'Big, you're not telling me you grabbed a quickie in the kitchen?'
'Oh, shut up.' She shifted in the bottom bunk bed.
'Did he really try, Big?' I asked her.
'Look,' she said coolly, 'you know nothing happened. It's just that you made it awkward for the kid.'
'I'm sorry, Big, really. I was just fooling ...'
'And I'll admit I was flattered,' she said, and then paused a long time. 'I mean, it was sort of nice,' she said. 'A young kid like that really wanting me.'
'You're surprised?'
'Aren't you?' she asked me. 'You don't seem that interested.'
'Oh, Biggie ...'
'Well, you don't,' she said. 'You might pay more attention to who's interested in me, Bogus, and not abuse it.'
'Biggie, it was just a dumb evening. Look at Couth with that girl Nell--'
'That brainless twat ...'
'Biggie! A young girl ...'
'Couth is the only friend you've got that I like.'
'Well, good,' I said. 'I like Couth too.'
'Bogus, I could live like this. Could you?'
'Like Couth?'
'Yes.'
'No, Big.'
'Why?'
I thought about it.
'Because he doesn't own anything?' Biggie asked, but that was stupid; that didn't matter at all to me, either. 'Because he doesn't seem to need any other people around him?' She was edging around it. 'Because he lives on the ocean all year round?' Which has nothing to do with anything we're talking about, I thought. 'Because he can put a lot into his photographs and not need to put much into his life?' She was a prodder, Biggie was. I forgot the question.
'So you could live here with Couth, Big?' I asked her, and she was quiet for a long time.
'I said I could live like this,' she said. 'Not with Couth. With you. But like Couth lives.'
'I'm not handy with anything,' I said. 'I couldn't be a caretaker for anything. I couldn't even replace a fuse in a complicated house like this, probably ...'
'That's not what I mean,' she said. 'I mean, if you could be content like Couth. You know, peaceful?'
I knew.
In the morning from Biggie's lower bunk we watched Couth and Colm out of the boathouse porthole. On the low-tide mudflats, Couth was taking Colm exploring, carrying his camera and a burlap potato sack to gather the odd sea-leavings off the mud.
In the breakfast nook of the Big House, Biggie served blueberry pancakes to a silent Bobby Pillsbury, a nervous Nell, Couth and Colm, a bubble of display. The contents of the potato sack were for us all to enjoy: a razor-clam shell, a skate's tail, the transparent, paper-thin skeleton of a sculpin, a dead gull, the severed head of a bright-billed tern and the jutting lower jawbone of what might be a seal, a sheep, or a man.
After breakfast, Couth arranged the carnage on our plates and photographed it, suggesting some weird, cannibalistic meal. Though Nell's interest in Couth's photography seemed to end with this, I watched Biggie watching Couth patiently arranging his table settings. Colm appeared to find Couth's work the logical extension of child's play.
'Do you ever do nudes?' asked Nell.
'Models are expensive,' Couth said.
'Well, you should ask your friends,' Nell told him, smiling.
'Biggie?' Couth asked, but he looked at me. I was balancing Colm on his head on the pool table.
'Search me,' I told him. 'Ask her.'
'Biggie?' Couth called. She was in the kitchen with the breakfast pans. Bobby Pillsbury and Nell handled the long pool cues at the end of the living room. 'Will you model for me, Biggie?' I could hear him asking her in the kitchen.
Bobby Pillsbury flexed his pool cue like a fly-fisherman's rod. Nell bent hers like a bow, and I was suddenly aware of how red in the face poor, upside-down Colm was. I righted him dizzily on the pool table, and heard Couth add cautiously, 'I mean, you know, naked ...'
'Yeah, just a minute, Couth,' said Biggie. 'Let me finish these dishes first.'
But Couth envied children more than wives. He used to tell me that he thought more of offspring than of mates. Though Biggie touched him, I think Colm got to him more. He used to ask me what I did with Colm; he was amazed that I had to think hard for an answer. All I could tell him was that children changed your life.
'Well, sure, I'd think they would,' he said.
'But I mean, they make you paranoid.'
'You were always paranoid.'
