Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  “I have only one secret yen involving pianos. I’d like to drop one off the roof of a building and see what happens. All them wire guts spilling in all directions.”

  “You’re probably very complex,” she says, sizing me up again. “Full of dark impulses and mad desires. But I understand the destructive urge. We all have it in us—creative people most of all. I have a writer friend who has this irresistible urge to drop his typewriter out his fifth-story window. I suppose he’d like to see its innards scattered around on the pavement, on much the same principle as yours.”

  When we had exhausted the subject of stuff we’d like to drop out of windows there was a pause. I took a large, loud gulp, sensing the woman taking me in again.

  “What about this posing?” she said.

  When I left it was with the understanding that I would think it over in terms of when I could work such a thing in et cetera, by which time I got the hint that she meant modeling in the altogether, an anatomy sketch, which in turn had implications to be read into a kiss and some hurried necking on a couch that could plainly be pulled out into a bed. She had a husband who was not on the scene, was all I found out about that. We talked some more about my secret leeric desires and I left.

  The question that remains in my mind to this day is, what if I had jumped in? Would that of had more or less repercushions than the thing that developed out of our preliminary skirmish? I don’t see how it could of produced an explosion as devastating as what resulted from a chain reaction it set in motion indirectly. She led to something worse, like the atom bomb needed to trigger the hydrogen bomb. The man who gobbles sex indiscriminately is not to be justified. He is either a fool or a knave, no two ways about it.

  I went to air my problem with the only person I could let down my hair to—Lena. By that time I had given Art one of the extra set of prints the woman had made. He showed them to Lena, and in doing so must of told her about my going up to the woman’s flat for a drink, because by the time I got to see Lena again she seemed to have the lay of the land and was spoiling for a discussion. “She probably is the lay of the land,” leave it to Lena not to fail to get in with typical malice.

  We were talking the whole thing over like two civilized people early one afternoon at her place. I had walked home from the warehouse for lunch and was walking back when I bumped into Lena as she was turning into her house with her arms full of groceries. Art I had sent on a long haul to Chicago, to give his hernia a rest after the recent exertions. He had strained his milk on the Mendenhall, all right enough, either getting it down the stairs or into the dump. Well he had earned a nice long ride to Chi with five, six easy rooms of furniture and no piano. Lena invited me in for a cup of coffee, either because her scruples about this had changed or her curiosity had proved too much for them, and so there we were now in her living room, hashing over my dilemma. Should I have an affair with this woman? Lena gave her opinion very forthrightly.

  “Show your true masculinity. I said true, not obvious or superficial, or purely animal, masculinity. Show you’re a man not down here,” she said, laying a hand on her loins, “but up here,” laying it on her bosom. She indicated the male heart as best she could through the contents of a jumbo size brassiere. “There lies the true virility.”

  I sat nodding, finishing my coffee as she developed her point.

  “These affairs are always shabby. They get sordid in the end, and found out. They’re bound to. Then they blow up marriages worth two, three times the affair. Oh the jewels that we exchange for bawbles! Then there are the taxing scenes that lay people waist, emotions boiling over, friends in on it and neighbors listening, and finally somebody getting drunk and riding off into the sunset. No, it’s not worth it, Stan. The game isn’t worth the candle.”

  I couldn’t help feeling she was right. The decision to pass this thing up suddenly gave me a warm feeling inside. It rapidly grew into a kind of elation quite unlike anything I had ever experienced before. I was tasting my own merit, along lines laid down by Lena. At the same time I had a sense of compatibility with her that made me positively glow. Who else could I talk to like this? Nobody. Not my wife. I became emotionally drunk with this feeling—that sensation of kinship with another party that is one of the greatest things in life. Impulsively I reached across the coffee table and took her hand. “You’re so right, Lena,” I said.

  She returned the pressure of my grasp, leaning forward out of her chair a little the same way I was. Together we rose and kissed across the table. Holding my mouth to hers, I maneuvered around the table to get closer to her, stretching my neck, our lips sort of corkscrewing together. She mumbled something I didn’t get as I reached blindly to put my arms around her. In doing so I tripped against a table leg and stumbled into her arms, which made her lose her balance and fall backwards onto a sofa, pulling me down on top of her.

  “Oh, Lena.”

  “This has been brewing for a long time.”

  “We tried to fight it but it’s no use. When two people feel that way about each other, what can they do?”

  There were several of those kisses that drain the glue from your joints. I unbuttoned her blouse and reached my hand inside, then into her brassiere, plundering its treasures after managing somehow to unhook it. When I lowered my head to her breast she sat up, not to interrupt what was going on, or rather coming off, but to argue that what we were doing could be perfectly sanctioned on intellectual grounds—that I could rest assured it had every justification.

