The Dick Gibson Show

by Elkin, Stanley

  “‘What about enemas? Do they ever get one when you give them an enema?’

  “‘Enemas too,’ Miriam said.

  “‘Jesus.’

  “‘Turn around. I’ll do you back there.’

  “Gently she reamed me. When Miriam had finished one of these baths you could eat off me. Then we made love. Me and Nurse. Calmly, not like on the bus, but languidly and with long graceful glidings like paddling canoes in dreams. Afterward I lay back with my hands behind my head, and soon it was me talking. I told her about being on the radio.

  “‘Mnn,’ Miriam said, for neither of us were much at discussion. There was give and take but it was of a certain kind, like the rules of service in a ping-pong game. I’d serve five times, then Miriam would. It’s the way people who will grow closer speak while they still don’t know each other very well.

  “Miriam talked only when she was doing something—I suspect it was a habit she picked up from her rounds, a compulsion to fill up the silence imposed on patients whose blood pressures or temperatures are being taken. There was something curiously polite, not to say efficient, about this habit, as though language were one more service she rendered. For my part I seemed to speak only when spent, as after lovemaking.

  “Miriam was making us some bouillon on the hotplate. She was naked despite the fact that there was no lock on our door; this, together with the domestic tour she made about the room—fetching the kettle and bouillon cubes, going to the bathroom sink for water— seemed very erotic to me, like the establishing of the story line in a stag film.

  “‘My father was an unhealthy man,’ Miriam said. ‘I mean, he was without health. His heart was bad—he’d had three heart attacks, two of them massive—but there were other things: his liver, migraine— more than that even. He’d had operations. But even before he was sick physically, there was something delicate about him mentally. He was very tender-hearted. I mean, he couldn’t take bad news. It didn’t just make him unhappy as it would others; it affected him physically. That’s what his illness was—bad news, bad news chipping away at his health. It was a sort of erosion.

  “‘We’re a large family—from Cedar Rapids originally. We moved across the state to Simms, Iowa, because it was easier to shield Daddy from bad news there. We were away from the family, my father’s and mother’s brothers and sisters, all of them getting along in years, and all their old friends too, whose illnesses and deaths could be managed better than if we were still with them right there in Cedar Rapids. Now that the news could come through the mail instead of over the telephone, we could plan how best to shield it from Father.

  “‘But not only physical things affected Daddy. Bad news could come in all sorts of ways—like if my sister or I got a bad grade in a subject, or if business was bad. Father had a little money and was a silent partner in a few small businesses—a grocery store, a barbershop, a drycleaner, that sort of thing—so that except in boom times there was always some bad news coming in from one business or the other. But even political things could upset him, current events from all over the world. My God, how that man had sympathies! Mother tells about the time she had to keep the news of the Lindbergh kidnapping from Father. She just cut it out of the paper—the big front-page headlines and stories and pictures, everything. “Here, what’s this?” my father asked her when he saw his paper all cut up. “Oh, that,” Mother told him, “that’s just a recipe I cut out of the paper.” “From the front page?” Father asked. “Well, the second,” Mother said. “The second?” “It’s a very newsworthy recipe,” Mother said, “it’s a big sensation all over the country. It’s for a good cheap eggless cake.” “Eggs are high?” Father said. “Yes,” said Mother, “very expensive.” “Oh, that’s terrible,” Father said, clutching his chest. “But we’re saved by the new recipe,” Mother tried to reassure him, but Father still held his chest and had grown very pale. “What’s wrong?” asked Mother. “I’m not thinking about the cakes,” groaned Father, “I’m worried about the omelets.”

  “‘Well, you can see how it was, how we had to shield him. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except that he was an unrelenting questioner. He knew the harm it did him but he couldn’t help himself. He was like someone flirting with a bad tooth, teasing and maneuvering it until it hurts.

