The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards

by Robert Boswell

  “He’s coming to,” Teddy Allen whispered excitedly. “Jesus, are you waking? He is, Father. Take a peek.”

  At what point is a man unable to continue a life based on the habits of a faith he no longer inhabits? At the point the knees give? At the point a fork in the path can be recognized? Father McEwen covered his eyes and made himself stand up on the jailhouse floor. He needed sleep. He could use a whiskey. He would like to be held.

  On the top bunk, the man tossed off the coarse blanket and sat upright. He stared at Father McEwen, and Father McEwen stared back.

  IN A FOREIGN LAND

  A friend of my ex-wife’s invited me to a party on the Upper East Side. The invitation surprised me because I knew she didn’t like me and she knew I didn’t like her.

  I accepted, of course. What good is life without a bit of the devious?

  The hostess wore a white satin bib sort of dress, open in the back to her sacral dimples. Not to my taste. I’m an advertising man and I’m not supposed to have any taste, but I can’t seem to help it. “How,” she said to me, opening the door. Howard Duel is my name, and she was being familiar, not imitating a Hollywood Indian.

  Her husband, a stranger to me, had about him the ordinariness often ascribed to serial killers. Sort of a bland Regis Philbin, if you follow my drift.

  As soon as the handshaking business was concluded, Judy Guevera came trotting up. She wore a strapless drop-waist dress and flat shoes that clapped too loudly against the hardwood floor: imagine a pretty out-of-towner in a piano bar. She smiled wryly at me, holding hands with herself at her abdomen, a single tan finger of one hand nestled coyly into the other’s fist.

  “I hear you gave Cyd the boot,” she said exuberantly. “I never liked that bitch.”

  “The other way around,” I said. “She disposed of me.”

  “Then she’s an idiot and a bitch,” Judy insisted, taking my arm. “They have Myers’.”

  With my usual lucidity, I gathered that Cyd was not present. Like most recently divorced men, I longed for my ex. If you have to ask why, you must be eighteen and of no interest to me. Judy Guevera was all of thirty-two and also of very little interest to me. I understand the attraction of young women, but I’ve never actually felt it. Another failing, no doubt, some misfiring in the pituitary, a failed synapse upstairs.

  Judy surprised me. Not because she was brusque, but because she remembered what I drank. She was the younger sister of my ex-wife’s closest friend, and if you put together every word we’d ever exchanged you wouldn’t have enough for a decent quiche recipe. Also, I was shocked that she didn’t like Cyd. I thought everyone loved her.

  “You still selling opiates to the masses?” Judy nudged a bearded man out of the way and grabbed the rum.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “I heard the best ad man in history is the guy who convinced people to buy ordinary rocks as pets.” She laughed through her nose, a half wheeze and half whistle. “I read that in a novel by this guy FTD. You ever heard of him?”

  “No,” I said. “And I don’t trust people who go by initials.”

  She thrust the drink at me, the rum rising dangerously close to the rim, receding just before it spattered my white shirt.

  “You must be getting old,” she said. “¡Salud!” We clinked glasses. “You used to keep up.”

  “I do keep up. It’s my business to keep up.”

  I should mention that I was, in fact, the oldest person at the dinner party by at least ten years. I was fifty and looked it, although that’s not such a terrible thing. I still had a single chin and a strong mouth, which is all a heterosexual male needs. As a bonus, I had a full head of hair—utterly white, but plenty of it. Women old enough to interest me don’t care much about the small details in a man’s appearance. Baldness, I can handle, they say, as long as he trims his ears. Or, Pocked skin is cute, really, provided he washes the algae out.

  Our hostess was roughly my ex’s age, thirty-seven, and Judy, for those of you not paying attention, was five years younger. The others looked to be in their twenties. Our hostess—her name is Frieda Lasch, although I was trying to keep her name out it—was a talentless writer with one tedious novel about menstruation (essentially) and a nonfiction account of her ex-husband’s vasectomy that she’d stretched like spandex to book length. I remember a line from it verbatim: “Bubbles of saliva grew on his lips, making me think of the third grade.”

