This arrangement was all right with the husband, or at least he had nothing to say about it. He wondered, actually, so I understand, what in God’s name he had ever seen in this taut, smirking woman, who had become falsely obsessed, falsely, mind you, with classic Mexican cuisine while he’d been away at “the farm,” as he always smilingly said. He was sure that he was stable, and patiently awaited each weekend, when his wife and the reinsurance clerk would go away on what she called “a jaunt” for two, sometimes three days, and leave him alone. He was, if not happy, no more miserable than many. I understand that all three of these people are dead now, and so, of course, is Bud.
IN LOVELAND
I have attempted to tell this story many times over the past years, the past decades, for that matter. I’ve not been able to bring it off, for I’ve never been able to invent—inhabit, perhaps—the proper narrational attitude. I begin to invent plausible situations that soon falsify everything, or unlikely situations that, just as soon, parody everything. I have even, at times, tried to tell the undecorated truth, which attempts virtually clang with mendacity, a callow sort of mendacity that wishes to be recognized as such, and so forgiven. I might call it the mendacity of youth, although I’m not at all certain how youth is currently defined.
At that time, my wife and I were living behind a barber shop, in a small studio apartment that was reached by means of a long, narrow corridor that seemed to belong to the barber shop, I don’t quite know how. The apartment, too, seemed more like an adjunct to the shop than it did an entity unto itself, and, perhaps because of this, I hated it. My wife was a very small woman, I might say a tiny woman, but her body was arrestingly erotic. It should have looked, given her size, like a child’s body, but it did not: she was a kind of aphrodisiacal miniature, a striking doll. Whenever she, alone, approached the corridor entranceway from the street, the scum congregated on the sidewalk, in a crass parody of the manly chorus boys in the musical comedies of the era, would ogle her, fondle themselves, make sucking and kissing noises, and proclaim what they’d like to do to her. She invariably insisted that they never offended her and I chose to believe her. I really didn’t care one way or another: those fools had no sense of her actuality, and I suspect that her calm, dispassionate gaze forced them to see themselves for the curious filth it suggested they were.
Our bed dominated the apartment, and was what, I later discovered, is called queen-sized, a term that almost shines with poignancy. This bed had a presence beyond its fact, probably because of something so mundane as its size relative to the total floor space of the room. It served my purposes, such as they were then, to think of the bed as having some special quality, as more than it was, as a symbol, in fact. As a symbol for what, I had no idea. But I wanted to write, more precisely, I wanted to be thought of as a writer, and I had started many stories having to do with the power that the bed exerted over various darkly tragic sagas, whose whining narrators were more unhappy and misunderstood, more irrevocably doomed than is, even melodramatically, possible. The desire to add some more stupid clutter to the clutter of the vacuous world is virtually unquenchable. Our marriage was, at this point, in the early stages of irreversible decay. My wife and I often talked for hours about our problems, our refined problems, sure that we were facing them honestly—a favorite word—sure that although they were unique, they were certainly solvable. We wasted a great deal of time in these thoughtful, respectful, futile colloquies. “Irreversible decay” is a phrase that I permit to stand as a reminder of its use in the first sentence of one of my early stories, “The Bower of Bliss.” The sentence read, “Although Amanda and I did not know it, the mutually ecstatic shudder that put period to our lovemaking on that breathless midsummer night, was the first subtle tremor of the irreversible decay that had infected our perhaps too bright union.” “Ecstatic shudder,” “subtle tremor,” “too bright union”! Even “Amanda” proceeds from the abyss of machine fiction. I couldn’t write because I so wanted to impress people with the fact that my writing revealed a knowledge of writing. I was, I think, unaware of this.
Our marriage was, indeed, falling apart, for many reasons, none of which is worth commenting on, that is to say, any reason might do. We had been married for almost five years, and my wife was allowing, or helping, perhaps, her boredom and restlessness to surface when and how it pleased. Had she been anything other than glumly dissatisfied, I might have been disturbed. As it was, her quiet and dazed contempt, her wayward anomie, passed right by me, as the phrase has it. I had no way of combating it, or her, anyway, assuming that I noticed. I had no idea what to do—assuming that I noticed. All this took place in the benighted days before husbands were sensitive to their wives’ needs, as they are now. In any event, I began dreading the walk down the corridor, the sight of my wife sprawled on the bed—the symbolic bed—reading, it seemed to me, always, The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain. That can’t be so, but since the title has, so to speak, declared itself, let it stand. I hated to see her there, her perfect little body, her small feet, her blond hair in a carelessly provocative upsweep, her toreador pants defining her thighs and buttocks and softly bulging pudenda. It was a kind of shabby ordeal.
She was too complete and complacent in her tiny model of a body, reading, or not reading, or just there, doing anything, I don’t know. Occasionally, I’d find her naked, or half-naked, after a shower, and this was worse: her womanly parts looked as if they’d been supplied her, as if she’d rented them at a costume shop. It was always hard for me to believe that her breasts were teacup-size, that her dirty-blond wedge of pubic hair was not even the size of a business card. Who was this woman?
