“Joyce who?” he asked, popping in beside her.
“Well, your interest in language.”
It was clear to Pete how much tutoring she herself needed. After caressing her persuasively for a bit, he took her hand in his and guided it gently to what he called “the hardened sinner.” It was after he had spent himself that he realized how she was shivering, and became once more tender. “Why, what have we here. There, there.” He gathered her close into his arms, and was so solicitous that before she knew it he had appeased himself again. It was, all in all, though, not as bad as she had feared. Tillie had been overprepared for the Bridal Night by a mother given to the warning, “It’s something every woman has to go through.” And if Tillie had taken rather the inherited attitude of being stripped for surgery, she could now enjoy the sense of the operation’s having proved a success.
She was a little dismayed by Pete’s quick recovery. He was evidently not one to loiter with soft endearments in what the sex manuals called the Afterglow. He returned unclothed to the kitchen to whip them up a little jetsonflots. That was all right. The plate of largely unidentifiable odds and ends he had dug out of the icebox were brought to her, and, she lying in the bed with the sheet to her chin and he sitting on it side-saddle, they washed their snacks down with cold beer. Then he waddled away into the living room, where through the open door she could watch him again sitting at the piano with his back to her, playing Twelfth Street Rag at, if anything, even dizzier speeds than before. He finished with the flourish, faced her with a concert-hall bow, and came back to her applause. The hardened sinner drooped with contrition now, halfway to his knees. She no longer felt sorry for him; he just seemed to have three legs of unequal length, instead of two. “Isn’t that more than you need?” He gave the vague prudential grunt with which men try to acknowledge a compliment without looking too utterly like an ass, and removed the plate of midnight debris from her chest and set it aside on a table. It was amazing how quickly you became sophisticated. Our dear Tillie, once so up-tight, yes, fairly creaking with inhibitions, was now liberated, wide open to sex and its vested humors. Able to enjoy Pete’s story about a country doctor he swore he had known, who went around lecturing to youth groups on the evils of masturbation, advising any boy who practiced it to get a firm grip on himself. Tillie recalled the newspaper headline: “Bishop withdraws at birth control conference.” Pete said it was people who didn’t know what they were saying who spread the real sunshine. They were worth a hundred of your malicious wits.
Tillie closed her eyes, and now, smoothing the sheet to either side of her like a contented convalescent, had a very sweet sensation indeed.
She had a déjà vu. That is normally a phenomenon so characteristic only of the very young that to have one after thirty is rare. She had not had one in years. The moment was like recovering her girlhood, rather than losing it. Thus her delight at having absolutely known, as Pete turned away with the plate, that he was going to say: “Look, I don’t want to feel guilty about something. But are my suspicions correct?”
“Well, I like to think of a line from Hart Crane. The ‘Powhatan’s Daughter’ section of The Bridge, you know. ‘And she is virgin to the last of men.’”
“He the one who goes ape with the ink?”
“Yes. You’ve read him then?”
“I doubt whether you could call it that. Something I prolly saw in a paperback I picked up in an airport.”
“I suppose Beowulf is more your speed.”
“No, I haven’t read him either.”
“Silly, it’s the name of the poem, not the poet.”
“Who wrote it?”
“We don’t know.”
“Then nobody’s one up. But I want you to know how grateful I feel, hell, that’s not the word, well, yes, why not—grateful, and a little guilty,” he said and lowered his eyes in shame, to hide his smug expression, prolly.
Well, Diary, he’s not one of your dried-up intellectuals, always with their nose in a book—hah! not him—always analyzing everything to a fare-thee-well, she would mentally scribble while she buffed her nails or rinsed out a pair of hose. He doesn’t anatomize and define everything till there’s no fun left at all in it, including double talk. He doesn’t know that’s a series of pleasurable unexpected epistemological suspensions. Why should he? He lost twenty clams on the election, in which he thus had more interest than I had thought … But getting back to the fun, he doesn’t destroy it by vivisecting it, he is fun. After a movie we had a sandwich at one of those Prexy joints that have the slogan, “The Hamburger with a college education.” “Mine’s a dropout,” mutters he, lifting the bun from an underdone patty. Adjacent diners in stitches.
