“Rage,” Abigail said, suppressing a belch. “All these years I’ve been carrying that rage with me, locked up inside.”
“Oh, come on!”
“Don’t blame me. It’s not my idea. Oh, and self-esteem. They destroyed my self-esteem.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.” Abigail chewed her thumbnail. “How’s Anna?”
“How does this contribute to the self-defense idea?”
“It doesn’t. We’re partly scrapping that, see? We’re going to say, number one, she killed him to save her life, and, but, number two, she killed him because, I don’t know, hell, everything in her past was one great big flashing arrow—”
“Insanity? Good Lord. How are you going to act like an insane person? That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard.”
“Uh-uh. Not insanity. Diminished responsibility.” She saw the appalled look on my face. “That’s a real defense. He says it’s our best shot.”
For a second I was derailed by the thought of Minden saying “our best shot.” “That’s an actual defense?” I asked.
“Yup.”
“Diminished responsibility.” I started to laugh. “Kid,” I said, “you’ve got nothing to worry about.” Abigail got the joke—we’ve always laughed at the same things—and we became rowdy and the guard made me leave.
Chapter Seven
Two Creepy People
Chapter 7
The DeVilbiss Circle
Here, Readers, I must step out from behind the curtain and admit my small part in this tale. For Abigail’s story cannot be told without extensive reference to my husband, Guy DeVilbiss, whose fondness and deep admiration for Abigail Mather played no small part in what was to happen to her. And how terribly ironic, how grotesque this connection is. My brilliant, tender husband, who wished for Abigail—for all his friends, students, readers—only the richest joy. O God! that one might read the book of fate…
Indeed.
Guy DeVilbiss, the poet, husband of Hilda, lover of women everywhere, is not a local poet but an actual, internationally acclaimed poet who happens to live in Frome, Rhode Island. He has always talked of how fond he is of the Community, and the Community itself is actually fond of him: they regard each other, Poet and Community, with fond incomprehension. When reporters from the Journal interview him at his home, which they do every four or five years, there is always a great deal of forelock-tugging, and an obeisant display of awed confusion on the reporter’s part, humility on the part of the Great Writer. Guy is the sort who “gazes kindly out at you through rimless glasses with a curiously childlike innocence,” for which read vacuity.
He is shiny bald, short, and pear-shaped. His skin is as white and blue-veined and paper-thin as that of an anemic young girl. His eyes are watery gray, myopic. He has an asymmetric, sensual mouth, one side of the lower lip permanently swollen, bee-stung, the upper lip thin and cruelly, subtly curved. His mouth is the only noticeably masculine aspect of him. His hands are plump, the cuffs of his long-sleeved flannel shirts always too tight, as though Hilda, who dresses him, were trying to cut off his circulation slowly over time. There is something particularly repulsive to me about the way his hands swell, wristless, painful, at the ends of his short arms, like ugly fruit.
Guy is an authentic genius artist, read by almost no one, revered in lit-crit circles. “The only postwar poet,” according to the Times, “certain to survive the millennium.” He writes about sex, and he writes about God, and he fuses the two. Sex is altar, pit, eternity, theology, the single worthy object of worship and subject of art.
He is a confessional poet. Critics call him instead the Poet of Analysis, or sometimes just The Analysand. In other words, he confesses not to a priest, not to an audience of gossip-hungry voyeurs, but to an Ideal Therapist. To say that these confessions are “intensely personal” is to understate considerably. When comprehensible they are wildly embarrassing, at least to anyone who actually knows Guy and Hilda. I can’t think what other people around here do when they have them to dinner or come to their door collecting for the Heart Association. Do they just blot out what they know?
Guy’s most celebrated collection, the fifteen-year-old Venus Accroupie, is a series of lyric descriptions of his wife’s private parts. He uses her name. He uses her body. Abby and I went swimming with her once. She really does have a small eggplant birthmark high up on the inside of her right thigh, an arrow, like a tattoo, pointing straight at her crotch. She is not, nor has she ever been, or pretended to be, an attractive woman. The arrow, Abigail says, is just as compelling as the arrow on a Band-Aid wrapper, the whole viewed prospect just as appetizing as a Band-Aid.
