She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me (16 page)

He paused while I failed to congratulate him.

“So with care, with attention, with patience…” He shot me a Tom Sawyer grin. Shy freckles exploded on his cheeks. He twisted his hands together. He wished his kind-of colleague Dan Kasdan would say something more, even something disagreeable he might overcome by love and understanding. It was my turn to share.

His kind-of colleague said nothing.

“So it's all psychological, Dan! That's the only problem! And all this time I was
worrying,
I was distraught, I felt actual
despair,
Dan!”

Now he decided, in this difficult moment for a man explaining that he would like to make love to his friend's wife but is having difficulties beyond loyalty and other such interpersonal concerns—he guessed it might be appropriate to make a little joke. He might try to lighten up. “You know what Priscilla said last night?” He lowered his voice to a respectful baritone hush. “She said a girl should train for oral sex by learning how to roll a bowling ball up a flight of stairs, using only her tongue.”

His lips were wet and parted. His mouth was open. He hoped Kasdan would join him in a moment of male sharing.

“I mean, that's strenuous, Dan. It takes a real woman like Priscilla, not a girl—a woman. Point is, here I'll just say it point-blank, I need her a lot and since you were kind of separated already, nothing to do with me … And I really like, he's a terrific kid, Jeff, your son—”

I knew who Jeff was. My son. Our son, Priscilla's, Dan's. I didn't require this instruction.

“—because he's the offspring of a real woman who means the most to me in the whole known world, who really cares about me—isn't that something?”

“Something.”

Xavier beamed. He was relieved that I was speaking again. He sought to encourage self-expression. “I fully recognize your rights of fatherhood, because you're the dad,” he stated. “I mean, there's room for lots of relationship for everybody. I don't suppose I'll have a kid, though who knows? But I love him too, Dan, in my own way. I hope you appreciate that.”

“'Preciate. Sure do.”

Xavier sighed. This difficult encounter was drawing to a close. He had carried it through in a way that a man destined to chronic impotence never could have done. “Not angry, Dan?” he asked.

It seemed that I didn't hear him. Xavier's face darkened a little and I noticed his fists clenching, fingers whitening. He had expected that I would fight back and since I was being—what?—passive-aggressive, it was time for him to rally other emotions, play the full organ of my humanity, get a rise out of me. “What you do, your métier, it's a fulfilling occupation—”

“Métier,” I said.

“—for a man with cleverness, probably a clever man, had some sort of education, and Priscilla used to think it was glamorous, you know, a self-employed dick—private eye—but now she's a grown-up woman. Exploring people's secrets and dark sides might not be such a temptation anymore.”

“You think trust fund is a more grown-up temptation.”

“Say background, Dan.” The smell I smelled was the vinaigrette smell of nice sportsmanship and appeal to better nature shutting down. “Say a certain tradition. Anyway, I've diversified my investments. You'd be surprised. With the real estate market the way it is here, I had to and I did. Whatever my family happened to be good enough to leave in my care, I've done more than increase it at market rates, I can assure you of this.” (Didn't require proof.) “I have been enterprising. Venture capital you don't even suspect. Try to give me credit for being worthy of Priscilla, certain qualities I have, even as I give you full credit for making an outstanding choice in wife when she was young and easily impressionable.”

This was a surprise to me. There was a man there for Priscilla despite his manners, his smug longing. The guy had an edge. Xavier played WASP wimp as well as George Bush did, but inside there was a killer. Kind of had to respect that. Before I came around, Priscilla saw a glimmer of firmness beyond difficult erections, something I was too prejudiced to see.

“I wish I could get through to you, Dan. We share a love, even if not in a temporal sense, so in some way we must be similar as temperaments. Despite appearances, don't you think, Dan?”

It seemed that Kasdan wasn't thinking. I was looking at a space just in front of me.
Temporal sense?
That couldn't have occurred. I saw a mote floating across my eye, I saw Xavier in a little cloud beyond. Fully confident that he was passing the test of masculine forthrightness with colors snapping in the wind, that he would want to tell Priscilla in detail what he had gone through, how he had led Dan step by step into the path of rationality and sharing, how they had consequently resolved the matter in a dignified and open fashion, Xavier showed me another boyish ducking smile, asking nothing more than understanding, fellowship, and decency in one of those complicated human relationships that so enrich our time on earth.

