by Chuck Kinder
I want to see him. I don’t want to sneak around, Jim. Jim, when was the last time we made love?
Hey, don’t try to turn the tables! Don’t dump all this on my doorstep. I don’t turn you on. You think I’m too fat and smell like beer. Don’t deny it. Do you want a divorce, is that it?
I can’t recall the last time we made love. Yes, you could lose a few pounds and quit drinking beer. But I haven’t thought about any divorce.
So you think that because we haven’t slept together much lately. . .
Lately? Are you kidding me?
You think I shouldn’t mind if you have a sordid affair, is that it?
I haven’t thought much about anything. Things just happened, that’s all, like I told you.
Just like with your last loverboy? Swept away with desire and passion and hot, uncontrollable, animal lust?
I guess so.
Oh, Lordy. So you want an open marriage, is that it?
What in the world does that mean?
It’s what they call it out here in hip, decadent, trendy California when a husband and wife agree that they can both fuck and suck anything cute that scoots.
That sounds downright disgusting. All I want to do is see Melvin sometimes. Until we figure out what’s what.
All right. All right. I get the picture, Jim told Judy, and filled his Mickey Mouse Club glass with vodka. Then Jim told Judy that his bottom line was, he didn’t want them to break up over this. They had survived her other loverboy, and they could survive this one, too. Get it out of your system, that’s what Jim told Judy. —Christ, enjoy yourself. There’s no reason for you to feel guilty even. You’re just, you know, a normal woman, Jim told Judy, trying to be big about everything, but, also, he would have to admit, entertaining a chubby. —Just do some things for me. Do some things for my sake. One, please don’t, for God’s sake, get pregnant. I will absolutely draw the line when it comes to raising any little Melvins around here. I absolutely will not abide the sound of any little fucken webbed feet running around here. Two, be discreet. This is nobody’s business but ours. The last time you blabbed to all your goddamn girl friends and I was a laughingstock. And, three, I want to know everything. You owe me this. I want to know when you’ve been with this so-called Melvin. Or when you plan on seeing him. There has to be absolute honesty between us about this sordid business. It’s like we’re taking a brand-new vow of honesty. If we want our marriage to work under these trying new circumstances, we have to tell each other the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
You mean you want me to tell you the lovey-dovey details?
I don’t want anything left to my imagination, that’s right. Leaving things to my imagination would be ten times worse than knowing the truth. If I know what’s going on, I can just accept it after a certain period of anger and pain and general anguish, and then hopefully forget it. If I have to sit around imagining things, I could easily go crazy. If you don’t want to hurt me unnecessarily, you’ll tell me the things I need to know in order not to go crazy with wondering. For instance, did you and Melvin, when you all were shacked up night after night on the buying trip, did you all have a lot of, you know, oral sex?
What exactly do you mean by a lot, Jim? Judy asked, and then she reached across the kitchen table and grabbed Jim by his arm and said, Honey, please, don’t go banging your head on the table like that.
Later, Jim couldn’t really recall much else about what he and Judy had talked about at the kitchen table that early evening. He could recall whining around pitifully for a time, and probably promising to do better, and begging for another chance. He was sure he begged for another chance until he was blue in the face. It seemed to him as though he had told Judy that what he had thought about while he was masturbating in order to fill the sample jar with his so-called seed was how he used to watch her when she was a cheerleader back in college. She was the cutest cheerleader Jim had ever seen, he told her, and he would sit up in the stands and watch her out on that blinding green grass, under those blazing lights, her little hands on her sweet, wagging ass, while she did all those cute little steps and jumps, and the way her cheerleader skirt swirled up above her sweet, Man- Tanned, shaved legs. And then Jim had reminded Judy that she had once been a Homecoming Queen, and that homecoming queens sort of represent a code of proper behavior for women, not unlike Miss America in many ways, and that there are responsibilities that former Homecoming Queens have to consider over the course of their lifetimes. And those responsibilities didn’t include giving goddamn sportswear buyers blow jobs, Jim suddenly sobbed out, but then quickly regained his composure. You were the Homecoming Queen of my heart, Jim could recall finally informing Judy, as that insipid line of whimpering sort of petered out.