Guy describes her, literally warts and all, in what is for my money one of the most nauseating literary performances of all time. In one of the poems, “Werewolf,” he describes her menstrual cycle as it is manifested in changing odor. The poem is divided into twenty-eight stanzas, each one evoking, with great art, a particular smell. Such is his genius—and I don’t deny him this—that you hallucinate olfactorily. You actually reach for your handkerchief, or your gas mask.
He has graduated now from Hilda to Women Everywhere. His poems are more sexual than ever, more personal, if that is possible. Having exposed his wife to Art, he now fearlessly exposes himself. After one brief unwise glance at “Transfiguration,” I, who have seen, in my life, only one naked man, only one, could pick Guy DeVilbiss’s penis out of a police lineup.
He truly loves women, say the book jackets and the critical studies, he “literally” worships them, but not in the bad old chauvinistic way. “The Woman, to Guy DeVilbiss, is not the mysterious, unknowable ‘Other.’ [Although she is, apparently, The Woman.] ‘She is the perfect knowable,’ says DeVilbiss.” This is the rock foundation of his faith, the first and only commandment of his church. “There is no Other.”
He is the most ardent of feminists. He makes Kate Millet look like Barbara Cartland. Women with young children bore him visibly, but all other women fall into one of three categories: splendid, superb, and magnificent. “He expects so much of us,” says his adoring wife, and this is true. If Robert Lowell and Robert Graves had cross-pollinated, Guy DeVilbiss would have been the orchidaceous result.
Abigail is of course “magnificent.” (I am merely splendid.) She met Hilda first, while making her postal rounds. Guy got lots of registered mail, for which Hilda would have to sign—galley proofs, I suppose—and Hilda would engage Abigail in conversation. Abigail has never been chummy with women. She’s not catty. She just doesn’t see the point of other women.
“I think she’s hot for my body,” she told me, in the early days of the DeVilbiss courtship. This was the only explanation she could come up with for Hilda’s interest. As things turned out, it wasn’t too far off.
“What’s he like?” I asked, one evening over dinner. I’d seen pictures, of course, and read the puff pieces in the Journal-Bulletin. And I despised his poetry, while admitting his gift. You’d be an idiot not to admit his gift. But despite my contempt for his public persona and his art I could not resist a fan’s fascination with the private life of anyone who stocked my shelves. Books are holy objects to me. I can’t destroy even the awfulest of them.
In my basement, stacked in large appliance cartons, themselves stacked to the ceiling all around the boiler, a fire hazard at the very least, are all the books we couldn’t sell at discard prices—not for fifty cents, not for a quarter, not for a bag of books for a dollar. Unredeemable trash. Volume three of the outdated Rhode Island General Laws. Portuguese paperbacks, oddly sized, with brittle shiny covers depicting dark-haired women in fifties makeup, their mouths in a fifties O to signify love and lust, and with titles which translate as Painful Honeymoon and She Loved Her Doctor. The Book of Knowledge from 1928. Useless texts on physics, chemistry. Phrenology: Fact or Fancy? An autobiography of Jack Paar. Ripped bodice-rippers, Gothics with fractured spines, Young Adult novels mutilated by young adults. Forever Amber.
>
“I haven’t seen the husband yet,” Abigail said. “She guards him like that dog.”
“Lassie?”
“Greek dog.”
“Cerberus.”
“And resembles it in a way.”
“Does she actually have three heads, or just a canine appearance?”
“She just resembles it….” Abigail went blank then and sighed, with that bone-weary expression that always overtakes her when she is confronted by the need to articulate a complex thought. Abigail has complex thoughts; she just can’t be bothered setting them in order.
“Spiritually,” I said.
“Yeah. Actually she resembles a sheep. She’s got woolly hair, dirty gray, or ash, and lots of it, close to her head.”
