by T. C. Boyle
“Stanley,” Katherine warned, her voice tight in her throat.
Stanley ignored her. He was transformed, huge and threatening, looming over the table like a tree cut and wedged and about to thunder down on them. He pointed a finger at an innocuous-looking young man at the far end of the table whose name Katherine hadn’t quite caught when he was introduced at the door. “Not while he’s here,” Stanley roared.
“Who?” half a dozen voices wondered.
Stanley trembled, tottered, swayed. His face was red. His finger shook as he pointed. “Him!”
The man he was indicating, ectomorphic and pale, with a fluff of apricot hair standing up straight from his head, looked over first one shoulder and then the other, utterly baffled. “Me?” he said.
“You!” Stanley bellowed, and Katherine got up from the table now to go to him, to calm him, to stop him. “You, friend. You! You‘re, you’re a wife-stealer, that’s what you are!”
Nothing was broken that night, not the innocent man’s head or their hosts’ Wedgwood plate, but the dinner was a fiasco; after Katherine had got Stanley into the other room and calmed him and explained separately to the guests that her husband was suffering from nervous exhaustion as a result of overwork at the Harvester Company, dinner went on, but Stanley didn’t utter a word more all evening, eating with a silent furious rectitude that made them all—even his wife—cringe.
That was the end of the social whirl, and no matter how hard Katherine and her mother tried to put the best face on it, they had to admit that Stanley’s eccentricities had gone beyond the pale. Certainly everyone was eccentric to a degree, especially the most sensitive and artistic—Katherine’s Aunt Louisa never removed her boots, for instance, even to go to bed or to bathe, and Mrs. London, who lived two doors down from her mother, spoke of her aspidistras as if they were sentient beings with informed opinions on taxes and the municipal elections—but neither was a danger to herself or others. And then there was Stanley’s family history to take into account, his sister Mary Virginia and his mother, who if she wasn’t actually unbalanced, was as close to the edge as normalcy would allow. Katherine agonized for days before deciding to call in a doctor—a psychiatrist, and she could hardly bear to pronounce the term aloud—but she remembered the look on Stanley’s face the day he hurled the vase across the room, the same look that came over him when he denounced her on the boat or ruined Hugh and Claudia’s party, and she went ahead with it.
Discreet inquiries were made—no one in their set had ever needed a doctor of that sort, and if they had they would never have admitted it—and on a leafy bright day in early August a very young-looking man with galloping palomino mustaches and two dull brown lidless eyes came up the walk of the house they’d taken in Brookline while their permanent residence awaited construction. His name was Dr. Jorimund Trudeau, and he’d had eleven years’ experience at the Rockport Asylum for the Criminally Insane after taking his degree at Johns Hop-kins. The maid showed him into the room.
Stanley was seated at a table by the window, poring over the plans for the new house, and Katherine had been pretending to read a magazine while the carpet crawled across the floor and the minute hand of the clock on the mantel advanced with a mechanical unconcern that made her want to scream aloud. She rose to greet the doctor, and Stanley gave him a quick startled look, though she’d been preparing him for this visit for days and they’d both agreed that he needed to consult a physician about his nerves, which were still—they both agreed—a bit overtaxed from all the recent change and excitement in their lives.
Introductions were made, Stanley rising gravely to take the doctor’s hand, and after an exchange of pleasantries about the weather and the season and the amount of fur the woolly bear caterpillars were carrying into the fall, Dr. Trudeau said, “So tell me, Mr. McCormick, how you’re feeling today—any nervous agitation? Anything troubling you? Business worries, that sort of thing?”
Stanley kept his head down. He had a T square in his hand, and he was making penciled alterations to the architect’s plans. “I feel slippery,” he said.
The doctor exchanged a look with Katherine. “Slippery? How do you mean?”
Stanley turned his face to them, a pale hovering handsome face that hung like a moon over the world of the table and the ceaselessly altered plans. “Like a salamander,” he said. “Like an eel. And all this room—you see this room? It’s like a big sucking f-funnel and I’m too covered in, in, well, slime to get a grip, do you know what I mean?”
