The Morels

by Christopher Hacker

  Doc is beside himself. Cynthia still comes over to spend time with Sarah, and Doc makes sure now to keep a Wednesday or Thursday afternoon appointment-free so that he might come home early and catch glimpses of her when she and his daughter come into the kitchen for a snack or the living room to watch American Bandstand. Dolores has discovered therapy and is getting out more, reconnecting with old friends, making new ones.

  Doc notices one day that Dolores has stopped focusing so intently on him. She tells him, I’ve come to realize that you’re not responsible for my happiness. It was her attempt at a blanket apology, some nonsense she had learned from her therapist, but it made him want to cry.

  How could he tell her that it was too late, the damage was already done?

  She takes a needlepoint class and stitches a slipcover that reads HOME SWEET HOME, with a picture of a house. She goes on a diet so she can fit into those outfits you used to love. She takes a class in Indian cooking at the local community college so they might introduce a little of the exotic into our lives. She no longer grills him on his whereabouts. If she catches him staring at Sarah’s best friend like the dirty dog that he is, she refrains from saying anything. She crawls on top of him in the middle of the night and rides a cock that is already stiff from dreaming about Cynthia.

  “She had really turned around, the poor thing. She wanted to make things work for us so badly. I think she figured Sarah’s almost out the door (that girl was college-bound from her first day of kindergarten), and Benji wouldn’t be too far behind—with the kids gone, we had a second chance at happiness. She would talk about future trips we might take, romantic places, retirement bliss, growing old together hand in hand. Shit like that.”

  So with Dolores at one of her therapy sessions or at an afternoon class, Doc has free rein at home to watch Cynthia watch television or make a sandwich—to be in the same room with her, to have her brush past him on the stairs, or to enter a bathroom she has just left. Even the lingering waft of her shit can bring about an erection. Cynthia finds Doc’s silent desperation sweet and a little sad. She turns to see him watching her and, making sure Sarah isn’t looking, gives him a quick wink. Is her pity the result of Sarah’s influence, tales of her poor father? In part, maybe. But she is also moved by his situation in general as a married man. It’s the pity she has for the beasts at the zoo, pacing their cages. All that desire and nowhere to go—it breaks her heart. And for the same reason she wouldn’t unlock a tiger’s cage, she does not indulge Mr. Morel any further. She doesn’t want anybody to get hurt.

  “That was until you found out you were pregnant.”

  “God, yes. But that didn’t make me want to sleep with you again. I needed to talk to you.”

  “How did you know it was mine?”

  “How many times do I have to have that conversation with you—forget it! I was not a virgin, no. Nor was I having vaginal intercourse on a regular basis. It was you—you, baby, you!”

  “She gets touchy. I like to tease her.”

  Doc and Cynthia declared it time for lunch. Suriyaarachchi opened his wallet and handed me three twenties. “Anything but Chinese,” Cynthia said.

  Doc said, “There’s an Indian on Wooster that does knockout palak paneer.”

  It seemed that even full-partner producers got the takeout around here. A motley crowd had developed outside of the entryway: tourists with cameras, construction workers with blue deli cups of coffee, locals with dry cleaning slung over their shoulders. They parted to let me through. One of the construction workers wanted to know what the deal was with these two.

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out, I guess.”

  We regarded the set together for a moment, and that was what it was, with the beat-up equipment boxes stacked to one side and cables taped to the floor. Suriyaarachchi squatted facing the camera, mounted on its low turret, lens in hand, blowing out the gate with a can of compressed air. Dave was crouched with a pair of enormous headphones, staring down at the audio equipment. I breathed deep of the manhole steam that drifted past us.

  One of the tourists said, “This place, Japan, very famous.” He held out his guidebook, and we all crowded in for a look. Sure enough, on the open page was a small photo and above it in English Carriage House Theater with its address. Everything else was in Japanese.

  We all nodded, impressed.

