The Early Stories (84 page)

But the girl was too young and, sensing an enemy, attacked her reliable old target, Dickie.
“You,”
she said. “I don't ever see
you
trying to help Daddy, all you do is make Mommy drive you to golf courses and ski mountains.”

“Yeah? What about
you
,” he responded weakly, beaten before he started, “making Mommy cook two meals all the time because you're too
pure
to sully your lips with
an
imal matter.”

“At least when I'm here I try to help; I don't just sit around reading books about dumb Billy Caster.”

“Casper,” Richard and Dickie said in unison.

Judith rose to her well-filled height; her bell-bottom hip-hugging Levi's dropped an inch lower and exposed a mingled strip of silken underpants and pearly belly. “I think it's atrocious for some people like us to have too many bushes and people in the ghetto don't even have a weed to look at, they have to go up on their rooftops to breathe. It's
true
, Dickie; don't make that face!”

Dickie was squinting in pain; he found his sister's body painful. “The young sociologist,” he said, “flaunting her charms.”

“You don't even know what a sociologist is,” she told him, tossing her head. Waves of fleshly agitation rippled down toward her toes. “You are a very
spoiled
and
self
ish and
lim
ited person.”

“Puh puh, big mature,” was all he could say, poor little boy overwhelmed by this blind blooming.

Judith had become an optical illusion in which they all saw different things: Dickie saw a threat, Joan saw herself of twenty-five years ago, Bean saw another large warmth-source that, unlike horses, could read her a bedtime story. John, bless him, saw nothing, or, dimly, an old pal receding. Richard couldn't look. In the evening, when Joan was putting the others to bed, Judith would roll around on the sofa while he tried to read in the chair opposite. “Look, Dad. See my stretch exercises.” He was reading
My Million-Dollar Shots
, by Billy Casper. The body must be coiled, tension should be felt in the back muscles and along the left leg at top of backswing. Illustrations, with arrows. The body on the sofa was twisting into lithe knots; Judith was double-jointed and her prowess at yoga may have been why Joan stopped doing it, outshone. Richard glanced up and saw his daughter arched like a staple, her hands gripping her ankles; a glossy bulge of supple belly held a navel at its acme. At the top of the backswing, forearm and back of the left hand should form a straight line. He tried it; it felt awkward. He was a born wrist-collapser. Judith watched him pondering his own wrist and giggled; then she kept giggling, insistently, flirting, trying it out. “Daddy's a narcissist.” In the edge of his vision she seemed to be tickling herself and flicking her hair in circles.

“Judith!”
He had not spoken to her so sharply since, as a toddler, she
had spilled sugar all over the kitchen floor. In apology he added, “You are driving me crazy.”

The fourth week, he went to New York, on business. When he returned, Joan told him during their kitchen drink, “This afternoon, everybody was being so cranky, you off, the weather lousy, I piled them all into the car, everybody except Judith; she's spending the night at Margaret Parillo's—”

“You
let
her? With that little tart and her druggy crowd? Are there going to be boys there?”

“I didn't ask. I hope so.”

“Live vicariously, huh?”

He wondered if he could punch her in the face and at the same time grab the glass in her hand so it wouldn't break. It was from a honeymoon set of turquoise Mexican glass of which only three were left. With their shared eye she saw his calculations and her face went stony. He could break his fist on that face. “Are you going to let me finish my story?”

“Sure.
Dîtes-moi
, Scheherazade.”

“—and we went to the car wash. The dog was hilarious, she kept barking and chasing the brushes around and around the car trying to defend us. It took her three rotations to figure out that if it went one way it would be coming back the other. Everybody absolutely howled; we had Danny Vetter in the car with us, and one of Bean's horsy friends; it was a real orgy.” Her face was pink, recalling.

“That is a truly disgusting story. Speaking of disgusting, I did something strange in New York.”

“You slept with a prostitute.”

“Almost. I went to a blue movie.”

“How scary for you, darley.”

“Well, it was. Wednesday morning I woke up early and didn't have any appointment until eleven so I wandered over to Forty-second Street, you know, with this innocent morning light on everything, and these little narrow places were already open. So—can you stand this?”

“Sure. All I've heard all week are children's complaints.”

“I paid three bucks and went in. It was totally dark. Like a fun house at a fairground. Except for this very bright-pink couple up on the screen. I could hear people breathing but not see anything. Every time I tried to slide into a row I kept sticking my thumb into somebody's eye. But nobody groaned or protested. It was like those bodies frozen in whatever circle it was of Hell. Finally I found a seat and sat down and after a while
I could see it was all men, asleep. At least most of them seemed to be asleep. And they were spaced so no two touched; but even at this hour, the place was half full. Of motionless men.” He felt her disappointment; he hadn't conveyed the fairy-tale magic of the experience: the darkness absolute as lead, the undercurrent of snoring as from a single dragon, the tidy way the men had spaced themselves, like checkers on a board. And then how he had found a blank square, had jumped himself, as it were, into it, and joined humanity in stunned witness of its own process of perpetuation. Joan asked, “How was the movie?”

“Awful. Exasperating. You begin to think entirely in technical terms: camera position, mike boom. And the poor cunts, God, how they work. Apparently to get a job in a blue movie a man has to be, A, blond, and, B, impotent.”

