“‘Thank you,’ I said, pronouncing my words distinctly. ‘You are very kind to me.’
“I sat down but the old fellow still stood in the aisle looking at me uncertainly. I smiled at him pleasantly but he seemed troubled. Then, looking away, he spoke to the woman in the seat in front of mine. ‘I think he ought to take his coat off. It gets pretty warm once the driver closes the door.’
“‘He’d probably be more comfortable,’ she said.
“The man turned back to me and I looked up at him with that curiously alert anxiety people show when others are discussing them. ‘Yes?’ I asked.
“‘We were thinking you might be too hot in that overcoat once the bus starts,’ the man said.
“‘Oh, yes. Thank you.’ I started to wriggle out of the coat and the man in the seat behind mine leaned forward to help. ‘You are very kind to me,’ I told him. The old man in the aisle folded the coat carefully and put it in the rack above his seat where it would not be crushed by my parcels. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You are all very kind to me.’ We smiled at each other and nodded, and then the man in the aisle took his seat and I settled in. In a little while the woman in front offered me her newspaper. ‘Oh, no,’ I said brightly. ‘Thank you. I am looking through the window.’ The woman nodded approvingly and looked where I was looking.
“‘Those are elm trees,’ she said.
“‘Oh, yes?’
“‘Elm,’ she said.
“‘Elm,’ I repeated.
“We came to a town and passed a schoolyard where some kids were playing basketball. ‘Those boys are playing the game of basketball,’ the old man said.
“‘The game of basketball takes much skill,’ I told him thoughtfully.
“‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘There are great universities that will pay for his education if the boy is skillful enough.’
“‘Ah.’
“‘They certainly have their energy. I suppose they’d play till the cows came home if no one stopped them.’
“‘With children it is much the same everywhere,’ I said.
“We went by an International Harvester agency where the machines were jammed up on the apron outside the store, the great yellow seats on the tractors and harrows like enormous iron catchers’ mitts. I looked out the window at everything, the best guest in history. And indeed, after my isolation and dedication of the last years, there was something profoundly interesting, astonishing even, about it all. I might have been a foreigner, a greenhorn to ordinary life.
“It was necessary for me to change buses in Des Moines, and over coffee in the Post House my new friends scrutinized my tickets and consulted with each other.
“‘His best bet,’ one said, ‘would be to lay over in Chicago for a night, look around the city tomorrow morning and catch an early afternoon bus out.’
“‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea,’ the man said who had helped me off with my overcoat.
“‘He’d want to see Chicago.’
“‘Of course. But look. He doesn’t get in till two-thirty this morning. Then, until he gets his bags and finds a locker where he can check them and looks over the bus schedule and hails a taxi cab it’s another forty, forty-five minutes. Then he first has to start looking around for a hotel. It could be four o’clock before he gets into a room. You think he’s going to be up to sightseeing in the morning? And even if he is, how much can he see in a few hours? No. I say if he wants to look around Chicago, fine, but he should make it a separate trip. Not a lousy layover that don’t mean nothing.’
“‘Well, maybe,’ the old man said.
“‘What maybe? There’s no maybe about it. I’m right and you know it.’
“‘If he doesn’t know Chicago it could be very confusing to come in at two-thirty in the morning,’ the woman who had offered me her paper said.
“Then the driver called for them to reboard the bus and we all shook hands. The man who had helped with my overcoat paid for my coffee. I went with them to the bus and stood by as they climbed on. ‘Everybody is very kind,’ I said, ‘very friendly.’
“The old man was the last to go up the steps. He turned at the top and looked down at me just before the driver pulled the big steel lever that shut the door.
“‘Listen,’ he said, ‘good luck to you.’
“The old man was an old man, no high priest but a stranger with a good wish no stronger than my own, but it made me uneasy. There’s something terrible to have it assumed that one needs luck. And, remember, we were at a crossroads.
