The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTEMPT

  and beneath that, extending onward for several pages:

  The source of marital estrangement in our society is nearly always that very condition of the mind and emotions which promoted the original attachment, viz., intimacy, or, specif., a verbal intercourse so acute it penetrates the mind as deeply as sexual intercourse penetrates the body. The hapless male ejaculates into the brain of his partner a seed of knowledge, of recognition, which creates in her mind a slow-growing concept of what he is, what he is like, or rather what she takes him to be. He can no more control that image than he could superintend what happens to his sperm once her ovum gets hold of it. Consequently the fully developed image of him which she bears in her mind, like the infant she bears in her womb, may not resemble him at all. The trouble with mankind today is that husbands are no longer content simply to fuck their wives; they must fuck their wives’ minds as well. The latter act is just as easy to botch as the former.

  But the simile has its limits: a man can, by cajolery, soft words, periodic gifts, and perhaps the assistance of liquor or other aphrodisiac, persuade the woman to open her legs to the incoming seed; but nothing will open her mind to the image of him which he would like to implant there. Also: whereas a woman’s womb may be impregnated as often as she and nature will allow, her mind can only be knocked up once. Short of thorough psychoanalysis or some dramatic transmogrification whereby the man suddenly becomes an entirely different person, nothing (repeat: nothing—confession magazines and Abigail Van Buren to the contrary) will ever change her concept of him.

  This lamentable condition, virtually pandemic today, did not always exist. American women of the past, the VAP, did not receive higher education, and were so reserved and withdrawn that few men would ever give them the affinity of serious talk. As early as the first quarter of the eighteenth century, old William Wollaston was remarking that the good wife was obliged to defer, to submit to her husband simply because his reason was stronger than hers, his knowledge and experience greater. And although Franklin himself argued that the young suitor should make his intended bride accustomed to serious, sensible conversation, he warned that this could too easily inflate her conceit and vanity. At about this same time Talleyrand made his excellent remark: “A clever wife often compromises her husband; a stupid one only compromises herself.”

  We are hard-pressed to strike a balance in the modern era of marital adjustments. Our efforts are frustrated. We get—

  “All right, you awful onanist, come on out of there,” her voice seeped through the solid oak bathroom door. Hastily I closed the notebook and popped it into my pajama pocket before opening the door. A twinge of guilt for what I had written flushed my face slightly pink; as I passed her she saw my blush and could interpret it in whatever way she liked.

  Let her. I went on to bed.

  But later, after she had come into the bed and lay scant inches away from me, I began to think I owed her one more chance. Perhaps the case might well have been that my understanding of her was no less frangible than hers of me. Women are, after all, strange, perplexing, well-nigh inscrutable creatures. Pamela was, at all events, my lawful wedded wife. This is my charity, my softness.

  Across the cold bed I reached out and touched her hand, to hold it, but she withdrew it, turning over, away from me.

  In the dark I looked where her back would be. Pamela honey, if I go to Arkansas I just might be unfaithful to you, once or twice, or maybe a dozen times or more if I take a notion to. Won’t you put out for me this one last time? Won’t you, seeing as how I might not be seeing you again for a month or more, put your middle up against mine, just this once? For old times’ sake? Huh?

  Her backside I embraced, and pressed my mouth against her ear: “Guess this is our last night together for a while.”

  There were words in her exaggerated sigh, two words I think, and although I could not catch them clearly I think they were: “Thank God.”

  Further efforts, additional motions, continuance of my meager maneuvering, would not have availed. But I tried anyway. Just, I suppose, for the hell of it. For the unpromised promise, the hopeless hope, the inominous omen of some mumbled utterance or revelative gesture heard or felt in the dark as testament to the restoration of contact, of the frail felicity from which we had absented ourselves for more than a while. Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas: Happy is he who has penetrated into the causes of things. She stirred not, nor spake. By and by I burped the last bubble of the humble pie, and thinking of custards and karo nuts and deep-dish blackberries which awaited me homeward, and then at last beginning to feel glad, even overjoyed, that I was going alone, without Pamela, that for the first time in four years of marriage I could escape her, and that that would be, could be, a delight worth anticipating, I fell at last to sleep, my Stone-ache drifting away.

