Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World: A Novel

by Antrim, Donald

  Bob’s hands pushed on my sternum, pushed me down into carpet sponging beneath me. On my skin: a coating of prickly warm sweat. I felt Meredith’s hand reaching out to touch me, the forefinger and thumb pinching shut my nose. She leaned over me and lowered her head. Her face, seen like that, by which I mean from below, coming down—her face looked like the face of someone preparing to drink directly from a stream, as watched from beneath the water’s surface. Here came Meredith’s mouth opening to show tongue and teeth. Here came lips. I tasted lipstick, felt Meredith’s hair feathering down to tickle my forehead and neck, when she pressed her mouth against mine.

  “Breathe,” Bob commanded, as air from my wife’s body flooded me. For a while it went like this: he thrusting rhythmically down; she blowing; he letting up; she raising her head to take in fresh oxygen before descending again in search of the seal between our mouths. Finally I lifted my hand from the floor and touched the back of Meredith’s head, as if guiding her to me.

  She took a long breath and said, “Phew.”

  “We experienced a convergence,” said Bob, climbing off me, now, to sit cross-legged on the floor by my feet. “Once in a graduate seminar a guy became an amoeba and accidentally parasitically invaded his girlfriend’s GI tract. She had to go on antibiotics to get him out of her system.”

  A joke? Some kind of academic drollery? Bob trying to put us all at our ease?

  Meredith, cradling my head in her lap, told me, “I saw you down there, Pete. You became a magnificent Great Plains bison. You almost kicked me in the face.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. You were drowning.” She stroked my head. It was good to feel her fingers roving over the scalp, tracing idle patterns through the unwashed tangle of hair. Sunlight came in every window, and the air smelled of orange blossoms. The drum cassette had long since spooled itself out. It was Saturday and I was alive.

  “How about lunch, everybody?” Meredith said.

  “Sounds all right to me,” replied Bob.

  Meredith’s hands abandoned my head, and Bob helped me up. We made our way—Meredith leading, followed by Bob, then me, feebly—into the sunny kitchen. There was a brief moment of fear when Meredith, leaning over the freezer chest, digging around, in fact, inside the freezer chest, sorting packages, said, “Honey, where’s that chowder I made a while back?” But then she found it, and soon we were seated before misting bowls of potatoes, celery, and clams in a subtle cream broth. Meredith sat on my right and Bob sat on my left; we formed a triangle lit by natural light. Meredith and I hunched forward over our places, not yet eating. Rather, we paid close attention as the anthropologist explained the morning’s accidental near drowning:

  “You didn’t have firmly established boundaries, Pete. The dominant animal inside you came right up and occupied your undefended mind. This is great chowder, Meredith. Do you make your stock from scratch?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s wonderful”—crumbling, into his wide china bowl, a cracker; spooning up a white crusty spoonful—“perhaps you’ll grant me your recipe. Unless, that is, it’s a treasured family secret.”

  “I’d be delighted to give you the recipe.”

  “I’d love to have it. I mean that. Anyway, Pete, you’re high and dry and that’s what matters. Right, Meredith?”

  “Right.”

  “I have to say, if you don’t mind my saying so”—and here Bob helped himself to another vast bite before turning to regard me with that hollow stare of his (what was this guy’s animal? Gila monster?)—“you’re one lucky hombre, Pete.”

  “Thanks.” But for what? Having Meredith to be married to? Being alive? I inquired of Bob, “Dominant animal?”

  “An animistic persona construct expressed as an embodied archetype. We all contain this. Yours regrettably found itself enmeshed in Meredith’s cerebrocabalistic sphere.”

  He turned his gaze on Meredith. Boldly, unashamedly, he looked her up and down. After a minute he declared, “Yes, she is carrying a lot of power.”

  What was there to say to this? Anything would be wrong. I lowered my head to watch my spoon stir up a rotary wake in the cooling broth—I was playing with my food. I felt deficient. My insides were ulcerous from coffee and terror. How was I supposed to eat? What was needed was a lengthy session on the can. Listening to Bob offer tribute to my wife—“Truly, Meredith, I am being one hundred percent honest when I inform you that never, never before have I witnessed, within this or any other culture, a keener mastery of the cataleptic condition and its psychic imperatives”—listening to this and watching Meredith nod and smile and say, “Really?”—it made me feel like I was being killed by a knife.