“And, indeed, when I returned to the restaurant where none now knew me, my foreignness seemed gone. No longer an object of interest to my fellow passengers, I was just one more weary pilgrim with all the pilgrim’s collateral burdens—his sour taste, the beginning of sore throat, a sense of underwear and standing oppressed by his luggage in an open place, feeling the attention divided and a touch of panic.
“Today with an hour to kill in Des Moines I would call up the big radio station, introduce myself and accept whatever professional courtesy was offered. But not then.
“In a few hours I was traveling again, comfortable and safe now that it was dark, snug, aware of the glowing dials on the driver’s console, relaxed by the long moist hiss of the tires.
“Somewhere along its route a girl had boarded the bus and sat down beside me. I saw her when I woke. Her eyes were shut but facing my lap. I turned on my haunch and closed my eyes again. I do not like to fall asleep in public because of the erection. I had one now—piss and lust—and I turned away to hide it. Something about my breathing must have put her wise, and I sensed that she too only pretended to sleep. We traveled like this for a time, both of us ever more wakeful. That she had come aboard some time after eleven o’clock from some small town, or even from beside the road perhaps, made her tremendously sexy to me. Somehow, even more than her proximity, her isolation and the lateness of the hour—which suggested that she was in trouble—made her seem available. It excited me that she had seen my hard-on, and our mimed sleep, of course. My God, I don’t know what I might have done, but just when I could stand it no longer, just when I was capable of doing something for which they could have thrown me off the bus, just then her hand moved, made a suicide leap from its place in her lap to the narrow space between us. No, not a leap; it was one of those great surrenders from an enormous height, this lovely Acapulcan plunge. The edge of her hand grazed my hip as it fell, took a wee nip of my buttock. Ah, I was on fire. Oh, I was hot. From this I took hot heart and turned blindly, still feigning sleep, boldly forcing my erection into her palm.
“She shrieked and slapped me. Was I wrong about her? ‘Don’t give me that,’ I said. I shook her shoulders and pulled her to me and maneuvered the whole works into her hand again. And you know what? She took it.
“What a lesson! What a lesson! So much for your timidities and reservations, so much for your doubts and reluctances, your equivocations and hesitancies and shields of decorum more heavy than the world. She held me, I tell you. Then I held her. We grabbed at each other like drowners grasping at spars. (We sparred all right: sparring partners!) But she had been sleeping, there was no question about it. It was like something in a charm: one smash of passion and poof went the world. There is more rape than ever gets into the papers, and madness is the common cold of the emotions.
“So we hugged and we kissed. Right there in the bus I put my hands up her skirt and down her panties and in her crotch. We hadn’t yet spoken, nor had either of us seen what the other even looked like. She unzipped me and pulled me off and collected my come and patted it on my prick like butter. In the bus. She squeezed it for luck and locked her legs around my hand when I started to withdraw it. These were her first words to me: ‘Not so fast, not so fast. Do me. Do me or I’ll scream again.’
“I did her. I thrummed her parts like rubber bands. Right there in the bus where they could throw you off for lighting a cigarette or talking to the driver. Then, when it was over and I wa
s thinking, well now we can relax, she still held on. She did me again and I did her again. Then she started to tell me jokes, and that was the way we traveled through the night—me with my hand in her pants and her playing with my cock and ears and touching my teeth lightly with her fingers so that I could taste my own semen, and telling me jokes. Dumb little jokes like a kid might know, not even dirty, just silly riddles and ‘Knock Knock’ stories and dopey limericks and one-liners about ‘the little moron.’ She knew them all and whispered them to me as if they were love words. After a while I thought she might be in show business. I asked her that.
“She put her head down shyly. ‘I thought that’s the way people speak.’
“‘Maybe it is,” I said.
“When it grew light I sat with a newspaper across my lap until my pants dried. I put the paper down and saw that some of the print had come off on my fly. People stopped to read my crotch as they passed by.
