by Tom Robbins
“Tragic” was Marvelous' word for it. Who would know better than he how tragic it truly was? Hadn't he had to fight his entire adult life against similar impulses? Hell, he could have wallowed in the transcendent, could have broadcast magical visions out of both blue eyeballs if he had weakened and given in to his primitive stirrings. But he held firm. He knew that man's potential on earth, his security and survival, lay in the proper exercise of reason. There were technological solutions to all of life's challenges if only scientific reason was permitted to provide them. It had been impressed upon Marx at the university and in the think tank the importance of resisting regressive cultural tendencies. Resist them he was prepared to do, even though he must suffer some in resistance. The angel of the bizarre he wrestled nightly into submission, though he often lost the first two falls. He wore the stains of the “dream world” as shamefully as a guilty smoker wears the yellow on his digits.
“I understand further,” continued Marvelous, “that you believe there is no difference between the external and the internal. Well, not only is there a difference, I'll have you know that it is that difference that makes life possible.” He launched into an explanation and, as if in retaliation, the sun card slipped back up the coat-sleeve of sky. On and on he went, blah blah, but when he noticed Amanda singing to a newly found cocoon, he began to suspect that she was paying him no attention. When the cocoon opened and a small butterfly wobbled out, he was sure of it.
There was one thing that might shut Marx Marvelous up, and Amanda realized that she must quit postponing it. Alas, however, she could not bring it off.
“I'm sorry, Marx Marvelous, but I can't fuck you.” It was ten o'clock at night. Amanda was dressed in a silken lavender tunic upon which had been embroidered scenes from the biography of the queen who chased butterflies while awaiting death. Amanda stood in the doorway of Marx's garage apartment. Her long lashes twitched, fluttered and jerked again, as if they were a pair of feather dusters being machine-gunned against an igloo; and then they drooped elegantly, tugging her lids half the distance over the curve of her eyeballs. “You undoubtedly believe that I've been leading you on, but the truth is I've discussed it several times with John Paul and we have decided that it would not be wise. You're an attractive man and I'd like to, but it would not be smart.”
Marvelous, who wore only the trousers to his checkered suit, pulled nervously at a hair on his chest. “So,” he said with some bitterness, “your liberated husband does care if you go to bed with other men.” Archimedes, who discovered the principle of the lever, once said, “Give me a place to stand on and I could move the world.” Archimedes could have stood on Marx's lower lip.
“No, that is not the case. As long as it's done with honesty and grace, John Paul doesn't mind if I go to bed with other men. Or with other girls, as is sometimes my fancy.” Her smile was the pride of Botticelli's cherubs.
“Then why the hell did you get married?”
“What has marriage got to do with it? I married John Paul because I'm knocked out by his style. Because I love him and respect him and enjoy the transformations that take place as a result of our sharing the same dimensions. But, Marx, marriage is not a synonym for monogamy any more than monogamy is a synonym for ideal love. To live lightly on the earth, lovers and families must be more flexible and relaxed. The ritual of sex releases its magic inside or outside the martial bond. I approach that ritual with as much humility as possible and perform it whenever it seems appropriate. As for John Paul and me, a strange spurt of semen is not going to wash our love away.”
“Then why do you deny me?” whined Marx. He stared at the floor.
Amanda closed the door and moved closer to him. She kissed his cheek. “Marx,” she said tenderly, “you are as sensitive as you are stubborn. And, you're, well, shall we say—terribly impressionable. Also, you tend to be possessive. Those are basic characteristics of Cancerians. I know you have no use for astrology but you can't deny that those are your traits. And neither John Paul nor I feel that you could handle a simple, free relationship with me. No sooner would we begin than you'd be in love with me, which is beautiful except that you'd make it so complex. You'd demand more of me. You'd be possessive and play ego games. You'd be jealous of John Paul. Before long, you would create tension . . . between all three of us. Then where would we be? Friction at the Captain Kendrick. No, I just don't think you're ready.”
