American Pastoral (51 page)

"The
Bible? Which
Bible?"

"The one that begins with Adam and Eve. Isn't that what they tell us in Genesis? Isn't that what the Garden of Eden story is telling us?"

"What? Telling us
what?
"

"Without transgression there is no knowledge." "Well, that ain't what they taught me," he replied, "about the Garden of Eden. But then I never got past eighth grade."

"What
did
they teach you, Lou?"

"That when God above tells you not to do something, you damn well don't do it—that's what. Do it and you pay the piper. Do it and you will suffer from it for the rest of your days."

"Obey the good Lord above," said Marcia, "and all the terrible things will vanish."

"Well ... yes," he replied, though without conviction, realizing that he was being mocked. "Look, we are way off the subject—we are not talking about the Bible. Forget the Bible. This is no place to talk about the Bible. We are talking about a movie where a grown woman, from all reports, goes in front of a movie camera, and for money, openly, for millions and millions of people to see, children, everyone, does everything she can think of that is degrading.
That's
what we're talking about."

"Degrading to whom?" Marcia asked him.

"To
her,
for God's sake. Number one,
her.
She has made herself into the scum of the earth. You can't tell me you are in favor of
that
"

"Oh, she hasn't made herself into the scum of anything, Lou."

"To the contrary," said Orcutt, laughing. "She has eaten of the Tree of Knowledge."

"
And,
" announced Marcia, "made herself into a superstar. The highest of the high. I think Miss Lovelace is having the time of her life."

"Adolf Hitler had the time of his life, Professor, shoveling Jews into the furnace. That does not make it
right.
This is a woman who is poisoning young minds, poisoning the country, and in the bargain she
is
making herself the scum of the earth—period!"

There was nothing inactive in Lou Levov when he argued, and it looked as though just observing the phenomenon of an opinionated old man, fettered still to his fantasy of the world, was all that was prompting Marcia to persist. To bait and bite and draw blood. Her sport. The Swede wanted to kill her. Leave him alone! Leave him alone and he'll shut up! It's no big deal getting him to say more and more and more—so stop it!

But this problem that he had long ago learned to circumnavigate, in part by subduing his own personality, seemingly subjugating it to his father's while maneuvering around Lou where he could—this problem of the father, of maintaining filial love against the onslaught of an unrelenting father—was not a problem that she'd had decades of experience integrating into her life. Jerry just told their father to fuck off; Dawn was driven almost crazy by him; and Sylvia Levov stoically and impatiently endured him, her only successful form of resistance being to freeze him out and live with the isolation—and see more of herself evaporating year by year. But Marcia took him on as the fool that he was for still believing in the power of his indignation to convert the corruptions of the present into the corruptions of the past.

"So what would you want her to be instead, Lou? A cocktail waitress?" Marcia asked.

"Why not? That's a job."

"Not much of one," Marcia replied. "Not one that would interest anyone here."

"Oh?" said Lou Levov. "They'd prefer what she does instead?"

"I don't know," said Marcia. "We'll have to poll the girls. Which would you prefer," she said to Sheila, "cocktail waitress or porn star?"

But Sheila was not about to be engulfed in Marcia's mockery, and with eyes that seemed to stare past it and right on through to the egotism, she gave her unequivocal reply. The Swede remembered that after Sheila had first met Marcia and Barry Umanoff here, at the Old Rimrock house, he had asked her, "How can he love this person?" and instead of answering him as Dawn did, "Because he's a ball-less wonder," Sheila had replied, "By the end of a dinner party, everybody is probably thinking that about somebody. Sometimes everybody is thinking that about everybody." "Do you?" he'd asked her. "I think that about couples all the time," she'd said.

The wise woman. And yet this wise woman had harbored a murderer.

"What about Dawn?" Marcia asked. "Cocktail waitress or porno actress?"

Smiling sweetly, exhibiting her best Catholic schoolgirl posture—the girl who makes the nuns happy by sitting at her desk without slouching—Dawn said, "Up yours, Marcia."