  “‘We had a little dog, the cutest little thing. Well, it was my dog but everyone in the family loved it. We were always petting it and making up to it, even Father. Maybe we loved Roger too much because he never really enjoyed being outdoors. Why should he? He had everything he wanted in the house. Well, of course a dog has to go out sometime, if only to make number one or number two, so we would send Roger out once in the morning and once again at night. That was one of the good things—if it was ever too cold or rainy to walk him, why we could send him out by himself without being afraid he’d run away. He’d do his duty and come right back, whining to be let in. But one time when we let him go out he didn’t come right back. Mother and my sister Rose and I were concerned but we didn’t want to alarm Father so we arranged it that two of us would go to bed and the other would keep a vigil for Roger. Of course we couldn’t go outside and yell for him because Father might hear that and then where would we be?

  “‘My sister was the one who stayed up, for Roger was my dog, remember, and Father might get suspicious if he came down at night and saw me. Also, we weren’t sure I could fool Father; I might not be able to hide my concern. Well, he did get up and come down that night. He saw the light and came into the kitchen where Rose was drinking from the glass of milk which Mother had cleverly thought to pour out for her so she’d have something to do in case Father came down. “I just can’t seem to sleep tonight, Father,” Rose told him, “I thought this milk might relax me.” “Is something wrong. Rose? Why can’t you sleep?” Father asked her. “No, nothing’s wrong, Daddy,” Rose said. “You know how you get sometimes, you just start thinking about things and you can’t seem to fall asleep.”

  “‘That was exactly the wrong thing to tell Daddy, of course; right away he wanted to know what things. Rose made up some stuff about the school elections to tell him. She was in charge of publicity for the candidate put up by her home room and she didn’t know where she was going to get the paints and cardboard for the posters. Well, that troubled Father and he had a little angina pain even though both knew the elections were a good two months off, but as Rose pointed out it wasn’t the end of the world, and that seemed to calm him some. But then he started to ask where everybody was: were Mother and I in bed, and where was Roger? Well, she had just let him out, Rose said. This satisfied Father for it was a natural thing to do, and so he went back to bed.

  “‘Roger still wasn’t back in the morning, but fortunately Mother, who rarely was up before Father, this time was, and she told him she’d just let Roger out. That started something in our house, I can tell you. From that time on poor Mother and Rose and I had to take turns rising before Father just so’s one of us could say we’d just let Roger out. The trouble was, Father usually got up at dawn. We were always tired now because we had to take turns staying up late too. This hurt us in the alertness department. I mean, it was self-defeating, for without sleep we just weren’t sharp enough to withstand Father’s assaults on us for information. It was wintertime—a cold one in Iowa that year—and suddenly it seemed as if all our relatives and friends were coming down with everything all at once. The three of us were always so tired now that we didn’t know what we were saying and would spill the beans to Father accidentally.

  “‘It wasn’t our fault, but the bad news would just tumble out all over the place and there didn’t seem to be anything we could do about it. It was just awful that we couldn’t shield him any more, and believe me it took its toll on that dear man. He lost weight and had pain all the time and his parameters—pressure, pulse, eye track—just went from bad to worse. About all we could manage was to keep Roger’s disappearance from him, and this at a time when we’d given up hope of the dog’s ever
returning. For that matter, Father was so generally dispirited and debilitated by now that he rarely ever asked after him. We wondered if it might not be better just to find some way of breaking the news to Father, have done with it altogether, and then maybe manage to get enough control of ourselves to try to deal with the routine day-to-day shielding of Father that the situation demanded. But of course we were too far into it now. We couldn’t just say we’d lied, and we certainly couldn’t tell him one morning that the dog had just gone off. Father had too much sense for that; he’d have seen that Roger had been missing for weeks.

  “‘Well, the way it turned out we didn’t have to choose any of these alternatives, but frankly I thought it was all over with us when Father himself brought up the subject. “I don’t know, Miriam,” he said, “I just never see Roger any more. The dog is always out. He never used to be like that before this damned winter. Oh, these are hard times, Mim. I’m hearing so much bad news lately I’m worried that there might be something wrong with Roger’s bladder”—and then he clutched with both hands at the small of his back as though he’d just felt a fierce jolt in his own bladder.

