Flying to America (10 page)
Will others aid in the deception?
Will others unveil the deception?
“T
WELFTH
: Except for the obligations, promises and agreements herein set forth and to be performed by the husband and wife respectively, and for rights, obligations and causes of action arising out of or under this agreement, all of which are expressly reserved, the husband and wife each hereby, for himself or herself and for his or her legal representatives, forever releases and discharges the other, and the heirs and legal representatives of the other, from any and all debts, sums of money, accounts, contracts, claims, cause or causes of action, suits, dues, reckonings, bills, specialties, covenants, controversies, agreements, promises, variances, trespasses, damages, judgments, extents, executions, and demands, whatsoever, in law or in equity, which he or she had, or has or hereafter can, shall or
may have, by reason of any matter, from the beginning of the world to the execution of this agreement.”
The painters are here. They are painting the apartment. One gallon of paint to eight gallons of benzine. From the beginning of the world to the execution of this agreement. Where is my daughter? I am asking for a carrot to put in the stone soup. The villagers are hostile.
A
: In the dream, my father was playing the piano, a Beethoven something, in a large concert hall that was filled with people. I was in the audience and I was reading a book. I suddenly realized that this was the wrong thing to do when my father was performing, so I sat up and paid attention. He was playing very well, I thought. Suddenly the conductor stopped the performance and began to sing a passage for my father, a passage that my father had evidently botched. My father listened attentively, smiling at the conductor.
Q
: Does your father play? In actuality?
A
: Not a note.
Q
: Did the conductor resemble anyone you know?
A
: He looked a bit like Althea. The same cheekbones and the same chin.
Q
: Who is Althea?
A
: Someone I know.
Q
: What do you do, after work, in the evenings or on weekends?
A
: Just ordinary things.
Q
: No special interests?
A
: I’m very interested in bow-hunting. These new bows they have now, what they call a compound bow. Also, I’m a member of the
Galapagos Society, we work for the environment, it’s really a very effective —
Q
: And what else?
A
: Well, adultery. I would say that’s how I spend most of my free time. In adultery.
Q
: You mean regular adultery.
A
: Yes. Sleeping with people to whom one is not legally bound.
Q
: These are women.
A
: Invariably.
Q
: And so that’s what you do, in the evenings or on weekends.
A
: I had this kind of strange experience. Today is Saturday, right? I called up this haircutter that I go to, her name is Ruth, and asked for an appointment. I needed a haircut. So she says she has openings at ten, ten-thirty, eleven, eleven-thirty, twelve, twelve-thirty — On a Saturday. Do you think the world knows something I don’t know?
Q
: It’s possible.
A
: What if she stabs me in the ear with the scissors?
Q
: Unlikely, I would think.
A
: Well, she’s a good soul. She’s had several husbands. They’ve all been master sergeants, in the Army. She seems to gravitate toward N.C.O. Clubs. Have you noticed all these little black bugs flying around here? I don’t know where they come from.
Q
: They’re very small, they’re like gnats.
A
: They come in clouds, then they go away.
A
: I sometimes think of myself as a person who, you know what I mean, could have done something else, it doesn’t matter what particularly. Just something else. I saw an ad in the Sunday paper for the C.I.A., a recruiting ad, maybe a quarter of a page, and I suddenly thought, It might be interesting to do that. Even though I’ve always been opposed to the C.I.A., when they were trying to bring Cuba down, the stuff with Lumumba in Africa, the stuff in Central America. . . . Then here is this ad, perfectly straightforward, “where your career is America’s strength” or something like that, “aptitude for learning a foreign language is a plus” or something like that. I’ve always been good at languages, and I’m sitting there thinking about
how my résumé might look to them, starting completely over in something completely new, changing the very sort of person I am, and there was an attraction, a definite attraction. Of course the maximum age was thirty-five. I guess they want them more malleable.
Q
: So, in the evenings or on weekends —
A
: Not every night or every weekend. I mean, this depends on the circumstances. Sometimes my wife and I go to dinner with people, or watch television —
Q
: But in the main —
A
: It’s not that often. It’s once in a while.
Q
: Adultery is a sin.
A
: It is classified as a sin, yes. Absolutely.
Q
: The Seventh Commandment says —
A
: I know what it says. I was raised on the Seventh Commandment. But.
Q
: But what?
A
: The Seventh Commandment is wrong.
Q
: It’s wrong?
A
: Some outfits call it the Sixth and others the Seventh. It’s wrong.
Q
: The whole Commandment?
A
: I don’t know how it happened, whether it’s a mistranslation from the Aramaic or whatever, it may not even have been Aramaic, I don’t know, I certainly do not pretend to scholarship in this area, but my sense of the matter is the Seventh Commandment is an error.
Q
: Well if that was true it would change quite a lot of things, wouldn’t it?
A
: Take the pressure off, a bit.
Q
: Have you told your wife?
A
: Yes, Grete knows.
Q
: How’d she take it?
A
: Well, she
liked
the Seventh Commandment. You could reason that it was in her interest to support the Seventh Commandment for the preservation of the family unit and this sort of thing but to
reason that way is, I would say, to take an extremely narrow view of Grete, of what she thinks. She’s not predictable. She once told me that she didn’t want me, she wanted a suite of husbands, ten or twenty —
Q
: What did you say?
