by T. C. Boyle
He did. And he hung his head and pulled mournfully at his cuffs and offered Josephine his handkerchief, but he was soaring, absolutely, no dogs in the mirror now. Katherine loved him. Incredibly. Improbably. Beyond all doubt or reason. He mooned at her across the table through the soup and fish courses and kept on mooning and beaming and winking till the dessert was in crumbs and the coffee cups drained, and after she’d pecked a goodnight kiss to the hollow of his right cheek, he phoned up an old friend from Princeton and went out to drink champagne into the small hours of the morning.
The next afternoon he was back at Katherine’s door, pale and shaking, his head stuffed full of gauze and his eyes aching in their sockets. No one was home and the maid wouldn’t let him in, so he sat on the stoop in a daze and watched a skin of ice thicken over a puddle in the street until Katherine came home and found him there. “I can’t let you do this,” he said, rising from the cold stone in a delirium of shame and self-abnegation.
She was in her furs and a scarf, the brim of her hat faintly rustling in a wind that came up the street from the Bay. “Do what?” she said. “What are you talking about? Her smile faded. ”And what are you doing out here in this weather—do you want to catch your death?“
Slouching, miserable, crapulous, chilled to the bone, his veins plugged with suet and his fingertips dead to all sensation, he could only croak out the words: “Marry me.”
She puzzled a minute, her bag and books clutched tight in her arms, her eyes working, her hat brim fluttering, and then she decided he was joking. “Marry you?” she echoed, talking through a grin. “Are you asking me again? Or is that the imperative form of the verb?”
“No, I ... I didn’t mean that. I mean, I can’t let you do this to yourself, throw your life away, on, on someone like me.”
She tried to make light of it, tried to slip her arm through his and lead him up the stairs, but he broke away, his face working. “Stanley?” she said. And then: “It’s all right now. Calm down. Come on, let’s discuss it inside where it’s warm.”
“No.” He stood there shivering, fitfully clenching and unclenching his hands. There was ice in his mustache where his breath had condensed and frozen. “I don’t deserve you. I’m no good. I’ve never—I won’t ever... Didn’t you read my letters?”
The wind picked up. Two men in overcoats with bowlers clamped manually to their heads went by on the opposite side of the street. Katherine looked uncertain all of a sudden. “I have a confession to make,” she said, ducking her head and pulling at the fingers of her gloves. “I’m afraid I didn’t read them, not all of them. They were beautifully written, I don’t mean that... it’s just that they were so, I don’t know, depressing. Can you forgive me?”
Stanley was thunderstruck. He forgot everything, forgot where he was and what he was doing and why he’d come. “You didn’t read them?”
In the smallest voice: “No.”
A long moment passed, both of them shivering, a couple in a silver-gray victoria giving them a queer look as they trundled past in a clatter of wheels, hoofs and bells. From down the street came the voices of children at play, shrill with excitement. “Well, you should read them,” Stanley said, his face drawn and white. “Maybe then you’d... you’d change your mind.”
She was firm, Katherine, unshakable and tough, and now she did loop her arm through his. “I’ll never change my mind,” she said. “Here”—all business now—“help me with my things, will you, please?” She handed him her books before he could protest and tugged him toward the door.
He tucked the books firmly under his arm and allowed himself to be led up the steps, where Katherine let her handbag dangle from her wrist and rang the bell rather than fumble for her key. “The letters,” he said, and they weren’t finished with the subject yet. “They—they’re nothing, they barely scratch the surface. You don’t know. You can’t know. You see, I‘m”—he turned his head sharply away from her—“I’m a sexual degenerate.”
“Stanley, really,” she said, and the maid’s footsteps were audible now, echoing down the hallway like gunshots. “You have to calm yourself—it can’t be as bad as all that.”