  Chapter four

  I took leave of my wife before dawn the next day, before she awakened, sacrificing a leaf from my Ring-Master for a terse parting message, reminding her of my father’s address and phone number in case she should ever want to reach me. With my one suitcase I rode a Greyhound bus across the Massachusetts Turnpike to Albany, where I caught the next westbound New York Central, a reasonably decent train called the Dewitt Clinton, which took me all the way to St. Louis, where, after a quick shave and defecation in the men’s room of Union Station (I have never been able to attend properly to such business in the cramped, jostling confines of a moving train’s lavatory), I transferred at last to a fine blue Missouri Pacific coach which provided excellent transportation through the Sunday afternoon hills of Missouri and on into the Arkansas night, until that triple-thierce camming pin or whatever it was gave way outside of Olyphant.

  The sound of the rails I love. There is nothing else like it, and probably no other reason why I travel by train whenever possible. Back cushions which prickle the neck, the omnipresent smell of disinfectant, surly conductors, tepid drinking water, and, above all, those impossible lavatories—all of this can be borne, even suffered, in order to listen to that unique sound. This may strike the habitual commuter as absurd, but just as he has immunized himself against the charms of his wife through long and intimate association, possibly he has also immunized himself against that sound which clicks in his unhearing ears from 7:35 until 8:40 five mornings a week. The way to listen to America, as you move across her, is to focus your ears on that steady clackety-clack of hard steel beneath you. Ah, the habitual commuter protests: but the sound of the rails is the same in Arkansas as in New York or anywhere else? Exactly. And the America of Arkansas, these days, is the same as the America of New York. Or anywhere else.

  The America of Olyphant, I would have sworn as I prepared to step down from that stalled train, was no different from that of, say, Drury, Massachusetts, a dreary wide-place on the road to Vermont. But I was unprepared. Respiring in the bland, soulless air of Boston as I had all winter, and then knowing only the olfactory interlude of disinfected train coaches and tram stations, I was totally unready for the fumes of spring which blasted my nostrils as I placed the first foot on Arkansas soil. A green and yellow smell, fragrant of night air after day blooming, effluvial of rich earth and burgeoning field weeds and flowers: a saturation of ripe, luxuriant vegetation. Having seen Olyphant by day in the days of my youth, I knew that physically it was no work of art: a scattered handful of unpainted box-like houses, an old store, the flatness of the soybean land, not at all a worthy namesake of the eminent Lord Olyphant. Its sole claim to note was that here on the chill night of November 3, 1893, the desperate bandit Jesse Roper held up the northbound Missouri Pacific (perhaps near the very spot my own train was stalled), robbed all the passengers and killed the conductor, thereby perpetrating the most daring train robbery in the annals of otherwise dull Arkansas history. But in this night, clinging tightly to the handrails of the train’s steps as I thrust my nose out into that incredible air, I fancied a sylvan park, a Pandean pleasance such as lo
om darkly and invitingly in the backgrounds of rococo paintings. O Fructuous Firmament! I was home. My own country, my motherland. Even the drab reality of the truck-stop café on the highway where I got my coffee and newspaper, and of the ugly waitress of overcurled hair who shocked me with her flat Southland drawl, could not spoil the enchantment of that first brave illusion.

  The copy of the Sunday Arkansas Gazette was the last one for sale in that café, and I carried it proudly and carefully back to the train, along with my cup of coffee. Even the smell of the Gazette, the mingling of a particular kind of newsprint with a particular kind of printer’s ink, evoked old memories of mornings at the family table. I usually read the funnies first, because the paper comes wrapped in them, but this time the funnies were alien, they came from New York, and neither Li’l Abner nor Snuffy Smith had any relevance to my home state. So I ignored them and drew out the Sports section. The sportswriters of the Gazette are the most literate, witty, perspicuous writers of their breed in the entire country; Arthur Daley and his crew at the Times could learn things from them. Their only fault is a hearty optimism, a conviction that Arkansas teams, whether football, baseball, bowling, hunting, or whatever, are the best in the country, a judgment which however is often correct. Reading their avid columns is an experience as entertaining as the games themselves, and I absorbed every word of the section, from the fate of the Travelers, now somehow in the Pacific Coast League, blanking Spokane 3-0, to the prospects for bass fishing in Lake Maumelle, Greers Ferry, and Bull Shoals. Here and there a familiar name: my old classmate Billy Compton was top city bowler with a 281 average; Tom Hoffman, who lived around the corner from me for some twelve years, had taken the lead in the Country Club four-ball tournament, 2 up; and old YMCA buddy Ken Vernon had reeled an eight and a half pound largemouth out of Lake Conway with a blue plastic worm and had his picture, same bashful grin and all but getting loose around the jowls, holding up the husky lunker in one meaty fist.

