Jenny and the Jaws of Life

by Jincy Willett

  She resumed normal life, did chores, loved her family, and was frequently happy, but she now had a permanent appetite for outrage. Her face in repose was never in repose at all, but tense and mulish, with the lowering brow and hard pursed mouth of her infancy. Her face in repose was intimidating but also slightly funny, in just the same way the naked face of a thwarted baby is funny. Because she was an adult her face set into this expression, leaving a permanent record, so that even when reflecting delight or gratitude it displayed, in its pattern of tiny lines around the mouth and between the eyes, the proof of self-contradiction. Sometimes, in public, she realized she was talking to herself out loud, usually in furious argument, and found that she did not particularly care, even when strangers caught her doing it.

  She talked back to the figures on the Nightly News, and eventually stopped watching all televised news because, as she put it, “Why should I have to look at them, when they can’t see me?” Often she threw the newspaper on the floor or whacked it against something, with an abrupt cracking sound that startled and annoyed her husband. He got so he could guess which story would set her off. “The little kid who fell through the ice,” he would say, without looking up, or, “The silo fire,” or “Beirut.”

  “God,” she would hiss, “what a world.”

  He had learned not to look up at these moments because the sight of her, truculent and bellicose, aroused a sudden pity that broke his heart, and a dangerous impulse to laugh.

  Once she actually shook her raised fist, with the crumpled newspaper attached, extended like a thunderbolt. “Seven thousand dead,” she whispered, nodding her head, in the manner of an ancient, reminiscing survivor.

  “Do you realize what you’re doing?” he asked her, with a trace of his old delight. “You’re taking an earthquake personally.”

  She said, “Anyone who doesn’t take earthquakes personally is an idiot.”

  Then her husband’s father, whom he strongly resembled, died in mid-sentence of a heart attack, one month after a reassuring checkup. Her own father, uncharacteristically drunk, fell in the bathtub and blinded his good eye, so that he had to give up driving, and retire early from his job, and could barely read large print. And her son developed what was ultimately diagnosed as a Fever of Unexplained Origin, which came and went for two months and then came and stayed and gradually climbed to a life-threatening level, so that he had to be hospitalized.

  All this happened in one year. And at the end of the year, during the Christmas holidays, she herself came before a radiologist, a Hungarian with a Gypsy name and a permanent air of distraction, so that with every question she seemed to jolt him from reverie. At his polite request she slipped the straps of her jumper off her shoulders and let the dress puddle at her waist, while a nurse stood guard. He had her sit up straight and put one hand on top of her head, and then the other, and then both. He kept looking back and forth between her right breast and the X-ray on the screen behind his chair. He seemed to disapprove of the X-ray, as though it were a poor likeness. They faced each other across his desk piled high with folders and thick manila envelopes; there was an ashtray, with ashes in it; there was a square lucite paperweight from the MGM Grand Hotel, and trapped inside of it a pair of tumbling red dice. She said, “I’ve always thought a mammogram sounded like something you’d send someone for a joke.”

  He came around the desk, never taking his eyes off her breast, and petted the one spot, on the outside close by the nipple, with the smooth pad of his thumb. He arched over her, the other hand gripping the back of her chair; her face was inches from his chest; she could smell him through his shirt, foreign and tangy. “Roll your head forward,” he said, and she did, with closed eyes. “Let it fall back.” She let it fall against his wrist.

  “Like a bellygram,” she said, “or a candygram.”

  “I don’t understand it,” he said. He left her and went back over to the X-ray.

  She said, to his broad back, “My son is terribly ill.”

  He told her to pull up her dress. He had to say it twice. “Is she dressed?” he asked, and the nurse said she was, and left. When he turned around his face showed nothing, even though he looked straight at her. He slumped into his chair, and after a moment, still deeply abstracted, beat out a sudden rhythmic tattoo on his desktop with the tips of his fingers, like a reveille. Instantly he focused on her and smiled in a comradely way. “These things are so…unpleasant,” he said.

  “Oh, yes,” she said.

