“We’re the same age, Mr. Lowe,” I said.
“My God, you certainly don’t look it.”
“I most certainly do.”
“Good for you! So you do! Good for you. So, here was this fearless young politico with a trunkful of false teeth, and he starts unpacking reams, and I mean reams, of paper, bound in pink ribbon, and I said—I was just some dumbass from Hollywood, you know, the only book I’d ever read was Gone With the Wind, and here was this simple, pudgy, weird young man, already showing me worlds I’d never dreamed existed, and I said, ‘Are you in the stationery business?’ and he said, I’ll never forget this, he said, ‘My name is Guy DeVilbiss, and this is my work.’
“I said, ‘You mean, unloading all this paper, and then, what? Loading it all back in again? Are you practicing to be a stevedore?’ I was already impressed as hell, and then he came right back, in no more than half an hour, with the stunning riposte, ‘Well, you may laugh if you wish, but I am going to be the greatest American poet of the Atomic Age, and this—he pointed at the mounds of paper on his bed—‘is my juvenalia.’”
Throughout this merciless basting both DeVilbisses laughed uncontrollably, Hilda covering her mouth, with her eyes popping, obviously, at some deep level, enjoying herself immensely, and why the hell not; Guy red-faced, clutching his stomach, eyes squeezed shut, wallowing on the sofa like one of those penguin toys for budgies. Guy was absolutely humiliated, absolutely hilarious, absolutely impotent. This was, as Conrad Lowe would say, a sobering sight, but I was soon to grow used to it.
Guy’s old roommate was clearly ascendant, his hero, the dominant male, and Guy assumed one of two postures, always, in his company. This was the first, that of the honoree at a “roast,” whose duty it is to endure vicious public abuse with visible good nature, to laugh loudest when the jokes are cruelest. His laughter now had just this quality, at once real and desperate, pitiable, and I actually felt sorry for Guy. Especially since he so richly deserved it. The other posture was even more striking, more ludicrous, and would shortly be on display.
Lowe had been speaking to me, and directly to me. He had not even glanced a second time at my sister. This was, to say the least, unusual. I divined he was doing it on purpose, to put her in her place. The man was obviously a sadist, a manipulator. I despised him instantly. He inspired in me an absurd crusading zeal.
It was the oddest, most unhinging thing. I hated him, gladly. It was as though I had waited all my life to do battle with this terrible man, and the unhinging aspect of my emotion was the gratitude, the bridal joy. He scared me to death. For one thing, despite all my efforts, I had laughed at the end of Lowe’s story, and the laughter had been forced upon me from the outside, I was sure, for the story was not funny, to me, and the general hilarity anything but contagious, and yet I had laughed, a short loud bark, and covered my mouth like girlish Hilda. I hadn’t turned to look at Abigail, or heard a sound from her. I didn’t know what she was doing, though surely she was as aware as I of his intentional snub.
Guy was helplessly shaking his head and telling us that yes, indeed, he had really been that young once, that pretentious, he cringed to think about it now.
“We were all that young once,” I said, to Lowe. “We all took ourselves seriously. We had to. It was our job.”
“Yes,” said Hilda. “We all do silly things.”
Lowe smiled. “Did you, Dorcas? Do silly things? When you were young?”
“You don’t know me well enough to ask me that,” I said.
Lowe spilled a little of his whiskey, which he had been putting away professionally. It dribbled down the side of his chin. “Excuse me,” he said, “Miss Mather.”
“I don’t care what you call me. I meant only that your question was too personal.”
“Conrad’s from southern California,” said Guy. Though he said it in unthinking defense of his buddy, without demeaning intent, the accidental wit of his remark delighted everybody but Conrad Lowe. Even Guy, with evident trepidation, laughed at his own unintended joke.
“You must be what they call a Yankee,” said Conrad Lowe, and I let it stand, wrapping all that bogus symbolism around me like armor. “You’ve got noble lines, like Kate Hepburn. You come from sturdy stock. Sure, we know about Yankees out in California.”
“You know about stereotypes, then,” said I, giddy with success.
“Well, of course,” he said, “being illiterate, sun-ravaged vulgarians, we are capable of grasping only stereotypes. Our attention spans are so short.”
“You’re right, of course, we were all laughing just now at a stereotype of Cal—”
“You got me good,” he said, and didn’t need to add you bitch. “That’s the beauty of the Hepburn maneuver. There’s never any point in the dialogue where you can’t turn around and say, ‘You don’t know me that well.’”
“It wasn’t any kind of maneuver,” I said. “You do me disservice, or credit, I don’t know which. It was an honest response.”
“Well, as long as it was honest.”
“I’m explaining, not excusing. It’s just that, well, intimacy cannot be enforced.”
“Intimacy cannot be enFOWahssed,” he mocked, in a Hepburn drawl, his mouth widening, his lower jaw thrust out. This was a distinctly feminine jibe, yet it did not diminish him. It was perfectly clear that he would use any weapon available to win, that there was in this man no sense of proportion, that all challenges to his power were alike and insupportable. He could not bear to lose. If there had been an axe there on the coffee table I would have feared for my life.
