“So that’s what heaven is then. Heaven is the fire that does that, a huge roaring bonfire with lots of little Japanese women dancing around it and every so often they let out a great shout and one of them rushes into it. Whoof!”
33. Shrimp, in Stuyvesant Square (2021)
“One of the rules in the magazine was that you can’t mention other people by name. Otherwise I could just say, ‘Heaven would be if I were living with January’ and then describe that. But if you’re describing a relationship, you don’t let yourself imagine all you could and so you learn nothing.
“So where does that leave me?
“Visualize, it said.
“Okay. Well, there’s grass in heaven, because I can see myself standing in grass. But it isn’t the country, not with cows and such. And it can’t be a park, because the grass in parks is either sickly or you can’t walk on it. It’s beside a highway. A highway in Texas! Let’s say in nineteen-fifty-three. It’s a clear, clear day in nineteen-fifty-three, and I can see the highway stretching on and on past the horizon.
“Endlessly.
“Then what? Then I’ll want to drive on the highway, I suppose. But notby myself, that would be anxiety-making. So I’ll break the rule and let January drive. If we’re on a motorcycle, it’s scarcely a relationship, is it?
“Well, our motorcycle is going fast, it’s going terribly fast, and there are cars and gigantic trucks going almost as fast as we are. Toward that horizon. We weave in and out, in and out. Faster we go, and faster and faster.
“Then what? I don’t know. That’s as far as I see.
“Now it’s your turn.”
34. Shrimp, at the Asylum (2024)
“What do I feel? Angry. Afraid. Sorry for myself. I don’t know. I feel a bit of everything, but not— Oh, this is silly. I don’t want to be wasting everyone’s time with—
“Well, I’ll try it. Just say the one thing over and over until— What happens?
“I love you. There, that wasn’t so bad. I love you. I love you, January. I love you, January. January, I love you. January, I love you. If she were here it would be a lot easier, you know. Okay, okay. I love you. I love you. I love your big warm boobs. I’d like to squeeze them. And I love your … I love your juicy black cunt. How about that? I do. I love all of you. I wish we were together again. I wish I knew where you were so you’d know that. I don’t want the baby, any babies, I want you. I want to be married. To you. For all time. I love you.
“Keep going?
“I love you. I love you. I love you very much. And that’s a lie. I hate you. I can’t stand you. You appall me, with your stupidity, with your vulgarity, with your third-hand ideas that you take off the party line like— You bore me. You bore me to tears. You’re dumb nigger scum! Nigger bitch. Stupid! And I don’t care if—
“No, I can’t. It’s not there. I’m just saying the words because I know you want to hear them. Love, hate, love, hate—words.
“It isn’t that I’m resisting. But I don’t feel what I’m saying, and that’s the truth. Either way. The only thing I feel is tired. I wish I were home watching teevee instead of wasting everyone’s time. For which I apologize.
“Somebody else say something and I’ll shut up.”
35. Richard M. Williken, continued (2024)
“Your problem,” he told her, as they were rocking home in the RR after the big nonbreakthrough, “is that you’re not willing to accept your own mediocrity.”
“Oh shut up,” she said. “I mean that sincerely.”
“It’s my own problem, just as much. Even more so, perhaps. Why do you think I’ve gone so long now without doing any work? It isn’t that if I started in nothing would happen. But when I’m all done I look at what I’m left with and I say to myself, ‘No, not enough.’ In effect that’s what you were saying tonight.”
“I know you’re trying to be nice, Willy, but it doesn’t help. There’s no comparison between your situation and mine.”
“Sure there is. I can’t believe in my pictures. You can’t believe in your love affairs.”
“A love affair isn’t some goddamn work of art.” The spirit of argument had caught hold of Shrimp. Williken could see her struggling out of her glooms as though they were no more than a wet swimsuit. Good old Shrimp!
“Isn’t it?” he prompted.
She plunged after the bait without a thought. “You at least try to do something. There’s an attempt. I’ve never gone that far. I suppose if I did I would be what you say—mediocre.”
