by Walter Tevis
“I know,” I said, becoming explanatory now. “I know it isn’t. I don’t know why I…”
“Don’t explain, for Christ’s sake,” she said. “Just shut up. You’re not talking to me. You haven’t talked to me all evening.” She stared at me hard. “Don’t you know, Ben, that the things you say hurt?”
I stared at her. “I’m sorry, honey,” I said. “I’ll fix tea.”
***
On her bathroom wall Isabel kept a hologram of herself as a seven-year-old, taken for her first day at Socialist Primary School in Paisley. She wears a hand-knitted sweater and a kilt and her eyes hold a look of anxiety. Isabel’s father was at sea for most of her childhood, and her mother was as cold as mine. Sometimes toward the end of our stay together I would see that same anxious look in Isabel’s eyes, in her early forties.
In the hologram she holds a striped cat in her lap. Something in Isabel’s psyche had always drawn her toward cats, and when I moved in with her she had the two, Amagansett and William. I remember shouting at Isabel once in the middle of the night that I could probably get it up for her if she weren’t so damned anxious about it and her saying, levelly, “Don’t get it up for me, Ben. Get it up for yourself!” and knowing with a knot in my stomach that she was right, I padded for refuge into the bathroom and found the two cats huddled behind the base of the sink. They stared up at me with pained, curious eyes. I looked at them silently a minute and then said softly, “She knows everything, boys.”
***
My red Chinese computer also reads. I can set a book in its drawer and it will turn pages and read aloud in a pleasant, avuncular voice with a midwestern accent. Sometimes I do that with my library books when my eyes are blurred from morphine or I just don’t want to open them. I set the drug synthesizer to make ethyl alcohol, mix it with grape juice from my garden vines, and drink myself into a near-coma while my computer reads the short novels of James: The Lesson of the Master, The Beast in the Jungle, The Pupil. I’ve never read them sober; I’m not sure which has the ball-less William Marcher as protagonist, but I know I see him looking like my father. Distant, lost in terminal self-regard.
***
I speak in this journal as though my time on Belson were spent in reading and thought; in fact, much of it is passed in the grip of an uneasy lassitude. For the last five days I have been incapable of action or reading or of amusing myself in any significant way. I merely pass time. Often I feel like a fifteen-year-old hanging around the drugstore waiting for someone to drop in. Yesterday I merely waited all day for Fomalhaut to set.
When dusk comes, the sky has a way of modulating its colors that evokes feelings I have no names for. There is nothing like it in the skies of Earth, no pinks and yellows to match these pinks and yellows, no blue-grays so somber as Belson’s. Last night I felt a gentle suffocation as I watched Fomalhaut descending. As it touched the magenta horizon and reflected from the thousand acres of obsidian the suffocation was relieved and my heart expanded with my lungs and I became for a moment dizzied with happiness.
***
It is a terrible comment on the nature of capitalism that a man as baffled by himself as I can be so successful at it—that I could become so rich and so confused at the same time.
Three days after I moved in with Isabel the temperature dropped to eighteen below zero. It was November 1, 2061. All Saints’ Day. Isabel had a matinee and an evening show and she was out of the apartment all day. I managed to get out onto the icy streets and buy enough wood to make a big fire in the fireplace; I spent most of the day huddled by it, wrapped in a blanket, reading a book called Nuclear Fission in the U.S.: The Loss of Denver. I don’t know why I didn’t find myself a warm hotel room. Yet something told me I should stick with Isabel for that winter, and I didn’t really question it.
She got home a little before midnight, wrapped up in a heavy coat with artificial furs and looking like a Russian countess. Her cheeks were as red as apples. She blew steam by the doorway, stamped her boots and sang out, “Hello, darling.” It thrilled my heart, grumpy as I was, to see her like that.
But a blast of icy air had hit me from the open door and I suddenly found myself furious. “Shut that damned door!” I shouted. And that was the way it often went from then on.
***
Sometimes, walking through the park that winter, dressed in a parka and muffled like a seal hunter, I would hear Isabel suddenly break out in song:
I like New York in June,
How about you?
I like a Gershwin tune,
How about you?
Her voice was so direct and unaffected that the old child in me wanted to cry at the sound of it. We held hands a lot, squeezing hard to feel one another through mittens.
