Man Descending (3 page)

On the second day of his stay Thompson took up with me, which was all right as far as I was concerned. I had no objection. Why he decided to do this I’m not sure exactly. Perhaps he was looking for some kind of an ally, no matter how weak. Most likely he wanted to get under the old lady’s skin. Or maybe he just couldn’t bear not having anyone to tell how wonderful he was. Thompson was that kind of a guy.

I was certainly let in on the secret. He was a remarkable fellow. He dwelt at great length on those things which made him such an extraordinary human being. I may have gotten the order of precedence all wrong, but if I remember correctly there were three things which made Thompson very special and different from all the other people I would ever meet, no matter how long or hard I lived.

First, he was going to write a book about a poet called Allen Ginsberg which was going to knock the socks off everybody who counted. It turned out he had actually met this Ginsberg the summer before in San Francisco and asked him if he could write a book about him and Ginsberg had said, Sure, why the hell not? The way Thompson described what it would be like when he published this book left me with the impression that he was going to spend most of the rest of his life riding around on people’s shoulders and being cheered by a multitude of admirers.

Second, he confessed to knowing a tremendous amount about what made other people tick and how to adjust their mainsprings when they went kaflooey. He knew all this because at one time his own mainspring had gotten a little out of sorts. But now he was a fully integrated personality with a highly creative mind and a strong intuitive sense. That’s why he was so much help to Aunt Evelyn in her time of troubles.

Third, he was a Buddhist.

The only one of these things which impressed me at the time was the bit about being a Buddhist. However, I was confused, because in the
Picture Book of the World’s Great Religions
which we had at home, all the Buddhists were bald, and Thompson had a hell of a lot of hair, more than I had ever seen on a man. But even though he wasn’t bald, he had an idol. A little bronze statue with the whimsical smile and slightly crossed eyes which he identified as Padma-sambhava. He told me that it was a Tibetan antique he had bought in San Francisco as an object of veneration and an aid to his meditations. I asked him what a meditation was and he offered to teach me one. So I learned to recite with great seriousness and flexible intonation one of his Tibetan meditations, while my grandmother glared across her quintessentially Western parlour with unbelieving eyes.

I could soon deliver, “A king must go when his time has come. His wealth, his friends and his relatives cannot go with him. Wherever men go, wherever they stay, the effect of their past acts follows them like a shadow. Those who are in the grip of desire, the grip of existence, the grip of ignorance, move helplessly round through the spheres of life, as men or gods or as wretches in the lower regions.”

Not that an eleven-year-old could make much of any of
that
.

Which is not to say that even an eleven-year-old could be fooled by Robert Thompson. In his stubbornness, egoism and blindness he was transparently un-Buddhalike. To watch him and my grandmother snarl and snap their teeth over that poor, dry bone, Evelyn, was evidence enough of how firmly bound we all are to the wretched wheel of life and its stumbling desires.

No, even his most effective weapon, his cool benevolence, that patina of patience and forbearance which Thompson displayed to Grandmother, could crack.

One windy day when he had coaxed Aunt Evelyn out for a walk I followed them at a distance. They passed the windbreak of spruce, and at the sagging barbed-wire fence he gallantly manipulated the wires while my aunt floundered over them in an impractical dress and crinoline. It was the kind of dippy thing she would decide to wear on a hike.

Thompson strode along through the rippling grass like a wading heron, his baggy pant-legs flapping and billowing in the wind. My aunt moved along gingerly behind him, one hand modestly pinning down her wind-teased dress in the front, the other hand plastering the back of it to her behind.

It was only when they stopped and faced each other that I realized that all the time they had been traversing the field they had been arguing. A certain vaguely communicated agitation in the attitude of her figure, the way his arm stabbed at the featureless wash of sky, implied a dispute. She turned toward the house and he caught her by the arm and jerked it. In a fifties calendar fantasy her dress lifted in the wind, exposing her panties. I sank in the grass until their seed tassels trembled against my chin. I wasn’t going to miss watching this for the world.

She snapped and twisted on the end of his arm like a fish on a line. Her head was flung back in an exaggerated, antique display of despair; her head rolled grotesquely from side to side as if her neck were broken.

