“Yo ho heave ho! Ugh!” Dolly’s on her back and they’re working on the belly side. Somebody got the great idea of buttering her down first. Not to lose the ground they’ve gained, they’ve shot it inside with a basting syringe. But now suddenly there’s this big tug-of-war under way between those who want to stuff her in and those who want to let her out. Something rips, but she feels better. The odor of hot butter makes her think of movie theaters and popcorn. “Hey, has anybody seen Harry?” she asks. “Where’s Harry?”
Somebody’s getting chased. She switches back to the love story, and now the man’s back kissing the young lover again. What’s going on? She gives it up, decides to take a quick bath. She’s just stepping into the tub, one foot in, one foot out, when Mr. Tucker walks in. “Oh, excuse me! I only wanted some aspirin . . .” She grabs for a towel, but he yanks it away. “Now, that’s not how it’s supposed to happen, child,” he scolds. “Please! Mr. Tucker . . . !” He embraces her savagely, his calloused old hands clutching roughly at her backside. “Mr. Tucker!” she cries, squirming. “Your wife called—!” He’s pushing something between her legs, hurting her. She slips, they both slip—something cold and hard slams her in the back, cracks her skull, she seems to be sinking into a sea . . .
They’ve got her over the hassock, skirt up and pants down. “Give her a little lesson there, Jack baby!” The television lights flicker and flash over her glossy flesh. 1000 WHEN LIT. Whack! Slap! Bumper to bumper! He leans into her, feeling her come alive.
The phone rings, waking the baby. “Jack, is that you? Now, you listen to me—!” “No, dear, this is Mrs. Tucker. Isn’t the TV awfully loud?” “Oh, I’m sorry, Mrs. Tucker! I’ve been getting—” “I tried to call you before, but I couldn’t hang on. To the phone, I mean. I’m sorry, dear.” “Just a minute, Mrs. Tucker, the baby’s—” “Honey, listen! Is Harry there? Is Mr. Tucker there, dear?”
“Stop it!” she screams and claps a hand over the baby’s mouth. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” Her other hand is full of baby stool and she’s afraid she’s going to be sick. The phone rings. “No!” she cries. She’s hanging on to the baby, leaning woozily away, listening to the phone ring. “Okay, okay,” she sighs, getting ahold of herself. But when she lets go of the baby, it isn’t screaming any more. She shakes it. Oh no . . .
“Hello?” No answer. Strange. She hangs up and, wrapped only in a towel, stares out the window at the cold face staring in—she screams!
She screams, scaring the hell out of him. He leaps out of the tub, glances up at the window she’s gaping at just in time to see two faces duck away, then slips on the bathroom tiles, and crashes to his ass, whacking his head on the sink on the way down. She stares down at him, trembling, a towel over her narrow shoulders. “Mr. Tucker! Mr. Tucker, are you alright . . . ?” Who’s Sorry Now? Yessir, whose back is breaking with each . . . He stares up at the little tufted locus of all his woes, and passes out, dreaming of Jeannie . . .
The phone rings. “Dolly! It’s for you!” “Hello?” “Hello, Mrs. Tucker?” “Yes, speaking.” “Mrs. Tucker, this is the police calling . . .”
It’s cramped and awkward and slippery, but he’s pretty sure he got it in her, once anyway. When he gets the suds out of his eyes, he sees her staring up at them. Through the water. “Hey, Mark! Let her up!”
Down in the suds. Feeling sleepy. The phone rings, startling her. Wrapped in a towel, she goes to answer. “No, he’s not here, Mrs. Tucker.” Strange. Married people act pretty funny sometimes. The baby is awake and screaming. Dirty, a real mess. Oh boy, there’s a lot of things she’d rather be doing than babysitting in this madhouse. She decides to wash the baby off in her own bathwater. She removes her towel, unplugs the tub, lowers the water level so the baby can sit. Glancing back over her shoulder, she sees Jimmy staring at her. “Go back to bed, Jimmy.” “I have to go to the bathroom.” “Good grief, Jimmy! It looks like you already have!” The phone rings. She doesn’t bother with the towel—what can Jimmy see he hasn’t already seen?—and goes to answer. “No, Jack, and that’s final.” Sirens, on the TV, as the police move in. But wasn’t that the channel with the love story? Ambulance maybe. Get this over with so she can at least catch the news. “Get those wet pajamas off, Jimmy, and I’ll find clean ones. Maybe you better get in the tub, too.” “I think something’s wrong with the baby,” he says. “It’s down in the water and it’s not swimming or anything.”