  “Have you ever read Bertrand Russell?”

  “No I haven’t,” I answered as best I could with my mouth full.

  “Huxley?”

  I shook my head, still feeding.

  “Over there is a book you must read. It’s called Something for Mrs. Grundy. Do you know who Mrs. Grundy was? What the title is taken from, the idea behind the book?”

  Again more mumbles in the negative.

  “Do you mean to sit there and tell me you never heard of Mrs. Grundy? That was never part of your childhood? Why, she’s folklore. ‘What will Mrs. Grundy think?’ ‘Leave something for Mrs. Grundy.’ Kids were told that at supper, to leave a little on their plate to appease her. Well it turns out Mrs. Grundy was a character in an old English play who stood for bluenose disapproval. Conventional censorship of other people’s conduct.”

  I felt a stir that wasn’t amorous, and I guessed Lena was trying to reach over to the table for a cigarette. I kept her firmly pinned down.

  “Funny you never heard that when you were a kid. I did all the time. Anyhoo, that’s the point of the book. That with all our vaunted freedom we’re still scared of Mrs. Grundy. Still afraid of what people will think. Or would think if they knew, which comes to the same thing and is just as strong a check on what are perfectly normal desires for perfectly legitimate pleasures. It’s deeply, deeply embedded in the American conscience due to our Puritan heritage, which has got a strangle hold on us. I want you to read that book. It’ll clear a lot of cobwebs out of your thinking. I know it’s helped me.”

  “But my conscience is clear!” I said coming up for air. “I got no qualms. What are you wasting valuable time preaching to the converted for? I don’t need any convincing.”

  “Nonsense. Didn’t you just have to come and talk to me about your doubts and anxieties over another woman, and you not even in bed with her yet?”

  “I did not! You wormed the whole thing out of me.”

  “Nice worming, that it could come out so easy it proved you wanted to get it off your chest. There was no resistance whatever, only a great eagerness to talk, only a great relief to get it off your chest. No, you’ll be racked with guilt, and I don’t want that. You’d never forgive yourself—and then you’d never forgive me, and then pfft, the end of a fine friendship. You’d end up hating me. Adam has blamed Eve from time immemorial.”

  “Then it goes a hell of a lot farther back than the Mayflower! Why pin everything on this country?”

  She shook her h
ead with a patient laugh. “Stan, Stan, you need work from the ground up. Honest.” She swung her legs out onto the floor and tucked the contents of the rifled blouse back into place. I watched her light a cigarette and pace the floor. Not agitatedly, but thoughtfully, looking at the carpet.

  “I don’t want this to leave a bad taste in anybody’s mouth, Stan,” she said. “Entire couples have come to hate each other because they’ve rushed into something without thinking. And why do you think you can just come barging in here, have a quick matinee and barge off again—like somebody dropping in somewhere for a short beer? Just a matter of refreshment, mere appeasement of the senses. A woman isn’t flattered by that, Stan. We have our pride. We’re not animals.”

  This I understood. This I appreciated. A woman’s pride naturally resists being possessed in a casual way, at least not taking much time. While they enjoy being swept off their feet, they do like preliminaries. They like the overtures to be made with some sort of style, and an affair to be conducted with gestures and flourishes. Plus with Lena this sort of thing is all very well in practice, but what about the theory?

  We agreed to have a rendezvous soon, at a time and place to be agreed on later and in keeping with the facts of the situation. I could slip into her house as I had today, after grabbing a bite of lunch at home, or we could, when weather permitted, meet by the river, though that would have limitations unless we rowed out to a densely wooded island upstream from Slow Rapids. Art I could keep out of town indefinitely by sending him on long distance hauls as long as his hernia held out as an excuse. Certainly in his present condition I would not send him on anything “to Valparaiso.” “Going to Valparaiso” is movers’ ironic slang for a job to be unloaded around the corner from where it’s been loaded, thereby offering no respite in the shape of a ride on the truck. At least it’s Midwestern slang. Out east they probably have a different expression.

  “I got a job booked to Muskegon next week,” I said. “I think Thursday. Could we make it tentatively then?”

  Seeing the amount of plotting and fenagling and sheer botheration I was prepared to go through in order to possess her softened Lena, and she whispered in my ear, “All right,” giving me another kiss. I went into the bathroom to wash the lipstick off my face, neck and even hands, which looked as though I worked in a slaughterhouse, and then after pocketing my homework—the book—I went back to the warehouse.

  I hadn’t read many pages in Something for Mrs. Grundy before I came across several phrases and even ideas Lena had already voiced as her own. If I wasn’t emotionally involved with an adulterer, at least yet, I certainly was with a thief. She never bothered to give anybody credit for anything, or even state a source, but simply tossed off as her own anything she helped herself to. That was why fine thoughts and fancy turns of speech kept cropping up in her conversation, to the embarrassment of all. The material in this book was so familiar to me as filtered through Lena that I saw no real need to read it. I just gave it a skim and put it aside. Why should you have to cram for the sack? It seems to me life is hard enough without that.

