Toward the End of Time (9 page)

An inch of wet snow had fallen while I had been wrestling with insomnia. From another upstairs window I saw that the black tire tracks of the man still bringing Gloria her
Times
had stopped—stopped as if his chariot had become Elijah’s or Phaëthon’s and taken flight—at the section. Dark footprints, however, brought the story
down from the realm of the supernatural: the poor fellow, not wishing to risk slipping off the curve, had, like the FedEx man two months ago, after the first snowfall of this snowy winter, got out of his vehicle and walked.

The
Globe
delivery man always prudently stops at the mailbox. As I, having squeezed my feet into my L.L. Bean Maine Hunting Shoes, walked down to retrieve the morning paper, I observed in addition to my own tracks (which imitate chains laid closely parallel) others: the clustered four paws of the hopping rabbit; the stately punctures, almost in a line, of the deer; the dainty marks, shaped like pansies, of the Kellys’ cat, who comes over here to stalk the Y-footed birds that feed on our purple pokeberries; and a troubling set of prints, as widely spaced as the deer’s but larger and multiply padded. In trying to picture the animal I could only imagine a lion. A smallish lion. One reads that, as the woods of the Northeast encroach more and more upon cleared fields, bears and coyotes and mountain lions are spreading south. As our species, having given itself a hard hit, staggers, the others, all but counted out, move in. Think of those days when the hominids were just a two-footed furry footnote lost amid the thundering herds of horned perissodactyls. Why does the thought make us happy?

Deirdre is becoming a little too familiar. Instead of submitting to my sexual whims, she prefers to give me the benefit of her feminist rage. “Why are men so cruel?” she asks soul-fully, with a little-girl rustle of her head on my shoulder.

“Natural selection,” I tell her. “The killers survive, the killed drop out of the genetic pool. Same reason,” I go on, “women are masochistic. The submissive ones get fucked
and make the babies and the scrappers don’t. The meek inherit the earth.”

I’m not sure she has been listening. “Jesus, I hate men,” she says, off in her own world of memories and strictly localized intellectual reference.

I permit myself to get angry. “You keep telling me that. Where would you be without them? A lazy ignorant cokehead like you, what are you fit for except turning tricks? And you’re damn lucky to have found an old sweetheart like me, instead of some crazy young buck who’d beat the crap out of you.”

“You’re not so uncrazy, Ben. You’re crazy about being Frenched, I notice.” Toying with my white chest hair, curling it around one index finger, while her headful of wiry oily wool tickles my shoulder and the side of my neck.

It is true, the sight of her plump lips obediently distended around my swollen member, her eyelids lowered demurely, afflicts me with a religious peace.

“And horsing around with my asshole.”

Yes, that, too. Her vagina, Deirdre’s unspoken accusation ran, was less favored by me than these two orifices designed for other purposes, for ingestion and excretion, and to this extent I was a pervert. My own sense of it is that, at age sixty-six, I am still working up to the vagina—that Medusa whose sight turned ancient men to stone, that sacred several-lipped gateway to the terrifying procreative darkness. I was not yet, at three score and six, quite mature enough to face its blood-empurpled folds, its musty exudations. I was still a boy shutting his eyes when the vaccination needle went in. My working-class doxy sensed this ant disliked me for it, even as she wearily roused herself from my side and prepared to nurse me into arousal.

“You rich leech,” she told me. “You’ve never had to get down into it, have you?”

“What do you mean, ‘into it’?”

“Into the dirt where the rest of us grub. You called me a money-grubbing cunt last week. Thanks a lot. Just because I didn’t get born a fat cat and can clip coupons all my life—”

“Nobody clips them any more. It’s all in computers. Anyway, I was born poor. Out in the west of the state. We lived in a town north of Pittsfield called Hammond Falls. There was a river downtown and a bunch of brick mills, mostly empty by the time I came along. Our house, which had belonged to my mother’s parents, was up the hill, out on the outskirts, an old farmhouse. Except it was narrow and dark, like a city rowhouse, close to the road, surrounded by these sloping fields going back to cedar and scrub maple. I went to U. Mass., when it cost almost nothing, and met my first wife, and we came to Boston, where I went to the B.U. Business School on student loans, and became a stockbroker. I changed my accent, to blend in. I suggest you change yours too, darling, if you expect to get anywhere in this very class-conscious commonwealth.”

This nearly made her spit, naked as she was, crouched on the bed. “Commonwealth, well, la-ti-da darling, yourself. What a liar! We should both wash our mouths out, me from sucking your stubby dick and you from being a liar. I can see all around this house, it’s full of inherited stuff.”

“It’s Gloria’s. My late wife’s.”

“Who says she’s late?”

“She’s not here,
is
she?”

“No, but she wouldn’t be, would she? With me here. Unless she was a real AC-DC.”

In a rage of annoyance—she was
resisting
me, in every resentful
fibre—I seized her brown arm, which was propping her up over my belly like the leg of a beast poised to drink. “Who says it’s stubby?
You’re
the liar. If it’s so stubby why do you gag when it’s only halfway in?”

She sullenly pulled her arm away, revealing four white finger-marks. “Ow. O.K., not stubby. Stinky, though.”

“You should talk. You’re like low tide down there—low tide next to a sewer outlet.”

Deirdre brushed a mass of her curls back from one ear, contemplating thoughtfully the erect refutation of stubbiness which my surge of violence had pushed through my blood. “You guys hate us, don’t you?” she said musingly. “Cocks hate cunts.”