  It was a literary evening.

  I sat across from none other than FTD (not his real initials but from the same regions of the alphabet), a dark man with a ragged, intelligent face—something like Bruce Springsteen with an MFA—and beside another literary light, the bearded fellow earlier nudged, whose name escaped me even as it was spoken. He was a redhead-and-beard with a desperate stammer about his looks, like a clown with a migraine.

  Judy sat on the other side of me, her chair close to mine, a pretty woman, with nothing of the bovine in her and only a tiny bit of the zebra. An ideal talking head in a deodorant commercial.

  Frieda did the introductions as if awards were forthcoming, listing publications and print runs, enunciating with excruciating care, as if that were the latest fad.

  Judy scooped her for my intro. “Howard Duel, call him How,” she said, taking my arm with both hands. “He’s got a big thick book on the outlaw Koos Vandermeyer, the Koos-Koos Kid. Did I get it right?”

  I nodded. “He was the fastest gun in Creede, Colorado, for approximately a week,” I offered, but they were too young to think a man my age might try to be funny.

  The book had been a hobby, never even an obsession, about a Norwegian settler who’d misunderstood a sheriff asking him to “Dismount, there’s a hanging about to start.” He’d heard, “Dismount, we are going to hang you.” He shot the sheriff in the kidneys and became an inept and doomed outlaw. My title was In a Foreign Land, and never mind what the publisher called it.

  Frieda, after listing every piddling thing of hers that had seen type, introduced Judy as “my good friend,” and began dishing out the food.

  I leaned close to Judy’s ear and whispered, “You was robbed.”

  “I saved you,” she said, assuming a mildly sardonic tone. “You were supposed to save me.”

  Judy was a radio personality, not a disc jockey per se, but the steady sweet voice you hear between classical cuts on public radio. She told me that night that she did not select the music herself. As it turned out, her personal taste in music annoyed me. She liked the current music of people who were at their peak back when I listened to popular music—Neil Young and Stevie Winwood, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones.

  Don’t get me started on taste.

  “Oh, yes, the Stones,” I said. “Never have so few done so little for so long to so many and made so much.”

  “Right,” the bearded one said. “I love the Stones, too.”

  Frieda had made the dinner herself—a pesto ziti, tomato and cucumber salad, and fresh sourdough bread with salt-free butter she had churned with her very own mitts. She was a great cook but undervalued her talent because she considered it too traditional, thereby discriminating against herself, and in the process creating a literary putz.

  “I hear,” Mr. Beard said cautiously to FTD, “that your new novel takes place entirely on the phantasmagorical plane. When’s the pub date?”

  “No, man, it’s a historical novel. Set backstage of the Cosby Show in an alternative universe where they’re all white—I didn’t want to get into the race thing. September.”

  From this jumping-off point, conversation rollicked from the topic of first-person point of view to the current state of publishing, and on to the advantages of omniscience—“You’d know what liquor to stock for your guests,” I offered, but no one even chortled. When FTD politely attempted to include me in the conversation by asking about the aesthetic distance of my narrator, I told him I was no writer and that the book was a fluke.

  “I’m an ad man,” I
fessed up. “I work for S_______, V_________, and N__.”

  “Hey,” beard said. “They couldn’t use a young guy with fresh ideas who knows how to write, could they?”

  “Yeah,” a heretofore silent novelist I am otherwise omitting jumped in. “Ideawise, I’m tough.”

  And so the clamoring began. As author of In a Foreign Land, I was a pitiable hanger-on, but as an advertising man, I was Tut, Ruth, Marilyn Monroe.

  To end my newfound status, Frieda brought up my divorce.

  “Has Cyd’s recent abandonment affected your work?”

  “You knew she dumped him?” Judy asked her, a bit too quickly, with that overly surprised my-goodness-gosh tone that betrays a lie.

