Willing

by Scott Spencer

  And then it happened. Like so many of life’s disasters, it came at a quiet moment. We were shopping for food at a nearby market. I was pushing the cart—half size and in surprisingly poor repair for a store selling cherries at fourteen dollars a pound—and Deirdre was picking out the items we were going to have for that night’s dinner. We were going to make a pasta to go along with some fresh halibut; she pulled a can of tomatoes off the shelf and seemed to be studying the label. Her back was to me, and I assumed she was reading the ingredients, as she was generally careful to avoid products that were laced with preservatives or corn fructose. I found myself distracted by a display of carving knives on the other side of the aisle, lethal-looking things encased in heavy plastic. They looked as if they could be used not only for slicing steak but butchering cows. I remember thinking We should get some really good knives and get serious about living together, and when I turned around again Deirdre was still studying that tomato can. I wondered how long it could take her to read a can of crushed tomatoes, she who could zip through two hundred pages on the Sino-Soviet split in an hour. Are you okay? I asked her. At first she didn’t answer, but then she shook her head. Her shoulders moved up and then down. Her voluminous red curls swung back and forth, and when she finally turned toward me her face was luminescent with fright. She was breathing through her mouth. You’re going to hate me, she said, and you should, you should; I am such an idiot. I felt like a child watching helplessly while everything falls apart. For all of my stupid tedious jealousy, I had never really believed Deirdre would deceive me. I had been playing a terrible emotional game, and now all my worst case scenarios were coming true. I’ve been seeing someone, his name is Osip, and I don’t know what I want to happen at this point. I turned away from her, stared at the little display of knives. His name is Osip? How dare she say his name! It would have been all right to tell me if I asked, but I hadn’t asked. You dope, I said, you’re never supposed to say the name.

  That night, we made dinner anyhow, set the table, and sat across from each other—we thought if we acted normally it would make things easier. But as soon as we were seated, Deirdre burst into tears. And through tears that seemed genuine to me, she said she was glad she was finally telling the truth, and that she cared too much about me to lie any longer, and I said Whatever happened to carrying the terrible secret? You just keep it to yourself, let it rot you out. You carry the weight even if it drags you right down into hell! I didn’t really want to give her a hard time but it was clear to me that even as she wept and apologized, she was maintaining her power—the power of being the one who knew everything, the power of knowing what it felt like when she and Osip went at it, the power of knowing what took place last Thursday afternoon, last Saturday morning, the power of Time, which is the power of God.

  I tried to grasp hold of what tiny fizzling little mitigating remarks she threw in as she sobbed out her confession. She said that while she was attracted to Osip, she didn’t really like him very much, but the more I thought about that the worse it made things. It made the connection seem compellingly dark, compulsive, and sexual. Then she said Osip had a mean streak a mile wide and could barely speak English, and he was actually sort of married, to a woman he had left in a mental hospital in Moscow, and he, finally, was not even going to stay in New York much longer. The general tenor of the remarks she threw my way was that I was a known commodity, tested, and branded, while Osip was something available only on the black market. I was Tylenol and he was heroin, to which I thought Thank you very much for the underwhelming praise. Don’t you fucking know me well enough to realize I would rather be heroin?

  What I ought to have done was marshal what dignity I had left and walk slowly into the bedroom, pack my bags, and leave. Or maybe I ought to have looked at my watch and said You have an hour to get your stuff together and get out of here. Leave your keys in the blue bowl next to the door. But I didn’t. What I did instead was try to get her into bed. Sorrow carried within it a backlash of desire, sheer savage lust, as if with a few violent thrusts I could cleanse myself of the loss, and cleanse Deirdre of the memory of all she had done, to inhabit her totally and force out every other thing.

  And so, with our stinking halibut still on our plates, I reached across the table for Deirdre, as if I could just fuck our troubles away, bump and grind my way back into contention, back into the great game of life. We went to bed; we made love; she cried some more; I stared stoically ahead. Nothing was solved; nothing was salvaged.

