“Well, that’s fine,” Mr. Blaine said. “And how about the plays?”
This time Michael spoke for himself. “Well, I haven’t had very much luck with those yet,” he said, and the truth was that he’d had no luck at all. Several of his early plays might still be on the desks or in the files of a few off-Broadway producers, but the big one, the three-act tragedy that had cost him so much, had earned only a cursory letter of acceptance from his agent and was now “making the rounds” – an endless avenue of little hope. At times during the summer he had even thought of offering the script to the Tonapac Playhouse, but he’d always held back. The director of that year’s itinerant company was a nervous, hurrying, indecisive man who didn’t inspire much confidence; the actors were either undisciplined kids, dying for their Equity credentials, or incompetent veterans forever too old for their roles. Besides, it would have been almost too much to bear if they had considered the play and turned it down. “The theater’s a very – a very difficult business,” he concluded.
“Oh, I know it is,” Mr. Blaine said. “I mean, I can imagine it must be.”
Laura came home from school then, and Michael knew this meant the visit would soon be over. Stewart and Charlotte Blaine had never had more than a little of themselves or each other to spare for being parents, so it was only reasonable not to expect them to show much interest in the child of another generation. After their first false cries of delight they seemed unable even to pay attention to the shy, big-eyed, grass-stained little girl who came up to stand too close to their knees, whose presence obliged them to hold their whiskey glasses aloft and well out of harm’s way as they craned their faces comically from one side of her to the other in an effort to keep the grown-ups’ talk alive.
As soon as the Blaines had gone, Michael clasped his wife in a hug and thanked her for the way she had answered her father’s question. “You really came through for me,” he said. “That was great. It’s always so great when you – when you come through for me that way.”
“Well,” she said, “I did it as much for myself as for you.” And she seemed to stiffen in his arms, or maybe it was his arms that stiffened; it might have been that he stepped on her shoe, or that they broke apart too quickly; in any case, it felt like the clumsiest embrace of their lives together.
*
One autumn day there was a knock on the pump shed door and Michael found Tom Nelson smiling there in his old GI tanker’s jacket.
“Want to go out for pheasant?” Nelson inquired.
“I don’t have a shotgun,” Michael told him. “Or a hunting license, either.”
“Hell, they’re not hard to come by. You can get a fairly decent gun for twenty-five bucks or so, and the license is easy. I’ve been going out alone the past couple mornings, and I thought I’d like some company. Thought an old aerial gunner’d make a pretty good wing shot.”
It was a nice idea – and flattering, too, that Tom Nelson had come all the way from Kingsley to suggest it; Michael took him down to the house so that Lucy could have a share in the pleasure. They had been to many parties at the Nelsons’ house, and the Nelsons had often sat talking and laughing in theirs; even so, Lucy still seemed glad of any reassurance that the Nelsons were their friends.
“Shooting birds?” she said. “Is that really such a good idea?”
“Ancient spirit of the hunt, ma’am,” Tom Nelson said. “Besides, it gets you outdoors. It’s exercise.”
And very early one morning, when Michael self-consciously carried his cheap new shotgun through yellow fields toward what Nelson had described as “a natural spot,” he felt a quickening of interest. Except for boxing, which he knew he’d taken up for complicated reasons, he had never pursued or enjoyed a sport in his life.
But when they sat down on a lichened rock, it soon appeared that Tom was less concerned with pheasant than companionship: he wanted to talk about girls.
Had Michael noticed the little black-haired number at that last party? With the sweet mouth and the kind of tits you could die for? She was shacked-up with that bullshit art historian from Yale – wasn’t that a heartbreaker? – and the worst part was she seemed to like the old clown.
Oh, and Jesus, talk about heartbreakers: A couple of weeks ago Tom had been hanging around the Modern trying to talk to this lovely young thing, looked to be fresh out of Sarah Lawrence or someplace, real doe eyes and sweet, sweet legs, and he’d just gotten to the point where he managed to tell her he was a painter.
