Arnold had been resting only a few minutes, his eyes closed, when he was startled by pounding at the door. Like a watchman’s nightstick or the back of a flashlight. At first, Arnold feared the protesters had overrun the police sentries—that his house was about to be stormed by the mob—but the hammering was too methodical for a stampede. The masses would have broken the door down or set the entire building aflame. Instead: Thump. Thump. Thump. Then an authoritative voice shouted: “City Marshal. Open up.” Arnold’s stomach tightened. Were they actually going to arrest him? Was this the beginning of the end? All that could be hoped for from the authorities was that they might keep him separated from other prisoners for his own protection, as they did with Charles Manson and child molesters. Better to run. Arnold retreated toward the kitchen with the intent of fleeing over the back fence, but Judith inadvertently blocked his escape route. She stepped past him and opened the front door, sending Spitford’s army into a frenzy.
The city marshal held the screen door open with one hand. He was a squat, red-faced officer whose long, craggy head was capped with a conspicuous toupee. “I have a special delivery for Arnold Brinkman,” he said.
“I’m his wife.”
“More than I need to know,” said the city marshal. He handed Judith a small beige envelope. “A pleasure doing business with you,” he said.
Judith shut the door and held out the envelope toward Arnold. He motioned for her to open it.
“You’re not going to believe this,” said Judith. Whatever the contents of the envelope, they were enough to override her silence.
“I’ve been drafted?”
“You’ve been subpoenaed.”
Arnold’s muscles relaxed. “It’s better than being arrested.”
“This is just too perfect,” continued Judith. “You’re being subpoenaed for creating a public nuisance. Apparently, darling, it’s your fault that those John Birch hooligans are out there shouting all day.”
“Not just the John Birch Society,” said Arnold. “Also the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Knights of Columbus, even the goddam Young Americans for Freedom. I didn’t know there were any more Young Americans for Freedom.”
“Maybe they’re having a reunion,” answered Judith. She was still reading the contents of the envelope.
“Doesn’t that make them the Old Americans for Freedom?”
Judith didn’t smile. “Would you like to know who’s suing you?”
“Let me guess. That woman whose dog kept tearing up the dahlias.”
Several years earlier, Arnold had complained to the neighbourhood association about a rottweiler with a penchant for tubers; the owner, a mousy English nurse, still crossed the street whenever she spotted him approaching.
“Much better,” said Judith. “You’re being sued by our dear neighbour Ira Taylor.”
“You’re serious?”
“Better than being drafted,” said Judith. “I think.”
“That’s outrageous! He’s the one creating the nuisance. He’s been out there holding court every morning.”
“Are you going to tell that to a jury?” asked Judith. “Who has more credibility? A retired banker whose ancestors probably bankrolled the Mayflower? Or the Fifth Column of Sixth Street?” She slapped the court papers against his chest. “Chickens coming home to roost, my dear. I warned you to press charges over the soda cans.”
“What good would that have done?”
“At least there’d be a written record,” said Judith.
“It wouldn’t matter,” answered Arnold. “Those are facts. This has gone far beyond facts.” He crumpled the subpoena and tossed it onto the marble tiles. “Can we talk for a couple of minutes? Please?”
Judith didn’t answer directly. Instead, she crossed into the living room and sat down beside the bay windows. She peeled back the drapes, just enough to peek into the street. A thin sliver of light danced across the opposite bookshelves. The protesters must have noticed the movement behind the glass, because their chanting suddenly rose in intensity. Judith let the curtain fall shut. “I’m very unhappy,” she said.
Arnold had prepared a speech to win his wife over to his side. He’d rehearsed it hour after hour at the nursery. But now, faced with the overwhelming simplicity of Judith’s declaration of unhappiness, he found himself at a loss for words. All he could muster was: “I’m sorry that you’re unhappy.” In case this wasn’t enough, he added, “I’m unhappy too.”
“My sister called again this morning. While you were playing Paul Bunyan,” continued Judith. “It seems the Tongue Traitor is even newsworthy in Greece.”
“You mean she knows?”
“She went through the roof, my dear. I’ve never heard her like that before. Some of it may have been for the effect—you know how Celeste is, and I think Mr. Republican tight-ass was in the room with her—but the bottom line is that they’re cutting short their trip. She’s booking the first flight out of Athens.”
“But that’s totally unnecessary.”
“She’ll be here tomorrow afternoon,” said Judith, “to pick up Ray.”
“But she can’t—”
“Of course, she can,” Judith cut him off. “Ray’s her son.”
It surprised Arnold that he cared so much about losing the boy. He hadn’t particularly enjoyed having his nephew around. If anything, Ray’s presence had impinged upon his social life with Judith, kept them from enjoying the theatre and the ballet. Besides, if not for the damned kid, he’d never have ended up at Yankee Stadium. But Arnold took his sister-in-law’s intentions as a personal affront—like being dis-invited from a party that one didn’t wish to attend. He also understood that Judith was being unfairly punished for his own actions. This made him feel even worse.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
Judith shook her head. She stood up and circled around the room—past the new cherrywood end-tables and the newly upholstered armchairs and the newly hung prints of the Sandpiper Key lighthouse at sunset. For her fiftieth birthday, Judith had redecorated the townhouse. That had been her present to herself. It had left her personal imprint on each room, much as Arnold had left his on the yard. Arnold hadn’t cared. Interiors weren’t his thing. Besides, he didn’t spend very much time inside—except when he was writing or socializing. But now that they were fighting, he suddenly felt as though he was conducting his struggle in alien territory. “It’s hard to believe I spent so much time redoing this place,” Judith said. “As though anybody cares what colour wallpaper we have. As though anybody gives a damn about us at all.”
