Elena didn’t say anything. She was as easy to read as some German theological tract. But she didn’t chide him either. She didn’t mention his weight and she didn’t muss his hair. It broke his heart in the end how she just kept listening and listening and he kept saying things he didn’t want to say.
In this way, Hood figured out that love was close to indebtedness. In settling this debt, he married Elena O’Malley. Family was a bad idea he got because there were no other ideas in those days. It was the outer margin of one little universe and nobody knew what lay beyond it. There were years full of evenings when the habit of marriage astonished him, when its repetition comforted him like nothing else ever had. Then this period came to an end. He had two kids, a house and a lawn mower, a Pontiac station wagon with simulated wood paneling on the side, a new Firebird, and a Labrador retriever named Daisy Chain.
He loved his wife and children, and he hated all evidence of them. The noise of children, and the terrible quiet just after, which augured—always, every single day—some broken heirloom or injury: it squeezed the life out of him a little bit at a time. His worry was ceaseless. His son, Paul, had picked his little nose and grabbed at his crotch in public. His daughter had exposed herself to a boy at the country club. Almost any life was feasible at his salary, but this was the one he had. It was seventeen years since he had met his wife, and in seventeen more years it would be 1990 and his son would be thirty-three and he would be fifty-six. Until recently he had believed that the elderly were born that way, unlucky. Now he knew how effortless that transformation was. His son would be there to remind him. In 1996, Paul would be his present age, thirty-nine, while he would be sixty-two, his mother’s age at the time of her death. His wife would be sixty, and she would be remarkably skeletal. Her church attendance would be regular.
—Janey!
Hood draped his prim, salmon-colored button-down shirt around his shoulders. He pocketed an escaped collar stay. Whose? His? In one hand, the bottle, the other, the drink. His vodka. A mourning dove was complaining out in back of the house. A car passed on Valley Road. Hood was sad. He opened the door. At the top of the stair, he called her name. Janey had assured him that the house was empty, that Mikey and Sandy were over with friends for the night—committing acts of vandalism, probably, ringing doorbells and running—that Jim was in the city for a week. Still, Hood thought he heard voices.
He fled back into the guest room and sat in the uncomfortable wicker chair. He zippered his pants, pulled on his socks.
He married Elena and they had the kids in ’57 and ’59 and they traded up in houses and they traded up in cars. To afford the family car, the Corvair, in ’63, Hood had been forced to trade in the Jaguar he had driven in college. It was all economics now. Or maybe he overlooked the subtlety of feeling that hid beneath economics. Beneath math. He made $48,000 a year not including the annual bonus. Income from stock held by Elena, $3,600; income from his own bad investments, a little less. Savings account. Joint returns. Public school meal allowance. Power boat. Life insurance. (His father had sold insurance.)
He had wanted another sports car ever since. And the first blossoming of adultery took place along precisely this vine. It was as humdrum as it could have been. He actually picked her up at the office Christmas party. This woman. Not at the family office Christmas party, to which he had taken the kids when they were young, but the interoffice Christmas party.
There was a drunken urgency to the event, an atmosphere of fear and need. He felt he had to say shallow, boorish things to this girl. There was no surprise in the way he complimented her knockers and her tush. He descended into vulgarity the way a buzzard locks in on some morsel of decay. He gorged himself on his discomfort. He had spilled a glass of wine on himself while trying to dance to a rock-and-roll song, and the spill, on his white shirt, resembled a chest wound.
He fully intended to drive her back to her Village apartment and then to get on some wide avenue north. It was uppermost in his mind. Instead, though, he found himself in his pathetic Karmann-Ghia, chauffeuring her around the empty west side of Manhattan, past the prostitutes and strip joints, through the haunted industrial quarters of the city. He pulled over, in his station car, in the meat-packing district. In front of a loading dock. He began to tell her stories, fabricated stories, about some past full of good humor, full of fraternity pranks and sex with girls in fast cars. And then he simply put his face in her lap, right in the middle of her lap. His nose and cheeks abraded on her wool skirt. He began to tongue the spot on her skirt where he imagined his disgrace might concentrate itself.