  And then the real hell began. We continued to live together, and I was plunged into a wretched state. We became roommates, and I became more wretched still. It was as if everything that had once been mine had been picked up and carried away by a tornado, and I was simply glad to be alive, and wholly unable to move. I was just going to sit there pretending the storm had never hit. Wretcheder and wretcheder. We were condemned to cross paths in the apartment while trying to make ourselves smaller and quieter. Our shame was razor wire; one false step and we’d be bleeding. We both wished the other were someplace else, a thousand or so miles away. It was madness of the grimmest, most degrading sort to continue living together on Fifty-fourth Street but neither of us had anyplace else to go. We were both looking for an affordable place to move to, but I thought she should be the one who moved, and she probably thought it should be me.

  In the weeks following Deirdre’s supermarket confession, I worked feverishly. I believed what Freud said about the two things you need for happiness: Love and Work. Now that the former had let me down, I doubly committed myself to the latter. I told myself and others that the plan was to make enough money to move out of my befouled Fifty-fourth Street nest, though ever making that kind of money in my chosen field seemed unlikely.

  About half of my modest annual income as a freelancer came from writing company reports for a few corporations where I had old college friends. The rest came from articles, profiles, a travel piece when I lucked into one, more celebrity journalism than I would have liked, but for which I was generally grateful. Despite the compromised nature of my particular craft, I held on to a secret ambition to one day create something extraordinary.

  Sometimes I wrote pieces that called for my putting myself through some arduous or strange experience. I lived for two weeks in a retirement community in Florida. I got a job in a puppy mill in New Hampshire. I took a menial position in a firm called Swept Away, which did the night maintenance in several downtown banks and brokerage houses—this turned out to be my most affecting piece. I found myself oddly and unexpectedly touched by the little signs of humanity left behind by the bond salesmen and computer programmers; the family snapshots, the little Buddhas, the list of nearby AA meetings, even the candy wrappers and rosary beads seemed steeped in pathos in the stark fluorescent light of those empty glass boxes.

  Shortly after Deirdre dropped the Scarlet A Bomb on me, Esquire finally ran a piece I had submitted eight months earlier, about having four fathers.

  FOUR KINGS

  Chances are I haven’t broken any more laws than you. Nevertheless, I have had four surnames. I have been Avery Kaplan, Avery Kearney, Avery Blake, and the byline you see on this piece: Avery Jankowsky.

  Which brings me to my mother. My mother is what used to be called the Marrying Kind—though I think that tag was meant for men who adapted easily to the married state. Her first marriage, to Theodore Kaplan, took place three days after her eighteenth birthday. She came from a nonreligious but fiercely Jewish family. Both her parents believed that every Jewish child born postwar was spit in Hitler’s eye, and even though they were poor and lived in five warrenlike rooms, more of a dovecote than an apartment, in a part of Brooklyn called Ditmas Park, my grandparents had nine children, concluding with so-called Irish twins, of which my mother was the distaff side. My mother’s father, Grandpa Sam, delivered for Dr. Brown’s soda; his back was always sore; his hands were a catastrophe of bruises and breaks. Grandmama Doris did piecework at home for a mean-spirited
cousin who sold aprons with funny sayings on them.

  Which is to say that love my mother as they surely did, Sam and Doris Cohen were exhausted, their finances were stretched thin, and they were not sorry to see her go. Each of those children might have been spit in Hitler’s eye, but, let’s face it, spitting at Adolf was easy compared to what’s involved in raising a family that size. The shoes, the pants, the fevers, the meals, the mess, the drama, the worry, the tedium, the feuds, the tears. Not all of the children married; not all of them moved. So when little Naomi was being courted by my father—an Upper West Side boy, a stranger, not terribly polite, with no great prospects, a couple years of college, a vague desire to travel—he escaped all scrutiny. And when, after a few weeks of courtship that included who knew how much sex, because this was the Golden Age of Sex, she announced she was going to marry Ted Kaplan, no objections were raised. Good luck, good-bye, don’t let the door hit your tuchis on the way out! Was this hasty sendoff, this mumbled mazel tov, wounding to my mother? Did it set her on her path as a serial matrimonialist?