  “Well, it’s nothing to worry about,” he said. He started to resubmerge, but caught sight of her face. “You can see,” he said, with a casual wave at the X-ray, “that it’s just fluid. I can’t understand why your doctor couldn’t tell. You’re fine.” He ushered her to the door. “You have nothing to worry about,” he said. She kept nodding. She shook hands, and with her free hand grasped his upper arm by the shoulder, and gave it one strong, familiar, knowing squeeze. He laughed behind the closing door. “Bellygram,” he said. “That’s very funny.”

  During Jenny’s childhood there had been a family two houses down from theirs, the Leemings, who, by the time she became aware of them, were already beginning to achieve local fame through their calamitous luck. At one time, according to the older neighbors, the Leemings had been an ordinary, unremarkable family, and then one of the children had drowned, or fallen out of a tree, and after that, one by one, the rest of the Leemings sickened and died, and the father, who didn’t die, became an alcoholic, and his mother, an eighty-year-old former school principal, took to wandering the street in her slip in the early evenings. People were horrified but solicitous. People recoiled in primitive, superstitious reflex, but steeled themselves and behaved decently. They stood by the Leemings. And behind drawn curtains they talked about “the luck of the Leemings”; and sometimes they had to bite their lips to keep from laughing.

  Now it seemed obvious to her, as she walked each morning through hospital corridors toward her unconscious son, that her little family had taken a pratfall off the edge of the civilized universe. Her husband would die without warning, her father after an inexorable decline. Her child was already beyond her reach. She would be the last to die. The radiologist had spoken to her in a kind of code, his immediate diagnosis utterly irrelevant.

  She remembered riding home from church in the backseat of the Nash when she was eight years old, with both her parents in front, her mother’s blue hat with the little black net veil, and how the car stalled just when they were almost at the driveway, and the car in back of them speeded up to pass, and the solid thud and then the Leemings’ Irish Setter airborne, boneless, lofting away like a baseball; and how, before the dog hit the pavement, her parents’ ferocious laughter rocked the car.

  She sat at the foot of her son’s bed and cooled her palms on the metal rail. Her head was bowed, her face white and slack. She swayed very slightly, in a tidal rhythm, and gracefully, like sea grass. Jenny rocked, finally, to sleep, in distant, reliable laughter.

  When her son woke up he watched her for a while, to get his bearings. She did not look much like his mother. She slept, her face turned toward him, her right cheek squished against the rail. Her face was doughy, like the face of a plump baby, and just as placid. She looked in sleep as though she hadn’t a hope or a care in the world. It frightened him to think she had lain like this with no one to watch over her. He called out to her and she opened her eyes without urgency and saw him.

  His mother’s eyes were as unguarded and clear as her sleeping face. He read great surprise and then, unmistakably, just before she cried out and embraced him, an awful impersonal dismay, something like resignation and something like disappointment.

  Days later, when he got up his nerve, he asked her what she had been thinking, to make her look like that. She answered readily, without a hint of shock at his question. “I was just getting used to the idea that we had been singled out,” she said, with a new kind of smile on her face, a half-smile of deep private amusement. “I th
ought I was special in at least that one way.” She bent toward him and whispered, close to his face, grinning amiably, frightening him: “Your mother always was a fool,” she said.

  His new mother often called herself “Silly Old Moms.” Her appearance was always careless. She let herself get plump, and even when she dressed up her slip would show or she would forget to put on stockings, or her blouse, buttoned wrong, would gape at the bust or waist. She learned to present herself to him or to his father for inspection. “Am I okay?” she would ask, with her silly smile. She played the clown for him and his friends, and as he grew older this embarrassed him more and more, because, while she was sometimes funny, she was just as often cornball and obvious, and he cringed at his friends’ indulgence.

  “I like your mother,” one of them said. “She looks right at you. She really sees you, you know? She doesn’t hide a thing.”

  Yes, he thought, that’s it exactly. She just doesn’t bother anymore.