The doctor’s voice slid up the scale and he took on another tone altogether: “Do you happen to recall what day it is today, Mr. McCormick?”
Stanley shook his head. He grinned beautifully, heraldically. “Tuesday?”
“He’s been out of sorts lately,” Katherine put in. “Really quite flustered.”
“And what month?”
No response.
“Uh, could you tell me, generally, where we are at this moment—this house, I mean? The neighborhood? The state?”
Stanley looked down at the plans. It took him a moment, and when finally he spoke he addressed the table. “I—the Judges told me not to talk to you anymore.”
It was at this point that Dr. Trudeau turned to Katherine. “Mrs. McCormick, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave the room now, and I hope you won’t mind, but Mr. McCormick and I will need to consult in private from here on out—if you would, please?” And he rose to show her to the door of her own parlor.
Dazed, she left the room, the unread magazine rolled up like a wand in one hand, and dazed, she mounted the stairs, entered her bedroom, pulled back the covers and slid herself between them. It was the first time she’d been excluded, as if she could be of no help at all to her husband—as if, far from being a help, she might even be a hindrance—and it hurt her, hurt her all the way down to a place so deep inside even the biological sciences would have been hard-pressed to identify it. It was the first time, but it wouldn’t be the last.
Three days later, after having examined her husband for several hours each afternoon, Dr. Trudeau asked to have a minute alone with Katherine. Since Stanley was in the sitting room, blackening both sides of the plans with a freshly sharpened pencil, she took the doctor into the library. She was impatient with the man, because he’d cut her out like that right from the start, and she was apprehensive too, because of Stanley’s extremely odd replies not only to the doctor’s preliminary questions but to the more intimate and domestic ones she put to him in the course of a day, and as soon as they were settled she crossed her legs and demanded, “Well?”
The doctor pulled at the long cascading mustaches that were meant to distract the eye from his receding chin and parsimonious little mouth. He looked directly at her. “About your husband,” he began, clearing his throat.
“Yes?”
“I’m afraid it’s more than nerves.”
For Stanley’s part, he knew something was wrong, deeply wrong, dog-in-the-mirror wrong, Mary-Virginia wrong, and it so terrified him he felt the pain of it in every fiber and joint of his body, in the pulp of his teeth, singing out, pain, pain, pain, in his brain and his fingertips, cancerous pain, killing pain, and he wanted to cooperate with the doctor and find a way out of it, he really did. But the Judges were strict and implacable, they were captious and shrill, and they wouldn’t let him. He heard the doctor’s voice clearly enough, heard the questions addressed to him, but there was static all around him, a noise of grumbling and dissent, and it sometimes drowned out the thin piping psychological voice as if it were the dying gasp of those pinched and hairy lips. Still, Stanley was fighting it, a ritualistic fight no one would understand, two steps up and one step down, don’t step on the cracks, hold your breath for sixty seconds and the Judges will vanish with an obscene flap of their black robes, and when the doctor advised him to go off somewhere and live a simple stress-free rustic life for a while, a life of hiking (how they loved hiking, these doctors), wood chopping, long
walks and meditation, he said yes, yes, of course, we’ll leave tomorrow.
Katherine found the place. It belonged to one of her mother’s bridge partners—or maybe it was her mother’s bridge partner’s mother—and they were able to lease it for two months without any fuss or trouble. It was in Maine, deep in the woods, a modest cabin of fourteen rooms and fourteen baths overlooking a lake, the leaves exploding all around them, simple tastes, simple fare, just Stanley and his wife, the chauffeur, the cook and two housemaids. Stanley chopped wood, and it was very therapeutic. He beat hell out of that wood, utterly destroyed it, and yet he was creating something too—the fuel for their fire. And every morning he built the fire, the Judges carping over his shoulder, no you idiot, that’s not how you do it, you don’t stack the logs like that, it’ll never catch, where’s your sense, more kindling, more kindling, and he took his time, sometimes hours, but then the moment would come, triumphant and complete, and he’d apply the match and watch the whole thing blaze up. And Katherine. She was there. White-faced. Sweet. His wife. He loved her, joked with her, cut the Judges right off—and so what if she was a slut, so what if she was all white underneath and her body a weapon of destruction and she as capable of that disappearing trick, that vaginal sleight-of-hand, as the whore in Paris? So what?