Arnold followed her across the room. “Can I hold you?” he asked.
She let him hug her—but only for an instant. Then she pushed him away.
“I want to have a baby.”
The words hit Arnold without warning, but they came more as a confirmation than a surprise. “Now?” he asked.
“I know it’s not rational. It’s completely irrational. But it’s what I want.” Judith spoke rapidly, as though afraid she might lose her mettle. “If you don’t want to apologize, don’t. Let’s just sell this place and move far away and raise a child.”
Arnold had considered leaving New York until the situation blew over, maybe renting a bungalow in the Catskills for a few weeks. Or going on a cruise—turning the getaway into a second honeymoon. Nobody ever criticized dissidents for fleeing China or Iran. Or Einstein for leaving Nazi Germany. But the more Arnold thought about it, running away seemed as bad as apologizing. In either case, it was giving in. Moreover, he’d envisioned a temporary escape. It had never crossed his mind that they might relocate permanently—that they would end up refugees like his ex-brother-in-law in Fiji. Arnold could imagine only one fate worse than permanent banishment from New York: Being permanently banished from New York and having to raise a child in exile.
“I don’t want to leave New York,” said Arnold. “And you don’t want to leave New York either. You’re not thinking straight.”
“Why not?”
“Please, Judith. In the first place, you’re fifty-one years old. You’d be seventy when the kid graduates from high school.”
“I’ve been reading a lot about older parenting. On the internet,” insisted Judith. “It’s far more common than you think. Look at Tony Randall. Or Saul Bellow. Or Anthony Quinn.”
Arnold recognized this as one of Judith’s traps, that she wanted him to say was: But they’re all men—so she could dismiss his objections as sexist. What he’d actually thought was: But they’re all dead. He knew enough not to say this either.
“And how exactly do you propose to have this baby?” he demanded.
Judith paused in front of a long walnut sideboard covered in knickknacks and photographs, picking up a hand-carved wooden stork that they’d purchased on a trip to the Canary Islands. “There are ways,” she said. “I don’t care about having the baby. Or even that it’s a baby. We can adopt a ten year old from Africa or a little girl with Down’s syndrome….But I want a child.”
“I thought we were on the same page about this,” pleaded Arnold. “I thought we’d decided….”
“I’ve changed pages,” snapped Judith. “I’m glad you wouldn’t apologize. If you’d apologized, everything would have stayed the same. I’d have gone on listening to Bonnie Card and her bullshit about the indecency of motherhood until I really was too old to raise a family. It all seems so horrifically obvious to me now: I’d have ended up one of those pathetic old widows who pesters strangers with photographs of her nieces and nephews.” She slammed the wooden stork against the sideboard, snapping off its bill. “Well I’m not going to let that happen! Bonnie Card can go fuck herself.”
“Okay, okay,” said Arnold. “We’ll figure something out. But can’t we deal with one problem at a time? I don’t think this is really a conversation to have while the Black Nazis are camped outside our door.”
“This is precisely the time to have this conversation, my dear,” answered Judith. “I want to know what I can expect from the rest of my life.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’m going to have a child, Arnold. One way or another.” Judith’s voice was suddenly calm. “I love you and I’d like you to be part of that experience. But whether you want a child or not, I’m going to have one. All you have to do is decide whether you want to share that with me.”
“But I love you…” said Arnold.
“I’m not bluffing.”
“I know you’re not,” he answered. “Let me think about it.”
That was the wrong answer. Arnold realized his mistake as soon as the words left his mouth—that a “maybe” was as good as a “no.” Both suggested that he’d consider leaving her, or letting her leave him, that the status quo wasn’t an inevitability.
Judith stared at him blankly. Then she knelt down on the carpet and gathered together the pieces of the shattered stork.
Later that afternoon, at the nursery, a second incident reinforced the sudden fragility of Arnold’s marriage. He’d ordered Guillermo to make sure that he wasn’t disturbed, and then he’d sat in his office, the door bolted, munching on cornflowers and pitying himself. Dozens of pink phone messages lay on his desk blotter—mostly from various news outlets, but also from at least two progressive law firms who’d volunteered to take “his case” pro bono. His aunt had also phoned from her summer cabin outside Santa Fe in order to let him know that she’d seen him on television. “Just wanted you to know; no need to call back.” At least his parents were dead. And Judith’s too. That was some solace. If Arnold had had to listen to his father describe the bombing of Rotterdam, or the three years he’d spent concealed under the floorboards of the baboon cage at the Utrecht Zoo, stinking perpetually of primate shit and surviving on monkey rations smuggled to him by a devout Catholic keeper, he’d have lost his resolve. Pieter Brinkman was the sort of man who loved the Statue of Liberty as much as his own wife and who experienced a chill down his spine when he saw the American flag draped at half-mast. He’d volunteered to fight in the Korean War, but his age and severe asthma had rendered him unfit for service. Eleanor Brinkman had also been a fierce patriot in her own way—a social worker who spoke of “my” President, as though he belonged to her personally, and who’d insisted upon mounting a portrait of FDR on her wall in the nursing home. How odd that none of this had rubbed off on Arnold. He balled up the pink slips one at a time and lobbed them at the wastepaper basket. Three of them were from Cassandra Broward at the Daily Vanguard.
