A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

by David Gates

  “Everything I think of is shit,” I said.

  He patted my head. “You have to work through it, is all. Or with it. You know, ‘Nothing to paint, nothing to paint with.’ Just go as dark as you want.”

  “It’s not even dark,” I said. “It’s just fucking stupid.”

  “Then that’s good information,” he said. “ ‘If the fool would persist in his folly, dot dot dot.’ I’m sorry to be quoting stuff at you. Why don’t we walk over and get you some ice cream.”

  “What, an affirmation of life?” I said.

  “There,” he said. “Now that’s you. See how easy?”

  Fed, flattered and fucked. I gained ten pounds that first year, and he didn’t seem to mind. He was a man who never put on an ounce, though his jawline had started to give.

  —

  I see that I’ve been painting myself as the little creepmouse victim-wife in a gothic novel—the house really did have a mansard roof: Was I not supposed to notice?—what with the attic room, the sad little plastic storage box and so on, the overwhelming older husband. My crack about the conjugal bed. But really, given who he was, he didn’t do one thing wrong. Yes, he paid the bills and picked up the check at restaurants, but he never slipped money into my wallet and he left it up to me to pay off my credit cards, or not. He even knew not to buy me a better car—at least not then. That crappy little Toyota parked by his handsome house for over a year and never a word out of him. He didn’t nag me about my divorce—in those days it took a year in New York State after you’d filed for separation—which I’m sure was why I got it happening so soon. He did give me his lawyer’s card, but only because I asked him for it. (The fee turned out to be suspiciously modest; I wouldn’t swear that he hadn’t supplemented it behind my back.) He did his own laundry, and sometimes mine. When he seduced me in the afternoon, he changed the sheets before bedtime.

  If you’re thinking, Aha, so that’s where the bitch earned her allowance, no. If I could have any of this back—which I can’t, and which is a weepy thing to say, and I promise not to hit the elegiac note too often—it would be those afternoons in bed. My first husband must have read somewhere that the woman had to come first and often, so he would slam away at me (it was impressive, for a while) or go after me with his tongue until my clit was sore. “How many was that?” he would say as I lay there catching my breath. But this man would take me at my word if I told him I just wanted to feel him let go. “Ah, God,” he would say, plying the warm, wet washcloth he’d get up and bring us, “that was so irresponsible of me.”

  All of which might have been the most insidious campaign ever by a man to convince a woman that he wasn’t a tyrant, and don’t think I didn’t suspect it—I wasn’t the ninny I’m sure I sound like. But wasn’t it on me whether or not I let myself be tyrannized, if he started showing his true face? And where was the line between tyrannized and taken care of? And if he pushed me to it, couldn’t I find pleasure in tyrannizing back?

  I just had to trust that we wouldn’t get to such a place, or what was the point of my being here? Despite his money and his manner—and believe me, I could see why my husband had thought he was an asshole—wasn’t this a good man? Or at least good enough to suspect he wasn’t good enough. And wasn’t I a good woman? Or couldn’t I act as if I were?

  —

  A few weeks after moving in, I called my mother and asked if she’d like to come visit. I thought she needed to be reassured that I hadn’t done a crazy thing, not that she was any judge. I picked her up at the train in the middle of the afternoon, showed her the town—she called it “charming enough”—and left silences in case she wanted to talk. Apparently not. We stopped off to get stuff for dinner—the wife had left behind Cucina Paradiso: The Heavenly Food of Sicily, and pasta col tonno seemed easy enough even for me—and when I parked in front of the house she didn’t move to open her door. “This is it?” she said. “I guess you’ve come up in the world.”

  “It’s not about that,” I said. “I mean, sure. But he’s really good to me.”

  “That’s gracious of him.”

  “You’re at least going to give him a chance, right?” I said. “It’s not like he’s Hugh Hefner in his smoking jacket.”

  “Baby, as long as you’re happy. I will say, I never thought the boy was right for you.” She looked into the backseat. “Do you need some help with those?”

  “Oh, the cook will see to them—let’s get you settled in. The butler will show you to the East Room.”

  “Don’t kid your poor old mother. I’ll be good.” She opened her door. “You don’t really have an East Room, do you?”

  “For Christ’s sake,” I said.

  At dinner, he kept filling her wineglass and got her talking about the workshop she’d taken years ago with Stanley Kunitz, and how May Sarton, or maybe it was May Swenson, had once made a pass at her—those stories—and he told her about going to jazz clubs in New York as a young man and hearing Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday and how once, at a party in some loft, he’d sat in with so-and-so, playing somebody’s borrowed bass. Those stories. Back in the living room, he opened more wine and put on Frank Sinatra. “I trust you like the Nelson Riddle era,” he said to her. “We can go later, if you prefer the doo-be-doo-be-doo.”

  “No, this makes me very happy.” The song was “I’ve Got the World on a String.” “Someone’s obviously briefed you.”