She’s staring up at them from the rug. They slap her. Nothing happens. “You just tilted her, man!” Mark says softly. “We gotta get outa here!” Two little kids are standing wide-eyed in the doorway. Mark looks hard at Jack. “No, Mark, they’re just little kids . . . !” “We gotta, man, or we’re dead.”
“Dolly! My God! Dolly, I can explain!” She glowers down at them, her ripped girdle around her ankles. “What the four of you are doing in the bathtub with my babysitter?” she says sourly. “I can hardly wait!”
Police sirens wail, lights flash. “I heard the scream!” somebody shouts. “There were two boys!” “I saw a man!” “She was running with the baby!” “My God!” somebody screams, “they’re all dead!” Crowds come running. Spotlights probe the bushes.
“Harry, where the hell you been?” his wife whines, glaring blearily up at him from the carpet. “I can explain,” he says. “Hey, whatsamatter, Harry?” his host asks, smeared with butter for some goddamn reason. “You look like you just seen a ghost!” Where did he leave his drink? Everybody’s laughing, everybody except Dolly, whose cheeks are streaked with tears. “Hey, Harry, you won’t let them take me to a rest home, will you, Harry?”
10:00. The dishes done, children to bed, her books read, she watches the news on television. Sleepy. The man’s voice is gentle, soothing. She dozes—awakes with a start: a babysitter? Did the announcer say something about a babysitter?
“Just want to catch the weather,” the host says, switching on the TV. Most of the guests are leaving, but the Tuckers stay to watch the news. As it comes on, the announcer is saying something about a babysitter. The host switches channels. “They got a better weatherman on four,” he explains. “Wait!” says Mrs. Tucker. “There was something about a babysitter . . . !” The host switches back. “Details have not yet been released by the police,” the announcer says. “Harry, maybe we’d better go . . .”
They stroll casually out of the drugstore, run into a buddy of theirs. “Hey! Did you hear about the babysitter?” the guy asks. Mark grunts, glances at Jack. “Got a smoke?” he asks the guy.
“I think I hear the baby screaming!” Mrs. Tucker cries, running across the lawn from the drive.
She wakes, startled, to find Mr. Tucker hovering over her. “I must have dozed off!” she exclaims. “Did you hear the news about the babysitter?” Mrs. Tucker asks. “Part of it,” she says, rising. “Too bad wasn’t it?” Mr. Tucker is watching the report of the ball scores and golf tournaments. “I’ll drive you home in just a minute, dear,” he says. “Why, how nice!” Mrs. Tucker exclaims from the kitchen. “The dishes are all done!”
“What can I say, Dolly?” the host says with a sigh, twisting the buttered strands of her ripped girdle between his fingers. “Your children are murdered, your husband gone, a corpse in your bathtub, and your house is wrecked. I’m sorry. But what can I say?” On the TV, the news is over, and they’re selling aspirin. “Hell, I don’t know,” she says. “Let’s see what’s on the late late movie.”
BEGINNINGS
(1972)
In order to get started, he went to live alone on an island and shot himself. His blood, unable to resist a final joke, splattered the cabin wall in a pattern that read: It is important to begin when everything is already over.
This maxim, published on the cabin wall between an outdated calendar and a freshwater fish chart, would have pleased him. He had once begun a story about the raising of Lazarus, in which Jesus, having had the dead man dragged from the tomb and unwrapped, couldn’t seem to get the hang of bringing h
im around. There was an awful stink, the Jews crowding around were getting sick, and Jesus, sweating, was saying: Heh heh, bear with me, folks! Won’t be a minute! If I can just get it started, the rest’ll come easy!
This, then, was his problem: beginning. And having begun: avoiding resolutions. Thus, there were worse jokes his blood might have played on him. Its message might have read: All beginnings imply an apocalypse. Perhaps, in fact, that’s what it did say, how was he to know? Pulling the trigger, he thought: This is working! I’m getting on!
