“It’s just not working,” he says to Amby one morning, she’s feeding the baby by spoon, he’s in the next room putting in toast. “What isn’t? The toaster?” “Listen, hell with this goddamn toast and eating,” and he pushes the toast up and throws it into the sink. “What’s wrong with you?” “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” he says, coming into the living room. “Listen, I still—hours every day. No that’s a little too farfetched, but I know it’s a short to moderately long time and just about every day. Please, stop feeding her for a second. This is very important. You have to have my complete attention. I have to have yours, I of course mean, for I might not be able to say this again. I was saying ‘long’ for something like this—a long time, almost every other day, and year after year, even when you wouldn’t think I would … the general you and maybe you-Amby too—think of Denise. There we are. Denise, that’s who.” “You’re a liar or a bastard. You just want to get out,” and she drops the spoon and runs upstairs. The baby cries in her highchair. Food runs out of her mouth. He sits, wipes her, says “There, there,” finishes feeding her, takes her out for a stroll. He speaks to Amby again later. I’m sorry. Listen, just sit. I’ll try to stop thinking of her. I know we should stay together—you and I. I want to. Olivia and Eva also shouldn’t lose you as they did their mother and then Gail. And lose their baby sister too, whom I’m sure you’d want to have total custody of if we separated or divorced, weekends this and that, which wouldn’t be enough for them—would be a great loss.” “You speak of her as if she isn’t yours.” “I do? Where? Because I’m sure she is. Who else’s could she be? Meaning: sure she is. I know you haven’t had lovers. Neither have I. I’d never do that to you. Meaning, that’s not what I’d do to you. The other thing—it’s all in my head—I’m guilty. Listen, I’m a confused man; very. Denise’s death must have turned off some important lights in me. And they just don’t make, or they’re too tough to find anymore, the same kind of bulbs—but enough of that crap. I should get a new lamp though, right? Or see a lamp fixer, even if he charges ninety-five an hour per. So what? What’s money in something like this, and I’m covered. We are, and I want us to continue to be. Listen, don’t pay any attention to what I’m saying. But I loved her deeply. I told you that when we met. But I also told you it was all over, except sad moments that come back now and then. That was natural. We agreed. But she got sick. She deteriorated badly and too quickly. Bam, I looked around, she was gone. The girls and I were heartbroken for a year. They could have got out of it sooner if I hadn’t been such a mess. Well, natural, natural, guilty as I still am about that too. Though they turned out all right, are turning out all right, and what else could I have done about it much as I wanted to and tried? Most of the time tried—I milked a little of it too. But it takes a year—it took a year—I thought, but some of it obviously stayed. Obviously. I still can’t quite get her out of my clunky head. Not ‘quite’—more. I’m a schmuck, a fool, something’s still got to be wrong with me and maybe I’ve gotten progressively worse. It’s ruined all my relationships with women since. The ones I wanted to be close. We’ve talked about that. Till you came. You were supposed to be different. Your patience with me, my feelings for you. Mutual, the other way around, though not my patience. And you were. You are. There isn’t anyone like you. But that woman keeps coming back. I can’t get hard-ons? Most of the time. Fine, now you know why. I’m almost sure that’s it. And I’ve pictures. I look at them of her. Nude ones even. I used to jerk off to them, now I don’t, maybe because I no longer can. Physiological, psychological—something, or the two combined. And her old letters. Me, with my bad memory, I’ve memorized whole passages. I sit and sit and stare at them, as if I expect the script to disappear and then her hand to write the same letter again or a new message to me. One time I actually thought I saw her hand doing this. I was ecstatic, though I couldn’t read it. First the hand, then the arm, then the whole body, I said to myself then—I won’t be able to sit still when it gets to the breasts and face—when the image of the hand faded. It’s crazy, I know. The entire thing. Or very bizarre, terrible, out of kilter, but it’s something and probably much worse than I’ve said. In those adjectives. But I don’t know what to say about it to you anymore. Thanks for continuing to listen to me. I shouldn’t have married you. Neither Gail—no one but my first wife. Denise. Meaning—but you can see what I mean. I’ll see a doctor. A head one. For the head. It was unfair to marry you, was what I meant, if I had any idea I was going to act like this—and I did—or even to have started with you. Well, we got a nice baby out of it. And I still love you—that’s no lie—that’s the truth—and need and want you—all that—and certainly for you and Gwynne to stay. I think it’ll get better. Don’t ask me why I do-something just tells me all of a sudden. Maybe all I needed was this—to let it out. I almost know it will, in fact—get better—so trust me, please. I’ll get down on my knees. A Bible. Anything. Swear on my beloved mother’s head. Actually not that, since it’s too much name-in-vain business and also too much like part of an act. But whatever, if you want, to convince you I truly believe all of it will get better to the point of being vastly to completely improved. I mean by that: you and I and also my body and mind. OK, I’m done, thanks again, listening and so on, and now you.” “I don’t see it, really. Let’s say I’m skeptical, based on what you’ve said. If it’s gone on for so long and with so many women and has only gotten worse, why should I think it will get better because of one voluminous and somewhat confusing airing-out? That said, we can still try. There are the children. I don’t love you anymore, but we’ll see about that too. But enough. The baby’s waking up.”
