A week before the party, we’d met in a café near the subway stop, where we’d planned to eat before heading to MOMA for a highbrow day of chat-and-stare. However, he’d brought a disreputable-looking friend with him, and our plans were ruptured.
“I don’t think my eyes could handle it,” Benj said of the proposed excursion, blinking owl-like behind his cheap lenses. His magnified eyes made him seem especially the child, calling to mind a baby’s exaggerated features—though the tiny post through one of his nostrils bearing a Guatemalan Worry Doll undercut the image somewhat. “Besides,” he went on, “Ogle doesn’t like art.”
“How is it possible that you do not like any art?” I asked Ogle (not his real name; his father is a lawyer).
“Rack your brain, señor. I’ve racked mine and it’s done zero, but there it is anyhow. It’s all no-go artwise for me.”
Unlike the skunk, who despite his bad odor and poor reputation is said to have impeccable table manners, Ogle ate beans by trapping a few in a bit of ravaged bread, then thrusting the dripping mass in the (approximate) direction of his mouth. Thank god he was garrulous; otherwise, we’d have been denied the sight of his amazing mastication.
“Your manner of eating is ghastly,” I said.
“Funny you should bring that up,” he began, and then launched into a defense of his eating like a buffalo (my simile, not his). His argument had something to do with the First Amendment.
Benj, meanwhile, wolfed down his chili cheeseburger quietly and with relative decorum. When Ogle finished his treatise, Benj said, “So you seeing anybody, Dad?”
“No,” I said, startled. “Not really. Not at all.”
Benj nodded, poking his glasses. “Mom’s got a new boyfriend. Pretty cool guy, I guess. She says he’s the first guy she’s met since you who has backbone.”
“Oh,” I said casually. “Had a large sampling, has she?”
Ogle answered, “Backbone’s way way overrated.”
To which, I replied, “Such is the argument of most invertebrates.”
“She goes out some,” Benj said. “Pretty much, I’d say. I think she misses you.”
I held my tongue and let Ogle launch into a directive about backbone and the poor and the superiority of unwaxed fruit.
We spent the day wandering about music shops, looking for a tape by the Revolting Cocks, a disc by Public Enemy, and Madonna’s snake poster.
“No way it’s Madonna who does the snake thing,” Ogle pronounced late in the search. “We’re barking up the wrong babe.”
Benj just shrugged. To me, he said, “I don’t much like him really. The guy Mom’s seeing.”
He stared at me plaintively, afraid he’d offended me earlier. I was touched.
Ogle agreed with him. “Major stooge,” he said, nodding like a straining horse.
Cyd had sent me The Good Enough Parent, and at moments like this one, I almost wished I had read it.
“It’s all right to like him,” I said to Benj, “and it’s all right not to like him.”
“Yeah,” Benj said. “Like I’ve got any choice, you know? How can you control who you do and don’t like?”
Ogle, as if to prove the assertion, scratched athletically at his crotch.
A funny thing happened after the party, not directly after but during the following week: I quit my job. Call me impetuous, call me impulsive, call me unemployed. I don’t know why I did it, but I told my immediate superior, V___________ himself, that I was ripe for a change.
“My marriage has ended you know,” I said.
V___________ replied, “Metamorphosis is passé. Ninety percent of butterflies suffer from airsickness.” His idea of humor, and evidence as to why he needed to change my mind: he had the creative repertoire of a tomato. “How, how ’bout a twenty percent raise?” he said. “The average butterfly would give his right wing for that kind of dough.”
You see, I’m a very good ad man. I started the whole eco-ad trend, connecting the purchase of our brand of toothpaste, motor oil, and luggage with saving the whales, protecting the rain forest, and plugging up the ozone hole. I did the wandering-camera, narrow-focus ads, too, that elusive, suggestive darting that other agencies are still copying. I got Nike Michael Jordan. I’m not a let’s-get-them-to-pay-for-a-rock kind of advertising man. I’m into big ideas. Laugh if you wish, but you’re wearing my products. You’ve probably taken out a loan to purchase something that I convinced you you couldn’t be done without.
