A Few Corrections

by Brad Leithauser

  “Well now”—she sighs—“this was shortly after Gordon died. Not more than a month or two. And one night there’s a knock on the door and in comes your father.”

  “Come to pay his respects to the widow.”

  “I didn’t know what he’d come for actually. Anyway, I led him into the kitchen. I’d just been to the grocery store.

  “Was I in a shaken state? Yes, I was, Luke, because, expected though Gordon’s death had been, the actual dying had torn me up. I don’t mean merely that it made me very sad—though it did. And very lonely—though it did. It also made me irrational, and one sudden fear was that poverty would descend on me overnight. (Actually, maybe I would have been better off if this fear had continued to haunt me—it might have prevented me from subsidizing Wes to the tune of eighty thousand dollars!) In any case, I’d gone to the grocery and bought just the sorts of things I used to buy after Wes left us, when we hardly had two dimes to rub together: I bought Spam and deviled ham and tin cans marked down because they were dented.

  “So now you have the background, Luke. And there we were, Wes and I, in the kitchen, and wouldn’t you have thought, under the circumstances, with Gordon something like a month in his grave, and both of us in our fifties, Wes actually almost sixty, and a new father of twins besides, truly it never occurred to me that— that he would make a pass at me.” Sally manages to look and sound outraged—or nearly manages it, for isn’t there just a hint of merriment lurking at the corners of her eyes, and out along the vibrating edges of her voice? “But that’s exactly what the man did! And he didn’t seem to have a doubt in the world about the suitability of what he was doing! I told him to stop and he didn’t stop. And I told him to stop and he didn’t stop. And for just one moment I got very angry. It was one thing if Wes was always going to be having these affairs, but another if he was going to have one with me. I’d been his wife, and surely there’s something unseemly about having an affair with your wife. In any case, I reached behind me and I—can you tell what popped into my hand?”

  “A can of Spam.”

  And merriment comes out plain—it’s dancing in her eyes—and Sally says something that, under the circumstances, could hardly please me more: “You’ve got the instincts of a real storyteller, Luke. A can of Spam is exactly what it was.”

  “Kapow.”

  “I’m sure kapow is a bit of an overstatement,” Sally corrects me. “I didn’t hit him hard,” she points out. “It felt more like a push than a hit.”

  “But you gave him a black eye.”

  “Well, he bruised easily. Like you.”

  My jubilant laughter appears to reassure her somewhat, even if she doesn’t join in. She goes on, pensively: “And I do have to say, in many ways it was the most effective let’s call it gesture I ever made toward Wes. I think I so flabbergasted him he never even considered making advances again. From that point on, we were on a completely different footing—one that lasted for the rest of his life.”

  “And that’s a ‘footing’ I still don’t fully understand. It would never have occurred to me, for example, that you were regularly lending him money . . .”

  “You know what I think? I think it’s time I had a glass of wine. Why don’t we have a glass of wine?”

  I throw on shoes and a polo shirt and we make our way up to the awninged terrace of one of the little cafés abutting the beach. Sally orders a kir royale and I do too, although at this point I hardly need a drink—sleeplessness has set my head aspin.

  Sally and I have long had a tacit understanding that either one is free to cut off an uncomfortable conversation—we don’t press each other too close—and I’m wondering whether by calling for wine she’s shutting the door on a painful line of inquiry. But soon after our drinks arrive, she lights another cigarette and resumes the conversation where we’d left it:

  “Surely you’ve discovered that Conrad can give you all sorts of information I just don’t have. But I don’t think even he knew how things stood with Wes and me these last few years. Wes kept turning up. The truth is, I didn’t let on to anybody just how often Wes turned up. He was forever driving down from Restoration to Grosse Pointe, some hundred and eighty miles round-trip, often for nothing more than a cup of coffee. He always had a new problem, or a new scheme. I suppose I was a sort of adviser. I suppose I was his confidante.”

  “This was after Gordon died?”

  “Mostly. No—not completely . . .” And it surprises me, it delights me: Who would have supposed this admission would bring a blush to Sally’s cheeks?