Arnold considered returning Cassandra’s calls—but to what end? No matter how many times he assured himself that his intentions were purely professional, that he’d have done the same for any reporter who shared his politics, the fact remained that he hadn’t phoned back the other periodicals whose messages now lay crumpled around the trash can. And several of these, like The Nation and The Village Voice, had run editorials in his defence. If he phoned Cassandra, no good would come of it: Some itches weren’t meant to be scratched. Instead, he flipped on the television set that he’d commandeered from his manager’s office—nominally, because the staff had been sneaking into Guillermo’s quarters on breaks to watch the news updates, but really because he was growing addicted to the coverage of himself. He was constantly a bit on edge about what else they might reveal of his past, but also curious that they might uncover something even he didn’t know. They’d already tracked down Judith’s estranged brother, to whom nobody in the family had spoken in twenty years. (The man ran a pawn shop in Bethel, Alaska, with his Yupik wife, and kept referring to Arnold as “Alfred.”) But that afternoon—the third since the baseball game—the cable networks were merely rehashing the week’s events. On the right-wing station, the camera panned across the demonstrators, many of whom had brought along umbrellas and trench coats to ward off the drizzle, so that the mob now looked slightly more civilized, like FBI agents attending a funeral. Four men held a green-and-black canopy above Spotty Spitford to keep him dry. The minister looked so pleased with himself, like a cat who dined on canary at every meal. Then the camera pulled back and surveyed the opposite side of the street: the bored cops chewing the fat under the sassafras tree, the octogenarian who lived on the other side of Ira Taylor, and her centenarian mother, relaxing in lawn chairs on their stoop. That’s when Arnold caught sight of Gilbert Card. The immigration lawyer was wearing a trench coat with the collar turned up and walking rapidly. Not unusual behaviour, considering the weather, but it gave Arnold pause nonetheless. He watched helplessly as Gilbert waited on his porch—his back turned to the jeering throng—until Arnold’s wife opened the door. In the brief interval when the door stood open, Arnold caught sight of Judith in the entryway. It looked to him as though she’d been smiling.
Up until that moment, it had never crossed Arnold’s mind that Judith might have a secret love interest of her own. They’d always been far too happy with each other, their lives far too intertwined, for infidelity to gain a foothold. Judith was constantly saying that if he were to die first, she’d never remarry. Not because she objected to a second husband in principle—that was probably the psychologically healthy choice—but because she just didn’t have it in her to start over again. (He’d admitted that he probably would remarry eventually, that anything was better than growing old alone.) It was hard to reconcile the Judith who criticized unfaithful wives in movies, the sharp-tongued creature who had no compunction about telling a dinner party that “Emma Bovary got what was coming to her,” with the Judith who was bonking his best friend on the sly. But, in hindsight, maybe the woman had protested too much. If he could have a crush on Cassandra Broward, Judith might as easily have a thing for Gil. After all, the lawyer was good-looking, personable, easy-going—and it didn’t take too much reflection for Arnold to realize that Bonnie Card wasn’t giving Gilbert what he needed in bed. She couldn’t be. Which meant that all of those references to national borders might have been a secret code that referred to oth
er, more personal barriers. Maybe Judith’s baby was just a symptom, not the underlying problem.
Once the ugly idea took root in Arnold’s thoughts, it wasn’t too difficult to rethink his entire past. All of those dinner parties with the Cards now acquired a sinister meaning: Gilbert was always wandering off with Judith to look at her paintings or to offer her wisdom on interior decorating. Arnold had always just been pleased that they’d gotten along so well. How many evenings had he listened to Bonnie criticizing Western Civilization’s irrational censure of bestiality, or our culture’s peculiar reverence for corpses, or insisting that chimpanzees be given the right to vote? He imagined listening to her declaim on the moral equivalence of golf and genocide, as he had done only last month, while her husband was going down on his wife in the linen closet. For all he could tell, Bonnie might have been in on the arrangement. Arnold could imagine her saying: There’s nothing natural or preferable about monogamy. It’s just an arbitrary choice, like monotheism.
He could easily return to the house and confront the pair, disrupt their lovemaking and drive Gilbert naked from his bedroom. But what if he were wrong? And worse, what if he was right—but the affair was taking its natural course and would soon be water under the bridge. The last thing Arnold wanted to do was to force his wife’s hand, to transform an unfortunate transgression into a marriage-breaking calamity. Under the circumstances, maybe not knowing was best.
The Man Who Wouldn't Stand Up Page 7