He recalled again the painful adventure at the state fair. The horrific woman, who’d had rolled flesh that swung like wet mop heads, had been the first of six strippers, each of whom improved, sequentially, getting better and better, younger and firmer and prouder, until finally a creature who looked like a hybrid of Marlene Dietrich and an Olympic swimmer took the stage and took the breath out of the boy who’d yelled “Pork!” and “No more!” and took everyone else’s breath as well. Robert Higginbotham had been glad to see the boy silenced, and he had been glad to see the beauty of the woman. Her unavailability to him had seemed, for once, correct, and not part of the infinite scheme of torture that was testosterone.
Tonight in Ybor City he got another turquoise drink and still refused to look at the naked woman who brought it to him, and he got ready for the women he was supposed to look at. When they came on it was gratifying that no one was yelling “Pork!” and “Stop!,” that no one considered it, that the women were very attractive, that he wasn’t surrounded by rubes on sawdust, that he’d bought earlier in the evening some navel oranges, which he now on a whim took two of from the paper sack on the chair beside him and put under his shirt and pushed up into the position of exceptionally high, firm breasts, and he watched the show, every savory and unsavory detail, smiling, and the women were smiling back. They had relaxed and unassuming minds and they saw in the front row, with oranges up his shirt and smiling, a little gangster.
Of the hero: of the man who would covet young girls so cannot be a hero: he is morose. He has the power of articulation but nothing of substance, of merit, to articulate. He cannot be a gangster, little and smiling or otherwise; nor can he be an innocent girl who will become a not innocent woman, realistically named or otherwise. He is a sayer, a mere sayer.
He is considering—as Robert Higginbotham sits smiling, proffering his proud navel oranges to women mystified by them, and by him—he, the morose, heroic sayer is considering installing on his ample estate a citrus grove. This is the purest of coincidence.
Of a coincidence less pure: the fate of a new piece of candy is not easy, nor is the fate of a nice girl. Years later, when Tattie McGrim, who did not know that Robert Higginbotham the night she saw him drunk in Ybor City would drink turquoise drinks and recall the cruelty of a teenager yelling “Pork!” at a desperate woman, became a stripper herself, what she thought as she looked at herself in the mirror before going onstage was that she looked like pork. “The other other white meat,” she said, chuckling and pinching a fold of herself. She recalled her mother’s insisting pork be cooked until it was hard and dry and white, against the threat of trichinosis. No one worried about trichinosis now. Now it was trichonomiasis, and that wasn’t from pork, and cellulite.
She did not, withal, look bad. She was becoming a stripper because, in a roundabout way, her mother’s greatest concern in life had been in the neighborhood of holding at bay a disease that had been eradicated forty or fifty years before. She, Tattie McGrim, had suburban ennui. She found insupportable being merely a nice girl with less to trouble her, really, than even her mother had had. She wanted some trouble. It was this wanting, incipient as it was the night she saw Robert Higginbotham acting the Planter’s Peanut on a tear, that allowed her to see around his smiling, happy-drunk form the blue aura of a gangster. She was hopeful.
That the other women, who did not hope for trouble but already had it and were already stripping for a living, could also see around Robert Higginbotham a blue air of danger is a coincidence, or a contrivance, which is what, universally speaking, a coincidence is. The universe has conspired that all women who are to come in direct or indirect contact with Robert Higginbotham on New Year’s Eve this particular year will see him as a gangster and at some time in their lives take their clothes off in the name of entertainment. If the universe has not actively conspired to effect this improbability, then it has by neglect relaxed its strict grip on probabilities and allowed this rude anomaly obtain. Were Robert Higginbotham to go immediately home from the Comic Book Club, he would find, moreover, his mother stripping for his stepfather, the one time in her life she does it. But he will not go home, because his mother does not know he drinks, and he thinks that the 45-degree angle of his carriage and the bumper-to-bumper pinballing way he’s been going through doorways might give him away.
He thinks of the state fair again, not of the embarrassing early part of the show, but of the better, later part. He ate popcorn and it was delicious watching the women. The popcorn was white and hot and savory in his hand, and there were nipples not far away, moving. The world was white popcorn and red nipples. It was delicious, all of it.