V___________ insisted I take a two-week vacation rather than giving notice. He was certain I merely needed a rest. I walked a couple of buildings down the street and got a new job in twenty minutes. More money, roughly the same benefits. I don’t know why I did it.
I preserved the two weeks of vacation, however, and tried to arrange to take Benj—sans Ogle—to Vermont to hike, but Cyd accused me of wanting to hog Benj’s time, and though it wasn’t the way I’d have put it, her analysis was accurate. I missed the boy so acutely I found myself weeping at anything even mildly sentimental: AT&T commercials or Robin Williams films. It was a pathetic business.
During those moments of helpless weeping I would hate Cyd for breaking us up, the way Beatles fans used to hate Yoko. Afterward, I would take it all back, in case some friendly god had been listening to my evil thoughts.
When Judy Guevera called and invited me to dinner at her apartment, I was free to accept. She lived in the Village, on the second floor of a three-flat, a nicer place than I had expected. She answered the door wearing only a robe, her hair wet and uncombed. Her mascara perfect.
“Would you believe I haven’t even had time to get dressed?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t believe that for a minute.”
Oh, well, you know what followed. Do I really need to describe the touching of fingertips to clothing and then to flesh? Or the staring, that nervous yet gooey brand of staring? We began the maneuvering of bodies and body parts, the strange little dance that precedes First-Kiss, our heads lifting and lowering, finding a parallel and then collapsing it—not suddenly but with little jerks forward, tiny retreats back—until finally our lips touched, our mouths opened. All of which served to create a dribble of sensation like a tickle or a lemon drop. Our tongues shyly collided, then less shyly commingled, and our mouths became sources of heat and sweetness—yes, sweetness; what a fine word for the pleasure of a woman’s mouth against yours.
Okay, I hammed that part up a bit. She was the first woman I’d kissed on the lips since the divorce, and the only one, besides my wife, in seventeen years. We bopped right into bed. Which happened to be next to the dining table because Judy’s absent roommate paid an extra thirty a month to sleep in the bedroom. I found that my sexual hunger had hidden an even more basic desire for food. By the time we finished the bed business, I was ravenous, too much so to cuddle, which seemed to suit Judy fine.
“Yeah,” she said. “Let’s chow.”
I grabbed my shirt and began buttoning, but she brought plates to the bed and sat cross-legged and naked in front of me, eating fried chicken with her fingers, licking often.
It was not at all erotic, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’ve never questioned why restaurants require their patrons to wear shirts. A beautiful woman. Have I mentioned that? Judy is beautiful, and being naked certainly enhanced her attractiveness, but I couldn’t look at her and swallow. I stared at her wall hangings and knickknacks, making vaguely polite comments. I ate in a rush.
Without any prompting, she began telling me about Cyd and her sister when they were teenagers.
“Cyd always took Sis’s boyfriend after convincing Sis to drop him.” Judy shook her head over her chicken. “Sis was a sap.”
Judy went on to explain that she had slept with many of the same boys herself, as well as her sister’s first husband. It didn’t seem to dawn on her that I was not the ideal audience for this confession. I came to understand that her hard work to win me stemmed not from great attraction to me for my mind
or even for my body, but for my position in the constellation of her universe.
We got married a month later.
This is my first attempt at a comeback into the literary world since In a Foreign Land. (If you must know, the book was published under the title Koos Koos, the Cuckoo Outlaw.) Judy insisted I start with this, the history of our romance. I’m hoping FTD will give me a blurb, and I have left out several damning bits about his dress and grammar as a result.
I’ve been at my new job two years now and made my hours flexible to have time to write and to be home when Judy’s there. At work, she comes over the speakers in my office, introducing Mozart and Sibelius.
Cyd has taken my sudden marriage to her best friend’s little sister as well as can be expected, which is to say, she hates me with a deep and genuine passion. I would prefer Judy didn’t have the old, long-standing connection with Cyd, though I know it’s possible that some of my love for her has to do with her position in my constellation, too. And what of it? I find I care no more about the emotional origin of this love than I do the paternal origins of Benj. He is my son, and Judy is my wife. My love for Cyd has moved to some posterior chamber of the heart now, back there with cheap pizza, J. D. Salinger, Sophia Loren, Hermann Hesse, and, yes, the Rolling Stones.
