by Ira Wood
Did I want to smoke a joint? Kharma asked. Why not? Would I roll it while she went to the bathroom? No problem. And upon returning to the bedroom naked except for a black lace bra, Didn’t I always really want to do this? I suppose I had.
Throughout the course of my much younger life I have had occasion to observe that whenever I had not been looking for sex, had no particular desire, no attraction, no place to do it or time to do it in, the opportunity often arose unbidden. Like the very next night back in Boston at the restaurant where I worked, when a waitress with whom I’d been carrying on a mild flirtation abruptly announced she had lost her apartment and was moving west. Could she buy me a farewell drink? Of course. Could I put her up at my place? Why not? The sex was entirely forgettable, a fumbling late night attempt to create closure to a connection that was a fantasy to begin with. It led to nothing. In fact I divulged everything upon Marge’s return. I don’t think we had left the baggage carousel at Logan airport before I begged forgiveness. I swore fidelity forever. End of story.
Except that a few days later, while on the Cape, I began to feel caustic electric shocks, burning flashes of liquid fire, whenever I tried to urinate. Marge insisted that I see a doctor immediately—IMMEDIATELY!—the quality of health care on Cod Cape at the time notwithstanding. (Marge had twisted her ankle jogging the year before and was diagnosed with gout.) My infidelity precluded putting it off, however. Nolo contendere. I was guilty.
The admissions clerk at the local clinic seemed to pick up on this—although at first I thought it was because I wasn’t a local, in itself suspect—and greeted me with a cold silent stare.
“Hello.” I smiled, but she wasn’t having any of it. Everything about me looked like trouble. “I’m here to see a doctor. I have a kind of burning pain—”
“Speak up, please.”
This was a delicate situation, one that begged privacy. Yet the closer in I moved the farther she backed away. “Well, I’m experiencing a burning—when I go to the bathroom.”
“And where would that be?”
“On the second floor of the house.”
“The burn wound,” she said, deciding she was in dialog with an idiot. “Has it begun to blister?”
“I didn’t say I have a burn wound, exactly, I said I have a burning.”
“Then where is the burning, exactly?”
There was no easy way to say this to a stranger, a woman, in a crowded reception room. I therefore tried to mouth the words.
“Speak up, please.”
“You know, in my. . . .” I dropped my eyes to my groin.
“Sir, I can’t hear you.”
“IN MY PENIS. I HAVE A BURNING PAIN IN MY PENIS.”
Every head in the room shot up. “You’d better come with me.”
I was directed down a long yellow corridor where a nurse in square white shoes, white stockings, and a starched Florence Nightingale cap looked me up and down with her fists firmly anchored to her hips. Without a word she led me to an egg-shaped man wearing a stethoscope and perched on a creaky wooden chair with wheels.
“Well let me see it, let me see it.” He waved at my trousers while pawing through a cluttered desk drawer. As I lowered my zipper the nurse glanced uneasily at the exit sign, unsure what exactly I was going to reveal, a bomb, a gun, a chancre-covered sack of pus. The doctor wheeled forward while untwisting a paperclip that he meticulously straightened to its full length, preparing to begin the examination.
“Open the meatus,” he growled, barely parting his lips to speak. Mē-ā′təs. I had never heard the word. “The meatus, the meatus,” he repeated, indicating the tip of my penis. I froze upon hearing the snap of the nurse’s rubber gloves. Confused, and therefore paralyzed, I didn’t know what they wanted, until the nurse pinched it open like the mouth of a baby bird. With the first jab of the paper clip I staggered into the doctor, whose chair rolled over the nurse’s foot. Enough! The nurse tore off her gloves. I would have to seek help elsewhere.
“But where?” This was the only clinic within forty-five miles. “Where?” I followed her to the door.
“Elsewhere, elsewhere,” she shouted, as if giving a deaf beggar directions to hell.
Marge, no stranger to casual sex, was angry and understandably wounded, but nonetheless making an effort to forgive me. In my absence, however, she, too, had begun to experience a burning sensation. We left immediately for Boston where she had scheduled an appointment with her gynecologist who referred me to a urologist, post-haste.