  She went downtown with him one day to help him shop for college clothes. She tripped on the curb of a traffic island at the center of a busy rotary, fell hard, sprawled forward on her hands and knees. He knelt to help her up but she didn’t want to move. She seemed willing to remain forever in this bovine, victimized position. “Wow,” she kept saying, without rancor, “that really hurts.” He hauled her upright, but with her hair half out of its bun and her stockings torn at the knee she looked even worse. She refused to turn around and go back home to change her clothes. “I’m fine, honey,” she said. “Nobody’s going to notice.”

  He lost patience. He had to shout to make himself heard above the din of the chaotic encircling traffic. He gestured with an angry sweep of his arm, pointing out to her the surrounding dangerous hubbub, their absurd position on the island, their awful exposure. “Somebody just might notice you, Mother,” he said sarcastically, shaming himself. “Somebody could see you. Doesn’t that matter to you at all?” She shrugged and smiled her weird private smile and said something he didn’t catch. “Mother, I cannot hear you.” He had never been so embarrassed in his life.

  “I said, So What? Who Cares?” She regarded him with cold sympathy. “What are the odds?” said Jenny.

  The Jaws of Life

  According to Hannah, real life just happens, whereas stories make sense. When you put real life in print, she says, you show it up for the pointless mess it really is.

  I wouldn’t be bothering with this now if Pillbeam hadn’t turned his face to the wall. I don’t blame the guy, but he could have saved me a lot of trouble. Although, I don’t know. Lately there’s this phenomenon that happens to me when I’m just about asleep: I’m actually falling asleep, drifting down nicely, and then there’s a noise in my head that jerks me wide awake, and it’s inside my brain, but deafening. It’s a little bit like a high-voltage buzz, but much more, really, like the jagged shriek of grinding, twisting metal. I feel like a sardine, with the lid rolling back, and up above, in the blinding light, this huge devouring face.

  The point being that everything really happened. The story I’m about to tell you is true.

  My name is David Swallow. (That’s really my name. I haven’t even changed the names.) My wife’s name is Barbara. She’s forty-five, two years older than me. She’s a housewife. I’m a wine merchant (Swallow & Mamoorian, “Where Every Year is a Good Year”). I do the buying and my partner, Cosmo Mamoorian, does the selling. His wife’s name is Hannah, and she writes the Big Hannah children’s books. These are the only people you have to keep straight. Barbara, Cosmo, Hannah & me.

  So, Barbara and I were eating dinner one night and she said, “Linus Pauley.” Obviously she said it in some context, but all you have to know is that she said it, “Linus Pauley.” This is what starts the whole thing rolling.

  Barbara is not stupid. She’s a lot better read than me, for instance. She’s a college grad, whereas I got drafted out and never went back. But she sometimes gets names wrong. That’s no crime, but wait: when you tell her about it she doesn’t listen to you. She says “Carlton Heston.” She says “Johnson & Johnson” when she means “Masters & Johnson.” I used to correct her, pleasantly, but she never took even ten seconds to tidy up the files. If this isn’t the kind of thing that bothers you, you won’t appreciate how, over twenty years, like the chirpy chirp chirp of the cuckoo in your clock, this adds up, if not to actual torture, then at least to malicious ignorance. I held my breath for the echo of an “ing,” and even tried to convince myself that I had heard an “ing,” or could have heard an “ing,” in some better world than this one But no. And I must have been subtotaling ever since we got married, because this single tiny provocation did the trick. Tilt! Bingo! Major League marital atrocity! I, a passive, amiable guy with all the suppressed violence of Mister Rogers, suddenly got a righteous urge, so that my palms tingled, to slap her handsome, confident face, howl in her ear, pull on her hair like a bell ringer. I thought, Nuts to You, Lady. You want grounds for divorce? I’ll give you grounds for divorce. Etc., though not, of course, in so many words. This is the best I can do to reconstruct the crucial moment. It’s not perfect, but close enough.

  Much later when I explained it to Barbara she laughed at me. To this day she doesn’t know me at all, really. She called me an opportunist. “You were just looking for an excuse,” she said. Which is ridiculous, because then I would have had someone in mind, which I didn’t. I mean, what occurred to me, when she said “Pauley,” was not the desire to cheat, but the possibility that I could if I wanted to. There’s a world of difference. Of course, I’d always known it was literally possible to cheat, I’m not a moron, but now I knew it was actually possible. And besides, if I had been wanting to fool around, as Barbara pretends to believe, I wouldn’t have been wanting to do it “in general,” that doesn’t make any sense; I’d have wanted to do it with some particular woman. That’s like saying you’ve always wanted to fly, only not any special kind of plane; or, you’ve always wanted to travel, but you didn’t know where. Nobody does that, or not many people, anyway.