They try. He tears up the pregnant photos. Doesn’t want to throw away all the pieces—sees himself tucking away two or three in some corner pocket of his wallet—but feels he has to. Also the poems and most of the letters. Two, and innocent ones, he puts in a file folder marked “keepsakes for the kids”—she’s talking about taking her summer vacation in one of them, her grandmother’s illness in the other and what it was like visiting her in a nursing home the first time. Goes to a therapist with Amby and to the same one alone and at each session says he’s thinking less and less of Denise, more of her, feels their recent efforts at saving the marriage are working, but not much of that’s true. Though it will be, he thinks, and for now she feels a lot better toward him. They have sex more often than they’ve had in a year, but it mostly doesn’t work for him. When it does he’s usually only hard for a short time and only twice did it end up for him in even a little thrill. She says a couple of times “Don’t worry, you’ll be the same bellowing bear as always, down on me, under me, in me, all around me, if just a bit less of that perhaps, modifications for age factors and all, but certainly this more than anything takes time. The essential thing is we both feel infinitely better about each other, true?” “Without question.” He still has a tough time holding her hand or putting his arms around her or pressing up close to her, except in bed, and there mostly to keep warm. He kisses her without feeling but seems to do a good job not showing it, the way she kisses back. Maybe she’s thinking of someone else or is kissing him like that to goad him on. If so, hasn’t worked. Sometimes she whispers in his ear, something she never did before like this, “Go, bear, go, bear, do it, any way you like.” He usually apologizes after, says he wishes it was better for her no matter what it is for him, and she says once “No real problem; I’m getting a few kicks out of it.” He starts sneaking looks at Denise’s photos in the kids’ keepsake folder. Some with the girls, others of just her, one of her in a bathing suit when they were on a beach building a sand whale with Olivia. It’s the only one where even a little of her bare legs and a lot of her bare arms show and more of the top of one breast than in any other photo, but she’s mostly hidden behind their beach equipment. He stares at the photo sometimes, trying to imagine from the way the breast’s shaped in the suit and on top what it would look like uncovered. In a book of hers—the variorum edit
ion of Yeats’s poems that had been her first husband’s—a photo drops out when he’s reading it of Denise and Eva in a bath. Eva’s first bath in a real tub, he remembers. Denise yelled from the bathroom “Howard, come quick with the camera—we have to catch this; she’s an absolute scream. She wants to swim first time in and I think she’s almost doing it.” The print’s not a good one and he can just about make out, because she’s helping Eva stand in the tub, which body’s which. He gets out the two letters and reads them almost every day, trying to find something in them he might have missed. A sexual or amorous reference or suggestion to him or anything hidden or not initially obvious of any kind. He also starts praying again for her return, things like “Please, if it can be done, let it be done, for me, for our girls, I’ll give a finger, a hand, an arm if You want, anything to get her back in one healthy piece and if the cutting off of it doesn’t give me too much pain,” and finally in another confessional burst tells Amby all this. She says “Perhaps you should go to the therapist twice a week in addition to the once-a-week with me,” and he does for a couple of months, no change, maybe even gets worse, searches the house frantically a few times for something of Denise’s he doesn’t know is there, curses out loud to himself when he can’t find anything, tears up an entire room’s carpet because he thinks he remembers she for some reason hid something under it, digs up a plant she planted thinking maybe when she dug the hole she intentionally or inadvertently dropped something of hers in it, and then says to Amby “Look, to avoid any discomfort or whatever you want to call it—call it ‘hell’ for all I can do about it now: hell, hell, I’ve become a freako wacked-out maniaco the last few months—I think I should start sleeping in the bed in the basement and maybe even start cooking and kakaing and living my whole fucking horrible life there.”
