by Ira Wood
I had all the time I needed for my writing. I had a job that paid the bills and asked little more than that I show up clean and sober. I had not only a mentor who believed in my writing, but an older and experienced lover. Not infrequently we would travel down to New York City where we’d dine with Marge’s literary agent and her legendary publisher. The lore of literary history abounds with famous couplings, friendships, salons, cafes, and writing classes, but surely my situation ranked among the best a young writer could experience. Could anyone be stupid enough to screw this up?
2.
The trouble with having the perfect situation for writing is that it leaves too much time for writing.
—An axiom
For you to understand this story it might be necessary to explain how my mind works. I create dramas, situations involving trouble and personal misfortune on a frightful scale. Behaviorists call it catastrophic imagination . It is as if I am only at peace when I imagine myself ensnared in some complex and tragic circumstance. If such a circumstance does not exist, I create it.
The other night I took in a movie. It was a tepid disappointment. Nor was there anything interesting on the radio on the ride home. Even the Red Sox were ahead nine to one in the eighth inning. Faced with a wearisome forty-five-minute drive on an unlit stretch of highway, I hit a pothole and imagined I’d run someone down in the dark. I had seen no one, of course, but the thump of the front tire echoed as the miles sped by and I turned off the exit ramp and circled back, not once but twice, searching the breakdown lane for a corpse. Finding none, I woke up in a cold sweat at dawn the next morning, checked the online edition of the Cape Cod Times and scoured the local news for days afterward in an effort to discover any unsolved hit-and-runs announced by the police.
So if a relatively tedious drive home from the movies is a situation intolerable enough to cause me to fabricate manslaughter, imagine the process of writing a novel. The countless false starts and dead ends, the months of solitary contemplation and postponed reward, only to be followed by the improbability of interesting a publisher.
In my tradition there is a story about a poor man who lives cheek by jowl with his large family in a tiny wooden shack. His children are underfoot, his mother-in-law mutters complaints, his wife is miserable. So he goes to his spiritual leader, his rabbi, for advice. Rabbi, he explains, I don’t have room to breathe, what can I do? The rabbi tells him to go to the market, buy a goat, and tether it next to his stove. A goat? You heard me, the rabbi says emphatically, and come back next week. The man does as he’s told. When he returns he tells the rabbi, the goat is shitting on the floor. My wife won’t talk to me. It’s worse! What should I do?
Go to the market and buy a donkey, the rabbi says. A donkey! But the man does as he’s told and comes back the following week tearing at his clothing. The donkey kicks the goat, he screams. The children now have fleas. What should I do?
Go to the market, says the rabbi, and buy a cow. Not a cow! But exactly one week later he returns to the rabbi sobbing, pounding the floor in fits of tears. The rabbi shakes his head. Sell the goat, he says. When the man returns, he does have to admit, things are a little better. But the stench, it’s unbearable, he says. Sell the donkey, the rabbi tells him. The following week the man is a bit calmer. My kids have settled down, he says, my wife is talking to me again, but the moo-ing, every morning at 4 A.M. Go sell the cow, says the Rabbi, and the man marches in the next time like a brass band. He looks twenty years younger. He’s smiling from ear to ear. My house feels as big as a mansion! he sings. No donkey, no goat, no cow. Rabbi, I feel like a new man.
Moral of the story: The way to make your life better is to make it worse first.
3.
Sex is more interesting than writing. Writing is alone. Sex is connection. Writing is dry. Sex is wet. Writing is anonymous. Sex is attention. Writing is a puzzle. Sex is the answer. Why would anyone write when they could have sex?
But I only saw Marge one night a week and sex with someone else wasn’t enough to make it worse. Marge was not in the least possessive and was in fact living with another man. It had to be sex with exactly the wrong person.
Wendy arrived in Boston on the night of a major snowstorm. She’d lost her job as a school aide as a result of budget cuts in San Diego. She had a young son and she had debts. There was a loan to pay off, she told me, then added in a nervous voice that trailed off as she spoke, that she’d hooked up with an escort agency to get them by. Desperate to turn her life around, encouraged by a guy she used to live with, she headed home to Chicago with her 4-year-old in the car seat of an old Chevy Malibu. But the guy never told her he was married, Wendy said, and her mother had a new boyfriend who didn’t like kids. Remembering an old college roommate whose child would now be about her son’s age, she made a last-ditch phone call from her mother’s kitchen. Twenty-six hours later she arrived on the doorstep of the woman my friend Jackson from the bus company was dating.