Suddenly Thompson began striking awkwardly at her exposed buttocks and thighs with the flat of his hand. The long, gangly arm slashed like a flail as she scampered around him, the radius of her escape limited by the distance of their linked arms.

From where I knelt in the grass I could hear nothing. I was too far off. As far as I was concerned there were no cries and no pleading. The whole scene, as I remember it, was shorn of any of the personal idiosyncrasies which manifest themselves in violence. It appeared a simple case of retribution.

That night, for the first time, my aunt came down to supper and claimed her place at the table with queenly graciousness. She wore shorts, too, for the first time, and gave a fine display of mottled, discoloured thighs which reminded me of bruised fruit. She made sure, almost as if by accident, that my grandmother had a good hard look at them.

Right out of the blue my grandmother said, “I don’t want you hanging around that man any more. You stay away from him.”

“Why?” I asked rather sulkily. He was the only company I had. Since my aunt’s arrival Grandmother had paid no attention to me whatsoever.

It was late afternoon and we were sitting on the porch watching Evelyn squeal as she swung in the tire swing Thompson had rigged up for me in the barn. He had thrown a length of stray rope over the runner for the sliding door and hung a tire from it. I hadn’t the heart to tell him I was too old for tire swings.

Aunt Evelyn seemed to be enjoying it though. She was screaming and girlishly kicking up her legs. Thompson couldn’t be seen. He was deep in the settled darkness of the barn, pushing her back and forth. She disappeared and reappeared according to the arc which she travelled through. Into the barn, out in the sun. Light, darkness. Light, darkness.

Grandma ignored my question. “Goddamn freak,” she said, scratching a match on the porch rail and lighting one of her rollies. “Wait and see, he’ll get his wagon fixed.”

“Aunt Evelyn likes him,” I noted pleasantly, just to stir things up a bit.

“Your Aunt Evelyn’s screws are loose,” she said sourly. “And he’s the son of a bitch who owns the screwdriver that loosened them.”

“He must be an awful smart fellow to be studying to be a professor at a university,” I commented. It was the last dig I could chance.

“One thing I know for sure,” snapped my grandmother. “He isn’t smart enough to lift the toilet seat when he pees. There’s evidence enough for that.”

After hearing that, I took to leaving a few conspicuous droplets of my own as a matter of course on each visit. Every little bit might help things along.

I stood in his doorway and watched Thompson meditate. And don’t think that, drenched in
satori
as he was, he didn’t know it. He put on quite a performance sitting on the floor in his underpants. When he came out of his trance he pretended to be surprised to see me. While he dressed we struck up a conversation.

“You know, Charlie,” he said while he put on his sandals (I’d never seen a grown man wear sandals in my entire life), “you remind me of my little Padma-sambhava,” he said, nodding to the idol squatting on his dresser. “For a while, you know, I thought it was the smile, but it isn’t. It’s the eyes.”

“Its eyes are crossed,” I said, none too flattered at the comparison.

“No they’re not,” he said good-naturedly. He tucked his shirt-tail into his pants. “The artist, the maker of that image, set them fairly close together to suggest – aesthetically speaking – the intensity of inner vision, its concentration.” He picked up the idol and, looking at it, said, “These are very watchful eyes, very knowing eyes. Your eyes are something like that. From your eyes I could tell you’re an intelligent boy.” He paused, set Padma-sambhava back on the dresser, and asked, “Are you?”

I shrugged.

“Don’t be afraid to say it if you are,” he said. “False modesty can be as corrupting as vanity. It took me twenty-five years to learn that.”

“I usually get all A’s on my report card,” I volunteered.

“Well, that’s something,” he said, looking around the room for his belt. He picked a sweater off a chair and peered under it. “Then you see what’s going on around here, don’t you?” he asked. “You see what your grandmother is mistakenly trying to do?”

I nodded.

“That’s right,” he said. “You’re a smart boy.” He sat down on the bed. “Come here.”

I went over to him. He took hold of me by the arms and looked into my eyes with all the sincerity he could muster. “You know, being intelligent means responsibilities. It means doing something worth while with your life. For instance, have you given any thought as to what you would like to be when you grow up?”

