Jim stands. He addresses the imaginary ball, starts a slow backswing, emulating the quilted golfer.
“That’s nice,” the therapist says. “That’s very nice.”
With a sigh, the therapist assumes his own comfy position on the couch. He folds his trimmed fingernails over his belly. “The wrist, arm alignment, the tuck of the chin. The quilt captured all that?”
The therapist closes his eyes. “Okay, Jim, here’s the deal. I’m willing to listen from time to time, I’ll take as much as I can, but when I can’t take any more there will be silence. Do you understand? All right, so you have a problem with this childhood thing. You yourself were kidnapped. And you had two ancestors who were kidnapped by the Comanches, and you worry constantly about your own children.”
“I wouldn’t say constantly.”
“Who asked your opinion? Now, I’m going to snooze for a little here while you tell me about your own children’s lives. Generalities will do. Personally, I find childhood most uninteresting.”
He dozes off as Jim talks about his own children. He recalls football and baseball seasons, swimming lessons, Happy Meals, gymnastics.
“Boring,” his therapist intones from the couch in a groggy voice. He tells him of the time one of them asked if there were a frog in heaven, the reply being that perhaps there might be room for a frog in heaven, when it was revealed he had said fog. Was there a fog in heaven? He tells him of the way their high-pitched voices were like a serenade to him, before the voices changed, grew deep as they turned into young men. Tells him of the way that one could swing back and forth on the monkey bars for a half an hour or the way another made a thousand bounces on the trampoline, counting them out one by one and making him count along.
Probably, he hovered over them too much. Checked too many doors and windows in the night.
The family read, the family sang. It wasn’t all happiness. He yelled sometimes. Who knows how much damage is done, but they are in their teen years now, and it is a new ballgame, one he can hardly keep up with. He feels like a volunteer firefighter, arrived windblown and helpless to meet their new needs.
In Which the Therapist Demands
to Talk About Sex
The therapist groans and snorts a white powder from a vial. “Cut to the chase already,” the therapist croaks. “Go back to your own pathetic teen years. Get to that Cicely broad again. Give me some sex, something I can sink my teeth into. Go on. I’ll just lie here and have a sniff from time to time. No worries.”
Jim, thirteen, lies in bed. Lower bunk. Late at night. Wakes and hears no comforting sounds from upper bunk—no heavy breathing, no sighs, no stirrings in dreams. He prays for Len’s safe return.
Len’s got too much energy to contain. He drinks to tamp down the energy, to keep it from overloading him. He drives the back roads with his friends. They go out drinking and shooting and hollering. Sometimes he takes off on his friends. They go out camping and Len picks up a backpack and disappears in the brush country, and Jim thinks he’s out there looking for Roughhound, who escaped and was never found. Jim knows Len’s gearing up for something. Len’s getting ready for some mission, steeling himself, and Jim just wants him back in the top bunk.
The voices of his parents drift down the hallway from the kitchen where they’re having a late-night snack, staring in worry at the 2:00 a.m. on the clock.
“I don’t get it,” Jim’s father says. “He was always such a good kid. I mean, a little wild, but a good kid.”
“He still is a good kid,” Jim’s mother says.
“Kids are all weird as hell these days. Ever since the Beatles. Why the hell didn’t they stay in England where they belonged?”
“Get to the Cicely broad,” the therapist says sleepily. “I like the sexy stuff.”
Jim sits at the kitchen table waiting for the call from Cicely that will signal her mother has left the house. She’s been grounded again, so it’s the only way he can see her. After her mother’s left, Jim will run there—it’s a mile, mostly uphill, and from the moment he hops up from the table, he’ll slip through her back door in seven minutes, though on the downhill coming home, he’ll crack six minutes. He’s been getting in good shape this summer, making the run to Cicely’s.
He’s playing Monopoly with Sis and his mother and his two younger brothers and he almost wishes the call would not come.