Now on his table there are several paper umbrellas, which are served with the turquoise things he’s had he doesn’t know how many of. If he has all of the umbrellas, he could count them. He has some of the umbrellas, maybe all. He cannot ask a naked woman, “Do I have all my umbrellas, or did you take some of them back?” because it would suggest some kind of accusation. He regards the umbrellas he does have and wishes there were tiny naked women strolling around under them, or reclining and reading tiny paperback books under them on the table, but his table is too wet for that. He would not be too abashed to look very closely indeed at the naked women were they walking around on his table under these fine little bamboo-and-tissue umbrellas. How lovely must be the East, he thinks, how daintily stupid and yet somehow correct. How undaintily stupid is he and the West. He takes the stupid oranges out of his shirt and puts them on the table with the umbrellas. They look like atom bombs. No one stripping is Asian. He leaves.
He shoots straight through the door of the club without hitting either doorjamb and out into the wee New Year. By now his mother will be through stripping, for the only time, for his stepfather, which performance he does not know about and of which performance he will tell you he does not want to know, and his father, an airline pilot, will be preparing to strip for his, Robert’s, stepmother, or preparing to do any other untoward business she might at her tyrannical whim request of him, Robert’s father, which he, Robert, does know about, the whimsical hoops and his father’s sheeplike jumping through them. They, Robert and his father, used to go fishing.
If stripping for money is valuable as a pursuit of trouble, of dark anti-suburban anti-ennui, as Tattie McGrim conceives it, it is because it, stripping—dollar bills weirdly moist slipped into your string, the emetic wafts of Scotch and spermine and perfume, and the almost unlimited spectrum of personal problems backstage among the girls, and the interface onstage and just off it with the totally unlimited spectrum of personal problems among the men in front of the stage—stripping is a ground zero for all that is at once crummy and practical in life. Tattie McGrim imagines that the equivalent to stripping for men, remove the sexual component, is being in the lower ranks in the Navy. And maybe you did not need remove the sexual component—all those men on a boat!
In her brief time stripping she saw plenty of Navy boys and they struck her as prototypes of the strip-show goer. They were horny, gullible, loud, not proud, and horny. When you got out of either stripping or the Navy, Tattie McGrim would figure out, you were likely to think of certain kinds of food as “shit on a shingle.” This was the essence of the kind of hard, practical, crummy vision of life inculcated by taking your clothes off for money and by being in the Navy. A stripper and a boy in the Navy could actually leave a club together in the early blear of a gray, unpromising morning in modestly eager pursuit of something called shit on a shingle.
What kept the hero from wanting the young Tattie Elaine McGrim Bolio Pearsall in a clean, open, lustful way was that he had had, some ten years before meeting her, a daughter. Leaving the hospital that morning, he suffered a difficult divination: that all women were some poor fool’s daughter, that he was now one of the poor fools. It was now impossible for him to look at a young woman with desire in his heart and not think of his own daughter, and then, dismissing that frontal assault, he’d suffer a rearguard atta
ck by another idea: that she, any young woman who caught his eye, was someone else’s daughter. This is but one of the sundry reasons the hero was morose. Desire, once an open honest thing of joyous excess, was now hopelessly pinched and troubled. He had not forgotten how to want; he remembered how to want. He could not want honestly.
The difficult divination that all women are someone’s daughter was reinforced in his brain as he pounded on the locked door of the bar across from the hospital at 11 a.m. The hero was a kind of effete moralist to whom inconvenience was an outrage. The kind of life which led, for example, to people routinely calling food shit on a shingle terrified him. So did pounding on a door locking you out of a drink at eleven o’clock in the morning after you’d seen twenty-six hours of labor and the bloody cantaloupe of a baby girl’s head crown. The puritans and their inconvenient ways were very much interfering with his calmly negotiating with this monstrous discovery that all women are daughters.
