“I mentioned it,” Beth said softly. “I didn’t pursue it.”
Dan became agitated. “That’s because I didn’t let you.”
Beth turned to Cook. “He started ranting about how I was too committed to finding a camp for Robbie—”
“I still feel that way. I still do.”
“—ranting about Robbie’s needs—”
“I was making legitimate points. I wasn’t ranting.”
“—and about how whenever it came down to Robbie’s needs versus my needs, I always thought of myself first—”
“I didn’t say that.”
“—and you know what?” she said, turning to Dan. “You’re right. I wasn’t thinking of him first. I was thinking of us. Have you ever done that? Thought of us?”
Dan hung fire—apparently not sure whether to repeat his denial that he had made this claim, pursue Beth’s partial surrender to it, or try to deal with her tricky question. He said nothing.
“Why isn’t our marriage as important to you as it is to me?” Beth said. “Can you answer that? There’ve been a few little signs of hope, but I’ve been stupid. You don’t want to go to Italy with me. You’d rather grab the excuse of Robbie’s camp. Even if this new one is just slightly less good than Camp Swallow, you’re going to say, ‘Nope. No way. Not good enough for my son.’”
Dan shook his head. “You have no idea what I was saying upstairs, do you?”
“You can’t stand the idea of being alone with me for two weeks, can you?” Beth’s face seemed about to collapse. She struggled to hold herself together.
“Not when we fight like this,” Dan said.
“We fight because you never want to be with me.”
For a time, the only sound was a gentle, rhythmic tapping at the back of the house. Robbie was still playing by himself with the Ping-Pong ball.
“How much do you want me?” Beth asked.
“I don’t know,” Dan said. “Pretty much, I guess.”
“I know how much I want you. I want you so much that I’ll leave you if I can’t have you.”
Dan looked at her. “I know.”
“Oh,” Beth moaned softly. “You say that so sadly, Dan. So weakly. You won’t even fight for me, will you?”
Cook sat alone in the living room, listening to the three voices from the deck. Beth had left Cook and Dan to go talk to Robbie, and Dan, hearing their voices, had roused himself from his position against the doorjamb and gone out and joined them. Cook couldn’t hear the words, but he knew by an outcry from Robbie that they had given him the news about Camp Swallow.
Dan came back into the living room. He heaved a big sigh and sat down on the couch across from Cook.
“How’s he taking it?” Cook asked.
“Awful.” Dan stared straight ahead at nothing. He seemed defeated.
“Maybe it’ll be great,” said Cook. “Maybe it’ll be a great camp.” Dan didn’t respond. Cook sat awhile longer, then stood up, suddenly miserable and restless.
Dan spoke quickly then, stopping him. “It’s funny how people remember things differently.”
Cook frowned.
“Take an argument,” Dan went on. “A husband and a wife can have two completely different memories of it.” Dan looked at Cook as if he should be impressed by this observation. “Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a recording of a fight so you could compare what each person actually said with what they claim they said?”
“Maybe,” Cook said guardedly.
Dan looked disappointed. “You don’t seem very excited. It sounds like a great idea to me. Why haven’t you done it?”
Cook shrugged. “It’s not part of the procedure.”
“Are you forbidden from doing it?”
Cook resented this reminder that he lacked autonomy. “Of course not.”
“The fight Beth and I had in the bedroom—wouldn’t you like to have a tape of that?”
“Maybe. But who’s got one?”
“I do.”
Cook tried to hide his surprise.
“I’ve got the whole damn thing,” Dan said.
“Where? How?”
“Upstairs. On the answering machine in the bedroom. It’s got this ‘Memo’ button that turns it into a regular tape recorder for anyone speaking in the room, in case you want to leave an oral memo for someone. All you’ve got to do is punch that button.” Dan grinned at Cook. “I punched it.” He glanced toward the deck, where Beth and Robbie were still talking. Then he leaned forward and spoke more intensely. “When I was done talking to the guy from Big Muddy, I knew we were going to have a fight. I knew it. I was staring at the phone. I was thinking how it’s the enemy—how it drags bad news into your life and makes you use it to go get more bad news. And then I thought maybe I could get something good out of it for a change. I knew we were doomed to fight, so I reached over and punched ‘Memo.’ Beth didn’t have a clue.”