She continued to sleep with him to prove that she wasn’t promiscuous, as a single fling would have done. He was often short of funds those days, thanks, he said, to his saving so much a week toward a car of his own. Tillie was working at the time in a producer’s office, and sometimes took him out to dinner when he was broke. Once she insisted on their trying the Chinese restaurant, where he found all the wall mirrors unnerving. He said he never looked into mirrors, or had his picture taken if he could help it, “out of vanity.” She assured him that he was handsomer than he looked, just as Bartók’s music is better than it sounds, tapping him on the nose with a clean spoon as she did so. “Why do you have a glass hanging in your living room then?” she asked him playfully. He replied that it was an heirloom brought from the old country, which his mother made him promise to keep and treasure always. “That was before she died,” he said. Then he sighed and glanced at the ceiling. “Well, shall we go up to my place?”
Another déjà vu!
That was the night she saw a hairpin on the floor as she was drawing a stocking up. She didn’t use them. She picked it up and confronted him with it. “You have a cleaning woman come in, don’t you?”
“Yes, once a week.”
“Tell her to tidy herself up. Not to shed her hairpins all over the place.”
“Right.”
They sipped brandies as they gossiped, she in Pete’s robe and Pete in the raw. Gertrude and Burt Wilson were moving across the river into a New Jersey suburb where Jimmy Twitchell had a small country place. He had found theirs for them, and would undoubtedly “do” it for them—or for Gertrude, since Burt took no interest in his surroundings. Tillie and Pete laughed as they pictured him slumped in front of the television set while Gertrude and Jimmy twittered over fabrics and colors. Pete yawned, showing a single gleam of gold far back in his mouth. “Burt’s no intellectual,” he said. Then he rose and went over to the piano, where he played Twelfth Street Rag.
“Would—?” Tillie began when she thought he had finished, but it was only a pause between choruses. It took two or three more such attempts before she was at last able to say: “Would you like to meet my mother?”
“I already have.”
“Oh, you’ve been introduced to her, and you’ve heard her shuffling around in the back room while we try to neck, but that’s not really meeting her. I mean come to dinner. She’s crazy about ragtime. You’re just a buff, but it’s her past. Well then, how’s Friday?”
Mrs. Shilepsky, a thin gray women in a lilac dress of shot silk, pointed out, with a finger like an autumn twig, the merits of the tablecloth off of which they were eating the beef Stroganoff she and Tillie had fixed. It was an ancestral damask into which figures of the twelve disciples were embroidered, each of which Mrs. Shilepsky indicated by name as she rose and made a circuit of the table. Pete lifted his plate to discover Judas Iscariot underneath it. The cloth had been exhumed from a trunk for the occasion. “A trunk, Pete, not a drawer! So little do people care about these things any more.” Pete was relieved that it was the cloth that smelled of mothballs and not Mrs. Shilepsky, that is, her dress, though perhaps both did. Long before a complete orbit had regained for Mrs. Shilepsky her own seat at the head of the table, she had given off talking about the disciples and begun to mourn her
husband’s indifference to familial treasures and the continuity they embodied. He had run away, nowhere to be seen these twenty years: he had made the separate vacations permanent. “I’d leave him in a minute if I could locate him!” Mrs. Shilepsky cried as she circled along behind Pete. He ran a finger under his shirt collar, like a bad actor illustrating discomfiture. But after a few glasses of wine he loosened up, and then Tillie made her first request.
“Talk some double talk for Mother, Pete.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said. “People don’t understand that your thoughts are just as hersensnerth as theirs, even though you may not abiquine them with the same perambisnath.”
