At around noon the phone rings. It’s Darrel.
“Hi,” he says.
I tell him I’m watching Saturday morning cartoons, all space heroes and ray guns, and he’s clearly impressed. He wants to know if I’d like to have dinner tonight, and because I really want to spend tonight with Georgianne, I say no but can we make it for next Saturday? and he says all right how about seven o’clock and I say great.
I like Saturdays. Now that I’m a merry widow, they feel happy, aspiring. When I was married, my husband and I would always fight on Saturdays: That was when we had the most time. I remember one Saturday, after The Best of Broadway had done 1776, and after my husband had declared twice in a loud voice “I cannot abide this musical,” he asked me to get his glasses from the bedroom, since I was closer. I said no, and told him he was lazy and presumptuous and had no sense of moral outrage at anything, at which point he bolted up and said loudly, “You needling bitch, if you really believe I’m so despicable then you’re a masochistic scumbag in love with my prick.” Our marriage, I suddenly realized, wasn’t going well.
I hadn’t heard the word scumbag since I was a kid. Eddie across the road had yelled it at my brother Louis once and Louis had yelled it back. I stared at my husband. This was a man who could say subpoena duces tecum like it was soup. Scumbag? It terrified me. My heart did a fast crawl out and onto the hilly dirt road of aloneness and escape; it’s an image I have: a wide dirt road which undulates like a roller coaster. I think it’s somewhere in Lebanon.
Later we had an argument about his involvement with a woman at work, and I stormed into the dining room and took the plaster bust of George Eliot he’d given me for Christmas (George’s middle name was Eliot; this was his sense of humor) and broke it against the stereo he’d given me for my birthday. Two birds with one of the birds.
We were rotten and cruel. Especially on Saturdays. We’d say things like, “Blow it out your ass, Bingo-Boots,” though I’m not sure why.
The rest of the afternoon George and I clean the house. I wash the dishes and run the vacuum cleaner quickly through the living room. Georgie dusts: “These cobs sure do make webs,” she says. She thinks this is fun. Her friend Isabelle Shubby from next door is helping her dust, a volunteer from the neighborhood. The Shubbys’ house is separated from ours by two driveways and three trees. It’s a big turquoise split-level, the only one on a street of brick and stucco. Her parents have noisy parties, which they invite me to so that I won’t get annoyed and call the police. I’ve never gone, however, though someday I just might show up in lace and emeralds or something. Isabelle has brought her Labrador, Adams, and we put him in the bathroom with newspapers on the floor. I don’t like dogs, large bumping dogs. They have a crowd behavior like humans: They gang up and go straight for the genitals. Besides, Adams doesn’t like the vacuum cleaner, which I keep turning on and off and moving from room to room.
In the living room Mme. Charpentier and Her Daughters is crooked. It is dry-mounted and unframed and I have to balance it between push-pins. I turn off the vacuum, go to re-align it, and notice a small dark scribbling, as with a black felt pen, in the left corner. It looks like the sort of thing Georgie used to do to books and papers of mine when she was little.
“Georgianne,” I say. “Did you do this to the Renoir print?”
She comes closer. “Don’t yell at me,” she says. “How do you know it’s not Gerard? He coulda done it.” She looks at the black squiggle, then moves on, dusting the TV, her little arm making circular movements with the rag. Isabelle has stopped to look at a magazine.
“I’m not accusing you, I’m just asking you.” Neither of us says anything. After a minute I add, “What makes you think Gerard might have done it?”
“I dunno,” she shrugs. She’s still concentrating on her darkening dustcloth. “He was looking at it.” Isabelle glances at me fearfully. She says she’s wondering if Adams is okay.
“I’m sure he’s okay,” I say.
The dark line on the Renoir looks like a miniature of the crack on the side of the house, the seam of a jigsaw puzzle, a tear in the blue of a dress.