  I guess I’d have to say that, all things considered, it’s not surprising in the least that the town meeting minutes I took by candlelight later that evening at Terry Heinemann’s Clam Castle came out, for the most part, illegible.

  Or that Meredith’s suggestion about getting naked on the jetty, all slippery and wet above the crashing ocean waves, made me nervous.

  “No thanks,” I told her. It was late. The municipal beach was deserted, the night was dark. Jerry and Rita Henderson, and Abe and Tom and the Nixons, and Terry and Claire, everybody, had gone home. Who knew what time it was. Meredith stood on soft sand beside me. I felt overwhelmed by sadness and the conviction that I had failed in some impressive way. By not becoming a coelacanth. By not being a coelacanth. Wasn’t our relationship (marriage) founded on care and the veneration of intimacy and fidelity? Hadn’t I violated this? What could be worse, in a close sexual relationship, than showing yourself to be a different species than your mate?

  “We’re really different,” I said, in tranquil, rising tones intended to suggest the beneficial aspects, whatever they might be, marriagewise, of biological diversity.

  “Hmn.”

  “Well, I guess it’s not so bad.” What nonsense.

  We stood staring at waves rolling in, and at the distant black water shaping the horizon. On any other night I might’ve asked Meredith, “What are you thinking?” Tonight this seemed an ominous line of inquiry, particularly with what felt like acute hydrophobia coming over me—I had to turn away from the breaking waves and concentrate on the yellow streetlamps hanging like bleached moons over the Clam Castle parking lot. Our purple Toyota glowed brown beneath their light. Other cars, in varying shades also tinted a gaseous brown, were parked far away, but no people were around. Only those cars washed in lamplight, and the dark restaurant, and a green Dumpster that gaped open, spilling fishy trash.

  It was well past bedtime. Most good people were in their homes, making love or sleeping, washing dishes or listening to music or getting up to check on a sick child, reading, talking on the phone, drinking. We were just kicking sand, my honey and I.

  “Want to go?” I said, and we walked to the car. We drove home past booby-trapped houses shrouded in fan-shaped leaves and gray hanging mosses. I was thinking, as I guided the car along the spooky streets, of children. It seemed to me that Meredith, silent beside me, might also be thinking about children.

  That night we cuddled in bed, but it was melancholy cuddling. I wasn’t sure what part of her to touch. I rested my hand on her hip, she slept curled in a ball.

  A few days later I set out, alone, on foot, to comb the neighborhood for likely recruits for the home school.

  The day was overcast. A gray impenetrable ceiling of sky seemed hammered to the tops of tall trees and the roofs of houses. Campaign slogans came to mind: PUT THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE WITH PETE. A VOTE FOR ROBINSON IS A VOTE FOR SANITY. GOOD OVER EVIL, THE ROBINSON WAY. That’s the great thing about politics: success rests in unashamed immodesty. Which is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. These particular campaign poster slogans spoke to the morbid depression I’d been feeling lately. Was it inordinately grandiose to assume a general public despair, on a cheerless day like today?

  My first scheduled stop was Dave and Jenny Jordan’s, over on East Manatee. Other hou
ses with children were closer, but Jenny Jordan had seemed so sympathetic and kind, that morning in the library during Mother and Child Story Time. It was probably wise to pitch the school to a friendly listener before taking this act to strangers. Also, little Susy Jordan was the perfect age for the school, right around seven or eight. If I could enroll Susy, who was widely known to be bright and talented, I could then drop her name with the parents of other children, as a draw.