He considered leaving the country, this land run by the heirs to ninth-grade class presidents and high-school quarterbacks. This was a favorite idea: living where no one’s sense of rectitude would interfere with your lack of sense of rectitude. He had in mind Malay, or somewhere like it so distracted with problems that no one had time for any but his own. He stood at the heavy, chain-beaten door to the bar, with Windjammer written on it by means of a heavy hawser nailed in cursive, and with conch shells stuck to it by means of epoxy, suddenly beginning to wonder: how could he live where there are women? He had loved women, and now a dark and low and trembling music began to play: he had loved other men’s daughters. The trash he had talked to people’s little girls!
He got in his car and floored it, trying to burn rubber. It had an automatic transmission and wouldn’t burn rubber, so he simply left recklessly. It was the best he could do. The moment and its sentiment became, in fact, a kind of motto for the hero from that point on. I have a daughter—I do the best I can. But it was clear to him now that whatever one did, with a daughter on earth it was not good enough. Without a daughter on the ground, there was no call to apologize for what you did. With one, what you did would always be merely the best you could do. It would not be good enough. You had blown the good enough. You had put a big bet on a big board and a big wheel was spinning and you were not going to win with a daughter in the world and fools like yourself running around after her. The hero, whether he really is a hero or is a hero only in some obscenely, lazily inaccurate sense (forgive me, forget me), had fair reason for being morose.
The door to the bar he pounded on the morning of the daughter revelation never opened, not that day or any other. The building itself was bulldozed shortly before the hero laid eyes on Tattie Elaine McGrim Bolio Pearsall, shortly before she laid eyes on Robert Higginbotham, drunk. The hero had by then stopped drinking. Young men who had not yet had the vision of daughters could carry on the inebriant tradition, as far as he was concerned.
Robert Higginbotham had not yet had the vision of daughters. In the strip club he pondered, in fact, something of the opposite: how many of the women, he wondered, were mothers?
Here is a curious truth with which to leave us: All women are not mothers, but they are daughters all. Through this truth, under its feet as it were, there walks a new blue baby boy, smiling as if he has candy, or as if he is candy. You decide, and decide before you father a daughter or mother a boy. It is only the morose, putative hero who wants to slap the boy, whether because he acts as if he has candy or because he is candy. Only the hero is perverse. You are neither, yet, and your responsibilities, which are neither heroic nor falsely heroic, are nonetheless immense.
Two Boys
ONCE UPON A TIME there were two boys. They were not boys anymore, actually, one forty-something and one nearly forty years old, but they were not stationed properly in Life as were men their age, and they were not going to be properly stationed in Life. They were not going to be bank presidents or lawyers or own car dealerships. One of them had once momentarily seemed properly stationed in Life for a man of his age; he had been a book editor. But he got into an affair with the editor in chief, under whom he worked, and she was the wife of a gangster who regularly employed the services of hit men, and this, this affair, was a very boyish thing to do. So when the editor resigned and ran, or ran and resigned thereby, he was properly a boy again on the street. He felt better all in all about resuming his true identity except that the stress of having pretended not to be a boy with a gangster’s wife who herself knew some of the hit men her husband used had given him cancer of the eyeball. It was his right eye.
The boy with the bad eyeball went through normal hoops trying to not have cancer of the eyeball, second-opinion surfing through waves of options and percentages and knives—
—Not knives, lasers! Why, hold on to that eyeball, in a few years we could save it, if it don’t kill you tomorrow—
It will—
No, it won’t—
—and then he got done with normal white-coat hoops and rag-bond letterhead and he emerged into a little dungeon where a Chinese woman who spoke only Chinese got ahold of him. “Eye poison in,” said the translator he had to take with him. The translator cost more than the Chinese woman who knew how to use the needles and squeeze the earlobes. On the fifth or so visit, well after a man properly stationed in Life would have desisted this quackery, the Chinese woman got down on her knees and thumb-wrestled the boy’s ear-lobe with more than customary vigor and the boy felt what felt like a cord twinging in his head from his ear to the eye in question and then some black stuff began to ooze from the eye in question. “Eye poison out,” the translator said, standing at a good remove. The boy was in a marvel of something like not despair. Despair had been when $200,000 worth of lasers and trips to Sloan-Kettering and having a radioactive ingot strapped to his eye in a dark solitary cell for two weeks and chemo nausea had produced only thin bones and hair loss and more coming-and-going white coats and good opinions and letterhead. For $20, black poison had come out of his eye of its own volition. This was more like it, to a boy. When you have an eyeball that is going to kill you, everything is like unto a boy again. Things begin to make original and final sense again, as they did in the beginning before you grew up and got confused. Or got half-confused, as it is proper to say of the forty-year-old boy who has resisted bank presidency. It would be a good thing, for example, after poison has come out of your eye, to go into your tree house and have a meal of chocolate milk and bologna sandwiches and maybe see a good bird. Not much else is required.
