The Reluctant Exhibitionist

by Martin Shepard

  What interested me seemed to interest her. When I hungered for her physically, she was always there to satisfy my appetites. If she resented the role of passive acceptance at that time, she never indicated as much to me. When she was abroad on week-long overseas flights, I would count the hours until her return and place a scarf, with her scent upon it, on the empty pillow beside me when I retired.

  After eight months of marriage, we decided to have a child. In February, 1965, Marc, our first-born, arrived.

  Some time after the third year of our marriage, I had two trifling intimacies with local women. They were not affairs of the soul as much as they were passing moments of the flesh between friendly neighbors. I never told Eivor about them, for she never asked. And I felt such extensions of intimacy to be perfectly proper.

  In the summer of ’68—our first summer in Bridgehampton—Eivor asked me if I’d ever been attracted to other women.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Then if you believe there is nothing bad about intimacy, why haven’t you slept with them?”

  “Because if I did and told you so, you’d misconstrue it. And I don’t want to hurt you or lose you.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’d understand. It would be natural.”

  So I confessed to having had my couple of intimacies. Eivor was furious. She was leaving me—going back to Europe. She couldn’t conceive of my loving her and being unfaithful. Out of the fearfulness of seeing my life fall apart, my children wrenched from me, my beloved no longer sharing her bed with me, I lied to her.

  “I only made that up to test your claim to being able to understand,” I said.

  In that way we weathered that summer storm.

  Yet something was lost then and there, I suppose. Some trust, some faith. Eivor began to reevaluate those long hours at home caring for an apartment and our first two children, while I was out working professionally and politically. She felt unfairly put upon for having to play a twentieth-century Cinderella to my supposed King Farouk.

  And so we drifted apart, slowly, imperceptibly, but surely. Whether it was due to her growing dubiousness of my person or due to the normal routines and tediums of a five-year relationship, due to my occasional amatory adventures or due to her short-temperedness from having to work too hard at home-making and child-raising, due to my lack of respect for her travails or due to her scapegoating me for her passivity, I know not.

  In the winter of ’68 I tried to get closer to Eivor. I thought of involving her in my work—in the exploration I was just beginning of familiarizing myself with encounter groups. I took her to a marathon training session.

  She had an unusual experience there. The group leader asked each one in the room to name the person they were most attracted to. Her attention focused on the question, she had to admit to being turned on sexually by another man. And yet she felt she loved me.

  Encouraged by the value placed on being honest in such groups, and believing that Eivor was now able to share my experience—in a way that would make sense to her—I told her of my previous affairs. This time she seemed to accept things perfectly. We laughed together about it. She had no jealousy that I was aware of. And we coupled magnificently that night.

  I then got it into my head that love need not mean sexual exclusivity; that the physicality of a friendship need not stop with a handshake or an embrace; that our marriage could survive and indeed be enriched by intimacy with others.

  As an idea, it made sense. As a reality, it was a fiasco.

  There were days and times when all went well and there was perfect understanding—Eivor of my liaisons, I of hers. There were other times of incredible madness, when my lingering look at someone or a hug on a social occasion served as a spark to bring forth resentments on Eivor’s part that had been festering for years. And so we had incredible swings in our relationship. The “downs” became so formidable and bleak that the “ups” then seemed like paradise regained.

  Yet the balance had shifted. The die was cast. No amount of good will or effort, no New Year’s resolution, seemed capable of changing things. Inexorably I received fewer “strokes” from Eivor, in spite of my belated attempts to ameliorate her complaints. I even went so far as to be unilaterally faithful to her for a prolonged period of time.

  In the last years of our marriage, Eivor became increasingly critical of me. If I was not at home I was criticized for having time for everyone but her and the children. If I stayed at home, I was faulted for hanging about and giving her extra housework. If I helped with the housework I was criticized for being a cleanliness nut. Well, who could blame her? On the face of it, who would fail to sympathize with the mother of three small children who had a philandering husband?

  Still, I loved her then, as I love her now.

  If she stopped cooking meals for me it was because she “was tired.” She’d be angry at my lack of understanding for wanting to make love when she was “fatigued.” Yet she was not too fatigued to stay out once until five in the morning with a total stranger, while I went out of my mind with fear for her safety. When I complained, she countered with, “If you don’t like it, you can leave.” Which I did.

  “Well you brought it upon yourself, Shepard,” I can hear the voices saying. “You started it all with your pecadillos and your honesty.”

  And yet, would I have been as restless had her love been truer? Was I making do as best I could, considering her aloofness and my interest in not forcing the issue? Or would a more loving woman have accepted my nature more readily?

  She has said in recent years that when she first married me she had thought of divorce as a possibility if it didn’t work out. I was hurt when I heard that. I felt cheated. How dared she enter into a marriage with an escape clause in mind? And yet, she wrote me the most beautiful love letters in our first years together. So what should I believe? Should I take something told in spite as “truth?” Or should I accept that “truth” as nothing more than spite?

  But the more I tell my father of these plans, the more I realize that the question raised is unanswerable. To devote more time to an analysis of why our union failed would be useless. In marriage, as in nature, the Yin can’t be separated from the Yang. One cannot, except as an exercise, hold one person individually accountable for a dance two do together.