· · ·
The news tonight is about Congress and about polyps, both threatened by man. We watch, glued, frozen. We have ice cream for dessert. After the news George and I watch a sociologically minded talk show whose program tonight is on talented, autistic children. One of them, Donna, is in the studio audience, between her parents. She looks only twelve, but is seventeen. The host makes a mistake, tells the world she’s fourteen, then apologizes. Her black eyes dart around, and then she retreats into the sweatered hump of herself. Autistic or not, she knows this is a humiliation: to be called fourteen in front of millions of viewers, when you are really seventeen. Her mother next to her, I can see, in the corner of the screen, tries to console her by squeezing her hand. Donna has made something of a national reputation for herself drawing greeting cards. The silver-haired host bends down to compliment her, as if she’s a lobotomized dwarf, a midge, a worm; her features suddenly relax when the host says again, “Donna, you’re really very talented,” and her mouth and eyes fall into all the right places, and the voice that says “Thank you” is a low, strong, woman’s voice.
It’s as if I know the girl. She almost has my name, and I bet we know things about each other: slipping behind the hips and shoulders of our mother, squeezing her hand, we don’t want to talk to this silver-haired man, we see things clearly, we can sit here all day locked up yet seeing, our mouths unnecessary, though they may smile to be polite. I have been her: the darkness, the slump, the fat splotched cheeks, the frumpish skirts. People talk past us, we are invisible; when they say our name, if they really look at us, they don’t mean it, they only want us to say anything, anything stupid, but our dark woman’s voice, we know, would terrify.
Sometimes anything but cartoons is too real for me.
· · ·
Sunday is always a bad day. A sort of gray purgatory that resembles a bus station with broken vending machines. God is dead, and denied the last word on things, is acting like a real baby. Sunday is some sort of revenge. “And on the Seventh Day he was arrested,” Gerard likes to say.
Before class on Monday the teacher, who smelled of Emeraude and faintly of onions and who felt herself perhaps the sort of woman doomed in middle age to be always taking other people’s children for walks in parks, read a giant stack of student poems. The ones by a black student named Darrel Erni were the most interesting, mostly about women he’d known in Vietnam. The teacher picked at the sweater lint caught in the ragged edge of her fingernail and then stirred her coffee with a knife.
In class she grew dramatic. “You need to ask yourself questions,” she told her students in something that resembled a hiss. “I want you to ask yourself, ‘How is writing a public act? What does poetry owe the world? Are we all vagabonds at a cosmic dump or are we just not paying attention?’ ” Then she stomped around back and forth in front of the class and spoke of nuclear protest, presidential petitions, throwing pies with lots of whipped cream. “Do you know whether this college has investments in South Africa?”
Outside, the leaves that had not blushed or died were doing a dazzling fade, the gold, paper money of pirates.
“I want you to think about the sick luxury of your being,” she said. And then she lit up a cigarette.
Tuesday is a train station with one working vending machine filled with nothing but Mars bars. I meet Gerard for a fast breakfast. I walk in a little later than usual and he looks up from a newspaper and an ashtray full of cigarette butts. He smiles. “Didn’t think you’d be here today.” I climb into the booth, look at him from across the table and gently take his cigarette from his fingers, helping myself to a long drag. Then I too smile. We’re friends. I’m relieved.
I glance at his newspaper. “What’s happening in the world? Do we still exist?”
We don’t talk about Thursday night—another undiscussable, like Darrel’s war, or
Gerard’s long ago restaurant: We leave them alone. There’s still something tense between us, but it’s tense like hope.
Gerard folds the newspaper. “Do you suppose this planet is hell and we’ve all been sent here from somewhere else because we fucked up, and we don’t realize it?”
I smile. This is how we talk when we’re happy. When we’re depressed we spout forth irrepressibly about our love lives.
I look at the paper again. The human race is dying. We are all dying and we are sitting up in our beds smoking cigars and making dying jokes, an impressively, compulsively vaudevillian species. Monkeys with spiff.
“The coffee’s like mop water today. I don’t know what happened.” Usually Hank’s serves the kind of coffee that makes you talk real fast and then sends you knocking around the room, breaking things.
