The Dick Gibson Show

by Elkin, Stanley

  But at thirty-four sociology and raw percentages took over. How many men were still bachelors at thirty-four? (The man could not be as much as five minutes younger than herself. She was unwilling to live under even the least psychological aspersion. Thus, she forbade the unsavory and pined for the prescribed. Even during the short time she stayed with Dick she insisted that the daily paper and the milk be delivered—not because she was lazy, not even because she read the paper or drank the milk, but because these things were tokens of decency.) And of those who were still single at thirty-four and born before April 11—her birthday—how many were homosexuals, mama’s boys, playboys whose heterosexual profligacies were the danger signals of a too extravagant need? How many were losers or becoming losers? (Was Dick Gibson—when he resigned from WHCN he once again withdrew the name—a loser? He was already forty and sensed that the great apprenticeship, like some recurrent disease from childhood, would soon be on him again. Was he normal? He had been told by Carmella that he had none of the normal man’s accouterments, and he could have told her that he did not even possess a character. Was he even sexually normal? He had not lived with a woman since Miriam in Morristown almost twenty-one years before, and although he was not virginal, sexually he had the past of a nineteen-year-old boy.) There were other requirements. Even if she were able to find someone who was sexually acceptable, he would have to be a man who was already established, his goals not already realized, perhaps, but within marching distance. It would not do for him to be a beginner, for once a beginner always a beginner. (That, he thought, was still another strike against himself.) Then, on a lower order of the imperative, Carmella would want him to have friends—old army buddies, perhaps—whom she would not entirely approve of, and one failing friend from childhood, say, regard for whom would be a measure of her husband’s loyalty and manliness. It was pretty slim pickings. But though he understood the percentages, he also knew how determined Carmella was and that people always get what they want, that all goals are within marching distance.

  So the adultery was inevitable and placed an extraordinary burden on Dick Gibson (now, as he had been twenty-one years before with Miriam, Marshall Maine again, having, in his own mind, retired “Dick Gibson” when he lost the Hartford show), because the assumption ordinarily made about two people who live together without being married is that the relationship is invulnerable to outside pressures. For a man the least approachable woman is the woman who already has a lover. She seems inviolate as a newlywed or nun. Carmella’s open flirting confused men; they never comprehended their eligibility. (Shy men, decent men, why would they?) As often as not they thought themselves toyed with. The burden of proof was on Carmella. She had to allay their fears, and she allayed them at Marshall’s expense, cuckolding him out of wedlock. He dreaded their public appearances together. More than once, even before they left Hartford, he thought of calling the whole thing off.

  Yet Carmella’s very need of the normal was the most fascinating thing about her. It was pathological. To the degree that she yearned for respectability she lacked it, so that as long as he stayed with her he enjoyed a heady sense of the forbidden. For all her absent-minded doodles of electric frying pans and steam irons, she seemed to him the most abandoned woman he had ever known, wilder than the Creole girls of Mauritius, crazier than the brutish whores he had been with in London during the war. It was her need to convert everything into the routine and domestic, her necessity to pretend even with him that they were just the nice couple next door, that fueled his lust. It was very clear; she was inviting him to play House, a game which she played so ferociously that there was something sinful in their supper- times, a wickedness in her burned meats and scorched vegetables, something so tantalizing in her bridey pout over a failed cake that he grew hard contemplating the unrisen dough. A vagrant smell of the amiss from the oven was often enough. For him Carmella was a French maid come to life out of pornography. In his imagination her bare behind bloomed just out of sight beneath her pinafores, and he often thought he could see the wide twin grins of her rump. Their arguments—it never went this far; they didn’t have arguments—would have had to have been settled by sexually seditious spankings. Sometimes she made perky mouths at him, as if she was his daughter as well as his bride, and it was both his torment and a source of his pleasure that she never stopped thinking of the day when she would have a real husband.

  They had gone to Pittsburgh for his mother’s funeral, but Carmella liked the city and it was she who decided that they would not return to Hartford. Then she wept, understanding that she could make such a decision only because her life was so irregular.

