by John Irving
"I was with the makeup girl, but it was only for one night," Wallingford began. "I was just horny."
What a way with words he had! (Talk about neglecting the context!)
He told Doris about the phone calls from various members of Angie's distraught family, but Mrs. Clausen was confused--she thought he meant that Angie was underage. (All the gum-chewing didn't help.) "Angie is a good-hearted girl," Patrick kept saying, which gave Doris the impression that the makeup girl might be mentally disabled. "No, no!" Wallingford protested. "Angie is neither underage nor mentally disabled, she's just ... well ..."
"A bimbo?" asked Mrs. Clausen.
"No, no! Not exactly," Patrick protested loyally.
"Maybe you were thinking that she might be the very last person you would sleep with--that is, if I accepted you," Doris speculated. "And since you didn't know whether I would accept you or reject you, there was no reason not to sleep with her."
"Yes, maybe," Wallingford replied weakly.
"Well, that's not so bad," Mrs. Clausen told him. "I can understand that. I can understand Angie, I mean." He dared to look at her for the first time, but she looked away--she stared at Otto junior, who was still blissfully asleep. "I have more trouble understanding Mary," Doris added. "I don't know how you could have been thinking of living with me and little Otto while you were trying to make that woman pregnant. If she is pregnant, and it's your baby, doesn't that complicate things for us? For you and me and Otto, I mean."
"Yes, it does," Patrick agreed. Again he thought: What was I thinking? Wasn't this also a context he had overlooked?
"I can understand what Mary was up to," Mrs. Clausen went on. She suddenly gripped his one hand in both of hers, looking at him so intently that he couldn't turn away. "Who wouldn't want your baby?" She bit her lower lip and shook her head; she was trying not to get loud and angry, at least not in the room with her sleeping child. "You're like a pretty girl who has no idea how pretty she is. You have no clue of your effect. It's not that you're dangerous because you're handsome--you're dangerous because you don't know how handsome you are! And you're thoughtless." The word stung him like a slap. "How could you have been thinking of me while you were consciously trying to knock up somebody else? You weren't thinking of me! Not then."
"But you seemed such a ... remote possibility," was all Wallingford could say. He knew that what she'd said was true.
What a fool he was! He'd mistakenly believed that he could tell her the stories of his most recent sexual escapades and make them as understandable to her as her far more sympathetic story was to him. Because her relationship, although a mistake, had at least been real; she'd tried to date an old friend who was, at the time, as available as she was. And it hadn't worked out--that was all.
Alongside Mrs. Clausen's single misadventure, Wallingford's world was sexually lawless. The sheer sloppiness of his thinking made him ashamed.
Doris's disappointment in him was as noticeable as her hair, which was still wet and tangled from their night swim. Her disappointment was as plainly apparent as the dark crescents under her eyes, or what he'd noticed of her body in the purple bathing suit, and what he'd seen of her naked in the moonlight and in the lake. (She'd put on a little weight, or had not yet lost the weight she'd put on when she was pregnant.)
What Wallingford realized he loved most about her went far beyond her sexual frankness. She was serious about everything she said, and purposeful about everything she did. She was as unlike Mary Shanahan as a woman could be: she was forthright and practical, she was trusting and trustworthy; and when Mrs. Clausen gave you her attention, she gave you all of it.
Patrick Wallingford's world was one in which sexual anarchy ruled. Doris Clausen would permit no such anarchy in hers. What Wallingford also realized was that she had actually taken his proposal seriously; Mrs. Clausen considered everything seriously. In all likelihood, her acceptance had not been as remote a possibility as he'd once thought--he'd just blown it.
She sat apart from him on the small bed with her hands clasped in her lap. She looked neither at him nor at little Otto, but at some undefined and enormous tiredness, which she was long familiar with and had stared at--often at this hour of the night or early morning--many times before. "I should get some sleep," was all she said.
If her faraway gaze could have been measured, Patrick guessed that she might have been staring through the wall--at the darker rectangle on the wall of the other bedroom, at that place near the door where a picture or a mirror had once hung.
