"I may be getting my period. You even look younger than I do. And that's not fair."
"You'll live longer. Women do."
"But I'll look older."
"What do you expect, if you live longer? At least you're alive."
"I was kidding," she says. "You don't even know when I'm kidding. It's getting harder and harder to talk to you."
My own good joke about Freud, money, and excrement went right by her, and I suppose I will have to leave her for something like that someday (she has never heard of Copernicus or Kierkegaard either, although she may have heard of Camus because he was killed in an expensive sports car), although I would not want to do it while my little boy still appears in such precarious need of me. (I am not sure he needs me at all.) I do not feel he'd last if I died suddenly or moved out. (He would not know what hit him if I were gone. My daughter's wish to steal our automobile may be a wholesome development: it gives her a goal to work toward.) When he grows up and gets away from me, I will get away from him. My daughter will be away too and there'll be only Derek, if we still have him. I wouldn't want to move away and stick my wife with a retarded child. Actually, I would like to stick her with Derek. She stuck me with him. (And he won't even be a child then.) But everyone would be on her side, unless I left her for another woman, which would change everything, because that would be romantic. I think I'd elope. There'd be lots of: "Why did he leave his wife? They have a retarded child, don't they?"
"He fell in love with another girl and ran off with her."
"Oh."
But change that to:
"Why did he leave his wife with a retarded child?"
"He didn't want to be married anymore."
And there'd be plenty of:
"He was only thinking of himself, wasn't he?"
And:
"How selfish. That poor woman. He left her alone with a retarded child just because he didn't want to be married to her. What will the poor woman do?"
I can hear those choruses of opprobrium reverberating to the four corners of the company. Not that I'm much help to her now when it comes to him. I don't have the strength. I'd rather slink off or look away. Someone will have to make the decision for me: she will, without even realizing she is doing it, or a doctor will have to aid us with an unambiguous recommendation based on anything but our own selfishness. (Our conscience must be clear.) "He'll be much better off there, safer. They have good ones now. It's best for all of you, the other children too. It hasn't been fair to them. You deserve a rest. You've both been marvelous. I know it will be hard to give him up."
Or an illness or accident will have to occur.
Till then, I'm powerless. (I don't have the guts even to want to talk about it. I've got no answers to the unspoken criticism I imagine I'll hear. I do not want to listen for the rest of my life to my wife's second thoughts. I could forgive myself in a second for putting him away. She would not forgive either of us.) I am not the pillar of support she wants. I keep my mouth shut and my sentiments suppressed, and I adamantly refuse to merge my feelings with hers. (I won't share my sorrows. I don't want her to have a part in them. They're all mine.) I wish I had no dependents. It does not make me feel important to know that people are dependent on me for many things. It's such a steady burden, and my resentment is larger each time I have to wait for her to stop crying and clinging to me and resume placing the silverware in the dishwasher or doing her isometric hip and thigh exercises. (I can't stand a woman who cries at anything but funerals. I feel used.) "For God sakes, what do you want from me of all people, Jesus Christ?" I roar at her. "They're my children, too. Do you really expect me to feel sorry for you?"
"I need someone to talk to. I wasn't asking you to feel sorry for me. Can't I even say how I feel?"
"Call your sister. You know damn well I can't stand crying anymore." I don't want to hear how she feels. I don't want to have to talk to anyone about Derek. I don't want to have to hear anyone talk about his own troubles. (I find it harder and harder to feel sorry for anyone but myself.) "I can't help you with this. I don't know how. I didn't order it this way and I don't know what to do, either."
And I saw it happening before anyone. Someone cursed us. I am ashes and stale air inside when it comes to him, have the fortitude and fiber of dried mushrooms and wet fallen leaves. I am cold. I could have prophesied. When pediatricians said he was slow, I saw he was clumsy. His knees and feet and fingers seemed angled slightly out of kilter. I discerned he could not seem to hold his head up straight for long. I had a feeling of disaster about him even before he was born (but I had that anxious feeling about the others too). I expected a Mongoloid. I would have settled readily beforehand for a harelip or cleft palate and trusted to surgery--with all three--although I can't visualize either my boy or my daughter wading through life even this far with any kind of serious birth defect. They've had trouble enough without it. I can't see how my wife really expects me to feel sorry for her when I have so many good reasons for feeling sorry for myself. Among them, her.