“You attempt too—ever so visibly.”
“What?” she asked.
She wanted to be torn to pieces (no one at the Asylum had bothered even to scream at her), but Williken didn’t rise above irony. “I try to do something; you try to feel something. You want an inner life, a spiritual life if you prefer. And you’ve got it. Only no matter what you do, no matter how you squirm to get away from the fact, it’s mediocre. Not bad. Not poor.”
“Blessed are the poor in spirit. Eh?”
“Exactly. But you don’t believe that and neither do I. You know who we are? We’re the scribes and Pharisees.”
“Oh, that’s good.”
“You’re a bit more cheerful now.”
Shrimp pulled a long face. “I’m laughing on the outside.”
“Things could be a lot worse.”
“How?”
“You might be a loser. Like me.”
“And I’m a winner instead? You can say that! After you saw me there tonight?”
“Wait,” he promised her. “Just wait.”
Part VI: 2026
36. Boz
“Bulgaria!” Milly exclaimed, and it took no special equipment to know that her next words were going to be: “I’ve been to Bulgaria.”
“Why don’t you get out your slides and show us,” Boz said, clamping the lid gently on her ego. Then, though he knew, he asked, “Whose turn is it?”
January snapped to attention and shook the dice. “Seven!” She counted out seven spaces aloud, ending up on Go to Jail. “I hope I stay there,” she said cheerfully. “If I land on Boardwalk again that’s the end of the game for me.” She said it so hopefully.
“I’m trying to remember,” Milly said, elbow propped on the table, the dice held aloft, time and the game in suspense, “what it was like. All that comes back is that people told jokes there. You had to sit and listen for hours to jokes. About breasts.” A look passed between them and another look passed between January and Shrimp.
Boz, though he’d have liked to retaliate with something gross, rose above it. He sat straighter in his chair, while in languid contrast his left hand dipped toward the dish of hot snaps. So much tastier cold.
Milly shook. Four: her cannon landed on theb & O. She paid Shrimp $200, and shook again. Eleven: her token came down on one of her own properties.
The Monopoly set was an heirloom from the O’Meara side of the family. The houses and hotels were wood, the counters lead. Milly, as ever, had the cannon, Shrimp had the little racing car, Boz had the battleship, and January had the flatiron. Milly and Shrimp were winning. Boz and January were losing. C’est la vie.
“Bulgaria,” Boz said, because it was such a fine thing to say, but also because his duty as a host required him to lead the conversation back to the interrupted guest. “But why?”
Shrimp, who was studying the backs of her property deeds to see how many more houses she could get by mortgaging the odds and ends, explained the exchange system between the two schools.
“Isn’t this what she was being so giddy about last spring?” Milly asked. “I thought another girl got the scholarship then.”
“Celeste diCecca. She was the one in the airplane crash.”
“Oh!” Milly said, as the light dawned. “I didn’t make the connection.”
“You thought Shrimp just likes to keep up with the latest plane crashes?” Boz asked.
“I don’t know what I thought, Trueheart. So now she’s going afte
r all. Talk about luck!”
Shrimp bought three more houses. Then the racing car sped past Park Place, Boardwalk, Go, and Income Tax, to land on Vermont Avenue. It was mortgaged to the bank.
“Talk about luck!” said January. The talk about luck continued for several turns round the board—who had it and who lacked it and whether there was, outside of Monopoly, any such thing. Boz asked if any of them had ever known anyone who’d won on the numbers or in the lottery. January’s brother had won five hundred dollars three years before.
“But of course,” January added conscientiously, “over the long run he’s lost more than that.”
“Certainly for the passengers an airplane crash is only luck,” Milly insisted.
“Did you think about crashes a lot when you were a hostess?” January asked the question with the same leaden disinterest with which she played at the game.
