American Pastoral (50 page)

"My approval or disapproval," Shelly had been saying to Lou Levov, "is beside the point of whether they go to those movies or not."

"But you are a physician," the Swede's father insisted, "a respected person, an ethical person, a responsible person—"

"Lou," said his wife, "maybe, dear, you're monopolizing the conversation."

"Let me finish,
please.
" To the table at large, he asked, "Am I? Am I monopolizing the conversation?"

"Absolutely not," said Marcia, throwing an arm good-naturedly across his back. "It's delightful to hear your delusions."

"I don't know what that means," he told her.

"It means social conditions may have altered in America since you were taking the kids to eat at the Chinks and Al Haberman was cutting gloves in a shirt and a tie."

"Really?" Dawn said to her. "They've altered? Nobody told us," and, to contain herself, got up and left for the kitchen. Waiting there for Dawn's instructions were a couple of local high school girls who helped to do the serving and the cleaning up whenever the Levovs had dinner guests.

Marcia was to one side of Lou Levov, Jessie Orcutt to the other. Jessie's new glass of Scotch, which she must have managed to pour for herself in the kitchen, he had picked up from her place and moved out of her reach only minutes into the cold cucumber soup. When she then made a move to leave the table, he would not allow her to get up. "Just sit," he told her. "Sit and eat. You don't need that. You need food. Eat your dinner." Each time she so much as shifted in her chair, he laid a hand firmly on hers to remind her she was going nowhere.

A dozen candles burned in two tall ceramic candelabra, and to the Swede, who sat flanked by his mother and by Sheila Salzman, everyone's eyes—deceptively enough, even Marcia's eyes—appeared blessed in that light with spiritual understanding, with kindly lucidity, alive with all the meaning one so craves to find in one's friends. Sheila, like Barry, was on hand every year at Labor Day because of what she had come to mean to his folks. On the phone to Florida the Swede almost never got through a conversation without his father's asking, "And how is that lovely Sheila, that lovely woman, how is she doing?" "She is such a dignified woman," his mother said, "such a refined person. Isn't she Jewish, darling? Your father says no. He insists she isn't."

Why this disagreement should persist for years he could not understand exactly, but the subject of fair-haired Sheila Salzman's religious origins had proved indispensable to his parents' lives. To Dawn, who'd been trying for decades to be as tolerant of the Swede's imperfect parents as he was of her imperfect mother, this was their most inexplicable preoccupation—their most enraging as well (particularly as Dawn knew that, for her adolescent daughter, Sheila had something Dawn didn't have, that somehow Merry had come to trust the speech therapist in a way she no longer trusted her mother). "Are there no Jewish blonds in the world other than you?" Dawn asked him. "It hasn't anything to do with her appearance," the Swede explained, "it has to do with Merry." "What does her being Jewish have to do with Merry?" "I don't know. She was the speech therapist. They're in awe of her," the Swede said, "because of all she did for Merry." "She wasn't the child's mother by any chance—or was she?" "They know that, darling," calmly answered the Swede, "but because of the speech therapy, they've made her into some kind of magician."

And so had he, not so much while she was Merry's therapist—when he had merely found her composure a curious stimulus to sexual imaginings—but after Merry disappeared and grief absconded with his wife.

Thrown violently off his own narrow perch, he felt an intangible need open hugely within him, a need with no bottom to it, and he yielded to a solution so foreign to him that he did not even recognize how improbable it was. In the quiet, thoughtful woman, who had once made Merry less strange to herself by teaching her how to overcome her word phobias and to control the elaborate circumlo-cutionary devices that, paradoxically, only increased her child's sense of being out of control, was someone he found himself wanting to incorporate into himself. The man who had lived correctly within marriage for almost twenty years was determined to be senselessly, worshipfully in love. It was three months before he could begin to understand that this was no way around anything, and it was Sheila who had to tell him. He hadn't gotten a romantic mistress—he'd gotten a candid mistress. She sensibly told him what all his adoration of her meant, told him that he was no more himself with her than Dawn was Dawn at the psychiatric clinic, explained to him that he was out to sabotage everything—but he was in such a state that he went on anyway telling her how, when they ran away together to Ponce, she could learn Spanish and teach techniques of speech therapy at the university there, and he could operate the business from his Ponce plant and they could live in a modern hacienda up in the hills, among the palms, above the Caribbean....