"Something used to hang on the wall ... in the other bedroom," he conjectured, trying without hope to engage her. "What was it?"
"It was just a beer poster," Mrs. Clausen flatly informed him, an unbearable deadness in her voice.
"Oh." Again his utterance was involuntary, as if he were reacting to a punch. Naturally it would have been a beer poster; of course she wouldn't have wanted to go on looking at it.
He extended his one hand, not letting it fall in her lap but lightly brushing her stomach with the backs of his fingers. "You used to have a metal thing in your belly button. It was an ornament of some kind," he ventured. "I saw it only once." He didn't add that it was the time she'd mounted him in Dr. Zajac's office. Doris Clausen seemed so unlike a person who would have a pierced navel!
She took his hand and held it in her lap. This was not a gesture of encouragement; she just didn't want him touching her anywhere else. "It was supposed to be a good-luck charm," Doris explained. In the way she said "supposed to be," Wallingford could detect years of disbelief. "Otto bought it in a tattoo shop. We were trying everything at the time, for fertility. It was something I wore when I was trying to get pregnant. It didn't work, except with you, and you probably didn't need it."
"So you don't wear it anymore?"
"I'm not trying to get pregnant anymore," she told him.
"Oh." He felt sick with the certainty that he had lost her.
"I should get some sleep," she said again.
"There was something I wanted to read to you," he told her, "but we can do it another time."
"What is it?" she asked him.
"Well, actually, it's something I want to read to little Otto--when he's older. I wanted to read it to you now because I was thinking of reading it to him later." Wallingford paused. Out of context, this made no more sense than anything else he'd told her. He felt ridiculous.
"What is it?" she asked again.
"Stuart Little," he answered, wishing he'd never brought it up.
"Oh, the children's book. It's about a mouse, isn't it?" He nodded, ashamed. "He has a special car," she added. "He goes off looking for a bird. It's a kind of On the Road about a mouse, isn't it?"
Wallingford wouldn't have put it that way, but he nodded. That Mrs. Clausen had read On the Road, or at least knew of it, surprised him.
"I need to sleep," Doris repeated. "And if I can't sleep, I brought my own book to read."
Patrick managed to restrain himself from saying anything, but barely. So much seemed lost now--all the more so because he hadn't known that it might have been possible not to lose her.
At least he had the good sense not to jump into the story of reading Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web aloud (and naked) with Sarah Williams, or whatever her name was. Out of context--possibly, in any context--that story would have served only to underline Wallingford's weirdness. The time he might have told her that story, to his advantage, was long gone; now wouldn't have been good.
Now he was just stalling because he didn't want to lose her. They both knew it. "What book did you bring to read?" he asked.
Mrs. Clausen took this opportunity to get up from where she sat beside him on the bed. She went to her open canvas bag, which resembled several other small bags containing the baby's things. It was the only bag she'd brought for herself, and she'd not yet bothered (or had not yet had the time) to unpack it.
She found the book beneath her underwear. Doris handed it to him as if she were
too tired to talk about it. (She probably was.) It was The English Patient, a novel by Michael Ondaatje. Wallingford hadn't read it but he'd seen the movie.
"It was the last movie I saw with Otto before he died," Mrs. Clausen explained. "We both liked it. I liked it so much that I wanted to read the book. But I put off reading it until now. I didn't want to be reminded of the last movie I saw with Otto."
Patrick Wallingford looked down at The English Patient. She was reading a grown-up literary novel and he'd planned to read her Stuart Little. How many more ways would he find to underestimate her?
That she worked in ticket sales for the Green Bay Packers didn't exclude her from reading literary novels, although (to his shame) Patrick had made that assumption.
He remembered liking the movie of The English Patient. His ex-wife had said that the movie was better than the book. That he doubted Marilyn's judgment on just about everything was borne out when she made a comment about the novel that Wallingford remembered reading in a review. What she'd said about The English Patient was that the movie was better because the novel was "too well written." That a book could be too well written was a concept only a critic--and Marilyn--could have.
