"Do it," I'd advise, if she were someone else's.
"Okay. I will."
It might do wonders for her morale, if she didn't expect too much. It's also time she struck back. Wouldn't it be funny if my boy is the one who turns out to be homosexual and I do not? It would be tragic. I, at least, have inhibitions of steel. It would be worse than tragic for me: it would be socially embarrassing. A suicide, a fag, and an idiot, the Slocum offspring from the Slocum loins. And an alcoholic, neurasthenic, adulterous wife. God bless the girl — she'd come in handy. I'd blame the children on her. Until someone as astute as I am pointed an accusatory finger at me and inquired:
"Hey, wait a minute, buddy. Buddy, wait a minute. Was she always this way?"
"I don't know. All of this takes time to mature and emerge. You'll have to ask some reliable, revolutionary, evolutionary, psychological historian, an experienced botanist of the psyche. Was I this way?"
"You made me this way."
"You made me make you."
"You made me make you make me. Why can't I talk to you?"
"Call your sister."
"I need a sympathetic ear."
"You drink too much."
"You make me."
"Call your sister and complain to her."
"I hate my sister. You know it."
"She has a sympathetic ear."
"You bastard," she blurts out. "You just can't wait to get away from me, can you? I know what you're thinking. I can tell by the way you look."
More and more often lately, I find myself looking her over critically evenings for stains and bite marks of illicit sexuality. I feel cheated when I don't find any.
"What'd you do today?" I'm the one who's likely to ask.
"Nothing."
"Shopping."
"Went to the beauty parlor."
"Saw my sister."
"Saw some friends. Why?"
"Just curious."
"What'd you do?"
"Worked. Nothing."
"Anything happen?"
"It's moving along, I think. I don't want to talk about it."
"Jinx?"
"That's talking about it."
"I'll knock wood."
There are even mornings now when I catch myself scrutinizing her for stains and blemishes obsessively with the same aggressive and scavenging suspicions, and this, I know, is irrational, for she has spent the night in bed with me. I don't want to go crazy. I like to keep tight rein on my reason, thoughts, and actions, and to know always which is which. I don't want to lose my inhibitions. I might hit people if I did (strangers, friends, and loved ones), commit murder, spout hatred and bigotry, scratch eyeballs, molest teen-age girls and younger ones with trim figures, come on crowded subway trains against the side of a hefty buttock on someone like my wife or Penny. Dreams are merciless; they come upon you when you're asleep.
I might start stuttering.
Waking up is such a peculiar and extraordinary process that I'm surprised we are able to manage it successfully so many times while we are still half asleep.
I think I might get used to the idea of my wife's copulating with other men, but never to the specifics, the mechanics, to all that probing and liquid, all those grunts and strenuous bendings. Everything gets wet. Places are raw or bruised afterward. I don't like to picture my wife ever doing with another male the things she does with me. Or my daughter. (Will he put — of course. Will she — why not?) Everything does get so wet and smelly, and this is called making love. Beasts do it. It has no connection with love, q.v., op. cit. (But better wet and smelly, for my taste, than dry and perfumed. I hate those artificial, candy-store scents. I want to embrace human flesh with musky, natural odors, not a bar of soap.) Even business handshakes these days have turned wet and smelly. Show me a young man with a dry, pumping handshake today and I'll show you an unscrupulous young man on the make. I wish my daughter would stop leaving her bra around where I can see it and stop leaving her nightgown hanging on the door of the bathroom. She's developed fast and knows it. I see the way she dresses sometimes to go out, and I am furious. (She has bigger breasts now than my wife.) I can barely look at her as she pauses in front of me to wait for the money she says she needs. (There isn't anything I can say that wouldn't be derogatory and crushing to her self-esteem at a moment when she might be feeling good about herself. I wish she'd always wear her bra instead of leaving it tossed around. She'll wear blue denim jeans and doesn't always look clean. She reminds me of Ann Arbor. Every girl I meet these days reminds me of a different one I've known.)
"No wonder they say dirty things to you when you walk past. You're asking for it. If you get raped you deserve it."
She'd break down immediately into sobbing hysteria.
"You always do that," she'd accuse shrilly (while my boy watches from a corner in apprehensive deliberation, and I am already sorry I started). "You always say something to spoil everything."
"I have spoken to her," my wife replies in wilted exasperation. "She thinks I'm mean and jealous. She thinks I'm envious because I've got no tits."
"You've got tits."
If anything does happen to my daughter these days, it will probably happen with that college graduate she's mentioned who works on a land-fill track and has offered to give her driving lessons evenings and weekends if we let them have one of our cars.
"No."