The other boy, who was a bit older, had also gotten himself tenuously properly stationed in Life for a man of his age, and was also suffering for it. He was a college teacher, a position that is not merely proper but that presumes to look askance at, if not down upon, car dealers and lawyers and bank presidents, but maybe not book editors. The college-teacher boy could not identify what was wrong with him but felt it was something like the other boy’s bad eyeball, though larger and vaguer, and he felt it was caused by the same tensions—the strain of posing as a man properly stationed in Life—as had caused the bad eyeball. There was one other link between the two boys: the college-teacher boy’s wife was having an affair. She was not having it with a book editor but with a rug merchant. The college-teacher boy wanted to go with the bad-eyeball boy to the dungeon and tell the Chinese woman to make the rugmaker ooze out of his mind, if that’s where he was. He was prepared for the Chinese woman to tell him the rugmaker was somewhere else, he didn’t care. If she said “Rugmaker in toe” it would be all right as long as she got after the toe. He was prepared to believe in any needles, any herbs, any grains, any tinctures, any thumbholds, any toeholds, any theretofore mystical non-empirical hogwash at all if it would make the rugmaker ooze away back onto the Anatolian plains, where he had frolicked with the college-teacher boy’s wife and where he belonged. “She says all trauma is cellular-deep,” the boy with the bad eyeball told the college-teacher boy. That would have sounded lik
e an exaggeration in the direction of preciousness to the college-teacher boy before he had begun to have a rugmaker inhabit him. Now it did not sound like hyperbole. It sounded like common goddamn sense.
He felt a little sheepish approaching the Chinese woman with the boy who had an actual bad eyeball when all he had was at most a bad heart or bad head. But the bad-eyeball boy could not see out of his eye, and the college-teacher boy could not think with his head, which rather throbbed, or hummed, but did not run. The bad-eyeball boy said, Come on, so they went to the dungeon. If there is anything better than a tree house with chocolate milk and bologna in it, it is an underground fort with a weird woman in it.
On their way to the dungeon, the boys stopped to eat. They liked to eat, and they knew a third boy who was also refusing a proper station in Life (though this third boy was not yet in their league as far as absolute dereliction went), who had forsaken a business-management career for a term in the Culinary Institute of America, which allowed him to say “CIA” once or twice a day, and which allowed him to wear a tall hat and call himself a chef and serve food nobody had ever heard of. On the way to the dungeon the two boys had a turkey and onion confit sandwich, chicken sate with yogurt and cumin and turmeric and garlic, a Black Angus tenderloin with an anchiote-seed salsa, and some White Russian ice cream—advanced tree-house food. It fortified them for the underground. If untoward things happened to either of them in the dungeon at the hands of the Chinese woman, they would not prove faint from want of nourishment. In this—eating well and cleaning their plates—they were being quintessentially good boys. They had both figured out, in fact, that it was only in the territory of eating that what was approved of in the behavior of a boy was approved of still in the behavior of a man. They knew women who tolerated obesity because it was a function of, and an unfortunate evil extension to the higher good of, a hearty appetite. A fat guy who cleans his plate was not merely a fat guy. Much of Life came down, in fact, they had discovered, to divining what women expected of you and allowed of you in order to still think of you as a good boy. The bad-eyeball boy said that the Chinese woman was in this sense a kind of purist, if not goddess.
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