Wendy was between jobs, betweens homes, between friends, between lives; she was destitute, afraid, a single mother in a strange city starting a new life from scratch. I knew little about her except that she was lost. And in own my way so was I. I woke up, took a bus, drove a bus, and took a bus home only to spend four hours writing nothing that had ever been published until it was time to take a bus, drive a bus, and take another one back. Marge’s time with me was strictly limited by her own schedule and my only friends were a loose amalgam of people who had fought against the Vietnam War which had ended years before and who now fought with each about what to be against next. I was submitting excerpts of my work to small magazines and getting a string of rejections, doing readings in local libraries for crowds of six or eight people, usually homeless. Like Wendy, I felt invisible. When my writing was acknowledged by anyone but Marge a friend might ask “How’s the project?” as if I was building a chicken incubator for the high school science fair.
Although Wendy was vain about her long slender legs and the dark chocolate hair that fell to her shoulders in loose ringlets, she was ashamed of her skin and used a heavy hand with powder and blush. Purple shadow made her eyes look enormous, almost childlike, especially when beamed wide on all the strangers she hoped to befriend. Along with bursts of inappropriate laughter and the short skirts she wore in the decade’s coldest winter, she was clearly in need, out of place in buttoned-up Boston. Marge, by comparison, a respected novelist, a poet who drew huge audiences, an exotic deep-breasted beauty with the kind of classic curves that made thin women think themselves superior and their husbands think of sex struck me as an anomaly in my life. How could a woman that hot, and successful, and married, ever really need me?
Certainly not as much as Wendy, or Wendy’s son, River, a ruddy little freckle-faced pepperbox bursting with curiosity and indignation; a fists-up bantamweight fighter with an eagerness to take on adults and bullies his own age alike. River was my first foray into fatherhood, instant fatherhood, and tripped whatever inborn instinct I had to nurture and protect. Wendy and River were living precariously at the indulgence of her friend Patricia, recently divorced, who was good-hearted enough to invite Wendy to share her apartment but canny enough to understand that living with another single mother who knew no one amounted to free and ready child care. So there was the rush of being needed and the opportunity to be a dad and in a time and place in which I felt invisible, I was suddenly the most important person in the world to a vulnerable little family of two.
But most of all there was sex. Wendy and I made love within two hours of being introduced, the week after she arrived in town, before she had even bought a bed, on a sheet thrown across the old living room couch. There was no door, which bothered Wendy less than Patricia, who was humping Jackson in her own bedroom, an event which frequently ended after a minute of thunderous bed shaking followed by the sound of Patricia’s frustrated stomp to the bathroom by way of the living room, where she would sometimes stop to say, “Jesus, you people are still at it?” We u
sually were.
Even on that first night, before we turned in, Wendy said with earnest cheer, “If you want to put it in while I’m sleeping, go ahead.”
Most women I had known desired a soupçon of foreplay at least, while Wendy’s particular physicality seemed to preclude the need for lubrication of any kind. “Just pop it in,” she might say, tugging her panties down, almost anywhere really, from the back seat during a drive-in movie to the lavatory of a Greyhound bus. Once, during a moonless night in July, a jogger tripped over us on the footpath surrounding Walden Pond. Many times I had thought Wendy would more properly enjoy a man with a much larger penis, something perhaps the size of a mature sockeye salmon. But she always seemed to come, quickly, with a shiver, like an actor downing a quick shot of booze before the curtain went up. Stud! Cowboy! Do me! she would moan. I had never had this effect on a woman before. But with all this, it was with her mouth that Wendy displayed a most singular talent, and while this would be an inappropriate space for any kind of graphic reminiscence, I can say I was reminded of Wendy just the other day while watching Animal Planet and seeing a python ingesting a wood rat.