'But with children, it's different,' I said, not knowing how to explain what was so different. I once wrote Merrill about it. I said that children gave you a sudden sense of your own mortality, which was clearly something that Merrill Overturf had no sense of; he never answered me. But I simply meant that you noticed how your priorities had changed. For example, I used to like motorcycles; I couldn't ride one after Colm was born. I don't think it was just responsibility; it's just that children give you a sense of time. It was as if I'd never realized how time moved before.
Also, I had this feeling about Colm that seemed unnatural. That is I desired to bring him up in some sort of simulated natural habitat - some kind of pasture or corral - rather than the gruesome real natural habitat itself, which seemed too unsafe. Bring him up in a sort of dome! Create his friends, invent a satisfying job, induce limited problems, simulate hardships (to a degree), fake a few careful threats, have him win in the end - nothing too unreasonable.
'You mean, sort of graze him, like a cow?' Couth said. 'Well, but he'd become a little bovine, wouldn't he?'
'Cattle are safe, Couth, and they're content.'
'Cattle are cattle, Bogus.'
Biggie agreed with Couth. When Colm was allowed to tricycle around our block, I fretted. Biggie said it was necessary to give the child self-confidence. I knew that; still, I lurked in the bushes around the block, following him unseen. I had a notion of the father as guardian angel. When Colm would see me peeling back a branch and peering out at him from the hedge, I'd tell him that it was actually the hedge that interested me. I was looking for something; I'd try to interest him in such safe scrutiny too. Better than riding your tricycle into danger! Come live a placid life in the untroubled hedge.
I even found a place I thought was suitable for a controlled environment: the Iowa City zoo. No life and death struggles or failures there.
'We always come here,' Colm would complain.
'Don't you like the animals?'
'Yes ...' But in winter there were only four or five animals. 'Mommy takes me there,' Colm would say, pointing across the river to downtown Iowa City and the university buildings.
'There's just people there,' I'd tell him. 'No raccoons.' Just people; if we went there, we might see one of them crying - or worse.
So coming home from People's Market, I'd take Colm through the zoo. In November, when the monkeys had gone south or indoors, and Biggie and I had been waiting a week to hear from my offended father, Colm and I brought the breakfast bread home through the zoo, and left most of it there.
Feeding the vile raccoons, an entire snarling clan of them in their stony cell, Colm was always concerned that the smaller ones got no bread. 'That one,' he'd say, pointing to a cowardly one, and I'd try to reach the little bastard with a wad of bread. Every time, some fat and surly one would get there first, bite the coward in the ass, steal the bread and wait for more. Is this good for a child to see?
Or the molting American bison, looking like the last buffalo? His legs as thin as some awkward wading bird's, his mottled coat falling off in hunks, like old furniture in need of reupholstering, a giant, tottering sofa with the stuffing hanging out.
Or the cold, wizened bear, in a brick pit with a swinging innertube he never played with, surrounded by his own awful reeking flaps.
'What's the tire for?' Colm asked.
'For him to play with.'
'How?'
'Oh, swing on it, bat it around ...'
But the tire, unbatted and unswung, hung over the ever-sleeping bear like a t
aunt. The animal himself probably lived in dread of what it was for. I had growing doubts about the fitness of this zoo habitat for Colm; perhaps the downtown streets would be better for the child, after all.
And then, that November, there was the disaster in the duckpond, where usually I felt most at ease with Colm. The soot-white domestic ducks scrounged the breaded pond; we awaited the striking visitations at this time of year from the bold, bright, wild ducks flying south. Iowa lay in a Midwest flyway, and the pond at the Iowa City zoo was perhaps the only place a duck could rest between Canada and the Gulf without being shot at. We used to watch them land there, a cautious flying wedge with a scout sent down first to test the landing; then he would quack the safe news up to the rest. Such color was a new thing in the zoo; the dull inhabitants were stirred up by the arrival of these real-world travelers: red-eyes, mallards, canvasbacks, blue-and green-winged teal, and the splendid wood ducks.
That November I held Colm's hand and watched the lowering V in the sky, imagining this tired and crippled gaggle coming to rest, blasted over the Great Lakes, shot down in the Dakotas, ambushed in Iowa! The scout landed like a skater on glass, gave a brazen quack at the old-maid ducks ashore, thanked God for the wonder of no artillery, then called his flock down.