Judy had said something like: You’ve sure got a funny way of showing it, Jim. And then she told Jim sadly how unhappy she had been for such a long time, and Jim could understand that. And then Judy asked Jim not to get himself worked up into a dither and wreck the house, but that she’d like to see Melvin that night for a little while. That if he could get away Melvin was going to call her. And that she didn’t want to make up some sneaky lie to tell Jim. And when Jim asked, Judy said that just because she and Melvin might see each other tonight didn’t necessarily mean they’d get lovey-dovey, but if they did she’d try to remember all the dirty details to relay to Jim, and for Jim not to worry about her getting in a family way either, because surely Melvin had a couple of Trojans left over from the buying trip. And then Judy told Jim that she didn’t mean to hurt him, she really didn’t. But she had been so sad for so long. And so lonely. And Jim could understand that. In those days Judy and Jim lived in a redwood-shingled bungalow back in a stand of trees across a short, narrow, private bridge over Matadero Creek just south of Palo Alto. The little bungalow had been lovingly hand-built nearly fifty years earlier by an old salt returned from a dangerous life at sea who had lived in it until his death at ninety only a year earlier, when he had been struck by lightning from a clear summer sky while sailing alone on a small mountain lake. Jim and Judy, such a nice, stable-appearing young couple, had been the first people the old salt’s aged niece had trusted enough to rent the bungalow to. Jim had loved that little house like no other he had ever lived in, and he had rubbed his fingers over every smooth board in the place. Night after night, Jim would sit out in the kitchen smoking dope and drinking alone, long after Judy had wandered off to bed and his drunken lout buddies had staggered out the door, and in the soft light of the brass wall lamps he would simply gaze around the room, at the thin, vertical redwood boards of the walls that seemed to glow from some inner source of light, and the low, dark ceiling of redwood boards so warm and rich with golden light and shadow. The bungalow’s redwood walls were dark with age and the ceilings of the rooms curved gendy toward the walls like the inner hull of a boat, which is what the whole house resembled vaguely, a boat, an old sailing vessel of some kind, as though after all those years upon the high seas the old salt could live only in a place that at least resembled something you could sail away in. Jim would look at the grains in the old boards and imagine giant redwoods aging in sunlight and fog a thousand years ago. He would follow a thin, dark, curving grain with his fingertips down a board slick as bone and think of those cross-section cuts of ancient redwoods in California state parks, their dark rings tagged with time and events, the Battle of Hastings, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the birth of Christ, the end of love as we know it.
In return for yard work, the old salt had permitted several generations of neighborhood boys to construct and maintain elaborate electric-train sets out in the redwood-shingled garage by the creek (the old salt had ridden a bike everywhere he went, or a bus, and never owned a car), where around walls shaped into miniature mountains wove at least a dozen tracks, circling through forests of tiny trees, through dozens of tunnels, along a running stream with a working waterfall and a little lake, and through two tiny towns with working lights. In return for
secret places in the garage where Jim could hide his drugs where Judy would never think to search, he bought the current generation of neighborhood boys beer and slipped them joints.
Early on the night Jim’s first wife forsook him, he had gone out to the garage and pulled the switch that set the tiny towns ablaze. He took a fat joint hidden in a bright red caboose and fired it up. He put a couple of the electric trains in motion, aimed in opposite directions on different tracks, and he sat there in the dim light smoking and watching the little trains as they rolled around and around as though they were going someplace in particular. From the open garage doors Jim could see Judy through a kitchen window at her ironing board. As Judy leaned slightly forward, her soft brown hair fell over her face and Jim could see the lovely curve of her neck. She was wearing a sleeveless blouse, and
Jim watched the firm muscle in her brown upper arm flex as she ironed. Once when Judy had raised her arm as she brushed back her hair, Jim could glimpse the delicate whiter flesh of a shaved underarm. When the phone in the kitchen rang, Judy rushed to it. Judging from the brightness of her smile, it was the call she had been waiting for. Judy sat down at the kitchen table to talk. At one point Judy threw her head back laughing, and Jim could see her teeth shine.
