Flying to America (13 page)

“How’d you find out?”

“Read it in a feminist text.”

“I heard they’re not gonna let us read any more books.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Just around. On the Rialto.”

“Maybe it would be better for us so we wouldn’t be exacerbated.”

“You’re like one of those people who lay down the flag in the dirt before it’s time.”

“Well that’s what you say you fool.”

“I want the car of my dreams.”

“What is it?”

“Camaro.”

“You’re like one of those people who have really shitty dreams, know what I mean? Really shitty dreams.”

“How can you say that?”

“I played in a band once.”

“What was your instrument?”

“Tambourine.”

“Can’t get a union card for tambourine.”

“My knee all black-and-blue, I banged my tambourine on it. First the elbow, then the knee.”

“I saw a beautiful ass. In a picture. It was white and was walking away from the camera. She was holding hands with a man. He was naked too. It was a beautiful picture.”

“How’d that make you feel?”

“Inferior.”

“Well that’s what you say you idiot.”

“I’d like to light up a child’s life, I apologize I was wrong.”

“Yes you were wrong.”

“But I still think what I think.”

“It’s hard to get a scrape when you want to light up a child’s life.”

“I’ve done it three times.”

“Leaves you heavy of heart.”

“It does.”

Simon was a way station, a bed and breakfast, a youth hostel, a staging area, a C-141 with the jumpers of the 82nd Airborne lined up at the door. There was no place in the world for these women whom he loved, no good place. They could join the underemployed half-crazed demipoor, or they could be wives, those were the choices. The universities offered another path but one they were not likely to take. The universities were something Simon believed in (of course! he was a beneficiary), but there was among the women an animus toward the process that would probably never be overcome, not only impatience but a real loathing, whose source he did not really understand. Veronica told him that she had flunked freshman English three times. “How in the world do you do that?” he asked. “Comma splices,” she said. “Also, every time I wrote down something I thought, the small-section teacher said that it was banal. It probably was banal.” Simon found what the women had to say anything but banal, instead edged and immediate. Maybe nothing that could be rendered in a five-hundred-word theme, one bright notion and 450 words of hay. Or psychology:
Harlow, rhesus monkeys, raisins, reward.
People did master this stuff, more or less, and emerged
more or less enriched thereby.
Compare and contrast extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, giving examples of each.
Father-beaten young women considering extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. “We all went through this,” he told them, and Dore said, “Yeah, and you smart guys did the Vietnam War.” Simon had opposed the Vietnam War in all possible ways short of self-immolation but could not deny that it was a war constructed by people who had labored through Psychology I, II, III, and IV and Main Currents of Western Thought. “But, dummy, it’s the only thing you’ve got,” he said. “Your best idea.” “I have the highest respect for education,” she said. “The highest. I’d be just as dreary when I came out as when I want in.”

Veronica comes into his room looking very gloomy.

“We have to talk,” she says. She’s wearing a rather sedate dark-blue nightgown, one he hasn’t seen before.

“What’s the matter?

“Dore. She’s falling apart.”

“In what way?”

“She’s lost her joy of life.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“She tries to hide it from you.”

“Maybe it’s just temporary.”

“I’ve never seen her like this. She’s been reading terrible books. Books about how terrible men are and how they’ve kept us down.”

“That should make her feel better, not worse. I mean, knowing the causes.”

“Don’t need your cheapo irony, Simon. She’s very upset.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Talk to her.”

“What can I say? I agree with half that stuff and think the other half is garbage.”

“Well it’s not for you to decide, is it? Whenever we say something you don’t like you say we’re hysterical or crazy.”

“Me?”

“Men in general.”

“Have I ever said you were hysterical or crazy?”

“Probably you didn’t want to stir us up. Probably you were thinking it and were just too tactful to say it.”

“Are you sure it’s Dore who’s got this problem?”

“She’s been lending us the books. What else do we have to do with our time?”

“So you’re all upset.”

“The truth shall make you free.”

“What makes you think this stuff is the truth?”

“Thirty-five percent of all American women aren’t allowed to talk at dinner parties. Think about that.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s in a book.”

Veronica’s trampoline is leaning against the wall and Veronica is throwing books at it to see how far they will bounce.
Buddenbrooks
in a paper edition bounces a good twelve feet. Dore is painting her legs red, with a two-inch brush and a big jar into which she has crumbled bright-red Easter-egg glazes. Anne is threatening to cut off her long dark hair. She stands poised, a hank in one hand, scissors in the other, daring anyone to interfere. “Anybody messes with me gets the scissors in the medulla.” Simon senses unrest.

A terrible night. Simon is in bed by 10:00, taking a Scotch for company. Anne and Dore are now watching television. Veronica is out somewhere. About 10:30 Anne comes into the room, strips, and gets into bed with him.

“I’m cold,” she says.

He turns her on her stomach and begins to stroke her back, gently. A very sculptural waist, narrowing suddenly under the rib cage and then the hipbones flaring.

When Anne goes back to her own bed, at 2:00, Dore appears in the doorway.

“Are you used up?” she asks.

“Probably.” Dore climbs into bed, clumsily, peels off her jeans and bikini pants, retaining the tank top she’s cut raggedly around the neck in the style of the moment.

“I’m sad and depressed,” she says. “I feel useless. All I do is sit around and watch MTV.”

“What do you want to do?

“Something. But I don’t know what.”

He struggles around the bed and begins to kiss the inside of her thighs. “This is a terrible night.”