What she did not tell him about was Merry in her house—after the bombing, Merry hiding in her house. She told him everything except that. The candor stopped just where it should have begun.

Was everyone's brain as unreliable as his? Was he the only one unable to see what people were up to? Did everyone slip around the way he did, in and out, in and out, a hundred different times a day go from being smart to being smart enough, to being as dumb as the next guy, to being the dumbest bastard who ever lived? Was it stupidity deforming him, the simpleton son of a simpleton father, or was life just one big deception that everyone was on to except him?

This sense of inadequacy he might once have described to
her;
he could talk to Sheila, talk about his doubts, his bewilderment—all the serenity in her allowed for that, this magician of a woman who had given Merry the great opportunity that Merry had thrown away, who had supplanted with "a wonderful floating feeling," according to Merry, half at least of her stutterer's frustration, the lucid woman whose profession was to give sufferers a second chance, the mistress who knew everything, including how to harbor a murderer.

Sheila had been with Merry and she had told him nothing.

All the trust between them, like all the happiness he'd ever known (like the killing of Fred Conlon—like
everything),
had been an accident.

She'd been with Merry and said nothing.

And said nothing now. The eagerness with which others spoke seemed, under the peculiar intensity of her gaze, to strike her as a branch of pathology. Why would anyone say
that?
She herself was to say nothing all evening, nothing about Linda Lovelace or Richard Nixon or H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, her advantage over other people being that her head was not filled by what filled everybody else's head. This way of hers, of lying in wait behind herself, the Swede had once taken to be a mark of her superiority. Now he thought, "Icy bitch.
Why?
" Once she had said to him, "The influence you allow others to have on you, it's absolute. Nothing so captivates you as another person's needs." And he had said, "I think you are describing Sheila Salzman," and, as always, he was wrong.

He thought she was omniscient and all she was was cold.

Whirling about inside him now was a frenzied distrust of everyone. The excision of certain assurances, the
last
assurances, made him feel as though he had gone in one day from being five to being one hundred. It would give him comfort, he thought, it would help him right then if, of all things, he knew that resting out in the pasture beyond their dinner table was Dawn's herd, with Count, the big bull, protecting them. If Dawn still had Count, if only Count....A relief-filled, realityless moment passed before he realized that of course it would be a comfort to have Count roaming the dark pasture among the cows, because then Merry would be roaming among the guests, here, Merry, in her circus pajamas, leaning up against the back of her father's chair, whispering into her father's ear.
Mrs. Orcutt drinks whiskey. Mrs. Umanoff has BO. Dr. Salzman is bald. A
mischievous intelligence that was utterly harmless—back then unanarchic and childish and well within bounds.

Meanwhile he heard himself saying, "Dad, take some more steak," in what he knew was a hopeless effort—a good son's ef fort—to get his self-abandoned father to be, if not tranquil, less insistently chagrined over the inadequacies of the non-Jewish human race.

"I'll tell you who I'll take some steak for—for this young lady." Spearing a slice from the platter that one of the serving girls was holding beside him, he dumped it onto Jessie's plate; he had taken Jessie on as a full-scale project. "Now pick up your knife and fork and eat," he told her, "you could use some red meat. Sit up straight," and, as though she believed he could well resort to violence if she did otherwise, Jessie Orcutt drunkenly mumbled, "I was going to," but began to fiddle with the meat in such a clumsy way that the Swede feared his father was going to start cutting her food for her. All that crude energy that, try as it might, could not remake the troubled world.