I want to get free of her before her health fails. I see an ailing wife in my future. There are eloquent forerunners now of chronic invalidism. (She's sure she has, is getting, will get cancer, and maybe she will.) I know her health will degenerate before mine does. She's better at it. I don't want to be tied to her by sickness (hers, that is). I will. I'll get battered by continuing hurricane warnings of bursitis, arthritis, rheumatism, diabetes, varicose veins, dizziness, nausea, tumors, cysts, angina, polyps, the whole fucking shebang of physical dissolution. (I can do without everyone else's but my own.) I'll be caught on that barb. And my grown-up children will keep me there.
"Dad, how can you even think of leaving her, when she's feeling so bad?" they'll say to me in reproof.
"But how can I ever leave her, when she never feels better?"
They'll get away from it all quickly enough (the self-centered fuckers).
"I don't feel well," my wife wakes up whimpering some mornings in a little girl's voice (when she feels someone wants something from her).
As if I care.
("I was watching you sleep," a girl will tell you while she's still in love with you. "You were snoring."
When she's not in love with you, it's revolting, and she will not want to see you again unless she's lonely or needs your money.) My wife snores now sometimes, and occasionally her breath is bad in the morning. But, so is mine, and so do I, so we are already in a headlong race toward decrepitude. The children join in with sniveling complaints of their own.
My daughter gets sore throats and stomach pains. My boy pleads tiredness and nausea and will sleep past noon some days if we let him. I use headaches. So does my wife. I've got chest pains I can draw upon, for everybody has great respect for a heart attack, and a liver up my sleeve I can play in a clutch. My wife can counter with cancer scares, and it's even-Stephen down to the wire in the shadow of the valley of Blue Cross major medical benefits. Wouldn't it be a laugh if my wife died of chest pains and I was the one who got cancer? When my wife is depressed and my daughter drops innuendoes of suicide, I can plunge into thick, sepulchral silences for days and feign such absorbed distraction that every remark to me has to be repeated--I can out-ail any of them at anything but hysterectomies if I want to make the effort, any of them but Derek, who begins with certain congenital handicaps that are impossible for me to overcome. (Ha, ha.) All of us boast of insomnia, not always truthfully. Were we taken at our word, not one member of the family has ever enjoyed a good night's sleep. Except, perhaps, Derek, who just can't bring himself to complain. (Ha, ha.) I wonder what's done with them in homes when they reach sexual maturity and discover they might just as well masturbate as do anything else. I'm glad he's not a girl. Castration's inhuman. So they cut off their arms. I wonder how they control attendants. How do they keep them away from the idiot boys and girls? My thoughts go haywire when I try to think of him. Tell me he'll not progress to a mental age past five: and I find myself thinking again
if people at five know how to clean themselves properly after defecating. Of course not. My boy of nine still leaves stains on his undershorts, and so do I. (So does everyone, probably, so why must I single out us?) I see him now so lovely, touching, and pitiful I can't bear to look. I see him next at thirty moving toward sixty, and he is appalling. I am dazed, horrified, stricken dumb. Dark hair is growing on his face and on the backs of his hands, and his eyebrows are bushy. Will he look like me? He'll be balding. His suit won't fit. No one will groom him. His dandruff falls like fish scales. I color his sweaters and jackets dark and his face pale. He is slack-jawed and flabby as they steer him about, he is repulsive, lame, and monstrous. He still won't be able to speak. He will not know how to diet or play tennis, squash, or golf, and his build and muscle tone will be sickly. He'll be ungainly. People would stare with hostility if he were anywhere else. They'll forget to clip his fingernails. People will want to kill him. They'll call him Benjy. I will not want to visit him. I hope I can't remember him. I hope I don't find out my wife is committing adultery, even though she probably should.