We walked every day, no matter how cold it was. Isabel is the only woman I know who shares my love for walking the streets of New York. Her gray hair glowed in winter sunlight and she would face the icy air with zip and aplomb; I think I loved her most while striding briskly up Madison or Fifth Avenue in December, seeing the stares she would get from Chinese tourists muffled in their Korean scarves.
Sometimes she would window-shop. At first this was annoying; it seemed to be the customary female dumbness. But gradually I saw that Isabel was as perceptive about clothing as she was about the paintings in museums. She knew a lot about shoes, for instance—more than some people know about life. She had a sense of the sheen and poise of a shoe and eventually made me see it for the piece of minor sculpture it could be. But when I offered to buy she said there wasn’t room in her closets.
Eating at restaurants with her was delightful, and we did it a lot that winter. I think I began to love her a dozen years ago when I first saw her eat truite fumée. She would cut it neatly with her knife, slide an ample slice onto her fork, push a dozen capers on top—still using the knife—and then put it into her mouth and chew with serious concentration. There was nothing prissy in this; Isabel was a formidable trencherwoman and her eating was punctuated with little sighs of pleasure. That was when I was married to Anna; I was backing a play that Isabel had a tiny part in. She had also carpentered one of the sets. I was taken by her intelligent face and her figure and asked her to lunch. Nothing developed from that meeting for a long time, but watching her eat made my heart go out to her. I love people who like to eat and don’t get fat doing it. This woman ate with gusto and had a waist like a girl’s. In the twelve years I’ve known her her hair has become grayer but her figure hasn’t changed. I tingle now to think of that figure, to remember her putting away truite fumée.
We laughed a lot on our walks and in restaurants. We hugged each other spontaneously from time to time. I was delighted by her in hundreds of small ways. But whenever we tried to make love during those five months I found myself with a knot in my stomach and some old smoldering fury in my loins. What had been a happy afternoon of walking and chatting could become a nightmare; sometimes I became withdrawn and bitchy for hours. I should have quit trying altogether; Isabel herself told me I should quit, but I found ways to override her objections. I told her my sexual failures needn’t upset her, that if she were really turned on it might help my problem, that maybe at depth it was she who was afraid of sex. For about two weeks I had her buffaloed. Everybody has sexual fears; I developed Isabel’s like an impresario, trying to cover up my own.
She saw through it eventually. “Goddamn it, Ben,” she said in the middle of a cold night in the loft bed. “You’re the one with the problem and you’re trying to blame me for it.”
I fumed and blustered for a few minutes and finally fell back to sleep. In the morning I waked to see her sleepy-eyed and a bit grim-faced, and said, “I think you’re right.”
Things were better for a while after that. I left her alone and quit trying to act on every sexual tingle I felt—and I felt plenty of them. I slept better. But there was a lot of fury in me, and I felt it building. Much of the time I was good-humored and enjoyed doing what little work I needed to do—
which took about three hours a day, mostly on the phone—but inside a pressure was building. I was becoming a time bomb, looking for an excuse to explode. I was scared by this and at the same time exulted in it. Living with Isabel and hating myself for impotence, I had become a sullen, angry, dangerous child.
Chapter 6
My hydroponics garden stands out now in green against the gray of Belson’s surface, alive against that bleak obsidian. It is remarkable what Fomalhaut can do to power a vegetable, more remarkable that plants bred to the light of Sol flourish under this blue star. They do it with chemical fertilizers recycled, and recycled water. Part of the fertilizers are recycled through me; I defecate into a hopper that feeds the system, and then add potash; I eat the same rearranged molecules over and over. Orbach would love it; it fits his thesis that my personality requires self-nourishment.
I find deep pleasure in seeing those lettuces and carrots and beets and asparagus growing in their plastic troughs. They cover a half acre of surface that for billions of years has been lifeless. I walk down the rows, encouraging my plants, rubbing their wet leaves tenderly, muttering to them sometimes, sometimes pulling a leaf of lettuce or spinach and eating it there in the rows, warmed by blue Fomalhaut, alone and happy with my vegetable companions.
