The Morels

by Christopher Hacker

  They happily agreed to be filmed and seemed eager for us to return with our equipment. The idea of being in the spotlight activated something in Cynthia. She became fluttery in the eyelids, hands going up to her hair and down to her clothes, adjusting the fit here and there. “I don’t know what I’ll wear,” she said.

  “Something that shows off your rack. She’s got quite a pair, even at her age.”

  We rented production-quality gear on Dave’s credit card—the not-so-secret industry secret was to rent for two days beginning Friday; as the rental houses were closed on Sunday, you got the third day for free.

  When we returned the following Friday, Cynthia was outside at a folding table with her jewelry. Similar to the piece on the postcard, the earrings and bracelets and necklaces and pendants were all made from teeth strung through bent paper clips. Creepy, but also kind of beautiful.

  “I found a box of Doc’s old stuff and just went from there,” she said.

  The four of us chatted while she fiddled with the arrangements. People stopped and looked, but Cynthia ignored them.

  “Let’s go inside,” she said.

  “Don’t you need somebody to mind this stuff?”

  “It’s fine. People like looking at it, but no one actually wants it.”

  It seemed they’d straightened up for the occasion, which for some reason I found touching, and set two armchairs next to each other facing the sidewalk, so that after we unpacked our equipment and the Morels took their seats, it appeared that, in answering our questions, they were addressing not only us and the camera but all of New York City’s passersby.

  It was agreed that Dave would handle the sound, Suriyaarachchi would handle the camera, and I would conduct the interview. As this was our first real break in the project and the first footage we would get, we spent a great deal of time planning in the days leading up to it. We watched Grey Gardens several times and all of Errol Morris’s films. We brainstormed a list of questions that we hoped would bring out their craziness. We wanted to hear about the wild seventies, their theory of parenting, the Permission Room, and what Cynthia fed her six cats.

  But, in the end, they insisted on answering their own questions and, in so doing, related to me, to us, to the city at large, the peculiar story of their lives.

  11

  WARHOL

  IT BEGINS IN NEW JERSEY, early fifties. Doc is a husband. The wife is not Cynthia but rather someone named Dolores. They have married young, Doc and Dolores, when he is just out of dental school. Happy years, these first living in Trenton, an apartment near Cadwalader Park. Dolores bears him a daughter. The birth of their second coincides with a move out to the new suburbs of Plainfield. This occasion also marks for Doc an end to that happy period in their lives. This second child, a boy, brings with him a deep and lasting depression for Dolores. Doc comes home to find four-year-old Sarah racing around the house naked, infant Benji in his crib, screaming. His wife can be found in bed with a pillow over her head, weeping. When they leave the children with her parents for the evening and go out to a nice restaurant, she ends up staring mutely into her salad, weeping. When they invite their friends over for drinks, Dolores ends up locked in the bathroom, weeping. When they drive to her parents’ for the holidays, Dolores won’t get out of the car because she doesn’t want her parents to see her weeping. Benji is weeping; little Sarah is weeping; the whole goddamned car is weeping! Dolores is not unhappy with Doc; in fact, as she tells him again and again, he is the only thing keeping her sane. If she didn’t have him, she just didn’t know what she might do.

  Dolores had always been needy; it was what drew him to her in the first place—that and her enormous breasts. In college, her neediness was romantic. He’d sneak her into his dorm room, and she would refuse to leave. He humored this, enjoyed it even. It appealed to an essential quality in his maleness to be relied on like this, to be needed—that her need bordered on dangerous? All the better, all the more exciting. Before the kids, before the suburbs, when they were free—they’d indulge in weeklong “vacations” in which they wouldn’t leave their Trenton apartment. Out, he would forage the grocery for ice-cream sandwiches—fifteen minutes, ten if he hurried—and when he returned Dolores would pounce on him, and they’d have sex; she would tell him that these minutes he’d been gone had been too long away from her. After sex, they would pick up the book they’d been reading aloud to each other—Dickens or Brontë—an ecstatic mixture of gloom and comfort that, in those first years, felt so much like the love they read to each other about. After a men’s night out, having stayed overnight on a buddy’s couch, he came back to the apartment to find Dolores had downed a bottle of aspirin with an entire bottle of cough syrup. The cough syrup in those days had codeine. She was in a near coma, facedown in a pool of vomit. This incident should have sobered him, should have warned him against kids. But he was in love.

  Over the years, through the birth of their two children, the move to the house, the start-up of his practice, there were moments of peace, of happiness. But the neediness, the dependency, out here in the suburbs, calcified into a jealousy of all people with whom he came into contact—men and women—but women especially: women patients, other mothers, her own women friends. His receptionist becomes a particular point of contention, and after firing three, he decides to live without. Where he worked, back then it was difficult to find a man with that particular skill set who would work for what he could afford to pay.