“So, not angry, Dan?”

And then I hit him. I wondered why I hadn't thought of that earlier.

After due deliberation, the former wimp Xavier, misinterpreted by me and inspired by love, would have hit back. Shaking his head and bleeding a little, thick blood oozing from a nostril, he would have risen. I saw him more clearly now. He was making the proper psychic adjustments after a jarring shock to the cerebellum. Deeper masculine needs were working their way to the fore as nose muck surged and the unseen mechanism of clotting strived to check in. It would take a moment or two. He was thrashing his legs and working to complete his thought about whether violence just now was really something to which he wanted to acquiesce. I hesitated above him as he lay awkwardly, still somewhat dimmed out. A sourness in the vinaigrette cologne. Then I didn't wait around.

Chapter 15

Many times I had wakened to the sound of the telephone not ringing, my wife not calling, but next morning it
was
Priscilla reaching me in Poorman's Cottage on Potrero Hill. The ringing filled Chateau Mope, where I was warming my sore hand over the mug of coffee while I looked out at agricultural and wildlife discoveries that could almost make me forget the aching small bones in my paw, the discolored knuckles and scraped skin, the geography of a fist probably foolishly used in one-sided, old-fashioned, outmoded discussion with poor Xavier. And Xavier had only wanted to use vocabulary with me. I hadn't noticed the braces on his teeth; in addition to everything else, I was a victim of orthodontia. Rational male-bonding asshole had gouged my knuckles.

Yesterday's cereal bowl was still in the refrigerator. With modern refrigeration there seemed to be no need to wash the bowl more than once a week, although a bachelor-in-training had to get used to facing ragged crusts of Kellogg's products and stuck milk at dawn, not one of the best sights for the lonely morning. Today I only wanted coffee. My right hand ached and so did my head.

The sun came up early and hot on Potrero Hill. Gorse was growing amid the tires of the junkyard slope outside my window. When I came home that night I had paced outside, kicking up the smell of licorice from the broken fennel plants. Had I thrashed about in the dark, I would have ended by catching my foot in the dry gulch network of my garden vista, so I had gone to bed, stretching, scratching, and farting with blocked rage because Xavier would not, could not, of course dared not fight back—against his principles. His large and giving spirit understood that violence is never an answer to violence unless you happen to carry an atom bomb in your backpack and even then your opponent might be into hydrogen or neutron. So let's give peace a chance.

Poor pretty loser jerkoff; sweet gentle egomaniac lover to my wife with the startled expression in his lyrical wide supplicant blue eyes.

In the fresh daylight now, I could see a blackberry bush, the berries still red as blood but inexorably ripening toward purple and tasty. A pigeon cooed. The pigeon shit (also gull) dropped on the hill and inexorably made things grow better. No doubt about it; they were part of the deal, along with the gulls sweeping across the bay. Gorse, Scotch broom, was a stiff plant once used to make brooms but not anymore. Bright yellow flowers couldn't fool me; it was gorse. Now we have plastic and don't need Scotch broom with its yellow flowers deeply committed to life among the fennel plants, blackberry bushes, tires, and spittle bugs flashing in sunlight when I stepped among them.

I kind of liked my lair. I was getting used to it. I was getting to know it. Poverty suited my soul just now. I was not tending to business, I was enlisting in the child-support ramble. I was poor. But I was already beginning to settle in like any other animal in a place it had not chosen. I even hoped the raccoons would come back; all was forgiven.

Sweet wife, sweet former wife; you did, after all, leave me living. Still alive after all, sweet lady.

Ring-ring-ring. Tight-lipped Priscilla saying: “I heard what you did.”

“And what did I do?”

“He's twice the man you are because he didn't stoop to—”

“He fell,” I said.