While Milly told her story about the Great Air Disaster of 2021, Boz snuck around behind the screen to revise the orzata and add some ice. Tabbycat was watching tiny ballplayers silently playing ball on the teevee, and Peanut was sleeping peacefully. When he returned with the tray the Air Disaster was concluded and Shrimp was spelling out her philosophy of life:
“It may look like luck on the surface but if you go deeper you’ll see that people usually get what they’ve got coming. If it hadn’t been this scholarship for Amparo, it would have been something else. She’s worked for it.”
“And Mickey?” January asked.
“Poor Mickey,” Milly agreed.
“Mickey got exactly what he deserved.”
For once Boz had to agree with his sister. “People, when they do things like that, are often seeking punishment.”
January’s orzata chose just that moment to spill itself. Milly got the board up in time and only one edge was wet. January had had so little money left in front of her that that was no loss either. Boz was more embarrassed than January, since his last words seemed to imply that she’d overturned her drink deliberately. God knew, she had every reason to want to. Nothing is quite so dull as two solid hours of losing.
Two turns later January’s wish came true. She landed on Boardwalk and was out of the game. Boz, who was being ground into the dust more slowly but just as surely, insisted on conceding at the same time. He went with January out onto the veranda.
“You didn’t have to give up just to keep me company, you know.”
“Oh, they’re happier in there without us. Now they can fight it out between themselves, fang and claw.”
“Do you know, I’ve never won at Monopoly? Never once in my life!” She sighed. Then, so as not to seem an ungrateful guest, “You’ve got a lovely view.”
They appreciated the night view in silence: lights that moved cars and planes; lights that didn’t move, stars, windows, street lamps.
Then, growing uneasy, Boz made his usual quip for a visitor on the veranda: “Yes—I’ve got the sun in the morning and the clouds in the afternoon.”
Possibly January didn’t get it. In any case she intended to be serious. “Boz, maybe you could give me some advice.”
“Me? Fiddle-dee-dee!” Boz loved to give advice. “What about?”
“What we’re doing.”
“I thought that was more in the nature of being already done.”
“What?”
“I mean, from the way Shrimp talks, I thought it was a—” But he couldn’t say “fait accompli,” so he translated. “An accomplished fact.”
“I suppose it is, as far as our being accepted. They’ve been very nice to us, the others there. It isn’t us that I’m worried about so much as her mother.”
“Mom? Oh, she’ll get along.”
“She seemed very upset last night.”
“She gets upset but she recovers quickly, our Mom does. All the Hansons are great bouncers-back. As you must have noticed.” That wasn’t nice but it seemed to slip past January with most of his other meanings.
“She’ll still have Lottie with her. And Mickey too, when he gets back.”
“That’s right.” But his agreement had an edge of sarcasm. He’d begun to resent January’s clumsy streaks of whitewash. “And anyhow, even if it is as bad as she seems to think, you can’t let that stand in your way. If Mom didn’t have anyone else, that shouldn’t affect your decision.”
“You don’t think so?”
“If I thought so, then I’d have to move back there, wouldn’t I? If it came to the point that she was going to lose the place. Oh, look who’s here!”
It was Tabbycat. Boz picked her up and rubbed her in all her favorite places. January persisted. “But you’ve got your own … family.”
“No, I’ve got my own life. The same as you or Shrimp.”
“So you do think we’re doing the right thing?”
But he wasn’t going to let her have it as easy as that. “Are you doing what you want to? Yes or no.”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s the right thing.” Which judgment pronounced, he turned his attention to Tabbycat. “What’s going on in there, huh, little fella? Are those people still playing their long dull game? Huh? Who’s going to win? Huh?”
January, who didn’t know the cat had been watching television, answered the question straightforwardly. “I think Shrimp will.”
“Oh?” Why had Shrimp ever …? He had never understood.
“Yes. She always wins. It’s incredible. The luck.”
That was why.
37. Mickey
He was going to be a ballplayer. Ideally a catcher for the Mets, but lacking that he’d be content so long as he was in the major leagues. If his sister could become a ballerina, there was no reason he couldn’t be an athlete. He had the same basic genetic equipment, quick reflexes, a good mind. He could do it. Dr. Sullivan said he could do it and Greg Lincoln the sports director said he had as good a chance as any other boy, possibly better. It meant endless practice, rigid discipline, an iron will, but with Dr. Sullivan helping him to weed out his bad mental habits there wasn’t any reason he couldn’t meet those demands.