  “Of course there was never anything improper,” she murmurs, but what do mere technicalities signify, in a case like this? When your conscience stands in the dock? When you already consider yourself guilty, as she manifestly does?

  And it seems I understand a good many things all at once . . .

  Even before Gordon died, Wes succeeded in beguiling Sally back into his world. Nothing untoward, no improprieties—no, no, and yet on the plane of the spirit he had conscripted her. There were contacts between them that had to be concealed from Gordon, and later, even after Gordon’s death, contacts needing to be concealed from Tiffany . . . And I saw how Wes had largely triumphed, notwithstanding the famous Night When Sally Blackened His Eye with a Can of Spam: He contrived to lure her into that clandestine world—concealed meetings, small lies, ongoing chains of deception—where he was most comfortable.

  Sally says: “It’s very simple, really. Wes was a proud man. He didn’t want everyone knowing it each time he hit a little snag. That’s understandable.” But her statement might as well be a question: That’s understandable? There’s an imploring note to her voice.

  She goes on: “Wes sometimes felt people were hostile to him and the truth is people were probably even more hostile than he realized. People don’t like womanizers. Maybe I ought to narrow my generalization and say, People in Restoration, Michigan, didn’t like womanizers. Maybe they’re commendable figures here on this French beach. But back there, and back then, it seemed men didn’t like womanizers because I suppose they were jealous; and women, particularly married women, felt misused by them, at least afterward. The fact is, among my women friends, one or two of whom it later turned out had actually gone to bed with him, everyone wanted me to hate Wes.

  “But honey, I could never hate Wes—at least not for long. I merely found him impossible to live with, which is another matter.

  “You know what? I sometimes felt, watching the way people responded to Wes, and later thinking about the utterly heartfelt indignation that women who’d bedded my husband were willing to express on my behalf—I sometimes felt, and I know I shouldn’t be saying this to you, do understand I don’t mean this the way it may sound—I sometimes felt, about the whole range of romantic, of sexual, activity in the world around us, I felt that the one safe generalization is: Almost nobody’s happy. Honestly, why else would they care so much who Wes was pursuing? There’s simply so much unbelievable resentment in the way most people gossip about others’ romantic lives. Why are small towns so poisonous? What were we all so afraid of in Restoration, Michigan? And in the Christian Reformed Church? If you listen not to the what they’re saying but to the tone in which it’s said, you understand that for many people the bitterest, most painful news they can ever possibly hear is: Two neighbors right down the street have been making love just like a pair of rabbits.”

  She brings out this last image as though it were daring, and new. Oh, there’s something touching to the look of faintly addled triumph on Sally’s face: For all her circumlocutions, she has struck a belated blow against those pharisees who were her husband’s relentless attackers.

  And would the people on this beach look more forgivingly on Wes? From underneath the café awning, the strip of sand seems a wholly indulgent place. The land of Cockaigne . . . The topless girl has set down her badminton racket to lie prone on an enormous Babar beach towel, while her boyfriend rubs suntan lotion into the tops of the backs of
her thighs and into the slight pale overspill of her buttocks. A pair of pretty girls in bikinis—young ones, tiptoeing on the edge of puberty—stroll along, arms folded self-consciously across their chests; they are followed by a pack of five equally young boys, who call muttered assessments, ridicule, praise, pleas. Their words don’t carry up to the café—and I wouldn’t understand them if they did—but whatever they’re saying stirs the girls to not quite suppressed smiles. And a man I’d idly grouped under what Sally calls Conrad’s “orientation”—a handsome, bronze, slight-boned man who has paraded daintily up and down the beach in a pair of whisper-scanty turquoise bathing trunks—at last meets the figure he has been awaiting. It’s a woman, as bronze as he is, and in greeting her he nuzzles his hips up against her hips, giving her a sort of crotch-kiss.

  Sally signals to the waiter for a new round of drinks.

  “Give me an example,” I say. “Of some of the bitterness or hostility Wes faced.”

  “Well what about Bernie?”

  “Bernie? Adelle’s Bernie? Bernie hostile to anybody?”

