by John Irving
"You'd do that for me?" Bardlong would cry then, overcome. "Why, I mean, I would, ah ... pay you for that, anything you ask."
And Ronkers would have him then, of course. With a hunting cat's leer, he would spring the price: "How about half a walnut tree?"
But things like that, Ronkers knew, didn't happen. Things like that were in the nature of the stories about abandoned pets limping their way from Vermont to California, finding the family months later, arriving with bleeding pads and wagging tails. The reason such stories were so popular was that they went pleasantly against what everyone knew really happened. The pet was squashed by a Buick in Massachusetts -- or, worse, was perfectly happy to remain abandoned in Vermont.
And if Bardlong came to Ronkers's office, it would be for some perfectly respectable aspect of age finally lodging in his prostate.
"Kesler's dead, Kit," Ronkers told her. "His heart stopped, saved him a lot of trouble, really; he would have gotten quite uncomfortable."
He held her in the fabulous sleeping place she had invented. Outside their window the scrawny, pruned tree clicked against the rain gutter like light bones. The leaves were all gone; what few walnuts remained were small and shriveled -- even the squirrels ignored them, and if one had fallen on the roof it would have gone unnoticed. Winter-bare and offering nothing but its weird shadows on their bed and its alarming sounds throughout their night, the tree seemed hardly worth their struggle. Kesler, after all, was dead. And Bardlong was so very retired that he had more time and energy to give to trivia than anyone who was likely to oppose him. The wall between Ronkers and Bardlong seemed frail indeed.
It was then that Ronkers realized he had not made love to his wife in a very long time, and he made the sort of love to Kit that some therapist might have called "reassuring." And some lover, Ronkers thought later, might have called dull.
He watched her sleep. A lovely woman; her students, he suspected, cared for more than her architecture. And she, one day, might care more for them -- or for one of them. Why was he thinking that? he wondered; then he pondered his own recent sensations for the X-ray technician.
But those kinds of problems, for Kit and him, seemed years away -- well, months away, at least.
He thought of Margaret Brant's sweet taste of revenge; her mature forgiveness surprised and encouraged him. And Harlan Booth's giving in? Whether he was converted -- or just trapped, and evil to the core -- was quite unknowable at the moment. Whether anyone was ... Ronkers wondered.
Danfors's season with the heart machine now stood at four-and-six. What sort of odds were those in favor of human reproduction -- Ronkers's and Kit's, especially?... And even if all the high school principals and parents in the world were as liberal and humorous and completely approachable concerning venereal disease as they might be sympathetic toward a football injury, there would still be rampant clap in the world -- and syphilis, and worse.
Kit slept.
The brittle tree clacked against the house like the bill of a parrot he remembered hearing in a zoo. Where was that? What zoo?
In an impulse, which felt to Ronkers like resignation, he moved to the window and looked over the moonlit roofs of the suburbs -- many of which he could see for the first time, now that the leaves were all gone and a winter view was possible. And to all the people under those roofs, and more, he whispered, wickedly, "Have fun!" To Ronkers, this was a kind of benediction with a hidden hook.
"Why not have children?" he said aloud. Kit stirred, but she had not actually heard him.
Interior Space (1980)
AUTHOR'S NOTES
"Interior Space" was first published in Fiction (vol. 6, no. 2, 1980). It is my second-favorite among the very few short stories I have written; I have written more novels (eight) than short stories -- I believe that will always be the case. I remember that I wrote the first draft of this story sometime in 1974, probably before I began The World According to Garp (1978); for forgotten reasons, the story languished in a bottommost drawer for five or six years before I took it out and finished it.
I admit that a certain confusion regarding the subject of this story may lie at the heart of why the story "languished" for so long, and why I was quite surprised when it won an O. Henry Award. "Interior Space" began as a story about a false case of gonorrhea, but Mr. Kesler's cancer stole the stage. All along, it was the death of the tree that most interested me. In the end, it is a story about marriage, and -- more important -- about the necessary optimism that is required of thoughtful, observant people who decide (despite what they know) to have children.
I see now, too, that in "Interior Space" I was testing a line that would (with revision) become the last line of The World According to Garp: "In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases." Here it is the tree that is a "terminal patient."