A well-fed, bull-necked fellow with an avuncular laugh and long silver-tipped cavalry mustaches, he dismissed the Cape doctor as a back-country moron and referred to himself as “the old army doc,” as in “The old army doc has served the troops on four continents,” and “There’s nothing the old army doc hasn’t seen.” Indeed the examination room was decorated with color photographs of anal genital herpes and pubic lice. Cheerfully describing the various shades and textures of discharge—milky, cottage cheesy, green—he began his examination. “So you had a sexual encounter outside marriage?”
“Well, my partner and I aren’t married.”
“The old one-night stand.” His chuckle held a hint of nostalgia.
“Two,” I corrected him. “One-night stands.”
“Besides the partner?” His eyebrows peaked. With a waiting room full of swollen prostates, his morning was suddenly getting interesting. “Not allergic to penicillin are you?”
“Will that cure it?”
“If you have syphilis it will.”
“I might have syphilis?”
“Any lesions or chancres?”
“No.”
“Any pustulating sores? Gumma on your anus? Your face?”
“Gumma?”
“Round tumorous masses. I treated an old man in Korea whose face looked like a sack of golf balls. No coloration on your shorts?”
“I haven’t noticed any.”
“Oh, you’d notice. Bunch of my boys in Pusan, half the damn platoon, came down with the clap. Their shorts were the color of eggs over easy.” He handed me a glass slide and instructed me to hold it in front of my penis while he opened a fresh tube of surgical jelly. “Hold tight to the table now.”
“But I haven’t had any discharge.”
“Not to worry, the old army doc can get blood from a stone. Ready?” he asked, and pressed my prostate like a doorbell until one tiny droplet dribbled onto the slide. Later that evening he telephoned with the results. “Chlamydia!” he proclaimed with the enthusiasm of a proud grandpa announcing the name of a newborn.
3.
Many men would have to admit that the sole reason they have even half a chance with a woman who is in all measurable ways more intelligent and financially independent, socially astute and imbued with a firm sense of life purpose, is that they are some kind of improvement over the previous guy; a WIFP, as the expression goes, a Work in F**king Progress. I was not as a rule unfaithful. Yes, there had been Wendy. But Marge was married and living with another man at the time. And yes again, the one anomalous weekend. But I was not some kind of man ho. I did not hit on Marge’s friends. Or try to impress these friends of Marge’s with four-star restaurant meals billed to the family credit card. I did not install my girlfriends in the guest room or sing lugubrious Appalachian folk songs on the auto harp when one of them dumped me. Yes, I had given Marge an STD. But I was not her ex-husband.
Marge was a reformed roué, a woman of admitted sexual experience and curiosity. I didn’t expect her to pump her fists and shout, Hey, I might have pelvic inflammatory disease but it beats living with a man who doesn’t want to share my bed. I didn’t expect her to choke down 500 mg of erythromycin four times a day and shrug, Who cares about nausea, stomach pain, and vomiting, Woody’s got my back. But the fact is, I did. I wasn’t jealous of the attention she received. I was more than happy to take up the slack at home when she was on the road and honored to be asked to read the early drafts of her fiction and offer feedb
ack. All of which the ex considered to be a drag.
I was ashamed of myself. I was ready, begging by now, to commit to monogamy. Her husband had never been. Even when I knew she was angry and feeling vulnerable, wondering if she would ever be able to trust me again, our strengths and weaknesses were oddly counterbalanced. Marge was good at making money but never able to save it. I was my father’s son, cheap. She didn’t have a retirement plan. I’d studied the market but had never had a dime to invest.
Some days before Thanksgiving, Marge received a cryptic summons from her mother in Florida. Come down here, her mother demanded. As soon as possible, she insisted. I have something to give you. And most mysteriously: Take the car.