“‘We’ll get off the bus,’ I whispered. ‘We’ll find a tourist cabin. We’ll make love properly. You’ll tell me all your best jokes.’ “‘We’re miles from anywhere. We have no motorcar.’ “‘Then let it get dark. I can’t stand sitting next to you and not being able to touch you.’ “‘Shh.’
“‘I mean it. This daylight is a bad business.’ “We introduced ourselves. ‘Marshall Maine,’ I told her. “‘Miriam Desebour,’ she said, ‘pleased to meet you.’
“Miriam was on her way to a convalescent home in Morristown, New Jersey, where she had taken a job as a practical nurse. I had intended to go home to Pittsburgh, but I went on with Miriam instead. She told her employers we were married, that I had been one of her patients, a sort of invalid who would never recover, and they accepted this.
“Do you know about Morristown? It’s a very peculiar place—the languishment capital of America, maybe the world. It’s the major industry. There are no famous clinics or hospitals, but there are schools for the deaf and the famous Seeing Eye Institute. There are convalescent homes like the one that hired Miriam, and old people’s homes, and a farm for crippled children, and a sort of plantation where the retarded children of the wealthy spend their whole lives. There were people whose plastic surgeons had botched their operations and who felt they were too ugly ever to go home. There were ‘training schools’ from which few ever graduated, and old gassed soldiers from the First World War. There were other veterans, men who came to Morristown to learn how to use their artificial limbs but never got the hang of it somehow. To my knowledge there were no lepers, but one of the persistent rumors was that a colony of them lived somewhere in the hills around the city. (I think the occasional appearance in the streets of the failed plastic-surgery patients gave rise to these rumors.) Many had lost limbs. There was lameness of all sorts, and it occurred to me that to be without a finger or an arm or a leg was a stunning kind of nakedness. (I thought of public exposures, emergencies of bust zipper and collapsed elastic. The needles and pins industry in Morristown must have been enormous, great patch fortunes might have been made there—fabulous thread mines in the Morristown hills. Indeed, the town did seem to have more shoe-repair shops and tailors than one would see in a city its size, and now that I think of it, it seems to me that something in the hearts of these people caused them to carry about all the scissors and thimbles and spot sewing equipment I saw.) It seemed to me that all the afflicted people of the world were stuffed into Morristown. It had all it could handle, a cornered market of gimps, a secular Lourdes, but not, withal, ungay. We were a community of arrested diseases, patient patients, developers of fortitude and resignation—all the loser virtues, all the good-sport resources.
“It was something to sit in those Morristown drugstores and see the doting purchases of the healthy, magazines for the relatives they were soon to abandon, cosmetics to make them presentable, pens, stationery, portable radios—all the sick man’s sick-room detritus. It may have been a sign of my lassitude at this time that sitting in those drugstores as the cash register rang up the sales I thought no more about it than that it ultimately takes very little to live, that the desert isle and the beachcomber are worthy fictions. I owned a radio myself, of course, and listened to the Morristown stations. I wonder why I never realized while I was there that they were the same as radio stations anywhere. Probably the station managers thought the shut-ins wanted the world on normal terms. But nobody does.
”I lived in the home with Miriam, in the staff quarters, which were really no different from the facilities elsewhere in the home. There were rubber treads in the bottom of our bathtub, and a vertical hand rail screwed into the tile. There were conveniences all about the room, closets deep enough to store wheelchairs and whirlpool baths, a customized feel to the special heights of the furniture, defenses against arthritic stoop and arthritic stretch. We slept in a double bed with hospital sides—I’m just a prisoner of love. There were no locks on any of the doors, not even the door to the toilet. And the coils of our hotplate were a bright, cautionary fire red even when the electric was off. I have not been entirely comfortable in any room I’ve lived in since. Once one knows the hazards …
“That my physical appearance did not certify me an invalid was no special problem. Many of the people there seemed as healthy as myself. In fact there was an entire population of the unscarred: men and women whose lameness was in the blood, ruddy six-foot fellows as hollowed out as chocolate Easter bunnies, their stony-muscled arms piled high with blood pressure, their wrists with racing, warbled pulse. We were—I speak now not only for the community but for myself as well (‘as well,’ ha ha)—weaklings, our strengthlessness imposing an obligation on others, so that it exerted its force too, as everything alive does.
