The Water-Method Man

  Fred couldn't look Couth in the eye, for fear that Couth might see how relieved he looked.

  No such relief, however, did he see in his bathroom mirror on the morning there was no hole to pee out of. At first, a little pinch would open it. Then it began opening and closing all by itself; he seemed to have no influence over it. He took aspirin and rationed his water.

  But on the morning he shyly shared the bathroom with his father (turned away from his father's looming lathered presence shaving at the mirror), Fred straddled the hopper and peed what felt like razor blades, bent bobbypins and ground glass. His scream opened a messy gash on his father's chin, and before he could hide the evidence, his father shouted, 'Let me see that!'

  'What?' said Fred, clutching what he was sure was only a remnant of his former part.

  'What you're holding,' his father said, 'that's what.'

  But Fred wouldn't let go, fearing it would fall at his feet; he knew that if he let go, they would never be able to put it back. He held on fiercely while his father raged around him.

  'Stuck together, is it?' the good doctor roared. 'A little discharge now and then? Something like nails in the way of your passing water?'

  Nails! So that's what he'd felt! My God!

  'What have you been into lately?' his father bellowed. 'Sweet Jesus! Just fourteen and you've been into it already!'

  'I'm fifteen,' Fred said; he felt more nails wanting to come out.

  'Liar!' boomed his father.

  Down the hall his mother called, 'Edmund? He is fifteen! What a lot of shouting over such a silly issue!'

  'You don't know what he's been into!' his father shrieked at her.

  'What?' she asked. They could hear her coming toward the bathroom. 'What have you been into, Fred?'

  But this made his father conspiratorial. He locked the bathroom door and called to his wife, 'Nothing, dear.' Then, all pink-foamed, his shaving cut bleeding through his lather, he bent over Fred. 'What was it?' he whispered grimly, and the way he said it made Fred want to say, A sheep. But the pink-frosted face was frightening, and after all his father was a urologist; expert advice on peeing was something he couldn't afford to turn down. He thought of iron filings floating down from his bladder; he saw the stout snout of a chisel pushing its way down his urinary tract like a raft.

  'God, what's in me?' he asked his father.

  'Feels like it's rusted shut, doesn't it?' the good doctor said. 'Now let me see it.'

  Fred let his hand drop to his knee, listening for the plop on the bathroom floor.

  'Who was it?' his father asked, touching the tip of his life.

  'Elsbeth Malkas!' he crooned, hating his betrayal of her but finding nothing delicious enough in his memory of her to make protecting her worthwhile.

  Elsbeth Malkas! His toes stuck out so straight he thought he'd fall. Elsbeth Malkas! Bring her in here, stretch her out, discover what in hell she hides in that deceptive snatch of hers ...

  'Clap,' his father said, and like most things his father said, it sounded like a command. And Fred thought, Clap? Oh no, please be careful. No-one should clap anywhere near it now. God, don't anyone clap, please ...

  Then his mother came to the bathroom door and called his father to the phone. 'It's Cuthbert Bennett,' she said.

  'For Fred?'

  'No, for you,' she told the good doctor, following him down the hall, looking anxiously back at Fred, who was as white as an Elsbeth Malkas canvas. 'Edmund,' she followed, chirping, 'be nice to Cuthbert. He's just lost his father, and I think he wants your advice.'

  Fred came grimacing after them down the hall, watched his father pick up the phone, slumped against the wall and waited.

  'Yes, hello, Cuthbert,' his father said in a kindly tone, plastering the mouthpiece with blood-pink shaving lather. 'Yes, of course, what is it?' Then his whole face changed and he shot a look at Fred like a killer-dart. Far off, in a tiny sound of panic, Fred heard Couth's hysterical voice; his father stared down the hall at him, shocked as the voice over the phone went on and on. 'No, no, not here. I'll see you in my office,' his father said irritably, and Fred simply had to smirk, a breaking grin. 'In an hour, then,' his father said, holding in his rage. 'All right, in half an hour,' he said, louder. Fred slouched haughtily against the wall, then dissolved in a cackling fit as his father shouted into the phone, 'Well, don't pee, then!' Hanging up, he glared at Fred, now laughing uncontrollably against the wall.

  'Why can't Cuthbert pee?' his mother asked, and his father wheeled on her, his wild head in a gory froth.