"But this is serious business, this children business." Having gotten Jessie taking nourishment, he was in a state again about
Deep Throat.
"If that isn't serious, what is anymore?"

"Dad," said the Swede, "what Shelly is saying is not that it's not serious. He agrees it's serious. He's saying that once you've made your case to an adolescent child, you've made your case and you can't then take these kids and lock them up in their rooms and throw away the key."

His daughter was an insane murderer hiding on the floor of a room in Newark, his wife had a lover who dry-humped her over the sink in their family kitchen, his ex-mistress had knowingly brought disaster upon his house, and he was trying to propitiate his father with on-the-one-hand-this and on-the-other-hand-that.

"You'd be surprised," Shelly told the old man, "how much the kids today have learned to take in their stride."

"But degrading things should
not
be taken in their stride! I say
lock
them in their rooms if they take this in their stride! I remember when kids used to be at home doing their homework and not out seeing movies like this. This is the morality of a country that we're talking about. Well, isn't it? Am I nuts? It is an affront to decency and to decent people."

"And what," Marcia asked him, "is so inexhaustibly interesting about decency?"

The question so surprised him that it left him looking a little frantically around the table for somebody with an opinion learned enough to subdue this woman.

It turned out to be Orcutt, that great friend of the family. Bill Orcutt was coming to Lou Levov's aid. "And what is wrong with decency?" Orcutt asked, smiling broadly at Marcia.

The Swede could not look at him. On top of all the things he could not think about there were two people—Sheila and Orcutt—he could not look at. Did Dawn consider Bill Orcutt handsome? He never thought so. Round face, snout nose, puckering lower lip... piggy-looking bastard. Must be something else that drove her to that frenzy over the kitchen sink. What? The easy assurance? Was that what got her going? The comfort taken by Bill Orcutt in being Bill Orcutt, his contentment in being Bill Orcutt? Was it because he wouldn't dream of slighting you even if both you and he knew that you weren't up to snuff? Was it his appropriateness that got her going like that, the flawless appropriateness, how very appropriately he played his role as steward of the Morris County past? Was it the sense he exuded of never having had to grub for anything or take shit from anyone or be at a loss as to how to behave even when the wife on his arm was a hopeless drunk? Was it because he'd entered the world expecting things not even a Weequahic three-letterman begins to expect, that none of us begin to expect, that the rest of us, if we even get those things by working our asses off for them, still never feel entitled to? Was that why she was in heat over the sink—because of his inbred sense of entitlement? Or was it the laudable environmentalism? Or was it the great art? Or was it simply his cock? Is that it, Dawn dear? I want an answer! I want it tonight! 75
it just his cock?

The Swede could not stop imagining the particulars of Orcutt fucking his wife any more than he could stop imagining the particulars of the rapists fucking his daughter. Tonight the imagining would not let him be.

"Decency?" Marcia said to Orcutt, foxily smiling back at him. "Much overvalued, wouldn't you say, the seductions of decency and civility and convention? Not the richest response to life I can think of."

"So what
do
you recommend for 'richness'?" Orcutt asked her. "The high road of transgression?"

The patrician architect was amused by the literature professor and the menacing figure she tried to cut in order to appall the squares. Amused he was. Amused! But the Swede could not turn the dinner party into a battle for his wife. Things were bad enough without colliding with Orcutt in front of his parents. All he had to do was to not listen to him. Yet each time that Orcutt spoke, every word antagonized him, convulsed him with spite and hatred and sinister thoughts; and when Orcutt wasn't speaking, the Swede was constantly looking down the table to see what in God's name there was in that face that could so excite his wife.

"Well," Marcia was saying, "without transgression there isn't very much knowledge, is there?"

"My God," cried Lou Levov, "
that's
one I never heard before. Excuse me, Professor, but where the hell do you get that idea?"

"The Bible," said Marcia, deliciously, "for a start."