Marx Marvelous slowly, desperately, sank to his knees. He embraced Amanda's legs. He buried his head in her perfumed tunic, in her crotch. His body shuddered. He sobbed against her pelvis, he whimpered. He clung to her tightly, perhaps ashamed now to let go.
For a while, Amanda stood absolutely still. Then she began to caress his fine sandy strands, her fingers twisting his hair in phantom knots. He relaxed a bit. He kissed her through the fabric. (Amanda, if you're leaving, you'd better leave now!) Gradually, like the falling of leaves or the bursting of buds or the other so gradual as to be nearly imperceptible dramas of nature, she pulled up her tunic and slipped her panties down around her calves. When the parachute of love descended, Marx Marvelous was face to face with her enchanted gypsy snatch.
So quietly did Amanda stand that the whole Skagit Valley, animate and inanimate, from the Cascades to the Sound, seemed on the point of standing quietly with her while he kissed and nibbled her about the groin. His tongue made a few exploratory licks, as if he were a child testing the flavor of a lollipop. She grew impatient and thrust her pubus toward him, and then and then . . . His tongue curled and thrust inside of her, his mouth mashed against her, the tip of his nose glistened with her juices. And then and then and then . . . Into the sucking of her went all the bafflement, all the rage, all the immense crazy consuming speechless frustration of his ineffectual genius. He lapped up the sweet darkness, his tongue drum-rolled against her clitoris, he sucked his way toward the plum of her womb. And then and then and then . . .
Her orgasm spanned a career that began with a delicate shudder and ended nearly two minutes later (his face against her all the while) with an volcanic gypsy moan. At first she came gently, as a moth might; then, losing control, she writhed and wallowed in hot cat spasms of crude delight. He thought she would never stop. She feared she would dissolve. Her nectars wet his neck and her thighs. Her clitoris was a ladyfinger cloud pump—and she groaned with animal dignity as it throbbed. Pumped its fishy billows. Its honey and sparks. It was the greatest of the imperfect ventriloquist acts: when his lips moved, her body sang.
After Amanda's pulsations had subsided, she wiped off Marx's face with the hem of her tunic. She pulled up her panties and hugged him good-bye. He was dizzy and ready for sleep. He had come, too. And he never wore those checkered trousers again.
At 3:25 on the afternoon of Thursday, August 6, Marx Marvelous was busy drowning. The Skagit River closed around his lungs like a wedding ring. The Skagit River, which bangs down from the high Cascades, which spills through the wild hills, which is cold and green and silty and (at this time of year) teeming with salmon spawn, which flows sullenly through the croplands as if pouting about the loss of speed, flowing daily, flowing as it did last year, flowing as it did when the three painted duck-hunting chiefs of the tribal Skagit rode upon it in their long canoes, flowing, flowing fearlessly into the future, flowing forever from beginning to end; the Skagit River did not give one watery damn that it was drowning the life of Marx Marvelous, promising (if confused) young scientist who had excelled at Johns Hopkins University and once owned a natty checkered suit.
At first, Marx Marvelous did not like drowning. The water in his lungs was heavy and unnatural. He thought of a cake his father once had baked for his mother's birthday. He felt as if that cake were in his lungs. But drowning is like anything else. You get used to it.
It was a relief to quit struggling. When he struggled his lungs felt overheated and rusted out, like the muffler on an old Ford truck in which he had delivered the Baltimore Sun after he grew too big for his bicycle
. That passed. When he ceased to struggle his lungs ceased to backfire. It was peaceful. Would they publish his dead picture in the Baltimore Sun?
Drowning takes a long time. It is not something one does in a fast minute. Don't think it is. There is time to think. There is time to eat a sandwich while drowning. Marx Marvelous would have enjoyed a grilled ham and cheese. Hold the pickles.
