“Do you love me?” Julie asked, as the boat rocked in the swell, Rusty thumping around on deck overhead.
“How do you mean that?”
“I mean, is it worth it to try to stick together? Marriages have their rough passages. It’s only worth it if there’s love. If there isn’t, why waste time trying to patch this up.”
“Do you love me?”
“I asked first.”
“How come I’m the one who has to say if I love you or not? Why is it always up to me?”
There was a loud thump above, like somebody kicking the side, and then Rusty let out a cry, “Oh shoot!” I poked my head up out of the hatch. “It’s the steering thing,” he said. The tiller had broken off and was now bobbing in our wake. I told him to lash an oar in its place and come around and retrieve the tiller, and I ducked back down into the cabin. Julie was sitting on the bunk, her back to the bulkhead, her trim brown legs drawn up.
“I better go up and help Rusty,” I said.
“You can’t run away, Danny,” she said. “It’s a simple question. Do you love me or not? What’s so hard about that?”
I flopped down on the chair. “Why can’t we converse about this in a calm friendly way instead of getting into a shooting match over every little thing—”
“A little thing,” she said. “Our love. A little thing. Oh right. Sure. Great way to start off a vacation. Our love, a little thing.”
There was a loud cra-a-a-ack above, like a sequoia falling, and a muffled splash. I stuck my head up. The sail was gone, and the mast. “I was gonna turn right and the whole thing broke and fell off,” he said, shaking his head. “Boy, that was something!” He shrugged and grinned, like he’d just burned the toast. “Oh well, we still got a motor.” I told him to come about and retrieve the sail and mast and then head for port.
I told Julie that we had serious problems above and maybe we should postpone our talk. She said we had been postponing it for twenty years.
I was about to tell her how full of balloon juice she was, and then I heard the motor turn over, a dry raspy sound, like gravel going down a chute, and I realized the Susy Q was going nowhere. Still, it wasn’t as aggravating as Miss Priss there, sitting and telling me about my marriage.
“Dave recommended a great book to me and it opened my eyes. The Silent Chrysalis. I read it twice. Danny, in some way my love for you is a symptom of my denial of myself, an attempt to make myself invisible.”
The starter cranked over once and wheezed and coughed a deep dry cough.
Julie’s eyes locked with mine. “We need to change that love from something angry to a mature love,” she said. “I can’t use you as an instrument of my self-hatred.”
What is that supposed to mean? I asked.
“Dave thinks you’re trapped in a lingering infantile narcissism, like a lot of guys. I don’t know. I can’t speak to that. Only you can.”
How does a stationery-store clerk suddenly become the expert on American men? I wondered, but then Rusty’s face appeared in the hatch, a mite taut around the eyes. “We may have to ditch the boat in a minute, you guys. We’re coming real close to the reef, I think. The water looks sort of bubbly out there.”
Julie grabbed my arm when I got up to go topside. “You’re not going to just walk away from this one, Danny. You’re going to face up to what’s wrong, which is your selfishness. Your selfishness is a fact, Danny. Let’s stop denying it. Let’s deal with it.”
Rusty’s voice was hoarse. “Come on, folks.”
I poked my head up. The Great Navigator had an odd horrified expression on his face, and his chin was aquiver. He wore an orange life jacket. “Want me to take the helm?” I asked.
“No helm left to take, and there’s big jagged rocks up ahead, folks, so if you see a cushion, better grab on to it. This is not a test.”
There was a distant roar of waves that was not as distant as before.
I ducked down and told Julie we were about to abandon ship. “If you can’t deal with the truth, Danny, then I can’t be married to you,” said Julie, softly. “I don’t want a marriage based on a lie.”
I was just about to tell her that she wouldn’t have that problem much longer, when there was a jagged ripping tearing crunching sound from just below our feet, and the boat lurched to a dead stop. Water began boiling up from below. I grabbed Julie and hoisted her through the hatch, grabbed a carry-on bag and a couple cushions, and took Julie by the hand, and we jumped into the water. Rusty was already on shore, waving to us. It was shallow, all right; the water frothed around our feet on the jagged coral, but it wasn’t too hard wading in to shore, a beautiful white sandy beach that curved around and around a very pretty island—uninhabited, we soon discovered. “Well,” said Rusty, “looks like you guys may get a little more than two weeks. Nice place, too.” And he glanced down at Julie. Her T-shirt was wet from the surf, and her breasts shone through. He looked at her a long time, I thought.
