The Early Stories (146 page)

Sapers looked about his apartment. He observed with satisfaction that there was no other living thing in it. No pets, no plants. Such cockroaches as he saw he killed. But for himself, the place had a Proterozoic purity. He breathed easy.

The telephone rang. It was his mother. He asked, “How are you?” and received a detailed answer—chest pains, neuralgia, shortness of breath, numbness in the extremities. “What can I do about it?” he asked.

“You can stop being a mental burden to me,” she answered swiftly, with a spryness unseemly, he thought, in one so dilapidated. “You can go back to your loved ones. You can be a good boy.”

“I
am
a good boy,” he argued. “All I do is sit in my room and read.” Such behavior had pleased her once; it failed to do so now. She sighed, like Markman over a uintathere, and slightly changed the subject.

“If I go suddenly,” she said, “you must get right down here and guard the antiques. Terrible things happen in the neighborhood now. When Ginny Peterson went, they backed a truck right up to the door, so the daughter flew in from Omaha to find an empty house. All that Spode, and the corner cupboard with it.”

“You won't go suddenly,” he heard himself telling her; it sounded like a rebuke, though he had meant it reassuringly.

After a pause, she asked, “Do you ever go to church?”

“Not as often as I should.” … 
no ready explanation
.

“Everybody down here is praying for you,” she said.

“Everybody?”
The herds had just wandered away
.

“I slept scarcely an hour last night,” his mother said, “thinking about you.”

“Please stop,” Sapers begged. When the conversation ended, he sat still, thinking, We are all, all of us living, contemporary with the vanishing whale, the Florida manatee, the Bengal tiger, the whooping crane.

He felt asthmatic. The pages about extinct mammals suffocated him with their myriad irrelevant, deplorable facts.
Amebelodon
, a “shovel-tusker” found in Nebraska, had a lower jaw six feet long, with two flat teeth sticking straight out. Whereas
Stenomylus
was a dainty little camel. Why is a horse's face long? Because its eyes are making room for the roots of its high-crowned upper grinders. But even
Eohippus
, interestingly, had a diastema. Creodonts, the most primitive of mammalian carnivores, moved on flat, wide-spreading feet; indeed, the whole animal, Sapers had to admit, looked indifferently engineered, compared with cats and dogs. “The insectivores, however, have made very little progress in any direction.” With a sudden light surge of cathexis that shifted his weight in the chair, Sapers loved insectivores; he hugged their shapeless, conservative archetype to his heart. “Feet and teeth provide us with most of our information about an extinct mammal's mode of existence.…” Of course, Sapers thought. They are what hurt.

Love Song, for a Moog
Synthesizer
 

She was good in bed. She went to church. Her IQ was 150. She repeated herself. Nothing fit; it frightened him. Yet Tod wanted to hang on, to hang on to the bits and pieces, which perhaps were not truly pieces but islands, which a little lowering of sea level would reveal to be rises on a sunken continent, peaks of a subaqueous range, secretly one, a world.

He called her Pumpkin, or Princess. She had been a parody of a respectable housewife—active in all causes, tireless in all aspects of housekeeping from fumigation to floor-waxing, an ardent practitioner of the minor arts of the Halloween costumer and the Cub Scout den mother, a beaming, posing, conveniently shaped ornament to her husband at cocktail parties, beach parties, dinner parties, fund-raising parties. Always prim, groomed, proper, perfect.

But there was a clue, which he picked up: she never listened. Her eyebrows arched politely, her upper lip lifted alertly; nevertheless she brushed her gaze past the faces of her conversational partners in a terrible icy hurry, and repeated herself so much that he wondered if she were sane.

Her heart wasn't in this.

She took to jabbing him at parties, jabbing so hard it hurt. This piece of herself, transferred to his ribs, his kidneys, as pain, lingered there, asked to be recognized as love.

His brain—that impatient organ, which deals, with the speed of light, in essences and abstractions—opted to love her perhaps too early, before his heart—that plodder, that problem-learner—had had time to collect quirks and spiritual snapshots, to survey those faults and ledges of the not-quite-expected where affection can silt and accumulate. He needed a body. Instead there was something skeletal, spacy.

But, then, the shivering. That was lovable. As they left a fine restaurant in an elegant, shadowy district of the city, Princess complained (her talk was unexpectedly direct) that her underpants kept riding up. Drunk, his drunkenness glazing the bricks of the recently restored pavement beneath them, the marquee of the cunningly renovated restaurant behind them, the other pedestrians scattered around them as sketchily as figures in an architectural drawing, and the artificially antique streetlamp above them, its wan light laced by the twigs of a newly planted tree that had also something of an architect's stylization about it, Tod knelt down and reached up into her skirt with both hands and pulled down her underpants, so adroitly she shivered. She shivered, involuntarily, expressing—what? Something that came upon her like a breeze. Then, recovering poise, with an adroitness the equal of his, she stepped out of her underpants. Her black high heels, shiny as Shirley Temple dancing pumps, stepped from the two silken circles on the bricks—one, two, primly, quickly, as she glanced over her shoulder, to see if they had been seen. She was wearing a black dress, severe, with long sleeves, that he had last seen her wear to a mutual friend's funeral. Tod stood and crumpled his handful of warm gossamer into his coat pocket. They walked on, her arm in his. He seemed taller, she softer. The stagy light webbed them, made her appear all circles. She said she could feel the wind on her cunt.

He had loved that shiver, that spasm she could not control; for love must attach to what we cannot help—the involuntary, the telltale, the fatal. Otherwise, the reasonableness and the mercy that would make our lives decent and orderly would overpower love, crush it, root it out, tumble it away like a striped tent pegged in sand.