In they came, breaking their flight patterns, splashing down in a great reckless dash, astonished at all the floating bread. But one duck hung back in the sky. His flying was ragged, his descent unsure. The others seemed to clear the pond for him, and he dropped down so suddenly that Colm grabbed my leg and clung to it as if he were afraid the duck was going to bomb us. It appeared that the bird's landing gear was fouled, his wing controls damaged, his vision blurred. He came in at too steep an angle, attempted to correct his position with a weak veer, lost all resemblance to a duck's grace and struck the pond like a stone.
Colm flinched against me as a choral quack of condolences came from the ducks ashore. In the pond, the downed duck's little ass protruded, a spatter of feathers floating around him. Two of his former flock paddled out to prod him, then left him to float there like a feathered bobber. His mates quickly turned their worried attention to the bread, anxious that at any moment a thrashing dog would swim out to retrieve their comrade. Were they shooting with silencers now? The irony of death descending on the Iowa City zoo.
All I said to Colm was, 'Silly duck.'
'Is he dead?' Colm asked.
'No, no,' I said. 'He's just fishing, feeding on the bottom.' Should I add: They can hold their breath a long time?
Colm was unconvinced. 'He's dead.'
'No,' I said. 'He was just showing off. You know, you show off sometimes.'
Colm was reluctant to leave. Clutching the maimed breadloaf, he looked over his shoulder at the crash-landed duck - former stunt pilot, bizarre bottom-feeding bird. Why this suicide? I wondered. Or had he been wounded, bravely carrying gunshot for many troubled landings, at last losing control here? Or was it just some midair seizure of natural causes? Or drunk, having last fed in a fermenting soybean bog?
'I wish, Bogus,' Biggie said, 'that when you know you'll be going to the zoo, you'd buy two loaves of bread so there'd be one left for us.'
'We had a wonderful walk,' I said. 'The bear was asleep, the raccoons were fighting, the buffalo was trying to grow a new coat. And the ducks,' I said, nudging the ominously silent Colm, 'we saw this silly duck land in the pond ...'
'A dead duck, Mommy,' Colm said solemnly. 'He crashed up.'
'Colm,' I said, bending down to him. 'You don't know he was dead.' But he knew, all right.
'Some ducks just die,' he said, being irritably patient with me. 'They just get old and die, is all. Animals and birds and people,' he said. 'They just get old and die.' And he looked at me with worldly sympathy, obviously feeling sad to be stunning his father with such a hard truth.
Then the phone rang and visions of my own terrible father blotted all else from my brain: Daddy with a five-minute speech prepared, an analysis of the emotional imbalance in Biggie's letters, puffing his pipe at his end of the phone. I believe there was supreme rationality in his tobacco. Suppertime in Iowa, after-dinner coffee in New Hampshire; a phone call timed on his terms, like him. But also like Ralph Packer, inviting himself for supper.
'Well, answer it,' Biggie said.
'You answer it,' I said. 'You wrote the letters.'
'I'm not picking that thing up, Bogus, not after what I called him, the prick.'
As we faced the ringing, unanswered phone, Colm slid a kitchen chair over and climbed up to reach it.
'I'll get it,' he said, but both Biggie and I lunged for him before he picked it up.
'Let it ring,' Biggie said, looking frightened for the first time. 'Why not just let it ring, Bogus?'
We did just that. We rode out the ringing.
Biggie said, 'Oh, can't you just see him? Breathing into the phone!'
'I'll bet he's just livid,' I said. 'The prick.'
But later, after Colm had fallen out of bed and bawled - and needed trundling to Biggie's broad chest, and some reassurance about a peculiar nightmare involving a zoo - I said, 'I'll bet that was just Ralph Packer, Big. My father wouldn't call us. He'd write us - he'd write a fucking opus.'
'No,' Biggie said. 'It was your father. And he'll never call again.' She sounded glad.
That night Biggie rolled back against me and said, 'Let it ring.'
But I just dreamed. I dreamed that Iowa was playing out of town and took me with them. They used me for the opening kickoff. From yards deep in my own end zone, I ran all the way upfield for a miraculous touchdown. Of course I was horribly jarred along the route, even chopped, quartered, halved, ground, gouged and swiped; but somehow I emerged, severely crippled but upright, churning into the enemy's virgin end zone.