But how could he explain that in half an hour in the visitors’ room? To his mother, who didn’t know Kike Chalmers from Opal Nash? His mother who was the source (he could understand that now) of most of his wrong ways of thinking. So he just told her.
“I don’t want to go back to 334. Not this week, not next week, not …” he pulled up just short of the word “never.”
“Not for a long time.”
Emotions flickered across her face like strobes. Mickey looked away. She said, “Why, Mickey? What did I do?”
“Nothing. That’s not it.”
“Why then? A reason.”
“You talk in your sleep. All night long you talk.”
“That’s not a reason. You can sleep in the living room, like Boz used to, if I keep you up.”
“Then you’re crazy. How’s that? Is that a reason? You’re crazy, all of you are.”
That stopped her, but not for long. Then she was pecking away at him again. “Maybe everyone’s crazy, a little. But this place, Mickey, you can’t want to—I mean, look at it!”
“I like this place. The guys here, as far as they’re concerned, I’m just like them. And that’s what I want. I don’t want to go back and live with you. Ever. If you make me go, I’ll just do the same thing all over again. I swear I will. And this time I’ll use enough fluid and really kill him too, not just pretend.”
“Okay, Mickey, it’s your life.”
“Goddamn right.” These words, and the tears on which they verged, were like a load of cement dumped into the raw foundation of his new life. By tomorrow morning all the wet slop of feeling would be solid as rock and in a year a skyscraper would stand where now there was nothing but a gaping hole.
38. Father Charmain
Reverend Cox had just taken down Bunyan’s Kerygma, which was already a week overdue, and settled down for a nice warm dip into his plodding, solid, reassuring pro
se, when the bell went Ding-Dong, and before she could unfold her legs, again, Ding-Dong. Someone was upset.
A dumpy old woman with a frazzled face, curdled flesh, the left eyelid drooping, the right eye popping out. As soon as the door opened the mismatched eyes went through the familiar motions of surprise, distrust, withdrawal.
“Please come in.” She gestured to the glow from the office at the end of the hall.
“I came to see Father Cox.” She held up one of the form letters the office sent out: If you should ever experience the need …
Charmain offered her hand. “I’m Charmain Cox.”
The woman, remembering her manners, took the hand offered her. “I’m Nor a Hanson. Are you … ?”
“His wife?” She smiled. “No, I’m afraid I’m the priest. Is that better or worse? But do come in out of this dreadful cold. If you think you’d be more comfortable talking with a man. I can phone up my colleague at St. Mark’s, Reverend Gogardin. He’s only around the corner.” She steered her into the office and into the comfy confessional of the brown chair.
“It’s been so long since I’ve been to church. It never occurred to me, from your letter … ”
“Yes, I suppose it’s something of a fraud on my part, using only my initials.” And she went through her disingenuous but useful patter song about the woman who had fainted the man who’d snatched off her pectoral. Then she renewed her offer to phone St. Mark’s, but by now Mrs. Hanson was resigned to a priest of the wrong sex.
Her story was a mosaic of little guilts and indignities, weaknesses and woes, but the picture that emerged was all too recognizably the disintegration of a family. Charmain began to assemble all the arguments why she wouldn’t be able to take an active role in her struggle against the great octopus, Bureaucracy—chief among them that in the nine-to-five portion of her life she was a slave at one of the octopus’s shrines (Department of Temporary Assistance). But then it developed that the Church, and even God, were involved in Mrs. Hanson’s problems. The older daughter and her lover were leaving the sinking family to join the Sodality of St. Clare. In the quarrel that had fumbled the old lady out of her building and into this office the lover had used the poor dear’s own Bible as ammunition. From Mrs. Hanson’s extremely partisan account it took Charmain some time to locate the offending passage, but at last she tracked it down to St. Mark, third chapter, verses thirty-three to thirty-five:
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