Had Marge lived in Boston, had she not had a husband who, in spite of his professed permissiveness, begrudged our growing intimacy and my visits to the Cape, had I thought there was any chance I might be more than a part-time boyfriend, I might have buckled down to my book and ignored the temptation to add myself to mother and son, like milk to a cake mix, and cook up an instant family. But daily sex with Wendy was difficult to resist.
If there was one factor that stoked her desire to the extreme it was my bond with her son. The more time I spent with River, the more I acted the role of a father, the more games of whiffle ball we played, the more songs we sang, the more mornings I made him pancakes and afternoons I picked him up from day care, the wilder Wendy was in bed. Every night I arrived with another children’s book, another VCR cassette from the library, and every night after River fell asleep we indulged in another debauch. C is for Cookie. Bein’ Green. People in Your Neighborhood. I Love Trash. Most people I knew back then had hot sex listening to the suave bass of Barry White; I memorized every song on Sesame Street Sing Along and screwed like a porn star.
But it didn’t take long to learn that the opposite was also true. Although Wendy had originally said she could handle my dating Marge, she was furious when I refused to break up with her and soon sex with Wendy was spiked with resentment. Frankly, because I had more than sex going on with Marge, because we, too, jumped into bed soon after she arrived, because we talked well into the night while Wendy and I had almost nothing in common, because Marge valued not only my work but my comments on the early drafts of hers, I decided the best option was to cool things with Wendy, to maintain a commitment to River and if possible transition to a family friend, when I fell victim to an obsession more destructive than any I had ever known, a hysteria to which I was all too susceptible but helpless to control.
It began while I was visiting Marge on the Cape, where I always made it a point to phone Wendy some time during the evening. Because Wendy was home baby-sitting two 4-year-olds and I felt guilty enjoying a good Bordeaux with another lover, I would go through the motions of telling Wendy how miserable I was without her, a charade she never believed but, with no other adult to talk to, she would grudgingly prolong. On this particular night Wendy sounded cheerful and vivacious. There was no TV in the background or squabbling children. In fact, I thought I heard a familiar tune. “I gotta go,” she said after a few minutes. “Have a good time with Marge.”
“You want me to have a good time with Marge?”
“Of course,” she said. “Bye!”
“Wendy, wait. What’s that song?”
“What song?” she said defensively.
“In your house, Wendy. The song I am listening to right now. Is that Rubber Ducky?”
“I don’t know.”
I distinctly heard the clear timbre of a young man’s singing voice and above it the silly laughter of two giggling children. “Who’s there, Wendy?”
“River’s day care teacher, Chad,” she said. “Why would you care, you’re with Marge?” But I caught it in her voice at that moment, the answer to her own question, the click of realization—I was jealous—and the birth of a strategy taking form. “Gotta go!” She hung up, and all that night I saw images of her fabulous oral tricks, her throaty dirty-talk, and an entire porn film starring Wendy going down on some grunger from the day care center to the tune of Rubber Ducky.
The more lurid my fantasies, the more I craved sex with her. The more she knew I wanted her, the more men she brought home when I wasn’t around. After River’s day care teacher there was the van driver, the cook, the director of the school, and then as far as I could tell, any guy who was remotely nice to her son. I couldn’t very well ask her to stop unless I stopped seeing Marge. Nor could I berate her for acting out the very behavior that had attracted me in the first place. Sex was easy for Wendy. She knew how to use it to get what she needed. I was living proof. But sometimes I’d burst out, “Why are you such a slut, Wendy? To get back at me?”
“Why am I a slut? Because I have sex with other men? Is Marge a slut?”
“I knew Marge before I knew you.”
“Well, I knew Chad.”
“What about Teddy? Or James? Or Carlos, the guy I saw you making out with in the laundromat?”
“Carlos was sweet,” she said. “River was cranky so Carlos bought him a package of peanut butter crackers from the vending machine.”
“He bought your son a package of crackers so you started tongue kissing the guy? I can’t even imagine what’s in store for the kid’s pediatrician.”
Now, if I was reading this instead of writing it, a satyricon, a sex farce featuring a moronic self-absorbed satyr, the anguished rant of some fool complaining about an impossible situation that he had created for himself, I would say, Idiot, you have no right to be jealous. I would ask, Why did you get involved with Wendy in the first place? You were dating a beautiful older woman who loved you, who loved sleeping with you, who believed in your work. What did you imagine would happen? What made you think that a lonesome destitute single mother who fucked you two hours after being introduced would remain faithful while you were with another woman? Why would you go on torturing yourself?