"Do it," I'd advise, if she were someone else's.
"Okay. I will."
It might do wonders for her morale, if she didn't expect too much. It's also time she struck back. Wouldn't it be funny if my boy is the one who turns out to be homosexual and I do not? It would be tragic. I, at least, have inhibitions of steel. It would be worse than tragic for me: it would be socially embarrassing. A suicide, a fag, and an idiot, the Slocum offspring from the Slocum loins. And an alcoholic, neurasthenic, adulterous wife. God bless the girl--she'd come in handy. I'd blame the children on her. Until someone as astute as I am pointed an accusatory finger at me and inquired: "Hey, wait a minute, buddy. Buddy, wait a minute. Was she always this way?"
"I don't know. All of this takes time to mature and emerge. You'll have to ask some reliable, revolutionary, evolutionary, psychological historian, an experienced botanist of the psyche. Was I this way?"
"You made me this way."
"You made me make you."
"You made me make you make me. Why can't I talk to you?"
"Call your sister."
"I need a sympathetic ear."
"You drink too much."
"You make me."
"Call your sister and complain to her."
"I hate my sister. You know it."
"She has a sympathetic ear."
"You bastard," she blurts out. "You just can't wait to get away from me, can you? I know what you're thinking. I can tell by the way you look."
More and more often lately, I find myself looking her over critically evenings for stains and bite marks of illicit sexuality. I feel cheated when I don't find any.
"What'd you do today?" I'm the one who's likely to ask.
"Nothing."
"Shopping."
"Went to the beauty parlor."
"Saw my sister."
"Saw some friends. Why?"
"Just curious."
"What'd you do?"
"Worked. Nothing."
"Anything happen?"
"It's moving along, I think. I don't want to talk about it."
"Jinx?"
"That's talking about it."
"I'll knock wood."
There are even mornings now when I catch myself scrutinizing her for stains and blemishes obsessively with the same aggressive and scavenging suspicions, and this, I know, is irrational, for she has spent the night in bed with me. I don't want to go crazy. I like to keep tight rein on my reason, thoughts, and actions, and to know always which is which. I don't want to lose my inhibitions. I might hit people if I did (strangers, friends, and loved ones), commit murder, spout hatred and bigotry, scratch eyeballs, molest teen-age girls and younger ones with trim figures, come on crowded subway trains against the side of a hefty buttock on someone like my wife or Penny. Dreams are merciless; they come upon you when you're asleep.
I might start stuttering.
Waking up is such a peculiar and extraordinary process that I'm surprised we are able to manage it successfully so many times while we are still half asleep.
I think I might get used to the idea of my wife's copulating with other men, but never to the specifics, the mechanics, to all that probing and liquid, all those grunts and strenuous bendings. Everything gets wet. Places are raw or bruised afterward. I don't like to picture my wife ever doing with another male the things she does with me. Or my daughter. (Will he put--of course. Will she--why not?) Everything does get so wet and smelly, and this is called making love. Beasts do it. It has no connection with love, q.v., op. cit. (But better wet and smelly, for my taste, than dry and perfumed. I hate those artificial, candy-store scents. I want to embrace human flesh with musky, natural odors, not a bar of soap.) Even business handshakes these days have turned wet and smelly. Show me a young man with a dry, pumping handshake today and I'll show you an unscrupulous young man on the make. I wish my daughter would stop leaving her bra around where I can see it and stop leaving her nightgown hanging on the door of the bathroom. She's developed fast and knows it. I see the way she dresses sometimes to go out, and I am furious. (She has bigger breasts now than my wife.) I can barely look at her as she pauses in front of me to wait for the money she says she needs. (There isn't anything I can say that wouldn't be derogatory and crushing to her self-esteem at a moment when she might be feeling good about herself. I wish she'd always wear her bra instead of leaving it tossed around. She'll wear blue denim jeans and doesn't always look clean. She reminds me of Ann Arbor. Every girl I meet these days reminds me of a different one I've known.) "No wonder they say dirty things to you when you walk past. You're asking for it. If you get raped you deserve it."
