Q: You haven’t answered me. This general guilt —
A: Yes, that’s the interesting thing. I hazard that it is not guilt so much as it is inadequacy. I feel that everything is being nibbled away, because I can’t get it right —
Q: Would you like to be able to fly?
A: It’s crossed my mind.
Q: Myself, I think about being just sort of a regular person, one who worries about cancer a lot, every little thing a prediction of cancer, no I don’t want to go for my every-two-years checkup because what if they find something? I wonder what will kill me and when it will happen, and I wonder about my parents, who are still alive, and what will happen to them. This seems to be to me a proper set of things to worry about. Last things.
A: I don’t think God gives a snap about adultery. This is just an opinion, of course.
Q: So how do you, how shall I put it, pursue —
A: You think about this staggering concept, the mind of God, and then you think He’s sitting around worrying about this guy and this woman at the Beechnut Travelodge? I think not.
Q: Well He doesn’t have to think about every particular instance, He just sort of laid out the general principles —
A: He also created creatures who, with a single powerful glance —
Q: The eyes burn.
A: They do.
Q: The heart leaps.
A: Like a terrapin.
Q: Stupid youth returns.
A: Like hockey sticks falling out of a long-shut closet.
Q: Do you play?
A: I did. Many years ago.
Q: Who is Althea?
A: Someone I know.
Q: We’re basically talking about Althea.
A: Yes. I thought you understood that.
Q: We’re not talking about wholesale —
A: Oh Lord no. Who has the strength?
Q: What’s she like?
A: She’s I guess you’d say a little on the boring side. To the innocent eye.
Q: She appears to be a contained, controlled person, free of raging internal fires.
A: But my eye is not innocent. To the already corrupted eye, she’s —
Q: I don’t want to question you too closely on this. I don’t want to strain your powers of —
A: Well, no, I don’t mind talking about it. It fell on me like a ton of bricks. I was walking in the park one day.
Q: Which park?
A: That big park over by —
Q: Yeah, I know the one.
A: This woman was sitting there.
Q: They sit in parks a lot, I’ve noticed that. Especially when they’re angry. The solitary bench. Shoulders raised, legs kicking —
A: I’ve crossed both major oceans by ship — the Pacific twice, on troopships, the Atlantic once, on a passenger liner. You stand out there, at the rail, at dusk, and the sea is limitless, water in every direction, never-ending, you think water forever, the movement of the ship seems slow but also seems inexorable, you feel you will be moving this way forever, the Pacific is about seventy million square miles, about one-third of the earth’s surface, the ship might be making twenty knots, I’m eating oranges because that’s all I can keep down, twelve days of it with thousands of young soldiers all around, half of them seasick — On the Queen Mary, in tourist class, we got rather good food, there was a guy assigned to our table who had known Paderewski, the great pianist who was also Prime Minister of Poland, he talked about Paderewski for four days, an ocean of anecdotes —
Q: When I was first married, when I was twenty, I didn’t know where the clitoris was. I didn’t know there was such a thing. Shouldn’t somebody have told me?
A: Perhaps your wife?
Q: Of course, she was too shy. In those days people didn’t go around saying, This is the clitoris and this is what its proper function is and this is what you can do to help out. I finally found it. In a book.
A: German?
Q: Dutch.
A: A dead bear in a blue dress, face down on the kitchen floor. I trip over it, in the dark, when I get up at 2 A.M. to see if there’s anything to eat in the refrigerator. It’s an architectural problem, marriage. If we could live in separate houses, and visit each other when we felt particularly gay — It would be expensive, yes. But as it is she has to endure me in all my worst manifestations, early in the morning and late at night and in the nutsy obsessed noontimes. When I wake up from my nap you don’t get the laughing cavalier, you get a rank pigfooted belching blunderer. I knew this one guy who built a wall down the middle of his apartment. An impenetrable wall. He had a very big apartment. It worked out very well. Concrete block, basically, with fibre-glass insulation on top of that and sheetrock on top of that —
Q: What about coveting your neighbor’s wife?
A: Well on one side there are no wives, strictly speaking, there are two floors and two male couples, all very nice people. On the other side, Bill and Rachel have a whole house. I like Rachel but I don’t covet her. I could covet her, she’s covetable, quite lovely and spirited, but in point of fact our relationship is that of neighborliness. I jump-start her car when her battery is dead, she gives me basil from her garden, she’s got acres of basil, not literally acres but — Anyhow, I don’t think that’s much of a problem, coveting your neighbor’s wife. Just speaking administratively, I don’t see why there’s an entire Commandment devoted to it. It’s a mental exercise, coveting. To covet is not necessarily to take action.
Q: I covet my neighbor’s leaf blower. It has this neat Vari-Flo deal that lets you —
A: I can see that.
Q: I am feverishly interested in these questions.
Q: Ethics has always been where my heart is.
Q: Moral precepting stings the dull mind into attentiveness.
Q: I’m only a bit depressed, only a bit.
Q: A new arrangement of ideas, based upon the best thinking, would produce a more humane moral order, which we need.
