Chapter 9. 1944
The man she might have married is sitting in the branches of an oak tree, thinking about Lord Byron’s teeth. Specifically, he’s wondering how his own teeth, whose complaints have come to the fore during this long period of enforced inactivity, compare to those of the scandalous poet. He knows that in general the early 19th century wasn’t a particularly good era for teeth, even the teeth of the upper classes; and any preexisting conditions might well have gotten rapidly out of control once Byron abandoned his comfortable if turbulent Italian exile for the rockier byways of the Greek independence movement. He thinks also that even Byron’s love of adventure and taste for the grand gesture had probably never placed him quite as far from dentists as he himself is now, perched in his oak tree, on the highest, thinnest branches he judges capable of supporting his weight.
Despite the heat and dryness of the terrain in which the oak tree has had the misfortune to take root, its foliage is quite thick, even near the top where he sits, with his aching rear end on one gnarled and scaly branch and his long, khaki-clad legs draped over another. With the slow and careful movements of his head that have already become automatic, he can find narrow tunnels in the leaves through which it’s possible to survey parts of the golden, sun-flogged hills, sparsely furred with dry grass, and the tawny ridges sloping down like the forelegs of posing lions. Farther away there are even swatches of sea, in a dark, unreal blue. Occasionally he can spot motion in that dormant landscape: dusty gray shoulders, or the diffuse flash of sunlight off the dome of a helmet.
Perhaps the steady ache from what must be an abscessed molar is actually a blessing. It distracts him to some extent from his current difficulties, the discomfort of sitting on the bumpy branch hour after hour, the silent and suffocating heat, the need to remain as still as possible. Its relentless burn also provides him with food for thought, such as the Byron connection. The tooth explodes with a fiery pain whenever he probes it with his tongue, which he does often, most other physical activity being inadvisable in his situation. The messages from this alien presence in his mouth have become so extreme that he’s contemplating the feasibility of extracting it with his own hand; just gripping it slowly and carefully between thumb and index finger and then ripping it out with a single yank, which probably won’t attract any unwanted attention if he can restrain himself from screaming. He’s confident that he can. He knows that if the people with helmets and gray shoulders discover him in his perch, they will certainly apply methods that will make the flaming molar only a blessed memory. Like the early dental anesthetic technique of holding a hot coal briefly on some other part of the patient’s anatomy to make him temporarily forget what was going on in his mouth. Or perhaps they’ll even treat him to a percussive extraction. Every cloud has a silver lining, he thinks, pleased that the habit of irony hasn’t deserted him, though there’s no one around to appreciate it. He wonders if the woman he might have married would have approved of this particular bit of calculated savoir faire. And wonders again why she’s been on his mind lately. It’s been years since he’s seen her; he hadn’t even thought much about her for several months, and now, without warning, here she is again, her blue eyes and lustrous hair, her humorous mouth. He’d found himself thinking about her even as he’d sat in the front seat of the German general’s car in his phony uniform, approaching the first of the series of some twenty roadblocks, the general himself now demoted to the back seat with the barrel of his own sidearm jammed pointedly into his ribs.
Adding to the tooth’s complaints, a slight pressure in his bladder has also perversely begun to nag like a jealous younger sibling, notwithstanding the desiccated air and his cracking lips. He’s hoping to put off attending to it until the sun goes down, an hour or so from now, when he plans to descend from the tree and take his chances in the dark. Toothache is one thing, but his imagination is having trouble placing the arrogant Byron in a situation in which it would be impossible to relieve himself. Much easier to picture the methodically unconventional poet, fretting in some tedious and endless London reception, pulling it out insouciantly to empty his bladder into the nearest potted plant or convenient Grecian urn. In his own circumstances, however, the rules are much more rigid than at any of the polite dinner parties he’s ever attended, and the penalties for transgression will be far less pleasant than the scandalized gossip the poet enjoyed cultivating. The sensation in his bladder is beginning to compete seriously with the aching tooth, swelling and receding like waves riding up and down a beach on a rising tide, each one reaching a little higher than the previous one. The discomfort is beginning to take a definite shape – an inverted triangle, like a funnel, whose sharp apex pokes ever more urgently into his groin, promising a culmination of some kind not far in the future. With meticulous deliberation he changes position slightly, removing his right foot from its branch and letting it hang below him, the process taking at least half a minute. The branch now presses a little more lightly on his perineum, buying him, he estimates, maybe 10 minutes more time.