  Coriander Menard. Coriander Menard was my first mistress, if one afternoon makes a mistress. She can stand in for the rest. She was a part-time counter girl at the store; she was a child of a child of the sixties; she was a flake. I took her to a motel, a fact that kept her in a constant state of wonder. She kept saying, “I can’t believe this place.” “A vibrating bed! I can’t believe it.” “I can’t believe dirty movies on the TV! Can you believe that?” She was twenty years old, pretty in a big-eyed way, much too thin, brutally stupid, and creepy. When we were naked she said, “Let’s pretend we’re the last man and the last woman on earth.”

  I was hoping she meant something like “If I were the only girl in the world and you were the only boy.” But no. “Let’s pretend instead,” I said, “that we’re the first man and woman on earth.” This was a new one on her. (“I can’t believe you thought of this!”) Of course, I didn’t want to pretend anything. Barbara and I haven’t pretended anything in twenty years, and we never have any trouble. Barbara’s as regular as Big Ben. The whole thing was degrading. She latched onto the phrase “naked and unashamed” and repeated it and repeated it until I thought I would lose my mind. She never closed her eyes. She showed me my first multiple orgasm; it was not a pretty picture. By my count she came five times, and afterwards, hunting under the bed for her high-top sneaker, she patted my knee in an absent way and said, “Don’t feel bad.”

  There was more to Coriander Menard than this; lots more; but I wasn’t going to stick around to find out what it was.

  Then there were, believe it or not, two Barbaras, and a nice woman named Kelly. And then, at last, came Hannah; and this is where it really gets going.

  Cosmo Mamoorian looks exactly like he sounds. Hannah does too (actually I think we all do) but I’d better describe her anyway. She’s taller than me, lots taller than Cosmo; she must weigh as much as I do; her voice is almost as low as mine; she’s older than Barbara; she’s
got long, black and gray hair, so coarse and wiry that when she undoes the braid it springs out around her head like the business end of a huge broom. Now that may not sound appetizing, but believe me, Hannah is a very, very sexy woman. She’s got one of those larger-than-life deep-throated laughs that grabs you right between the legs. For years Barbara and I suspected she sometimes did exactly that to Cosmo when we went out to dinner: he would break off in mid-story, or mid-sentence, and look sort of dreamy and pop-eyed.

  Actually we always liked Cosmo better than his wife. Barbara said Hannah was theatrical and self-important, and always “on stage”: “the kind of woman with whom you can go just so far and no farther.” (Boy, was she wrong!) Barbara especially disliked Hannah’s books, all very expensive, and aimed at the 8–10 age group, and all illustrated by Harry Kong, a sick cartoonist who hit paydirt when he switched to illustrating for Hannah. Critics and psychiatrists loved his stuff, which turned all of Hannah’s monsters, who were already pretty frightening, into slobbering, bug-eyed perverts. Hannah never sold a manuscript until she teamed up with Kong. “My Evil Ones,” Hannah said, “put the child directly in touch with his most crippling fears.” Our sons were in their teens when Hannah made it big, which was lucky. Had they been younger, Hannah, childless herself, would have wanted to use them as guinea pigs. Like all bullies, Hannah had terrific staying power.

  So the first move was hers, an under-the-table grope at Mamma Giso’s, which I was so sure was an innocent mistake that I told Barbara about it later, and we both had a satisfying “suspicions confirmed” type of laugh. By this time I had pretty much given up on adultery and was feeling well off and pretty close to my wife. Barbara’s quite a woman. As I may have mentioned, she’s smarter than I am, but that’s all right, because she’s never taken advantage—certainly not in public, to show me up, and never even in private, although she must know it as well as I do. It’s always there, but she’d never use it. That’s how smart she is.