It’s such a warm, languid, innocent morning playing Monopoly at the kitchen table, and he’s cozy and home and feeling like a kid again, and he hardly understands this strange world he’s entered with Cicely, and he wishes it were like the old days, with Len still living at home, not in the Marines, not fighting in a war far away, and all of them out on a summer evening with Momma slow pitching the softball and calling, “Swing, honey, swing!”
Sis covets Boardwalk. Seventeen years old now and she covets Boardwalk. A blonde now. She has shocked them all by dyeing her hair. In a few moments, she will trade toughly but fairly for Boardwalk and soon drive them all out of the game, including the youngest, Dan, who has been building hotels on property he doesn’t own. But the call comes from Cicely. Two rings and then silence. His mother stares at the phone.
He starts to sweat. He waits three minutes so it will not be obvious and then he springs up, blurts, “I’ll be right back. I forgot something at the reservoir!”
His mother gives him the dark-eye and Sis shouts, “You can’t leave. I just got Boardwalk!”
As he bolts out the front door, invisible fingers seem to reach at him to try to draw him back to that kitchen table in the morning sunlight, and maybe if he’d let the invisible fingers pull him back to that table in the sun, Momma cooking and Sis coveting nothing more than Boardwalk, all would have been different somehow, ended differently, ended happily. But the fingers clutch and release; he breaks from them, he is running, he is always running.
From the couch, the therapist stirs, his eyes opening wide. “That isn’t bad, really. Not a bad metaphor in a sense. Running. Invisible fingers. But if only you would let the invisible fingers pull you back . . . What does it all mean to you? Not that I really care about your opinion.”
“Actually, they’re not entirely invisible, it occurs to me.”
“No?”
“The fingers are like bands of light, or rays, blue and red and yellow rays stretching out, and they’re almost leaving smudges on my white T-shirt.”
“Your mother’s fingers?”
“I suppose . . . It’s as if in that moment, life could have turned one way or the other.”
“Why would that have affected Len?”
“I don’t know. I feel like I set off some bad luck somehow. Or maybe if I had been drawn back, he would have been drawn back, too. We would have all ended up back there together again.”
“Go on. Get to the sex.”
He runs up the hill, past the grassy enclosure behind the water reservoir, down an alleyway, backyard dogs barking savagely. Springs over Cicely’s chain link fence. Old mangy Jeeter nips at his jeans, but he’s too fast for Jeeter. Sprints across the backyard, slips into the den through the patio’s sliding glass door.
And there is splendid Cicely. Standing in front of the living room couch, she opens her terrycloth robe, naked beneath. Perfectly naked. Perfectly slender. A sculptor’s finely drawn curves within the dancer’s flat build, so much fine mystery on such a tiny frame. Still damp from her bath.
It takes him three seconds to unbuckle and slide down his jeans to his knees and they fall down on the couch, with her already leading him in, sliding him into a silky moist warm velveteen world. Thirty-one seconds after he’s entered the house, seven minutes and three seconds after he jumped up from the kitchen table, he cries out, “Yow!”
She wraps her legs around him, savors him for five seconds more, then pushes on his chest and orders, “Go! She’ll be back in a minute!”
&nb
sp; Jeans up and zipped, and less than a minute after entering the house, he’s back out the sliding glass door and running across the backyard, Jeeter attached to his ankle. He shakes off the cranky old dog at the top of the fence. Runs back up the alleyway, crosses behind the reservoir and drops down the hill to home and thirteen and a half minutes after he jumped up from the table, he’s sitting back down, his head covered in sweat.
He holds up the watch that was hidden in his pocket. “I left my watch at the reservoir yesterday when we were playing football. I remembered I had to get it.” He dangles the watch for them to see.
His mother gives him the evil eye again. “Who was that on the phone?”
“What are you talking about?”
“That was some kind of signal, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The therapist rolls off the couch. He’s in Jim’s face, standing over him, screaming, “Why did you lie to your mother!” He wraps a plump arm around his neck in a headlock and Jim thinks that he can take him, but he just lets the therapist squeeze his neck. He passes out for a while and when he wakes, he is bound to a chair in the attic room.