  “Yes, oh absolutely yes—Wes’s own brother-in-law, sweet sleepy never-an-unkind-word-for-anybody Bernie. I remember returning to Restoration for a Christmas party—this was long after I’d married Gordon and we’d moved to Grosse Pointe—where Bernie had too much to drink, something he did maybe once a year. And he starts very earnestly explaining to me that deep down Wes is just like Conrad, I’m speaking sexually now, only Wes won’t admit it. Do you see? According to Bernie, this accounts for the womanizing.

  “And I said to him, ‘Bernie, you’re talking about somebody who used to be my husband.’ I said, ‘Wes may have all sorts of psychological quirks, and maybe he has trouble dealing head-on with the truth at times, but I can assure you that his attraction to women is genuine.’

  “I got a little stern with Bernie, which was very gratifying. I felt like one of those Victorian spinsters in a Masterpiece Theatre production—you know, the mousy ones who can be counted on in the penultimate episode to reveal that they’re going to stand on principle. And of course whenever anybody gets stern with Bernie, he collapses like a soufflé.

  “But twenty minutes later he’s back, more in his cups than ever, and he’s developed a new theory. It’s, heaven help us, sexual inadequacy. That’s what’s at the root of Wes’s womanizing. He isn’t able to perform, or he doesn’t really enjoy it, and this is the shortcoming driving him so impulsively into the arms of new women.

  “And once again I take him to task. I explain to Bernie that he’s talking about somebody I’ve been married to, and I assure him that he couldn’t be more wrong about this inadequacy business. Or about the other, either.”

  “The other?”

  “The not enjoying it. I suppose I’m being vague and euphemistic with you, just as I was with Bernie, though afterward (many times over the years, in fact) I wished I’d spelled it out precisely, because I think frequently of something Wes used to say. It was a joke. It wasn’t macho bragging, no, it was mock-macho bragging. It was a sweet boyish boast, that’s all, but it was true nonetheless. He’d say, I love fucking—saying it with a sort of sweet boyish surprise, as if it was a revelation he’d never quite gotten over. And maybe that’s what I should have told Bernie: Wes loved fucking.”

  Well, it was the first time I’d ever heard the word on Sally’s lips. Thousands of miles away, in the Restoration Christian Reformed Church on Grand Elm Street, no doubt the pulpit has just exploded like a giant kernel of popcorn. Still further off, in Heaven, stunned choirs of angels have broken off their eternal chanting. Yet things go on just the same on the beach at Mare aux Cerfs—where private parts are going public, and oil is being kneaded into flesh, and the entire frieze of warm near-naked bodies has given Sally license to confide matters she has never confided in me before. I’m struck by a sensation, as we sip our drinks on the café terrace, that all our recent conversations in France have been drifting toward this juncture: the one where seemingly no conversational terrain is off-limits and I can ask whatever I choose.

  But how far do I—how far would anyone—want to pursue these things? Do I inquire now whether she recalls the evening of my conception? And what the two of them discussed that night? And precisely where the act was consummated, and in what position, and whether the resulting pregnancy was intentional? (Or were they hoping no child would result who might, thirty-six years later, pose such vexing questions?)

  And why does her little anecdote elate me so?

  Why? No doubt my pleasure is rooted in simple male vanity. (Obviously I’m keen to hear, coming off a failed marriage and an aborted career, that my often hapless, much-divorced, prematurely unemployed biological father was more than a caddish seducer— he was a memorable lover. Male vanity runs so deep that even among those Cistercians of the abbey of Coppée, doubtless there was some devout medieval monk who, kneeling at morning prayers in his unheated stone cell, savored the occasional thought that his father was a damned rogue . . .) But I’d like to think I was heartened too on Wes’s behalf. For with each passing month in my quest I’d grown more solicitous of him: of the skinny high school kid with the big grin and the big ambitions, and of the old salesman with his white pompadour, befuddled to have arrived at a future where inhospitality awaited him at every doorbell . . . And while I’m pondering such questions, Sally takes up the narrative thread again. Oh, I know what she’s doing. She is fulfilling a compact with a dead man. She is surmounting her natural reticence and modesty in order to do right by Wes—to do right to the father by way of the son:

  “I’m happy to say I make no claim to wide experience in these matters. But I’m a woman who has been married twice, and I know what I know. And one of the things I know, and one of the things I should have made crystal-clear to Bernie, is that, A), Wes certainly wasn’t motivated by any lack of pleasure, and, B), for him it wasn’t merely a matter of his own enjoyment. Wes wanted to please. In most everything, Wes wanted to please.