Then there's the aftermath: I am carried off the field by the Iowa cheerleaders and toted along the sidelines, past the seething, jeering enemy fans. Little sweatered nymphs bear me along; my near-limp and bloodied arm brushes one of their cold, pink legs; somehow I sense both the smoothness and the prickle. I look giddily up at their young, tear-streaked faces; one brushes my cheek with her hair, perhaps trying to remove the grass stain on my nose or dislodge the cleat embedded in my chin. I am light to carry. These strong young girls bear me under the stadium, through a bowel-like tunnel. Their high voices echo, their shrill concern for me pierces me more than my pain. To some linen-covered table, then, where they spread me out, remove my encrusted armor, marvel and wail over my wounds. Above us the stadium throws down its muted din. The girls sponge me off. I go into shock; I shiver; the girls lie across me, fearing that I'll chill.
I am so cold that I have another dream; I'm in a duck blind in the New Hampshire salt marshes with my father. I am wondering how old I am; I don't have a gun, and when I stand on tiptoe, I can just reach my father's throat.
He says, 'Be quiet.' And, 'Jesus, see if I ever bring you with me again.'
I am thinking: See if I come!
Which I must have dreamed aloud, because Biggie said, 'Who asked you?'
'What, Big?'
'Let it ring,' she said, asleep again.
But I lay awake contemplating the horror of having to look for a real job. The notion of earning a living ... The phrase itself was like those other obscene propositions offered on a men's-room wall.
17
Reflections on the Failure of
the Water Method
THE PROCEDURE FOR making an appointment with Dr Jean Claude Vigneron is unpleasant. The nurse who answers his phone does not care to hear a description of what ails you: she only wants to know if this is a convenient time for your appointment. Well, no. Well, she's sorry. So you tell her you'll find the time.
The waiting room at Vigneron's office is comfy. A former Norman Rockwell cover for The Saturday Evening Post is framed on the wall; also, a Bob Dylan poster. Also, you can read McCall's, The Village Voice, The New York Times, Reader's Digest or Ramparts - but no one reads
. They watch Vigneron's nurse, whose thigh, rump and swivel chair protrude into the waiting room from her typing alcove. They also listen when the nurse asks for a description of what ails you. A certain pattern is evident.
'What are you seeing the doctor for?'
Incoherent whispers.
'What?'
Louder incoherent whispers.
'How long has your urine been this way?'
What way? everyone pretending to read is dying to ask.
Urology is so awesomely foul and debilitating a speciality that I took Tulpen with me for support. The office presented its usual puzzle. A child the color of urine sat cramped beside her mother; perhaps she had not peed for weeks. A stunning young girl, dressed entirely in leather, sat aloof with The Village Voice. No doubt, she was infected. And an old man quaked by the door, his tubes and valves and spigots so ancient and malfunctioning that he probably pissed through his navel into a plastic bag.
'What are you seeing the doctor for?'
'The water method has failed.' Intense curiosity is provoked in the waiting room.
'The water method?'
'Failed. Utterly.'
'I see, Mr ... ?'
'Trumper.'
'Do you have pain, Mr Trumper?' I sense that the mother with the swollen child is anxious; the girl in leather grips her paper tight.
'Some ...' A mysterious answer, the waiting room is on edge.
'Would you tell me, please, just what ...'
'It's stuck.'
'Stuck?'
'Stuck shut.'
'I see. Shut...' She looks through my record, a long history of being stuck shut. 'And you've had this trouble before?'
'The world over. Austria to Iowa!' The waiting room is impressed by this worldly disease.
'I see. It's what you saw Dr Vigneron about before?'
'Yes.' Incurable, the waiting room decides. Poor fellow.
'And have you been taking anything?'
'Water.' The nurse looks up; the water method is clearly unknown to her.
'I see,' she says. 'If you'll have a seat, Dr Vigneron will see you in a moment.'
Crossing the waiting room to Tulpen, I saw the mother smile kindly at me, the child stare, the stunning young girl cross her legs, thinking, If it's stuck shut, stay away from me. But the poor old man with his faulty tubes did not respond; hard of hearing, perhaps, or totally deaf, or peeing through his ear.