Because I was writing. Because sitting alone in a room for four hours a day and attempting to make up a story is much less interesting than imagining your woman with a stranger’s penis in her mouth. Yes, it is painful. Of course, it is counterproductive. But on any scale of interest or measurement of emotional involvement jealousy is to writing what five-alarm habañero chile is to cream of wheat. Writing is cream of wheat.
It gets better. But not until it gets worse.
4.
After some months I had finished a few hundred pages of a not very good first draft, but I had wild sex every day, some days twice, with two different partners. Wendy and I had reached a kind of shaky equilibrium, based on the fact that Marge and I spent only one night a week together when she was up from the Cape and their paths never crossed. There were the occasional complications that involved the application of Nix Creme Rinse for Pubic Lice, but by and large, we co-existed.
Until one hot summer night, while at my apartment with Marge, I received a telephone call from Wendy who was choking on mucus and tears. “I’m homeless,” Wendy said. “She’s throwing us out.”
“Who’s throwing you out? Why?”
“Patricia, the bitch. For no reason.”
Patricia’s side of the story painted her in a somewhat more understanding light. Apparently she had arrived home unexpectedly to find Wendy and Jackson asleep on the couch. “We weren’t doing anything,” Wendy protested. But, according to Patricia, nor were they wearing very much.
Marge, always sympathetic to the plight of a homeless single mother, worked diligently to find a new place for Wendy, who eventually located what may have been
the last available rent-controlled apartment in the city. It was unfortunate that it was two blocks from mine, and so started her habit of showing up for a surprise lunchtime date on the very afternoons Marge was scheduled to arrive. My sudden lack of sexual energy on those afternoons caused Marge to give me an ultimatum: draw limits with Wendy or she would give up on the relationship with me. Marge was seriously evaluating an offer to teach at a prestigious writing program where a former lover of hers was also teaching. It is certainly possible that Wendy’s spontaneous lunchtime blowjobs could have been the factor that ended my relationship with Marge and changed the course of my life. But it wasn’t; it was the fire. The electrical fire that burned down Wendy’s building and left her without a home or an article of clothing to her name and brought her to my door one night with her son in her arms.
It had taken me exactly eighteen months to go from a promising young writer with his own quaint apartment and a sophisticated older mistress to a putz with two angry girlfriends who hated each other, a child not his own and, in lieu of a goat, a donkey, and a cow, an eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the bedroom.
5.
I would occasionally answer the phone to the following:
“Hi, is Wendy there? This is Brad from her Ed Psych class. No? Tell her not to call me back, okay? Tell her I’ll call her. You got that? Under no circumstances should she call my house.”
These were men from her night school courses, guys who were hoping for a little action on the side. Three nights a week Wendy was making up required credits, completing her BS in Education in hopes of getting into grad school for a Masters in Special Ed. It seemed like an impossible long shot, a single mother of thirty working part-time, studying for the GRE nine years after leaving college, but we rarely talked about it. In fact we avoided talking about our situation entirely. Our little makeshift family lived together in my small apartment along with the invisible gorilla, a huge and unmentionable presence made apparent the very morning after the fire, when Wendy opened a dresser drawer, found Marge’s stash of black fishnet stockings and garter belts and threw them in my face; a situation hopeless to discuss because, as Wendy had no money and no other alternatives, there was nothing we could do about it. Therefore River was the focus, always. Getting him to school in the morning, making sure he ate breakfast, reading to him at night, painstakingly scheduling pick-ups, drop-offs, play dates; making life seem normal, making sure he wasn’t crushed by the enormity of this love blunder of ours. With every spare moment, early mornings before sunrise, evenings, breaks at her job, Wendy studied. A teaching job was the dream, the only imaginable solution, the impossible outside chance that might ensure her ability to make a living for herself and her child. I could feel her sheer impatience with me, her excitement as weekends approached, when I might visit Marge and leave her to her son, her studies, her new school friends. There was no future for Wendy and me, only her present dependence, and the unspoken but mutual determination to see this mess through to a peaceful end.