He looked me over now. Stared at my bosom, stared down at my lap, my locked knees, so that it took all my will not to shield myself with my hands, and his expression was confident, insolent, and here it came, the sexual insult. It had been so long since I’d had to take one of these. Hey, Dork, where are ya tits? What’s long and thin and comes by itself? “You have beautiful legs,” he said. “You have legs like Kate Hepburn.”
“Nonsense,” I said, blushing hotly.
“No, Dorcas. I’m not backing down on this. You do look your age, whatever that is, and you do have beautiful legs.”
Guy cleared his throat. “My old friend,” he said to me, “is an unreconstructed chauvinist.”
I had never known Guy to remark on any woman’s physical aspect. With Guy there was always the pretense that we were pure spirit, pure intellect and “sexuality,” and our bodies were incidental, negligible, beside the point. This was part, Abigail said, of his weird original perversion. “He doesn’t stare in an ordinary way,” she told me. “He doesn’t sneak peeks. He looks right at your tits, but wide-eyed, like a child, which isn’t quite it, but he looks right at them, like nothing up my sleeve! He looks at your tits and you can watch him turning them into words on a page. He turns your tits into ideas. It’s disgusting, in an interesting way.”
“Are you saying she doesn’t have beautiful legs?” asked Conrad, leaning toward his tormentee, who sat on the couch beside him, his face inches away.
Guy cleared his throat. “I’m just saying,” he said, “that it’s demeaning to a woman when you—”
“Look,” said Conrad. “Look at them.”
“No.”
Conrad smiled, his first full smile in front of us, and it was dazzling and full of charm. The swiveled front tooth, fully exposed, somehow rendered him harmless, trustworthy. It was an imperfection upon which you could focus and think, look, he’s just an ordinary fellow, nothing menacing here, he was a child once, he had parents who didn’t give him braces, he didn’t spring full-grown out of someone’s, everyone’s, my, neurotic needs. “Remember Betty Alice Bascomb?” he asked Guy in a stage whisper.
Guy, who had been trying to be manful, was startled into a look of baby surprise by the name of Betty Alice Bascomb. His bee-stung mouth contracted into a little O, and he snorted, like an infant eructation.
“Well, this one makes Betty Alice Bascomb look like a Clydesdale.”
This, of course, was Guy’s alternate posture with his old roommate, and when he assumed it for a long period of time, which on this night he did not, he accepted the role fully, or at least appeared to, and the panicky look would disappear, and it would become possible to believe that he had been a more or less ordinary young man, who snickered and told dirty stories with the rest of them. He would relax into his old incarnation, and take some delight in it, I think. He would look younger, and not disingenuous, but really ingenuous. His language would become genuinely offensive, even to a woman like me, who hates to take knee-jerk offense.
They would talk about women, about oneself, as though women were nothing but ambulatory body parts, the container for the thing contained, the part for the whole. They would tell repugnant jokes with horrid imagery, comparing us to carnivorous plants, dead carp, snails. At such times Conrad Lowe would eventually extract from Guy some explicit hateful remark, some punchline of his own, and then he would abandon Guy, slip out from under him like a retracted gangplank. Lowe’s face would transmogrify, the contagiously filthy-minded young man would disappear, and in its place would be this bemused adult with an ironic face, staring at his old chum in mild wonder. And there would be poor Guy, the focus of shocked attention, and the echo of his own obscenity ringing in everyone’s ears like cookware spilling from a closet. It was impossible to look at him at such times, or to enjoy his horror, and we would all spend the rest of the evening pretending that nothing had happened, while Guy sat paralyzed in our midst, or sometimes just rose up and left the room and went upstairs to bed.
As for the rest of us, we did nothing. Nothing to stop it, or even slow it down. Even Hilda did not protect her husband, but simply watched, as we did, fascinated, wondering how it would all come out: how Conrad would dispose of Guy. We all accepted his ascendancy from the beginning. He was the dominant male. The wickedness of the man, the wickedness of his behavior, of his corrupting influence upon us, of our submission to him, all this was beside the point. He was the dominant male. Everything else was just talk.
It took all my strength to sit still, back straight, as he attacked me, to keep my legs crossed and still, to keep my complexion pale, to keep my stare fixed upon him and his giggling dummy, to keep my expression stern. To be judged desirable, to have any part of my body found desirable, was insupportable to me. Somehow he had known immediately what course of action would be the most vicious. What he did to me that night, and many times thereafter, amounted, if such a thing were possible, to psychological rape. And this was surely his intent. Ever since, my legs, about which I had had no particular attitude—why should I?—have felt heavy and cumbersome. I drag them around beneath me. They give off a sickly public glow. I have dreams in which they are diseased, life-threatening, and I beg to have them cut off.