“Tell me more about Cicely,” the therapist says. “Does she arouse you still?”
Who is Cicely? Who was Cicely? Sometimes he thinks that he has dreamed Cicely, that she could not have really been. It will take him years, a lifetime, to realize there will never be another woman who will want him the way Cicely wanted him; no other woman will have Cicely’s urgency, the frequency of her urgency.
A twig of a girl. So thin. A dancer’s build. Black hair. So straight. Not a hint of a curl. It hangs straight and flat as if ironed, cut straight across just above her eyebrows. Her lips red, lipsticked at a time when natural is in. Brown eyes. She seems not to blink. She looks at all men with those unblinking eyes, smiling, as if each man, the young, the old, the fat, the thin, are all marvelous creatures whom she can appreciate. All are splendid.
But Jim’s the real one, the one she really loves. He’s the one. He’s wanted. She must have him this very minute, at the drive-in, at a park, on a picnic bench, behind the reservoir, on a rooftop, on a hill, at the lake, beneath a bridge. Tell me you love me, Jim. Come, come, come, look at me when you come!
I love you! I will!
Cicely, Cicely, Cicely . . .
They break up; they get back together. He hears she’s been seen with Bobby G. again; he breaks up again, lies around the house moping, trying not to cry . . .
On the day his family receives notice of Len’s death in combat, Jim takes off running up the hill like he’s on fire. Runs behind the reservoir, screams down the alleyway, springs over Cicely’s fence. Jeeter fixes him with a yellow-eyed glare, shoots across the lawn and rips at his jeans as he bangs on the sliding glass door. When she opens it, he falls into her arms, not taking her down on the couch, which is good because her mother is in the den watching TV. He cries into her and she holds him, crying with him, the two of them shaking and her mother up now, too, figuring it out, her own husband a pilot in the war, and the three of them standing there holding each other and crying, Cicely’s mother dabbing at his head, his hair, his shoulders, as if to put out the fire . . .
Through the teen years, driving alone in cars late at night, he screams and beats at the steering wheel . . . Come back, Len, come back, he wishes a million times. A million times a million . . .
After Winning the Nobel Prize, Jim Writes a Letter to His Literary Agent, Toward Whom He May Have Mild Romantic Feelings
For your eyes only:
There hasn’t been anyone to talk to lately. My wife is busy with her own work. And the kids are older now and don’t need me so much.
I came down to this beach town. I found myself brooding over my own life. It frightened me. I want to spend time elsewhere, back on the frontier with my ancestors Tom and Will.
The people who were my friends have drifted away . . . We don’t call each other much anymore. Or write except for forwarded email jokes.
I’m glad you came down for a day. I kept picturing in my mind that you would. I suppose I was raving. I suppose we won’t ever have our affair. I don’t have affairs, you know. At least I don’t think I do.
But I was happy to walk with you on the beach. I was happy to hold your hand, a slender, fragile hand. So light. Like holding air. I felt my own hand was so hard and calloused and nicked from my years of boxing and deep water fishing.
I was happy when we hooked the marlin. I was glad when we let it go. I’m sorry the boat captain made a pass at you. You were right to Mace him.
For a moment, back on the beach, when you pushed up your sunglasses and swept your hair back from your brow, I almost kissed you. I almost started this affair that cannot happen, that I cannot allow to happen. I do not have affairs. You looked magnificent with your long white shirt open over your black swimsuit. I took a breath and prepared to lunge in. You were right to Mace me.
After you left, I found a gym to work out in. I punched the heavy bag. I sparred with a contender. He beat me senseless. I felt more like myself again.
I’m getting old . . . I need some new tricks . . . a stiffer jab . . .
I’ve found a beach café with good coffee. I sit beneath a table umbrella and hear snatches of conversation. Everyone is so earnest. They’re working out their problems here at the tables. It’s okay to be this or that, they say, they’ve discovered it’s okay to behave this way or that. They’ve learned to accept things about themselves, they’ve learned how to love themselves unconditionally. They forgive themselves and each other. So what if one is an ax murderer? Sure, there’s always room for improvement, but there are reasons for such things, one can’t get down about it.
