The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  “Life is riddled with mysteries,” I mused aloud. Then I asked, “Why didn’t you ever ask your father about the birds and bees?”

  “He died before I was ever fully aware that there is a fundamental difference between a he-bird and a she-bird, or a he-bee and a shebee. But I remember once I found something out in the alley behind our house, and after examining it puzzledly for a while I took it in and showed it to him and asked him what it was. He took it away from me and told me to stay out of the back alley. Years later I saw another one when you and I were walking through War Memorial Park and I asked you what it was and you got all red in the face and pretended you hadn’t heard my question. Finally when I was working in the stockroom at Alexander’s Shoe Shoppe I found another one in an old box of shoes, so I asked one of the ladies who worked there what it was and she told me. She called it a fuckinrubba. What do you do with fuckinrubbas? I asked her. ‘Dearie,’ she said, ‘I don’t do anything with them. My boy friend puts em on his dofunny so I won’t get p.g.’ ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘So his wad doesn’t get loose, huh?’ ‘You got the idea,’ she said. Oh, I was naive. Really a square. Yet although the mechanics of the business, the implements and the techniques and the chemistry, were largely way over my head, I had some kind of innate, intuitive realization of its relation to Eros; I sensed how my own feelings and drives were bound up into a force which needed only an object, somebody or something to activate them. I told you about how when I was thirteen I discovered the surprising phenomenon of the orgasm. Well, even though I suspected it was some supernatural thing which was unique in me and never happened to anybody else, still I had an overwhelming feeling that it had a potential relation to somebody else, and finally I decided that that somebody else was my father, although he was dead, and it became his hand which stroked me and took me on that ride through heights of weird physical ecstasy. Does that shock you? Clifford? Does it bother you for me to talk like this?”

  “Not especially,” I said. “Maybe my ears are burning, but my curiosity is too.” Large green flies were molesting both of us, but I was in no hurry to go.

  “I suppose anything I say would only reaffirm your notion that what I need is a father figure.”

  “It doesn’t need any reaffirming,” I said.

  “Well,” she said. Then she asked me a hestitant question. “Did you ever…ever…do that? I mean, did you ever—?”

  “Play with myself?” I said. “Sure. Who hasn’t?”

  “Last night—” she said.

  “Never mind about last night,” I said.

  “You were upset,” she said.

  “It was a lousy substitute,” I said.

  “But you didn’t think it was…unnatural? Perverted or anything?”

  “No. I thought you learned how to do it by practicing on Slater.”

  “I didn’t. For all I know, Jimmy doesn’t even have one. I ‘practiced’ by—long ago—I used to imagine that I did it to my father. There. Does that shock you?”

  “If you want it to.”

  “I have an evil mind,” she said.

  “Not evil,” I said. “Just wild.”

  In the wilderness of the river, two men, shirtless, were passing by in a high-speed flatboat outboard. She waited until the roar of the motor had faded off, and then she said, “All right, wild. Would you rather I didn’t want to talk about masturbation?”

  “That’s an ugly word,” I said. “One of the harshest words in the language. I remember the first time I heard it. It was at the YMCA. I was twelve or thirteen. After all the other guys had gone into the pool for the daily swim, I had to stay behind to put a fresh Band-Aid on my skinned knee. The lifeguard, a huge fat guy of twenty or so who was supposed to be a benevolent counselor to us boys, came back into the locker room and said, ‘Okay, Stone, what’s keeping you? Are you masturbating in here?’ ‘Am I what?’ I said. ‘Masturbating,’ he said. ‘Ain’t you ever heard of the art of masturbating?’ I thought it sounded like it might have something to do with fishing: if one learns how to put the bait on the hook properly, one knows how to master bait. ‘How do you spell it?’ I asked him. ‘Aw, shut up and get your ass on into the pool,’ he said. Afterward I went to the library and looked it up, and made some sense out of ‘stimulation of the genital organs to orgasm achieved by manual or other bodily contact exclusive of sexual intercourse.’ Naturally, because I did it sometimes, I was suspicious that the fat lifeguard was reading my mind or spying on the bathroom of my house. It was another year or so before I learned, from Dall as a matter of fact, that everybody does it, so during that period I had an awful guilt complex and I still get tense every time I hear the word.”