  Though Marshall’s father was an old man by this time—Carmella told him that they were married—he still enjoyed performing as much as ever. Only a week after he had buried his wife he was playing the role of a dirty old man, and Carmella was an ideal prop for him. Leering, he might pretend to a sudden palsy. Then, his right hand twitching uncontrollably, he would bring it up to the level of Carmella’s breasts. In this way he managed to brush them at least a half-dozen times a day, or, in passing, to strum her behind every hour or so. Lest he be misunderstood—his peculiar pride wanted it made perfectly clear that he was lascivious and not physically impaired—he occasionally arranged to get his hand tangled inside Carmella’s skirt, where it thrashed about like a fish in a sack making rash plunges and rushes. All Carmella said at these times was “Please, Dad,” or “Now Dad, you know that’s just perfectly silly.” She probably assumed that every family had its eccentric, and that it was perfectly normal for old men, even supposititious fathers-in-law, to turn lewdly on their sons’ wives.

  With his brother Arthur it was something else again.

  Like Marshall, Arthur had never married. In real estate now—they were staying with him until they found an apartment—Arthur lived in a big house in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh. After his mother’s death he had tried to convince his father to come and live with him, but had been unable to budge the old man. Carmella and Marshall were present on one such occasion, Carmella sitting on the sofa between Arthur and the father.

  “Be reasonable, Papa. Why do you need the aggravation of a house? List it with me. I’ll give it my special attention. We’ll put it on the market for twenty thousand, add another thousand realtor’s fee, and when I dump it you can keep the extra grand yourself. The buyer doesn’t have to know I’m your son. Then you come in with me. There’s the solarium, for God’s sake. Remember how you and Mama used to enjoy sitting in the solarium when you came out to see me in Squirrel Hill? You don’t need this cave.”

  “Cave? You call where your Mama and me lived our lives and raised our children a cave? Are you a cave man? Is your brother a cave man? Am I? Did I ever pull your mama around—may she rest—by the hair? Did I hit her on her head with a club? Music you had. Every Saturday afternoon these walls were alive with the sound of the Metropolitan Opera on the radio. What’s the matter, you don’t remember Milton Cross? Is music like that heard in a cave? Carmella, tell him.”

  Carmella, looking from one to the other, was taking it all in.

  “That’s not the point, Papa. What I’m—”

  “It’s not the point? It’s not? Big shot, what’s the point? What’s the point, teddy bear? That you got a solarium, that my big-shot son owns the sunshine? You don’t own the sunshine. I want sun I go in the yard. My backyard is covered with sunshine like a lawn. You think you get more in your solarium? In fact you get less.”

  “Papa, why are you so upset?”

  “I’m not upset, sonny, I’m not upset. But when you ask me to give over my memories, you ask something which will never happen. Your mama’s spirit is in this house. A woman don’t live in a home forty-two years so her spirit can be listed with her son for twenty-one thousand dollars.” Here his hands flew up like a bird to Carmella’s tits, one finger getting caught in the décolletage.

  “Mama’s dead, Papa. When are you going to face that?”
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  “Mama’s dead not even two weeks, Arthur,” Marshall told his brother quietly. “You’ve got to give Papa time.” He had never called them Mama and Papa in his life. Neither had Arthur.

  “Now, Dad, you know that’s perfectly silly,” Carmella told the old man, pulling his hand out from where it had become caught in her brassiere.

  “Time,” Papa said fiercely, turning on Marshall. “You could give me a million years. I’ll never forget her.” His palsied old hand floated down to splash about in Carmella’s crotch.

  Carmella took the hand and held it in both of her own. “Please, Dad,” she murmured sweetly.