  I guessed then that Judy had asked to have me invited. My spirits lifted. Not that I had any intention of going home with the girl, but I was suddenly certain that the whole dinner had been arranged to get me at the table, seated beside Judy Guevera. I moved from the cold and dismal periphery of belonging into the warm center of the action.

  “How’s Benj handling it?” Judy asked, lowering her voice slightly.

  Benj is my sixteen-year-old son.

  “He has complained about his eyes,” I told her. “The optometrist and ophthalmologist say his vision is perfect, but he’s started wearing big, black-rimmed, dime-store magnifying glasses. He claims he needs them.” What he’d actually said to me was, “Everything’s suddenly too little,” but I wasn’t going to repeat that and see it turn up in bearded-one’s next family saga. “It’s disconcerting,” I said. “My son has suddenly become Woody Allen.”

  Judy laughed, bless her, through her nose, a melodic phh-phh-phh.

  “Otherwise,” I went on, “Benj is bearing up well enough.”

  “You know,” Frieda said, and maybe I should start calling her “our hostess” again for anonymity’s sake, “I’ve always wondered. Is that boy really yours? I mean, are you the father?”

  Perhaps this is a good time to describe our hostess. Starting at the top, I’d say her hair was once brown, and now wavered between blond and yellow in a neverland impolitely known as green. Her nose, needlelike yet with cavernous nostrils, dominated a face otherwise lacking distinction, except perhaps for a rather handsome bleached mustache of ordinary dimensions. She was fashionably thin in a worn-out, oversexed sort of way, and her skin had the resilient tone and mock-tan coloration of cardboard.

  Before I could respond to her, she added, “I’ve never thought he looked like you. I always believed Cyd trapped you. I’ve never thought Benj was yours.”

  What I thought was this: Judy had conspired with Frieda to have this dinner, agreeing that Frieda would be a hateful moronic toad to the both of us, which would endear us to each other and seal our sex-doing. What I said was the following: “Sperm and egg are the easiest, most entertaining, and least important parts of parenting. If it’s true that I’m not his biological father, then I’m inordinately lucky because I certainly wouldn’t trade my boy for any other child in the world.”

  She backed off.

  Oh, well, I didn’t say exactly the above, but a somewhat less articulate facsimile of same, and Frieda did back off. During the next lull in the conversation, I asked her why she hadn’t invited any women writers to this liturgy. Just a light jab to keep her off balance. I had no intention of launching a haymaker.

  I was, after all, a guest.

  Cyd and I were married ten years. We’d first been lovers another seven years earlier, when she was all of twenty, and I, thirty-three. She had been a student at Johns Hopkins, and I an erudite reporter for the Baltimore Daily News, assigned to obituaries and crime—a niche in the journalistic hierarchy a half step above sweeping and mopping. I spent a good portion of my time at rest homes interviewing octogenarians about their late roommates (“Dead, is he?”) and hating myself for not having gotten the scoop on Watergate.

  Cyd did an internship with the paper, starting at the bottom—a euphemism for me. An hour into my training of her, I could see that she was already a better reporter than I was. She had a knack for getting to the heart of things. She’d see that so-and-so had been a grocer and now he was dead, and bingo, she’d be finished with the obituary. Meanwhile, I’d be looking for a human angle (“Did the deceased like large animals?”) or some way to reveal his character (“His death mask divulged the wizened face of a philosopher, though his social security number belonged to a retired heavy machine operator”). I realized she could do my job, which took me every second of an eight-hour day, in about forty-five minutes.

  I decided then we should marry.

  I quit the paper and started dating her. She was given my job, and much sexual hilarity followed. Love came later, a fierce and jealous love, a big polar bear sort of love.

  I had a flat downtown near the newspaper. There we practiced a lively brand of lovemaking and read aloud from Lost in the Funhouse and Carson McCullers (her favorites), and Cheever and Updike (mine). Otherwise, we didn’t do a damn thing. Didn’t travel, rarely went out to eat, never bought gifts for each other. We didn’t even take the paper. I got a part-time job proofreading at a law firm. She did burglaries and obits. We were destitute. It was the best time of my life.