  I found a place that sold soup out of an old clapboard newsstand. The line was long, but I waited, using the opportunity to pull out my list of questions and revise them. I thought of prompts that might get them talking about Arthur. I was glad to hear their story—they provided a good starting point for the puzzle of Arthur Morel, product of a teenage Warhol groupie and a philandering suburban husband—but worried about its direct connection to Arthur’s present dilemma: so far, there was none. Would it continue like this, running parallel but never connecting? This was, after all, Arthur’s story. I was reminded of Grey Gardens, the documentary about the Bouviers, the crazy mother-daughter pair that was obliquely related to Jacqueline Kennedy. The story went that the filmmakers intended to make a movie about Jackie but, quite by accident, hit on this pair in a vine-choked falling-apart mansion in East Hampton and decided to make the whole movie about them instead. Like the Bouviers, there was something monstrous and compelling about these two, hearing them relate this adulterous statutory rape like a pair of old lovebirds. But would Arthur, like Jackie, end up on the cutting-room floor?

  I also had to wonder why Arthur had sent us here. I did the math and calculated that the last time he had seen them he was performing his “cadenza” onstage. In all that time—wife, child, career—with all of them living in the same city, not once had they seen one another? That took serious determination. So why now?

  By the time I returned with the food, the crowd had dispersed. Doc offered us utensils. “It’s okay, they’re clean,” he said as he chipped bits of dried food off the edge of a spoon. They sat in their armchairs, hunched over their bowls, slurping away, wordlessly passing a bag of bread back and forth. It was hard to reconcile these two with their sexed-up sixties selves. They seemed so sweet here, with their heads together, murmuring to each other. But then Cynthia would open her mouth and the connection became clear.

  I gathered the empty containers, and Dave did a sound check. Suriyaarachchi examined the gate one more time, and we were rolling again.

  “It was May of ’68,” Cynthia said. “I was getting ready to leave. I had no interest in finishing high school. What for? I didn’t need a diploma to be a Superstar! I hadn’t been feeling well for some days. I had been out sick. I was rifling through the medicine cabinet for I don’t know what, feeling lousy—I saw the tampons and it hit me flat. What a wallop! I mean, teen pregnancy I’m sure is no picnic these days, but back then, where we lived? It was a death sentence—”

  “Or a life sentence,” Doc said with a chuckle.

  “You could take your pick. Either way it was permanent. I mean, to be sexually liberated at the age of fifteen is one thing, to be thought of as easy, a slut? Fine—I’ll wear that, and proudly even. Some girls in school, myself included—not that we were a group or anything—we weren’t too bothered by what we were called behind our backs or to our faces. We got our power from it somehow. But to be pregnant? That was a whole different matter. That was disgrace, plain and simple. And there was no other option, no Planned Parenthood. Abortion was a horror story you heard about, somebody’s uncle taking manslaughter for trying to help some poor girl in her second trimester. Or the girl in our class who survived a malpractice butcher—the look in her eyes when she told you what he did, what she went through. Legal abortions were something new, in only a couple of states. I sat there on the toilet, box of tampons in my hand, racking my head for which ones. It had been on the news, one of the C states: California? Colorado? How would I get there? How would I pay for it? How much safer would it be? And how could I keep this from my parents—though I made much noise about not caring what th
ey thought about me, I very much did not want them to know about this. I didn’t want to know about this. So I did the only thing I could think to do: I made an appointment with my dentist.

  “I said it was an emergency. His receptionist put me on hold and came back on the line to tell me they could squeeze me in. Ha! I don’t know what you thought you were getting.”

  “I thought we were going to fuck.”

  “Boy, were you disappointed.”

  “I sent my assistant out on an errand. I brushed the hell out of my teeth. Floss, rinse, repeat. Moved the tray of tools out of the way this time, and that stupid light! And then you came in.” It was, to put it mildly, not welcome news to the beast in Doc’s pants.

  She was not wearing her wig or her boots. She was in jeans and an old Rutgers sweatshirt that smelled like men’s aftershave. She walked into his examining room and punched him in the jaw, then sat down, vomited neatly into the porcelain sink attached to the chair, and wept.