Before this afternoon he’s been far too busy and even, he’ll admit to himself, too frightened to bother with minor physical complaints. But with the success of the long operation has come a letdown, a kind of emptiness; and his neglected body has joyfully occupied that sudden void with its childish demands. After the stimulating costume party of the kidnapping itself, and the two weeks of running and hiding from the swarming German patrols that followed, they had finally bundled their prize general onto a launch the night before, in the pale light of a poet’s moon rocking low on the horizon, and waved him off to Cairo. The Germans, though, are unaware that they’ve lost the game, and their enthusiasm for the chase is undiminished. He and his little band of militant shepherds, on the other hand, are weary and, their object attained, perhaps a bit less alert than they really should be. The gray shoulders are now much closer to him than they’ve been at any time since he and his comrades bluffed their way through the checkpoints, which explains this boring and less than glamorous afternoon in the oak tree. He wonders what’s happened to the rest of the fellows. It’s a good sign that he hasn’t heard any gunfire, but beyond that he knows nothing.
He’s holding these anxieties damped well down, knowing it’s even more useless to keep running his mind over them than it is to poke at the aching tooth. But that leaves only the physical concerns for entertainment, and when his attention strays briefly from them, thoughts of the woman he could have married. What is she doing at this moment? He doesn’t know much about her life, other than that she’s married and lives somewhere in Pennsylvania. He invented a husband for her when he heard about her marriage – a pale, skinny intellectual type. Certainly he can’t be much of a physical specimen, given that he must be 4-F, or worse, faking some kind of disability. He knows there’s at least one child, although his mind tends to shy away from that thought. He makes it a boy, who will now be about 5. Motherhood hasn’t diminished her beauty, he’s sure, just made her charmingly unkempt. He doesn’t know much about parenthood, but he guesses that she’s not taking as much trouble with her wavy hair as she used to; it’ll be a little wild, and barely corralled with careless bobby pins. He sees the little smile on her lips, and hands resting on round hips inside the pockets of her slacks. But thinking about her body isn’t a good idea; it complicates the signals from his groin. Luckily, green Pennsylvania is too remote from this baking hillside to seem very real. Children, grassy back yards, baby furniture; all can seem dreamlike to a man who’s being methodically hunted by other men with rifles.
The sun is nearing the horizon, trailed by a pale divot of moon, but he’s beginning to fear that the darkness will come too late for his bladder. He considers his options.
A robin, stealing a march on the sun, is already singing from the big oak tree in the back yard when she awakens in the darkness from a long, not entirely pleasant dream of climbing. There was someone with her in the dream, but a little behind her, making her aware of her skir
t on the steep hillside. She lies on her back with her eyes open, wondering as usual if his sudden appearance in her mind means that something exciting is happening to him on the other side of the world, or in Washington, or some Pacific island, or wherever he is. It seems possible to her that some people can transmit to each other across vast distances; in fact, she suspects that this ability, if it exists at all, is not limited by space or even by time.
The mental telegrams come quite regularly; not well defined emotions but just signals, like tugs on her skirt. She’s received only one physical communication from him in five years; a postcard from Crete. She has no idea how the message managed to cross an entire planet at war from the Mediterranean to her quiet neighborhood of young families on Powell Avenue, Clark’s Summit, Pennsylvania. He would have arranged it somehow; it was the sort of thing he always managed. The Greek wine was good, the card informed her, and he found the dry climate exhilarating.
She knows very little about Crete, except that it’s an island, and she finds it impossible to picture what he’s doing now. Anyway, she knows vaguely that the Germans have occupied Crete, so he must be elsewhere. He wouldn’t have allowed himself to be caught, even if he’d been there at the time of the invasion. He’s involved with the war somehow, she’s sure. Nothing could have made him miss it, or spend it in an aircraft factory like her husband; but there are so many theaters (the term fitting his outlook so perfectly) in this war that she has no idea where to place him in her imagination. Wherever he is, she’s sure he won’t be marching in a mass of uniformed men shooting their way across France or wading onto a beach of white coral sand with rifles held above their heads. He will have found something more elegant and individual, something that will require him to wear a beret or a silk scarf or, at the other end of the spectrum, to disguise himself as an Indochinese peasant (unthinkable, with his height and coloration, and yet she’s sure he could bring it off) herding water buffalo with a stick while he makes mental notes of Japanese troop movements. She doesn’t know which of the hundred possibilities to hook her thoughts to, and so she’s left with an image of him simply standing and looking at her: tall and sandy-haired, but with incongruously dark eyebrows and the little smile that always seemed to be challenging her to throw something off – convention, obligation, her clothes.