  The Jordans’ modest wood-frame home, fifth on the right past the intersection of East Manatee and Fountain, sits only a short distance, about a block, from Jerry and Rita’s moat-enhanced corner-lot villa. Walking past the Hendersons’, I kept careful watch for serpents. What exactly did I expect to see? Vipers bellying forth from watery nests to slay hapless pedestrians? No, your moccasin is a docile creature, unless disturbed at home. The waters in Jerry’s moat sat brown and still. The drawbridge was up, everything seemed peaceful. For fun I threw a rock. The splash sent ripples against the poured-concrete banks of the moat, but nothing happened as a result, and so I continued on down the somber lane bordered in diminutive purple wildflowers. Along the way I checked the shrubs and flower patches for a viable burial site for Jim’s liver, which seemed an appropriate follow-up to the foot, seeing as it was an organ and therefore rich in multicultural symbolic properties of an altogether different order than hand or foot (by which reasoning the genitals, being both organ and extremity, would come, naturally, last in the interment procession); and also because the liver was so big, considering its origin inside a little old bald guy, and thus quite easily detectable by Meredith, down in its hiding place beneath the restaurant-sized bag of fish sticks, deep at the icy heart of the freezer chest.

  Interesting to note, here on Manatee—not one of the wealthier lanes in town, though by no means poor, either. Solid middle class—interesting to note was the pride of workmanship apparent in the various domestic fortifications. These were well-planned, sturdy structures, erected by gifted home-improvement enthusiasts willing to lay out for topflight materials. Case in point: Dan Gleason’s ingenious “Rainbow Pillbox” at 23 East Manatee. Gleason, who works, or did until recently, at the local boat basin, spraying fiberglass onto the hulls of recreational vessels, had used this same industrial aerosol technology to apply a white lacquer of composite slipperiness to his house, transforming it into a fantastic humpbacked windowless bunker with a nautical screw hatch for a door. The roof, a low dome, had ganged at its apex a cluster of heavy-duty latex garden hoses, spewing forth. The water cascaded out of the hoses, over the roof, down the hard-shell walls, and into PVC runoff gutters sunk neatly into the flower beds. This spilling sheet of wetness gave the entire house a strategic “banana peel” unscalability, rather like an omnidirectional theme-park water slide. The water also served as an excellent exterior surface coolant for the house, reducing Dan’s air-conditioning bills, one would imagine, by a considerable sum. A sump pump recycled the flow. Sometimes, in early morning and late afternoon, sunlight playing on the translucent building caused rich, shimmering rainbows to appear, as if painted on the walls.

  Nobody’d seen Dan or his family for a long time. Presumably they were happily ensconced and doing okay. The lawn looked recently trimmed; water was running as usual over the rooftop; everything seemed fine. I proceeded past the Rainbow Pillbox, past Bob and Linda Hamilton’s amusingly named, two-bedroom “Beaver Dam,” and after that, Ed and Jane Shapiro’s “Fort Ed and Jane” (not such a finished job, Fort Ed and Jane—an eyesore actually, resembling nothing so much as a complex split-level plywood clubhouse hammered together by stoned teenagers), arriving, finally, at 57 Manatee, the home of the Jordans. This was a house that was still, to the naked eye, a house. Which gave me pause. I stood for a moment on the sidewalk, peering at the grass and the small bushes lining the driveway, searching, among the ubiquitous purple flowers, for what if anything might befall me upon setting foot off public, onto private, property. But there was nothing out of the ordinary here, only porch furniture parked up on the porch, and a couple of toy trucks and other children’s play objects littering the walkway. I stepped over one truck. Then another. At the foot of the steps rested a Big Wheel. I breathed out the tension before gripping the Day-Glo plastic trike and rolling it gently from my path. And at the door, rather than thumbing the buzzer, which could be hot-wired for electric shock, I knocked.

  “Hello?” The voice of Jenny, calling from deep inside the house. I heard her approaching footsteps, and hollered back, brightly:

  “It’s me, Pete! Pete Robinson? From the library the other day?”

  “Oh, hi,” opening wide the door, gesturing me into a living room crowded with matching furniture and more kids’ toys, and smelling like a hamper. “You’ll have to excuse me, the house is a mess. I’ve got the kids all day and there’s only so much a person can do.”

  She wore that haggard young-mother look. Messy blond hair, bare feet, a wrinkled blue sundress hanging from bony shoulders. Susy, her seven-year-old, peered from around a hallway corner. I waved to her and said, “Hi there, bet you don’t recognize me with a shower and a shave.”