  His home becomes a prison, his wife the warden. They are alienated from their friends. The children spend increasing amounts of time at their classmates’ houses. Home life is reduced to minor repairs and fighting with Dolores. His one solace is his practice, and he spends as much time there as he can, booking appointments as early as six forty-five in the morning and as late as seven forty-five in the evening. She is jealous of his patients, too, the time he spends with them, in intimate contact with their open mouths, their tongues, their pain. What do you want from me! he exclaims. Are you married to me or your patients, she asks. He points up, which has become in this recurring argument shorthand for the mortgage, the maintenance, the food and clothing and general well-being his salary can afford; and in response she gives her shorthand, a different finger.

  “It wasn’t even like she wanted to spend time with me anymore,” Doc said.

  This need for him to account for his whereabouts replaced her need for his actual presence. Jealousy replaced desire.

  “And these were arguments I couldn’t win, of course. The conversations were rigged. They were torture. Really, they were a form of psychological torture. There’s a woman in the supermarket parking lot. Drop-dead gorgeous, dressed to kill. ‘You think she’s pretty,’ she says. First off, it’s not a question. It’s a statement, so already I’m trapped. To deny it is to disagree with her. But to agree with her is to admit feelings for another woman. Second, it’s a fact; she is pretty. To deny this is to deny your senses. Like if it was raining and Dolores had said, ‘It’s raining.’ Of course it’s raining! You bet your ass it’s raining! So I offer a noncommittal, ‘She’s okay.’ Not good enough. She wants a real opinion, a firm opinion. Then it’s on to ‘Would you have sex with her?’ ”

  It’s no use. Whether or not he engages her in the discussions, the outing would be ruined, and depending on his performance, later there’d be broken dishes or appliances. A best-case scenario is a black hole of days without speaking to each other.

  Inevitably, this suspicion becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Her statements—you don’t love me anymore; I repulse you; you want to have sex with her—become facts.

  “You know, Doc,” Cynthia interjected, “it’s entirely possible that she was just ferreting out something you were already feeling. Maybe the way you looked at women was dangerous in some way. Some men look—and that’s it, nothing threatening about it. Other men look, and it’s predatory, a prelude to something else. You don’t think it’s possible that she was attuned to things about your
self and your marriage that you weren’t ready to admit—she wasn’t just helping you along?”

  Doc shrugged. “Whatever the case, I found that sex—and I was never an especially horny guy before this—was suddenly all I could think about. Every girl on the street or who’d pass through my office, every magazine ad—it was as though her jealousy had unleashed this in me, had woken up something in me that had lain still for a long time. I was all of a sudden masturbating three or four times a day. It used to be a couple times a week, most, but no more. And before I was okay with having sex with my wife—our sex was fine, in spite of everything. Not fantastic, but fine, perfectly fine. Well, no more. ‘I repulse you,’ she said. Well, yeah, now she repulsed me. ‘You don’t love me anymore.’ It was true. I wanted to leave, but I was afraid of what she might do. At this point Sarah was fifteen, Benji was eleven. Mama’s boy and Daddy’s little girl. This was where the lines were drawn.”

  That year, Sarah and Dolores were having a particularly difficult time, and perhaps as a way of hurting her mother, or maybe just out of loyalty to Doc, she began to take particular interest in what she saw as her father’s plight and would relate daily updates to her best friend, Cynthia.

  Cynthia said, “Sarah and I lived across the street from each other. She spent many nights at my house—and I spent many afternoons at hers, listening to Sarah tell the saga of her poor daddy and her evil mother. To tell you the truth, I tuned it out. They were grown-ups: What did I care? I had bigger things on my mind. It was 1967. I wanted out, I was going to the city. I was going to be an Andy Warhol superstar! There had been a screening of Chelsea Girls at the old Criterion. Do you remember the Criterion?”

  “Sure. Beautiful Greek columns outside.”

  “It was a big event, this screening. Rated X. The manager was young—he’d been a star of our drama club. God, what was his name? Rudy Jackalone. Jackalane? And he had notions of making our theater into a kind of art house. Ha! They got halfway through the film that first night before the cops raided the place, confiscated the film, arrested half-a-dozen people. On obscenity charges. It made quite an impression on me, and I thought if this is what art can do, cause a stir like this—everyone was talking about it, months after—then count me in! I learned all I could about him, about the Factory. Earlier that year, or the year before, he had staged a happening. He called it the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. I read about it in the library—they had bound back issues of the major newspapers. There in one volume, six months’ worth of news, and I could see it just reverberate out, in stop motion, column after column. Like what happened in our town, but on a much-larger scale, from the announcement the day before to the review of it in the arts section, to the op-ed pieces that appeared weeks later, how mention of it showed up on the fashion page, a music review, a piece about local politics. It really did explode. That one event reverberated outward for six months, a year, reaching as far out as here, our small New Jersey theater, and who knows how much farther out? Well, that was it—I wanted to be at the center of the explosion. I sent away for a silver wig and patent-leather boots from a mail-order place in Van Nuys, California. Remember those?”

  “You looked like a Forty-Second Street hooker.”

  “I don’t remember you complaining back then.”

  “Who’s complaining?”