We made a hut from palm fronds and the jibsail. Julie had brought her purse and suntan oil and four books about marriage and communication, and I had dragged in our suitcase and a bottle of Campari, and Rusty had salvaged the oregano, sweet basil, rosemary, chives, coriander, cayenne pepper, paprika, orange zest, nutmeg, cinnamon, pine nuts, bay leaf, marjoram, tarragon, caraway, and saffron.
“The boat sinks and you rescue the spice rack?” I cried. “You’re the captain and your boat goes down and you come ashore with the spice rack?”
Rusty looked at Julie. “Just because we’re marooned on an island doesn’t mean the food has to be bland and tasteless,” he said.
She nodded. “It’s no dumber than bringing a bottle of Campari. You don’t like Campari,” she said. “You only like beer.”
And an hour later, Julie had made beds out of pine boughs and Rusty had carved a salad bowl from a stump and tossed a salad in it—“Just some ferns and breadfruit and hearts of palm,” he said. He had also baked a kelp casserole over an open fire. Julie thought it was the best salad in salad history. Actually, it was okay. “And this casserole!” she cried. “I have never tasted kelp that tasted like this kelp tastes. What’s the secret?”
“Paprika,” he said.
Julie couldn’t get over it. She said, “Danny couldn’t even boil an egg. I kept offering to teach him, but he never wanted to learn.”
It was hard not to notice that she was talking about me in the past tense.
“No, Danny couldn’t have made a salad like this in a million years. Are you kidding? Not him,” she chortled. “No, no, no, no, no.”
We sat under the palm tree as the sun went down, and Julie and Rusty talked about the American novel, how they didn’t care for Updike, who had never written strong women characters and was hung up on male menopause and had no ear for dialogue.
“No ear for dialogue?” I cried.
“No ear for dialogue,” she said.
“John Updike? No ear for dialogue? Are you kidding me? Updike? That’s what you said, right? Updike? His dialogue? No ear?”
“He has none,” she said.
“None. Updike.”
“Right.”
“I can’t believe this,” I said. “You’re sitting here under this palm tree and saying that John Updike—the John Updike, who wrote the Rabbit books—that he has no ear for dialogue? Tell me something. If John Updike has no ear for dialogue, then who do you think does have an ear for dialogue?”
Rusty looked at Julie. “Maya Angelou. Alice Walker. Doris Lessing,” he said.
“Doris Lessing,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “Doris Lessing.”
“An ear for dialogue,” I said. I stood up. “You know, I must be going deaf, but I could swear you just said Doris Lessing. Or did you say Arthur Schlesinger?” I kicked a little dirt toward Rusty.
“I said, Doris Lessing,” he said.
It was the first of many discussions where I was in the minority. One morning, over a dried-seaweed breakfast, Julie said s
he thought there is such a thing as a “masculine personality” and that it is basically controlling and violent. Rusty agreed. “But some of us are working to change that,” he said. Julie felt that men are inherently competitive, i.e. linear, hierarchical, and women are circular, i.e. radiant. “I never thought of it that way before,” said Rusty. Julie and Rusty started meditating together every morning, sitting on the beach facing the east. “Hey, mind if I sit in?” I said, cheerfully.
Julie squinted up at me. “I think you’d block the unity of the experience,” she said.
Rusty nodded.
“Well, far be it from me to block anyone’s unity,” I said, and walked away.
That night, Julie and Rusty were cooking a bark soup and she looked up at me and said, “Rusty is such an inspiration. I’m glad this happened.”
I grabbed her arm. “This numbskull who ran the boat onto the rock is an inspiration?”
Rusty confronted me later that night, after Julie went to sleep. “I’ve decided to take Julie away from you,” he said. “You two do nothing but fight, and she’s obviously attracted to me, so if she and I paired up, at least there’d be two happy people on this island. It makes more sense that way. Two out of three isn’t bad. So why don’t you go and sleep in the jungle someplace. This tent is for Julie and me.”