—Ben, she said. Take pity on me. I can’t even see straight. Come on.
He wouldn’t talk to her though. He was pulling off the lingerie under her skirt. She was still sweating from the dancing and he could smell it on her. She sighed. The lights of passing cars had a metronomic regularity. He maneuvered around the stick shift and the emergency brake to get his face between her legs. His pinstriped ass was up around the steering wheel. He was doing his best to feel bad. It didn’t matter that she had not bathed that morning; they had an arrangement now. Soon she was holding up her end. She was grunting softly, almost protestingly. He’d never heard such a thing before. Sounded like a swallow trapped by a barn cat.
—Ben, Ben, she whispered, let’s move. This isn’t the right place. You know that.
He pretended she meant to the back seat.
Hood banged the back of her head on the rearview mirror as he was swinging her around and trying to carry her to that tiny storage area behind the front seats. He was close to tears now, though he was determined to go through with it.
—Take them down, she said, take down your trousers. I want to see you in full. If it’s going to be like this.
She worked the zipper herself. She didn’t require his help.
He remembered her kneeling across him. His suit pants coiled around his ankles like shackles, around his cordovans. His tie was loosened, his shirt unbuttoned, the tails of his shirt flapping around in the midst of their efforts. It was cold in the car, he could see his breath.
—Get on board, he said. C’mon.
He had never spoken during the act before. The words sounded to him like an impropriety. They were like an ethnic slur. They were like talking about money in public.
She sat on his impoverished penis.
Hood thought of Elena, of course. How could he not? And of Paul and Wendy and how they would feel when they found out. The look of inconsolable shame and remorse with which they would greet him. Something led Hood these days into degradation. There was some tug, some mournful and beckoning melody he followed.
In fact, Melody turned out to be the girl’s name, and she was better at it than his wife. She was fortissimo—ff, when scored. What was upsetting about Melody was what was good. He thought about prostitutes and group sex and transvestites and sadomasochism and he could see the lure of the alien, the lure of the barbarous sexual act. As she rocked, she banged her head again. On the ceiling. He came. All the life went out of him. And then the moment turned. Really. For a second everything smelled sad and good. Like after a heavy rain. He held her in his arms. Melody from the office, whom he would have to see again right after the family ski trip to the Berkshires, right after he saw his dad, his lonely dad, right after he relaxed for a week. He would have to see her and he wouldn’t know what to say. He would forget he had been happy right then, for a moment.
—Should we get a drink?
He hoped she would decline. He was a little scared.
—You have to go back to your wife, fool, she said quietly. You’ll be folded up on some lane divider if you have another drink.
—I can make my own decisions—
—Well, I don’t want another drink with you. Even if I do appreciate the company.
They didn’t talk anymore after that. He dropped her off at her apartment.
The trip home was an adventure into the northern wastes. He drove erratically, d
espondently, dangerously. He sped, tailgated. Back at his house, in the master bedroom, he splashed water on his penis. He bathed the site of his transgression with a violet shell soap.
—What are you doing? Elena called sleepily as he dried himself off in the bathroom. Never coming enough out of her unconsciousness to see it.
—Oh, just brushing my teeth, Hood mumbled. Didn’t want to wake you. Just brushing.
Nine months later. A full gestation period after Melody, he began to execute his affair with Janey Williams.
Their kids and his kids got along famously. This provided the opportunity. The kids were like some suburban gang of Sharks or Jets. Slovenly, affluent kids from the suburbs, staying out late to shoot pellet guns at the Van Dorens’ rottweiler, to smoke marijuana, or to get into one another’s pants. Mikey Williams and his friends had begun to call each other Charles all the time—this was part of how Janey and Hood had grown close, one night, talking it over. Hood had asked Mikey, taking him aside brusquely one night at a dinner party at the Williamses, what the hell Charles was all about. Short for the opposition in the Vietnam conflict? Nickname of Manson? Name of a perfume? Nah, Mike told him sullenly, Charles, like Charles Nelson Reilly. From Match Game. The one, Hood surmised, with the incredibly long microphone.
Wendy was the only sensible kid on the block.