“Well, don’t, then,” Mrs. Shilepsky said, patting him on the hand as a guest who was not going to be forced to do anything he didn’t want to do. She turned her head to look into the kitchen before rising to clear the plates and fetch the dessert, a strawberry mousse whose virtues she extolled well before they had begun to eat it. “Tillie made this herself. Young brides these days don’t care about cooking. They’d just as soon feed their man something dumped out of a can, like a dog.” She enacted a graphic pantomime of someone slapping an overturned tin with the heel of the hand, in order to release its contents, assumed to be adhering to the sides. It was obvious where Tillie had got her dramatic ability. “Well, you won’t find this one afraid to pitch in, I can tell you that,” she said, pointing the finger straight at Tillie as though accusing her of something like probity or diligence or something else hopelessly out of fashion.
After the mousse, which was all it had been cracked up to be, Tillie clapped her hands gaily, as though they were all having more fun than might at first blush appear, and said, “Now Pete’s going to play the piano. Won’t you play something for us, Pete? Anything.”
Pete played Twelfth Street Rag, ripping it off at a rate possibly never before equaled except by members of the Philharmonic seeing how fast they could get through The Flight of the Bumblebee. Mrs. Shilepsky sat on the sofa spanking her palms together to the rhythm of it, rocking her head from side to side as she exclaimed, “I always liked swing.” When he had finished a couple of choruses he was prevailed on to do another and then still another, in lieu of anything else in the way of encores. Then Mrs. Shilepsky rose to excuse herself, but Pete insisted she stay a while. He had begun to find her interesting, if not downright amazing.
That left only the question of his improvidence still unsettled—but not for long. He greeted Tillie one evening with the news that he had been kicked upstairs. No longer need he spend his days in the streets, buttonholing strangers in order to quiz them, clipboard and pencil at the ready. Now he had an office job as a supervisor, collating and organizing the data gathered by others. The promotion included a raise, and he was already spending the money. He had his eye on a new Buick, or, if that was too expensive for his pocketbook, at least a new Chevrolet. “I wonder how much a convertible would cost me,” he said.
“That depends on what they’ll allow us on mine,” Tillie answered, levelly.
She resented being taken for granted. But romantic avowal was not Pete Seltzer’s speed, and certainly the tableau of a ceremonial proposal on bended knee was more than could reasonably be expected in this case—or any, for that matter. This was a more casual era, whatever the Dark Stranger of her Oberammergau dreams might think, raving and despairing at the garden gate, there in the upper-right-hand corner of her fancy. How casual was driven home to her by the manner in which such elements now fairly regarded as having ripened between these literal lovers were, at last, brought to harvest.
Mrs. Shilepsky spent a weekend with her sister in Ohio. Tillie invited Pete into her bed that Saturday night. Sunday morning she fixed them a late breakfast, over which they dallied between the sheets. After clearing their trays away, she took a shower, and then came back into the bedroom for her robe. Seeing Pete lying there, a cigarette in his hand, with an air of lolling contentment, she said something not intended as a wisecrack at all, which, however, the instant it was out, struck her as quite a funny commentary on what could certainly be called the new era. She later claimed it as a witticism.
“The honeymoon’s over,” she said, throwing a pillow at his head. “Time to get married.”
Three
Tillie did not invite the Wilsons to the wedding reception because it was kept purposely small, mostly just a few relatives, and for a number of other more incidental reasons, but mainly because of the poor judgment Gertrude had shown as a matchmaker.
