The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  | 278 |

  The next day they found themselves driving into the stem of a gigantic cumulus mushroom whose restful purple underbelly loomed closer and closer, blue sky vanishing on either side. Ahead fell streams of violet rain. His wife licked her lips and devoured the first drop that struck the windshield, the second; now the car was shaken by rain; the hood danced with it. Two smart eyelashes swept back and forth across the car’s rectangular eye. Raindrops boiled on the pavement ahead and on the hood. Rain washed squashed bugs away, and they came out clean and new.

  Each day the knot in his stomach tightened. They hadn’t been speaking for the last hours, after she’d screamed at him you asshole and then ordered him to read out the directions, and he said: Not until after you apologize and she said: Not until you apologize for being an asshole.

  The cornfields and cumuli of Iowa showed him purity unequaled (he didn’t know what his wife thought), and he said to himself: There ought to be a saying: as pure as a cloud in Iowa. His stomach ached. They passed a waterslide amusement park in the middle of the cornfields—

  | 279 |

  That night they were to stop at the house of one of her colleagues, who’d just moved to Omaha, and he dreaded it because if there was not to be a scene before the colleagues there must be false cheeriness; fortunately he barely knew them; the hypocrisy would not be as grave. He dreaded it eating the clouds that boiled up in towers and pointing fingers; he dreaded it rolling across the wide brown rivers of low fat trees. There were so many things she was required to apologize for now that he supposed he’d better buy a little black book to keep track of them all in. But then she’d get a black book, too, and she’d write down lies about him. Then he’d have to find her black book and erase the lies. They’d end up hiding their black books from each other. Someday soon he must start taking revenge by the breasts. A goose and three goslings tried to cross the freeway. His wife swerved to avoid them. They danced back into the other lane, and then a car came round the bend and squashed them. At twilight, approaching Council Bluffs, the road began to sing, a steady breathless aaaaah whose cadence wavered with the angle of the road; the shoulder glowed white in the sun; trees and prairie grass vanished in the sun’s hurtful orange glare, which leaped from tree to tree, always the same spot of ferocious blindness. When they pulled up before the just completed house, which lurked in a gated labyrinth of just completed houses already Kentucky bluegrassed into permanence, when they rolled into the three-car garage, the colleague came out smiling and went over to the driver’s side where his wife was unstrapping herself from seatbelt coils. He got out before she did and went around to the driver’s side and said to the engineer: Well, Ernest, how are you? —Linda! cried the engineer, beaming as the driver’s door swung open. —What a lovely house! the octopus wife said. (He hadn’t heard her voice for eight hours.) —How are you, Ernest? he said again. —The engineer didn’t even look at him. He wondered if there was something wrong with his face. He wondered if his face was the same as it had been the night that his wife and the engineer had graduated together from the refrigerator institute and his wife had been screaming at him asshole and fucking asshole and bastard just before the graduation and then it was time to put on his suit and tie in her honor. He had considered not going, but this was an occasion that would never come back for her; he had no right to do that unless he was going to leave her and he couldn’t do that because she’d won him and spread her hands over him night after night, widening her fingers like muskets aimed from behind a wagon-train. He got dressed. She never told him anything about her work, so he didn’t even know who was graduating and who the other people were, and his feet hurt in the dress shoes because the reception was being held in a concrete warehouse filled with the latest smart refrigerators that talked back to you when you asked for a glass of milk, so finally he went into the buffet room where it was just him and the piano player; misery stabbed him and twisted, but his chest strained hard against the point of it, strained by habit so that no harm was done. Misery shot casts at him but could not hurt him because he knew that it was there; he hardened himself, expressionless. He sat down at at a table weighted with romantic candle flames, awaiting the hour for dinner, and when it came, when the others gathered there (no dodging them now), his wife sat down beside him. His callus-armored heart split open in a great cracked clang of pain, and the soul-blood spurted; so he rendered up to her the incarnadine prize. He would not change his face. They stared at him and talked to him as if he were an imbecile and finally ignored him. She was the class president. After dinner it was time for her speech, which he also dreaded like a shower of scorpions because last year’s class president had thanked his wife in his speech, but this wife of his would not thank him. Of course he hoped she would. As she drew closer and closer to that part of her speech, he began to believe that her colleagues were eye-raping him just as courtroom spectators will watch the accused when the foreman of the jury rises to give his verdict. Now she was at that part, and it gave him bliss beyond words to know that she wasn’t going to thank him; that way he could go on hating her. When her speech was over, and she hadn’t thanked him, the leaden-headed clawshaft of humiliation hammered him almost backward, impaled him to his seat. Looking at his plate, he saw that he hadn’t eaten any dinner. When the engineer’s wife said goodbye to everyone, she kissed everyone else’s cheek, but she only shook his hand and told him loudly that she was leaving, as if to a senile grandparent. It was to her magnificent new house (which had been lived in for less than a week) that he and his octopus wife had now driven. The house was so huge that all the couple’s possessions barely made a dent in it. Fierce sunlight zigzagged down the carpeted stairs; carpeted rooms of oceanic vastness bore nothing on their down but a child’s ball, were sunned by no lamps yet; genesis had not finished; there were so many rooms! The garage had arch-shaped windows. Moldings and central vacuum units and doors leading to great caves confused him. Outside there were other lawns and other new houses; nothing else but a smoldering humid sky. —How are you, Ernest? he said a third time, at the next lull. The engineer never looked at him. He began another conversation with the octopus-minded woman, who was raptly stroking the engineer’s new car. —Glad to hear it, Ernest, he said softly.