In poems and novels, Marge’s mother emerged as an impoverished and embittered working class housewife from inner city Detroit, and more, an insidious manipulator. She was a psychic, according to Marge, able to perceive the innermost secrets of strangers and read the palms of neighbor women who lined up outside her kitchen door for the privilege. She was resentful of having had to quit high school in the tenth grade to work as a chambermaid and, jealous of her daughter’s opportunities, she had tried to prevent Marge from taking a scholarship to one of the best universities in the country so she might remain living at home and pay rent. She was prone to fits of childish petulance. In one family story, upset with her husband’s late arrival for dinner, she dumped a stew she’d been cooking for hours into the garbage can. Powerless, however, in the face of her husband’s violent temper—he once slammed the car door on Marge’s hand because she was slow to climb into the back seat—Marge’s mother attempted to wield absolute control over her daughter, sniffing her underpants for evidence of sexual activity, finding and reading her hidden diaries, subjecting her boyfriends, and later in life Marge’s husband, to unyielding ridicule. In fact her ex-husband flat out refused to visit his in-laws ever again.
“What exactly does your mother want to give you?” I asked.
Marge couldn’t even guess.
“Why the hurry?”
“She said it had to be before Christmas.”
“But your mother is Jewish.”
Many things about her mother were a complete mystery to Marge.
“Why do you have to drive twelve-hundred miles?”
“I assume it’s too big to take back on the plane.”
“What is?”
“She wouldn’t say.”
What I was about to experience upon meeting her mother was inexplicable and is to this day, bizarre, as close as I have ever come to encountering the supernatural. I had no way of knowing any of this at the time, only that Marge and I were partners and friends as much as we were lovers, however long we might remain together. I knew that visits with her mother were emotionally wrenching for Marge. I gathered, too, that this visit might be the last and I wasn’t about to ask her to face it alone.
4.
I had seen photographs of Marge’s mother and I was expecting an intimidating matriarch with Marge’s dark penetrating eyes and loose black hair, but it was a white-haired lady, slender and frail, who opened the door of their small retirement home in Tequesta. She was perhaps four-and-a-half feet tall with a coquettish gleam in her eyes and a soft hopeful smile. She led us to the kitchen table and an old aluminum pot full of something lumpy and thick with a brown gelatinous gravy reminiscent of motor oil. “It’s lamb stew,” she whispered. “But I have to say it’s beef or he won’t eat it.”
He? I looked around. “I’m not really hungry,” I said.
She nodded with quiet understanding, “You still worry about your weight.”
How did she know that? “I’m not worried about my weight.”
“People make life miserable for overweight children.”
I turned silently to Marge. Obesity was the shame of my childhood. You told her that?
Marge slowly shook her head, of course not.
Then how did she...?
Marge shrugged, She just knows.
Her mother patted the chair next to hers at the kitchen table. “Have some,” she said. It was not a question.
He, who I realized was always Marge’s father, was enveloped in an enormous Naugahyde recliner watching TV. No longer the sadistic despot who once gave his wife a gift-wrapped mop for her birthday, he was a pallid old man with smudged eye-glasses, a half-zipped fly and the bewildered expression of someone stranded on an island between two lanes of traffic. He was happy enough to have visitors but confused as this was Tuesday and the visiting nurse came on Wednesdays. Nonetheless he rolled up his sleeve to have his blood pressure checked and chuckled, “Heh, heh, heh,” the only sounds I heard from him as long as the visit lasted.
Marge’s mother entered the living room with a thick folder of newspaper clippings. She took a seat next to me on the couch and placed them one after another on my lap. Some were yellow and crumbling, decades old.
“Mother likes to talk about current events,” Marge said by way of explanation.
“I don’t know,” I responded politely after giving each one a glance. “I really haven’t put much thought into President Carter’s dealings with Anwar Sadat.”
“He’s no use at conversation.” Her mother sniffed at her husband. “How about this?” She handed me an article about the introduction of a mechanical heart called the Jarvic-7.
“Don’t know much about medicine, I’m afraid.”
“You were in the slow reader group in grade school, weren’t you?”
I had never told that to anyone. Not Marge. Not one soul.
Marge looked at the ceiling.