He tried to pull away, but she held fast to him. “It is,” he cried in a kind of whinny, his frozen breath spilling from him like some vital essence. “And I have to tell you this, I have to,” the maid at the door now, the tumbler clicking in the lock. “In all honesty, I can‘t—what I mean is, Katherine, you don’t understand. I’m, I‘m”—and he dropped his voice to a ragged chuffing whisper—“I’m a masturbator.”
“Good afternoon, madame,” the maid said, pulling back the door. “And sir.”
Katherine’s face showed nothing. “Good afternoon, Bridget,” she said, ducking out from under the woolen scarf with a graceful flick of her neck and reaching up to unpin her hat in the vestibule with its mahogany-framed mirror, Tiffany lamp and Nottingham curtains. Stanley was staring down at the rug. “Bring us some tea in the parlor, would you?” she said, addressing the maid. “And some biscuits.”
“Oh, I can‘t—” Stanley said, still studying the pattern of the rug, “I really, I have to go, I—”
“We need to talk, Stanley.” There was no arguing with the the tone of Katherine’s voice. She made an impatient gesture. “Come, give Bridget your coat and we’ll sit by the fire—you must be chilled through.”
Again he let himself be led, slumped over and shuffling, a man of sixty, eighty, a hundred, his face transfigured with pain and mortification. She helped him to the couch and sat beside him. They listened in silence as the clock chimed the half hour—four-thirty, and starting to get dark. Stanley shifted uneasily in his seat. “I’m so dirty,” he groaned.
“You’re not. Not at all.”
“I’m not suited for marriage. I’ve done filthy things.”
She seized his hand, and she was as wrought-up as he was, but it wasn’t his revelation that disturbed her—certainly masturbation wasn’t a nice habit, not the sort of thing you’d discuss over dinner or cards, but she was a biologist, after all, and she took it in stride—no, it was the idea of it that got to her, the mechanics of the act itself. She kept picturing Stanley, alone in his room and touching himself and maybe even thinking of her while he was doing it, and that sent a thrill through her. She could see him, stripped to his socks, his long strong legs, the pale hair of his thighs and chest and abdomen, Stanley, her fiance, her man. She loved him. She wanted him. She wanted to be there in that bedroom with him.
He was inexperienced, like her, she was sure of it. And that was the beauty of the whole thing. Here he was, a big towering physical specimen of a male, and yet so docile and sweet, hers to lead and shape and build into something extraordinary, a father like her father. And there was no chance of that with Butler Ames and the rest—they were smirking and wise, overgrown fraternity boys who tried women on for size, like hats, and went to prostitutes with no more thought or concern than they went to the barber or the tailor. But Stanley, Stanley was malleable, unformed, innocent still—and that was why everything depended on getting him away from his mother, that crippling combative stultifying monster of a woman who’d made him into a pet and all but emasculated him in the process. He needed to get free, that was all, and then he could grow.
Katherine squeezed his hand as the maid clattered into the room with the tea things. “It’s nothing to worry about,” she said. “Really. It’s your nerves, that’s all.”
The room was warm, secure, wrapped up in its particularity, suspended in time. Katherine waited till the maid had set down the things and left. “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done,” she whispered, and she wanted to kiss the side of his face, the bulge of his jaw, the place at the corner of his right eye where a lock of hair dangled like a thread of the richest tapestry, “because you have me now.”
In June, their engagement was officially announced, and the papers in Boston, New York, Washington and Chicago all ran stories trumpeting their wealth, family conn
ections and accomplishments, and a dozen smaller papers, including the Princeton Tiger, printed prominent notices. Stanley was described as “the Harvester Heir” in most of these accounts, a “motoring enthusiast” and “amateur artist,” and Katherine was, simply, “the Boston socialite and scientific graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.” The Boston Post decreed their engagement “a betrothal of the highest expectation and promise” and the Transcript was moved to pronounce it “the match of the year.”