Benj no longer wears magnifying glasses. He is out of high school and, against my wishes, enlisted in the army. Any day now he’s going to be sent to the Middle East. He’s waiting for his orders, waiting to discover his destination. Cyd claims he’s doing this to impress us. (She’s dating her therapist.) I don’t think it’s that simple.
When Judy gets in from the radio, she joins me on the floor in front of the Magnavox, and we watch the newscaster sanctimoniously describe the world. Between reports, my ads appear, and I’ve discovered that I’m proud of them—not for what they’re doing, but for the care that went into their making. Then the newsman returns, looking solemn. “In Baghdad…,” he begins, or “In Afghanistan…”
We hold hands, Judy and I, and listen. We wonder to which distant country Benj will be sent, wonder what it was he misinterpreted that led him into uniform, wonder where the next unnecessary battle will be fought.
Marriage suits me. It’s so red, white, and blue, but also subversive. We didn’t understand that in the sixties. The subversive in matrimony will be the next wave in advertising.
You wait and see.
CITY BUS
Helen Swann shivers in shirtsleeves at the bus stop, coatless and confident the day will warm. The city bus, as it lumbers toward her, cracks the ice that lines the gutter. Frost nubs its broad, bald forehead and clouds the immense windshield. Like glaucoma, Helen thinks. It’s one of the old buses, which means the brakes will shriek and the heat won’t work. She boards at City Self-Storage, a concrete bunker directly across from her apartment building. She rents units on either side of the street. From the front window of her living room, she can see the corrugated metal door of her storage shed. This fact pleases her. The vehicle’s brakes bleat, and something under the great body rattles. The morning air is the gray of doves’ wings.
The driver slumps behind the steering wheel, his head bulging beneath his city cap as if it were screwed on too tight. His name is probably Otis, but his name tag bears an extraneous u (Outis), and at each scheduled stop he bellows not the street corner but merely Out, as if to confirm his complicity in a divine pattern. He is her least favorite driver. His hand rests on the steel knob that operates the door, the first two fingers tobacco-stained to the second knuckle as if dipped daily in a secret vat. He keeps his eyes on the asphalt, does not nod or smile as she boards, the bus accelerating as the doors whip shut, his aftershave as pungent as poison.
The few passengers already aboard, veterans all, avert their eyes as Helen navigates the rocking aisle. She feels the urge to hike her skirt to her neck to see if any head will turn. They space themselves about the bus, each in a separate stall. Helen sits equidistant from the fleece cap three seats ahead and the fur coat three behind, inclining her head against the chilly window as the behemoth carrying them plods around a corner.
The view is too familiar to seem remarkable, and yet she looks for evidence of hidden splendor. High above her, the sun notches a gloomy body of clouds. Snow lingers in north-facing lawns and the scant sunlight makes it sparkle. Winter is finally coming to an end. The channel nine meteorologist has promised it. His kind voice and sly face (as if he knows more weather than he’s letting on) visit her apartment five nights a week. She wears no coat as testament to her faith in him. He is a central figure in her secret life.
The bus slows and stops. Cars huddle at the traffic light, a woolly frost layering their backs. Helen’s mother died earlier in the year, and Helen had not wanted to fly across the country to go through the possessions. A moving company delivered it all to City Self-Storage. The van was full, and she advised the men to stack the boxes to the ceiling. When she came home from work, she discovered that the crates and furniture filled only the back wall of the shed. She had room to park a car in there if she wanted.
She had planned to go through her mother’s belongings quickly, discarding or selling most of the artifacts. But investigating the crates tired her. She pulled an overstuffed couch free of the pile in order to have a place to rest. She set boxes about as if they were tables. She bought a space heater, leaving the big door open, providing a view of her apartment window. One evening she fell asleep in the easy chair, as her mother had often done. She did not wake until after midnight, cozy in her friendly cavern. A light shone in her living room window across the street, the curtains slightly parted, as if the apartment itself were jealous.