“Miriam, who knew my real condition, labored to make my assumed one come true. She made tight hospital corners on the very sheets we made love on and kept a bedpan for me within easy reach of the bed, and there was always a full glass of ice water on the nightstand. She sometimes gave me bed baths, first outlining one side of my body with towels and pushing the towels against it tightly like one beginning a sand construction, then pulling my pajama bottoms down—‘Can you raise your hips a moment?’—the length of the bed, producing them from beneath the sheet at the foot like a minor trick of magic. ‘Turn on your side, please,’ she’d say. ‘Can you turn on your side?’ Then, arranging the sheet so that just my back and the upper part of my buttocks were exposed—I felt prepared, lovingly set up, set off, appetizing as vegetable-ringed meat on a plank—she would begin to rub my back with the warm, soaped cloth. She spoke as she worked, peaceful, passive monologues, her voice more distant than her hands which turned and rubbed and stroked, telling me not the jokes now—she had run out of jokes, though she was always careful to tell me the new ones her patients told her—but about her life before she met me.
“‘I have to help people,’ Miriam said. ‘I thought I’d be a schoolteacher. In Iowa you don’t have to be a college graduate. You can get a temporary certificate so long as you’re enrolled in college and earn at least six credits a year. A lot of teachers never graduate. They just sign up for summer school year after year, but I’ve known some who manage to save enough so they can take off every third year or so and maybe get their degrees in eight or nine years. Of course, those who get positions in Ames or Iowa City have an advantage: they can teach and go to the university at the same time. Those are the plum jobs, though. They’re very rare.’
“‘Mnn.’
“‘When I graduated high school I did teach for a year. Fourth grade. I liked it very well. It was very interesting and I enjoyed being around the children, but you know—when it comes right down to it that’s not really helping people, teaching school. I mean, kids aren’t in trouble, not even if they’re poor, not even if they don’t always get enough to eat. I mean, they’re kids, you know? Kids can play. I guess really the only kind of trouble people can get into is to be sick.
“‘I mean, their bodies can be in trouble. That’s really all that
can happen to a person. I’ve always been strong. I’m very thankful for that. I love being strong. I mean, if we were to wrestle I’d probably win. I wouldn’t try to hurt you but I’d win. Here.’ She handed me the washcloth. ‘Do your private property.’ She giggled. ‘That’s what we call it. Or “family jewels.” Isn’t that silly? Sometimes we say that to the men.’
“‘You do my private property, Miriam.’
“‘Don’t be wicked, Marshall.’
“‘Miriam, you do my family jewels.’
“‘Now I’ve already spoken to you, young man.’
“‘Do my cock, Miriam. You do my prick. Please, Miriam, do my wang wang.’
“‘Marshall!’
“‘You said you liked to help people.’
“‘People in trouble. You’re not in trouble.’
“I turned on my back. ‘There’s trouble and there’s trouble.’
“‘No,’ Miriam said firmly. ‘Whenever I wash you down there you just come all over the sheets and there’s nothing left for me.’ She looked down at me and laughed. ‘Look at you. You’re just like one of the old men around here with their big old things.’
“‘Do the old men get hard?’ I was interested; I hadn’t known this.
“‘Of course they do. It’s a reflex, silly. There are some men around here who get an erection when I feed them.’
“‘Who? Who does?’
“‘Never mind. That’s a nurse’s confidence.’
“‘Who does? Who gets an erection when you feed him?’
“‘Never mind. You’ll never get me to violate my professional ethics.’
The Dick Gibson Show Page 7