  If he had felt the wrongness of what he had done and what he had continued to feel, it was never more acutely felt than right there with this young girl crying in his chair, wearing her father’s sweatshirt, face damp with sweat. It was his daughter, sitting there. He held her hand and smoothed her hair, her real hair, and murmured fatherly words of comfort.

  “I would be lying if I said I wasn’t turned on,” Doc said.

  “I was your daughter, and you were turned on.”

  “I had the hardest erection.”

  “Fine. You felt what you felt. Moving on.”

  He took a urine sample (“What are you going to do—make a painting?” “A what?” “Never mind.”) and sent it off to a colleague of his. He wasn’t entirely sure he could trust the man, who was more of an acquaintance, but it would be senseless to go through with all of this on a false premise. It would take a couple of days to get the results, enough time to prepare, to plan. Doc agreed that doing nothing was out of the question. He also agreed that she needed to be rid of the thing growing inside her. But how? California, Colorado, Oregon, North Carolina. These were the states they might go to for the procedure. They could make Charleston in six hours, have the procedure the same day. Post-op recovery would have to be done there, at the hospital or in a motel room nearby. There would be no hiding what she had been through for at least seventy-two hours following the surgery. It would cost thousands. It would involve elaborate lies—he would have to pose as her father. He could make up a conference to attend; she could “run away” from home, leave a note about going to the big city—only to return the following week. She would look bedraggled; her parents would be angry, worried sick, but happy to have their daughter back, lesson learned, none the wiser about her real whereabouts. She would head to the bus station on the morning he left for his “conference,” and he would pick her up at the station. At the hospital, he would pay cash, in full. He would bring equipment with him to monitor her condition at the motel and if necessary drive her to a nearby emergency room.

  But a hospital stay was to be avoided—for the expense and the added scrutiny they’d be under. It would be dangerous, but they just might, with a little luck, get out of this intact. He goes home to his wife and kids, dark cloud of worry following him through the front door.

  Dolores has cooked a Mexican fiesta. Happy Cinco de Mayo! she says. She has made a pitcher of margaritas, decked out the dining room with streamers. She is wearing a sombrero. Grilled steak, tortilla shells, beans and rice, and guacamole. The table is stacked with platters. They sit down to it as a family, the first time in a while they’ve eaten together. Dolores is beaming and a little tipsy.

  Dinner, he is sure, is good, delicious even—it smells fine—but he has no appetite. He may as well be eating wet cardboard and library paste, for this is what the food feels like in his mouth. He leaves a large portion on his plate. Dolores asks him if he’s feeling okay, and he says he just doesn’t have the stomach for spicy food, which is certainly the wrong thing to say.

  Benji, ever the pleaser, helps himself to what’s on his father’s plate and exclaims how he himself enjoys spicy food. He heaps second and third servings of refried beans and rice onto his licked-clean plate and eats as though he is having a wonderful time, pretending to be drunk on the pitcher of virgin margaritas his mother has prepared for his sister and him—performing slapstick pratfalls off his chair. Sarah is openly helping herself to the other pitcher, which her mother is pretending not to notice. When Doc starts to say something about it, Sarah fixes her father with a withering look.

  “She knew,” Cynthia said.

  “You didn’t tell her.”

  “I didn’t have to tell her—she knew what you were up to. She was a smart girl.”

  The phone rings, and Sarah storms out of her seat to get it. She comes back in and says to him, It’s for you. It was Cynthia.

  “She was getting cold feet.”

  “I did not have cold feet.”

  “You didn’t want to go through with it.”

  “It wasn’t like I changed my mind. I still didn’t want to keep the thing; it wasn’t that. It was just—there was so much lying involved. I didn’t know that I wanted to be a part of it. I had been doing some reading.” She tells him this on the phone. She says that it’s true that in New Jersey, as in most other states, abortion is illegal. Except in cases of rape or incest.

  There is a long pause on the line while he waits for her to go on, but that is all she says.