  In fairness to her—and, believe me, I want nothing more than to be fair to her—her first and fourth marriages did not result in divorce. My first father killed himself—gently, I might add, asphyxiating himself in our garage. (I still wonder why a Jew, just thirty years past the Shoah, would choose to gas himself.) My fourth father, whose name I now bear, died of congestive heart failure.

  This was my final father. If my mother remarries again, I am now well past the age when I can be either forced or persuaded to give up my name. My second name, Kearney, was slapped over Kaplan like hastily hung wallpaper in a room in which a crime has been committed. Not only did my father gas himself, but he did this terrible thing to himself in direct response to having been caught with his hand deep in his company’s till, a flag and banner manufacturing company he co-owned with none other than Andrew Kearney, my second father…

  Etcetera. I hadn’t spent much time agonizing about cannibalizing my personal life for a few inches of copy and enough of a payday to make rent for four months. I didn’t feel I was prostituting myself; I was only using the materials at hand. But my mother, who, in the past, when she happened to see something I had written, could usually be counted on for a polite little note or a phone call, was furious with me and experienced the article not only as a breach of good taste but as a thoughtless betrayal of her. Some things are personal, Avery, she’d said to me over the telephone, I never thought you would compromise the privacy and dignity of your family just to make money. So how are things in Costa Rica? I asked her. She was down there for the duration, living comfortably on her share of the Jankowsky Cross. It’s none of your goddamned business, you little brat. Mom, come on, there’s no need for that. Don’t you tell me what there’s a need for. You better watch out, Avery, and I mean it. I’m going to come up there and really let you have it. You’ve gone too far this time, you really have. I’ve already spoken to my attorney, and he tells me that suing is going to be too hard, but there’s more to life than lawsuits and you better believe it—I’m going to make you sorry you ever did such a thing to me. Me! Who gave up half her life to take care of you. How could you do this to me? Your one and only mother? Haven’t you ever noticed that everyone in your life has found a way to get rid of you, and I’m the only one still here?

  2

  IN THE DAYS following Deirdre’s confession, I had little luck standing up to the hurricane of grief and shame—let’s say the levees of the ego did not hold. I was stuck on the shaky idea that something—something—had to be done to make what had happened between Deirdre and Osip not to have happened. I wanted her to be unfucked. In this insanity I found kinship with certain species of dragonfly, whose genitalia are veritable Rube Goldberg inventions, a penile balloon with sticky hooks and a scouring brush added on for good measure—all designed to remove the sperm of rival dragonflies, in a tireless competition for the prime real estate of one female’s reproductive organ. But of course the nice thing, for the dragonflies, is that there are others, billions of other dragonflies, they all look good, and you can try your luck elsewhere. The only thing you can’t do is mope around; evolution makes short shrift of the mopers. You only have so much time and then: your DNA dies with you. The body is not here to write celebrity profiles or try new restaurants; the body is here to reproduce.

  Forget the flies. We’ve got closer relatives designed for unfucking. The bush babies, our little pocket-sized cousins, scurrying up and down the dark green trees, their eyes large and glassy, with a kind of imbecilic shine. The bush babies have elaborate genitalia, crooked, twisting Roto-Rooter penises a riot of spikes and knobs, so the males might compensate for the waywardness of female desire by literally going after the ejaculate left behind by other males, piercing it, hooking it, scrubbing it out, and thereby increasing the chances that I, King of the bush babies, I, the Inimitable bush baby, my seed will be the one to germinate.