My wife nods in agreement. "You have to be sixteen."
"I can get a little head start. Everyone else does. You want me to pass, don't you?"
I want her to pass geometry, English, French, social studies, and science — not driver education. And I want her to get at least a B average so she'll be able to go off to college when she's through. (I won't want her here.) I don't see how I'll ever be able to make conversation with a simpering, clever son-in-law much younger than I who I know is humping my daughter quietly in another part of the house when they come to visit us weekends. My wife will bake cakes for them and look forward to grandchildren. (She's the one with the dirty mind.) They'll want things from us and lie to me.
"Maybe she won't. Maybe she'll be different. Maybe she'll grow up by the time she's married."
"We didn't."
"What do you mean?"
My wife doesn't understand me. I don't think she ever thinks I'm thinking she might be out screwing another man or that I am inspecting her belly, hair, thighs, neck, chest, panties, slips, and blouses systematically and belligerently for semen stains that aren't mine. (My wife has one of those light and softly sloping bellies you often see in photographs of attractive, long-waisted girls.) Often when I'm inspecting her hair and belly closely my antagonism turns into passion (to antagonistic passion, of course, otherwise known as lust, and I will want to make love). I'll have to leave her if I find one. I have something more potent than an ordinary hypocritical, male chauvinist double standard to give me the strength and determination to walk out: I have insecurity.
I have forgotten all about brain tumors, the thirteenth largest killer of undivorced men my age in Connecticut with three children, two cars, and an opportunity for promotion to a better job. No wonder I have to yell a lot at home to make my identity felt. (I don't really want to be feared; I want to be nursed and coddled. I don't get the love and sympathy from my family that I used to get as a child from my mother and certain women teachers. God dammit — I want to be treated like a baby sometimes by my wife and kids. I've got a right. I need that feeling of security. I'm not one of these parents that expect to be taken care of by their children in their old age: I want my children to take care of me now.) My wife believes I enjoy being home with her these days; she cannot detect that I can hardly wait to get out of the house to the office to be near Arthur Baron (with whom I am exchanging glances these days, I think, that are of more than ordinary significance).
The convention's in Puerto Rico again (to do rightful honor to Lester Black's wife's family), and Kagle's away in Toledo. My wife will find it hard to forgive me f
or firing Andy Kagle (until I tell her unequivocally it's him or me. Then she'll look over my shoulder into a distance and not wish to know anything more about it). My wife feels sorry for Kagle's leg, wife, and two children. My wife empathizes easily with all religious families, except Black ones, and except Jewish ones, whose foreign language ("It isn't even Latin.") and incomprehensible praying seem crude and offensive to her. (She thinks they are praying about us.) Even their holidays fall on different days. (They are a perverse and stiff-necked people. She does not want our daughter to marry one, although she'd prefer that to a Puerto Rican or Negro.) Kagle won't improve. He still goes to church with his family when he's home on a Sunday and to places like Toledo on business for a week and to low-class whores in the late afternoon. He is still a bigot and won't hire a Jew or fuck a Black girl, unless he's away at some business meeting on an island in the Caribbean. Then he likes them young; he's had them fifteen and would take them thirteen and eleven, I think, but would feel abnormal. I have to fire him; I've been to whores with him and can't forgive him or forget. He'll hover. He'll bump shoulders with me, snigger indecorously. "Aw, come on, Bob. Cut it out. I know you. Remember when.»
"It never happened. And if it did, I don't remember and you have to pay."
I will shift his hard-drinking cronies in out-of-town offices around to new positions in different cities and hope they quit. Arthur Baron and I do not talk much about matters like this when we meet by chance in corridors, but there is a diplomatic understanding now, I feel, in the small talk he makes.
"How are you, Bob?" he'll always stop me now to say.
"Fine, Art. You?"
"That's good. Horace White tells me he gets a big kick out of you."
"I like Horace White a lot, Art. He's a fine man."
(My facts are wrong but my answer is right.)
Horace White approves. Does Lester Black? Johnny Brown will go growling to him in dissension when he learns I'm his boss. Black probably won't care. It's out of his area, and Black is ready to retire anyway and spends much time out of the office sailing.
I did my best to dissuade Kagle from going to Toledo (and knew, of course, I would fail. My conscience is almost clear.
"Stay in town, Andy. You know Arthur Baron wants you here."
"I'll tie it in with a supermarket promotion," he responds with one of his conspiratorial winks. "Heh-heh. You'll see.").
"Kagle in Chicago, Bob?"
"Toledo."
"There? He told Laura Chicago. What's there?"
"He might come back with a supermarket promotion."
"He shouldn't be the one to do that."