  “Random guess,” he said. “There are times nobody else will do, right? When you’re my age.”

  “I am your age.”

  “You’re trying to butter me up,” he said. “I’m not that well preserved. Pour you a bit more?”

  “Oh, why not.” She lifted her glass to him, leaned back and closed her eyes.

  “You know, Mom,” I said, “if you brought anything with you, you’re not going to scandalize anybody.”

  Her eyes came open. “Oh, God no. I had to give that up—this stuff they have today is way too strong for an old lady. I’m sorry. If that was a hint—”

  “Far from it,” I said. “I know just what you mean.”

  “I suppose if I get cancer, it might be a different story,” she said. “But for the time being.” She took a long drink of her wine and closed her eyes again. “My God, that voice. It’s hard to believe he’s turned into such a terrible man. I remember when he used to be a Democrat.”

  “Happens to the best of us,” he said.

  After he went to bed, I turned down her covers in the guest room. “All right, I’m sold,” she said. “I guess I’ve gotten to the age where I don’t mind.”

  I went down the hall to the bedroom and found him under the covers reading The Golden Bowl. “Thank God,” he said. “I’m about ready to give up on this. So, did I get decent notices?”

  “Come on, you know she liked you.” I took my hairbrush from the dresser and brought it over to the bed. I knew he liked to watch me.

  “My well-practiced charm,” he said. “She wasn’t really a pot smoker, was she?”

  “We were a very progressive family,” I said.

  “As were we,” he said. “Except for us it was Henry Wallace. I’m glad you don’t sit around smoking pot all day.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You might like me better if I was placid and stupid.”

  “I couldn’t possibly.” He ran a finger down my thigh. “She’s wrong about Sinatra, by the way. He was always a shit, I don’t care who he voted for. That damaged-soul-in-the-wee-small-hours crap—the fraudulence is the whole appeal.” He patted the covers beside him. “Let’s try not to be noisy tonight.”

  —

  I never did figure out what had damaged him, assuming he was damaged. True, he liked to drink, but he liked liking to drink. (Having met my mother and heard my family stories, he must have figured out what damaged me, but I don’t think he wasted any time worrying about it.) The stories he told about his parents never suggested they hadn’t loved him, or each other. His father had been a professor
and his mother a faculty wife, but supposedly the father had stayed out of bed with his students. Saul Bellow and Mary McCarthy and Ralph Ellison and F. W. Dupee—whoever that was—and Hannah Arendt used to come over for dinner. A painter named Stefan Hirsch, whom I also had to look up. He remembered seeing Eleanor Roosevelt, who would make the short trip from Hyde Park for international student conferences. I would have run screaming from all this, but instead of joining the marines—he was a CO during the Korean War—he made them proud by going off to study painting at the Art Students League, then to architecture school at Columbia. It was his brother, ten years younger, who disgraced the family, by becoming an investment banker.

  He’d seemed so complicated when we’d first met—I think I said so—but you have to remember I was used to my husband. And now that I could pick up his allusions, most of them, and decode his ironies, he seemed to be a simple man who happened to know who F. W. Dupee was and had learned how to look at a Diebenkorn. When he took pleasure—in bed, at the opera, at a baseball game, reading Bleak House for the fiftieth time or a Trollope he’d somehow missed, playing his bass in that restaurant—he actually appeared to enjoy it. I hope I’m not being condescending; it’s possible that I seemed uncomplicated to him too. I don’t suppose we were any more or any less opaque to each other than any other two people, or to ourselves, though of course how would you ever know? Anyway—to go back to where all this started going off the rails, a couple of paragraphs ago—these days I miss the sex, meaning the traditional two-person, I-Thou sex, not that there was ever a lot of Thou when I was a party to it.

  Well, I say this now. But when I’m tempted to get sentimental, I have to remind myself that back then it seemed pretty fraught. At his age, he wanted a woman who didn’t want children—he’d already put in his time—but since he had once wanted children (or why would he have had one?) wasn’t there something fishy about me? If you’re a woman, you can’t win that one: because I didn’t want to be a mother, he couldn’t trust me to mother him, however deep he burrowed his little peepee up into my birth canal. So no wonder he came to prefer the other venue, where he could hurt me—I was a good actress—and then be treated, literally, like shit. Okay, and now let’s do me: this was not just a man old enough to be my father, but a man who had been a father—still was a father—so I needed him to fuck me and then to be turned over and punished. A grown-up dirty marriage, where grown-up dirty needs got met and afterward you smelled of mortality—except I can’t use that; it’s from King Lear. How about “smelled of subtext”?

  Except it did smell of mortality. As we both knew: When I was forty-five, still more than fuckable if I didn’t gain another ten pounds, he’d be seventy-five. When I was sixty, maybe still halfway viable, he’d be ninety, and even if he was still alive, no longer even Viagrable. Or if Viagrable, by some awful miracle, not a creature you’d want to see tottering at you with a gleam in his rheumy eye, a steely shaft clattering against his frangible pelvic bone. Didn’t this argue that we should relish each moment while there was anything to relish? Or maybe “cherish” is a better, warmer word, since this is getting a little grim.