  The two sons were having the time of their lives. Biblically ferocious, they shouted back and forth at each other like Italian sons in melodrama. They glowed with a Fifth Commandment intensity. Meanwhile the old man was now a wild Greek patriarch, now ancient Bulgar, now wily WASP whittler and fisherman, now proud old chief, between the peaks of his wrath declining to mournful Jew, actual tears in his eyes when he spoke brokenly of his dead wife, the late lady who for years had led him a merry chase with her Maw Green stunts. Carmella might have been on the sidelines of some three-sided tennis match as she followed the volleys from father to son to brother to father to brother. For her their vaudeville turns were like a dream come true; the vague religiosity of their syntax was holy to her. There was gemütlich in the room like sunshine in the backyard.

  “I didn’t know Methodist families were this warm and close,” she broke in during a lull.

  “What, are you kidding?” Arthur said. “Methodist families are the closest families there are. The closest. We’d kill for each other. Anything, anything at all. One for all and all for one among Methodist brothers. Right, kid?” He punched his brother’s arm.

  “Right,” Marshall said. “Right, kid.”

  “You know,” Carmella said shyly, “you all make me feel ashamed.”

  “Ashamed?”

  “Of what, dear?” Papa asked. In a sudden seizure, his fingers leaped across her cleavage to her far nipple.

  “Of the way I’ve deceived you.”

  “Deceived?” Arthur said.

  She covered her eyes with her hands. “We’re not really married,” she said, and peered out at Arthur from behind what would have been her ring finger.

  Marshall had been expecting a widower, someone with children in high school. He had looked jealously on the balding and pot-bellied and pin-striped. Love would come from that quarter, he thought. And it would be love, hearts erupting in floozy passion, Carmella the Queen of the Cocktail Lounge and Wild West, a Claire Trevor knocking like last opportunity on Mr. Right’s storm doors and aluminum siding. He had been wary of just such a juxtaposition; even at Mama’s funeral he had steered her clear of all avunculars, his brother’s corny cronies, men in liquor, furniture, restaurants and automobiles. He had been rude, accepting their condolences with perfunctory replies as he jerked Carmella next to him as if for support—though the gesture was vicious, like a man with a beast on a stage doing hidden, close-order things with the leash. For the truth was he loved her as much as the man in liquor ever could—perhaps even more since it was still rare and grand for him to be with a woman. It was lovely waking up beside her. On those mornings when she was out of bed first he felt deprived of some special treat he had come to depend on. It was lovely to be in rooms with her or to sit with her in taxicabs, lovely to share space. It was lovely to have her with him in restaurants, to see her head bent over the big menu as in prayer.

  Carmella loves Arthur.

  In an instant his brother had been transformed. From a life-long kibitzer he had become one of the earnest of the world. Suddenly he seemed to acquire wrists, great rawboned red things that hung from hick cuffs. He had become all that Carmella wanted merely by Carmella’s wanting it.

  But now Arthur took them for lovers and grew shy. Even his father had to find some other role to play. It was all right to feel up a daughter-in-law but a mistress was a perfect stranger. Carmella’s strategy in revealing the true state of their arrangement was superb. What followed was inevitable. Arthur grew more sedate and Carmella more ardent, his humility like a sign to her from an astrologer. Now she had a focus for her needs. She was convinced—and so was Marshall—that Arthur was the one and only. For Marshall it was as if all the torch songs he had played all those years on the radio were suddenly coming true, a delphic Tin Pan Alley. His heart was breaking. It was terrible, but not unpleasant.

  One day he told Arthur—they were in Arthur’s solarium—“She’s set her cap for you.”

  “Aw, come on,” Arthur said, “what are you talking about? I’m your brother, for gosh sakes.”

  “She’s got a crush on you, kid.”

  “Blood is thicker than water.”

  “You’re the apple of her eye, I get a feeling.”

  “Say, what do you think I am?” Arthur said. “We grew up together. We lived under the same roof. We’re flesh and blood.”

  “My impression is the love bug has bit her. That’s the long and the short of it.”