“Have you listened to it since the fight?”
“No no no. That wouldn’t have been fair. After the fight I forgot about it, and then when I remembered, I deliberately stayed away from it. I knew we would end up arguing about it. She always distorts our fights when we fight about them. She says I ranted. I didn’t rant. I made solid points. But I’d like to let you be the judge of that. It’s what you’re here for, really.” Dan leaned forward still more, so confidential in his manner that Cook feared he might slip off the edge of the couch. “I’d really like to play it for you.”
“Don’t you think Beth should hear it, too?”
“Of course! Hell, I intend to include her. That’s the whole point.”
They heard footsteps on the deck, then the sound of the side gate opening and closing. Beth came in through the dining room and said, “He’s going down to Philip’s house to see what his plans are.” She turned to Cook. “Phillip’s a friend of his who was going to go to Camp Swallow, too.” She looked at Dan. “He’s trying to drum up some interest in Big Muddy. Maybe he can get a friend to go. He’s coping. He’s handling it.” She sighed. “I ought to throw something together for dinner.”
“You sure the camp has more than one vacancy?” Dan asked.
Beth closed her eyes. Dan seemed to sense an attack was coming and preempted it. “I taped the fight we had in the bedroom. It’s on the answering machine. We could go listen to it. What do you think?”
Beth’s face went through a number of changes. “Is this your idea, Jeremy?”
“No,” Dan said for him. “But he’s not opposed.”
“But what’s the point? It’s pathetic, Dan. It’s so completely beside the point.”
“Come on,” Dan said. “It’ll be great. You’ll see.”
“What do you hope to get out of it? Some sort of proof of your position or something?”
“Not at all!” Dan said with extreme good nature.
“What made you tape it?”
“It was just an impulse. I punched the ‘Memo’ button.”
“So the whole time we were talking you knew it was being taped?”
“Yeah. But that didn’t change anything. I forgot about it after a while. It was a regular argument. Didn’t I say the kind of stuff I normally say in a fight? Don’t we always say the same thing, over and over?”
Beth gave him a look of immeasurable weariness. “Have you listened to it yet?”
“Nope.”
Beth looked away, across the room, at nothing in particular. “If you want to listen to it, go listen to it. I don’t care.”
“But we want you to join us,” said Dan. He might have been speaking of an excursion to go play miniature golf.
“It’s so pointless. This whole thing is pointless.” She stood up. “Come on. Let’s get it over with.”
Dan stood up. Cook had never seen a face so obviously in the act of not grinning.
Upstairs, Dan bustled to the answering machine and fiddled with it awhile. The tape noisily stopped and started several times. It seemed to run backward, then forward,
then backward again. Cook wondered if it was going to work. Dan threw an eager glance at Cook, who had sat down on the large bay window seat. Beth was leaning against the footboard of the bed. She had picked up an emery board and was filing her nails.
“Coming right up,” Dan said as he punched a button. “It should start right after I talked to the Big Muddy people. That’s when I—”
“—better stop right now, Dan, because there are some things I could say that really shouldn’t be said.”
Dan scowled at the sentence. He punched another button. “That’s at the tail end. But well put, honey,” he said acidly. “Well spoken.”
Beth pressed her lips together and continued filing her nails.
The tape ran fast, stopped, ran again, and stopped again. Dan punched a button.
“—better stop right now, Dan, because there are some things I could say that really shouldn’t be said.”
“Damn it,” said Dan. He punched the buttons and tried it again.
“—better stop right now, Dan—”
Dan punched it off. “Fuck!” he said.
“That’s it?” Beth said, looking up with a derisive smile. “You dragged us up here for that?”
“What do you want?” Dan protested. “That’s all it picked up, the goddamn thing. See?” He punched the button again.
“—because there are some things I could say that really shouldn’t be said.”