  —

  My father died that spring, of the heart attack I should’ve known was coming when I saw those veins in his face, and my husband-to-be—I’m getting ahead of the story, but in this sentence I need a new designation for him—offered to go to the funeral with me. It didn’t seem like an ideal occasion for having him meet the family, such as the family was, nor did I want to show up with some other gray-haired man, suggesting that my heart either did or didn’t belong to Daddy—unwholesome either way. He persisted just enough. At the last minute, my mother decided to stay away too—my father had had his own life, she told me on the phone, and she’d made peace with that, but she didn’t want to see any of “those creatures.”

  My brother, though, flew in from Colorado; none of us had seen him since he’d gotten clean and saved. I was three when he was born: my mother told me he was an accident, which was indiscreet of her, and I passed it on to him, which was unkind of me. I’d wanted him dead until he was thirteen, when I made him my little drug buddy. He’d dropped out of UConn—it was a wonder he lasted two semesters—and shot heroin, first in Willimantic, then the Lower East Side, then Seattle, then nobody knew where. Somehow he’d ended up in Colorado Springs, where he was drug free, married and a so-called elder in some right-wing church. When he walked into the funeral home, I had the weird thought that it was my father, come back as he was when I was little: he had a businessman’s haircut and a businessman’s blue pinstriped suit, and black-framed glasses like the ones my father had worn before he’d gotten contacts. I ran up to hug him and felt him turn aside to avoid contact with my breasts.

  None of my father’s ladies showed up, if he’d still had any, and the only other mourners were two of his friends from work. One got up and spoke of his “community spirit”—I have no idea what that was about—and said he would be missed, not specifying by whom. My brother and I went on to the cemetery, in his rental car. He’d said yes to the offer of a “viewing” before the service—he hadn’t seen my father since dropping out of college—but I’d been willing to take their word for it, until I saw the casket suspended above the grave on canvas straps, by which point it was too late.

  “Was it okay looking at him?” I asked my brother as we walked back to his car.

  “That wasn’t him,” he said. “I don’t even know why I did it. So, I’m guessing he didn’t know the Lord.”

  “Probably not.”

  “That’s fucked,” he said. “Sorry—I don’t use that language anymore. But it just is.”

  “But don’t you think he’s at peace now?” I said.

  “Probably we’d better not get into it,” he said.

  “You think he’s in hell,” I said.

  “And you think I’m a pod person,” he said. “Like somebody took me over, right? Well, somebody did. And praise Jesus for it. Okay? I said it out loud.” He cast up his eyes at the top of a cedar tree, as if he’d never seen such a thing before. “It’s all different now. I can’t really tell you—it’s like my eyes were washed.” He sounded like he was thirteen again, in wonder after smoking his first joint.

  “Are you okay to drive?” I said.

  “You have to know, I pray for you every day,” he said. “Then again, I prayed for him. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Will you see Mom before you go back?”

  “I’ve prayed about that too,” he said. “But I think my family needs me home.”

  “Wait—you have kids?”

  “Well. In a couple of months. A little boy, they’re saying.”

  “That’s great—I mean I’m happy for you. Does Mom know?”

  “You can tell her. Let her know that this one’s wanted.”

  —

  But back to this man I was about to marry—I don’t know if I’m really getting his appeal across to you. If he played music with men half his age—and there was no “if” about it—he didn’t play rock and roll, and he hadn’t bought a motorcycle. If he drank every day—and he did—he’d take care to feed the cat in the afternoon when he felt a big night coming on. (It took a while to get what he meant by “feed the cat.” Repulsive, yes. But hilarious, no? Yet I never heard him say “cunt,” though I said it often enough.) And he was never a mean drunk—okay, he did put my poor first husband through some shit when he took us to dinner that time, but I give him a pass for that. He called a perfume a scent, a chauffeur a driver—not that he’d ever had one—his studio a workroom, an author a writer. He claimed not to have watched television since Nixon resigned—I think I was thirteen—and this was probably more or less true, except that he didn’t count baseball. He allowed the radio—by which he meant public radio—only while driving. He could always guess the Piano Puzzler on Performance Today. The news and talk shows he called “bien-pensant agitprop”: the world, he said, was not ceaselessly fascinating, and all things need
not be considered. When Bill Clinton’s voice came on, he jabbed for the mute button; later, he’d do the same with Bush. After 9/11, he drew a design for a new World Trade Center and had me put it up on the Web: a giant replica of Scrooge McDuck’s money bin. That would have stirred up a hoo-hah, if anyone had known his name anymore. But he convinced himself that this was why Bard College had given the commission for its new concert hall to Frank Gehry, so fuck Leon Botstein—if he wanted Gehry to be his fucking Albert Speer…and so on. Largely the single malt talking.