The air was sweet that evening with the aromas of the flowering bushes along the creek bank and of bread baking somewhere and of both clean and old oil on the cement garage floor. The lights of the tiny towns had looked somehow so sad to Jim, and fragile and beautiful, and the tiny trains made him remember lying in bed as a boy and being rocked gendy by the faint rumble of an endless freight or coal train passing through the little coal town at night, headed someplace special and new and infinitely distant in the mysterious, adult dark. Jim could hear the flow of the shallow water in Matadero Creek, and the croaks of frogs, and crickets, and from beyond the trees the faint sounds of El Camino Real traffic, and he knew that his life there in that beloved little bungalow with that beautiful woman talking on the phone to her new loverboy was lost to him. Even distant sirens sounded like sad echoes from a whole life Jim could imagine someday only faintly remembering.
Jim had watched his first wife talk on the phone and laugh as he hadn’t seen her laugh in ages. Judy looked so happy Jim couldn’t help but be happy for her. From inside the mouth of one of the tunnels through the miniature mountains, stuck back deep enough so that the trains wouldn’t bump against it as they rolled by, Jim fished out the sample jar with its tiny tear of sperm. He tossed it from hand to hand, as he might have a baseball, and then held it up in the dim light, tilting it this way and that, watching the tiny tear glisten as it slid about. Jim let himself imagine tiny eyes, a tiny mouth, teeth like tiny tombstones.
The next time one of the little electric trains swung out of a tunnel onto the straight stretch of track near him, Jim placed the jar in an empty boxcar and watched it ride around. Presently Jim heard the screen door bang and Judy’s footsteps come across the brick driveway. Then she was a shadow in the doorway of the garage. Jim could smell her perfume. I’ll be back in a little bit, honey, Judy said quietly, and Jim said okeydokey. Jim watched his wife walk to her vehicle in the soft glow from the kitchen lights through the windows. Judy had combed her hair and pulled it back behind her ears with little silver barrettes. She had changed into a short red-and-white-checked sundress. Jim noticed that Judy had a litde lift to her step. Jim watched as Judy studied her face in the rearview mirror for a moment, before she pulled her station wagon on out across the narrow wooden bridge to go do it with her new boyfriend, Melvin.
In the hot darkness of the garage Jim had bawled for a while. Then he had plucked the plastic jar from the boxcar when it swung near him. He closed his runny eyes, and with a startling vividness he pictured his pretty first wife naked in her new boyfriend’s arms. Whereupon Jim had started bawling again. He started jerking off, too. And this time Jim had no trouble filling that sperm sample jar halfway to its brim in about a half-dozen furious whacks.
Holding to the shadows, Jim had walked out onto the little bridge over Matadero Creek. Years later, when he would attempt to resurrect those moments in his memory, Jim would recall thinking, Is this my real life? Is this it? Jim had stood in the shadows in the center of the bridge blubbering some more and hating himself for it, and finally he quit it. He listened to the shallow water flowing below. He listened to the frogs and the faint sounds of £1 Camino Real traffic and laughter from a yard up the street. He watched as street light coming through the leaves of the trees along the creek bank was gathered and released on the shining, tremulous current.
In the darkness two hundred yards ahead, Matadero Creek disappeared into the entrance of a tunnel that ran under El Camino Real and most of Palo Alto, to empty finally into the waters of the East Bay, a perilous passage, full of rats starved insane, rabid fish, snakes glowing in the dark, crawdads that dined on the living and the dead: a passage full of danger at every turn, spiritual fatigue, failures of will, a daily ton of turds floating to the Bay, along with Jim’s jar of secret sons.