Some days he wouldn’t speak to her, not a word. He’d fling himself out of bed, dress in casual clothes (shirt, collar, tie, sweater and sport coat) because this was the wild rural backcountry woods of Maine, after all, and then come to breakfast and there she’d be, full of white smiling cheerfulness, and the Judges would be at him, a game really, could he, would he, did he have the resourcefulness today to ignore her every word and gesture and shut her out completely? Of course he did. He was a man of iron. A man of steel. Inflexible. Inexorable. A walking trap, serrated teeth, snap, shut, game over. On other days, the game reversed itself, and he couldn’t stop talking to her, all sorts of silly nonsense about love and holding hands and sweethearts and the poems of Robert Herrick. She was there, right there with him, his wife, his love, Katherine, and that made him feel better.
One afternoon—there was a nip in the air, every leaf singed with it—he went down to the lake to find an old man perched there on the end of the boat dock, fishing. He didn’t remind Stanley of his father, really, this old man, but he was about the age of his father when he died, and he did have his father’s bellicose beard and unforgiving eyes and the boxy giant’s build, but that wasn’t it, that didn’t affect him at all. “Good afternoon,” Stanley said, his feet leaping away from the cracks between the boards as he made his way up the dock. The water gleamed all around him in a sick watery way.
The old man—he wasn’t like Stanley’s father at all—glanced up from his pole and his bait and the float that bobbed in a liquid dream at the end of the line. “Afternoon,” he said.
Stanley had reached the end of the dock now, a boat tethered there, beardy reeds, a smell of muck and decay. He loomed over the man, who was dangling his heavily shod feet over the lip of the gently quaking wooden structure, his feet lolling there, just lolling there, inches from the water. Stanley was very erect, very proper, the tight clasp of the collar, his beautifully brushed hair, his shoes glowing at the nether end of him like toeless hairless impervious new and improved feet—or better yet, hoofs. Hoofs of iron, hoofs of lead, hoofs of indestructible horn. “What are you doing,” Stanley said, “fishing?”
“Ayeh,” the old man replied.
“I fished once,” Stanley said. “In the Adirondacks, when I was a boy. The guide said I should be proud.”
The old man said nothing. He spat in the water, a circle of concentrated spittle, minuscule bubbles, floating there on the unbroken surface like something else altogether, like jism, sperm, spunk. The float twitched at the end of the line, plunged suddenly, and the old man snatched it back with a whip of the rod, the line hissing through the sunlit air, but there was nothing there, not even a fish’s disappointed lips, no bait fish either, just a hook. “That one,” Stanley observed, “got away. ”
A look, that was all: the old man gave him a look. “Ayeh,” he said, fishing a minnow from the bucket beside him and impaling it on the wickedly curved device of the hook, where it wriggled in its pain, fishy pain, a pain not worth mentioning, dumb animals and dumber. And then the float shot through the air and slapped the water like the flat of a hand—thwap!—and in that moment Stanley’s mind failed him.
What happened next is entirely from the fisherman’s point of view because Stanley was no longer, in a sense, there. But the fisherman got wet, tattooed by those hard horny shoes and then lifted right out of his collar and flung into the cold clean enveloping water. And he damned near drowned too, what with the cold and the weight of his clothes and boots, but it was his own two arms and legs and the McCormick money that saved him and hushed him and made him comfortable in the declining years of his old man’s life.
Katherine was upset—no, distraught would be more accurate. For days on end she had no one to talk to but the servants, Stanley haunting the place like a revenant, as silent as if he’d had his tongue cut out. They were together, yes, and he seemed calmer (but for the single terrifying incident with the fisherman at the boat dock), and yet he was more remote than ever. There would be nothing from him, no spark, no animation at all, and for hours he’d be gone in the forest or obsessively chopping wood—wood enough for a village—and he’d pass right by her as if she didn’t exist. That was the hardest thing. That made the breath catch in her throat and it darkened the room and put out the sun in the sky.