She'd break down immediately into sobbing hysteria.
"You always do that," she'd accuse shrilly (while my boy watches from a corner in apprehensive deliberation, and I am already sorry I started). "You always say something to spoil everything."
"I have spoken to her," my wife replies in wilted exasperation. "She thinks I'm mean and jealous. She thinks I'm envious because I've got no tits."
"You've got tits."
If anything does happen to my daughter these days, it will probably happen with that college graduate she's mentioned who works on a land-fill truck and has offered to give her driving lessons evenings and weekends if we let them have one of our cars.
"No."
My wife nods in agreement. "You have to be sixteen."
"I can get a little head start. Everyone else does. You want me to pass, don't you?"
I want her to pass geometry, English, French, social studies, and science--not driver education. And I want her to get at least a B average so she'll be able to go off to college when she's through. (I won't want her here.) I don't see how I'll ever be able to make conversation with a simpering, clever son-in-law much younger than I who I know is humping my daughter quietly in another part of the house when they come to visit us weekends. My wife will bake cakes for them and look forward to grandchildren. (She's the one with the dirty mind.) They'll want things from us and lie to me.
"Maybe she won't. Maybe she'll be different. Maybe she'll grow up by the time she's married."
"We didn't."
"What do you mean?"
My wife doesn't understand me.
I don't think she ever thinks I'm thinking she might be out screwing another man or that I am inspecting her belly, hair, thighs, neck, chest, panties, slips, and blouses systematically and belligerently for semen stains that aren't mine. (My wife has one of those light and softly sloping bellies you often see in photographs of attractive, long-waisted girls.) Often when I'm inspecting her hair and belly closely my antagonism turns into passion (to antagonistic passion, of course, otherwise known as lust, and I will want to make love). I'll have to leave her if I find one. I have something more potent than an ordinary hypocritical, male chauvinist double standard to give me the strength and determination to walk out: I have insecurity. br />
I have forgotten all about brain tumors, the thirteenth largest killer of undivorced men my age in Connecticut with three children, two cars, and an opportunity for promotion to a better job. No wonder I have to yell a lot at home to make my identity felt. (I don't really want to be feared; I want to be nursed and coddled. I don't get the love and sympathy from my family that I used to get as a child from my mother and certain women teachers. God dammit--I want to be treated like a baby sometimes by my wife and kids. I've got a right. I need that feeling of security. I'm not one of these parents that expect to be taken care of by their children in their old age: I want my children to take care of me now.) My wife believes I enjoy being home with her these days; she cannot detect that I can hardly wait to get out of the house to the office to be near Arthur Baron (with whom I am exchanging glances these days, I think, that are of more than ordinary significance).
The convention's in Puerto Rico again (to do rightful honor to Lester Black's wife's family), and Kagle's away in Toledo. My wife will find it hard to forgive me for firing Andy Kagle (until I tell her unequivocally it's him or me. Then she'll look over my shoulder into a distance and not wish to know anything more about it). My wife feels sorry for Kagle's leg, wife, and two children. My wife empathizes easily with all religious families, except Black ones, and except Jewish ones, whose foreign language ("It isn't even Latin.") and incomprehensible praying seem crude and offensive to her. (She thinks they are praying about us.) Even their holidays fall on different days. (They are a perverse and stiff-necked people. She does not want our daughter to marry one, although she'd prefer that to a Puerto Rican or Negro.) Kagle won't improve. He still goes to church with his family when he's home on a Sunday and to places like Toledo on business for a week and to low-class whores in the late afternoon. He is still a bigot and won't hire a Jew or fuck a Black girl, unless he's away at some business meeting on an island in the Caribbean. Then he likes them young; he's had them fifteen and would take them thirteen and eleven, I think, but would feel abnormal. I have to fire him; I've been to whores with him and can't forgive him or forget. He'll hover. He'll bump shoulders with me, snigger indecorously.