“She said ‘You mean you’re Thomas Nelson?’ But son of a bitch if some flaming faggot curator didn’t pick that very moment to call out to me from the other side of the room in this fluty voice: ‘Oh, Thomas, do come and meet Blake So-and-so of the National Gallery.’ And man, I mean I shrank across that floor. I was absolutely positive she had me figured for a fag.”
“Couldn’t you’ve gone back to her later?”
“Lunch, man. Had to eat lunch with that National Gallery asshole. Spent half an hour looking around for her afterwards, but she’d taken off. They always take off.” He sighed heavily. “My trouble is I got married too young. Oh, I’m not knocking it: it’s home, it’s family, it’s stability and all that.” And he stubbed out his cigarette on the rock between his boots. “But some of these girls are – some of these girls are too much. Want to try flushing out a bird or two?”
And they did, conscientiously, but they found none.
Deer season came later. The only legal way to hunt deer in Putnam County was with shotgun slugs, rather than rifles – and the blunt snouts of those slugs, protruding from their tight paper shell casings, looked so brutal that many hunters must have been only halfhearted in stalking their prey. Michael and Tom weren’t even halfhearted: their mornings in the woods were mostly given over to conversational strolls or to taking long rests, seated with their guns across their laps.
“Ever have a girl write you a fan letter about your poems?”
“Nope. That hasn’t happened.”
“Be pretty nice, though, wouldn’t it? Some neat girl fall in love with you and write you a breathless little letter; you write back and set up a meeting someplace? Take a lot of careful planning, but it might really be nice.”
“Yeah.”
“I almost had something like that once. I mean almost. Girl went to one of my gallery shows and wrote me this letter: ‘I feel you have something to say to me, and perhaps we have something to say to each other.’ Like that. So I played it cool, and it’s a good thing I did. Wrote back and asked her for her photograph, and there went the ballgame. She’d had the picture taken with these shadows of leaves partly covering her face, to make herself look more arty, I guess, but there was no hiding it: tiny little eyes, pursed-up mouth, frizzy hair – I mean not exactly a dog, but a semi-dog. Talk about disappointment, man. And I mean it wouldn’t’ve been so bad if I hadn’t had this altogether other girl built up in my mind. Christ, what imagination can do to you.”
Another time Nelson complained that he never really got away from home these days except when Fortune magazine gave him an illustration assignment. “And I usually enjoy those jobs; the work’s easy, and I like to travel. Last year they sent me down to south Texas to do some sketches of the oil rigs there. That part was all right. Trouble was there were these two guys in charge of showing me around down there in a jeep, you see, and I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t like me: they kept calling me ‘the artiste.’ One of ’em would say ‘Hey Charlie, wanna run the artiste over to Number Five?’ or ‘Think the artiste has had enough for the day?’ Like that. Then once the three of us were eating lunch in this truck-stop kind of place and they got to talking about their families, and I happened to mention I had four sons.
“Wow! You shoulda seen their jaws drop! Made all the difference in the world, just hearing me say ‘four sons.’ Point is, you see, a lot of those characters think ‘artist’ equals ‘fag,’ and I guess you can’t blame them; anyway, from then on they couldn’t do enough f
or me. Buying me drinks at night, calling me ‘Tom,’ asking me all about New York, laughing at my jokes. And I think they were about ready to fix me up with a girl, but there wasn’t time. Had to catch the damn plane.”
As they made their way home for breakfast on the last day of deer season, trudging as slowly as tired infantrymen with their weapons balanced on their shoulders, Tom Nelson said “Ah, I’ll never know what the hell was the matter with me when I was a kid. I was a very slow developer. Reading books, playing the drums, fooling with tin soldiers – that’s what I was doing when I should’ve been out getting laid.”
Lucy took longer than usual over washing the dishes one evening, and when she came out into the living room she wiped back a fallen lock of her hair in a way that suggested she had a difficult announcement to make.