BRENNBAR'S RANT
My husband, Ernst Brennbar, worked steadily on his second cigar and his third cognac. A slow, rising heat flushed his cheeks. His tongue felt lazy and overweight. He knew that if he didn't try to speak soon, his mouth would loll open and he'd belch -- or worse. A bear of guilt shifted in his stomach and he remembered the bottle of '64 Brauneberger Juffer Spatlese that had accompanied his ample portion of trutte Metternich. His red ears throbbed a total recall of the '61 Pommard Rugiens that had drowned his boeuf Crespi.
Brennbar looked across the wasted dinner table at me, but I was lost in a conversation about minority groups. The man speaking to me appeared to be a member of one. For some reason, the waiter was included -- perhaps as a gesture meant to abolish class distinctions. Possibly the man who spoke with me and the waiter were from the same minority group.
"You wouldn't know anything about it," the man told me, but I'd been watching my blotching husband; I hadn't been paying attention.
"Well," I said defensively, "I can certainly imagine what it must have been like."
"Imagine!" the man shouted. He tugged the waiter's sleeve for support. "This was the real thing. No amount of imagining could ever make you feel it like we did. We had to live with it every day!" The waiter guessed he should agree.
Another woman, sitting next to Brennbar, suddenly said, "That's no different from what women have always had to face -- what we still have to face today."
"Yes," I said quickly, turning on the man. "For example, you're bullying me right now."
"Look, there's no persecution like religious persecution," the man said, yanking the waiter's arm for emphasis.
"You might ask a black," I said.
"Or any woman," said the woman next to Brennbar. "You talk as if you had a monopoly on discrimination."
"You're all full of shit," said Brennbar, slowly uncoiling his lounging tongue. The others stopped talking and looked at my husband as if he were a burn hole developing in a costly rug.
"Darling," I said, "we're talking about minority groups."
"As if that counts me out?" Brennbar asked. He made me disappear in a roil of cigar smoke. But the woman next to him seemed to feel provoked by this; she responded recklessly.
"I don't see that you're black," she said, "or a woman or a Jew. You're not even Irish or Italian or something like that, are you? I mean -- Brennbar -- what's that? German?"
"Out," said the waiter. "That's German, I know it."
And the man whose pleasure had been to abuse me said, "Oh, that's a fine minority group." The others -- but not I -- laughed. I was familiar with my husband's signals for the control he gradually lost on polite conversation; blowing cigar smoke in my face was a fairly advanced phase.
"My husband is from the Midwest," I said cautiously.
Oh, you poor man," said the woman next to Brennbar. Her hand lay with facetious sympathy on Brennbar's shoulder.
"How appalling: the Midwest," someone far down the table muttered.
And the man who held the waiter's sleeve with the importance he might lavish on a mine detector said, "Now, there's a minority group!" Laughter embraced the table while I observed my hu
sband's journey through one more lost control he held on polite conversation: the stiff smile accompanied by the studied tossing off of his third cognac and the over-steady pouring of his fourth. I'd forgotten that he bought the bottle.
I was so full I felt I'd temporarily lost my cleavage, but I said, "I'd like dessert. Would anyone else have anything else?" I asked, watching the studied tossing off of my husband's fourth cognac and the fantastically deliberate pouring of his fifth.
The waiter remembered his job; he fled to fetch the menu. And the man who had sought in the waiter an ethnic kinship boldly faced Brennbar and said with unctuous condescension, "I was merely trying to establish that religious discrimination -- at least historically -- is of a more subtle and pervasive kind than those forms of discrimination we have all jumped on the bandwagon about lately, with our cries of racist, sexist --"
Brennbar belched: a sharp shot like a brass bedpost ball flung at random into the kitchenware. I was familiar with this phase, too; I knew now that the dessert would come too late and that my husband scarcely needed to pause before he would launch forth.
Brennbar began: "The first form of discrimination I encountered while growing up is so subtle and pervasive that even to this day no group has been able to organize to protest it, no politician has dared mention it, no civil-liberty case has been taken to the courts. In no major, nor in any minor, city is there even a suitable ghetto where these sufferers can support one another. Discrimination against them is so total that they even discriminate against one another; they are ashamed to be what they are, they are ashamed of it when they're alone -- and all the more ashamed to be seen together."
