tipsy.
“Couldn’t you of gone to visit just once?” she says to me. “He was so lonely in that rest home.”
“I didn’t put him there,” I declare.
“Somebody had to,” she says, “and nobody knew where you were and couldn’t write to you but twice a year.”
“Listen, we’d better get on back down to the road before it’s dark,” I tell them.
“Just another snort outa that jug,” she requests, “while I tell you something. Like that song says, ‘Farther along we’ll know all about it.’ Something you never knew. Momma made me promise never to tell you until after Daddy had passed on. It’s been all I could do to keep it from you. On her deathbed after that car wreck she said to me, the last thing she ever said to me, she made me promise never to tell you this while your daddy was still living.”
“Perhaps I’d rather not know,” I say, pouring her one last, small drink. “Look, drink that up and let’s get back down to the road.”
“We can find our own way to the car.”
“No, you can’t.”
“I guess he’s right,” her husband says. “We probably couldn’t.”
“Okay, okay,” she says, “but let me tell you this. No, first, I’ll ask you: do you remember anything from when you were five years old?”
“I remember virtually nothing of my childhood,” I say. “Now, come on, let’s go.” I take her arm. My dog hoists himself erect and begins to lead the way.
I walk behind my sister. She talks over her shoulder. “Nothing at all? Don’t you remember your rag doll?”
Yes: Late in my fifth year, about the time I began the first grade of school, my mother had made me a small doll out of an old stocking, with buttons for eyes and a painted-on mouth. It was sexless; it could have been female when I wanted it to be. I had taken it to school a few times, and I could trace the beginnings of my boxing career from having to defend myself against the taunts of my male classmates. I slept with it for years, until it was worn out. Was that also the origin of my life-size doll wife?
“Do you remember Mr. Crockett, who lived next door?” my sister asks. She trips on a root and nearly falls; I catch her. She goes on. “He offered you a quarter if you could go for a whole day without crying so loud all the neighbors could hear you. You never collected.”
“I never collected,” I admit. But what did I cry about? “But what did I cry about?”
I am too late to catch her; she trips on a rock and falls. Her husband turns and I help him pick her up. “Shit,” she says, brushing herself off. “No body in their right mind would live in the woods.” She goes on. “What did you cry about? I don’t know, I usually tried to get as far away as I could when you were doing it. The other girls teased me because my kid brother was a crybaby. I know I never made you cry, except maybe once or twice, like the time I hid your wagon. I guess the main reason you cried was pure dee frustration. That’s what I’m getting to. Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine, we’ll understand it all by and by.” She sings these last words, to the tune of the song. But there is no sunshine. “Oh, it’s awful. Maybe I shouldn’t even tell you.”
“Then don’t, please,” I request.
“Have to. I’ve kept it all bottled up all these years. Been times I worried Daddy would outlive you, and you’d never know. I mean, living like you do, what if you were to get pneumonia or something, and nobody to tend you? What kind of medical care do you have? When was the last time you even had a physical?”
“I have no use for doctors,” I inform her.
Her husband trips over a log and crashes into a sapling. We wait a moment for him to recover.
“Look at that!” she says. “You could break your neck way up here in the timbers, and wouldn’t be nobody to get you to a hospital. You could get eat up by a bear. You could catch the ’flu.”
“Catch it from whom?” I ask.
“Well, anyway, I’m glad Daddy died before you did. No, I don’t mean it that way. I just mean I’m glad you’re still alive and kicking, so I can tell you what I’m going to tell you. You don’t know how lucky you are to be alive all these years.”
“I wouldn’t call it luck,” I say.
“I would,” she snaps over her shoulder, and in turning her head toward me ignores a depression in her path, which sends her stumbling headlong into her husband, knocking him down and collapsing on top of him. I help them both up. “Jesus Christ,” she says, “we’ll never make it out of here in one piece.”
“Two pieces,” I suggest.
“What?”
“Nothing. Let’s get on. It’s not much farther along.”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” she continues, talking and walking, “if Momma hadn’t of caught him just in the nick of time, you wouldn’t be here tonight. Maybe you don’t remember, but you were really Momma’s darling little boy. She couldn’t keep her hands off you, she was holding you and loving you all the time. And I guess she and Daddy weren’t getting along too wel
l. I almost know for a fact that they weren’t…they didn’t…they had stopped having…relations…I don’t know why, maybe she was afraid of getting pregnant again. Anyway, it nearly drove Daddy crazy, for him to watch the way she was cuddling you all the time. In fact, I guess it did drive him crazy, for a moment, once, and that was one night when you were asleep in her bed, and he…he came in and tried to smother you with a pillow. You never knew that, did you?”
Oh, I did, in a way. For years, I had had a recurrent nightmare, not of an event but of a feeling: a huge soft but very heavy weight bearing down on my head. “No, I never knew that.”
“Well, he did. He really meant to. But Momma woke up, just in time, and stopped him. So he stopped, but he made you get up and go back to your own bed, and then he told her that if she ever even touched you again, he would kill both of you. And she never touched you again, until she held your hand when she died.”
I remember the hospital, holding her hand. I do not clearly remember all of the thousands of days that I was never touched or held by her.
My sister pauses, far ahead of me down the trail. She turns and calls my name. She shouts, “ARE YOU COMING THE REST OF THE WAY WITH US, OR NOT?” I catch up with them and walk them to their car.
Her husband shakes my hand. What am I to be congratulated for? She pats my cheek. “You pore thing. Write us sometime. Put some flowers on Daddy’s grave. Take care of yourself.”
It is too dark for me to find my way home through the woods of the mountain, even with the help of my dog. When my brother-in-law has driven out of sight, I continue on down the main road, toward the abandoned village.
Chapter nine
Unwittingly (for she had no wits), my doll wife made increasing claims on my time, and that was her undoing. After that one afternoon in the Garden, I never took her out. There would be some movie I particularly wanted to see, but I couldn’t take her because she would be blind (although not deaf) to it, and yet I couldn’t leave her and go by myself. I began to feel so sorry for her. And despite her always cheerful and honest smile, I sometimes felt that her eyes were accusatory, resentful, but because she was mute I could only guess the source of her hurt. Perhaps she resented me because I had given her existence without giving her life. Perhaps she simmered in her complete passivity, being able only to sit, or to lie, waiting for me to move her, or touch her, or hold her, or (as I increasingly did) talk to her. I used to wonder if the owners of cats, those useless loafing freeloaders, realized how much secret contempt or disdain the cat feels for the master, and I agonized over my doll’s possible scorn for me. Of course she had no sentience, but she was snooty enough, despite that smile, and I think she “knew” that I was becoming her total captive, coming straight home to her from work or wherever I spent my afternoons (never again in the Garden, for the sight of my ex-wife, now with two children, was more than I could bear), eating my frozen dinners with her seated across the table from me, reading a book (sometimes aloud) with her snuggled into my lap.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 25