A light followed Marx Marvelous down to the river bottom. He did not know from whence it came. Perhaps the fishes are familiar with this light. Marx Marvelous stared into the light. It is possible to drown with one's eyes open, you know. The face of Albert Einstein appeared in the light. Einstein was demonstrating that since motion depends upon the observer no one point can be considered the zero of motion. Einstein's face, baggy beneath the eyes, was very kind. Nevertheless, it made Marx Marvelous nervous. He soon replaced it with the face of Someone We All Know and Love. Marx Marvelous and the face hung in the water as if the river were a museum and they were famous pictures placed opposite one another for contrast. The light dimmed. “Our gallery is closing for the day,” thought Marvelous.
One witness who saw John Paul Ziller dive off the Conway (South Fork) bridge said it reminded him of the Tarzan movies when Johnny Weissmuller would dive in to save Jane and Boy from the crocodiles. Two other witnesses agreed. It was the loincloth, they said. The remaining witness, a Swinomish Indian boy, said it reminded him of a movie, too. He did not say which one. “It was sure no movie when he pulled that feller outta the water,” admitted the first witness. “His face was purple, solid purple. I thought for sure he was gone. I was surprised when they got him to breathing again. Did you see that girl? Her inner tube overturned, too, but she swam to shore okay. She kept calling, 'Marx, Marx.' Then that hairy guy dove off the bridge. Man, that's a long way down. It was like a movie.”
Marx Marvelous regained consciousness. His chest ached. He felt sick. He couldn't hear the music any more. Nor see the light. What for an instant he thought was the light proved to be the great rosy buttocks of Mon Cul baboon. The baboon was bowing to the crowd that had gathered. Each time he bowed his butt ascended like a flaming sun, and when he straightened, the sun set. So the day dawned and ended, dawned and ended, over and over again with only a soft sound in between like Magritte's bowler hat rolling upon a Belgian carpet. Time passed quickly by Mon Cul's rectal reckoning. It was all okay.
Marx Marvelous is going to break the genius machine when he grows up. That's what everyone said. He hasn't, of course. As yet he hasn't put a strain on it. The reader, with his training in psychology (via novels, films, TV, Ann Landers, etc.) knows why.
Our sandy-haired young thinker is desperately searching for something in which to believe. Isn't he? As a child he was too sensitive and too bright to be attracted to his family's Baptist fundamentalism for very long. He turned to science almost as a substitute. How cool it was in comparison, how clean and cogent. But that didn't last. With his understanding of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, he began to realize that every system that science proposed was a product of human imagination and had to be accepted with a faith nearly as blind as the religious beliefs which he had jettisoned. Much scientific truth proved to be as hypothetical as poetic allegory. The relationship of those rod-connected blue and red balls to an actual atomic structure was about the same as the relationship of Christianity to the fish or the Lamb.
What now, dear Marvelous? A fresh examination of traditional religion found it as deficient in function as in creative energy: the wildest scientific postulates seemed sound (and alive!) in comparison. Paradoxically, his investigations in pure science, in abstract mathematics and theoretical physics, frequently led him into areas of thought which he could only describe as . . . well, say it, Marx: metaphysical. How could that be? The mental processes of religion and pure science may be similar, but the ends are different. It is not the purpose of science to make a man feel whole, to produce a kind of exalted happiness.
Why not?
It is a pity that Marx Marvelous should amplify that peculiarly Western quarrel of science and religion. But he was so terribly ambivalent. Thrashing about within him were two of the major and vital quests of the human spirit—the search for fact and the search for value. Why did the facts he pursued prove so impoverished in value, why were the value systems he examined so contrary to fact? Could mysticism help him? Various sources informed him that in the life-system known as mysticism there was a harmonium of fact and value. But Marvelous recoiled from mysticism with immediate distaste. Mysticism was so corny, so adolescent, so cluttered with dusty and discredited modes of thought, so clouded with woolly abstractions. No good. No good. He clung to science as a wino clings to a doorjamb. But the deep division within kept spreading its cheeks.