"I haven't read it," was all Wallingford said to Mrs. Clausen, who put the book back in her open bag on top of her underwear.
"It's good," Doris told him. "I'm reading it very slowly because I like it so much. I think I like it better than the movie, but I'm trying not to remember the movie." (Of course this meant that there wasn't a scene in the film she would ever forget.)
What else was there to say? Wallingford had to pee. Miraculously, he refrained from telling Mrs. Clausen this--he'd said quite enough for one night. She shined the flashlight into the hall for him, so that he didn't have to grope in the dark to find his room.
He was too tired to light the gas lamp. He took the flashlight he found on the dresser top and made his way down the steep stairs. The moon had set; it was much darker now. The first light of dawn couldn't be far off. Patrick chose a tree to pee behind, although there was no one who could have seen him. By the time he finished peeing, the mosquitoes had already found him. He quickly followed the beam of his flashlight back to the boathouse.
Mrs. Clausen and little Otto's room was dark when Wallingford quietly passed their open door. He remembered her saying that she never slept with the gaslight on. The propane lamps were probably safe enough, but a lighted lamp was still a fire--it made her too anxious to sleep.
Wallingford left the door to his room open, too. He wanted to hear when Otto junior woke up. Maybe he would offer to watch the child so that Doris could go back to sleep. How difficult could it be to entertain a baby? Wasn't a television audience tougher? That was as far as he thought it out.
He finally took off the towel from around his waist. He put on a pair of boxer shorts and crawled into bed, but before he turned the flashlight off, he made sure he'd memorized where it was in case he needed to find it in the dark. (He left it on the floor, by Mrs. Clausen's side of the bed.) Now that the moon had set, there was an almost total blackness that resembled his prospects with Mrs. Clausen.
Patrick forgot to close his curtains, although Doris had warned him that the sun rose directly in his windows. Later, when he was still asleep, Wallingford was supernaturally aware of a predawn light in the sky. This was when the crows started cawing; even in his sleep, he was more aware of the crows than he was of the loons. Without seeing it, he sensed the increasing light.
Then little Otto's crying woke him, and he lay listening to Mrs. Clausen soothe the child. The boy stopped crying fairly quickly, but he still fussed while his mother changed him. From Doris's tone of voice, and the varying baby noises that Otto made, Wallingford could guess what they were doing. He heard them go down the boathouse stairs; Mrs. Clausen kept talking as they went up the path to the main cabin. Patrick remembered that the baby formula had to be mixed with bottled water, which Mrs. Clausen heated on the stove.
He looked first in the area of his missing left hand and then at his right wrist. (He would never get used to wearing his watch on his right arm.) Just as the rising sun shot through his bedroom windows from across the lake, Patrick saw that it was only a little past five in the morning.
As a reporter, he'd traveled all over the world--he was familiar with sleep deprivation. But he was beginning to realize that Mrs. Clausen had had eight months of sleep deprivation; it had been criminal of Wallingford to keep her up most of the night. That Doris carried only one small bag for all her things, yet she'd brought half a dozen bags of paraphernalia for the baby, was more than symbolic--little Otto was her life.
What measure of madness was it that Wallingford had even imagined he could entertain little Otto while Mrs. Clausen caught up on her sleep? He didn't know how to feed the child; he'd only once (yesterday) seen Doris change a diaper. And he couldn't be trusted to burp the baby. (He didn't know that Mrs. Clausen had stopped burping Otto.)
I should summon the courage to jump in the lake and drown, Patrick was thinking, when Mrs. Clausen came into his room carrying Otto junior. The baby was wearing only a diaper. All Doris was wearing was an oversize T-shirt, which had probably belonged to Otto senior. The T-shirt was a faded Green Bay green with the familiar Packers' logo; it hung past midthigh, almost to her knees.
"We're wide awake now, aren't we?" Mrs. Clausen was saying to little Otto. "Let's make sure Daddy is wide awake, too."
Wallingford made room for them in the bed. He tried to remain calm. (This was the first time Doris had referred to him as "Daddy.")