  “‘I told Mother and Rose what Father had said and we agreed that we had to do something fast. Well, the very next night Mother went up to Father and said, “You know, Earl, Mim and Rosie have given what you said about Roger yesterday quite a lot of thought, and Mim agreed that maybe it’s just too cold for Roger here. We did get him as a pup from that nice man that time we went down to Florida, remember. Anyway, Mim’s decided that Roger might be better off if he lived with her Cousin Ernestine down in Birmingham, where the climate’s not so harsh. We know how tender-hearted you are, Earl, and we didn’t want to burden you unnecessarily with a sad leavetaking, so we’ve already been down to the depot and shipped Roger off.” Well, it caused Father some pain to realize that I’d given up my dog, but after a while, when he saw the thing in perspective, his spirits began to brighten, and the rest of us felt better too because now we could get more sleep. In no time at all we were able to cope and shield Father again from the bad news that seemed to come from everywhere that winter.

  “‘It was marvelous to see Father grow lively again. I can’t say that he recovered his health, but not having to hear bad news all the time did restore a certain confidence and vigor to the man. And the winter too seemed to be declining in its fierceness, the back of the cold spell had been broken, and though it wasn’t actually warm, the terrible snow had begun to melt—though here and there there were still high drifts and all the curbs were piled with the stuff. It wasn’t just that we knew how to handle the bad news better now that Roger was off our mind; it was that the bad news itself fell off. One day Father even felt well enough to go out for a walk. It was fun to see him in so fine a fettle—Father was a marvelous man to be with when he was feeling good—and I joined him. He was so cheerful that he didn’t seem to be the same man, and once he even bent over to gather up some snow for a snowball. I thought he might hurt himself doing a thing like that but he was up again as spry as any boy and threw the snowball all the way across the street to hit the tree there a lovely bull’s-eye. This made him so happy he couldn’t contain himself and he just stepped bold as you please into a pile of snow at the curb, but then he got this horrible look on his face, and he dropped down on his hands and knees and began uncovering whatever it was he had felt in the snow. Well, it was Roger’s frozen body and when he stepped on it he’d snapped its neck.

  “‘I had to carry Father back to the house on my back, and I think he must have been dead by the time we got there. I took his body in through the back door because I knew Mother and Rose would be in the parlor, and out of habit I didn’t think they should see this.’

  “The funny thing is,” Dick Gibson told his audience, “I don’t remember hearing any of this. I mean, I must have or how would I know it, but I don’t recall much of anything that went on in that room the months I was there. Was I silent the whole time she spoke? Was it a monologue? Did I ever drink the bouillon? Did Miriam get into bed with me during her story? Did I fall asleep? What happened?

  “I wasn’t in love with Miriam. It’s more probable, though unlikely, that she was in love with me. She made me comfortable, more comfortable than I’d ever been in my life. Perhaps because she was a nurse. Nurses have lousy reputations because of what they do for men. I mean the bedpans, the enemas and the pubic shaves, I mean the deathbed vigils and hearing folks scream. I could be myself with Miriam, vent my gas, kiss with a bad taste in my mouth, grunt over my bowels in the toilet. So when I ask if I could have fallen asleep it isn’t out of fear of not being on my mettle as a lover. I was in a trance, a catalepsy, a swoon, a brown study, a neutral funk. I was languid, gravid, the thousand-pound kid in Miriam’s room, sensitized as human soup. And if I heard her at all it was in my ilium I listened—as deep as that—harkened in my coccyx, my pajama strings all ears, and my buttons and the Kleenex under my pillow.

  “‘What is wrong with you, Mr. Desebour, may I ask?’ Doctor Pasco, the Home’s young director wanted to know.

  “‘I have the falling sickness, Dr. Pasco,’ I told him lazily, dizzily. ‘I have the petit mal.’ Nor was I lying. I was in the cataleptic’s ‘aura’ state. It must have been something like that.

  “Miriam noticed my passivity.

  “‘Too many bed baths,’ I told her.

  “‘We’ll cut them out,’ she said. ‘Are you bored here? Are you tired of me?’

  “‘Christ, no. I swear it. If I didn’t know you I’d tune you in and listen to you on the radio.’