  'Clap!' he shouted at her. He frightened the poor woman; she began to clap.

  918 Iowa Ave.

  Iowa City, Iowa

  Nov. 3, 1969

  Dr Edmund Trumper

  2 Beach Lane

  Great Boar's Head, New Hampshire

  Dear Dr Trumper:

  As I understand your feelings, if Fred had not brought me back pregnant from Europe and married me, you would have continued to support him through graduate school. You have never made it clear, however, that if I hadn't been pregnant, you might have continued your support of Fred. Well, frankly, this all strikes me as both insulting and unfair. If Fred didn't have a wife and child to support, he would not really need your money. He could pay for himself through graduate school with part-time jobs and scholarships. And if I hadn't been pregnant I could have gotten a job to support the remainder of his studies. In other words, the situation we are now in requires your support more than both situations you claim you would have supported us in. What exactly is it you don't approve of? That I was pregnant? That Fred didn't wait to do things in the order you did them in? Or is it just me in particular whom you simply don't like? It's like some moral punishment you are handing out to Fred, and don't you think that someone over twenty-five shouldn't be treated this way? I mean, you had this money set aside for Fred's education, and I can understand you not being willing to support his wife and child too, but isn't it sort of childish to refuse to pay for his education as well?

  Yours,

  Biggie

  918 Iowa Ave.

  Iowa City, Iowa

  Nov. 3, 1969

  Dr Edmund Trumper

  2 Beach Lane

  Great Boar's Head, New Hampshire

  Dear Dr Trumper:

  Fred's letters to you have, I think, been what you'd call 'hints'. I am not going to hint around. My mother and father give us what they can so that Fred can finish his goddamn Ph.D., and I think that you should give us at least what you were planning to give Fred for his education before I came pregnantly along and upset your plans for him. I also think that your wife would agree with me, but you bully her.

  Biggie

  918 Iowa Ave.

  Iowa City, Iowa

  Nov. 3, 1969

  Dr Edmund Trumper

  2 Beach Lane

  Great Boar's Head, New Hampshire

  Dear Dr Trumper:

  You are a prick. Please forgive my language, but that's what you are. A prick for making your own son suffer and casting aspersions on his manner of marrying me and having Colm and all. Just because he wasn't a doctor when he did it. Even so, your Fred has done quite well for Colm and me. It's just that this last year, with all the pressures on him to finish his thesis and look for a job, he is getting very depressed. And you haven't helped him any - with all you've got, too. My own parents haven't half your luxury, but they contribute something. Did you even know, for example, that your Fred has sold football pennants and borrowed no small sums from his friend Couth, who obviously cares more for us than you do? You prick with your principles, you. A fine fucking father you are, is all I can say.

  Your daughter-in-law,

  (Like it or not!)

  Biggie

  That muddy November afternoon, I sat in my window watching Fitch, the grim raker, standing soldierly on his immaculately dying lawn. Fitch was on guard, his rake at the ready; he scanned the mess of leaves on all his neighbor's lawns, waiting f
or one to stray his way. In the rain gutters of his house, leaves lurked above him, waiting for him to turn his head; then they would swoop down. But I sat there with intolerant thoughts toward the harmless old fool. May your entire yard cave in, Fitch.

  In my lap were the carbons of Biggie's three letters, and she sulked over my shoulder. 'Which is the best one?' she asked. 'I couldn't decide.'

  'Oh, my God, Big ...'

  'Well, it's high time somebody told him how it is,' she said. 'And I didn't notice that you had anything to say.'

  'Biggie ... oh, Christ,' I went on. 'A prick, Biggie? Oh, my God ...'

  'Well, he is a prick, Bogus. You know very well ...'

  'Of course he is,' I said to her. 'But what is the effect of telling him?'

  'What's been the effect of not telling him, Bogus?'

  '"You prick with your principles, you,"' I read in horror. 'That's two pricks, Big. That's twice you've said it ...'

  'Well, do you like the other letters better?' she asked. 'What do you think of the reasonable one, or the short one?'

  'God, Biggie, which one did you send?'

  'I told you, Bogus,' she said, 'I couldn't make up my mind--'

  'Oh, thank God!' I groaned.

  'So I sent all three of them,' Biggie said. 'Let the prick take his pick.'