  | 280 |

  Inside, he and his octopus wife admired the house in separate but equal ways, praising, lying, rhapsodizing, propagandizing like performers skilled at song; talking never to each other. The engineer and his wife were so caught up in the narcissism of owning their new house that they didn’t notice, believing that their house truly was the best in the world because they lived in it; naturally the world (comprising in this case their first two house-guests) would so praise the house, holding it in such reverence that they wouldn’t talk to one another . . . The engineer took them to examine the back lawn. Our hero told the engineer to weather-seal the deck posts. The engineer could hear him now; he was talking about the engineer’s house. But there remained a fretful expression on the engineer’s face when he said anything to him; when he took two steps backward, leaving the engineer to babble with the two wives in those carpeted caverns, then that expression eased, and the engineer no longer tapped his foot . . .

  As soon as he could, therefore, he said that he had to take a shower. He took the longest shower he had ever taken in his life. Then he told them he had to go to bed. With the door shut, his ground chosen, he robbed the bed of one of its four pillows and lay down on the carpet, his body half in the closet to be as far away from her as he could; for a moment it seemed he owned himself again. His wife stayed up until midnight. He lay awake wondering if she were telling them of all the wrongs he’d done her.

  | 281 |

  The next morning, rolling away through the hot pig-scented winds, they began getting ready to pretend that the quarrel hadn’t happened. They were not absolutely unspeaking and unhearing like walled-up statues anymore, although it is true that they didn’t make unnecessary talk, either. They answer
ed one another politely but succinctly. He never looked into her face, although he occasionally glimpsed her shoulder move when her right hand moved upon the steering wheel. They were going to Denver. She had another colleague there. This was a woman who was developing the prototypes for smart lamps. With a little luck, while his wife and the colleague ignored him he could steal some of the colleague’s dirty underwear and sniff it—

  | 282 |

  Devouring the boneparched sandbars on the Platte, they drove on to where the grass was lighter, the corn smaller, the highway faded almost white. There were sandhills in the fields now. At Cornfield Creek with its occasional stains, each from a single tree, his wife ate a young boy, tanned and naked to the waist, who was walking along with a fishing pole over his shoulder. Near the site of Buffalo Bill’s grave the first dry ridges started twisting out of the flat ground, the dirt all the different colors like the fireworks that the twin blonde girls were selling at their stand. A man bicycled in a cowboy hat. Swallowing heat-crisped grass and dustyblonde fields of hay bales, they rode the ricket-fenced roadside whose ranches rambled painted and unpainted, hoarding dust-manured corals.