"What kind of conversation is this?" Lou Levov asked.

"A dinner conversation," Sylvia Levov replied.

"And what makes
you
so blasé?" he asked her.

"I'm not blasé. I'm listening."

Now Bill Orcutt said, "Nobody's polled you, Marcia. Which would you prefer, assuming you had the choice?"

She laughed merrily at the slighting innuendo. "Oh, they've got big fat mamas in dirty movies. They, too, appear in the dreams of men. And not only for comic relief. Listen, you folks are too hard on Linda. Why is it that if a girl takes off her clothes in Atlantic City it's for a scholarship and makes her an American goddess, but if she takes off her clothes in a sex flick it's for filthy money and makes her a whore? Why is that? Why? All right—nobody knows. But seriously, folks, I love this word 'scholarship.' A hooker comes to a hotel room. The guy asks her how much she gets. She says, 'Well, if you want blank I get a three-hundred-dollar scholarship. And if you want blank-blank I get a five-hundred-dollar scholarship. And if you want blank-blank-blank—'"

"Marcia," said Dawn, "try as you will, you can't get under my skin tonight."

"Can't I?"

"Not tonight."

There was a beautiful floral arrangement at the center of the table. "From Dawn's garden," Lou Levov had told them all proudly as they were sitting down to eat. There were also large platters of the beefsteak tomatoes, sliced thickly, dressed in oil and vinegar, and encircled by slices of red onion fresh from the garden. And there were two wooden buckets—old feed buckets that they'd picked up at a junk shop in Clinton for a dollar apiece—each lined gaily with a red bandanna and brimming with the ears of corn that Orcutt had helped her shuck. Cradled in wicker baskets near either end of the table were freshly baked loaves of French bread, those new baguettes from McPherson's, reheated in the oven and pleasant to tear apart with your hands. And there was good strong Burgundy wine, half a dozen bottles of the Swede's best Pommard, four of them open on the table, bottles that five years back he had laid down for drinking in 1973—according to his wine register, Pom mards laid down in his cellar just one month to the day before Merry killed Dr. Conlon. Yes, earlier in the evening he had found 1/3/68 inscribed, in his handwriting, in the spiral notebook he used for recording the details of each new purchase..."1/3/68" he had written, with no idea that on 2/3/68 his daughter would go ahead and outrage all of America, except perhaps for Professor Marcia Umanoff.

The two high school kids who were doing the serving emerged from the kitchen every few minutes, silently offering around the steaks he'd cooked, arranged on pewter platters, all carved up and running with blood. The Swede's set of carving knives were from Hoffritz, the best German stainless steel. He'd gone over to New York to buy the set and the big carving block for their first Thanksgiving in the Old Rimrock house. He once had cared about all that stuff. Loved to hone the blade on the long conical file before he went after the bird. Loved the sound of it. The sad inventory of his domestic bounty. Wanted his family to have the best. Wanted his family to have everything.

"Please," said Lou Levov, "can I get an answer about the effect of this on the children? You are all way, way off the topic. Haven't we seen enough tragedy with the young children? Pornography. Drugs. The violence."

"Divorce," Marcia threw in to help him out.

"Professor, don't get me started on divorce. You understand French?" he asked her.

"I do if I have to," she said, laughing.

"Well, I got a son down in Florida, Seymour's brother, whose
spécialité
is divorce,
I
thought his
spécialité was
cardiac surgery. But no, it's divorce. I thought I sent him to medical school—I thought that's where all the bills were coming from. But no, it was divorce school. That's what he's got the diploma in—divorce. Has there ever been a more terrible thing for a child than the specter of divorce? I don't think so. And where will it end? What is the limit?
You
didn't all grow up in this kind of world. Neither did I. We grew up in an era when it was a different place, when the feeling for community, home, family, parents, work ... well, it was different. The changes are beyond conception. I sometimes think that more has changed since 1945 than in all the years of history there have ever been. I don't know what to make of the end of so many things. The lack of feeling for individuals that a person sees in that movie, the lack of feeling for places like what is going on in Newark—how did this happen? You don't have to revere your family, you don't have to revere your country, you don't have to revere where you live, but you have to know you
have
them, you have to know that you are
part
of them. Because if you don't, you are just out there on your own and I feel for you. I honestly do. Am I right, Mr. Orcutt, or am I wrong?"