Josephine was in her glory, fielding telegrams, canvassing caterers, bakers and florists and prattling her way across the Back Bay through one parlor after another. Nettie was less pleased. Her letters—separate letters—to Stanley and Katherine seemed to accept the betrothal as a fait accompli, but she made no bones about her disapproval of the match, especially in her letter to Katherine, in which she questioned her future daughter-in-law’s morals, education (there was too much of it), taste in millinery and footwear, dietary habits, religiosity and commitment to her last and most precious child. The word “love” never came up. As for Stanley, he seemed to be in permanent transit between Chicago and Boston, his nerves on edge, obsessing over the smallest details—“What sort of rice should we provide for the guests to shower us with, arborio or Texas long-grain?”—and every once in a while, dashing into the men’s room at the station or coming through the doors at the Copley Plaza, he began to think he was seeing that dog again in the glass. But he tried to brush it off—not to worry, the smallest of things—and instead concentrated on collecting all the announcements from the various newspapers and mounting them on red construction paper as a memento for Katherine. They set a date in the fall, the bride’s favorite season.
It was then, just when everything seemed to be going forward and all the major hurdles had been leapt, that things began to break down. Suddenly Stanley was having palpitations—he couldn’t seem to stop jittering, bouncing up off his feet, shaking out his fingers till they rattled like castanets, twisting his neck and gyrating his head in response to some frenetic inner rhythm—and all he could talk about was Mary Virginia. Mary Virginia and his genitals, that is.
He came bobbing and jittering into the house on Commonwealth Avenue early one morning two weeks or so after the engagement had been announced, his eyes fluttering, his face in flux, talking so fast no one could understand him. He frightened the maid, upset the cook and chased Josephine’s cat all the way up into the rafters of the attic in an excess of zeal. Katherine, who’d been dressing in her room, came out into the hall to see what the commotion was, and she watched Stanley dart past her up the stairs in pursuit of the cat, never even giving her a glance. When she caught up with him on the steps to the attic, he couldn’t seem to explain himself—he was afflicted with logorrhea, the words tripping over one another and piling up end to end, and he was going on and on about something she couldn’t quite catch, aside from the frequent repetition of his sister’s name. She’d never seen him like this—his eyes bugging out, his hair a mess, every cell and fiber of him rushing hell-bent down the tracks like a runaway freight train—and she was frightened. She managed to get him outside, out in the sunshine and fresh air, to try to walk it out of him, whatever it was.
They walked the length of Commonwealth Avenue, from the Public Garden to Hereford Square and back—or actually, it was more of a jog than a walk, Stanley setting an accelerated, stiff-kneed pace and Katherine clinging to his arm and struggling to keep up. The whole while Stanley kept shaking and trembling and running on about Mary Virginia and her illness and some sort of mysterious “whiteness,” as if she were lost in a blizzard somewhere instead of quietly ensconced with her nurse and doctor on a grand and faultless estate in Arkansas. It wasn’t till they’d passed the house for the second time, Stanley wet through with perspiration and the neighbors giving them looks that ranged from shock to alarm to amusement, that Katherine began to discern what he was driving at.
Leaping along, straining to look up into his face, her breathing labored and her mood beginning to fray, she managed to gasp out a little speech. “There’s no mental illness in my family, Stanley,” she wheezed on an insuck of breath. “On my mother’s or my father’s side, so the chances are very remote that our children will suffer, if that’s what’s worrying you, and it is, isn’t it?”
“She’s sick,” he said, never breaking stride. “Very sick.”
“Yes,” she gasped, “I know, and it’s right of you to bring it up now that we’re going to be married, but I really don‘t—can’t we stop here, just for a minute?”
It was as if she’d waved a flag in front of him or given a sudden jerk at a leash—he stopped as abruptly as he’d started, his feet jammed together, one arm clasped in hers, sweat standing out on his brow and his hat soaked under the brim in a dark expanding crescent. “It’s not just that,” he said, and he was talking not to her but to the ground beneath their feet. “It’s my genitals.”