Time passed. By sunlight, by a window, he suddenly saw a web, a radiating system, of wrinkles spread out from the corners of her eyes when she smiled. From her lips another set of creases, so delicate only the sun could trace them, spread upward; the two systems commingled on her cheeks. Time was interconnecting her features, which had been isolated in the spaces of her face by a certain glossy, infantile perfection. She was growing old within their love, within their suffering. He examined a snapshot he had taken a year ago. A smooth, staring, unlistening face. Baby fat.

Tod liked her aging, felt warmed by it, for it too was involuntary. It had happened to her with him, yet was not his fault. He wanted nothing to be his fault. This made her load double.

•  •  •

As mistress, she adapted well to the harrowing hours, the phone conversations that never end, the posing for indecent photographs, the heavy restaurant meals. She mainly missed of her former, decent, orderly life the minor blessings, such as shopping in the A & P without fear of being snubbed by a fellow-parishioner, or of encountering Tod's outraged wife across a pyramid of dog food.

Their spouses' fixed fury seemed rooted in a kind of professional incredulity; it was as if they had each been specialists (a repairer of Cyrillic typewriters, or a gerbil currier) whose specialty was so narrow there had been no need to do it very well.

But how he loved dancing with Pumpkin! She was so solid on her feet, her weight never on him, however close he held her. She tried to teach him to waltz—her husband having been a dashing, long-legged waltzer. But Tod could not learn: the wrong foot, the foot that had just received his weight, would dart out again, as if permanently appointed Chief Foot, at the start of the new trio of steps; he was a binary computer trying to learn left-handedness from a mirror.

So Tod too had his gaps, his spaces. He could not learn to repeat himself. He could do everything only once.

On a hotel bed, for variety, he sat astride her chest and masturbated her, idly at first, then urgingly, the four fingers of his right hand vying in massage of her electric fur, until her hips began to rock and she came, shivering. He understood that shivering better now. He was the conduit, the open window, by which, on rare occasions, she felt the
ventus Dei
. In the center of her sensuality, she was God's plaything.

And then, in another sort of wind, she would rage, lifted above reason; she would rage in spirals of indignation and frenzy fed from within, her voice high, a hurled stone frozen at the zenith of its arc, a mask of petulance clamped so hard upon her face that the skin around the lips went quite white. Strange little obstructions set her off, details in her arrangements with her husband; it was a fault, a failure, Tod felt, in himself, that he did not afford her an excuse for such passion. She would stare beyond him, exhausted in the end as if biologically, by the satisfaction of a cycle. It fairly frightened him, such a whirlwind; it blew, and blew itself out, in a region of her where he had never lived. An island, but in a desert. Her lips and eye-whites would look parched afterwards.

At times it occurred to him that not everyone could love this woman. This did not frighten him. It made him feel like a child still young enough to be proud that he has been given a special assignment.

And yet he felt great rest with her. Her body beside his, he would fall in the spaces of her, sink, relax, one of her cool hands held at his chest, and the other, by a physical miracle he never troubled to analyze, lightly clasped above his head, by the hand of his of which the arm was crooked beneath his head as a pillow. How her arm put her hand there, he never could see, for his back was turned, his buttocks nestled in her lap. Sleep would sweep them away simultaneously, like mingled heaps of detritus.

Though in college a soc.-sci. major, and in adult life a do-gooder, she ceased to read a newspaper. When her husband left, the subscription lapsed. Whereas Tod, sleeping with her, his consciousness diffused among the wide spaces of their shared self-forgetfulness, dreamed of statesmen, of Gerald Ford and Giscard d'Estaing, of the great: John Lennon had a comradely arm about him, and Richard Burton, murmuring with his resonant actor's accent, was seeking marital advice.

Sometimes her storms of anger and her repetitions threatened to drive him away, as the blows in his ribs had offered to do. (Was that why he held her hands, sleeping—a protective clinch?) And he thought of organizing a retreat from sexuality, a concession of indefensible territory: Kutuzov after Borodino, Thieu before Danang. A strategic simplification.

But then the awful emptiness. “O Pumpkin,” he would moan in the dark, “never leave me. Never: promise.” And the child within him would cringe with a terror for which, when daylight dawned bleak on the scattered realities of their situation, he would silently blame her, and hope to make her pay.

They became superb at being tired with one another. They competed in exhaustion. “Oh, God, Princess, how long can this go on?” Their conversations were so boring. Them. Us. Us and them others. The neighbors, the children, the children's teachers, the lawyers' wives' investment brokers' children's piano teachers. “It's killing me,” she cheerfully admitted. Away from her, he would phone when she was asleep. She would phone in turn when he was napping. Together at last, they would run to the bed, hardened invalids fighting for the fat pillow, for the side by the window, with its light and air. They lay on their rumpled white plinth, surrounded by ashtrays and books, subjects of a cosmic quarantine.

•  •  •

First thing in the morning, Pumpkin would light a cigarette. Next thing, Tod would scold. She wanted to kill herself, to die. He took this as a personal insult. She was killing herself to make him look bad. She told him not to be silly, and inhaled. She had her habits, her limits. She had her abilities and her disabilities. She could not pronounce the word “realtor.” She could spread her toes to make a tense little monkey's foot, a foot trying to become a star. He would ask her to do this. Grimacing pridefully, she would oblige, first the right foot, then the left, holding them high off the sheets, the toe tendons white with the effort, her toenails as round and bridal as confetti bits. He would laugh, and love, and laugh again. He would ask her to say the word “realtor.”