Even in the enveloping darkness Jim could see the tiny sparkle of the splash when he had tossed it, that plastic jar with his name on its label containing his so-called seed, and he had watched that tiny arc of lost, secret sons float in the creek’s shallow, shimmering current out of his life for good.
The Wife in the Story
1
Although it was against the terms of the fellowship, Ralph Crawford had retained his part-time teaching position at Berkeley while he was a Stegner Writing Fellow at Stanford (and this on top of illegally collecting unemployment). On one occasion when Lindsay had flown down from Montana for a romantic rendezvous with Ralph at his Berkeley apartment, she had gone along with him to the Tuesday-afternoon writing workshop at Stanford, where Ralph was scheduled to read a story that day.
Lindsay was thrilled with the lovely, sunny day and the silly ride down the East Bay, laughing their heads off, singing along with golden oldies on the radio, windows wide open, the hillside houses and downtown buildings of San Francisco shining white as bones in the distance against a glorious blue cloudless sky, sailboats blowing about the green water of the bay. In the intense clarity of the light that day shapes were luminous, surfaces seemed to swell. Then they strolled across a campus of stone colonnades like caves full of Spanish sunlight and shadow, sprinklers lifting blue bells of light above fiercely green lawns, dogs romping in fountains, woodpeckers pounding high in palms, hordes of absolutely beautiful, blond, sun-browned people pedaling bikes everywhere, pictures of such perfect health and happiness and confident hope they made Lindsay want to barf. Lindsay and Ralph stopped at a plaza display table loaded with turquoise and silver jewelry, where Ralph helped Lindsay select a tiny ring of silver fish, which Ralph pledged he would return to purchase as soon as his next ship came in.
In the second-floor library rooms where the writing workshop met, Ralph had introduced Lindsay around to a blur of faces. She was his fiancee flown down from Montana, where she worked as a cowgirl, to witness his literary lionization is what Ralph told everybody. (Then it must be true, Lindsay had thought, her heart soaring. Ralph really had separated from Alice Ann.) Lindsay had loved the two high-ceilinged rooms the writing class met in, with their book-lined walls and comfortably shabby couches and stuffed chairs, and the huge, oblong table in one room the writers sat around as they listened intently to Ralph read in his soft, almost whispery voice between long drags on a cigarette. Lindsay loved Ralph’s looks, a large, shambling man with dark, woolly hair and dark eyes, who had such a sensitive, shy, gentle nature, yet radiated an inner strength she found comforting, compelling. Ralph smoked continuously as he read the story, and he often laughed out loud at lines that cracked everybody else up, too, and Lindsay felt like his wife.
The story Ralph read that day was the one that became so famous in years to come, about a couple on the verge of bankruptcy who had to unload their Cadillac convertible before some creditor cou
ld slap a lien on it. The wife in the story, who was smart and had personality and business sense, would have to do it. The wife in the story was gone for hours before the half-drunk, stir-crazy husband got call one. The wife was making the deal over dinner, she said. Returning home finally near dawn, drunk and disheveled, the wife called her husband a worthless bankrupt and dared him to do anything about her being out all night doing God-knows-what with some greasy used-car salesman, and then she had stumbled on off to bed and collapsed. After one sad thing and another, the story ended with the husband tracing his fingertips over the stretch marks on the backs of his naked wife’s legs and hips while thinking about how those blue lines looked like dozens, perhaps hundreds, coundess really, roads running through the flesh of the wife in the story. The story was a great hit with the other writers that day.
Lindsay had listened to Ralph read his story that day and she had thought about how Ralph’s hands had felt on her own flesh the night before while they had made love, how warm they had been, and gentle. Could Lindsay go out and unload a Cadillac convertible in a hurry like the wife in the story? If Lindsay had been the wife in the story, what would have had to have happened to drive her to such desperation and betrayal? The backs of Ralph’s huge hands were so hairy, those huge, gentle hands.