  “Needless to say, he was utterly flummoxed by the women’s movement, calling into question, as it did, his old-fashioned gallantry. What was Wes going to do with hairy-legged women who resented his trying to open doors for them? In various ways he’d become quaint, and naturally he hated that. Anyone would. The sixties and seventies were hard for him. He didn’t like rock music, he distrusted all those slovenly hippies who distrusted well-groomed salesmen. He had no interest in drugs. But one of the funny aspects to it all (you’re probably too young to remember this, Luke) was that right about then the human race discovered something you might suppose they would have discovered aeons ago: that women were one half of the equation when a married couple went to bed. That’s the way it felt for us in Restoration, anyway, where suddenly all those magazines that used to carry articles about how to slip-cover your sofa or how to keep your Thanksgiving turkey from drying out now began advising us on how to make our men more responsive in bed. In retrospect, it was all so wonderfully ludicrous! All my married friends, grown women with three or four or five children, had suddenly discovered the existence of sex. Suddenly the air buzzed with talk about women ‘sensitizing’ their men and I finally realized how ahead of the game Wes always had been. He may have become quaint and antiquated, and yet apparently he knew what all sorts of sophisticated, au courant men were just now beginning to learn. I shouldn’t be talking this way, obviously I shouldn’t be talking this way to you, I can’t believe I’m speaking like this to you, Luke, but I used to get so God-damn excuse me tired of everybody slamming Wes. He wanted to bring pleasure, and you can say all you want about his being a narcissist, you can read a few magazine articles the way Bernie did and conclude that it was merely selfish egotism motivating Wes, but damn it surely selfishness that takes the form of generosity has something to be said for it.”

  “And what about Gordon?”

  “Gordon?” And Sally looks at me blankly. I’d swear that she fails, for just an instant, to recognize the name of her
second husband. And in all my interviews—with Sally, or Adelle, or Tiffany, or even Conrad—this seems to be the common motif: the moment when, as they’re recalling Wes, an amnesiac glow slips over their features. Thinking of him, they forget everything else they ever knew. And it wouldn’t surprise me to learn, despite all the wrongs done to her, that on her paralyzed deathbed Klara Kuzmak, too, shone for a moment at the thought of Wesley Sultan.

  I say: “Gordon was the same way? As Wes?”

  Just moments before, Sally had said, “I can’t believe I’m speaking like this,” and I too am marveling at the knowledge that never in our lives have we had a conversation as open as this one. And yet it seems that boundaries exist even in this new territory. What am I asking her, in effect, but Hey, how was my adoptive father in the sack? And this is none of my business. For if Sally has a duty to do right by Wes, she has a kindred duty to do right by Gordon. A curtain comes down—it seems my stint as a voyeur is over.

  Sally says, “My whole life was different—everything was different—with Gordon. In many ways, I honestly feel he saved my life. He rescued me, he rescued the two of us. I think I’ll have my third cigarette.” But she has lost count. This is her fourth.

  Sally says, “You know in his unflashy way I honestly think Gordon was a genuine hero. He had a gift that is far, far rarer than it ought to be, or than it’s supposed to be: He truly forgave the insults and the slights inflicted on him. That takes a great soul. I’ve told you before how my parents initially disapproved of him. That was partly his Catholicism, but partly what they held against him was that he would consider marrying me—a divorcée with a little boy, living on Downward Lane.”

  “It’s a Marx brothers joke: Nobody is suitable to marry our daughter who would agree to marry—”

  “And of course that’s it! That’s just what it was. But then it turned out, as the years went by, there were benefits in having an ultracompetent doctor for a son-in-law. And when first Poppa and later Momma got sick, who was there to ensure that they got the very best medical attention available? And who was loyally at their bedsides every God-damned day—excuse me, somebody better shut me up, why is it I can’t manage to get a sentence out today without cursing like a sailor?”