Dan let the tape run on, and the sound of footsteps and a slamming door could be heard as one of them left the room—Beth, Cook assumed, since she had delivered the exit line. This was followed by an empty hiss from the tape. Dan glared at the machine and hissed back at it angrily. “Fuck it,” he said, reaching for it.
“Oh what a bitch!”
This sudden cry from the tape seemed to puzzle Dan and made him hesitate. Then he quickly reached for the machine again.
“Hold it!” Beth said. “Let it play.”
Dan froze. Cook looked at him. He seemed curious, as if he himself wasn’t sure what the tape might reveal.
“Oh what a bitch! Oh! Oh! Oh! What a bitch of a bitch! You’ve got her, Dan. You’ve got her, boy.” Dan’s voice almost sang the words, as if in jubilation. “Yessirree. She’s all yours. You did it, boy. You’ve got her. Bitch for breakfast, bitch for lunch, bitch for dinner. Whoa. What’s that? The front door? Yep. There she goes. Look out, world. Here comes the bitch. Where’s she off to? Who knows? Bitch school, maybe. Look at her bitching her way down the sidewalk. Birds of the neighborhood, shit on her, I command you. Cars, kill her. Earth, swallow her. Oh! Oh! Oh!” His footsteps could be heard on the tape in nervous, agitated pacing. Then the bedroom door banged and the footsteps grew faint. The tape continued to run, but it was just a hiss.
Dan pushed the button to make it stop. “I’m not going to apologize for that.” He looked at Beth. “I’m not. What you said was much worse.”
“What I said?”
“That there are things you could say, only they’re so horrible you couldn’t say them. That’s the worst there is. That’s why I blew up like that.” His voice caught, and he seemed about to blow up again. ‘Jesus, I wish I had the whole thing on tape. I spelled it all out—all the examples, all the evidence. Your stinking idea about soccer camp. Your idea about farming Robbie out to your parents for two weeks in hell. Your desperation for a camp, any camp. You didn’t even hear what I was saying. Don’t you know what I was saying?”
Beth seemed to lean away slightly, toward the door.
Cook said, “Look, Dan, it’s too bad about the tape, but—”
“I was saying you’re a rotten mother. That’s what I was saying. What’s more horrible than that? Tell me. What’s more horrible than that?”
Seventeen
“I’m dead, Jeremy.”
“No you’re not.”
“I’m a goner.”
“No. It’ll be all right.”
“I’m fucked.”
“You’ll get through it. She’ll get over it.”
Dan sat on the edge of the window seat, his face pale and blank. From the kitchen Cook heard the scream of the portable dishwasher being rolled out of the way, followed by the clang of a pot.
“See?” Cook said, gesturing to the door and the sounds beyond it. “Life goes on. We’ll get over this hump.”
Cook spoke with more hope than he felt. Beth had said nothing to Dan in response to his accusation, but after the first wave of shock and hurt, her face had gone hard—harder than Cook had ever seen it. Then she had turned and left the room.
“I don’t know,” Dan said vaguely. He sighed and went to the closet. He stared into it for a moment, then began to take out his work clothes. “All a guy can do at a time like this is go dig some postholes.”
Cook, struggling to make this transition to the banal with Dan, offered to help, but Dan said no, not now, maybe later.
Cook went up to his room. He took THE HORROR! from his shirt pocket as he sat down at his desk, and he set it before him:
She’s a bitch.
He’s a prick.
Money.
He’s a failure.
She thinks he’s a failure.
He picked up the pen on his desk, crossed out his day-old theory, and wrote down a new one:
He thinks she’s a bad mother.
This hypothesis had been his easiest yet. Dan had spoken it—no need for risky inductive leaps this time.
Of course, Dan had spoken it in anger, but Cook had a theory about that, going back to his days with Paula. It was one of the things they had constantly disagreed about in their year together. Paula believed that people could become so enraged that they would make claims they didn’t believe at all—“outlandish” claims, she said, using a ruralism he hated the first time he heard it from her. She said that if people came to the injured partner later and said, “I didn’t mean what I said,” they spoke the truth. They didn’t mean it.