Compounding the spread was yet another side of his personality, the side that had a tooth for the whimsical and outlandish, the side that rutted in him like a lewd and unpredictable springtime compared to the stolid autumn that had settled upon his more public self. The less said about that side the better. Students of Kepler do not stress his lifelong belief in fairies any more than biographers of Benjamin Franklin dwell upon his illegitimate children, his venereal disease. Pass.
After a few months at the Zillers' roadside zoo, however, our boy betrayed a change. Gradually, Marvelous ceased to challenge his employers on every intellectual ground where he suspected them vulnerable. Slowly, even painfully, he fell in step with the rhythms that prevailed at the zoo. In his notebook he himself described the mood at the zoo as one of “intensity within tranquillity.” By that he probably meant that the Zillers generated an atmosphere of rest and harmony through which coursed currents of unnamable excitement as veins run through meat. Marvelous could relax without fear of apathy. If he did not penetrate the mysterious activities that transpired behind the scenes at the roadhouse, he did at least share in the air of adventure that surrounded them. If he did not abandon his own attempts to isolate the psychic ember that would flame into the next religious phase, he did relieve the mission of some of its urgency. Following his tasty liaison with Amanda (how like the wilderness she was flavored) there had been a perceptible easing of strain. He became calmly fatalistic about his desire for her. “I want to roll in the hay with Amanda.” “I wish the sun would shine for two days in a row.” These remarks he made with equal emphasis. Following his rescue from the river by John Paul, he smiled more often at the magician and the magician at him. The three of them became closer friends. Marx gave his checkered suit to the Salvation Army. He let his hair grow long, although he still shaved each morning upon rising. At his baboon-nap trial in Seattle his lawyers wangled a suspended sentence. He developed a tolerance for wild mushrooms and wild music: morels, chanterelles, shaggy lepiotas; the Hoodoo Meat Bucket, the Beatles, Roland Kirk. His hemorrhoids even disappeared. Ah! Sigh!
By the middle of September Marx was secure enough in his new station in life to risk a small vacation. Sure, why not? Tourist season had petered out. The zoo was in fit condition. Might put things in clearer perspective if he got away for a while. Reportedly, a lot of strange things were erupting down around San Francisco, events with religious undertones that might bear looking into. Besides, though life at the roadside zoo was anything but dull, how long had it been since he'd been out on the town, picked up a broad in a nightclub, drank a double martini on the rocks? Too long, you bet. John Paul lent him a musician's card that would get him in free to any number of dives. Amanda gave him a scarab for luck and a wet kiss for the joy that was in it. Mon Cul waved good-bye at the airport, and Baby Thor cried to see him go. Marvelous almost cried himself. But what the hell, he wasn't going away forever. Very soon, he consoled himself, he'd be back at the Capt. Kendrick and things would be as they were before, only better. As it happened, however, that was not quite the case.
When two weeks later he returned to the zoo, Amanda was in bed with Plucky Purcell and Jesus Christ was locked in the pantry.
Part IV
October lies on the Skagit like a wet rag on a salad. Trapped beneath low clouds, the valley is damp and green and full of sad memories. The people of the valley have far less to be unhappy about than many who live elsewhere in America, but, still, an aboriginal sadness clings like the dew to their region; their land has a blurry beauty (as if the Creator started to erase it but had second thoughts), it has dignity, fertility and hints of inner meaning—but nothing can seem to make it laugh.
The short summer is finished, it is October again, and Sung dynasty mists swirl across the fields where seed cabbages, like gangrened jack-o'-lanterns, have been left to rot. The ghost-light of old photographs floods the tide flats, the island outcroppings, the salt marshes, the dikes and the sloughs. The frozen-food plants have closed for the season. A trombone of geese slides southward between the overcast and the barns. Upriver, there is a chill in the weeds. Old trucks and tractors rusting among the stumps seem in autumn especially forlorn.
October scenes:
At the dog-bitten Swinomish Indian Center near La Conner, there is a forty-foot totem pole the top figure of which is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. One of the queerer projects of the WPA Roosevelt's Harvard grin is faded and wooden in the reservation mist.