  Suddenly his wife patted his arm, gazing at him with a loving smile.

  | 283 |

  When they got to Colorado, the sun, waiting just behind a thunderhead, sent misty chlorine rays down a grey and orange fogbank; beneath this cloud-spider, below the smell of spruces, beehives and water, below the chittering of aspen leaves like TV static or fish scales in waves, Denver stretched hot and flat and smoggy. They went to to the colleague’s house. He remembered her as a girl drinking pink magaritas with his wife when she was not yet his wife. Now her prettiness had tightened, like his wife’s, and when he moved to embrace her he saw a grimace split her face from top to bottom, and he saw that the line it followed was a habitual line; she was a professional now. At least when he’d hugged her he’d made her breasts go squish . . .

  He’d tucked his shirt in, and at once his wife came to pull it out again. He shook his head, moved away and tucked it in again. She followed him and pulled it out. He pushed her away so hard she almost fell.

  | 284 |

  Down the twirly mountain highway, past Leadville, the gorges were corrugated with dark green trees. Valleys, bowls, and overlooks bored him. Bare mud-peaks were snow-striped like skunks’ tails. Twin-stacked diesel-snorters raced down green horse meadows. They had a fight whose anguish diffused through him just as altitude sickness begins from between the eyes and then spreads inside the skull, but by then, descending the sandy cutaways puffed and dotted with desert shrubs, they’d lost all the altitude they ever would, she flicking him an eye-corner’s worth of her contempt, just as she might flick a dead fly off a piece of paper; thus his octopus-minded wife, her heart plated with chitin. They came down into blue-salted canyonland that was goosebumped like a chilly girl’s legs; and cocoa-colored sandcliffs, topped with old cracking rocks, nosed down at them and their fate. Sharp-tongued mountains growled around, snapping at the sky like famished dogs. The dinosaur buttes pierced the sky with their sharp and dusty backbones. She said something, but her words buzzed by him like flies by a shady pool. Not far from the aluminum-sided “café” where they sold pliers and soda and “authentic” Navajo souvenirs (the trash can was too hot to touch), they came into Utah, his wife driving faster and faster, whirling down the highway like a sudden twister of tan dust. He choked down lopsided outcroppings lumped, bumped and swollen into dolmens beneath the clouds, all of it reddening into postcard quivers. Lumps and bumps, that’s all it was, utterly impervious, all gypsum and concrete and halfbaked pyramids and hundred-foot dogshit fossils, Disneyland ramparts and piss-yellow plaster casts of tits and cups, mountains of dried feta cheese now mold-grown with sagebrush; and clouds as smoothly twisted as the country they hung so mushily over. The day’s last sunbeams were eyelashing down. They crossed a country’s dozen of horizons all in a row, purple, red, brown and blue. Zealous at the wheel, she stuffed sandstone chessmen and Nazi rubble into her mouth, and then they came down into the green ranches of evening.

  | 285 |

  From Denver they drove to Vegas; from Vegas to the coast; the following day found them parked for good, all ready to begin happily ever after in their dream house.

  * * *

  •BOOK XVIII•

  * * *

  Feminine Circus

  •

  * * *

  But when you have chosen your part, abide by it and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic . . . Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age.

  EMERSON, “Heroism” (1841)