And then the next day he’d walk into the room completely transformed. “Katherine,” he’d say, “do you remember that woman with the funny little dog in Nice?” and go off on a fascinating reminiscence of all the dogs in his life—and hers, because hadn’t she had dogs too? He would be attentive and affectionate, taking her arm when they went in to dine, rowing her round the lake for hours—no, no, she wasn’t to touch an oar—getting up from his reading to adjust the pillow behind her head. Sometimes this would go on for days and her hopes would leap up. The long face was gone, the muttering, the halting walk, the whinnying laugh: he was Stanley again, her Stanley, Stanley of the charm and sweetness and concern. She reveled in his smile, his dimples, the way his eyes seemed to reach out and hold her. He was hers. All hers.
“What do you think of Jack London?” he asked one morning when they were lying on a blanket in a meadow, the sun palely warming, the season crashing down all round them. He was lying on his side, his head propped up on one hand, a stalk of yellowed grass between his teeth.
Katherine had been reading desultorily in a book of Wallace‘s—The Malay Archipelago—that one of her professors had particularly recommended. She was planning to begin graduate research during the winter semester, once Stanley had recovered. Her hand was clasped in his. She looked up from her book and into the blue sheen of his eyes. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I certainly like him for his social consciousness, but as for his adventure stories... well, I guess I prefer stories about proper people, Edith Wharton, that sort of thing. You know I do.”
“He’s a real he-man,” Stanley said.
She looked at him, looked into his eyes, his grin. “Yes,” she said, “I suppose he is.”
“Chasing after gold, mushing dogs, risking everything.” He glanced away from her, at the line of trees at the edge of the meadow, one flame of motionless color. “I’m not like him at all,” he said, dropping his voice. “I‘m—I’m—I’ve been pampered and coddled all my life, up to my ears in my father’s m-money. I haven’t accomplished a thing, not the smallest thing, not even on my ranch. I’m not a he-man. I’m not even a man.”
“Oh, Stanley, you are, you are—”
He couldn’t look at her. “Not to you I’m not.”
She slid a hand up over his shoulder and gently, very gently—hold your breath, Katherine, hold your breath now—laid her cheek against his. “I love yo
u, Stanley,” she whispered.
“I feel—” he began and trailed off.
“You will be a man to me, Stanley, I know you will. You just need to... relax.”
Cheek pressed to cheek, the sky all around them, the trees, the silence. “I feel better now,” he said.
She lifted her head so she could look into his eyes, the softest fragmentary wisp of a smile playing across her lips. “Do you think we could—?” she whispered.
A trace of panic. “Here? Out-outside?”
She held him to her.
“In the light?”
It wasn’t ideal. It wasn’t even natural. And it was a failure, absolute, unmitigated, beyond hope or repair. He managed, after an eon and a half of fumbling and apologizing and kissing her ear so assiduously it ached for days afterward, to pull her dress up and her bloomers down and to work himself out of his trousers, but when it came to the blind impulsive moment of insertion, of becoming one with her after all, he shrank back and she felt nothing but a premature wetness and a grasping yearning sucking drain of emptiness that would never, in all her natural life, be stopped or plugged or filled.
So the years went by, years of abstinence and denial, a withdrawal from the world of men so complete that Katherine became a kind of prisoner herself, Mrs. Stanley Robert McCormick, married and yet not widowed, attached to a man and yet detached from him too. Jane helped. Her mother helped. NAWSA and the American Birth Control League and the War Service Department, they all helped. But the fact was, she turned fifty-two years old in 1927, and as far as men were concerned she might as well have been a nun. Sexual love—heterosexual love, procreative love—was a thing she would never experience, she was resigned to that, but beyond sexual love there was dutiful love, a platonic and idealized love, and when her activism flagged, when the speeches became repetitive and the speakers crabbed and insipid, she thought of Stanley. Still. After all these years. Was it even love at this point, she wondered, or just curiosity? She managed his affairs with the fierce uncompromising zeal she’d brought to NAWSA and the birth control movement and saw that he was provided with the best of everything, and she wrote him and spoke with him on the phone, but it was all an abstraction. She wanted to see him, just see him, and that was what Kempf had promised her.