“But they love mouths,” I crooned to her, and fell into a state of beatitude as her lips absent-mindedly enclosed me, and her brown hand, narrow as a hoof, worked the skin at the base up and down, into a moist tingle mounting heavenwards.

“We hate you, too,” she told me afterwards, when I was too languid to hurt her. “You own us, but we hate your guts.” She had come back from the bathroom, after a tumult of flushed toilet and expectorated mouthwash, in a clearheaded, combative mood.

“Who’s this ‘you’?”

“You rich creeps. I never got into one of your houses before. Usually the tricks are guys with no background, Irish or eyetie, you know, who have a little money they can’t hang on to. They don’t want to hang on to it. They’re too Catholic. Down deep they think it’s holy to be poor. Only the Jews and you Wasps aren’t ashamed to hang on to money, to sit in heaps of it and roll in it and smear it all over yourselves—disgusting! You think you’re so great God
likes
your being stinking rich.”

“Darling, I agree. I must learn to spend. That thing you just did was worth every welder.”

“Two hundred.”

“It’s usually a hundred fifty.”

“You had a lot of come today. I nearly choked.”

“I love it when you nearly choke.”

“I know you do, you prick. That’s what my father began by having me do, blow him.” Her eyes narrowed as she looked into the past, preparing to match my confession with her own.

“Hey,” I said, “do I need to hear this? I’m no therapist. I’ll start charging
you
by the hour.”

“I was eight. My head came up to just the right height on him. He said to do it, I didn’t know, I thought it might be normal. He was my father, he said it was all right, who else could I trust?”

“You could have gone to your mother.”

“Tchaa!”
—a catlike snarl. “She was worthless. She would have slapped me and called me a liar. She didn’t
want
to know. He was all she had, too.”

“I’m sorry, dear, for calling you a liar.”

“O.K. I appreciate your saying that. I’m a hooker and I steal, but I don’t generally lie. It’s too confusing, it makes another world. So I stick with the truth, generally. Except when I said you were stubby. You have a nice prick.”

“Don’t break my heart.”

“You can’t take a compliment, can you? You hate me too much. You hate needing me. Guys do. It must feel funny, having that business hanging down outside you have to keep feeding.”

“I feed you,” I said, and felt compelled to embrace her, her pliant slim waist, the long brown supple abdominal stretch
between the wispy ghosts of her bathing suit, and I felt her harden, in fright at my confessed need and in calculation of how best to employ it to her advantage. I was her slave, my slave’s slave. I whispered into her ear how I wanted before I died to pump a ton of jism into her, into her mouth, into her little puckered asshole, into her huge warm cosmic cunt, pump it all as some kind of glutinous silvery bridge to the next world, and she was saying, “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” automatically, calculating how to put my craziness into a profitable harness.

Our mothers wipe our bottoms and praise our first babbled words, our nurses at the finale tidy up and maternally murmur amid the mess of our dying, but the women who out of whatever motive swallow our seed through one of their holes deliver the acceptance that matters. They drink our groins’ milky tears. Through the bodies of women men conduct what tortured dealings they can with the universe, producing serial murder and morganatic marriages and a Morgan Library’s worth of love letters, novels, and death threats. Women don’t ask for this, true. But what
do
women ask for? as a maligned sage at the far end of the last century infamously inquired in all innocence.

Between bouts of lovemaking Deirdre and I have taken to exploring the house together, naked. I turn the thermostat way up for the adventure. Gloria kept a thrifty cold house, and when I wasn’t looking would sneak our bedroom window open an inch or two even in the bitterest January weather. She would even raise the storm window, which she ordinarily said she couldn’t do because the little spring
catches would break her fingernails; but, in the attempt to freeze my old gray head fast to the pillow, she would take this risk. When I began wearing a knit watch-cap to bed, she mocked me, and would pluck it off in my sleep, to ensure that I awoke with sniffles and a fatal dry cough.

My slim young companion and I explore seldom-visited chambers of the far-flung old house. It was built by one of that legendary race of Boston rich who came to this shore for the summer cool, before air conditioning, their untaxed dollars engaging armies of Italian masons and Scots-Irish carpenters. Seven fireplaces, no two alike, in Ionic, Doric, and even (in the living room) Corinthian modes. Palladian windows, columned verandas. A fully finished third floor, and a basement with a plastered ceiling. Over the course of more than a century, the plaster has lost its grip, and chunks of it litter the remoter regions, including a mysterious room whose floor is the jagged ledge the house was built upon. This rough chamber, which knits the structure to primal matter, has always rather frightened me. It lies beyond the laundry room and the servants’ bathroom, where the thick old porcelain toilet goes months unflushed, its oval eye of water scummed with plaster dust. A steam pipe arrives at its safety valve in the farthest, rock-bottomed chamber, and the hissing, as from a captive serpent, startles us. Deirdre exclaims in disgust at the dry filth, the decades of unswept plaster fragments and whitewash flakes and flecks of crumbling brick and mouse droppings and bits of mouse poison, all accumulating on her sticky bare soles. I tell her, in the ardor of this strangeness, that I will lick them clean, even though I die of it. My genitals dangle in the cloistered cellar air; I love how her body beside mine displaces dead space. Faint musty and oily whiffs spring from her flesh and hair
and dart deep into my nasal passages. I keep touching her, lightly, guiltily, the way we touch a smooth statue or a rough-textured canvas when the museum guard is not looking.