  Then, of course, it fell apart. She became distracted, spent more time at the Daily News. Despite her conspicuous efforts, I wouldn’t let her discard me. Finally, she disappeared. Quit her job and left town, leaving no forwarding address. After a month of torture and reading her mail, I chucked the proofreading job and tracked her to her parents’ house in Columbia, Missouri. She was pregnant. She wanted nothing to do with me. She was thinking of studying cultural anthropology once breast-feeding was at an end.

  I got hired by the local paper and hung around her as much as she’d permit. After the baby was born, she decided she needed me.

  We moved to Philadelphia and lived there from the time Benj was three months until he was five years old, at which time I became employed by the ad agency. We decided to marry the same day I officially started work, grabbing strangers off the street to be witnesses (one Edith X. O’Connell, a retired telephone operator, and Jim Jennings, unemployed bricklayer).

  I tell you all of this so you understand that our hostess’s question had a history. I’m trying to be fair to the twit.

  Following dinner, we adjourned to the living room. FTD and the beard began exchanging stories about graduate school, its peculiar intimacy and philosophical whatnot. There was “some something” profound about it, they agreed. They spoke learnedly about the manners, mores, and drugs of the times. Then began the inevitable agent comparisons and lamentations about the publishing world. Writers are a tedious lot. No wonder so many of them drink.

  Judy sidled up to me, and I inquired about her sister.

  “She is so happy about your divorce,” Judy said. “She’d been pleading with Cyd to leave you for years. She and I used to argue about you guys all the time. ‘Cyd deserves better,’ she’d say. ‘Cyd sucks,’ I’d say.”

  “I had no idea our marriage generated such controversy.” I was more than a little embarrassed. “I hope the divorce was sufficiently entertaining.”

  “Oh, don’t get huffy. That’s the only time I don’t like you, when you become Mr. Huffy. Get me a drink. Liquor me up and I’ll tell you wonderful things about yourself.”

  I accepted her offer. Her litany of compliments did, in fact, lift my spirits. I discovered that I had a kind voice, sexy eyebrows, and a graceful way of “bopping around”—something I’d always secretly suspected of myself. She also loved my book.

  “Poor Koos-Koos,” she said. “I identified with him completely. One misunderstanding and your whole life is turned around.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but how does that apply to your life?”

  “I completely misunderstood my parents. I thought they were normal,” she explained. “I’m still playing catch-up.”

  “You’ll have to be more specific.”

  “It’s your basic young
er sister story or Electra story, kind of a Gretel-and-Gretel-make-it-back-from-the-witch’s-house-and-their-father-won’t-believe-the-younger-one-until-the-older-one-puts-in-her-two-cents story.”

  She began to add something more about her sister but was interrupted by facial hair, who was quite drunk now, asking her to dance. Frieda and FTD were already fritzing about, as were a few others whose names I’m omitting to protect their publishers.

  “Nah,” Judy said to him. “I promised the first dance to How.” To me, she added a seductive, “C’mon.”

  How should I describe Ms. Guevera’s style of dance? An undulation with horns, perhaps, though that doesn’t capture the distinctively postmodern charm of it. Meanwhile, the beard made it onto the floor with his second choice and immediately seemed to suffer electroshock convulsions. Frieda hula-hooped about, letting her bib-dress slide around her hidden parts. Husband of Frieda waffled between off-beat hand-clapping and a horsey sort of clompity clomp. Suddenly FTD yelled, “Limbo!” and—oh, you get the picture. A riotous time was had by all.

  Benjamin and I were close, despite what his mother called “our opposite dispositions,” which is an uninspired way to say Benj was polite to strangers. Since the divorce, our time together was restricted to Saturdays, and what I hated was that it robbed me of the everydayness of him: the nocturnal refrigerator plunderer, the six o’clock news-groping purist, the mealtime barbarian. When we meet now, he’s on best behavior, and so am I. Our time is too short. I never get to see him with his hair uncombed, or when he’s in his grubs doing the lawn. I miss my boy.