  “When did you quit?” she asked. “How old were you?”

  “I never quit,” I sighed. “Not completely.”

  “Me neither,” she said, and we sat side by side on the Rock staring at the surge of the heavy brown river, and we were a pair of confederates, sympathetic chums bound in a synchronous moment of reflection that was lost in time, ageless: we might as well have been eager children, and if this were some barnloft instead of the Rock, and all the grownups were off at some safe distance, then now would be the time to say: I’ll take down my pants and show you mine, if you’ll take down your pants and show me yours. Why do we have to grow old and acquire hardened candor and nonchalance and blaseness before we can reach this rapport? And now that we’ve reached it, what do we do with it? Sit on porches with it and grow older together?

  “When I was a little girl,” she said, still staring reflectively at the river, “I would climb trees. There was not a tree anywhere that I was afraid to climb. But I never knew how to get down. Somebody always had to come up and get me.”

  “That’s you,” I said. “That’s you all over.”

  “Because, even then, I was punishing myself? Do you think? Have I always got into these scrapes, these situations, for self-punishment, so that somebody would have to come and get me out of them? When I make love to myself in that way, I feel that I am punishing myself, that I have got myself up into a tree and I don’t like it there, but there is nobody to get me down. Can a person punish himself but still not really like it, not want to?” She paused, and because she was asking that question of herself, I made no comment. Then she asked me, “Does this river frighten you?”

  “It scares me witless,” I said. “I recall once a high school friend of mine was playing around on the bank one evening up above town, and he fell in and drowned. He was an excellent swimmer, the best.”

  “Jimmy and I went swimming a few times in Lake Maumelle,” she said, “back in early April when the water was still pretty cold. We would row out into the lake in his boat, and jump in and splash around until we were nearly frozen. One time, when we were bringing the boat back toward the shore, I had an impulse to dive into the water and see if I could swim all the way to the shore, just to impress him, it wasn’t far, four or five hundred feet. So I did. I swam for a while and then turned to see what he was doing, but he wasn’t even looking at me. What if I drowned myself? I wondered. Would he care? There I was, paddling madly in that icy water, with him two hundred feet behind me and the shore two hundred feet ahead of me, and I seemed to get the curious notion that if I reached the shore, somehow I would be free of him. I would be saved—because I knew already then that he entertained crazy thoughts of getting rid of his wife and marrying me—but if I didn’t reach the shore, I would drown, I would die, and that too might be a salvation, a liberation, a freedom. As I swam I became angrier and angrier at him, because he had pretended to ignore my daring attempt, and because he could’ve brought the boat up alongside me and hauled me in, but he didn’t. I thought I could hear the sound of him laughing at me, but probably it was just my indignant imagination. If I hadn’t been so furious, and so obsessed, I probably would have drowned, right then and there, but I fought so hard that I finally reached the shore. And that was when I began to think constantly that the only way I could ever get away from
him would be to drown myself or something. So one evening not long ago—just a week ago last Tuesday, in fact—I decided to do it. All day Jimmy had been beleaguering me with a lot of crazy talk about how we were destined for each other and how I could never get away from him because the Fates had intended that I come into his life and restore his lost youth, his lost manhood, and how his wife was a sinister intruder whom he had to dispense with in order to appease the Fates; and to top it all off my mother had been in one of her frequent bitter moods and had been berating me for everything, and Blass and Pfeifer’s had sent me letters saying they were going to take action if I didn’t pay my bills, and Ethel Slater had just finished telling me that I was the only good friend she’d ever had and she wanted me to come up more often and massage her poor paralyzed pudendum for her, and the trees were blooming and the flowers were blooming, but I wasn’t, I wasn’t blooming, I wasn’t—”

  She had begun to tremble and I put my arm around her and she lay her head against the side of my neck, but still she trembled, although her voice became quieter for a while. “And I kept remembering how much I had hated and despised myself, and I remembered that I was still wearing those cotton panties that belonged to some nun named Sister Mary Dolores who had lost them in a laundromat, and I brooded sullenly about how life had mistreated me and I had mistreated life, and how life was supposed to be all a bowl of cherries but I never got anything but the pits…”

  Margaret wriggled out from under my arm and stood up. She moved to the edge of the Rock and stood there staring down at the water. She continued talking. “So I decided that night to come to this river and plunge into it.” Her eyes were glazed; she gazed entranced at the water. “But on the way down here to the river I happened to pass a movie theater and saw that they were showing a movie I wanted to see, Two for the Seesaw, so I went in to see it, and in the movie a man held my hand.” She turned and smiled at me. “And that man was you.”