I said, “Okay, you’re right,” and I turned and bent down and picked up my Campari bottle and then whirled and swung it straight up into his nuts and he staggered back and I threw a handful of dirt in his eyes. He bent down, blinded, and I kicked him as hard as I could in the gut, and he went whooomph, like a needle sliding across a record, and down he went, and I picked him up and threw him into the ocean and suddenly the water was whipped to a froth by thousands of tiny carnivorous fish and the frenzy went on for a half a minute and subsided and whatever was left of Rusty sank bubbling to the bottom.
It wasn’t the Zen way but it got the job done.
Julie was distraught in the morning. She dashed around the island screaming his name. “What have you done to him, Danny?” she shrieked.
“He fell in the water and the fish ate him,” I said.
“You killed him!”
“Nothing ever dies. He is at one with the fish.”
Two weeks later, when the big cruise ship saw us and anchored a half-mile to leeward and sent in a launch to take us off, Julie had calmed down and was almost ready to talk to me again. I could tell. I yelled up to her where she sat on the ledge of the rocky promontory, “You know something? I think the secret of marriage is that you can’t change the person you love. You have to love that person the way he or she is. Well, here I am!”
“You got that out of a book,” she called back. It was the first time she’d spoken to me in two weeks.
A man in officer whites with big tufts of hair on his chest was on the launch. He said, “You the couple who went down with the Susy Q? Where’s the captain?”
“He drowned,” I said. Julie said nothing. She still has said nothing about Rusty to me at all, and nothing about our marriage, but we have had sex more often than any time since we were twenty-four. It has been nice. I definitely think there is a vital connection between anger and an exciting sex life.
When we got back to the States, I saw a newspaper in the Newark airport with a picture of Dave on the front page glowering at the photographer and trying to stiff-arm him. He had been arrested for fondling a couple of fifteen-year-old girls in his swimming pool at his birthday party and was charged with six counts of sexual assault. I chuckled, but it was a low chuckle, and Julie didn’t hear it. We were back two days and a publisher offered me $50,000 for a book about our “desert-island” experience. “Nah,” I said, “nothing happened. Worst part was having to go around in a wet bathing suit.” Since returning, I have done little except be a help and a support to Dave and Julie and the whole Grebe family. I have been a monster of pity and understanding and quiet strength. I have been there for them every moment in their terrible suffering. Dave sat weeping in our kitchen and told us, “I’ve been under so much stress, and it was like it was somebody else unfastening those girls’ straps, and I was only watching.” I said, “Don’t feel you have to talk about it.” He told me that he didn’t know what he would ever do without the strength I gave him in this awful crisis. “It’s my pleasure,” I said, sincerely.
DON GIOVANNI
arriage takes too much out of a man, says the old seducer through a cloud of cigarette smoke. Marriage is an enormous drain on a man’s time and energy, it produces continual deficits, it reduces him to silliness and servility, it is the deathbed of romance. Figaro, my friend, a man owes it to himself to stop and consider the three advantages of the single life.
One, if you’re single, you can think. Two, you can act. Three, you can feel.
Probably there are other advantages, but those three surely are important, yes?
Think about it. There is never a substitute for freedom, and there is no prison so deadly as a life of unnecessities, which is what marriage is. A woman takes over a man’s life and turns it to her own ends. She heaps up his plate with stones, she fills his bed with anxiety, she destroys his peace so that he hardly remembers it.
But even a married man knows what he should have done. You should find a cheap place to live—who needs a mansion? You put your money in the bank and you furnish your place as you please, with your own junk and great bargains from auctions. You come and go, you eat when you’re hungry, you stay up late, you get drunk as it pleases you, and you have two or three terrific lovers who visit when you invite them and stay about the right length of time.
Enjoy yourself. That’s what we’re here for.
Some men should have two lovers, some three, it depends on the man, said the Don. Never limit yourself to one: monogamy leads to matrimony, and marriage, my boy, is pure struggle. Of course the single life has problems—having two lovers is a scheduling problem, and three is a real test of a man’s organizational ability, and yet those are the very problems a man hopes for, Figaro. Living alone in a cushy old apartment with your friendly Jamaican housekeeper coming on Fridays to put a shine on things, the corner laundry delivering clean clothes on Wednesdays, and your girlfriends dropping in on various evenings, each of them crazy about you, anxious to please—you know how accommodating young women can be when they want to be. Think of having three like that at once, their eyes alight at the sight of you, their lips moist, the flush of desire on their cheeks. Sound good? My, yes. The Don smiled at the thought.