  God knows, she tried in her way. Had she not felt guilt-ridden about what harm it would cause our children, she might have left years earlier. And treated both me and herself more pleasantly in the process.

  Fritz Perls said it best in his Gestalt Prayer:

  I do my thing, and you do your thing.

  I am not in this world to live up to your expectations

  And you are not in this world to live up to mine.

  You are you and I am I,

  And if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.

  If not, it can’t be helped.

  “You look tired,” my dad says. “Why don’t you go on home and get some rest?”

  It is ten-thirty at night. Before I go I ask if I can feel his belly—feel the massive gall bladder that grows bigger each day.

  “Sure,” he says, lying down and pulling up his pajama top. “I’ll show you where they’ve been poking,” he adds, forgetting that I’m a doctor.

  I put my hand on his abdomen as he breathes out forcefully, pushing the swollen, obstructed organ beneath my fingers. I look down at his belly. The jaundice, deeper with each passing day, has colored his skin a deep yellow.

  “Well,” I say, “at the very worst you can always get yourself a job working in a Chinese restaurant.”

  We both laugh heartily.

  I put on my parka, slip the manuscript back into my Swissair bag, take the elevator back down to Madison Avenue, and head out into the black night.

  XI

  Peter Wyden, my publisher, has just read the manuscript. And he has objections.

  He is a decent man in his late forties. Somewhat overweight and balding, he has a mo
st cherubic face, with smiling eyes set behind his modest eyeglasses and a friendly smile, more often than not, playing about his lips. His dress is conservative but tasteful; his manners polite and pleasant, as befits his European background. Yet he is as American as apple strudel. I have seen him laugh heartily, from the belly. It ripples through his entire body. I like the man.

  His finely critical mind, along with a certain maiden-aunt fussiness, stands him in good stead in his business. For he leaves not a stone unturned in examining the possibilities for more explicit writing and more successful promotion of his books. Yet I feel put upon and resistant to his suggestion.

  “Martin. For $6.95 you cannot dismiss your childhood and adolescence in one line. The reader who pays that kind of money for a book is going to want to know more about your early years. Yet you say nothing about them except for that one-sentence reference in your first chapter.”

  “But Peter,” I protested. “It doesn’t seem important to me. What can I say about the past that is so special anyway? That I always felt that I didn’t fit in? That I was quite shy as a child? That in public school I was self-conscious about my cowlick, which I could never comb down? That I dreaded my acne pimples in high school? Should I write about how I squeezed them in front of a mirror each morning and baked them under a sun lamp at night? Who hasn’t experienced that?”

  “Listen. All I’m telling you is that readers will want to know more. Even if you wish to flush your early years down the toilet, you must explain why,” he retorted.

  We argued back and forth this way some more. I felt irritable. I didn’t want to write some schlock for the lady in Sheboygan. Fuck her. And fuck Peter for pressuring me to write a formula autobiography. If he wanted The Making of a Psychiatrist he should have gotten the psychiatric equivalent of Dr. Nolen,* complete with case histories.

  “What was the phone call about?” Judy asked. We were sitting in the kitchen after having finished off a late-evening meal.

  “It was Peter. He wants more of an account of my childhood.”

  “Are you going to do it?”

  “I don’t know. When he asked me to expand Summer on the Tantric Road, I felt just as pissy—just as resistant. Yet he was right. The additions do make for a better book. But my childhood? It seems irrelevant to the statement I want to make.”

  “How would it be irrelevant?”

  “Because I’m saying that Now is what there is and all that there is. The past, more often than not, is an excuse for the present—a justification that justifies nothing.”

  “If you couldn’t give the answer ‘It’s irrelevant,’ what other answer would you give?” she countered.

  Good question. I had to stop and think.

  “That it was too disjointed, perhaps. There was no theme. None, at least, that seems to bear on how I developed into the person that my book describes.”

  “What sort of memories do you have?” she pushed on.

  “Mostly emptiness, turmoil, loneliness,” I answered. “I had no friends. At least none that I valued. I was one of the last kids chosen for pick-up ball games. I was the smallest child in my public school graduating class. I was picked on and bullied a lot. The only kids who seemed interested in me were bigger misfits than me.

  “I remember in high school watching the popular kids and trying to imitate their styles. I’d tell jokes in order to copy the good storyteller, misbehave in class so as to be as respected as the tough kids, and raise my hand to try to answer the teacher’s every question so that I might be like the good students. Yet nothing fit in, nothing really seemed to work. Deep down, I felt that there was something wrong with me, something unnameable that would prevent me from finding acceptance in the eyes and hearts of others.

  “You see, I thought, in my adolescence, that there was such a thing as a happy popular person. It wasn’t until my early adulthood that I came to realize that those who I thought had it made were just as insecure as I was.

  “So what would I say about my childhood that was different from anyone else’s?”

  “That’s not true,” Judy answered. “There are some people who really have had happy times in their youth—who really were secure.”