“And look at these eggs,” says Gerard. Yolk has bled and dried all over the plate. Gerard always likes his yolks cooked more. “I hate them when they’re all embryonic like this. The waitress is new. The last time she walked by here I said, ‘Excuse me, could I also have some Band-Aids for these?’ and she just walked away.” Yolk has dried into Gerard’s beard like wax.
“Who wants to tell me what a sonnet is?” asked the teacher. “Lucy?”
“No, it’s Joyce.”
“Really? Gee, my seating chart says Lucy. Oh, I see. Lucy Joyce Brondoli. Why are you called by your middle name? Is there a long story to that?”
Lucy Joyce Brondoli shrugged and spoke slowly, in a diffident deadpan. “The dog was named Lucy, so they had to call me Joyce.”
“The dog was there before you and got your name?”
“I forget.”
“I don’t understand. Why did they name both you and the dog Lucy?”
“I guess they liked the name. A sonnet is fourteen lines of iambic pentameter ending in a couplet and the rhyme scheme before that goes ABAB,CDCD,EFEF. Like that. Shakespeare wrote a lot of them.”
“But why didn’t they just call the dog Joyce? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I get sidetracked,” I tell Eleanor. We slurp coffee together in the lounge. “I get fascinated. I think people spend most of their lives just trying to adjust to their names. When you’re eighteen months old, you learn what it is, one of those huge, immutable abstractions in life, and from there on in it’s all recovery from the shock and indignity of it.” My father had wanted another boy after Louis. He was hoping for a Benjamin. That’s partly how I became Benna. The other part involved my mother who, in looking through a book called Names for Your Child, became very distressed to see that if you were a boy your name usually meant “Almighty One,” and if you were a girl you were probably “a wee, faithful thing of the woods.” My mother didn’t want me hanging around in the woods. “Well, Nick,” she said to my father in the hospital, “looks like we have a little Benna.” Which was the beginning of a lot of confusion. My father sometimes called me Ben, complicating my childhood in the obvious ways. And in the second grade I got thirty valentines, all with my name spelled differently, everything from Bean to Donna. No one could get it right.
“My name was always such a hideosity I finally had to take up yoga to relax,” says Eleanor. I smile, slurp, and accidentally burn my tongue. “You know,” says Eleanor, “if I were to write a book, it would be filled with women sitting around having lunch, talking like this—about God and diaphragms and Middlemarch. After every lunch they’d all take out their compacts at the table and reapply their lipstick together. What yould you write?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I’d call it Split Infinitives and load it up with a lot of divorces. Then at the end I’d have it be like To the Lighthouse, where all human life is suddenly lifted up out of the book and vanished, only an old house at the end, with English weeds tapping at the glass.”
Eleanor nods and smiles. “That’s depressing.”
“Yeah, I guess if it was too depressing I’d add a knock-knock joke.”
At night it’s cold and I sit out on the steps of my front porch, listen to the leaves drop, like the beginning of rain. I suck on my cigarette, its false restorative, the dry papery sponge, the sucking finger of love. I exhale in the direction of the streetlight and what I see, what is formed, is a sort of halo, a luminous flower, splayed ghostly starfish! for a moment and then it floats off into the hydrangea. I repeat this, breathing on my cigarette, blowing upward into the light: At night all ghosts, all angels, haloes, luminous flowers are this nicotined dust against the streetlamp.
When I told my husband I hated him, we hadn’t been married long at all. It was when he was taking my picture with his new camera, narrowing his eyes, adjusting the shutter speed, posing me at various angles until my smile felt aching and absurd. We were in the living room. He had asked me to take my shirt off and I’d obliged. I’d been standing there by the mantel awhile and it was getting cold, the hairs on my arms standing on end, my nipples erect. “Got your high beams on,” said my husband, like a college kid, camera to his face. Finally he pulled the camera away from his eyes. “Light’s bad,” he mumbled and walked off without taking the shot. Stunned and topless, I followed him into the dining room where he began taking pictures of the porcelain monkey-head lamp my Aunt Wyn had sent us for our wedding. “The light’s hitting this great,” said my husband. “The reading’s perfect.” His camera was clicking away.