  Susy made a face. Her mother asked her, “Pumpkin, did you finish your cereal?”

  “No.” Followed by: “Yes.”

  “Go finish.”

  “Okay,” vanishing, with the refreshing sound of small feet. I complimented Jenny, “Great kid.”

  “Isn’t she? We have a lot of fun, me and Susy. Brad’s around here somewhere too. He’s still kind of in the labor-intensive phase.”

  “How old is Brad?”

  “Going on five. You want to sit down? Watch out for that stuff on the sofa. It’s part of Brad’s Erector Set.”

  I picked up the debris in question, a constructivist replica of what appeared to be a mobile missile launcher, complete with retractable blast shield, tractor wheels, the works. “Brad built this?” It seemed incredible. Jenny explained, “With help from his sister.”

  “Ah.”

  “Do you, Mr. Robinson, have children of your own?” She smoothed her dress in her lap and leaned forward, attentive. Her naked feet, pressed side by side on the floor, were narrow and smooth, and showed strong arch support and excellent toes.

  “Meredith and I have decided to wait. We’re both teachers, so, you know, it isn’t like we don’t get to enjoy the company of children.”

  “It’s so terrible about the schools.” At that moment there was a great crash in the back of the house. Jenny jumped up, called, “Sweetie?” and jogged down the hall.

  Her absence gave me a chance to peruse the bookshelf. The usual assortment of paperback classics, plus a surprising amount of hardcover new fiction. Not many people buy hardcovers these days. I pulled down a few volumes, then put them back as Jenny came in, smiling. “Would you like a cup of tea, Mr. Robinson? Why don’t we go in the kitchen where I can watch the monsters.”

  “Call me Pete,” following her into the warm kitchen that smelled of a mixture of foods; smelled also, like everything in this house, of the children, just now visible through the screen door, out back naked and splashing each other in a small blue inflatable pool shaded by a tree bearing round fruit. Brad was blond and fat, Susy dark and thin. Their mother held a kettle beneath the faucet. “Unfortunately, my drain is clogged. You don’t know anything about clogged drains, do you, Pete?”

  “Hmn. Did you try chemicals?”

  “I poured Drāno down there but that stuff worries me. You’re not supposed to use too much, but how much is too much? Linda Hamilton down the street used Drāno and it ate through the pipes.”

  “Their drain’s clogged too?”

  “Yup.”

  So it was a community problem. How widespread? And what could be causing it? “Do you have a snake?”

  “A snake?”

  “It’s a thing that bores through the drain, to dislodge whatever’s in there. A long metal thing, but pliable. My drain was clogged, and I used a snake.”

 
“Your drain was clogged?”

  “Yes.”

  “Recently?”

  “A few days ago.”

  “Weird.”

  We peered together into her sink drain, I over her shoulder, gazing down. It was the closest I’d ever come, I think, since I’d gotten married, the closest I’d come to pressing myself, front to back, against a woman not Meredith. A smell of soap rose from Jenny’s freckled neck. The small hairs behind her ears were quite appealing. We stood there, breathing. Kids splashed, sink water stood. The kettle whistle blew and I backed off into the middle of the room as Jenny, in a voice hard to read, a little sharp, a bit curt, said, “Don’t worry about it. Dave will take care of it when he gets home.”

  “When does Dave get home?” What a stupid thing to say. It sounded like a line. But it wasn’t a line. Not entirely. “I mean, what kind of work does Dave do?”

  “Junior administrator at the junior college.”

  “You guys wouldn’t happen to know a visiting anthropology professor named Bob, would you?”

  “Bob Barrow?”

  “Skinny guy, deep-set eyes.”

  “Sure, we know Bob.”

  I sipped tea. What was the right tack? Were Barrow and the Jordans friends? Or did Dave’s business bring the Jordans routinely into contact with faculty, in which case it mightn’t be personal. Test the waters.

  “He seems like a nice person.”

  “Bob’s brilliant. His theories about intracranial cross-speciation are groundbreaking. But the psych research community is very hostile to people like Bob. He poses a threat. That’s why he’s guest-lecturing at the jaycee, and not holding an endowed university chair.”