Since there are no seasons here, every season is growing season; I am already on my second crop and am improving the breed. Why can’t you just let things alone? Anna would say at times in anger. Well I can’t. I don’t want to. So I save the best plants for seed, sensing that the new spectrum of Fomalhaut is an evolutionary spur and that some of my varieties will thrive on the short day-night cycle. Luther Burbank Belson, prodding his bush beans into stardom. It has worked, especially with the carrots; I’ve never seen such big, firm, orange carrots. I had Annie pull out one of the nuclear cooking coils from the Isabel’s galley, and I cook my vegetables on that. It requires twenty minutes at Belson air pressure to produce a carrot al dente—neither crisp nor mushy. They are superb with Java pepper.
***
I remember now the pattern of sliced carrots on Isabel’s white floor the day I cooked the leg of lamb.
It was the first time I had ever roasted a leg of lamb, but I hadn’t told Isabel that. My career as a cook had begun for all practical purposes in her apartment; I knew how to scramble eggs and make a grilled cheddar sandwich when I moved in, but that was it. I started taking over the kitchen at Isabel’s when I felt I had to create something for her and me, something elemental and sensual. For one orifice if not the other. Orbach pursed his lips when I told him that, but he didn’t look convinced. “Hell,” I said, “I’ve got to do something. I can’t fuck, and I’m bored with making money.”
“Benjamin,” Orbach said, “cooking is a fine and creative thing to do. But it wouldn’t be wise for you to pretend you are a woman when you’re having difficulty being a man.”
“Come on!” I said. “I’m not pretending I’m a woman. My mother opened canned spaghetti for supper. And complained about it. She spent more time in the kitchen drinking screwdrivers than she did at the stove.”
“Maybe you want to teach her to be domestic,” Orbach said.
“Isabel?” I said.
Orbach frowned. “I’m not sure,” he said.
“I’m not sure of anything,” I said, “except that I love to bring her coffee in the mornings and drink it with her.”
“Bring her coffee?” Orbach said. “Who?”
“Isabel, goddamn it!” I said. “If it was Mother, I’d bring her a martini.”
Orbach smiled wanly at that. “Benjamin,” he said, “as a child you had to nourish yourself, because there was little other nourishment around.”
I lay on the couch and looked at the water stain on Orbach’s ceiling. “I get tired sometimes,” I said. “I get damned tired of the whole fucking weight.”
“Clearly,” Orbach said, with sympathy. “I’d like to use chemical recall with you for the rest of our session today. I’d like to give you sorbate and take you back to your infancy and see if we can find out what you were thinking.”
I felt myself sweating. I hadn’t used chemicals in therapy for several years. They scared me. “Those pills pack a terrible hangover,” I said. “I need a clear head for…”
“For what?”
“For cooking supper tonight,” I said.
Orbach shrugged. “Very well. Perhaps some other time.”
***
The supper of which I’d spoken was the leg of lamb. I’d noticed it on sale that morning at thirty dollars a pound and bought it impulsively. I then wound up carrying it around with me while I spent a couple of hours with my lawyers, who were too polite to ask what in heaven’s name I was doing with a leg of lamb in a plastic bag.
It took me awhile that evening to figure out the controls on Isabel’s oven, but I managed. The combination of those electronic gadgets and a heat source of hickory wood has always seemed disorderly to me. It was a Wednesday and there would be no evening performance of Isabel’s play, so I had plenty of time. I cut slits in the fat and pushed in slivers of garlic, then rubbed the whole phallic thing with rosemary and coarse pepper. I had it in the oven by the time Isabel came home from her matinee; she gave me a quick kiss and a pat and went off to take a bath. I was beginning to feel very professional about this meal. I peeled away at my carrots, happy as a clam. Since the bathroom of that little apartment was only a few yards from the stove, I could hear Isabel splashing away merrily.
After a while the cats started nosing around at my ankles and looking pushy. It was time for their supper and I should have fed them, but I didn’t. The black one, as heavy-looking as a bag of cement, began meowing in his choked way. The brown-and-white, shyer, looked at me reproachfully. Get out of my way, you dumb bastards, I thought at them, viciously, not wanting to say it aloud in Isabel’s hearing. The black one croaked at me louder. I wanted to tell him to go back to cat school and learn to meow properly. I began to think I should open a can of food just to shut them up. I looked at them again, at their pushy, imploring faces, at their insistence, and thought, Fuck you, boys. Your lady friend can feed you when she gets out of the bath. They looked at me as though they shared an I.Q. of 3 between them. I grabbed a saucepan and threatened them with it. They slinked away.