These thoughts cause her to stir under the single sheet in the early darkness, nearly waking up her husband. He’s always restless at this time of the morning, already worrying even in his sleep about the problems of the coming day. Hoping to preserve a few more minutes of mental solitude, she freezes, watching him out of the corner of her eye. He rolls up on his side facing away from her, without waking up, uncovering his broad shoulders and smooth back, which remind her of the night before. She’s afraid she’s pregnant again. In her lower abdomen is a sharp ache that has been growing slowly but steadily for the last three days. She has not, however, mentioned these worries to Peter or anyone else.
By eleven in the morning, the ancient gray flatbed truck of Leo the Italian produce vendor has appeared at the foot of Powell Avenue and chugged its way up the short but steep slope to its usual spot in the middle of the tree-lined block. The young housewives of the neighborhood are clustered around it in their light summer dresses, hoisting the fat cantaloupes to test their ripe aroma and squeezing the dark green zucchini with professional skepticism.
Leo stands near the curved metal pan of his scale, smiling faintly at the young housewives buzzing around his colorful banks of vegetables. Watching him, she realizes to her surprise that it was Leo in her dream this morning, the man climbing slightly behind her. Or was it? Leo couldn’t be more different, physically and stylistically, from the man she might have married. He’s short and dark, wearing wrinkled trousers, a faded beret pulled low over his watchful eyes, and a gray, weary jacket. Black curly hair shows in the V of his white shirt. She’s not unaware of the way his eyes always flicker downward and then back up to her face, and she’s both pleased and embarrassed, though not tempted. But there’s something about his complicit smile, the silent question posed by his raised, dark eyebrows, that reminds her pleasantly of the other man. She handles the produce automatically, selecting apples with her right hand and dropping them into a paper bag held in her left, while her mind continues to examine the tightening clench in her abdomen. She thinks almost with despair of the being she’s sure is growing there, and of her two other young children, whose ceaseless demands already nearly overwhelm her. How can she possibly add a baby to that – the nursing, the diapers, the wailing, the loss of sleep, Bill’s sulking about her lack of interest in sex. More worrisome, she doesn’t remember any such pain from the first two pregnancies.
Leo flashes his sardonic, questioning smile at her. Of course, he uses it on all the housewives, most of whose husbands are away at the war. She keeps her face expressionless. She’s called Dr. Roger, who’s promised to come this morning; meanwhile, she tries to ignore the burning in her abdomen.
“Ruth!” someone calls, and she turns to see Evan, her five-year-old, advancing along the sidewalk with blood dripping down his face from a wound over one eyebrow. Evan is an active boy, and prone to injure himself. He’s not crying, of course – Evan doesn’t cry – but his expression says clearly enough that he expects both immediate medical treatment and praise for his stoicism. In one hand he trails a large cowboy hat of the Tom Mix variety.
“What happened, Lambie?” she says, ignoring the pain in her stomach as she squats in front of him and wipes blood from his cheek with her thumb. “You got blood on your hat.” The wound is in the area above the thick curve of one of his eyebrows, but the streaming blood makes it hard to determine the extent of the damage.
“I hit a rock,” he tells her. There’s something like a smile on his lips as he describes steering his tricycle down the steep, weedy slope of the Carters’ driveway next door, losing control, and slamming into one of the boulders old Jared Carter had placed to mark the edges of the drive. For a five-year-old, he’s sometimes disturbingly self-aware. She can see from his expression that he knows he’s a mildly clownish figure, with the leisurely drip of blood in front of his eyes. But he also wants her to know that he knows.
She takes his hand, slaps the bloody cowboy hat jauntily on her own head, and walks him into the house to the bathroom, leaving the disappointed Leo and the clucking of her friends behind. He sits on the closed lid of the toilet kicking his legs while she rummages in the medicine cabinet for tincture of merthiolate, gauze, adhesive tape. Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, she leans forward to swab off his face, first with tissue and then with a damp washcloth. The bleeding has mostly stopped. “Does it hurt?” she asks him. “No,” he answers, and perhaps it doesn’t. But she knows he’s also pleased by the volume of blood the small wound has generated. She leans forward to examine it more carefully. The edges of cut skin are surprisingly clean and smooth. She swabs again with the washcloth.
“Look at that!” she says curiously. “There’s a little hole right in the middle. I can see the whole inside of your skull. It’s just a big empty space!” She does have the odd sensation that she could see through this opening all the way in to his strange little brain, if only she could clean the hole completely. But it refills with blood over and over, no matter how many times she wipes it away with the washcloth.
She pats at his forehead with a towel to dry it thoroughly, then cuts gauze and adhesive tape with the nail scissors to create a dressing of heroic size and smooths it gently over the cut, pressing the tape firmly around the edges. A single spot of blood immediately appears in the center of the white gauze, but grows no further. His face is level with hers, and he smiles happily at her as she examines her handiwork, pursing her lips with mock seriousness, the brim of the bloody cowboy hat flopping low over her eyes.