  “It was the truth. That was exactly how I listened to Miriam—as if she were some new kind of radio personality. Once I realized this I tried to study her inflections, but she had no inflections. I sank deeper and deeper into my desuetude, the pit of my stomach spreading till I was all stomach pit.

  “One night she asked me to leave.

  “‘Just like that?’

  “‘Yes.’

  “‘I won’t leave. I like it here. I won’t leave until I unlock the secret of your voice,’ I told her, yawning.

  “‘What are you talking about, Marshall? Why are you so difficult?’ ‘ “Please, Miriam, let’s make love. Then fix us bouillon and tell me a story.’

  “‘I am not the Story Lady, Marshall. I’ve told you, I want this ended. You must get out.’

  “‘If you make me leave Dr. Pasco will know we’re not married. He’ll throw you out.’

  “‘We could say we’re getting a divorce.’

  “‘I won’t agree to a divorce, Miriam.’

  “‘We’ll see,’ she said. •

  “I became a laughing stock; Miriam made me a laughing stock. Oh boy, the laughs at my expense, last laughs and best laughs, up one sleeve and down the other. I was their butt, their asshole I was. Miriam’s strategy was simple: she cuckolded me. It probably didn’t amount to much more than washing the private property of a few of the chronics. From the talk I think there may have been some hanky panky with the man who came when she gave him enemas. (He was a nice enough fellow, unremarkable except for a peculiar inability to pronounce certain rs sounds which, in his mouth, came out tch.) The place fed on scandal; it was good therapy for those chronics. I could have blown the whistle on her; I could have gone up to them and said ‘Look here, I’m no cuckold. Miriam’s not my wife,’ but then I would have seemed more pathetic than foolish. It’s one thing to lose control of your wife, but quite another not to be able to handle your mistress. Besides, I hadn’t yet broken the secret code of her voice.

  “But it was the strangest thing I have ever endured. For one thing, we still screwed, more than ever probably, for Miriam was determined to make her adultery seem real, and to do that she needed to preserve the illusion of our marriage which could now be maintained only by the further illusion that she was deceiving me. How complicated it all was. For the first time in my life I was involved with someone who actually had motives. I even had motives myself. (H
ow motiveless the world is, when you stop to consider, how unconspiratorial is the ordinary bent of humanity, how straightforward that bent. Drive drives the world, simple inclination is its capstan.)

  “Another thing was my standing now with the patients. How they clowned with me, how they made jokes with their joke! For instance, they would pretend that I had this enormous dick. The source of this idea, I suspect, was just the fact that of all the people in the home— patients and staff—Miriam and I were the only two who cohabited, so that even before Miriam made cuckoldry with the enema man, an aura had built up around us. We stood apart from the rest of those lame ducks and can’t-cut-the-mustards, though they didn’t see those bed- baths in the double bed with the hospital sides. The conceits they invented were elaborate and insane:

  “‘Ah, Mr. Desebour, pull up a couple of chairs, why don’t you?’

  “‘He’s in for rupture,’ one man liked to explain to his visitors, ‘from carrying great weights.’

  “‘Is it a fact, Mr. Desebour, that you had a limb amputated in order to accommodate your incredible cock, and that you now wear a pant leg over that cock and fill up your shoe with its foreskin?’

  “‘No, that is not a fact,’ I said, and they laughed the harder. Everyone laughed. The man who got hard-ons when Miriam fed him laughed; the Sherpa who had injured his spine in an Everest expedition, and whose employer—a rich Southerner who had taught the Sherpa English—brought the fellow to Morristown to spend the rest of his life in the Home, he laughed.

  “‘Down home,’ the Sherpa said, ‘there was this good old boy. Now he had a piece on him and that piece, well sir, it was big but it was cuter’n a speckled pup under a red wagon. Folks down home said he could climb it. Whoeee, have mercy, have mercy. My daddy told me that old boy went up it like a nigger chased up a tree by a li’l ole ghost. I ain’t sayin’ a thing ’gainst Marshall’s here, I’m just tellin’ you all what my daddy reported.’