"He phones in every day. I know where I can reach him. He asked me to cover the office."
"Good, Bob. We'll have to start making our preparations for the convention. I'd like it to go very smoothly this year."
"I think it will, Art."
"So do I. Horace White gets back to town next week and he and I'll start setting up our meetings upstairs. Are you ready to make some enemies?"
"If I have to."
"You'll have some friends."
I'll have some speeches, too. I'll need Kagle for the convention. He'll do that well, claiming credit for having engineered the changes himself and professing gladness at having shed administrative responsibilities he did not want and being free at last to do the type of work he really enjoys. No one will believe him. But that won't matter. After that, I won't want him around.
"What will you want to do about Andy Kagle?" Arthur Baron will ask.
"I think I'd want him to open the convention."
"I think that's good."
"I think he'll do that well. He'll smile enough without being told."
"And afterward?"
"I don't want him around."
"Would you want to keep him on as a consultant or use him on special projects?"
"No, Art."
"He could be useful."
"But not here. I think it might be a bad idea to have him around."
"I think you're right, Bob."
"Thanks, Art."
Of course, I can't fire Kagle. (If I could fire people, I would fire Green, and I would fire the typist Martha, who is still going crazy slowly but not fast enough to suit me.) I can merely indicate that I don't want him around and the company will move him somewhere else. I wish somebody else would fire her before I have to make Green do it.
"Art," I might say. "Have you got a minute?"
"How are you, Bob?"
"Fine, Art. You?"
"That's good, Bob."
"There's a girl in Green's department with a serious mental problem. She's going crazy. I think she talks to herself in imaginary conversations. She laughs to herself. It doesn't really help the appearance of the department to have her there."
"Is she happy?" he might ask.
"Only when she laughs," I answer. "But she stops typing then and her productivity suffers."
"Tell Green to get rid of her."
If he says that, it will signify he wants me to start issuing instructions to Green and take dominion over his department. If he says:
"I'll talk to Green."
That means he wishes us to maintain our departments separately (and I will not be downcast, for there's an advantage in having Green's department to shift blame to).
If, with an expression of sobriety, he asks:
"What would you do?"
"She probably has a fair amount of sick leave coming to her," I'll answer. "And after that her major medical hospitalization insurance can take over, if she wants to use it. People who go on voluntary sick leave for mental disorders almost never try to come back."
"That's good, Bob. It sounds like the kindest way for her."
"The jobs aren't held open. We can tell her that, if she reapplies. One of the nurses can tell her she needs a rest."
"But I'm happy here. I smile and laugh all day."
"It's just for a little while, dear. We — they — have to cut down."
(Sick leave is what I am holding in reserve for Red Parker.)
(He'll think I'm slipping him a favor.)
(Wait till he tries to come back.)
(I'm so smart I ought to be President.)
I might even start using Red Parker's apartment again when he's no longer with the company. It will not dawn on him for a while that he's not with the company but outside it, and there will be major medical benefits for me in his major medical insurance policy. His job will be filled. (He will be filed.) The opening he left will be closed if he tries to come back. (He probably won't. He'll get used to doing nothing and jumping about aimlessly on reckless vacations.)
People who go on voluntary extended sick leave for anything but surgery or serious accidents almost never try to come back. They don't feel up to it. (Even people who've been out awhile with hepatitis or mononucleosis have a hard time making their way back. They lack pep.) (Long after they've left, somebody who enjoys keeping track of people (in the army, it was our public relations officer) drops by to tell us they're dead (or suffered a "cerebral vascular accident," and then we know they really are gone for good. Or bad, ha, ha).
"Did you hear about Red Parker? Or Andy Kagle? Or Jack Green?" someone like Ed Phelps will stop by to say, if Ed Phelps isn't dead by then too. Ed Phelps will be dropping in often after he's retired (like Horace White with his wheelchair and metal canes after he falls ill, or pushed into the office on a stretcher on wheels, waving hello limply as he rolls past, by an inscrutable Black chauffeur in meticulous gray livery. How will I look when I'm eighty and toothless? I'll have no teeth — periodontal work will not preserve my deteriorating jawbone forever — and my ankles and arches grow worse. My nose will be closed, and I'll breathe through an open mouth. My fingers will roll pills. I've met me already in hospitals and photographs. How will I smell? I know how I will smell. I smell that smell now and don't like it) because he will have no place else to go. It would not surprise me if Ed Phelps began showing u
p at my army reunions (in place of me. I've never gone) as another surplus survivor. (We really have no need for that many survivors anymore.) "I'm not sure what it was," he'll keep repeating about Red Parker. "I wonder who'll take care of the children. How many did he have?"
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