  Finishing Sports, I skimmed through the Society section. The sixteen young brides and brides-to-be on the first page, every one of them lovely, were a new generation and I recognized none of them, although several of the family names were familiar, and thus I gave them each only a quick glance, pausing long enough to admire their good blooming Arkansas-type beauty: the fluffed coifs, the doe eyes, the cherry cheeks, the full beaming consummate mouths—hadn’t an Arkansas girl been reigning as this year’s Miss America? On page 2, the regular column, “Among Ourselves,” informed me that, among other things, Marilyn and Steve McComb had returned home from two weeks in St. Croix, Virgin Islands, with their three children; Susan and Guy Hammond had entertained thirty friends Friday night at a special housewarming for their new home at Sixteen The Riverway, Hickory Wood; Cinny and Dick Anderson would leave tomorrow for a week at the harborside chalet of Chuchu and Lonny Heffington on Lake Catherine. All of these people I had known in school.

  The Home and Garden section showed three photographs of the new contemporary house built in Pondmeadow for the Ernest L. Jacksons. The Business section had photographs of Steve McComb, now elevated to a partnership in a law firm; of Henderson (Henk) Wainwright, newly appointed account executive for Nash Advertising; and of Byron Drenker, promoted to vice-president of Apex Insurance. I knew these guys too. Long ago, it seemed.

  The Entertainment section mentioned a special news broadcast on Channel 8 to be conducted by the regular announcer, Hy Norden, who, if I was not mistaken, had been one of my best friends in high school; we had worked together for a time on the school paper and yearbook, belonged to the same service and social clubs, taken three years of Latin together, and frequently lunched at the same table in the cafeteria. I had not expected that Little Rock would hold him, but if he had to be held it was appropriate that he would be a semi-celebrity in a position of such public exposure.

  Two other items, in the News section, which I saved for last, are worth mentioning here. A photograph showed the current contingent of stalwart policemen being honored for various acts of meritorious service and bravery, and in the forefront of the group stood Sergeant Doyle C. Hawkins, who, as plain old Dall, a tall, gangling but sinewy hayseed produced by the same section of the Ozark backwoods that had fostered my father, had been my closest friend through the Little Rock public schools. We had corresponded irregularly over the years, but I had not seen him the last two or three times I was home, and although I knew he was on the police force, I had not known he was now a sergeant, nor that he was capable of being decorated for an act of foolhardy bravery (persuading, the paper said, a drink-crazed wife-killer to turn his shotgun on himself instead of on the cops who were unable to flush him out of his hideaway.) Possibly I ought to look up Dall this time, for old times’ sake.

  The other item, sans photograph, said simply that the premiere of the new play, How Many Times Have You Seen the red shoes? by Arkansas’ own Bollington Prize-winning dramatist, James Royal Slater, scheduled to open at the Arkansas Arts Center Theater next Saturday evening, was sold out, but that tickets for the Monday and Tuesday performances of the production, starring Hugh Berrey and Margaret Austin, were still available. Margaret Austin? My old girl friend Margaret? No, it couldn’t be. Not old Margaret Austin the pale and wan, Margaret the shy and hopeless, not Margaret the untouchable brunette. Strange, I had not thought of her for quite some time. Or had I? That name…

  No, I decided, no, there must be another Margaret Austin. It was a common name. My Margaret would never—could never—have gone on the stage, even a little stage.