Q: Apple honey, disposed upon the sexual parts, is not an index of decadence. Decadence itself is not as bad as it’s been painted.
Q: That he watched his father play the piano when his father could not play the piano and that he was reading a book while his father played the piano in a very large hall before a very large audience only means that he finds his roots, as it were, untrustworthy. The father imagined as a root. That’s not unusual.
Q: As for myself, I am content with too little, I know this about myself and I do not commend myself for it and perhaps one day I shall be able to change myself into a hungrier being. Probably not.
Q: The leaf blower, for example.
A: I see Althea now and then, not often enough. We sigh together in a particular bar, it’s almost always empty. She tells me about her kids and I tell her about my kids. I obey the Commandments, the sensible ones. Where they don’t know what they’re talking about I ignore them. I keep thinking about the story of the two old women in church listening to the priest discoursing on the dynamics of the married state. At the end of the sermon one turns to the other and says, “I wish I knew as little about it as he does.”
Q: He critiques us, we critique Him. Does Grete also engage in dalliance?
A: How quaint you are. I think she has friends whom she sees now and then.
Q: How does that make you feel?
A: I wish her well.
Q: What’s in your wallet?
A: The usual. Credit cards, pictures of the children, driver’s license, forty dollars in cash, Amex receipts —
Q: I sometimes imagine that I am in Pest Control. I have a small white truck with a red diamond-shaped emblem on the door and a white jumpsuit with the same emblem on the breast pocket. I park the truck in front of a subscriber’s neat three-hundred-thousand-dollar home, extract the silver canister of deadly pest killer from the back of the truck, and walk up the brick sidewalk to the house’s front door. Chimes ring, the door swings open, a young wife in jeans and a pink flannel shirt worn outside the jeans is
standing there. “Pest Control,” I say. She smiles at me, I smile back and move past her into the house, into the handsomely appointed kitchen. The canister is suspended by a sling from my right shoulder, and, pumping the mechanism occasionally with my right hand, I point the nozzle of the hose at the baseboards and begin to spray. I spray alongside the refrigerator, alongside the gas range, under the sink, and behind the kitchen table. Next, I move to the bathrooms, pumping and spraying. The young wife is in another room, waiting for me to finish. I walk into the main sitting room and spray discreetly behind the largest pieces of furniture, an oak sideboard, a red plush Victorian couch, and along the inside of the fireplace. I do the study, spraying the Columbia Encyclopedia, he’s been looking up the Seven Years’ War, 1756–63, yellow highlighting there, and behind the forty-five-inch RCA television. The master bedroom requires just touches, short bursts in her closet which must avoid the two dozen pairs of shoes there and in his closet which contains six to eight long guns in canvas cases. Finally I spray the laundry room with its big white washer and dryer, and behind the folding table stacked with sheets and towels already folded. Who folds? I surmise that she folds. Unless one of the older children, pressed into service, folds. In my experience they are unlikely to fold. Maybe the au pair. Finished, I tear a properly made out receipt from my receipt book and present it to the young wife. She scribbles her name in the appropriate space and hands it back to me. The house now stinks quite palpably but I know and she knows that the stench will dissipate in two to four hours. The young wife escorts me to the door, and, in parting, pins a silver medal on my chest and kisses me on both cheeks. Pest Control!
A: Yes, one could fit in in that way. It’s finally a matter, perhaps, of fit. Appropriateness. Fit in a stately or sometimes hectic dance with nonfit. What we have to worry about.
Q: It seems to me that we have quite a great deal to worry about. Does the radish worry about itself in this way? Yet the radish is a living thing. Until it’s cooked.
A: Grete is mad for radishes, can’t get enough. I like frozen Mexican dinners, Patio, I have them for breakfast, the freezer is stacked with them —
Q: Transcendence is possible.
A: Yes.
Q: Is it possible?
A: Not out of the question.
Q: Is it really possible?
A: Yes. Believe me.
Paradise Before the Egg
He’s not potent more than forty-two percent of the time.”
“Maybe we could feed him nourishing broths.”
“They say that vitamin E is good for that.”
“That’s what I hear too.”
“I don’t think you can give somebody too much of any particular vitamin. The body takes what it needs and rejects the rest. I read about it.”
“It’s because he’s so old.”
“I don’t think so. I read about this guy who was ninety-three and still was fathering children when he was ninety-three.”
“Perhaps at long intervals after he had been carefully fed with vitamin E and nourishing broths.”
“Maybe we should offer stimulating photographs.”
“Of what?”
“Potentially arousing scenes.”
“You mean the photographs would be more arousing than we are?”
“Well I don’t know how their minds work.”
“Maybe we should offer him potentially arousing scenes that are not photographs.”
“You mean like real life.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Consisting of what?”
“I don’t know. I’d have to look in some books.”
“He’s doing the best he can.”
“That’s your opinion.”
“I think he works quite hard at it, spends hours and hours.”
“I just think we’ve gotten ourselves into a fundamentally false position here, I don’t blame the poor bastard, it’s just more than the male mechanism is equipped to do.”
“I saw this guy in a movie once. I couldn’t believe it.”
“They have these special guys they use for those movies, they’re not what you usually run into. They’re specialists.”