It was comfortable, that cabin, roomy and clean-smelling, with walls of unvarnished Norway pine, Coleman lanterns for light, a wood cookstove, and a long pine table with a yellow checkered oilcloth he’d bought for it, big enough to eat on and write on at the same time. There was a bay out front with a small pier for the boat. He was alone on the island, except for a few squirrels, frogs, muskrats, the odd weasel, birds, porcupines. The nearest people were about a mile’s boatride away.
He rarely needed these people, though sometimes he visited them when his imagination failed him or he ran out of peanutbutter. On these occasions, they often told him stories, astounding him with their fearless capacity for denouement, and he’d return to his island shaken, thinking: I’m the last man alive on earth! Once they told him about a man who had come to one of the islands to write, but on arriving had shot himself. Yes, he told them, that was me, and they noticed then that his head was coming apart, and on the wall was a message: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, friends!
He once wrote a story about a man who was born at the age of thirtytwo with a self-destruct mechanism in his gonads, such that he could be sure of only one orgasm before he died. This man traveled all over the world, seeking out the perfect mate for this ultimate experience, but blew it one night in a wet dream on a jet flight over Bangkok. What was fascinating about this story was neither his travels nor his dream, but rather the peculiar physical appearance of a man kept so long in the womb. He had rather liked this story and stayed with it longer than most, but had had to abandon it finally when he’d heard about the new cults forming aboard jetliners.
Well, we’ve made a start, his blood said on the wall. Nothing else matters. The people who had come to identify the body crowded around, staring in disbelief. This is impossible, they cried. That story wasn’t true, it was only a legend! They noticed that he’d left the coffeepot on the stove and it had boiled over. They pointed to it and said: Aha!, satisfying thereby their lust for motive, but they couldn’t conceal a certain disappointment. They scratched about, however, and finally found enough peanutbutter for two sandwiches, though there wasn’t any bread. Well, at least we haven’t come for nothing, they said.
There was nothing primitive about this island. He had a shallow bay to bathe in, a cabin to eat and sleep in and an outhouse to shit in, a chair to read in, wild blueberries for breakfast, saws and axes for cutting wood, a boat to go to town in, and he could write anywhere. If he subsisted largely on peanutbutter, that was his own fault, because he even had a gas refrigerator and stove. These he used as little as possible, though, because his principal hardship was exchanging used butane tanks for new in town, then singlehandedly dragging the loaded one back to the boat, later heaving it out of the boat and up the steep hill to the cabin, and finally setting it up in place and lighting it without blowing himself up.
As for the old wood cookstove, he loved it. When the lake was darkened by a storm, or at night, he could sit for hours in front of it, watching the flames, warming himself, brewing coffee, frying up feasts of fish and potatoes when he had them, imagining a life free of settings forth, and thus immortal. What limited his use and diminished his enjoyment of the stove was the need to chop wood for it. He found it took about as long to burn the wood as it took to cut it. There seemed to lurk some kind of unpleasant moral here, and it was this more than the hard work, which in his womb-wrinkled condition he should have welcomed, that made him use the cookstove less and less. He would have abandoned it altogether, but for his insomnia. On bad nights, he could stare at the flames, each one new, violent, unique, and sooner or later all this variety would put him to sleep.
An ordinary island then, with ordinary trees and bushes, ordinary bugs, birds, and reptiles, ordinary lake water lapping it about, yet even before pulling the trigger, he recognized that there was something suspicious about it, as though it might have been, like the air he breathed, just another metaphor. So many otherwise solid and habitable islands had gone that way in the past, it was a kind of pollution. Perhaps he should have shot himself in the boat on the way to the island, spared the world another bloody epigram and the island this transgression, this erosion. It was Adam did the naming, why did Eve get all the blame?
Because she was near at hand. This was her offense: affectionate trespass. She wanted company. She couldn’t leave well enough alone, she had to turn up and tax his vocabulary. She must have come there sometime between the pulling of the trigger and the loosing of his blood and brains against the cabin wall. He named her many times over, but never Eve, having after all a certain integrity. What could he say in her behalf? That she helped him drag the butane tanks up the hill. But she helped him use them up faster, too, contaminating his days with history.