  But still, somehow, I felt strangely nervous—no, apprehensive—as I saw all of these old familiar names in the newspaper, and I began to ponder a question which had troubled me only slightly since I left Boston but would begin to crop up at frequent intervals in the days ahead: What, or who, am I really looking for? I could not fool myself into thinking that this was a purely social visit or a mere vacation. Something, or someone, was waiting to snare me or entangle me in some fateful course of events which might well determine the direction of my future. Call this hunch a portentous presumption. Color it a gaudy shade of mauve. But although I am as much an antipredestinarian as the next man, I felt this presentiment in my bones, and I knew that I was looking for something, or, even now as I read this newspaper, someone, and that it might be Guy Hammond or Dick Anderson or Hy Norden or any one of these old friends who would herald some chance adventure of great consequence.

  Well, all of these people—perhaps even Dall Hawkins—were ones I would have to see again. They would want to see me. Clifford Stone, the home-town boy who went East and made good, now returning in triumph. Ah, that was a pretty image. They would all want to know why I had come back, and they would like my answer: to see if this was where I belonged. To find out why I had ever left in the first place. Now, reading the intimate old Gazette again, seeing familiar names and faces, which never appeared in the pages of those other two newspapers, Boston’s and Rutland’s, I was tempted to ask: Why, indeed? Had I been so presumptuous as to think that I was better than most Arkansans and thus should seek my fortunes elsewhere? Folks belong where they was reared, my oracular Newton County grandmother had once said to me; and truly it had hurt my father to pull up stakes in the little mountain-locked village of Parthenon and move even the relatively short distance of a hundred and sixty miles down to Little Rock. If there was only one thing held against me by my widowered father and my motherless and now brotherless sister and any of my other relatives, it was that I had betrayed my birthplace, I had cast my lot with the Yankees. But now I was coming home, wasn’t I? From Boston, where I had the anonymity of a very small cygnet in a very large lake, I was returning to Little Rock, where I could have the prominence of a grand and handsome swan in a very small pond. It gave me a happy feeling, it beatified me. Abruptly I was aware of two things: first, the train had begun to move again, the camming pin re-cammed or re-triple-thierced; and, second, I was not chewing my hangnails. In Boston, reading the paper o
r reading magazines or simply working at my desk, I continually gnaw the little slivers of tough skin that fringe the sides of my fingernails. A talented and sophistic therapist might easily interpret this as a semiconscious manifestation of my wish to revenge myself on my wife (or Clara) by biting her. Myself, I figured it was just nervousness. Now I wasn’t, suddenly, any more.

  Now, from a Boston which seemed to me thoroughly feminine—and rather dowagerish at that—because of the quality of the city itself which I have already mentioned and because my days there had been lived in the company of such as Pamela and Clara, I was setting a course toward a Little Rock which was, by positive contrast, thoroughly masculine, a warm river-town, rough, broad-shouldered, a little wild, the feeling of a forceful fellow who had seen enough of the West to be fierce but enough of the South to be gentlemanly, a scrappy chap who, like me, was small but sharp, little but rocky. And the people I would see there would be mostly men: my wiry old dad (my mother died in an automobile accident when I was a teenager), shrewd Steve McComb, waggish Hy Norden, rough Dall Hawkins. Lord, what a refreshing change from my emasculated Boston life!

  Come on, train, let’s move!

  And it did, gathering speed and rushing on smoothly out of Olyphant, across the broad and flat land between the White and Arkansas rivers. I would be home by dawn. After a glad and near-tearful reunion with the old man, I would begin, one by one, to notify everybody of my return. Steve and I would play tennis and golf; Dall and I would don old khakis and drift across the waters of Lake Maumelle, filling the boat with all manner of bass and bream and crappie, and we would shoot snooker and watch the Travelers and sit on front porches in our undershirts sipping beer the warm night long. Hy might ask me to do a guest appearance or two on his television program: ‘Little Rock Revisited,” or “The Superiority of Arkansas over Nearly Any Place Else.” And if all this activity became a little too taxing at times, why, I could simply relieve it with a night of fun in the company of a warm-blooded lass. There was sweet old Sarah Farnley and Sissy Portis and undoubtedly countless others I would meet at Steve’s parties. Hell, what was a woman for, anyway? Certainly not for dry, juiceless scholarship, as Clara, nor for frigid, sadistic scorn, as Pamela. By God, in a man’s world like Little Rock, a woman was good for, damn good for, a lay, and she knew it, and by God a man could have himself a little pleasure.