“Yes,” Joan said and turned her back, as if to conceal a train of thought. “We have to go to dinner tonight with the new Dennises.” Mack Dennis had remarried, a woman much like Eleanor only slightly younger and, the Maples agreed, not nearly as nice. “They'll keep us up forever. But maybe tomorrow,” Joan was going on, as if to herself, timidly, “after the kids go their separate ways, if you'd like to hang around …”

“No,” he took pleasure in saying. “I'm determined to play golf. Thursday afternoon one of the accounts took me out to Long Island and even with borrowed clubs I was hitting the drives a mile. I think I'm on to something; it's all up here.” He showed her the top of his backswing, the stiff left wrist. “I must have been getting twenty extra yards.” He swung his empty arms down and through.

“See,” Joan said, gamely sharing his triumph, “you're sublimating.”

In the car to the Dennises', he asked her, “How is it?”

“It's quite wonderful, in a way. It's as if my senses are jammed permanently open. I feel all one with Nature. The jonquils are out behind the shed and I just looked at them and cried. They were so beautiful I couldn't stand it. I can't keep myself indoors, all I want to do is rake and prune and push little heaps of stones around.”

“You know,” he told her sternly, “the lawn isn't just some kind of carpet to keep sweeping, you have to make some decisions. Those lilacs, for instance, are full of dead wood.”

“Don't,”
Joan whimpered, and cried, as darkness streamed by, torn by headlights.

In bed after the Dennises (it was nearly two; they were numb on
brandy; Mack had monologued about conservation and Mrs. Dennis about interior decoration, redoing “her” house, which the Maples still thought of as Eleanor's), Joan confessed to Richard, “I keep having this little vision—it comes to me anywhere, in the middle of sunshine—of me dead.”

“Dead of what?”

“I don't know that, all I know is that I'm dead and it doesn't much matter.”

“Not even to the children?”

“For a day or two. But everybody manages.”

“Sweetie.” He repressed his strong impulse to turn and touch her. He explained, “It's part of being one with Nature.”

“I suppose.”

“I have it very differently. I keep having this funeral fantasy. How full the church will be, what Spence will say about me in his sermon, who'll be there.” Specifically, whether the women he has loved will come and weep with Joan; in the image of this, their combined grief at his eternal denial of himself to them, he glimpsed a satisfaction for which the transient satisfactions of the living flesh were a flawed and feeble prelude—merely the backswing. In death, he felt, as he floated on his back in bed, he would grow to his true size.

Joan with their third eye may have sensed his thoughts; where usually she would roll over and turn her sumptuous back, whether as provocation or withdrawal it was up to him to decide, now she lay paralyzed, parallel to him. “I suppose,” she offered, “in a way, it's cleansing. I mean, you think of all that energy that went into the Crusades.”

“Yes, I dare say,” Richard agreed, unconvinced, “we may be on to something.”

Nevada
 

Poor Culp. His wife, Sarah, wanted to marry her lover as soon as the divorce came through, she couldn't wait a day, the honeymoon suite in Honolulu had been booked six weeks in advance. So Culp, complaisant to the end, agreed to pick the girls up in Reno and drive them back to Denver. He arranged to be in San Francisco on business and rented a car. Over the phone, Sarah mocked his plan—why not fly? An expert in petroleum extraction, he hoped by driving to extract some scenic benefit from domestic ruin. Until they had moved to Denver and their marriage exploded in the thinner atmosphere, they had lived in New Jersey, and the girls had seen little of the West.

He arrived in Reno around five in the afternoon, having detoured south from Interstate 80. The city looked kinder than he had expected. He found the address Sarah had given him, a barn-red boardinghouse behind a motel distinguished by a giant flashing domino. He dreaded yet longed for the pain of seeing Sarah again—divorced, free of him, exultant, about to take wing into a new marriage. But she had taken wing before he arrived. His two daughters were sitting on a tired cowhide sofa, next to an empty desk, like patients in a dentist's anteroom.

Polly, who was eleven, leaped up to greet him. “Mommy's left,” she said. “She thought you'd be here hours ago.”

Laura, sixteen, rose with a self-conscious languor from the tired sofa, smoothing her skirt behind, and added, “Jim was with her. He got really mad when you didn't show.”

Culp apologized. “I didn't know her schedule was so tight.”

Laura perhaps misheard him, answering, “Yeah, she was really uptight.”

“I took a little detour to see Lake Tahoe.”

“Oh, Dad,” Laura said. “You and your sightseeing.”

“Were you worried?” he asked.

“Naa.”

A little woman with a square jaw hopped from a side room behind the empty desk. “They was good as good, Mr. Culp. Just sat there, wouldn't even take a sandwich I offered to make for no charge. Laura here kept telling the little one, ‘Don't you be childish, Daddy wouldn't let us down.' I'm Betsy Morgan, we've heard of each other but never met officially.” Sarah had mentioned her in her letters: Morgan the pirate, her landlady and residency witness. Fred Culp saw himself through Mrs. Morgan's eyes: cuckold, defendant, discardee. Though her eye was merry, the hand she offered him was dry as a bird's foot.

He could only think to ask, “How did the proceedings go?”

The question seemed foolish to him, but not to Mrs. Morgan. “Seven minutes, smooth as silk. Some of these judges, they give a girl a hard time just to keep themselves from being bored. But your Sary stood right up to him. She has that way about her.”