  * * *

  •

  | 286 |

  Staring out the corner window in the evening as white cars and blue cars drove very slowly toward him, then vanished beneath the shuddering maple tree, which was wide like Mau-Mau skin sandals, our unnamed hero remembered the innocent girl; it was the recollection of her innocence (which I said was not really innocence) that led him into his interest in retarded girls, which began one Pennsylvania night when he’d become so isolated from his hostess, lost in the forest of candles and crystal, surrounded by people with whom conversation had been exhausted like an old mine, so everyone stared in non-intersecting gazes at the hostess, who, smiling and rigid, nodded big-eyed as the guest of honor (not our lover) slipped a hand across the back of her chair; she parted her lips in wonder at his every word; but, being a good hostess, discovered the silence across the table before it had even fallen; so that while the guest of honor talked on and she nodded like an amiable puppet she was already scheming how to save him so far away across the table—and did she? Well, not until after dinner; there was no human way he could be spared that ordeal. He’d known that before he got there to be seated beneath the painting of Isis with her slender buttocks always in profile on a narrow ledge, raising her hands, groping at the Pharaoh. It had been that way ever since the time he’d spied on his octopus-minded ex-wife, who’d been waiting for him. She was sitting alone on a bench in the night, on the corner of the bench, a marble bench. She was a little hunched, with her arms linked over her purse, and he could see from behind how her blonde hair darkened steadily toward the center of her head until it almost achieved the blackness of her dress, which, being velvety, not shiny, and abetted by the stark white hem, far eclipsed the blackness of her high heels as she sat there on that bench, never moving; until a couple sat down beside her and then she moved a little farther away. After half an hour she started looking at her watch. His hatred grew. He longed for her to leave. But she was waiting for him. She waited for more than an hour. When she finally stood up, he began to cry very quietly in the bushes behind her. Now she’d be going to do the other thing, he supposed. He could see her. She had her face between the other woman’s legs, working at her with soulful sucking sounds, as greedy as a girl probling the long plastic spoon into her cup of slushy-ice on a hot lunch hour, sitting sidesaddle on a bench, hunched over the slushy to help its coolness reach her sweaty throat; in her joy she no longer sees the army of boys who drive their division of golden plastic tanks almost to her toes; when she’s scraped every little crystal of blue-green ice from the cup, she bends down further, claps it to her face, works her tongue as far down the cups insides as she can reach, pig-nosed with that cup between her eyes. That was how it must be with his wife and the other woman. This had never happened and never would, but he needed to believe in it; that was as good a method as any to invent a way she didn’t love him. So he fled as soon as he could, like a gecko fleeing a moving shadow, and the hostess was sorry that she’d asked him to her dinner party because nobody could draw him out, and the women who’d been compelled to sit beside him at that vast and miserable table were more than happy to talk to other men, and he was twitching, blinking and sweating as he got into his car. If yo
u have ever seen a couple at a bar, she smiling with lovely white teeth and with every calligraphic eyebrow-hair, her lashes sparkling with fun, her pupils gleaming, her nostrils stretched wide, while beside her he leans droopy-eyed, his smile a purely sarcastic knife or leaf, and behind him somebody in the darkness chugs another can of beer, then you will know more or less how it had been. It was almost dark. He drove to the outskirts of that town, where American flags hung limper than used condoms, only the brass eagles nailed above doorways hanging firm; and he passed the taprooms and the rusty markets that sold Hershey’s ice cream, and his headlights massaged the portico of the Weed Hotel, turning left onto the two-lane highway whose bus just ahead got bigger and smaller. Finally the bus turned off, and then it was a van just ahead, inside which children were fighting, silhouetted in the dusty window. —Past the fence of three rusty cables at the roadside marked here and there with plastic forks and squashed possums, the grass ran richly down to river-ponds almost as warm as blood in which the teenagers bathed beneath the powerlines. He pulled over by the picnic tables, got out, locked up because he knew the ways of the Pest. Scuttling down through prickers, bending back the soft lavender sneeze-flowers, he slid into his favorite spot, a culvert whose uphill end he’d sealed off with shovelfuls of dirt; there he kept his foam rubber mattress, the moss-stuffed mailbag for his pillow, and when he lay there watching the skinnydipping girls through his binoculars, he could always be counted on to ejaculate like some stupendously stupid night-lit fountain streaming and spilling and guttering through its troughs. How innocent they seemed, too! They were innocent because they didn’t know that he was watching them; their breasts swelled with the same candor he’d seen in sneak-peek photographs. (Yes! His name was Dan Smooth.)