Yet he was grateful, because he was able to throw away everything he had written before she had come there, and this altered the fuel balance, permitting more fires in the cookstove. Also she was good at finding blueberries and cleaning fish, chopping off their heads like false starts. But she confused him by insisting she had been there first, he was the newcomer to the island, and she lifted her skirts to show him the missing rib. It was at this time that he began to suspect that he, not the island, was the metaphor. He began a story in which the first-person narrator was the story itself, he merely one of the characters, dead before the first paragraph was over.
He returned the rib to her and discovered it was more blessed to give than to receive, though this was not accomplished without some bloodletting. They found much peace and pleasure in this sharing of the rib, and called it fucking. Thus, he was still naming things. Perhaps because it rhymed with luck: fucking, they thought, was good for it, good for the raw nerve ends of his navel, too. I think this is the beginning of something, he said, as his hips bucked. Though they never let it get in the way of their struggles with one another, it always proved useful whenever they began to repeat themselves. It was almost like a place, somewhere to go when the island and his work became hostile and wounded him, an island within an island.
Small wonder, then, that he took to inventing stories in which time had a geography, like an island, place moved like the hands of a clock, and point of view was a kind of punctuation. He assigned numbers and symbols to death, love, characters, unexpected developments, transitions, then submitted them to the rhythms of numerologies. He invented a story with several narrators, each quoting the next, the last quoting the first and telling the story being told. He began another, added footnotes, subfootnotes to the footnotes, further footnotes to the subfootnotes, and so on to exhaustion, which came early: he still had something to learn about pacing himself.
The woman, like all women no doubt, was always the same woman and never the same woman twice. Sometimes she was pregnant, sometimes she was not. Sometimes she soaped him up when they bathed in the bay, and then they fucked in the water, or else on shore, under the trees, in the cabin, out in the woodpile, less often when she was pregnant. She did her best to hide the children from him for fear he’d eat them. Sometimes she was distracted and then he did eat them. He was always sorry about it afterwards, because he missed them and they gave him constipation for a week. In which case, she cared for him, scratched his head, gave him enemas, strewed the path to the outhouse with rose petals.
The outhouse was a short walk away from the cabin by the thick forest of pines, poplars, birch, and dogwood. It was strictly for the relief of mind or bowels, since it was their habit to pee wherever they were when
the need hit them, except inside the cabin. Sometimes, at night, simply out the front door into the moonlight, hoping not to get bit by mosquitoes. Hoping did little good, they got bit anyway. This added a certain purpose and energy to their fucking, true, but did little to improve their technique. It was like the sting of conscience, teaching them to murder or be damned.
The children were less scrupulous about their toilet, with the result that the cabin often smelled worse than the outhouse. On such days, he would take the boat out on the lake and fish for walleyes and bass, pretending to be the Good Provider. He was not lucky at it, though, and hated taking the hook out, so sooner or later he’d go on into town and buy fish at the store. The woman was always amazed at his luck in catching filleted fish. It’s a parable, he explained, and put the gun to his head. Soon I’ll be able to dispense with this gun altogether, he thought with his scattering brain. It’s like taking a cathartic.
Sometimes he thought that might be the way to get started at last: with a cathartic. But what if the trouble was heartburn? For it was true, his writing was a vice and tended to alienate them. He found he did no writing at all while fucking, and vice versa. It could be even worse inbetweentimes, when he wasn’t sure which he was doing, or should be doing. He ate better than when he lived alone, slept better, she even took to chopping the wood and dragging the butane tanks up by herself, he had all the time in the world, and yet if anything he was writing less. He used to spill beer, ashes, peanutbutter, kerosene into his typewriter, and hardly noticed; now she kept it clean for him, and it kept breaking down. Whenever an idea really gripped him, she would cry and accuse him of leaving the island; he’d apologize and take her for a ride in the boat, wondering where it was he’d been. She diapered the children in the climaxes of his stories, doing him a service, but she also borrowed his typing ribbon for a clothesline and mistook his story notes for a grocery list, nearly poisoning them all.