“Oh, you!” she says, laughing but feeling like crying, and suddenly reaches forward with both arms to hug him. Downstairs the doorbell rings. It must be Dr. Roger.
The moment of decision has arrived for the bladder, although the sun’s lower rim barely touches the horizon. Its long, long light bathes the landscape in tender gold. But the nagging in his groin has become a scream, swamping the toothache that was only recently so annoying. The smart thing to do, he knows, is just to let it go, piss in his pants without moving a muscle. The gray shoulders and the helmets are closer now; he’s heard voices and the thud of boots less than a hundred yards from his oak tree. But he knows they’ll give up the search at dark, load themselves gratefully into their truck and roar back off to whatever comforts the nearby village can supply, leaving a sentry, maybe two, behind. A sentry or two he can handle. Pissing his pants like a little boy in school, however, is not part of the game.
With enormous care he hitches closer to the tree trunk and turns to face it. He wraps his left arm around the trunk and slowly opens the buttons of his fly one by one with his right hand. The trick here is to pee directly against the trunk, at close range; surface tension and the dryness of the air will prevent any telltale moisture from reaching the ground. For a moment he’s flooded with a great sense of well-being, and the face of the woman he could have married comes to mind again. She’d laugh at the way he’s embracing the coarse skin of the old oak, although he hopes she’d also be appalled by his predicament. As his bladder gratefully empties against the tree trunk, he pictures himself describing this scene to her, the two of them smiling with their wine glasses at a table shadowed by a trellis of grapevines in that outdoor cafe in Iraklion, while Mediterranean breezes twirl the benevolent shades of the Minoans around them...
As the flow dwindles, he glances down along the tree trunk, to reassure himself that all is well. At the foot of the tree, in the dimming light, he sees the top of a helmet and dust-gray shoulders. The German examines something on the back of his left hand for a long moment, then looks up. Their eyes meet.
He still has the general’s Luger in his pocket, but what is the point? Even if he manages to dispatch this one German, there are all the others; at the sound of a shot they’ll mob him like jackals, before he can even get down from the tree. The option of shooting himself to avoid their ministrations is no more in his repertoire than deliberately pissing his pants was, although now he regrets his fastidiousness.
The German shoulders his rifle and points it at him. “Herab!” he shouts. From the tree branch he watches his threatening enemy without moving, frozen by the sudden dissonance of events. The German fires a burst up into the tree; startled by the noise and the ripping of leaves near his head, he loses his grip and falls, hips, legs, ribs banging painfully against the lower branches as he tumbles, catching himself miraculously only on the final horizontal limb, about 10 feet up, where he hangs for a few seconds like a chimpanzee before dropping finally to the dry soil in a puff of dust. The German has backed off to a safe distance, keeping him covered and calling to his comrades.
He realizes that his equipment is still hanging out. In these awkward circumstances it’s a relief to be able to reach down and casually tuck himself back in and rebutton, like any politely inebriated gentleman swaying at a urinal in the men’s room at Sardi’s. He half hopes that the German, whose rifle barrel is trembling a little with tension, will misconstrue his movements and finish him off here and now. He feels a bit weak himself, but still has enough control to reach into his shirt pocket and pull out the pack of cigarettes and the matches, light one up, and then offer the pack to the German, who merely stares at him, keeping the rifle pointed at his belt buckle. He puts the cigarettes away, leans against the trunk of the tree, crosses his arms to still their shaking, and waits. The cigarette smoke is comforting, but a sharp pain on one side of his chest accompanies every inhalation. No matter, he thinks. In this context, a cracked rib or two is about as relevant as a toothache.
The thudding of a multitude of approaching boots tramples the quiet of the evening, and soon a whole squad of German soldiers are pointing their weapons at him and examining him curiously. He wishes there were a little blood to ignore. An officer appears, upright and stiff in his cleaner, tailored uniform, triumphant but casual. Not to be upstaged, he draws deeply on his cigarette despite the pain in his chest, and directs the exhaled smoke upward with a thrust of his lower lip. “Guten Abend, Herr Leutnant,” he says. The shaking is beginning to subside, and already he feels almost calm; this is a game he knows how to play, at least for the time being.
Under the lieutenant’s direction, the soldiers extract the revolver from his pocket and use his own belt to bind his wrists together behind his back. The lieutenant approaches him long enough to remove the cigarette from between his lips and fling it far away, conveying with his expressionless stare that this is only the first, and the least, of many deprivations. Luckily, the truck is not so distant that his beltless pants will fall down before he reaches it. The sun is gone; the soldiers prod him toward the dying moon reclining in a lemon sky just above the dark plane of the sea. We’ll go no more a-roving, he thinks, automatically. It would be noon in Pennsylvania; the moon there nearly invisible, high in the summer sky.