  “I had that Velvet Underground record, the one with the banana on the cover? I played that album constantly. It drove my mother nuts. She banned it, so I had to come over to Sarah’s and play it. Sarah had no idea. She was innocent. She thought I had a crush on Andy Warhol. She wanted to make this some teenage heartthrob thing, which was sweet. She decided that she was in love with Lou Reed—as though these were the Beatles we were swooning over. But it wasn’t about that for me. Not at all. I mean, Blow Job was a movie in which Warhol films DeVeren Bookwalter getting a blow job. His oxidation paintings were done by putting copper paint on a canvas and then inviting underage boys drunk on wine to piss on them. This wasn’t about love—this was about freedom! I felt so much older than Sarah, though we were the same age. I want to say she looked up to me, but that may just be fantasy. I don’t know if she really knew what to make of me. We would lie there in her room—she would be on the floor on her back—and she would tell me about her poor father and her evil mother, and I would sit in front of her dressing-table mirror, puckering up, putting on makeup, getting myself ready for my fifteen minutes. When did I first notice Doc?”

  (This is what she would do—what they both did—throughout the interview: ask themselves questions and then proceed to answer them.)

  “I think it was when I caught him watching me undress. That time I think it made me angry. Later, I thought maybe I was angry, not because my best friend’s dad was a pervert violating my privacy, but because I felt that my privacy was being violated. You see, I thought I was enlightened. Here I was, walking the walk in these boots and that wig and some nobody watching me undress has the power to send me scurrying into another room! How bourgeois can you get? I don’t know for how long he’d been watching me—”

  “A while—”

  “—before I noticed. But after I noticed, I thought, Okay, let’s give the old perv a show. Why not?”

  “Our houses were directly across the street from each other, and all of the houses in the neighborhood were the same—”

  “So from my bedroom window I could see Doc there watching me from the upstairs bathroom. I don’t know what you were doing in there while you were watching me. You weren’t brushing your teeth, that’s for sure.”

  “I was masturbating.”

  “There. He was masturbating. I found it terribly exciting, to tell you the truth. I did it as a kind of lark, a what-the-hell sort of thing at first, but it was tremendously arousing. My whole body came awake, my skin was alive. I felt nervous and self-conscious and sick to my stomach, but, oh, terribly excited! When did we first fuck?”

  “She’s no romantic, this one. Don’t you remember?”

  “Oh, I remember. I just think you should tell it.”

  “She showed up—for an appointment. I saw her there in the waiting room—those boots and that hair—I mean there was no mistaking her, she was one of a kind. The kids were beginning to dress wilder by then, long hair, fatigues, and those long shapeless flower dresses—it was like your generation was trying on costumes.”

  “We were. We were trying to figure out who we were. It’s no different now.”

  “It is different. It all comes prepackaged.”

  “Okay, whatever, moving on—you don’t want to get him started.”

  “I could barely contain myself with some of the girls that came in, girls who feared the needle, girls I knew from the age of six and seven, to them I’m the same old white coat, the same old nightmare in a face mask, but to me they’re—in that chair, grown up, vulnerable, beautiful, eyes closed, mouth open, supplicating. That’s what it was, almost religious, a blessed offering. They had no idea. But this one, sitting in the waiting room. She knows me. She’s seen my desire, stoked it even. She puts down the magazine she’s reading when she sees me, gets up. ‘Right this way, Miss Bonjorni.’ ”

  “The appointment had been made for me a ways back. My mother, she took care of those things. I was going to cancel it, but then I thought—why? Let’s see what happens. I knew I was going to fuck him.”

  “She knew. I didn’t know. I left her in the chair for—”

  “An hour!”

  “While I tried to pull myself together in the bathroom. I brushed my teeth several times. I flossed. I gargled mouthwash. I was very paranoid about my breath, I remember. And my hands. I scrubbed my fingernails. I filed them down and buffed them. I don’t know why—I wore gloves. I come back in. ‘And how are we doing today?’ All formality. ‘Lean back for me, that’s it. Rinse, if you please.’ I had an assistant, where was she? She wasn’t there that day, that’s right, which must have been why I was so nervous. With my assistant around, it would have
been an entirely different encounter.”

  “I would still have fucked you.”

  “How could you?”

  “I would have found a way.”

  “She’s very persistent. She would have found a way. So, routine examination, all tact, very gentle with the instruments. Nothing is said out loud that betrays our, um, relationship. It’s all in the eyes. I say, ‘That wasn’t so bad,’ and she says, ‘It was fine,’ and it’s the eyes that say everything. ‘You’re a bit too big for a lollipop, I think,’ and she says, ‘I’ll take one anyway, if you don’t mind.’ We did it right there on that chair.”

  “It wasn’t the most comfortable place to have sex.”

  “It was very awkward.”

  “Knocked over a tray of tools, hit my funny bone on the sink. Banged my head on that articulating lamp. But it did the trick.”

  “For you. It was over very quickly.”

  “That’s always been a problem for me. Imagination gets me too excited for the actual deed.”

  “I made a follow-up appointment, which I ended up canceling.”

  Back at home, Doc waits by the bathroom window, but in the days that follow the curtains in Cynthia’s room remain shut. He thought that the encounter in the chair was the start of something, but for Cynthia it was the end of it.