  “My goodness,” I responded to the wonder of it. “Do you mean that if you hadn’t met me at that movie, you might have come on down here and jumped in?” But she didn’t reply. Again she was staring at that water as if it held a particular fascination for her. “Margaret,” I implored her, “sit down! Come on back here and sit down! I’m getting dizzy just looking at you.” I held out my hand to her, but she ignored it.

  “I wonder,” she said to the water. “I wonder what would have happened if I had jumped in. Would I have drowned?”

  “Hell yes you would’ve, you ninny! Now come away from there!”

  It’s such an ugly river in the daytime,” she said, spreading her arms wide to indicate the vast ugly length and breadth of it, and, in the act of this sudden sweeping gesture, she lost her balance—or did she?—she lost her balance and fell forward and out, and down, and dove into the river and disappeared from sight beneath its muddily opaque water.

  Chapter thirty-nine

  Now this has all been a hallucination, a bad dream, and she has been only a succubus who now has gone away and left me alone, and now I can wake up. But perhaps not yet. Perhaps I have to be in the water too, drowning too, sinking toward the dark gar-infested slime and ooze at the bottom, and then in that last moment of terrible panicked consciousness I will wake up. I am standing now, and I am kicking off my shoes, and in just another second I am going to dive in after her, but in the last on-shore moment of this fantastic dream I am thinking: Dall, rise up from your bed and come to the river, for there are two people this time who need your help.

  Who is going to alert the fire department rescue squad? I am asking, and now I am in the water too. Who is going to bring the boats? The water is very warm, almost hot, and it is full of crud. Where are the boats? Because somebody is always jumping into the river, the fire department has a number of special rowboats, permanently anchored at the base of each of the three bridges, which are used exclusively for fishing the frequent jumpers out of the river. But where are they? I go under water and try to look around, but all I see is crud. Who has seen us, who has noticed? Margaret has already gone to the bottom, probably. The boats, where are the boats? How deep is this river? Sixty-four feet, I read once somewhere. And grappling hooks, too, bring grappling hooks! I surface for air, gulp big draughts of it into my lungs, and once again go under and look around, but it is useless, I can’t see six inches through all this crud. I surface again and look around to see if there is anybody anywhere who is watching us, anybody on any of the bridges who has paid any attention to us, but I see no one, except, a long way out in the river already, Margaret, swimming, swimming nicely toward the other shore. I follow her, thinking: What the hell? I am a good swimmer, a regular little frog in fact, but she is just as good, or better, and I cannot catch her. Across the wide stream we go, dodging driftwood and debris, swallowing mud and crud; her arms rise and fall in a slow even breaststroke, while I flail away at the water for all I’m worth, but she keeps ahead of me, and I think: She would, being a succubus, a hallucination. But then I decide: This isn’t a dream after all, it’s just a crazy anticlimax. And you, son, I say to myself, are the fall guy. You’ve been had. If only she would drown.

  But she doesn’t. Although the river is nearly five hundred feet wide, and although the strong current has shoved us far aslant down the stream, we survive, both of us.

  Chapter forty

  Gasping and limp, I staggered up onto the bank of North Little Rock under the span of the new Interstate Highway bridge, took a few steps and collapsed into the sand. I rolled over onto my back and lay there looking up at the underside of the bridge and the sky, now ultramarine in the late afternoon, and I breathed in great heaves. Chasing her up that Hot Springs observation tower had not winded me as much as this did. My seersucker suit was ruined, I mean really ruined; hopelessly besmirched with all the river’s foul exudations, and even its inherent drip-dry nature was not meant to withstand such a drenching. I had lost one of my argyle socks in the water. My unwaterproof wristwatch had ceased ticking. But worst of all, my elevator shoes, without which I am reduced to a dwarf of a mere five feet six inches, were left behind on the opposite shore, where any tramp might come along and take them.