A minute afterward, Isabel came out of the bathroom stark naked. I wanted to take her right there, but I restrained myself. Isabel could be testy about sexual advances that led nowhere. My balls had begun to tingle at the sight of her and I really wanted to drop to my knees for a while and let the lamb be well done if need be. But I pulled back from the tingle and cut it off somehow. That, I should have known by then, is how you get blue balls. That’s how you get into fights over whatever is handy—like carving a leg of lamb. I should have gone ahead with Isabel and let her decide whether she liked it or not; it would have saved a lot of grief.
Instead, I started fussing with the peas and managed to spill a third of them down into the wood fire, where they hissed at me in derision. I could feel the inanimate world gathering itself for one of its attacks on my person. I began to feel like hunting down the black cat and strangling him. I reached for the oven door and burned my hand. Instead of shouting, I gritted my teeth. Stoicism. It gives you blue balls in the soul.
But I did manage to control myself enough to get the peas into a bowl and then to get the lamb out of the stove and onto a big plate for cooling. It looked terrific. Very professional. I felt a lot better. I spooned out the carrots and circled the leg of lamb with them. It was shaping up like a sculpture. I was cheerful again despite the tight feeling in my stomach. I remembered we had fresh parsley in the bin. I got some and put it at one end of the plate. Voilà.
Isabel had pulled on a pair of jeans and set the table by the window. I was standing by my masterwork, waiting for praise.
And then my stomach sank. Somebody had to carve this fucker, and I’d never carved anything in my life. When I was a kid my mother managed
to roast a turkey once a year, on Thanksgiving, with a kind of cold, hungover resentment. She always carved it herself, while my father sat around looking bored. I think that, down deep, I was waiting for Isabel to get up and carve, like Mother. She came into the kitchen, in fact, and I felt a sigh of relief in myself. But what she did was exclaim over how beautiful the lamb was. And then she said, “Hurry up and carve it, Ben. I’m hungry!”
Jesus, did I want to throttle a cat just then! If I could have just done it—or just kicked a cat around the living room for a minute, I could have sliced up that roast the way an orchestra leader slices air with his baton. With a pinky sticking out as the slices fell with gentle plops on the serving platter, arranging themselves prettily between disks of carrot. But what did I do? I gritted my teeth, stuck a fork into the roast, took a big kitchen knife and started slicing as though the lamb were a loaf of bread. Immediately I hit a bone. I tried the other end. Another bone. I slipped the lamb, greasy now and still too fucking hot, over on its side in the plate, which was now filling with juice, soaking about half the carrots and giving them the color of wet orange socks. Burning grease was sticking to my fingers. I shook it off. Some of it landed in the peas. I began slicing at the first end of the roast, but from a different angle. There was another bone. How could a white, furry lamb walk around with so many goddamned bones in its legs? How could the bones be coming from so many different directions? My cheeks were burning as though rubbed with Brillo; Isabel was watching every move in tactful silence.
And then, as I stood ready to turn my knife against anything that lived, there was an abrupt, loud plop, as though someone had dropped a fish on the kitchen counter. It was William, the normally shy cat. He must have jumped down off an overhead shelf where he’d been hiding since I’d scared him away with the saucepan. I stood frozen, staring. During my carving I had managed to get loose a piece of lamb the size of a poker chip. William took that piece demurely between his teeth, leaped to the floor and scampered across the room. I gripped my Sabatier, visualizing the mess in the apartment from feline decapitation. William huddled with his find in the corner, under Isabel’s bronze urn of pussywillows. The black cat slinked over to join him. Clearly a coconspirator. I picked up the roast, plate and carrots and all, held it over my head the way King Kong would hold a subway car, and threw it at them with all my strength. It whammed into the bronze pot with a thud that enriched my soul with relief. The plate-Isabel’s best Delft—flew apart like a comic-strip firecracker. And the carrots spread themselves over the white floor like abstract expressionism. Like the perfectly placed rocks in a Japanese garden.