“Michael,” she began, “I’ve decided I ought to see a psychiatrist.”
His lungs seemed to shrink, as if breathing might now be severely curtailed. “Oh?” he said. “Why?”
“There isn’t any why in the sense of something that can be explained,” she told him. “If there were, I could explain it.”
And he was reminded of her impatience with him over the abstract-expressionist painting in that dimly remembered Boston art gallery: “If he could have said it, he wouldn’t have had to paint it.”
“Well, but I mean is it mainly what you’d consider a marriage problem?” he asked, “or other kinds of problems?”
“It’s – all kinds. Current things, and things going all the way back to my childhood. I’ve come to feel I need help, that’s all. And there’s a man in Kingsley named Fine who’s supposed to be quite good; I’ve already made an appointment with him for Tuesday, and I think I’ll be going twice a week. I just wanted you to know about it because I think I’d feel funny if you didn’t. Oh, and of course there’s no need to worry about the expense of it or anything; I’ll be using my own – you know – my own money.”
And so he had to stand at a window on Tuesday afternoon and watch her drive away. There was a chance that she might soon come back, disgruntled by the psychiatrist’s questions or his manner, but the far more likely thing was that from now on she would disappear every Tuesday and Friday into a world of secrets that couldn’t be confided; she would grow ever-more distant; she would evaporate and be lost to him.
“Daddy?” Laura asked him once when they were alone together. “What does ‘dilemma’ mean?”
“Oh, it means when you can’t quite decide what to do. Like maybe you want to go out and play with Anita Smith, but there’s a good show on television and you sort of feel like staying home and watching that instead. Then you’re in a ‘dilemma.’ See?”
“Oh,” she said. “Yes. That’s a good word, isn’t it.”
“It sure is. You can use it in a lot of ways.”
When the heaviest snowfalls hit Putnam County it always took four or five days before Ann Blake could arrange to get her driveway plowed. On those mornings, holding hands and shuddering or laughing, Michael and Laura would plod all the way down through the drifts to the place where the school bus stopped, and they always had Harold Smith and his children for company. Harold would carry Keith, his brain-damaged boy, and he’d say “You’re not getting any lighter, buddy,” as his daughters trailed behind. When the children had been deposited at the bus stop, all looking forlorn in their ice-flecked mufflers, their stiff mittens and their rubber boots, it was time for Harold to wave goodbye and strike off up the road for the mile-and-a-half walk to the train station – and if it happened to be a Chain Store Age day, Michael would go along with him. They’d walk fast, pausing now and then to crouch and blow the congestion of their nostrils into the snow, and they’d talk like hardbitten comrades.
“Well, marriage is funny, Mike,” Harold said once with the wind whipping the vapor of his voice over his shoulder. “You can go along for years without ever knowing who you’re married to. It’s a riddle.”
“You’re right,” Michael said. “It is.”
“Course, most of the time it doesn’t seem to matter: you get by; you get through; the kids get born and start growing up, and pretty soon it’s all you can do to stay awake until it’s time to go to sleep.”
“Yeah.”
“Then maybe once in a while you take a look at this girl, this woman, and you think: What’s the deal? How come? Why her? Why me?”
“Yeah, I know what you mean, Harold.”
By the spring of 1959 Michael had come to feel he was discovering poetry all over again. The publication of his second book had been disappointing – not very many reviews, most of them tepid – but now he was putting together a new one that gave every promise of excellence.
Some of the new poems were short but none were slight, none were loose, and it pleased him to read the better ones aloud in the solitude of the pump shed. Sometimes, almost wholly without shame, he would cry over them. There was still a lot of work to be done on the long, rich, ambitious poem that would conclude the book – something comparable to the one called “Coming Clean” that Diana Maitland had said she liked so much – but he had some strong opening lines for it and a generally sound idea of how it would develop: he felt confident he could bring it off by September, if the summer went well. It would begin slowly and accelerate as it gathered complexity; its controlling images would be of time and change and decay, and at the end, very subtly, it would turn out to be about the falling apart of a marriage.