That’s good! They say to one another. That’s right! Right on!
I treasure my friendships, they say to one another. You have a special place in my life, they say, and that’s kind of what it’s all about . . . I’m changing . . . I’m growing . . . Growing is good! I’m so happy for you!
They’re all growing and changing and forgiving themselves before my eyes, and I am alone. The only image that cheers me is of a golfing quilt I once saw on the Fourth of July in Oregon. Such a great swing! I’d like to buy that little golfer a drink.
In a day or two, no doubt, I will ride the train home and embrace my wife and children and we will resume. We will take it up again, yet again, but for now there is no one to talk to, and only these mad voices inside to listen to . . .
The afternoon wears on and now the conversations dwindle and run dry . . . No one is growing . . . We feel oily and fat . . . We wander off to our rooms . . .
In the night the wind howls at my door. The electricity goes out. I light a candle, take a gingko balboa for clarity, perform a Chi Kung exercise called Old Man Eats Shit. Swooping down and swinging my arms, and as my head comes up dizzily, I leave myself and I am back on the frontier.
In Which Tom Meets Alice
Tom holds the spare horses and watches from a hilltop as the battle rages on. He’s got the horses and this would be the perfect chance to escape as the eight braves, led by White Crane, batter at the doors and windows of the cabin and the settlers inside fire through portholes. This attack’s gone sour, one brave already killed. The Comanches like surprise attacks, not these pitched battles, and White Crane orders a retreat to the hilltop. Every life is precious. He doesn’t want to lose another warrior, but he’s lost control of the braves in their blood lust. White Crane looks at his adopted son in despair, shakes his head and rides back in.
Now, Tom thinks, ride away, ride. He can ride through the night and by morning be striking deeper into the settlements, back to safety. But Will’s back in the Comanche camp. He can’t leave Will. He promised he’d take him home even if Will no longer wants to go home.
The cabin goes up in flames, and Tom tri
es to close off his ears from the shrieking inside, but out of the flames runs a figure, a woman in a long gingham dress. She screams as the braves encircle her. The back of her dress is lit on fire and White Crane tackles her and rolls in the dirt with her, tumbling over and over to put out the fire, and now a moment later a blazing man, a human torch, flees out of the cabin and the braves shoot him down in a fusillade of bullets as he rushes them.
The braves move in on the woman, but White Crane commands them to stand back. He throws the woman up on a horse, swings in behind her and they ride back up the hill to Tom. He sees her slumped over the horse, though even her slump of despair and shock cannot hide her wholesome Texas country ranch curves, her willowy North Texas supple strength, her raven brown hair; ah yes, she is a beauty, fresh from a burning cabin and he sees her eyes shining at him and imploring. She is about his own age and he says, in English, “Don’t worry. I’ll get you back home.”
She puts her hand to her mouth and bursts into hysterical tears and he realizes he’s just said something incredibly stupid. Her home is up in flames. Her people are dead. She has no home.
White Crane spurs his horse and rides off with the woman, and Tom understands. White Crane’s affections are sudden and intense; the woman is to be White Crane’s wife.
The Word Terrorist
Dalton, the word terrorist, barges into Jim’s office at the college. “I was able to hack into your computer and saw the shit you’re writing! My God! It’s horrible, but I love it! I’m enjoying every word of it, but unfortunately, I’ve changed a few of your syllables and you’ve read them, and I’m going to clear out of here, because in a few minutes, you’re going to go stark raving mad!” He howls with glee and cackles as he runs down the hallway.
Jim sits on his hands waiting for the madness to overpower him. But Dalton had not counted on the thin layer of white gas creeping under the door. It’s a light gassing President Jammer is giving them this time. It calms Jim, soothes his racing heart.
The Western Lonesome Society Page 4