Before dawn, it had been cool enough to sleep under a blanket, but now the room was flooded with sunlight. Mrs. Clausen and the baby slipped under the top sheet while Wallingford pushed the blanket off the foot of the bed to the floor.
"You should learn how to feed him," Doris said, handing the bottle of formula to Patrick. Otto junior was laid upon a pillow; his bright eyes followed the bottle as it passed between his parents.
Later Mrs. Clausen sat Otto upright between two pillows. Wallingford watched his son pick up a rattle and shake it and put it in his mouth--not exactly a fascinating chain of events, but the new father was spellbound.
"He's a very easy baby," Mrs. Clausen said.
Wallingford didn't know what to say.
"Why don't you try reading him some of that mouse book you brought?" she asked. "He doesn't have to understand you--it's the sound of your voice that matters. I'd like to hear it, too."
Patrick climbed out of bed and came back with the book.
"Nice boxers," Doris told him.
There were parts of Stuart Little that Wallingford had marked, thinking that they might have special significance for Mrs. Clausen. How Stuart's first date with Harriet Ames goes awry because Stuart is too upset about his canoe being vandalized to accept Harriet's invitation to the dance. Alas, Harriet says good-bye, "leaving Stuart alone with his broken dreams and his damaged canoe."
Patrick had once thought Doris would like that part--now he wasn't so sure. He decided he would skip ahead to the last chapter, "Heading North," and read only the bit about Stuart's philosophical conversation with the telephone repairman.
First they talk about the bird Stuart is looking for. The telephone repairman asks Stuart to describe the bird, then the repairman writes down the description. While Wallingford read this part, Mrs. Clausen lay on her side and watched him with their son. Otto, with only an occasional glance at his mother, appeared to be listening intently to his father. With both his mother and father near enough to touch, the child was getting sufficient attention.
Then Patrick reached the moment when the telephone repairman asks Stuart where he's headed. Wallingford read this excerpt with particular poignancy.
"North," said Stuart.
"North is nice," said the repairman. "I've always enjoyed going north. Of course, south-west is a fine direction, too."
"Yes, I suppose it is," said Stuart, thoughtfully.
"And there's east," continued the repairman. "I once had an interesting experience on an easterly course. Do you want me to tell you about it?"
"No, thanks," said Stuart.
The repairman seemed disappointed, but he kept right on talking. "There's something about north," he said, "something that sets it apart from all other directions. A person who is heading north is not making any mistake, in my opinion."
"That's the way I look at it," said Stuart. "I rather expect that from now on I shall be traveling north until the end of my days."
"Worse things than that could happen to a person," said the repairman.
"Yes, I know," answered Stuart.
Worse things than that had happened to Patrick Wallingford. He'd not been heading north when he met Mary Shanahan, or Angie, or Monika with a k--or his ex-wife, for that matter. He had met Marilyn in New Orleans, where he was doing a three-minute story on excessive partying at Mardi Gras; he'd been having a fling with a Fiona somebody, another makeup girl, but he dumped Fiona for Marilyn. (A long-acknowledged mistake.)
A trivial statistic, but Wallingford couldn't think of a woman he'd had sex with while traveling north. As for being up north, he'd only been there with Doris Clausen, with whom he wanted to remain--not necessarily up north but anywhere--until the end of his days.
Pausing for dramatic effect, Patrick repeated just that phrase--"until the end of my days." Then he looked at little Otto, afraid that the child might be bored, but the boy was as alert as a squirrel; his eyes flashed from his father's face to the colored picture on the book's cover. (Stuart in his birchbark canoe with SUMMER MEMORIES stamped on the bow.)
Wallingford was thrilled to have seized and kept his young son's attention, but when he glanced at Mrs. Clausen, upon whom he'd hoped to make a redeeming impression, he realized that she'd fallen asleep--in all likelihood, before she fully comprehended the relevancy of the "Heading North" chapter. Doris lay on her side, still turned toward Patrick and their baby boy, and although her hair partly covered her face, Wallingford could see that she was smiling.