Pairing two such utterly dissimilar people as Tillie and Pete could only be the product of the most brilliantly acute and incisive perception or downright obtuseness, and Gertrude Wilson was not the former. She was a notoriously indiscriminate meddler who liked playing God, and who did not mind playing with fire in order to do so provided others ran the risk of being burned. Tillie had elected to run that risk on her own, with her eyes open, and no escape hatches. Pairing her and Pete Seltzer had been dumb, given the matchmaker’s lack of access to, and therefore total ignorance of, the subtle, subterranean elements that finally made the union possible despite its surface absurdity. Perhaps every marriage involves close harmony, but a chord is not produced by bringing two hands blindly down upon the keyboard to see what we shall see, as Gertrude was always irresponsibly doing. If one was produced by chance in this case—if one of Huxley’s apes had thumped out Point Counter Point again—it was no thanks to Gertrude. No. On the basis of the facts available at the time, the blind date was a booboo. The emerging results had no bearing on the matter. Life abounds in instructive parallels, but one from the world of baseball would suffice.
A manager tells a batter to bunt. The batter swings instead and hits a home run, winning the game—and is fined a hundred dollars. The manager is quite right in taking that punitive measure. Given the assessable facts at the time—who’s pitching, on second, up next—taking a cut at the ball was dumb. So was doubling her off with Pete Seltzer, given the above facts. The odds had been wildly against anything coming of it (as they are against filling an inside straight in a poker game). The fact that you do fill it, or do happen to smack the apple out of the park, does not alter your stupidity in having banked on it. Besides, owing her husband to a woman with so little grasp of the human merchandise galled Tillie. She was fining Gertrude a hundred dollars.
Pete’s favorite literature, as it turned out, was outmoded sex advice. He combed the secondhand bookstores for old-fashioned marriage manuals, the cornier the better; the gems they yielded were, of course, more priceless the farther back in time you went. In his collection were treasures rarer than those landmarks of the unintentionally laughable, What a Young Man Ought to Know and What a Young Woman Ought to Know. In a musty jumble shop he had found a handbook called Preparing for Marriage, which had a chapter dealing with how a bride should behave on her honeymoon, parts of which he read aloud to Tillie on theirs—the real one. He had packed it in his bag to amuse her with. They were pounding through the night on the Canadian Pacific railroad, homeward bound after a week at Lake Louise. He lay in the upper berth of their bedroom while she did her nails in the lower.
“Listen to this,” Pete said, reading a passage on the subject of the wedding night. “‘Having, by disrobing, unveiled to her man that supreme work of the Creator, a Woman, let her permit herself to be gathered into his arms, and, having done so, kiss him full on the mouth. Then let her engage in some dallying byplay, such as teasing him with the fib that her wedding ring is lost, and asking him to look for it. Let her hide it in that other treasure, the ultimate flower that he seeks, nestled betwixt her thighs, and slowly, coyly lead him on with clues and subtle hints, blushing sweetly all the while—’ No, I’m serious. I mean it. I’m not making this up. Here, look for yourself.” He hung down like a bat from the upper, pointing to the passage in the book.
Tillie believed it. “Where should she hide it?” she teased, smiling at her inverted lord. “What in, Pete?”
For every organ or act for which a foul or a stilted word was the only existing alternative, he tried to think of a suitable one, from the phonetic and other standpoints. He kept a notebook of his creations, tirelessly changing, resubstituting, polishing and perfecting, till his scholarship yielded at last a finished dictionary, and they had a whole new glossary for “thrunkling,” as the act was now called. The word was deliberately devised to convey implications of muffled intimate uproar, of drunken bedded ecstasies, and so much more. It packed a host of related concepts such as throbbing, rumpling, tumbling, grunting, humping, pumping, and Christ knew what all. Even spelunking, with its Freudian overtones of darkly penetrated mammalian caverns, was embedded in it (though not always with the speaker’s awareness, of course, and possibly not even Pete’s, except on a subliminal level which was the important one). Poe had not put more painstaking and systematic thought into what combination of syllables would best communicate melancholy, before deciding on Ulalume for that.
When the lexicon was finished, he showed it to her with an air of long, exhausted inquiry, like one showing you a thesis that must be his life’s work. She read it through with nods and murmurs of approval. “Very good,” she said. “Some of these are marvelous. So expressive. Onomatopoeic.”
The Cat's Pajamas & Witch's Milk: Two Novels Page 18