  Yet there are not even any myths about human women who have had sex suddenly having that act erased. When you are fucked you are fucked is the one thing we have always been able to agree upon—not when you’re dead you’re dead, not if dreams can or cannot foretell the future, not if we are or are not ruled by the stars, not if we are or are not destined to be reborn and have, in fact, already been popping up here and there throughout history, once, say, as a baker, then a banker, then a biker, then as a water moccasin. All of these possibilities have been put forward, sometimes strenuously proposed, sometimes just as strenuously denounced. But whether or not once you’ve been fucked you do or do not remain fucked has never been subject to debate.

  I could not make it unhappen. All I could do was build a wall between what she had done and the pain it was causing me. As to what that wall would be made of—I already had the first component, Work. The second, which I had initially thought was Love, might have to be Sex, a bit of last-minute substitution with which all builders are familiar, because you have to know how to use the materials at hand. Yet these two ingredients—only one of which was actually at hand—were not in themselves sufficient for the wall. The wall needed something to hold it together; it needed cement; it needed insulation: it needed money.

  Money, money. I had never needed it more. My yearly take from the Jankowsky Cross was but a mockery of my needs. When it arrived I thought about taking the whole thing—less than five grand, unfortunately—and going over to Atlantic City or maybe out to that Indian casino over in Connecticut and putting it all on red at the roulette table, and doubling it with one spin of the wheel. (Some people in difficult straits ask themselves What would Jesus do? I, however, was wondering What would Dostoyevsky do?) But even if I won, my money woes would still be on me like that proverbial stink on a monkey. All you got with a red/black bet for five thousand was even money, another five thousand, and even if I took the whole ten thousand and let it ride, and won again, I’d only have twenty, and if I let that ride and won again, I’d be up to forty thousand, a nice piece of change, to be sure, but mere pocket lint when it came to buying an apartment in New York, setting down roots, living a life of some dignity and stability. For that I would have to win twenty times in a row—and there was no chance of that, none whatsoever.

  I sat at my silver and peach Piedmont computer, trying to generate ideas for work. I sent my poor agent, Andrew Post, a flurry of pitches, or pitches for pitches, most of them, I see now, insane and unsellable. Nearly all my ideas for articles—as well as a couple of TV pilots that struck me as sure things, even though I knew nothing about writing a TV pilot and almost nothing about television itself—involved putting myself into some kind of jeopardy or predicament. A couple were attempts to get some editor to assign me a task I was otherwise trying mightily to resist. For instance, I proposed writing a piece called “Stalking,” in which I would “assume the identity” of someone obsessively following someone, say, a woman, say, just for the sake of illustration, a woman with whom the writer either is or has
been involved, and what it is like to trail after her, making deductions as to her activities based on her movements around the city, how close you can get to the person you’re stalking, what taxi drivers actually say and do when you tell them urgently to Follow that cab, how to cope with the inevitable human dilemmas you encounter along the way, such as where to get out of the rain, where to take a leak, what to say and do if you happen to run into someone you know and they are curious about what you’re doing walking around with your jacket collar up and your Mets cap pulled down over your eyes. I also proposed a piece about interviewing and then hiring a private detective to follow and photograph someone; the pitch included an estimate of what I would need by way of expenses, since it wasn’t likely I could put various New York investigators through their paces free of charge.

  Not all of my ideas were so transparently wounded. I thought it might be interesting if I went out to Colorado and hung out with the guys who were building a see-through walkway over the Grand Canyon. I wanted to cover one of the Enron trials. I proposed profiles of Mark Knopfler, Judy Pfaff, Francine Prose, Paula Abdul, Randy Newman, Gillian Welch—at one point I just started writing down the names of musicians whose work was in my iPod and then doing an Internet search to see if anything had recently been published about them. And not all of my ideas were sane. I spent hours working up a pitch for some enterprising, imaginative editor to send me to Costa Rica, where I would confront my mother and somehow fathom the mystery of her multiple marriages—but was there really such a mystery to untangle? Anyhow, these were coals I had already thoroughly raked in “Four Kings.” Now they were cold.