We had been married almost five years earlier, after knowing each other for fifteen months. At the time we met, she was the best friend of a woman that I had been planning to marry, but who had been seduced, a week before we were to have been engaged, by my best friend, whom she was, eventually, to marry. This is neither here nor there, although I believe that their marriage is quite successful. I realize, as I write this, that I have no way of knowing this: the last I heard from them, via a pretentious Christmas card, was that they were living in one of the smug, self-congratulatory towns of the San Francisco Bay Area.
All I clearly remember of my earlier love is that she often liked to be fully dressed when we fucked—she had what may be characterized as a masculine pornographic imagination. I draw no moral from this penchant, but do think of it, from time to time, with a pang of lewd nostalgia, as perfectly befits the dirty old man I have all but become. Sometimes she even, marvelously, wore a hat. It was, she said, like being fucked by somebody she’d bumped into on the street or the subway. And so it was. I say, “all I clearly remember,” but that is, of course, only an expression. I remember many, oh, many things about her, for instance, the oddly asymmetrical v of her pubic hair. She was extremely attractive, and I can’t really blame my old friend for his loss of control. I blame her, of course, because a woman is more than just—more than just what? I know nothing about women. I remember things like hats.
Perhaps my wife and I were propelled or pushed or excited into marriage because of her mishap, the accident that she suffered shortly prior to our wedding: she somehow slipped and then fell down a flight of subway stairs, cutting, bruising, and very badly abrading one side of her face. I can’t clarify what I mean when I say “excited into marriage,” but the accident had the effect of making us agree to move the wedding date up by about a month, as if, somehow, we had to marry while she bore this painful blazon. I later considered writing about this injury and the huge scab that asserted itself as its astonishing manifestation, for it seemed—it still seems—a symbol of our disastrous marriage. It was not, any more than the bed was, but the idea that I might force it into one made me feel like a writer. That I even considered a narrative flowering from the fact of her wound was, finally, enough. I never wrote a word.
Her scab covered the left side of her face from jaw to hairline in a grim paro
dy of deformation. There was about it, at once, a sense of the overwhelmingly repulsive and the breathlessly desirable, much in the same way that the human sex organs are hideously attractive. I can’t say that I thought this at the time, but I do seem to recall becoming aroused during the ceremony—so much so that my vows came in troubled quaverings. When we kissed to seal our compact, I thought that I might burst into ragged, tense laughter. She smiled at me, one side of her mouth held immobile by the thick scab: I wanted to fuck us into hysteria, there, in the minister’s study, before the wedding guests. Later, at the small reception given for us at her mother’s house, we found ourselves together in the kitchen, and I vulgarly put her hand on the hard lump in my trousers and then bent to lick her scabbed face. She rubbed me, flushed and quivering, and then, immediately, she was, at a sound from the doorway, in front of the refrigerator, into which she stared. I could see her legs trembling from her thighs to the doll-sized white heels she had on. I leaned against a table and smiled brilliantly at the doorway, amazed at the ruttishness that possessed me. It was her—and my—bitch friend, who looked at us and raised her eyebrows. As if she knew what we knew! As if she could. We glared insanely at her.
But it is not my intention to tell the story of our wedding and the twisted, dreamlike interlude of our honeymoon and first months together. It may well be that the fact of this period has, in the past, asserted itself so strongly that I’ve lost, again and again, the impetus to tell the real story, if you will. Or perhaps I have been distracted by my wife’s injury, by my accumulative reimaginings of its reality, its domination of her fine-drawn face, the way I touched it. My consistent, predictable arousal when clutched by these drifting memories and half-memories, these semi-fantasies, always seemed to point toward the necessity of the “wedding story” or the “honeymoon story.” This, or these, stories will never be told, but their seeming demands always precluded my telling any story: this story.
I should, however, put the phenomenon of my wife’s injury—and the oddly perverse timing of the accident that caused it—to rest, of a sort, by speaking, candidly, of my feelings, as I now construe them to have been, at the time. This can, admittedly, be a supremely inexact business, but I see no way of ignoring it. It is quite possible that my past failures to complete this story have had to do with my avoidance of the centrality of this compelling wound, this fabulous wound. It has always been an assertive image, one that threatens all the other elements of my tale. But to avoid it has always meant to be driven into the faltering discourse that ends in silence.
My wife’s scab was the result, as I’ve said, of a terrible fall down the stairs of the local subway station, although I never quite believed that the fall was accidental. For a long time, I thought that she had thrown herself down the stairs in a seizure of misery, or even despair, at the prospect of our impending marriage. I took, as may well be imagined, little pleasure in thinking this. Later, I began to believe, groundlessly, that her fall was the unexpected and unintended outcome of a subtle sadomasochistic adventure gone awry. I was possessed of an unshakable sense of the truth of this fancy, of its actuality, and spent many hours, many many hours, trying to picture the partner with whom she had been so thrillingly involved.