“Does she have a shiny black nose?”
“She smiles all the time. I’ll hand her the return receipt to sign and she’ll give me this big smile, like she’s just won the Publishers Clearing House. She always wears these heavy, dark dresses, like the old Italian women. She smells dusty. She can’t be more than ten years older than us.”
“Dowdy,” I said. “Faculty wife.”
“This one makes faculty wives look like…” Abigail shrugged and waited for me to tell her. I don’t even believe in ESP and I’ve been doing her thinking for her all her life.
“Coco Chanel.” Abigail pouted and shook her head. She actually makes me anxious to please her at times like this. I did her math homework for four years. “Elizabeth Taylor. Twiggy. Jesus, I don’t know.”
“European,” said petulant Abigail. “Old…”
“-Fashioned? -World? Old World dowdy? You mean, striving for some phony cultural effect?” Abby shrugged. “Striving for a certain timelessness. Is that it? No, that’s not it.”
“She’s dusty, musty. Like a book.”
This did the trick. “Striving for a historical quality…she could be Tolstoy’s mother, Dickens’s wife…”
“Yeah.”
“She is woman. She stays in the murk, in the shadows, with the great artist in the foreground, and when he needs a woman, in the abstract, she shoots out into the footlights like a funhouse gorilla.” How do I do that? Exhausted, I poured myself a drink.
“I wonder what he does,” she said, “when he wants a woman in the concrete.” Abigail is never impressed when I read her mind, never grateful for the brute work of it. At such times I exist merely to straighten out her thoughts, like the President’s speechwriter. “Anyway, she always gives me this lightbulb smile and draws me out. Everything I say is delightful, don’t you know. She drips. And the thing is, she’s really fascinated with me, you can tell. All the time she draws me out you can see her learning. She makes me feel…”
Sigh. “Exotic. Endangered, like a dodo. Self-conscious? Surely not that!”
“Prepped,” said Abigail.
“Prepped?”
“Yeah. What nurses do to you before an operation.” She saw my ignorance and grinned, yawning. She loves to twit me; as we age, this is harder for her to do. I grow entropically, unwillingly, corrupt. “They shave you, Dorcas,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows. “Down there. Bald as the capital dome.”
“She makes you feel like that?”
“She makes me feel like that,” said my sister, who is just lazy and a slob. Who is nobody’s fool.
So we were both betting that Hilda was a lesbian. But then came the day that she reached out, smiling loonily, and took my sister’s hand, gently, with a magical hush, as though finally getting up the nerve to pet a wild deer (“I almost popped her one”) and led her to her husband’s study. “I’m sorry,” Hilda kept saying, “I’m so bad at these things, but Guy has been aching to meet you.” Abigail wrenched away. “So that’s it!” she said, and stalked out the door, leaving her mail sack in the hallway. God knows my sister is no stranger to perversion and orgiastic pursuit, but she was genuinely shocked by this. “I wonder why,” she said, that night.
I set to work. “Because you had her down as a lesbian and she turned into a pimp. You’re shocked at your own lack of perspicacity.”
“Nah.”
“Because…you were being treated like a thing.”
“I like being treated like a thing.”
“Nothing degrades you, does it?”
“Yes! She degraded me.” For a second she looked almost upset. “The thing about being treated like a thing is…”
I snorted at her and folded my arms. There are limits.
She brightened then. “She treated me like an idea! That’s it. She treated me like an idea. Can you imagine the nerve?”
My sister outraged was a fabulous sight. If my camera had been handy I would have caught it for posterity. “Why, Abigail, I do believe you’ve got scruples.”
“Nah. I always sit like this,” she said absently, not attending to her own joke. With her heels side by side and her toes turned out, her plump ankles stretched and loose, her plumper knees hanging wide. She really does always sit like that. I asked her why once. Taking the air, she said.
When she went back to the DeVilbisses’ the next morning to retrieve her mail sack, they both opened the door before she could ring the bell, and went into what she later described to me as a vaudeville routine.