"Listen," said the woman next to Brennbar, "if you're talking about homosexuality, what you're saying is no longer the case --"
"I'm talking about pimples," Brennbar said. "Acne," he added, with a meaningful and hurting glance about the table. "Zits," Brennbar said. The others, those who dared, stared into my husband's deeply cratered face as if they were peeking into a disaster ward in a foreign hospital. Alongside that terrible evidence, the fact that we were ordering dessert after brandy and cigars was of little consequence. "You all knew people with pimples," Brennbar accused them. "And pimples disgusted you, didn't they?" The diners all looked away from him, but their memory of his pockmarks must have been severe. Those indentations, those pits, appeared to have been made by stones. My God, he was lovely.
Nearby, but coming no nearer, the waiter hovered and held back the dessert menus from this queer party as if he feared the menus could be consumed by our silence.
"Do you think it was easy to go into a drugstore?" Brennbar asked. "A whole cosmetic counter devoted to reminding you, the saleslady grinning at your zits and saying loudly, 'What can I do for you?' As if she didn't know. Even your own parents were ashamed of you! Subtle indications that your pillowcase was not washed with the rest of the laundry, and at breakfast your mother would say to you, 'Dear, you know, don't you, that the blue washcloth is yours?' Then watch your sister's face pale; she excuses herself from the table and rushes to rewash. Talk about myths involved with discrimination! God, you'd think pimples were more communicative than clap! Some kid after gym class asks if someone has a comb; you offer him yours, you see his mind melt -- praying for an alternative, imagining his precious scalp alive with your zits. It was a common fable: If you saw a pimple, you assumed dirt. People who produce pus never wash.
"I swear on my sister's sweet ass," Brennbar said (he has no sister), "I washed my entire body three times a day. One day I washed my face eleven times. Every morning I went to the mirror to read the news. Like a body count in a war. Maybe the acne plaster killed two overnight, but four more have arrived. You learn to expect the greatest humiliation at the worst time: The morning of the night you achieved that blind date, there's a new one pulling your lips askew. Then one day, out of misguided pity or a vast and unfathomable cruelty, those few people who pass for your friends secure you a date with another pimple freak! Mortified, you both wait for it to end. Did they expect we would exchange remedies or count our permanent scars?
"Zitism!" Brennbar yelled. "That's what it is, zitism! And you're zitists, all of you, I'm sure of it," he muttered. "You couldn't begin to understand how awful..." His cigar was out; apparently shaken, he fumbled to relight it.
"No," said the man next to me. "I mean, yes ... I can understand how terrible that must have been for you, really."
"It's nothing like your problem," Brennbar said morosely.
"No, well, yes -- I mean, really, it is sort of what I mean," the man groped. "I can truly imagine how awful --"
"Imagine?" I said, my face alert, my mouth turning toward my best smile. "But what about what you said to me? You can't possibly feel it like he did. He had to live with it every day." I smiled at my husband. "Those were real pimples," I told my former attacker. "They're not to be imagined." Then I leaned across the table and touched Brennbar's hand affectionately. "Nice work, darling," I said. "You got him."
"Thanks," said Brennbar, totally relaxed. His cigar was relit; he passed the rim of his brandy snifter under his nose like a flower.
The woman next to Brennbar was unsure. She touched him gently, but urgently, and said to him, "Oh, I see, you were kidding -- sort of. Weren't you?" Brennbar consumed her in cigar smoke before she could read his eyes; I can always read his eyes.
"Well, not kidding, exactly -- were you, darling?" I said. "I think it was a metaphor," I told the others, and they looked at Brennbar with all the more suspicion. "It was a metaphor for growing up with intelligence in a stupid world. It meant that intelligence is so peculiar -- so rare -- that those of us with any real brains are constantly being discriminated against by the masses of stupidity around us." The entire table looked more pleased. Brennbar smoked; he could be an infuriating man.