  Of course she was right. I have met them. And I have felt such people to be among the more unfortunate of men. As adults, they are rarely content. Their best years are always behind them. Beaus and friends are never as adoring in the grown-up world as they were in their school days. Spouses are never as good or as understanding as their parents. Adulthood is one long downhill slide.

  God bless my unhappy youth. It has made me appreciate my present life. I would not choose to live those years over again for anything. I feel more complete at thirty-six than I did at thirty-five. I welcome old age. One of my fondest ambitions is to become an octogenarian.

  Judy and I went on to talk of other things. Yet Peter’s suggestion stayed with me for days. I had decided to comply with his request provided I could think of some way of relating past to present. And then today, I grasped a connection. For one of the things I’ve come to believe in is giving an honest accounting.

  I was at an encounter session at Riker’s Island this morning, listening to Ernie, a newcomer to the group, tell his story. The other guys in the group kept catching the numerous inconsistencies in his claim to having been jailed unjustly. Each time Ernie was picked up in an apparent deception, he elaborated a further story designed to justify his inconsistency. Yet each new story contained further contradictions. What he was doing is technically known as “bullshitting up a storm.”

  It went on and on this way for about twenty minutes. Ernie would never admit he was lying. It became sad and unbearably painful watching this charade go on.

  “You dumb motherfucker,” I finally shouted at him. “Do you enjoy this? Do you like yourself being one big pile of bullshit?”

  He began to protest. I cut him off.

  “Don’t start up again,” I said. “’Cause I know where you’re coming from. I’m not trying to put you down for bullshit as much as I’m trying to tell you that it’s dumbass—that it’s a losing proposition. ’Cause I’ve been there. I used to bull and bull and bull until pretty soon I didn’t know what the truth was myself.

  “When I was a kid I had a million excuses for everything. I’d get a bad report card and I’d decide to change the grade before my parents signed it and then change it back before returning it to school. But the ink eradicator took the yellow dye off the report card. ‘Why does this card look so funny?’ asked my mom. ‘I dropped it in a puddle,’ I said. But when I got it back to school, I was found out.

  “I wouldn’t do homework assignments. ‘Why are you unprepared, Martin?’ my teacher would ask. ‘I was at the doctor’s,’ I’d say. So I’d get away with it once or twice. But I was always scared, always afraid of being found out. And in the end, I always paid for it. If the lies worked, I used them more often. And when I used them so often, I always fell on my face.

  “Once, my language teacher in high school asked to see my mother because I was failing. But I had told my mother I was doing all right. ‘She’s out of town,’ I ad-libbed, ‘visiting my grandmother down in Florida.’ Well, who do you think walked into my Spanish class the next day but my mother? Right in the middle of the lesson. My teacher had called her and never told me. ‘I thought you said your mother was in Florida,’ she said. She needn’t have bothered to add that I never had a grandmother living there. I was mortified. I could have shit in my pants then and there.

  “And I bullshitted and I lied about so many things. I’d take money from my mother’s purse to try to ‘buy’ friends—you know? Buy some guys ice cream and rabbit’s foot key chains so they’d like me? Only their mothers would wonder where they got all these toys and things and they’d say ‘Marty Shepard bought them.’ And so their mothers would call mine and mine would check her purse and ask if I took any money. ‘Oh, no,’ I’d say. ‘Herbie bought the toys.’ Then we’d all go over to Herbie�
�s house and again I’d be exposed as a frightened, fucking liar. And just like you, I still wouldn’t admit it.

  “And I felt miserable. I was telling so many different stories to so many different people that most of my waking energy went into keeping my stories straight and worrying that two people who heard different tales would meet.

  “Finally I said to myself ‘Fuck it. It just isn’t worth it. I’m going to say what is, regardless.’ And I started to do that. And let me tell you—it’s a hell of a lot simpler than the bullshit trip I was into before.”

  Ernie and the others listened attentively. Ernie conceded as much as he was going to at this session: he didn’t protest my only slightly exaggerated rap.

  And I had found a thread that connected my childhood and adolescence to my adult life.

  * Author of The Making of a Surgeon.

  XII-Tantric Road (continued)

  Friday night, July 24

  Hot, sweat-soaked, and oily-skinned from my five hours behind the wheel, I parked at the roadside and went for a swim. The pond, formed from a damned-up mountain stream, had a soft silt bottom, fish that nibbled at your toes, and water arranged in layers of decreasing coolness—much like those rings of multicolored juices and whiskies seen in exotic tropical drinks.

  Feeling refreshed, I returned to my car, parked it in the lot, and went inside the house. I was here to lead a weekend encounter group.

  A number of the summer staff had just settled down at the dinner table. There was Dave, a fine, blunt encounter leader and Anthos’ associate director, whose previous credits included being the only Jewish Afro-Cuban drummer on the Puerto Rican music circuit; his woman, Jill, Anthos’ business manager; Hal, a gentle health-food-conscious ex-hallucinogen freak who taught Latin at a posh boys’ school in the winters and in the summertime helped manage the retreat; his girlfriend Susie; and Ned, a spaced-out, innocent-looking cook/server/handyman/draft dodger who nibbled carrots, thought the world was “groovy,” and seemed to derive most of his satisfactions from contemplating either trees or his own navel.