A
: I said, Go to it.
Q
: Well, how does it make you feel? Adultery?
A
: There’s a certain amount of guilt attached. I feel guilty. But I feel guilty even without adultery. I exist in a morass of guilt. There’s maybe a little additional wallop of guilt but I already feel so guilty that I hardly notice it.
Q
: Where does all this guilt come from? The extra-adulterous guilt?
A
: I keep wondering if, say, there is intelligent life on other planets, the scientists argue that something like two percent of the other planets have the conditions, the physical conditions, to support life in the way it happened here, did Christ visit each and every planet, go through the same routine, the Agony in the Garden, the Crucifixion, and so on. . . . And these guys on these other planets, these lifeforms, maybe they look like boll weevils or something, on a much larger scale of course, were they told that they couldn’t go to bed with other attractive six-foot boll weevils arrayed in silver and gold and with little squirts of Opium behind the ears? Doesn’t make sense. But of course our human understanding is imperfect.
Q
: You haven’t answered me. This general guilt —
A
: Yes, that’s the interesting thing. I hazard that it is not guilt so much as it is inadequacy. I feel that everything is being nibbled away, because I can’t
get it right
—
Q
: Would you like to be able to fly?
A
: It’s crossed my mind.
Q
: Myself, I think about being just sort of a regular person, one who worries about cancer a lot, every little thing a prediction of cancer, no I don’t want to go for my every-two-years checkup because what if they find something? I wonder what will kill me and when it will
happen, and I wonder about my parents, who are still alive, and what will happen to them. This seems to be to me a proper set of things to worry about. Last things.
A
: I don’t think God gives a snap about adultery. This is just an opinion, of course.
Q
: So how do you, how shall I put it, pursue —
A
: You think about this staggering concept, the mind of God, and then you think He’s sitting around worrying about this guy and this woman at the Beechnut Travelodge? I think not.
Q
: Well He doesn’t have to think about every particular instance, He just sort of laid out the general principles —
A
: He also created creatures who, with a single powerful glance —
Q
: The eyes burn.
A
: They do.
Q
: The heart leaps.
A
: Like a terrapin.
Q
: Stupid youth returns.
A
: Like hockey sticks falling out of a long-shut closet.
Q
: Do you play?
A
: I did. Many years ago.
Q
: Who is Althea?
A
: Someone I know.
Q
: We’re basically talking about Althea.
A
: Yes. I thought you understood that.
Q
: We’re not talking about wholesale —
A
: Oh Lord no. Who has the strength?
Q
: What’s she like?
A
: She’s I guess you’d say a little on the boring side. To the innocent eye.
Q
: She appears to be a contained, controlled person, free of raging internal fires.
A
: But my eye is not innocent. To the already corrupted eye, she’s —
Q
: I don’t want to question you too closely on this. I don’t want to strain your powers of —
A
: Well, no, I don’t mind talking about it. It fell on me like a ton of bricks. I was walking in the park one day.
Q
: Which park?
A
: That big park over by —
Q
: Yeah, I know the one.
A
: This woman was sitting there.
Q
: They sit in parks a lot, I’ve noticed that. Especially when they’re angry. The solitary bench. Shoulders raised, legs kicking —
A
: I’ve crossed both major oceans by ship — the Pacific twice, on troopships, the Atlantic once, on a passenger liner. You stand out there, at the rail, at dusk, and the sea is limitless, water in every direction, never-ending, you think
water forever,
the movement of the ship seems slow but also seems inexorable, you feel you will be moving this way forever, the Pacific is about seventy million square miles, about one-third of the earth’s surface, the ship might be making twenty knots, I’m eating oranges because that’s all I can keep down, twelve days of it with thousands of young soldiers all around, half of them seasick — On the Queen Mary, in tourist class, we got rather good food, there was a guy assigned to our table who had known Paderewski, the great pianist who was also Prime Minister of Poland, he talked about Paderewski for four days, an ocean of anecdotes —
Q
: When I was first married, when I was twenty, I didn’t know where the clitoris was. I didn’t know there was such a thing. Shouldn’t somebody have told me?
A
: Perhaps your wife?
Q
: Of course, she was too shy. In those days people didn’t go around saying, This is the clitoris and this is what its proper function is and this is what you can do to help out. I finally found it. In a book.
A
: German?
Q
: Dutch.
A
: A dead bear in a blue dress, face down on the kitchen floor. I trip over it, in the dark, when I get up at 2
A.M.
to see if there’s anything to eat in the refrigerator. It’s an architectural problem, marriage. If we could live in separate houses, and visit each other when we felt particularly gay — It would be expensive, yes. But as it is she has to endure me in all my worst manifestations, early in the morning and late at night and in the nutsy obsessed noontimes. When I wake up from my nap you don’t
get
the laughing cavalier, you get a rank pigfooted belching blunderer. I knew this one guy who built a wall down the middle of his apartment. An impenetrable wall. He had a very big apartment. It worked out very well. Concrete block, basically, with fibre-glass insulation on top of that and sheetrock on top of that —