“No woman would accept such an arrangement. You would have to lie to her,” said Figaro.
Yes, certainly, said the Don.
“To lie to three women at once? To keep inventing stories about where you went? Is that nice?”
The girls who share my bed want to share my life, said the Don, and that would leave me no life at all.
“But to be so selfish—what if everyone were? What if your parents had been?”
I am selfish, Figaro, because I have a larger capacity for pleasure than other people do. Pleasure is only a hobby to them and to me it is a true vocation: the joy of eating a sumptuous meal in the company of a sharp-tongued woman who secretly adores me—who argues with me and ridicules my politics and my ideas, the things I don’t care about, and who, in a couple hours, will lie happily next to me, damp and drowsy, smiling, this is to me the beauty of the male existence. As for my parents, what they did wasn’t my responsibility.
Figaro had dropped in to see his old friend at the Sportsman’s Bar in Fargo, where the Don was engaged for three weeks to play the piano. Figaro had moved to Fargo with Susanna shortly after their marriage, and he had not laid eyes on the Don since he had attempted to seduce Susanna on their wedding night—one of those cases of mistaken identity in dimly lit places, so Figaro bore no grudge.
The Sportsman was an old dive near the Great Northern yards where the switching crews liked to duck in for a bump of whiskey on their coffee breaks. It was n
ot a place you would bring a woman, Figaro thought, and any woman you might find in there you wouldn’t want to know better. The little marquee out front said, “BBQ Beef S’Wich $1.95 Happy Hour 4–6 Two Drinks for Price of One D G’vanni in Hunters Lounge Nitely.” When Figaro stepped into the gloom, the cloud of beer and smoke and grease, he heard someone playing “Glow Worm,” and recognized the Don’s florid glissandos, the tremors and trills, the quavers and dips, the big purple chords rising, the mists, the Spanish moss, the grape arbor in the moonlight, the sighs, the throbbing of the thrush. The Don sat all big and glittery at the keyboard in the rear of the deserted room, in an iridescent silver jacket that picked up every speck of light from the sixty-watt spotlight overhead. The silver threads went nicely with the Don’s flowing bleached-blonde hair and the gaudy rings on his fingers, chosen for maximum sparkle. Six rings and six chunks of diamond, a ruby-studded bolero tie, a silver satin shirt with pearl buttons, and silver-and-turquoise earrings.
He looked much the worse for wear, Figaro thought, as if he had been living in these clothes for a number of days, including some rainy ones, but he was full of beans, as always. He told Figaro he would soon be back in New York, where a big recording contract was in the offing, a major label, large sums of cash that he was not at liberty to disclose—he rubbed his fingers together to suggest the heavy dough involved—the people were secretive types, you understand, said the Don.
“And you? How are you? Have you found a wife yet?” asked Figaro.
The Don laughed. It was their old joke.
Marriage looks very appealing until you are in the company of married people and then the horrors of the institution cry out to you, said the Don. Marriage is for women, Figaro, ugly women. It makes no sense for men. It never did.
The married guy has to have an airtight explanation for everything he does by himself. If he wants to go for a walk around the block alone, he has to invent an excuse for not taking his beloved with him. To get up out of his chair and go into the kitchen and run a glass of tap water, he has to announce this to his wife, like a child in the third grade, or else she will say, “Where are you going? To the kitchen? For a glass of tap water? Fine. Why can’t you say so? Why do you always just wander away without saying a word? You wouldn’t treat anybody else that way. How do I know if you’re going to the kitchen or going to New Orleans for a week? And it would’ve been nice if you’d offered to bring me something from the kitchen. If you loved me, you’d think of these things. But no. You just get up and walk away. I could be sitting here dying and you’d never notice.” And then she bursts into tears, grieving for herself and her future death. This is marriage, Figaro.
The Book of Guys Page 10