  And I felt the wind blow down Fitch, sweep him light as a leaf down the block and cram him under a parked car!

  918 Iowa Ave.

  Iowa City, Iowa

  Nov. 4, 1969

  Mr Cuthbert Bennett

  Caretaker/The Pillsbury Estate

  Mad Indian Point

  Georgetown, Maine

  My Dear Couth:

  In the afterglow of your nice phone call, Biggie and I are sitting up tonight, spending imaginary fortunes and considering the alternative: a hara-kiri duet. See the two of us, squatting across from each other on the newly waxed linoleum floor. Biggie is carving out my stomach with the bread knife; I prefer the steak slicer for disemboweling her. We're quite absorbed in our work. We're being careful to smother our screams, not wanting to wake up Colm.

  Colm, we agree, will go to Biggie's good parents in East Gunnery, Vermont. He'll grow up to be a skier and a wood-chopper, ruddy and craggy and so strongly mired in his New England nose-tones that he'll never care to trouble himself with another language - like Old Low Norse. The mumbled tongue of his ancestors, close and far.

  It's not that I don't agree with everything Biggie told my father. It's only that I wish she hadn't blown her tact. Because I fear my father has to be treated like a Pope before he'll bestow blessings, and if you call the Pope a prick, will he still pray for you?

  In the meantime, Biggie and I sit tracing her letter eastward. I see Biggie's blunt truth tilting a mail van in Chicago, her heavy message felling a postal employee in Cleveland. An ember of its heated feeling cools in the sea breeze on the coastal route between Boston and Great Boar's Head, where our mail is invariably delivered in the early afternoon. My mother will be home to open it, but Biggie swears it was addressed to my father alone, not to Dr & Mrs, in which case, recalling my mother's awe of the good doctor, she will not open it. She'll lay it on the counter below the liquor cabinet.

  My father will come home at four, having just removed a bladder spigot or told some octogenarian that such an operation is advisable; having just fussily shaved himself in his tidy office-bathroom; having removed from his hands all traces of the surgical powder that helps the gloves slide on and off. He will allow my mother to peck his clean-shaven cheek; he'll fix himself a neat Scotch - after holding up the glass to light, to make sure it's been properly washed. Then he'll see the letter. He'll pinch it around, to see if there's a check enclosed, and my mother will say, 'Oh, no dear. It's from Iowa City. It's not a patient; it's from Fred, don't you think?'

  My father will take off his suit jacket, loosen his tie, meander through the den to the sunporch window and remark on whether the tide is high or low, as if, mystically, it will influence where he sits. It never seems to.

  He'll sit down in the same red-leather throne, crush the same hassock under his heels, sniff his Scotch, sip it, and then he'll read Biggie's letters.

  If it went out in the noon mail yesterday, it's at least past Chicago today, if not already through Cleveland, and through Boston by tomorrow, and in Great Boar's Head tomorrow or the day after.

  At which time, Couth, if you'd be so kind, please enter your darkroom and print two absolutely solid photographs, one all-white and one all-black; one is hope and the other is doom. Mail both to me. I will return to you the one that doesn't suit my occasion.

  Wishing you, Couth, infinite varieties

  of Hope and Freedom

  from the Fear of Doom.

  Love,

  Bogus

  Imagining good Couth by the rainy sea, his wild hair sailing in a nor'easter blowing Bar Harbor to Boothbay. Couth with one of his fuddy sea prayers for my letter held aloft, the empty Pillsbury mansion behind him, a ramble of rooms for his lonely play.

  I remember the end of that one funny summer when we moved into the boathouse with its crammed little bunk beds.

  'Top or bottom, Big?'

  'Get up there ...'

  While Couth lolled in the Big House after the Pillsburys had gone home for the fall.

  Some younger son phoned to say he might be coming. 'My mother gone, Couth?'

  'That's true, Bobby.'

  'Aunt Ruth won't be there, will she?'

  'Right again, sir.'

  'Well, Couth, I suppose you've moved into the Big House now. I wouldn't want to put you out, so we'll take the boathouse.'

  'Who's we, Bobby?'

  'A friend and myself, Couth. But I'd appreciate your telling Father I was alone for the weekend.'

  'Sorry, Bobby, there are people in the boathouse. Friends of mine. But another couple of bedrooms in the Big House could easily be ...'