"Of course," I went on, "people with intelligence really constitute one of the smallest minority groups. They have to endure the wallowing sheep-minded-ness and flagrant idiocy of what's forever being popular. Popularity is probably the greatest insult to an intelligent person. Hence," I said, with a gesture to Brennbar, who was resembling a still life, "acne is a perfect metaphor for the feeling of being unpopular, which every intelligent person must suffer. Intelligence is unpopular, of course. Nobody likes an intelligent person. Intelligent people are not to be trusted. We suspect that their intelligence hides a kind of perversity. It's a little like thinking that people with pimples are unclean."
"Well," began the man next to me -- he was warming up to the conversation, which he must have felt was returning to more comfortable ground. "Of course, the notion of the intellectual constituting a kind of ethnic group -- this is hardly new. America is predominantly anti-intellectual. Look at television. Professor types are all batty eccentrics with the sort of temperaments of grandmothers. All idealists are fanatics or saints, young Hitlers or young Christs. Children who read books wear glasses and secretly wish they could play baseball as well as the other kids. We prefer an armpit evaluation of a man. And we like his mind to be possessed by the kind of stubborn loyalty we admire in dogs. But I must say, Brennbar, to suggest that pimples are analogous to intellect --"
"Not intellect," I said. "Intelligence. There are as many stupid intellectuals as there are stupid baseball players. Intelligence simply means the perception of what is going on." But Brennbar was cloaked in an enigma of cigar smoke and even the woman next to him could not see through to his point of view.
The man who had momentarily experienced the illusion of returning to more comfortable ground said, "I would dispute with you, Mrs. Brennbar, that there are as many stupid intellectuals as there are stupid baseball players."
Brennbar released a warning belch: a long, tunneling, and muffled signal like a trash can thrown down an elevator shaft while you are far away, in a shower on the 31st floor ("Who's there?" you'd call out to your empty apartment).
"Dessert?" said the waiter, distributing menus. He must have tho
ught Brennbar had asked for one.
"I'll have the pommes normandes en belle vue, " said the faraway man who had found the Midwest appalling. His wife wanted the ponding alsacien, a cold dessert.
"I'd like the charlotte Malakoff aux fraises " said the woman next to Brennbar.
I said I'd have the mousseline au chocolat.
"Shit/' said Brennbar. Whatever he'd meant as a metaphor, his ravaged face was no invention; we could all see that.
"I was just trying to help you, darling," I said, in a shocking new tone.
"Smart bitch," Brennbar said.
The man for whom comfortable ground was now a hazardous free fall away sat in this uneasy atmosphere of warring minority feelings and wished for more intelligence than he had. "I'll have the clafoutis auxpruneaux," he said sheepishly.
"You would," said Brennbar. "That's just what I figured you for."
"I got him right, too, darling," I said.
"Did you guess her?" Brennbar asked me, indicating the woman next to him.
"Oh, she was easy," I said. "I got everyone."
"I was wrong on yours," Brennbar told me. He seemed troubled. "I was sure you'd try to split the savarin with someone."
"Brennbar doesn't eat dessert," I explained to the others. "It's bad for his complexion."
Brennbar sat more or less still, like a contained lava flow. I knew that in a very short time we would go home. I wanted, terribly, to be alone with him.
Brennbares Rant (1973)
AUTHOR'S NOTES
This angry little story was much more fun to write than it is to read. It was originally a part of my third novel, The 158-Pound Marriage (1974), wherein the story served as an example of the writing of one of the characters, Edith Winter; it also served as an example of how Edith "fictionalized" her husband, because Brennbar was meant to be identifiable to the reader (of the novel) as an exaggeration of Edith's husband, Severin Winter. Such a heightened degree of playfulness became exasperating to me; it seemed too much a story within a story for its own good -- I cut it from the novel.
But before then, an argument ensued -- I forget with whom -- about whether or not I could write a convincing short story from the point of view of a woman. (The argument must have been with a woman, now that I think of it.) Anyway, I set out to demonstrate that this story could have been written by a woman -- namely, Edith Winter -- and to prove the point I submitted "Brennbar's Rant" to Playboy. The story was not presented to Playboy as a story by John Irving; it was submitted as a story by Edith Winter-- an unknown writer, who would remain unknown (except to readers of The 158-Pound Marriage).