“We’re sorry,” cried Hilda.
“I’m sorry,” said the great man, in what Abigail described as a cognac voice, whatever that means. “We’ve behaved abysmally.”
“God knows what you must think of us.”
“Please don’t blame my wife.”
“Please don’t blame my husband.”
“Gimme my mail sack,” said Abigail.
“I only last night realized,” said Hilda, a hideous purple blush climbing up her neck, “what you must have imagined we wanted from you.”
“She vomited,” offered the great man. He spoke with such genuine pride that Abigail was taken aback, wondering whether what he so admired was his wife’s sensitivity or “her actual puke.”
“Let’s have it, people. What exactly did you want from me?” Abigail was already beginning to be mollified. She has always been unable to hold on to a bad temper. She lives in a hospitable world. And Guy fascinated her right off, because she couldn’t categorize him, or, to be more accurate, his perversion. He’s some brand-new kind of pervert, she thought.
“Do come in,” he said, “and let us fix you tea.”
He had the saddest, most limpid, liquid eyes, fixed on Abigail and her alone of all the objects in the world. His body was hairless, white, defenseless. She thought his skin would have no temperature to the touch, like a corpse in a heated room. If human beings really were evolving constantly, further and further from their animal origins, then Guy was the latest prototype. He looked fetal. There was, she told me, correctly, something sketchy about his physical presence, something merely humanoid, as though he had been incarnated at the last minute, out of grudging necessity. Only his mouth gave away his kinship with the rest of us. If she stared at that self-indulgent bee-stung mouth she could imagine him “shitting and pissing and almost fucking. I can see him,” she told me that night, “sitting in a chair in a corner of someone’s bedroom, staring. Not touching. Never touching. He’s disgusting,” she said, “but sort of wonderful, too. He takes you in with that stare. He makes you feel like anything you did would be wonderful, as long as he could watch.”
“And write about it later,” I said. Abigail smiled.
DeVilbiss led Abigail inside, one plump weightless hand on her shoulder, guiding her into his study, with Hilda trailing behind. There he made a great show of debating with Hilda about which of them would fix the tea. His wife won, arguing that it would make her feel so much better to do something for Abigail, to atone. Guy shook his head at his wife’s retreating black back and said, when she had closed the door behind herself, “She still cannot quite break herself of the old oppressed ways. She takes comfort in brute servitude.” Abigail could see he was really put out with his wife for making the te
a. “I got the feeling,” she said, “that there would be hell to pay for it later.”
The study was lined with books and decorated with the torsos of naked women. The largest of the three-dimensional torsos stood on a pedestal beside what Abigail realized must be his desk, since there was no other workstation in evidence. It was a high school desk-chair combination, the old kind with an inkwell, which contained a jar of ink. The torso, of pink marble, dwarfed the desk-chair, and would surely loom over the writer seated there. If it were to tip it would crush his shoulder, possibly his skull. If he were to look up at it, amid his creative throes, he would be confronted with vast flat buttocks, massive truncated thighs. If he were to reach up he could just caress the cold childish breasts, inverted marble nipples; he could just trace the puckered appendectomy scar on the loose abdomen.
Abigail knew with intuitive certainty that this was Hilda’s torso. Half the statues and paintings in the study resembled it, to the scar. The rest depicted other sorts of women’s bodies, and children’s too. Butterballs. High-waisted torsos with long breasts and slim hips. Lanky adolescent slabs. The bodies of very young girls, prepubescent, pot-bellied, waistless; the most purposeful looking bodies of all, with their lack of animal fur. Looking at one such, a larger-than-life sculpture of bleached cherry wood, Abigail was overcome, and determined to start shaving herself. Prepping herself, I reminded her, but she told me to mind my own business. “I can handle those two,” she said.
“I understand,” Abigail said, smiling evilly, “that you were aching to meet me.” She sat in a huge wicker throne, looking down upon him at his child’s desk.
Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather Page 7