She leaves with Gwynne. He sees Gwynne every Sunday, a month every summer, promises himself no more women ever. For what’s the use? He might get excited by one a few times, for weeks, a month, then it would happen again: Denise, letters, searches, praying and ranting like a madman, screwing up another woman’s life and maybe even another kid’s, confusing his other children’s lives even further. Or maybe he wouldn’t get excited by any woman but he’d try doing it with them from time to time to prove something—that he could still attract them, was still attracted by them—and how could he fake it now if he can hardly even get it up to do it to himself anymore? Olivia and Eva go to college, Gwynne to kindergarten. He likes living alone and getting older and gradually weaker; fewer chances; he can go crazy when he wants, so long as his daughters are away; drink till he passes out if he feels like it. He puts up photos of Denise all over the house. On walls, up against things: every photo he can find of her. Then has negatives made of his favorites and gets these made into positives and lots of them enlarged and puts them around too. He writes poems about her again, stories, one-act plays but they’re all terrible, bring back nothing to him, don’t make him cry or laugh or excited or anything and the writing stinks too, and throws them away. Does drawings and then portraits and whole-body paintings of her from memory. Several of them nude, but the only resemblance he thinks he gets is the shape and color of her vulva pubic hair. He puts one of the nudes on the floor, jerks off to it, when he’s about to come he falls flat on the canvas but miscalculates where he is on it and does it on her belly. Then he thinks this is disgusting, he’s gone from bad to almost hopeless, not only seeming nuts and becoming a dumb drunk and slob but doing something sickening and sick to her memory, and jumps on the painting, kicks a hole in it, rips it and all the other canvases off their stretchers, dumps the drawings and canvases and burns the brushes and stretchers. What now? No art form left to express himself about her. Music, but he can’t read a note and his extemporaneous piano playing is just banging. Singing, but his voice is flat. Dance, and he takes off his shoes and runs across the room in a dancing motion, eyes closed, arms out as if he’s going to embrace someone, and slams into a chair.
He throws away most of the photos. Leaves up a few of her with their daughters. Cleans the house, fixes up the yard, paints the girls’ rooms, gets some new furniture. Olivia goes to medical school, Eva joins a theater company, Gwynne enters the third grade. He retires, tries to drink moderately, exercises every day, wants to make himself look presentable and the house comfortable for his daughters when they visit him. He resumes reading a lot, mostly religion and philosophy now. He tries to find writers who can explain some things about his life. Who might have gone through what he did or some of it or just be better able to express it. His depressions and obsessions and other things: past mistakes and repeating them, Denise dying and his almost twenty-year reaction to it, how to lead the right life with his particular personality, whether the right life is a realistic or suitable goal for anyone, sex and love, sexuality and creativity, his heavy drinking sometimes. Who will make him want to turn to them when he needs to or thinks something terrible in him might be coming on. He can’t find any. A line here, there, a passage, a paragraph, sometimes the words click for pages or a chapter and he thinks this is the writer for him or the book he’s been looking for, he just knows, and goes through the whole book and gets increasingly disappointed, and maybe then through some of the other books of this writer, or at least one or part of one more.
He starts going to art museums and galleries, trying to find in the work there something that might apply to his life or be deep or hidden inside him or just give him pleasure in some way, maybe stimulate him to do creative work of his own again or what? Just to be at a big safe cultural place with other people he doesn’t know ambling by. One nude in a museum painting looks very much like Denise: body, face, hair when it hung loose. This isn’t what he came here for, he thinks, to find a figure in an artwork that looks like her, but he forgot that occasionally what gives him pleasure or makes him think about his life or sets off an action or idea leading to some kind of work comes unexpectedly like this. It isn’t the painting’s subject that interests him much, which is of a woman sitting on the edge of an unmade bed, drinking from a simple cup, holding a matching saucer in her other hand, seems to have slept nude and just woken up, clothes hanging out of a drawer and on the floor all seem to be hers, memo pad and uncapped pen by her leg, book, radio, eyeglasses, nailclippers and lamp on the night table, semiabstract seascape in a broken frame above the dresser, walls and furniture quite shabby, rowhouses through the completely opened window rundown and some of them torched, sun coming up over the tall building at the end of her block, clock between her feet says ten to twelve so it must be winter and some very northern country she’s in or the clock’s stopped. Painting’s called “Mourning Woman Rising,” though her face doesn’t show it—she just seems to be enjoying her day’s first coffee or tea—and if a double meaning’s meant, and it isn’t that she’s mourning for her poor circumstances or the stopped clock or neighborhood in some way, it gets by him. The painting was finished last year and bought for the museum by an anonymous donor. He goes back to this “New Acquisitions” room for weeks, stays in it for an hour or two daily, usually leaning against a wall, finally asks the guard, one of a few who float around this wing of the museum and he’s come to greet or say goodbye to, if a couch, as the museum used to have in almost every room years ago, couldn’t be put in this one so he and other people could look at the paintings and such without getting tired. The guard says something about crowd control, new museum rules, also the insurance company wouldn’t permit it, can’t. He wants to cut the woman out of the painting, take it home, hang it up but not to masturbate to it. He rarely tries that anymore to even a nude magazine photograph he might come upon or what to him is a provocative lingerie or swimsuit ad. Few days later he goes to the museum with a single edge razor blade to cut the figure or the whole painting out, whichever he can do fastest, but walking up the museum’s great interior stairway he says to himself “No, trouble again, and big trouble this time too if you’re caught, which you’ll be, of course, so
go back, don’t look at it today, maybe even stay away from it from now on.”
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