  He says, So?

  So, you turn yourself in.

  For what?

  For rape. You say you raped me.

  But I did no such thing.

  You don’t have to put it that way. Put it however you want to. I seduced you, you seduced me, it was entirely consensual. In the eyes of the law, it doesn’t matter—it all amounts to the same thing. You see, it’ll be so much easier, and we can be honest about it—and I can have an abortion here without all that lurking around.

  If Doc was lying before about why he wasn’t hungry, his stomach is now making it true—he belches and feels a sour sting in his throat, the spicy steak and beans lodged, burning, in his chest.

  But your life would be over, he says. You told me that you wouldn’t want people to know about this.

  I’d rather live with them knowing than live with this lie buried inside me. Look, I’m on my way into the heart of total liberation, man. I don’t want to meet Andy Warhol with this thing on my—

  Fuck Andy Warhol! Will you get real for a minute? This is my life, okay? It would be my life you’d destroy.

  There is another long pause, after which Cynthia says, You’re the one who needs to be real. Call me back when you’re ready to do that. She hangs up.

  He sets the phone back gently in its cradle. When he returns to the dining room, everyone has gone. Dolores stands in the kitchen sudsing the pots in the sink. Benji is shuttling dirty dishes to her side from the dining room table. He looks like he is going to cry.

  Dolores says, I’m trying here. You see that I’m trying, don’t you?

  I see that you’re trying.

  And I’m willing to try harder, as hard as I can to bring us back together. But I can’t do this alone. You have to want this, too. Do you want it, too?

  Look, he says, babe. He is about to say something, some autopilot reassurance to end this discussion—nonsense that he doesn’t even believe—but stops himself. He looks at his wife, who has turned to face him.

  They have known each other for so long—since they were kids, almost Sarah’s age now. They are kids no longer. She looks so old, so tired and sad. Maybe it’s the booze—her eyes are droopy, her hair matted to her forehead—she has taken off the sombrero, but it’s left a thin red line across her forehead. Her face has become so wrinkled—under her eyes, around the corners of her mouth. When had that happened? She isn’t old, yet she has the face already of the old woman she will become before long. She has always insisted on a full face of makeup—it’s somet
hing his mother has been warning her about for years, whenever she visited. All that makeup, dear. It’ll make you old before your time. You’re young. A little love is all you need to make those cheeks rosy. A kiss from that fine man—that’s all you need to get color in those lips. It seems his mother was right—the products are taking their toll on her. Her hands hang at her sides, dripping suds.

  A year ago—a month ago!—he would have welcomed this moment, would have rejoiced in it, would have gladly taken his wife into his arms, kissed her, and said whatever he had to say.

  She says, I’m not stupid. And I’m not deaf. I don’t want any admissions, any explanations either. Not interested. Keep it between yourself and whoever. I’m only interested in hearing if this is something you want, something you want to work.

  It is, he says. I do want this to work. Which is true enough. But it won’t, which he knows, too.

  Dolores looks so relieved at hearing him say it, and so on the verge of collapse, that he has no choice but to take her into his arms.

  He lies awake the entire night. He watches day brighten the window, hears the birds begin their morning noises. He had his opening. He could have said, No—it’s over. He could have told her the truth. But to do so would have been to end the marriage, end their lives—the lives of the four of them—as they all know them. Harder than it seems, to utter the word no. To tell the truth.

  And what is he to do about Cynthia? She is threatening to end his marriage, this life as he knows it, even if he can’t do it himself. He finds himself plotting her murder, something that, when he thinks about it, is actually easier than getting rid of the fetus. He would have to convince her to let him perform the procedure. Have her sneak out in the middle of the night to his office. He would put her under a general anesthetic and then give her a second, lethal, injection. He wouldn’t have to go as far as North Carolina for all this either. Drive out to Newark Bay to dispose of the body. But where would that get him? He’d be without Cynthia. So instead he plots his wife’s murder, which then brings him around to the easiest solution of all: suicide.