This spectacularly disfiguring scab that thickly encrusted the left side of her face from hairline to eyebrow, thence from cheekbone to lower jaw, had the uncanny effect, although I have vacillated and hedged concerning this for years, of making me doubt my wife’s identity. Not in any melodramatic or mystical or metaphysical sense, reverberant with implications of mystery and anima, but in the simplest and most pedestrian sense, so to speak: the scab was for me a mask that concealed half of her face, a half whose contours I could no longer bring to mind. This mask was all the more efficacious since the part of her fact not affected wore precisely the innocently wanton expression that was habitual to her, a misleading expression, and one that often duped me into humiliating behavior.
The other aspect of the scab, one that I have already adumbrated, was its sexuality: it possessed an erotic component strong enough to make me virtually stupid with desire. Its surface glistened in the way my wife’s nylon stockings glistened, and as, too, did her labia. Over and again I was moved by the perverse desire to use the small and perfect architecture of her broken face as I did her sex. To put it crudely, I wanted, for as long as she wore that crusted domino, to fuck it. I remember that my terrific desire made me weak with wonderful fear, and placed a cold, stone-like nausea just below my breastbone. Yet as my desire increased, my nausea lessened, my intoxicated self-disgust and sexual terror were smoothly transcended by what I thought of as the sacramental purity of my undeviating lust. I even felt, and this was indeed so, complacently proud of myself for finding my damaged bride still desirable, for overlooking this egregious flaw in her beauty, for being so understanding. And all the while that I blithely misled myself, my genitals ached with desire: I could not wait to marry this imperfect Venus so that I could have her with me day and night. What did I tell her, what could I have told her? I can’t believe that I told her of my distorted lust, but I know that I did. I waited, however, until her scab had been replaced by new, creamy skin, and until our marriage had been pushed, as marriages are, now here and now there, by whatever we took love to be. My confession was an act of meaningless courage that, perhaps, disgusted her.
After our honeymoon, I got a job, not worth describing, as a clerk in a midtown office, and we moved from our gloomy first apartment to the one behind the barber shop. I began to write at night and on the weekends, and to publish occasionally in little magazines. I soon met, as one might expect, other young writers or would-be writers, those who could be writers had they the time, husbands and wives and lovers of these people, and many others. They began—we began—hesitantly at first and then with increasing confidence, to use our apartment as a gathering place, and hardly a weekend, and then hardly an evening passed that did not discover one or more people at our table or bedded down on the floor, trading small-time literary gossip and tales of academic backbiting for beef stew or spaghetti or bean soup and a few cans of beer. It is emotionally numbing for me to acknowledge, to admit, that I never thought of these perpetual visitors as anything other than legitimate, as the cream of the tottering fifties. We made fun, we actually, good Christ, made fun of other people! How we waited for things to happen, successful things, adventures and journeys and relocations to exotic locales, events that would soon metamorphose us into the glittering figures that we knew we were beneath our unfashionable and superior shabbiness. We were, certainly, but deadbeats, impotent, arrogant, lazy, and headed toward peripherally creative jobs in public relations and advertising and publishing, we were perfect American clichés, too good for mere work. Some, assuredly, would become hip assistant professors, bored and jaded and ticketed for the limbo of a hundred committees and MLA meetings. My wife and I were willing members of this clique, as I have suggested.
A few years passed, the scene, ramshackle and unimportant, barely changed, save for the fact that my wife and I permitted ourselves occasional adulteries, I with women I met in the jobs I felt myself much too talented for, she with one or another of our stream of guests and visitors. I did not then know of her adventures but was aware of the longing glances given her by the shifting cast that streamed through our apartment. With true delight, trite but true delight, I was proud of her ability to enflame these freeloaders. I once, perhaps more than once, jokingly, as I recall, asked someone if he’d like to watch her undress so that her lilliputian perfections might be seen rather than merely imagined: her adolescently rosy breasts, her toy vagina with its reticent screen of silky hair, her perfectly round doll’s buttocks. She was always furious and embarrassed by these crudities, yet I believed that she would have been more than pleased to exhibit herself. I often, in that period of our marriage, masturbated, fantasizing myself as a guest, and my wife as a willing partner: I would, so to say, cuckold myself, with pleasure. When our wr
etched apartment was ours alone for a day or so, I would ask her to fuck me with her face partially covered by a scarf or kerchief. I pretended that she was a whore whom I had hired to play my wife. She seemed to like this game, and I remember how her face would flush, loose with pleasure, her lips swollen and slightly parted as she entered the role.
My writing, if I may use such a word for the sporadic affectation in which I was fitfully engaged, had more or less ceased, save for a review or two, once or twice a year, in some ruthlessly mediocre magazine or the pitiful book-review section of a newspaper’s Sunday arts page. Thankfully, I can recall nothing of these reviews, except that I’m pretty certain that I usually would take an author to task for such grave sins against the body politic as cynicism, and lack of belief in the redemptive powers of art and the wisdom of the common man. One of my boilerplate remarks, I think, was to the effect that this blight on good letters was self-indulgent, and that it is never enough for fiction to point out the failings of a terrible world for the pleasure of literary voyeurs. These reviews were as insubstantial as they were insufferable. In the meantime, our marriage collapsed a little more each day.
The Moon In Its Flight Page 18