“We don’t want to stress him beyond his capacity or have him go mad or something.”
“He shows no signs of going mad.”
“He’s raveling his clothes. Plucking at threads.”
“I just think that means he doesn’t have very good clothes. His clothes have a lot of loose ends and it’s natural, I think, when you see a loose end to pluck at it.”
“Has he made a will?”
“That’s an evil thought, has he anything to will?”
“Beats me. I wouldn’t take it if he did.”
“Sure you would.”
“How old is he actually?”
“He says he’s fifty-three.”
“He does appreciate what he’s given.”
“As well he should; he’s in hog heaven, objectively speaking.”
Veronica is bouncing on her trampoline. Dore is reading Flowers for Algernon. Simon is in bed with Anne.
“How does it make you feel with us in here and them out there?” she asks.
“Nervous.”
“We’re very tolerant.”
“I see that. What’s that wham-wham-wham noise?”
“Veronica.”
“Is she making obscene comment?”
“She’s just mindless when she gets on the trampoline. She can go for hours. She thinks she’s got a problem with her rump. I don’t think there’s a problem but she thinks there’s a problem.”
“Makes me nervous.”
“Everything makes you nervous.”
“True.”
“Is this a male fantasy for you? This situation?”
“It’s not fantasy, is it?”
“It has the structure of a male fantasy.”
“The dumbest possible way to look at it.”
“Well, screw you.”
“Our purpose here, I thought.”
“Where did you go to college? Was it Harvard?”
“No it wasn’t Harvard.”
“Lots of people didn’t go to Harvard.”
“There’s just not enough Harvard.”
“Maybe we could start a branch. In Florida or somewhere.”
“They probably don’t feel the urgency.”
“What are you going to do after we leave?” she asks.
“Go back to work, I guess.”
“I wish I could do something.”
“Work is God’s best invention. Keeps you all seized up and interested.”
Simon wanted very much to be a hearty, optimistic American, like the President, but on the other hand did not trust hearty, optimistic Americans, like the President. He had considered the possibility that the President, when not in public, was not really hearty and optimistic but rather a gloomy, obsessed man with a profound fear of the potentially disastrous processes in which he was enmeshed, no more sanguine than the Fisher King. He did not really believe this to be the case. He himself had settled for being a competent, sometimes inventive architect with a tragic sense of brick. Brick was his favorite material as the fortress was the architectural metaphor that he had, more and more, to resist. To force himself into freshness, he thought about bamboo.
Getting old, Simon. Not so limber, dear friend, time for the bone factory? The little blue van. Your hands are covered with tiny pepperoni. Your knees predict your face. Your back stabs you, on the left side, twice a day. The soul’s shrinking to a microdot. We’re ordering your rocking chair, size 42. Would you like something in southern pine? Loblolly? Send the women away. They’re too good for you. Also, not good for you. Are you King Solomon? Your kingdom a scant 259,200 square inches. Annual tearfall, 3¼ inches. You feedeth among the lilies, Simon. There are garter snakes among the lilies, Simon, garter belts too. Your garden is overcultivated, it needs weeds. How’s your skiwear, Simon? Done any demolition derbies lately? You
run the mile in, what, a year and a half? We’re sending you an electric treadmill, a solid-steel barbell curl bar, a digital pedometer. Use them. And send the women away.
When he asked himself what he was doing in a bare elegant almost unfurnished New York apartment with three young and beautiful women, Simon had to admit he did not know what he was doing. He was, he supposed, listening. These women were taciturn as cowboys, spoke only to the immediate question, probably did not know in which century the Second World War had taken place. No, too hard; it was, rather, that what they knew was so wildly various, ragout of Spinoza and Cyndi Lauper with a William Buckley sherbet floating in the middle of it. He’d come in one evening to find all three of them kneeling on the dining-room table with their asses pointing at him. Obviously he was supposed to strip off his gentlemanly khakis and attend to all three at once, just as obviously an impossibility. He had placed a friendly hand on each cul in turn and said, “O.K., guys, you’ve had your fun, now get back to the barracks. Out, out, out,” he’d shouted, and they’d scattered, giggling. One night on his back in bed he’d had six breasts to suck, swaying above him, he was poor tattered Romulus. When they couldn’t get a part of him they’d play with each other.
Dore likes to scold people. When anyone in the house does anything that does not meet her specifications for appropriate behavior, Dore scolds.
“Simon you’re not supposed to talk to Anne like that.”
“Like what?”
“You were condescending.”
“In what way?”
“O.K., she never heard of the Marshall Plan. You don’t have to explain it to her. In that way.”
“Was I pompous?”
“Not more than usual. It was in that incredulous look. Like you couldn’t believe that somebody’d never heard of the Marshall Plan.”
“It was a big deal, historically.”
“Simon you are twice as old as we are.”
“That does not absolve you of the necessity of knowing your own history.”
“That’s pompous. That’s truly pompous. That’s just what I’m talking about. And another thing.”
“Oh Lord, what?”
“When you made that joke about George Gershwin and his lovely wife, Ira.”
Flying to America Page 8