Cook’s view was that if it came out of your mouth, it was yours. If you said, “You’re selfish!” then you believed the person was selfish—and more important, you had been cultivating that belief for some time. Of course, your view might change later, but such a change did not justify the claim that you did not mean what you said. You did mean it—every bit of it.
So Cook believed Dan had meant what he said. But he had other problems with it. Was Beth a bad mother? She seemed loving, attentive, and genuinely interested in her son—all the things a mother should be. Cook went back through events since his arrival, looking for Robbie-related combustions. Dan’s strong words to Beth about helping Robbie with his math was one—a peculiar one, too. Dan had seemed to want Beth to be out of the picture—the very thing he was complaining about now. Cook recalled the disagreement on his first night there over whether Robbie should be told the truth about him. Dan wanted to tell him, Beth didn’t. Did this make Dan the better parent? Not necessarily, but Dan might have thought it did. There had also been a little pronoun disagreement that night, when Dan and Beth had interpreted “our books” differently. For Dan, “our” had meant the whole family. For Beth, it had meant just the two of them. Did this mean Beth was a bad mother for excluding Robbie? Dan probably thought so. But from Beth’s point of view, it simply meant she was a good wife. Who could say which one was right?
Cook remembered his excitement that night at being able to relate the problem to the Old English pronoun system. Old English? Good God, he thought. Old English had nothing to do with it. Old English was a dead language spoken by a bunch of ax-wielding, head-cleaving twits. What cold, mechanistic notion of language had sent him flying there for an answer? The answer would be found in the messy give-and-take at Dan and Beth’s house, in the sloppy present, not in the rigid grammar of a dead tongue.
Cook stood up from the desk and looked out the window. The taste of moo shu pork and General Tso’s chicken was suddenly, surprisingly, on his tongue. He smiled grimly at the memory. Not long after Paula had moved in wi
th him, he had taken her to a Chinese restaurant near Wabash. He had ordered the pork under the assumption that he would eat it all. She had ordered the chicken under the assumption that they would divide their portions in half and share them. When their conflicting intentions became clear, there was laughter. Then there were words.
Cook’s words were neutral. They had to do with his habits—he always ordered moo shu pork and ate all of it. Paula’s words were ugly. She talked about his failure to accept her into his life. Cook said she was just talking about her habits: she was used to sharing dishes, whereas he wasn’t. Just when he expected her to agree, she called him a name. She called him a “splendid isolationist.”
Cook called her a few things in response. He called her “clingy,” “needy,” “demanding,” “smothering,” and “swallowing.” She asked him if he wanted to be alone, and he said yes, in a sense he did. It turned out to be a trick question, because instead of taking his answer in the general, spiritual way he had meant it (we’re all alone, basically; I need my independence, you need yours; etc.), she got up and left. He ate all the moo shu pork and all of General Tso’s chicken, and he went home with his brain flying on monosodium glutamate.
Later she recanted her words, saying she hadn’t meant them. He recanted his, but with the condition that he had meant them. They got over the fight. But they never got over the recantation.
He turned back to his desk. As he picked up THE HORROR! it struck him that he should view the list in a new light—not as a progression from darkness to light but as a whole. Or better, as a rotating set of equally legitimate views, each subject to reinvocation at any moment in this dynamic, horrific cycle.
He went downstairs. Beth was at the sink, scrubbing at something. He could tell from the way her butt shook rapidly that she didn’t want anything to do with him. Robbie must have still been at his friend’s house, though the dinner hour had come and gone. Through the sun-room windows Cook could see Dan taking measurements along one side of the backyard. It was amazing, Cook thought, how Dan was able to find jobs to do around the house. He usually did them with pleasure, too—with a noisy gusto of singing, whistling, and tool banging. At the moment, though, Dan was swearing loudly at the tape measure wriggling on the ground, and Cook went out to help him. Dan let him do this, but it was clear that there would be no extra talk.
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