The wind gusted fiercely, wailing its dissonances, turning the corner around Janey’s house, around the guest room, passing into the valley below, over the Silvermine River—a creek, really—and into the forest. The weather report was bad. Rain, rain, and then turning sharply colder. It was coming down in sheets now and mixed with harder stuff.
Kids, that was how it happened. They had a laugh over Charles. It was Halloween night and their kids, his daughter and the Williams kids and Danny Spofford from up the street, were dressed up, along with every other kid in the neighborhood, as vagrants. Decked out in rags with mud and tar and eyeliner speckling them, with penciled-on boils and gin blossoms and dead teeth. Dressed like urban flotsam. Benjamin Hood had driven the half mile to fetch some forgotten culinary item, a cup of milk or some Tang or something. He sat for a moment on the couch next to Janey. They rated the costumes of their beloved vagrants. The further the distance from their cushy lives, the higher the rating.
It had to do with kids and Halloween. With this mythology of the holiday. The carnival of sleep and death. The ghosts of the past, the ghosts of all his mistakes, crowded the earth, reminded him of the folly of his best efforts. Regrets. Hood turned the other cheek: he permitted the kids to carry shaving cream and soap and raw eggs out into the street. Go ahead, he laughed. Go fuck each other up. Doesn’t matter in the long run. Doesn’t matter what the hell you do. The kids froze, stunned by the oath.
Then they piled out the door, to menace the neighbors.
Janey Williams’s lipstick was a chocolate color, a real earth tone.
The long flat stretches of matrimony were over. He was thirty-nine and balding and unattractive and his children wanted to be nothing so much as vagrants.
—Let’s fuck, he desperately proposed to his neighbor. He drained a highball.
—So romantic, she said. But I think you might have another engagement.
—Oh, Janey, he said. You know what I mean.
—Boy, do I, she said.
—Tell me I’m totally wide of the mark, he said. Tell me it’s all in my head.
Janey smiled sadly. She had her own problems.
He made it back in time for dinner.
The erotics of adultery are well documented. In the guest room, thinking back, Hood drank again. Maybe he honored his wife in this way; maybe it was for her. Maybe he fucked against the notion of family, to escape its constraints. Maybe he adultered because of his keen appreciation of beauty. Maybe he celebrated the freedom of the new sexuality. Maybe he did it to abase himself. Maybe he did it to hurt Janey Williams, or to injure her husband—they were more attractive than he was, they were more at ease. Maybe it was her husband he wanted to fuck, and it was such a terrible, dark secret that it was secret even from Benjamin. Maybe he wanted to get caught. Maybe he did it to escape, from his job, his anxieties, his psychosomatic complaints. Maybe he did it because his parents, too, had done it (or so he supposed) and the desire to cheat boiled in his genes. Maybe, at last, he did it simply because he wanted what he couldn’t have.
Touching briefly—in the guest room—on this shortage theory of adultery, Hood arrived at a brilliantly incorrect understanding of Janey’s absence. He believed suddenly that he understood the afternoon. Of course! He was supposed to look for her! In the overdecorated chambers of her house, he was to embark on a quest, a Buzz Aldrin or Neil Armstrong sort of a quest. He would have to work for this oblivion he wanted. He was dressed but ready to disrobe. He poured a fresh tumbler of vodka and set off on the tour.
—Janey …? Janey …?
To the right lay Sandy’s room. Jim and Janey’s prized, brainy, creepy son. The jigsaw-puzzling son. The son who did puzzles of popcorn—just popcorn, or just M&M’s. The brainy son who memorized Nolan Ryan’s E.R.A. going back into the late sixties, who explained the physics of curveballs and kept track of the dead in Vietnam. He wouldn’t permit his photograph to be taken. He was afraid of water.
Sandy’s room was tentatively decorated, as if he suspected he would be moving soon. A lone Yale pennant was tacked up over his bed. It served only to confirm the emptiness of the space. There was a bookshelf full of strange-but-true baseball stories, strange-but-true ghost stories—The Thing at the Foot of the Bed—and the 1972 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records. (Heaviest man, Robert Earl Hughes of Monticello, Ill., who achieved a peak heft of 1,069 pounds. Buried in a piano case.) On top of the bookshelf, several small fish tanks full of Magic Rocks.