“Why?”

“You guys aren’t solving your problems. I can’t help you very much.” His hands are splayed out over her back, moving up and down, over the shoulders and down to the splendid buttocks. Thinking of buttercups and butterflies and flying buttresses and butts of malmsey.

“Veronica has a rash,” she says, coming up for air.

“What kind of rash?”

“Dark red. Looks like a wine stain.”

“Where is it?”

“You’ll see.”

Veronica walks in. “What is taking place here?” she asks, in a voice like thunder.

Simon thinks about Paradise. On the great throne, a naked young woman, her back to the viewer. Simon looks around for Onan, doesn’t see him. Onan didn’t make it to Paradise? Seems unfair. Great deal of marble about, he notices, shades of rose and terra-cotta; Paradise seems to have been designed by Edward Durell Stone. Science had worked out a way to cremate human remains, reduce the ashes to the size of a bouillon cube, and fire the product into space in a rocket, solving the Forest Lawn dilemma. Simon had once done a sketch problem on tomb sculpture, for his sophomore Visual Awareness course. No more tomb sculpture.

Was he in love with these women? Yes, he was, however stupid that might be. He was in love with Anne, Veronica, and Dore. “I understand a divided heart,” his wife had said to him once. The women would soon be gone. The best thing he could do was to listen to them.

“I’ve had twenty-six years’ practice in standing up. I can do it,” Anne says.

She’s wearing sweat pants with a dark-gray crew-neck sweater and medium-gray Reeboks. She’s been drinking tequila and she’s terribly drunk.

“I want to tell you something.”

“What?”

“You think we’re dumb bunnies.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Your attitude.”

Simon’s been reading
Audubon Action,
“Arizona Dam Project Faces New Challenge.”

“What’s my attitude?”

“I see fatigue and disgust.”

“Sweetie, that’s not true.”

“Don’t call me Sweetie.”

Some days they were angry with him, some days they were angry with each other. Four people, many possibilities. Each person could be angry at any given point with one, two, or three others, or angry at the self. Two people could be angry at a third, three people at a fourth. He reached forty-nine possibilities before his math expired.

Their movement through the world required young men, a class to which he did not belong. Simon liked young men, within reasonable limits, and approved, in general, of the idea of young men and young women sleeping together in joyous disregard of history, economics, building codes. Let them have their four hundred square feet. Veronica liked garage apartments. Perhaps the young men would do well in the world, attend the new branch of Harvard Business in Gainesville, market a black-bean soup that would rage through Miami like rabies or a voice attenuator capable of turning crackers into lisping Brits, and end up with seven thousand square feet in Paris on the Ile de la Cité. Young men smelled good, by and large, almost as good as babies.

Simon constructs a white plaster egg eight feet tall and positions it in the sitting room. The women are watching, sitting on the gray couch. He smashes the egg with an iron-headed maul. Inside are three naked young men. Their names are Harry.

Three

I
presented myself to the husband. He was an impressive figure in his brown velvet smoking jacket frogged (an ornamental fastening for the front of a coat consisting of a button and a loop through which it passes) with real frogs. I was wearing full dress with a red sash on which all thirty-four of my merit badges were displayed.

“Let there be no misunderstanding,” I said. “I am here to ask for the hand in marriage of your wife.”

He accepted this news calmly. He handed me a brandy in a brandy glass.

“I see you have Penmanship,” he said regarding my sash. “Nothing gives one a better opinion of oneself than Penmanship.”

“I also have Reverie,” I said, pointing to Reverie.

“As to what you propose,” the husband went on, “the girl is too young. Much, much too young. Too young and too beautiful. But a girl. Practically a maid if we are thinking of life experience.”

“I love her,” I said. “I want to make that clear. I love her, as that term is understood by me. Her perfections —”

“Yes, yes, that’s all very well,” the husband said, knocking back a bit of the brandy. “To be sure. An attractive match, from some points of view.” He looked at his swords, which were crossed on the wall above the fireplace. “You are young and vigorous. I know your
family of old. Good people. Your income is acceptable. Your prospects bright. You have delicacy of feeling. You are not bad-looking, aside from the scar.”

“That was Counterinsurgency,” I said pointing to the Counterinsurgency on my sash.

“Yes,” the husband said, quieting a frog with his stroking fingers. “You are a fine fellow, as fellows go. But —”

“I faint a good deal,” I said. “In fairness I must tell you that fainting is something I do a lot. Even now —”

“Yes,” the husband said, “that often happens, with you younger men. But may I point out that the lady, or rather the girl, whose hand you seek has already made other arrangements?”

“I am aware of that and do not consider it an insurmountable obstacle. You see I have Surmounting.” I pointed to same, on my sash.

“Let me top you up,” the husband said and did so from his decanter which bore a small silver plaque on a silver chain reading
Gift of the Mongolian People’s Republic.

“You perhaps think I am not right. For Marie-Helene,” he continued.

I made “no no no” noises.

“It is true that I am a man of a certain temperament,” he said. “But
not right!
Marie-Helene doesn’t think so. Only this morning she was remarking upon my muscle tone.”

He ripped open his smoking jacket to display the naked muscle tone beneath. I had to admit it. This was good skin, clear, smooth, rosy in color.

“Also there is my superb singing voice,” the husband said.

He sang then some of Satie’s furniture music. There was no gainsaying the fact that he had a superb singing voice.

“Sir,” I said, during a crack in the singing, “she loves me.”