I saw myself for the first time as a thing, a thing in someone else’s mind. Of course I had always acknowledged my body, the fact of my visibility, but I had not been a thing, really, because I had been of no use. A pebble is a thing, a blade of grass a thing, the broken thread in an old binding. But no one holds these things in mind, they exist in solitude. In privacy. I had known myself to be a perceptible object, a serviceable body, unlovely, unugly, unremarkable. Plain and capable, I moved through the perceptible world, and people nodded and asked questions and sometimes shook my hand, but no one, no one shrank me, remembered me, kept my image prisoner, arranged my body in poses, put words in my mouth, imagined me, used me, used me, like a spread-legged thing in a magazine, like a thing. I had not known until this moment, really, I had not believed that anyone had this power.
And this despite my sister, whom I have never been without, who loved being treated as a thing, who derived power from that, and I had not looked over at her once since meeting him and could not look at her now, or away from him. But I wondered at the power she derived from this and did not doubt it, or doubt her power now, even in silence, even in his denial of attention to her.
And for the first time in my life I called out to her, silently, for help, like an overwhelmed child, and she was my older sister, who knew the ropes, who was bigger and stronger, who could beat the shit out of this son of a bitch, who would feed upon his weapons, catch his bullets in her teeth and chew them like bubble gum. My great Amazon bawd of a twin. And thinking of her, taking comfort from her unseen presence beside me, I smiled, still afraid, but excited by the carnage to come, at Conrad Lowe.
Who caught my thought. He abandoned Guy in mid-leer, dismissed my leg-things with a regretful parting glance, and regarded my sister for the first time. “Who’s your friend?” he asked me.
“She’s not my friend. She’s my sister.”
“You’re kidding.”
“She’s my twin sister.”
He let his jaw drop down and stared at me with deliberate amazement, and then back at my sister’s body. I watched his eyes rake her up and down, and focus ironically, comically, upon her big pink legs. He was going to say something disgusting about her body, and that was awful, but he underestimated her. He assumed she was stupid and vain and vulnerable. He thought she didn’t know she was fat. He thought she was a deluded fool. “Does she have a name?” he asked.
“Her name is Abigail.”
“Does she talk?”
She talks and walks. She eats little salamanders like you for breakfast. I clapped my hands over my mouth to keep from yelling, Sic ’im, Abigail!
“What’s happening here?” asked Guy, in a dopey, querulous way, like a traveler waking up from a nap to a hijacked plane. “Let’s all eat something.”
“Guy, Dorcas is upset,” said Hilda.
“I can see that, dear.”
Conrad Lowe was staring at my sister’s face, I could tell by the level of his gaze, and he was looking at her without appraisal, not as a stranger, but as if her face, her being, were long known to him and comfortably familiar. As if they were old enemies; as if she were an old defeated enemy. As if seeing her again brought old and pleasant memories. As if he had the right to stare and stare until he grew bored and looked away, and she had no rights at all. “And what do you do?” he asked her now, with a patronizing smile. Abigail, unseen, said nothing, but I could feel her shift on the couch. I could hear it squeak. I imagined her face, matching his expression exactly, going it one better: the confident, arrogant face of the blooded sexual warrior. She was getting her balance, there on the couch, she was biding her time.
“What does she do?” he asked Guy, without looking away from her. This was a favorite trick, I was to learn: looking at one person, addressing someone else, demeaning two people at once.
“I told you about her this afternoon. Abigail is that magnificent woman—”
“Whoa! This is the town pump?”
“Really,” Guy roared, he really roared, but then sputtered and blustered and petered out into a whine. “I never said…unthinkable…you go too far…that was evil and you know it…why do you do these things to me?”
“The postman cometh!” crowed the delighted Conrad Lowe. “Neither snow or rain, eh, toots? Or heat or gloom of fucking night?” There was more subterranean upholstery shifting. “Abigail! Abigail. Abby-baby.” His voice descended to
a practiced whisper. He was making obscene public love to her. He winked. “Abby,” he said.
“Yes,” said Abigail.
Of course I had to look then, and of course she was sitting there defenseless as a baby, harmless as a milk cow, with the eyes of a lovesick milk cow, and her knees apart not by design or habit but as though pried apart, and her skin was tight and pink, and a terrible musk rose from her, They’ll have to clean the couch, and she was having trouble breathing.
My sister was in love. When he spoke her name she was transformed with joy, like a mentioned dog.
“Abby,” he said again.
“Yes,” she said again.
Chapter Nine
Oh, Doctor, You Struck a Nerve
Chapter 9
The Angel’s Son
Guy and I elected, on principle, not to bring children into our violence-pocked postnuclear world. And though we have never regretted our decision, I here confess that if we had ever had a son, we would have named him Conrad, would have striven to raise him with all the love and respect denied his namesake. For we loved Conrad Lowe. We could not help but see, beneath the cruel wit, the icy misogynist rage, even the outright brutality of his final years with Abigail, the haunted, tortured eyes of his inner child. For the boy Conrad was ill-used indeed…
Considering what holy objects books are, how mysterious the metamorphosis from thought to print, and considering how tiny and bleak our community here—we have the highest illiteracy rate north of the Mason-Dixon line—considering all this I am often struck by the number of people in Frome alone actively or formerly involved in the book biz.
Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather Page 9