The bus wheezes forward as far as the intersection. Helen’s sigh hazes her window. She does not want to go to work. Her desk is in Public Records at City Hall, a room as mammoth as a toothache. Until last month, her job entailed filling the great room with papers—certificates of marriage and divorce, deeds to houses and cars, licenses for businesses and bureaus. Every civilization must leave a record of its existence, she had told herself. It was important work. But now she is required to empty the same wide hall, transferring documents to computer files. At her present rate, it will take another dozen years to erase the tangible evidence of the first twelve.
It seems to her that she has ridden this bus more than twelve years. Fifty, perhaps. Thirty, at the least. She can shut her eyes and describe the paltry buildings along the route: the white bank winged with a drive-through, the elegant brick courthouse warted by a concrete addition, the sleek silver supermarket on Laurel, the slate steak house on Sacker, the ugly new library spouting its shiny sculpture of the letter O, and the chalk white astonishment of her own City Hall. This daily edifice trail resides in her mind like something less than a city and something more than a routine, a coded sentence that is, at once, meaningless and beyond her ability to decipher.
“Out,” Outis yells and a bundled-up man and child obey.
To be fair, it’s her birthday. Thirty-five is a troubling age, especially if one is alone, a woman without husband or children. Helen doesn’t particularly long for either, but she has always assumed she would have a few of each. Today, she has her doubts. When she was fifteen, she ran off with a boy. The police tracked them to a neighboring city and arrested him on his birthday. He had turned eighteen, which meant he could be charged with statutory rape, as well as kidnapping. Sometimes she believes they purposely waited until he was of age. The channel nine weatherman makes her think of him, although the weatherman looks nothing like the boy. Her lover had been short with a leonine mane, while the weatherman is tall, his premature white hair thinning and wispy, like cirrocumulus skies. You remind me of the ocean, the boy had said to Helen in the motel room, minutes before her rescue and his arrest, sirens already singing for them on the avenue. Something big, he continued. Like… I don’t know… the air.
Her mother pressed charges. For years, until near the end, Helen and her mother were e
stranged. Malignant polyps brought about the reconciliation.
Today Helen feels that the remainder of her life may be like this very morning, a repetitious trip over familiar ground in an anonymous and nearly empty hovel of transport. She stares at her fingers’ web on her lap as if it is literally her womb and feels suddenly weepy. Normally, she treats a maudlin thought like a stranger’s sudden interest—something to flee. Today, she is defenseless. She pictures the weatherman bumping up against her in a tight-fitting tavern, his hands tumbling down to her waist, his tongue touching the soft hide of her lips. The image both excites and embarrasses her. “The future is fair,” the weatherman likes to say, “no matter how stormy the past.” He’s folksy but also a smart aleck. Helen likes to invent new lines for him. “Weather is the forbidden frontier,” she would have him say. “What we do about the weather defines us.” She knows the actual man who appears on her television is a jerk. She saw him once in a bar sitting with one woman and staring at another. His real life is of no interest to Helen.
In the fantasy world she daily creates, the forces that battle over the weather have volition: they are gods. The mortal things—humans and trees, buildings, sewers, and homes—both serve the gods and struggle against them, until they fall weather-beaten to the hoary screech of crane, the thunder of wrecking ball, or the insidious algebra of cancer. Each morning she searches the city for signs of change in the struggle, and each evening she listens to the weatherman predict tomorrow’s skirmish. Her secret life has no other plot. It is not so much a narrative as an embellishment. An insanely elaborate construct, but Helen Swann knows she is not insane. Merely intelligent, alone, and gravely bored. In her private world, actions have meaning, and the trivial torment of daily life is transformed into a grand struggle.
“You should get professional help,” her mother said when Helen described her attachment to the weatherman. They were on the phone. Helen had grown tired of the silences and revealed too much. “And I don’t mean one of those TV psychics,” her mother added to make the conversation lighter.
The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards Page 15