  I turned and watched Margaret. She had hit the bank thirty feet or so upstream from me, but she had not collapsed from lack of oxygen. She was walking around, sedulously examining a pile of rocks beneath a clump of willow trees, and I thought: Indeed she is loco. But she lifted a large flat rock from near the bottom of the pile, and drew out a cardboard box about thrice the size of a shoebox, and she brought this over and sat down on the bank near where I was lying. I was still too exhausted to speak; I could only watch her. She opened the box and began to remove its contents, which were wrapped in aluminum foil. The first item was a pair of silk panties, and she reached under her wet skirt and removed her wet panties and put on the new dry ones, then flung the old ones over to me so that I could see that name label sewed into them: Sister Mary Dolores. The next item was a brassiere, and she reached inside her blouse and unfastened her wet bra and wriggled loose from it and pulled it out, and put in the new bra and wriggled into it and fastened it. The next item, a larger one which she unfolded, was a gray skirt of pleated gabardine, and, after glancing furtively around to see if anybody was watching (nobody was but me), she took off her wet skirt and put on the new one. She did the same with her blouse, replacing it with a new one made of striped blue-green silk. Then she took out a new pair of shoes, black suede flats, and put them on her bare feet. Then she took out a small make-up bag and checked its contents: lipstick, powder, comb, miniature hair spray, small vial of cologne, and two ten-dollar bills. The only other item in the box was a paperback book, New York: Places and Pleasures, by Kate Simon. She riffled through its pages for a moment, then gave it a toss, and it landed out in the water and was carried swiftly downstream, finally sinking. She threw the cardboard box and the wads of aluminum foil in after it, and they too ultimately sank. Then she began to comb her hair.

  �
�Margaret,” I said, regaining my voice and my wits and feeling an irresistible urge to give vent to the vexation which festered inside me, “you take the cake. You are a first-class bamboozler, a big fraud. You ought to be put in jail. You—Do you realize you could have got us both killed?”

  “I knew you wouldn’t drown,” she said, “and I knew you wouldn’t let me drown even if I hadn’t thought I was able to make it on my own.”

  “But of all the dumb stunts! What was the big idea, anyway? In the name of all that’s holy, what—”

  “I just wanted to see what you would do,” she said. “And you did it.”

  “Christ sakes Almighty! You capricious female! Why, you couldn’t commit suicide if you wanted to! You couldn’t do it if you tried!”

  “Oh, I could too!” she said, returning part of my vehemence. “And I did try! All day that Tuesday I worked at it! I tried to get some sleeping pills, but the druggist wouldn’t give me any without a prescription! I thought of slashing my wrists, but I remembered I can’t stand the sight of blood! I put Daddy Polk’s old shotgun to my head and pulled the trigger, but it wasn’t loaded! And I couldn’t find any shells! I tried to jump in front of a bus on Main Street, but I stumbled and fell flat on my prat! I couldn’t even write a decent suicide note, because my pen ran out of ink! But one thing I could do, and that was jump in the river, so I—”

  “Well, how are you going to explain that box of clothes? Did your goddamn fairy godmother put them there for you?”

  “Let me finish. So I decided to jump in the river, but I thought, what if that failed too? what if that failed just as everything else has always failed for me? and I knew I was a good swimmer, and I thought: What if I can’t sink? And this is what I decided: I would put that box of clothes and twenty dollars—which I stole from my mother—and that book over here on the bank, and then I would go and jump in the river, off the Broadway bridge, which is pretty high, you know. At night, in the dark. If I sank, then that was the end of me. Fine. But if I didn’t sink, I would swim over here and climb out and put on these clothes and take my twenty dollars and see if I could sneak out of town, and out of this state, under cover of darkness, and get to New York. As far as the police would have been concerned, or my mother would have been concerned, or Jimmy would have been concerned, I would have ceased to exist, either way. In one case, it would have been a matter of ‘body recovered.’ In the other case, it would have been a matter of ‘body not recovered.’ But either way, I could have escaped the intolerable situation I was in, and Jimmy would have had to give up his plan to murder his wife.”