At four-ten it was time for dinner and they were taking us to the best restaurant in town. The parking lot of Bob’s Muddy Rudder was mobbed to overflow. Pushing through the early-bird crowd to the hostess stand, Marge’s mother announced our arrival and was told to wait in the lounge, a dark, low-ceilinged room throbbing with reggae, lit only by fish tanks. “But we have reservations,” her mother insisted. Then she turned to her husband. “Did you make the reservations?”
“Heh, heh, heh.”
“Mother, we could try another restaurant,” Marge suggested.
Crestfallen, she looked longingly at the potted palm trees on the outdoor deck and the view of the natural gas facility across the canal. “But I’ve always wanted to eat here.”
“How long?” I asked the hostess, who sized up the importance of Marge’s parents. She was perfectly polite, running her fingers through the names in her reservation book, but I’d worked in the restaurant trade and her body language was clear enough: Why don’t you nice folks go and try the Taco Bell on South Dixie Highway?
Marge’s mother was near tears. “What did she say?”
“That they’re booked solid.”
“You don’t get along with your mother, do you?” she said.
We found a steak house in a nearby strip mall. The décor was tired, the crowd ancient, the waitresses overworked. “They have chicken, they have seafood. Look, Dad, ribs!” Marge, apparently sensing trouble, did her best to settle us in for a pleasant meal. “It’s a nice big menu, Mother, isn’t it?”
In fact her mother had completely disappeared behind it, muttering a string of epithets. “It’s shit, all shit,” her mother hissed. “A stinking shit menu.”
Marge ordered a bottle of wine.
“What would you like, Mother? Fresh tuna? They have very nice shrimp. Red grouper. And Mahi Mahi. . . .”
“Piss. Shit and molasses.”
Marge ordered broiled tuna for her mother, ribs for her dad, but no sooner had the waitress delivered the main courses than her mother’s entree had disappeared, the plate empty except for a small serving of julienned carrots. “This is puke. Not eating puke,” Marge’s mother muttered, folding a half-pound tuna steak in an oil-stained linen napkin and stuffing it into her purse. “I’m bringing it home to the cat.”
“Can I pour you another glass of wine?” I asked.
“Please,” Marge said
.
“You drink too much.” Her mother fixed me with a cold stare. “And you better stop it with those drugs.”
I smiled weakly, as if to slough off a bad joke, but inside I was ice. Could she know about the cocaine, this little woman who lived twelve-hundred miles away? Marge didn’t know about the cocaine. I believed it now. She was a mind reader, just as Marge had said. She was some kind of savant or a mutant out of the X-Men comics. I understood why Marge was overly secretive at times, why she got angry if she ever came upon me searching for something, even a pencil, in her desk drawers, why she clammed up if I came near when she was on the telephone. It was pure self-defense.
A moment before, I had had the illusion of something flying past my eyes. An insect, I’d surmised, but just now something hit me in the neck. When I saw the waitress bring her hand to her ear, I realized it was Marge’s mother. She was rolling tiny balls of rye bread and throwing them while her litany of curses got louder. “Fuck. Balls. Shit and molasses.”
“Mother, please, stop it.” Marge grabbed the breadbasket. “Mother what are you doing? Dad, what is she doing?”
“Heh, heh, heh.”
When we arrived at their house the following morning, Marge’s mother was vibrant, wearing a black and white checkered dress and red lipstick, cheeks flushed with mischief. “He’s not here.” She seemed years younger, giddy with relief. “He’s playing pinochle.” She steered us to the couch. “He won’t be back till eleven.”
As Marge and I sat in wait, her mother darted from room to room. Drawers flew open, boxes tumbled from closets, shoes were scattered, the freezer door slammed. Returning again and again to the couch she dropped wads of dollar bills in our laps. They were rolled tightly, crumpled, folded, bound with rubber bands. The pile grew too large for us to hold and toppled to the floor. But she kept returning, out of breath, digging treasure out of sewing boxes, flower vases, old boots, jelly jars, the backs of stuffed chairs, anywhere she could hide it from her husband, years upon decades of one-dollar bills secretly hoarded and hidden out of sight.