He’s surprised at how easy, how natural it is to stroll through the soft Mediterranean twilight, to ignore the rude jabbing of the rifle barrel, to hum a few bars of something that used to be popular. He’s even enjoying the opportunity to stretch his legs, after the long hours in the tree. But the sharp stab of his cracked ribs, and now also the pointless returning ache of the abscessed molar, remind him a little sadly of his vulnerable body.
She’s surprised and a bit worried at the concern shown by the normally talkative and easygoing Dr. Roger. Once she’d mentioned that she might be pregnant, he’d insisted she go immediately to the hospital, which is in Denton, 30 miles away. She couldn’t do that, she’d told him. There was no one to take care of the children, after all, and no one to drive her, since Bill was already in Denton himself, at work in the airplane factory. Doctor Roger had brushed off her objections and told her he’d drive her himself. He’d walked briskly next door, explained the situation to Evelyn Carter, and recruited her to watch the kids for the afternoon.
“Is this all really necessary?” she’d asked him. “Can’t you just give me something?” But Dr. Roger had loaded her into his rattly old Plymouth without bothering to argue, making her curl up in the back seat with a blanket over her despite the summer heat, gotten behind the wheel himself, and started off down Powell Avenue at a speed she thought was excessive for a residential neighborhood. The whole process had taken less than 10 minutes. The last thing she’d seen of home was Evan standing in the front doorway with the big white bandage on his forehead and a puzzled look on his face. Evelyn Carter’s plump white hand rested protectively on his shoulder.
If she tilts her head back now, she can see clouds and a self-effacing little moon drifting in the blue June sky, along with faster-moving leafy trees, as Dr. Roger roars along the ambling country roads toward Denton. Maybe he’s right, she thinks. The pain has grown rapidly and now occupies the whole center of her body. But maybe it’s just that he’s making such a big deal out of it. The power of suggestion. She was getting along all right before. He’s taking it so seriously, it’s as if he’s given her permission to be sick. It might be more than that, though. The signals from her body seem quite real and insistent, and even under the blanket she feels chilly. She drifts for a while, watching the stately clouds.
Bill is there to meet them at the hospital in Denton, with a frightened look on his face. It’s important to smile at him; but when she sits up she’s overcome with vertigo. It’s far from an unpleasant sensation, quite marvelous actually, as though she were being effortlessly accelerated toward a featherbed of cosmic dimensions. Curious, she lets the softness envelop her.
Strangely, when she opens her eyes after a long and dreamless sleep she’s still in the back seat of Dr. Roger’s car, sitting up, with her feet now on the pavement. Bill has one arm under her legs and the other behind her back, and
is trying to lift her out of the car. For a moment she resents his efforts; it’s been unspeakably delicious to rest. As her vision steadies, though, her loves begin to reconvene, like anxious sparrows settling on a branch. Julia looking up at her from the crib, Evan at the door with his bandage, his eyebrows upcurved in surprise. Bill of course; she’s never seen him look as unguarded as he does now, not even during sex. Even Dr. Roger, she sees, seems to need her attention. He’s wondering if he’s failed, if he should have driven more recklessly. That’s enough of the featherbed, she thinks, a little regretfully. If I go in there again, I might not come back out.
They’ve got her on one of those carts now, rolling her off down a long hallway. Bill watches helplessly. She remembers to smile at him again; beyond that, she’s without volition. There’s nothing she can do about all this. Now she’s surrounded by a green grove of masked doctors and nurses, all of them gazing at her curiously. She’s at their mercy. She suspects that one of the green doctors is about to slice her stomach wide open with a very sharp knife and rummage around in her innards, and she thinks of the time she had to muck out the flooded basement of the house on Powell Avenue. Yet her only emotion is a mild, belated sadness at losing the new baby, and even that is diluting itself in the sharper sense of loss she’d felt earlier, seeing Evan smiling at her from under his silly bandage. Her helplessness makes everything so easy. She’s grateful to have only the one task to focus on.
The face of the anesthetist appears above her, upside down, staring assessingly into her eyes. He’s wearing a tight green cap and a white mask that hides his whole face except for his own eyes and a pair of dark, curving eyebrows. Though she can’t see his mouth, she thinks she can detect a slight smile as he ushers her again toward the featherbed, which now she’s allowed, even required, to embrace.
The Inelegant Universe Page 9