—Janey! Hood whispered, in the center of this unnaturally clean space.
He slid back the door to Sandy’s closet. A mound of dirty laundry piled there. No Janey, though, crouching, in lingerie, waiting.
Back in the hall, Hood headed for Mike Williams’s room. He was sure the doorknob would be rigged with home electronic alarms. The apparatus for this alarm would be arranged on the floor just inside the room, rigged with pipe cleaners and roach clips and a nine-volt battery he had lifted from somebody’s automatic garage opener. Mike liked whoopee cushions and rubber dog excrement. He often wore a Nixon mask.
And he also had a fondness for the crank telephone call.
—Hello, is your refrigerator running?
—Why, yes.
—Well, I guess it must be, because I just saw it run by my house. HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!
—Hello, is this 655-FUCK?
—Hello, is this 655-SHIT?
Paul had told him all this one night. One of those frail dusks when father and teenaged son share a good laugh over something. Few and far between were these days. Hood found these calls hysterically funny. Perhaps this was the day that Paul told him about his own crank phone calls, and about the bizarre miracle of their own number, 655-4663. The last four digits actually rendered their name. 655-HOOD.
Mike’s doorknob released no shock, however. It sent up no electronic squeak. (Alarms were never activated for the real intruders.) The room belonged to Hood, the interloper. Black-light posters and tapestries covered the walls, tapestries that, in light of the dim table lamp Hood switched on, were full of burn holes and unidentifiable stains. A water pipe the size of a barber pole stood in one corner. Janey permitted this behavior? With more time he might have extended the search. No doubt the traditional pornographic magazines were concealed between his mattresses, along with socks crusty with his dried seed. The shame and resourcefulness of the masturbator coming into his craft! No fabric or substance or receptacle was beyond being tested. Mike’s laundry was probably welded together with his semen.
Imagine the sheer volume of it at single-sex schools and in penitentiaries. Consider how often the average American male masturbated in 1
973. That year there were, say, 100 million American men, two thirds of whom were capable of achieving orgasm. At once a week, that meant approximately 3,432,000,000 ejaculations in the calendar year. At ½ ounce per ejaculation, that’s 1,716,000,000 ounces or 13,406,250 gallons. Larger than a very large oil spill. Where to put all that waste sperm? All across the vast land, in the suburbs, in the rural and forested regions, in inner cities, guys were coming into rags, into sinks, onto their own bodies, outdoors in the alley or upon the earth. How many thought about disposal?
He had tried to explain self-abuse to his son once, and this was one of the conversations that did not go well. He sat the boy down in the bedroom one day and asked him not to do it in the shower, because it wasted water and electricity and because everyone would expect it of him there anyway, and not to do it onto the linen, and not to do it with his sister’s undergarments or any clothes belonging to his mother, and not to do it with the dog. The best time was when he was certain no one else was in the house. The best place was into the john, where it would cause no trouble and mix with the other sad waste products of America. If he became concerned about any sign of perversion in his habits, he should feel free to come forward and discuss it. Together they could consult a medical text.
At the close of this monologue, Paul looked as though he had just learned of his family’s financial ruin.
Every man lusted to renounce masturbation once and for all, to cease from those tepid orgasms whose only novelty lay in the freedom to invent that they encouraged (Janey in crotchless hot pants presenting her ass to him while sucking on her third finger). Inventions that were otherwise shameful to harbor. Yet Hood himself had not found occasion to give it up. Sometimes he even had to masturbate while lying next to Elena. He imagined, he hoped, he relied on the fact that she slept through these nocturnal abasements.
Hood left Mike’s room. He stood at the top of the banister and looked down. He leaned over it and felt the cool of the polished wood on his abdomen. Why dwell in the illusion that Janey was waiting for him here? She had left, of course. The conclusion was unavoidable. She had released him to the inevitability of his marriage, to confession and inadequate apologies. He could hear the rain and sleet pelting urgently against the windows of the second floor. It was only a half mile or so to his house, along Valley Road. In minutes, he might be settled in front of a fire in the library, contemplating the oblivion of fires.