  'One bedroom will do it, Couth. With a double ...'

  In the poolroom, while Biggie helped Colm build a fire, Couth and I racked up the balls.

  'It won't be so private this fall,' Couth said sadly, 'now that some of the Pillsbury kids have reached fucking age. They'll be bringing their lays up for the weekends. But after November it'll be too cold for them.'

  The great mansion still was heated strictly with coal, wood stoves and fireplaces. Couth loved the winters best, with the whole run of the house to himself fussing with wood and coal all day, banking the fires at night, trying to keep the chemicals from freezing in his darkroom. With Colm after supper, Couth worked down there on a series of Colm pulverizing a clamworm on the dock. Colm grinding it with a sneaker, hacking it with a piece of shell; Colm requesting a replacement worm.

  In the darkroom, Colm refused to talk; he just watched his image emerging from Couth's chemical baths. He was not at all amazed at his underwater development; he took miracles for granted; he was more impressed by being given a second chance to view the mangled clamworm.

  Couth also printed from a double negative: one of Colm on the dock, the other of just the dock from the same angle. The structure was slightly out of focus around the edges, since the two docks did not quite mesh, and Colm appeared to be both on the dock and under it, the grain of the wood spread over his hands and face, his body laid out in planks. Yet he sits up (how? in space?). I was stunned by the image, though I shared Biggie's dislike for it, the boy with the wood imposed over him was strangely dead. We mentioned to Couth the incredible paranoia one felt about one's own children. Couth showed the image to Colm, who disregarded it since it was not a clear reproduction of the worm.

  The girl whom Bobby Pillsbury brought 'home' for the weekend thought it was 'almost like a painting'.

  'Nell is a painter,' Bobby told us all.

  Seventeen-year-old Nell said, 'Well, I work at it.'

  'Some more carrots, Nell?' Couth asked.

  'It's such a lonely photograph,' she told Couth; she was still staring at
the picture of Colm with his face under the dock. 'This place, you know - in the winter, I mean - it must pretty well sort of collaborate with your vision.'

  Couth chewed slowly, aware that the girl was gone on him. 'My vision?' he said.

  'Yeah, well,' said Nell, 'you know what I mean. Your world-view, sort of.'

  'I'm not lonely,' Couth said.

  'Yes, you are, Couth,' Biggie said. Colm - the real Colm, his face ungrained with wood - spilled his milk. Biggie held him in her lap and let him touch her boob. Beside her, Bobby Pillsbury sat in love with Biggie.

  'It's a very untypical photograph for Couth,' I told Nell. 'Seldom is the image so literal, and almost never does he use such an obvious double exposure.'

  'Can I see more of your work?' Nell asked.

  'Well,' Couth said, 'if I can find it.'

  'Why not have Bogus just tell her about it,' Biggie said.

  'Up yours, Big,' I said, and she laughed.

  'I've been working on some short stories,' Bobby Pillsbury announced.

  I took Colm from Biggie and stood him on the table, aimed at Couth.

  'Go get Couth, Colm,' I said. 'Go on ...' And Colm began to walk with a brute glee across the salad, avoiding the rice.

  'Bogus ...' Biggie protested, but Couth stood up at his end of the table, his arms held out for Colm, now bearing down on him through the mussel shells and corncobs.

  'Come to Couth,' Couth said. 'Come on, come on. Want to see some more pictures? Come on, come on ...'

  Colm went sprawling over a basket of rolls and Couth swept him up and bore him dizzily off to the darkroom, the girl named Nell following devotedly.

  Bobby Pillsbury watched Biggie push her chair back from the table. 'Can I help you with the dishes?' he asked her. I gave Biggie a gleeful pinch under the table; Bobby thought her blush was meant for him. He began to clear the table in clumsy swoops, and I retired to the darkroom to watch Couth dazzle Bobby's girl. As I left her with this bumbling would-be lover, Biggie caught my eye with a comic look of mock lust for Bobby.

  But later, in our boathouse racks, as Couth slept with Colm in the master bedroom of the Big House, and Bobby Pillsbury and his young girl Nell were or were not reconciled, Biggie was cross with me.

  'He was a perfectly nice boy, Bogus,' she said. 'You shouldn't have left him alone with me.'