  And it was love. Seeing it in her, Marshall was as embarrassed and awed in its presence as his brother. It was profane, it was passionate. Ah, his heart. Breaking, breaking, broken. He had the blues. He had the blues to his shoes. He moped. He moped and hoped. He saddened and baddened. He felt the terror of exclusion and loved Carmella the more, estrangement dislocating him and making him feel as he had as a child tuning Atlanta, St. Louis, Cleveland or Toronto.

  Carmella joined them, and Arthur, decent but flustered and guilt working in him like a decision, went off to fetch tea.

  “I suppose you haven’t actually slept with him yet,” Marshall said miserably. Of course he knew that she hadn’t, that she wouldn’t dream of going to bed with his brother until he was out of the picture, so that by her propriety the adultery became deeper than the mere technical one of flesh.

  She seemed as miserable as he did, her pain—she wasn’t very intelligent, the strategy had been a lucky stroke—conceiving how to get out of her difficulties. “What are you going to do?” he asked her.

  “Oh Richard”—he hadn’t told her he was no longer Dick Gibson—“what’s going to happen? He loves you.”

  “Blood is thicker than water. I’m the apple of his eye.”

  “He’s so ashamed. Sometimes I think he hates me for what he’s doing to you. I could be a good Methodist wife to him—I know I could. Redemption happens, people change. We could have kids. The house is marvelous, but there’s a lot that needs to be done. Once we were married we might even be able to talk Dad into staying with us. Children need grandparents. Did Arthur have grandparents?”

  “He used mine.”

  “Oh Rich, forgive me. I didn’t mean—”

  “Has he made his move?”

  “He’s too good. He wants your word that it’s all right.”

  He hadn’t thought Carmella would stay with him after she blew their cover, but if anything she was with him more than ever now. Their lovemaking grew wilder in the last days. It was as if she understood the criminal source of Arthur’s feeling for her and tried to make herself worthy of it.

  One night about a week later, she put him to sleep with the most incredible lovemaking of all. He rode Carmella about the room like a horse, slapping at her ass as she, bucking and running, strong as a wrestler in her passion, carried him. Later, he inexplicably woke up. Knowing he wouldn’t be able to fall asleep again, he got up without even looking toward Carmella’s side of the bed and went up to the big solarium at the top of the house and entered the great diced glass room. He had never been there at night before. Rain fell heavily on the glass ceiling and he kept ducking his head involuntarily. Remaining dry under the steadily ticking rain seemed another facet of the illusion. Great storm-trooper shafts of lightning flashed all about him and he blinked timidly. He walked to one huge vaulting wall of glass and looked out. Though he was higher than the trees and saw nothing moving,
he sensed a great wind. The rain simply appeared, visible only as it exploded against the glass. It was if he were flying in it. He thought of radio, of his physics-insulated voice driving across the fierce fall of rain; it seemed astonishing that it ever got through. Now, though he was silent, it was as if his previous immunities still operated, as if his electronically driven voice pulled him along behind it, a kite’s tail of flesh. He stood in the sky. He raised his arm and made a magic pass.

  “This is Dick Gibson,” he whispered, facing the thunder, “of all the networks, coast to coast.” The lightning burned along its fuse. “Latest flash from Dick Gibson: Dick Gibson loves Carmella Steep.” It exploded and made an electric alphabet soup of the wet, dark sky. “This is not Dick Gibson,” Dick Gibson said. “This is God,” he called softly across the heavens and raised his right arm and threw a thunderbolt at downtown Pittsburgh. It was just possible that because of all this turbulence his voice would get through, that someone might pick him up on the rib of an umbrella or the buckle of his galoshes. And he thought of Carmella as of some mortal woman he had loved, the memory of his recent ride apt, as if he’d had to change her into a horse in order to love her.

  Arthur was touching his shoulder.

  The radio man wheeled. “I want you to have Carmella,” he said. “I want you to teach her the laws of calm and Methodism and to get all that dreck out of her pussy and line it with mortal children before it’s too late. I want her to be charming to your clients and rearrange the furniture and mix it up in the Mix-master. I would marry her myself but I am not religious, though I am a god.”