“A spy,” I said.

The silly bugger laughed.

It was the persistent, rhythmic thud that first woke me, and once wakened, I picked up the undercurrent of muted clamour, of stifled struggle. The noise seeped through the beaverboard wall of the adjoining bedroom into my own, a storm of hectic urgency and violence. The floorboards of the old house squeaked; I heard what sounded like a strangled curse and moan, then a fleshy, meaty concussion which I took to be a slap. Was he killing her at last? Choking her with the silent, poisonous care necessary to escape detection?

I remembered Thompson’s arm flashing frenziedly in the sunlight. My aunt’s discoloured thighs. My heart creaked in my chest with fear. And after killing her? Would the madman stop? Or would he do us all in, one by one?

I got out of bed on unsteady legs. The muffled commotion was growing louder, more distinct. I padded into the hallway. The door to their bedroom was partially open, and a light showed. Terror made me feel hollow; the pit of my stomach ached.

They were both naked, something which I hadn’t expected, and which came as quite a shock. What was perhaps even more shocking was the fact that they seemed not only oblivious of me, but of each other as well. She was slung around so that her head was propped on a pillow resting on the footboard of the bed. One smooth leg was draped over the edge of the bed and her heel was beating time on the floorboards (the thud which woke me) as accompaniment to Thompson’s plunging body and the soft, liquid grunts of expelled air which he made with every lunge. One of her hands gripped the footboard and her knuckles were white with strain.

I watched until the critical moment, right through the growing frenzy and ardour. They groaned and panted and heaved and shuddered and didn’t know themselves. At the very last he lifted his bony, hatchet face with the jutting beard to the ceiling and closed his eyes; for a moment I thought he was praying as his lips moved soundlessly. But then he began to whimper and his mouth fell open and he looked stupider and weaker than any human being I had ever seen before in my life.

“Like pigs at the trough,” my grandmother said at breakfast. “With the boy up there too.”

My aunt turned a deep red, and then flushed again so violently that her thin lips appeared to turn blue.

I kept my head down and went on shovelling porridge. Thompson still wasn’t invited to the table. He was leaning against the kitchen counter, his bony legs crossed at the ankles, eating an apple he had helped himself to.

“He didn’t hear anything,” my aunt said uncertainly. She whispered conspiratorially across the table to Grandmother. “Not at that hour. He’d been asleep for hours.”

I thought it wise, even though it meant drawing attention to myself, to establish my ignorance. “Hear what?” I inquired innocently.

“It wouldn’t do any harm if he had,” said Thompson, calmly biting and chewing the temptress’s fruit.

“You wouldn’t see it, would you?” said Grandma Bradley. “It wouldn’t matter to you what he heard? You’d think that was manly.”

“Manly has nothing to do with it. Doesn’t enter into it,” said Thompson in that cool way he had. “It’s a fact of life, something he’ll have to find out about sooner or later.”

Aunt Evelyn began to cry. “Nobody is ever pleased with me,” she spluttered. “I’m going crazy trying to please you both. I can’t do it.” She began to pull nervously at her hair. “He made me,” she said finally in a confessional, humble tone to her mother.

“Evelyn,” said my grandmother, “you have a place here. I would never send you away. I want you here. But he has to go. I want him to go. If he is going to rub my nose in it that way he has to go. I won’t have that man under my roof.”

“Evelyn isn’t apologizing for anything,” Thompson said. “And she isn’t running away either. You can’t force her to choose. It isn’t healthy or fair.”

“There have been other ones before you,” said Grandma. “This isn’t anything new for Evelyn.”

“Momma!”

“I’m aware of that,” he said stiffly, and his face vibrated with the effort to smile. “Provincial mores have never held much water with me. I like to think I’m above all that.”

Suddenly my grandmother spotted me. “What are you gawking at!” she shouted. “Get on out of here!”

I didn’t budge an inch.

“Leave him alone,” said Thompson.

“You’ll be out of here within a week,” said Grandmother, “I swear.”

“No,” he said smiling. “When I’m ready.”

“You’ll go home and go with your tail between your legs. Last night was the last straw,” she said. And by God you could tell she meant it.