“The monkey-head lamp?” I said. I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it. Three times before, my husband had asked me to pose with various articles of clothing removed. Once in the bedroom wearing only boots and one of his ties. Once in the bathroom with a red towel draped strategically to miss one breast. Once in the kitchen in just my bra. And today. I did this because I loved him, I supposed, but maybe I did it because I’d grown up in a trailer and guessed that this is what people did in houses, that this is what houses were for. I’m not sure. Maybe I did it because I had only five pages of a dissertation on Miltonic echoes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century children’s literature. Each time my husband had never actually taken the picture. He had put the camera to his face, squinted his eyes, bared his teeth, and grown dissatisfied. This day, however, this day of the monkey-head lamp would be the last. I stood there, naked from the waist up, fury spreading up from my gut into my face, as fury does, and when my husband turned around with only a vaguely apologetic half-smile, I punched him in the neck. “I hate you,” I said, and then went back into the living room and put on my shirt. I turned around, buttoning, and he was standing by the sofa, wide-eyed, the camera hanging from its long black strap, resting against his torso like a dark, outsized belly button, like an insect that had crawled into his abdomen and was poking its head out to look around.
“The litter bag on our honeymoon was bad enough,” I said. We had driven to Cape Hatteras. He had made me put the car litter bag in my pocketbook so it wouldn’t stink up the rented Plymouth. I have always felt that life was simply a series of personal humiliations relieved, occasionally, by the humiliations of others. But compared to my husband I had no imagination with which to fight back, with which to construct indignities. “This is the last draw,” I said. From the time I was a child I always thought people were saying “draw” not “straw.” “I despise you.” I walked toward the front door. I was going for a walk.
“I’m sorry,” he said. I stopped and turned to look. He had kind of a vegetable glaze, the look, I imagined, potatoes got in their eyes. His neck was red. “Shoot me, if I’m such a shit. Shoot me.” And then, apparently, he became quite taken with the joke, and handed me the camera, dancing around in front of me, singing, “Shoot me, shoot me.”
“George,” I said. “You’re losing it.”
“Shoot me!” he persisted, and he started taking off his clothes. I grabbed the camera and took off out the front door, across the lawn; perhaps I would throw the camera away in a trash can somewhere. “Shoot me! Shoot me!” I could still hear George cry behind me, and I turned a
nd he was bouncing up and down on the front porch, ludicrous in his underwear. “Shoot me!”
And I shot, and the picture I took and still have, shows him ducking back inside the house, one side of him still caught within the doorframe, half of a pale blurry body embedded forever in the long dark marrow of that entrance, deep inside unseen and grinning, a monkey-head lamp in perfect light, a present only an aunt could give.
· · ·
You cannot be grateful without possessing a past. That is why children are incapable of gratitude and why night prayers and dinner graces are lost on them. “Gobbles Mommy, Gobbles Grandpa …” George races through it. She has no reference points. As I get older the past widens and accumulates, all sloppy landlessness like a river, and as a result I have more clearly demarcated areas of gratitude. Things like ice cream or scenery or one good kiss become objects of a huge soulful thanks. Nothing is gobbled. This is a sign of getting old.
“Writing is a safari, dammit,” exclaimed the teacher. “It means going out there and spotting, nabbing, and bringing home to the cage of the page the most marvelous living stuff of the world.”
Timothy Robinson sat right in front of the teacher. He was doodling scenes from Conan in the margins of his notebook.
“But those cages are small and expensive,” the teacher continued, searched, groped, not knowing quite what she was talking about.
Conan’s pectorals were like concrete slabs and in Timothy Robinson’s margins Conan’s biceps and triceps had begun to make his arms look like large croissants. Now he suddenly was getting sunglasses. Now striped thighs.