"To wonder where the limit is?" Orcutt replied.

"Well, yes," said Lou Levov, who, the Swede observed—and not for the first time—had spoken of children and violence without any sense that the subject intersected with the life of his immediate family. Merry had been used for somebody else's evil purposes—that was the story to which it was crucial for them all to remain anchored. He kept such a sharp watch over each and every one of them to be certain that nobody wavered for a moment in their belief in that story. No one in this family was going to fall into doubt about Merry's absolute innocence, not so long as he was alive.

Among the many things the Swede could not think about from within the confines of his box was what would happen to his father when he learned that the death toll was four.

"You're right," Bill Orcutt was saying to Lou Levov, "to wonder where the limit is. I think everybody here is wondering where the limit is and worrying where the limit is every time they look at the papers. Except the professor of transgression. But then we're all stifled by convention—we're not great outlaws like William Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade and the holy saint Jean Genet. The Let Every Man Do Whatever He Wishes School of Literature. The brilliant school of Civilization Is Oppression and Morality Is Worse."

And he did not blush. "Morality" without batting an eye. "Transgression" as though he were a stranger to it, as though it were not he of all the men here—William III, latest in that long line of Orcutts advertised in their graveyard as virtuous men—who had transgressed to the utmost by violating the unity of a family already half destroyed.

His wife had a lover. And it was for the lover that she'd undergone the rigors of a face-lift, to woo and win
him.
Yes, now he understood the gushing letter profusely thanking the plastic surgeon for spending "the five hours of your time for my beauty," thanking him as if the Swede had not paid twelve thousand dollars for those five hours, plus five thousand more for the clinic suite where they had spent the two nights.
It is quite wonderful, dear doctor. It is as though I have been given a new life. Both from within and from the outside.
In Geneva he had sat up with her all night, held her hand through the nausea and the pain, and all of it for the sake of somebody else. It was for the sake of somebody else that she was building the house. The two of them were designing the house for each other.

To run away to Ponce to live with Sheila after Merry disappeared—no, Sheila had made him come to his senses and recover his rectitude and go back to his wife and as much of their life as remained intact, to the wife even a mistress knew he could not wound, let alone desert, in such a crisis. Yet these other two were going to pull it off. He knew it the moment he saw them in the kitchen. Their pact. Orcutt dumps Jessie and she dumps me and the house is for them. She thinks our catastrophe is over and so she is going to bury the past and start anew—face, house, husband, all new.
Try as you will, you can't get under my skin tonight. Not tonight.

They
are the outlaws. Orcutt, said Dawn to her husband, lived completely off what his family once was—well, she was living off what she'd just become. Dawn and Orcutt: two predators.

The outlaws are everywhere. They're inside the gates.

H
E HAD
a phone call. One of the girls came out of the kitchen to tell him. She whispered, "It's from I
think
Czechoslovakia."

He took the call in Dawn's downstairs study, where Orcutt had already moved the large cardboard model of the new house. After leaving Jessie on the terrace with the Swede and his parents and the drinks, Orcutt must have gone back to the van to get the model and carried it into Dawn's study and set it up on her desk before proceeding into the kitchen to help her shuck the corn.

Rita Cohen was on the line. She knew about Czechoslovakia because "they" were following him: they'd followed him earlier in the summer to the Czech consulate; they'd followed him that afternoon to the animal hospital; they'd followed him to Merry's room, where Merry had told him there was no such person as Rita Cohen.