Words and phrases rode in his head as he walked home from the shed every evening, and later as he sat with his whiskey in the living room while Lucy moved around in the steam and savory smells of the kitchen.
Only very slowly, absentmindedly, was his attention drawn to a bright purple-and-white book on the coffee table that might have been lying there for days. It was called How to Love, by Derek Fahr, and the photograph on the back showed a bald man whose keen eyes had been caught looking straight into the camera.
“What’s this?” he inquired when she came in to set the dinner table. “Some kind of sex manual?”
“Not at all,” she told him. “It’s a work of psychology. Derek Fahr is a philosopher, and he’s also a practicing psychiatrist. I think you might find it extremely informative.”
“Yeah? Why me?”
“Well, I don’t know. Why me?”
The following Sunday, when all sounds and activity in the living room were swamped under the Sunday newspapers, he looked up from The New York Times Book Review to say “Lucy? Did you know this guy Derek Fahr’s been up at the top of the best-seller list for twenty-three weeks?”
“Yes, sure, I knew that,” she said as she paged through fashion advertisements across the room, and then she looked at him. “You think everything on the best-seller list is trash, don’t you? You always have.”
“Well, not everything, no; I’ve never said that. It’s certainly true that most of the stuff is trash, though, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think that’s true at all. If a man can write something that appeals to a great many people; if his ideas and his way of expressing them turn out to be what a great many people want, or need – isn’t that a substantial achievement?”
“Oh, come on, Lucy, you know better than that. It’s never been a question of what people ‘want’ or ‘need’ – it’s a question of what they’re willing to put up with. It’s the same rotten little commercial principle that determines what we get in the movies and on television. It’s the manipulation of public taste by virtue of the lowest common denominator. Oh, Jesus, I know you know what I mean.” And he rattled his paper back into reading position, to make clear that the subject was closed.
There was a silence of ten or fifteen seconds before she said “Yes. I know what you mean, but I don’t agree with you. I’ve always known what you meant about everything; that’s never been the trouble. The trouble is I’ve never agreed with you – ever – and the appalling thing is I’ve never even come to realize it until the past few mo
nths.” And she stood up, looking defiant and oddly fearful at the same time.
The book section slid to the floor as Michael got to his feet. “Now, wait just a God damn minute,” he said. “Is this something you and Dr. Fine have worked out in those cozy little intimate sessions of yours?”
“I might have known you’d jump to a cheap conclusion like that,” she said. “As it happens, you’re entirely wrong – I’m not even sure if I’ll go on seeing Dr. Fine – but I suppose you can believe whatever you wish. Could you just stop talking now?”
She went swiftly into the kitchen then, but he was right behind her. “I’ll stop talking,” he told her, “when I’m fucking ready to stop. Not before.”
She turned on him and looked him up and down. “Oh, this is strange,” she said. “This is really interesting. I mean it’s been surprising enough to find I’ve always hated all your precious, elitist little Kenyon Review ideas – and my God, if I never hear you say ‘poem’ or ‘play’ again it’ll be too soon – but what I know now is that it’s your voice itself I hate. Do you understand me? I simply can’t bear the sound of your voice anymore. Or the sight of your face.” And she wrenched open both taps of the sink at full blast, preparing to wash the dishes.
Michael went back and wandered trembling among the strewn Sunday papers. This was worse than bad; this was the worst. In other fights he had sometimes managed to give her time enough alone, in silence, to recover and be sorry, but now the old rules no longer applied. And besides, he had a few more things to say.
She was hunched over the steaming suds when he came up to stand behind her, keeping his distance. “Where do you get ‘precious’?” he demanded. “Where do you get ‘elitist’? Where do you get ‘Kenyon Review’?”
“I think we’d better stop this at once,” she told him. “Laura can hear us, and she’s probably crying up there.”