“Your what?” They were stopped on the walk in front of a yard full of roses. Bees dug into the blossoms. The perfume of the flowers wafted out into the street. Everything had such an air of calm and normalcy—except Stanley. Stanley was making faces and staring down at his shoes. And that wouldn’t have been so bad except that two smart young women suddenly emerged from the yard under a trellis of white and yellow roses and gave them a long look before brusquely stepping around them.
“My genitals,” Stanley repeated.
Katherine studied him a moment, his nostrils like two holes drilled in his head, his eyes locked on the ground and every other part of him jerking into motion and relaxing again in a long continuous shudder. She waited till the women were out of earshot. “Yes,” she said. “All right. What about them?”
“I—well—I—what I mean is, maybe they’ve been... damaged.”
“Damaged? ”
“From, you know, from my habits—”
She was a patient woman. And she loved him. But this wasn’t the sort of romance she’d dreamed about, this wasn’t being swept off her feet and wooed with tender intimacies and anticipatory pleasures—this was psychodrama, this was crazy. It was hot and she was perspiring and she’d meant to go out with her mother and look at some lace for her trousseau, and now here she was making a spectacle of herself in the middle of the street and Stanley carrying on over nothing—yet again. She was fed up. The furrow she was unaware of crept into the gap between her eyebrows. “If you’re so worried,” she said, “then why don’t you go see a doctor,” and she turned and stalked off down the street without him.
He called her from his hotel later in the day to tell her he was taking her advice and catching the next train to Chicago to see a specialist and that he’d return at the end of the week and she shouldn’t worry. But by nightfall he was back on her doorstep, Bridget in hysterics, her mother’s face drawn up tight in a knot, and Stanley acting as oddly as he had that morning—or even more oddly. He’d boarded the train and gone as far as New London, he said, still talking as if a howling mob were at his heels and this was the last speech of his life, but then he’d got to thinking about their situation and had changed trains and come back because there were a few things that just couldn’t wait a week—or even another day.
She looked at him a long moment. “What things?” she asked, ushering him into the parlor and closing the door behind them.
He seemed confused, agitated, his movements jerky and clonic. He knocked over a vase of gladioli, water spreading a dark stain across the tabletop, and didn’t even seem to notice. “Things,” he said darkly. “Vital things. ”
She watched the water fan out, seeking the lowest point, and begin a slow, steady drip onto the carpet. She’d made a date with Betty Johnston to go visiting that evening and she was already impatient and exasperated. “You’ll have to be more specific, I’m afraid,” she said. “If I don’t know what these vague ‘things’ are, how can you expect me to discuss them with you?”
He kept shuddering an
d twitching, shifting his weight from one foot to the other like a tightrope walker. “About us,” he said. “About our, about my—”
“Genitals?” she offered.
He averted his face. “You shouldn’t say that.”
“Say what? Isn’t that what this is all about? Your genitals? Not to mention hypochondria. Correct me if I’m mistaken, but isn’t that the subject under discussion? Didn’t you just leave this morning to go to a specialist and clear up the suspense?” Suddenly she felt very tired. The whole thing seemed hopeless, as if she’d been wrapped up in a blanket and pitched headfirst into the dark river that was Stanley, and no coming up for air. “Listen, Stanley,” she said, and she could hear the rustle of skirts in the hallway, her mother and Bridget listening at the door and fidgeting with their sleeves and buttons, “you’ve got to get a grip on yourself. You’re acting crazy, don’t you realize that?”
He stopped his quivering then, automatically and without hesitation, and for the first time he seemed to notice the overturned vase and the dripping water, and when he bent for it she assumed he was going to set it upright, to rectify the problem and make amends. But when he lifted it from the table—heavy leaded crystal with a sharp crenellated edge—and kept lifting it till it was cocked behind his ear like a football, she couldn’t help opening her mouth and letting out a tightly wound shriek of fear and outrage even as the mirror behind her dissolved in a flood of silvered glass.