“You're proud of yourself. He didn't stoop to brawling with you. You realize, of course, he's younger than you are. He's just as fit, maybe more so. If he'd wanted to, if he'd had some notice of what was coming, or just if he
wanted
to—”

“Yeah. I know he could have fought back. He was down, but not out.”

“Do you know how smug you sound?”

“I think so. Yes. Probably.”

“You're still proud of yourself, aren't you, Buster?”

And then she stopped. She was thinking. Was she going to say “macho”? No, she would spare them that. She had an idea that this conversation was useless and unnecessary, yet there was some point she wanted to make with her former, very soon to be forever former, husband, now known as Buster. The point was her anger. The point was to let Buster know in such a way that he would feel it. The thought of my smug comfort distressed her sense of justice. No doubt I was sitting there with a cup of espresso, the morning
Chronicle,
my feet on a table, and a contented half-smile on my stupid macho face. Not a pretty picture.

Priscilla didn't believe in useless fretting, stewing, the destructive practice of anger. She believed in making points and moving on.

I could hear her breath on the phone. I could imagine the little motion of her nostrils, like that imperceptible minnow agitation after we made love—when her face was still, her eyes blank and departed, and then she returned to me with a smile, her nostrils taking breath eagerly, greedily. Her soul alive to herself and me, returned from its voyage. Her eyes studying mine as if our souls could be printed upon each other forever.

“I guess you know he had a problem,” she said, “because I let you know, nothing for a real man to be ashamed of in my opinion, nothing to feel smug about if you're not, it's just human, just shows feelings, a sensitivity, an awareness. But Xavier is fine, it's nothing physical. He's healthy. He checked out okay.”

“Great.”

“And about that problem, Dan. Sure, he needs me. What I do is I imagine I'm rolling a tennis ball up a flight of stairs—”

How wise of her to reserve this conversation for the telephone. Now that there was a precedent of my losing control, she knew enough to say certain things at a time when all I could do was break the electronic connection.

Macha.
But I wouldn't break the connection. I wouldn't say anything that would make her hang up on me. I would just wait and let her listen to herself because she learned better that way than from anyone else. I waited to hear what she would say next about how Xavier impotent was more moving to her than Dan with machinery functioning and no need to roll a tennis or bowling ball up a flight of stairs in that special way.

But had I said something anyway?

Because she had hung up and I was alone, grasping the telephone in my scabbed fist.

*   *   *

Months passed, moons and cycles; unrelieved compassion tends to tucker out; even the joys of helping a man with a deeply human and normal male problem were passing. My hand healed. A person forgets, when he grows up, how long such healing takes, given the constant flexings, washings, general busy use of both fists and open hands. Or maybe the wounds from scuffles and accidents heal more slowly at my age, as do all other injuries. Socking a playground rival is boy's work.

In the mornings I once again awoke to the sound of the telephone not ringing and stared out the window at broom grass, yellow flowers, fennel; I grasped the mug of coffee, reached for my crusted cereal bowl chilled from the refrigerator, read the
Chronicle,
kept busy.

The telephone didn't ring and that was all right with me.

More months, the season of yellow flowers dropping, butterflies disappearing, and I knew from seeing Jeff, from watching Priscilla, that the pleasures of curing Xavier were passing like the other pleasures in life. When the mouth dies, what is there? So then a person has to seek out new pleasures.

Then the telephone didn't ring and I wanted Priscilla to call. But I wasn't merely waiting. I was also watching the yellow gorse sway in the hot wind across Potrero Hill and missing the raccoons, the wild cats, the kids from the Projects, all of life that had abandoned me. Probably I was the cause of this myself.

*   *   *

It seemed that my devoted friend Karim never gave up. He didn't abandon me. I tried to avoid him by avoiding the terrace at Enrico's, but since my office was just up the Kearny steps alongside, there was no reason to stay away from the terrace at Enrico's at odd hours. At odd hours was when Karim, nodding, nodding vigorously in greeting, was awaiting me. His eyebrow clumps worked; the ants crawled; he had five o'clock shadow above his nose.