  Tom was sitting in the parlor with me, and I turned my attention to him. He had his heels hoisted up on the edge of his chair, and between his knees he was holding a comic, his elbows resting on the arms of the chair. He had a sucker deep in one cheek.

  “Have you ever heard of Mrs. Grundy?” I asked him.

  He shook his head slowly, after the fact that the question was addressed to him had penetrated it, and without removing his eyes from the comic or the lollipop from his cheek.

  “Well she was an imaginary woman people use to be scared of, or at least scare each other into being good with. Kids at least. Well no, grownups too. A superstition. Like the old witch. Or …”

  His mother appeared in the kitchen doorway drying a pan. A figure materializing. She kept an ear cocked not only for my infidel ideas, but for any turn in the conversation that would give me a chance to slip them in. There was now open warfare between us over the kid’s upbringing. If she took him to the mission, I would take him out for a soda and some indoctrination. If she gave him one of her religious tracks, I’d counter with some propaganda of mine in the form of one of the many free-thinking Little Blue Books I got by mail. She started it. I was only asking for equal time.

  “Or a god who looks down at us and writes down everything we do in a book,” I pushed on.

  “There is one, Tom,” she said as he turned a page, “and he knows your every thought. And to him you’ll have to give account some day.”

  “Bunk. When you’re dead you’re dead, and you damn well better live while you can, because you only live once.”

  Elsie came all the way into the parlor. She wore a flowered wrapper and her hair was drawn up in a roll on the exact top of her head. She smiled down at the little fox-faced version of herself with the perpetual grin that was his trademark. He was grinning now, but whether about a development in the comics or something else was hard to say.

  “Wouldn’t it be ridiculous to create something only to have it die?” she said. “Wouldn’t that be foolish, now? Even a child knows that—and a little child shall lead them. These things are hidden from the wise and prudent and revealed unto—”

  “Boobs and sucklings.”

  “Mock all you want.”

  “I am. Life perpetuates itself in offspring. That’s how it doesn’t die,” I said, “and that’s the only way it doesn’t!”

  “Don’t believe him, Tom. No, Tommie. You have an immortal soul that you have to give account of. When you die or when Christ comes on the clouds of glory.”

  “Maybe tonight.”

  “Maybe.”

  I was thinking of that religious nut who predicted the end of the world that spring. He had been patrolling his beat every day downtown. “Where is that pamphlet of his?” I said, shuffling through the pile on the parlor table where everything usually lay in a heap. I finally found it, and now read it really for the first time. “June 11 he claims. That’s today. Well today’s over.”

  “The week of June 11,” Elsie said. “I told you I didn’t approve of trying to predict, but he didn’t say anything more than that. I don’t think either that you can figure these mysteries out—after all it says that Christ will come like a thief in the night, when we least expect it—but there’s no harm in trying. It keeps our minds spiritually occupied.”

  She went back to the kitchen while I read the pamphlet through, wondering if the nut was still downtown parading around with his placard now that it was zero hour. Tom hadn’t raised his head from the comic during the entire discussion. How much had he taken in? How closely did he listen to these debates he seemed to totally ignore? It was hard to say. You couldn’t get under his skin.

  “Put that down!” I barked. “Do you want to be a Polak all your life? Put that down and just listen to this drivel.”

  He put the funnies down with a sigh and paid some attention while I read the nut’s prognostication about the last days. Eschatology it’s called. When I would look up Tom was either licking his sucker or contemplating it for the next lick. The time schedule for the Last Judgment, based on an analysis of the pipe dream in Revelation, was something I didn’t feel the need to reply to, it was its own reply. But when I finished the kid gave a nervous giggle and said, “What if it is true, Pop? You say everything is a mystery we don’t have an answer to, so what if this turns out to be the answer? What will you do then?”

  “He’ll say to the hills ‘Cover us,’ and to the mountains ‘Fall on us,’” came from the kitchen doorway again. “He won’t be such a Bill Blowhard then.”

  I remembered reading an argument by a philosopher named Sidney Hook on this very subject. I tried to explain it to the kid.

  Hook’s reasoning runs that if an unbeliever died and woke up to find there was a God after all, he would still have a right to tell Him, “You didn’t give me enough evidence.” A scofflaw in such a jam could fairly insist that the facts in his possess
ion during his lifetime justified his unbelief, and that if he had it to do all over again he would reach the same conclusion because reason dictated it. If Hook’s logic is valid for something as vague and general as the idea of God, how much more for anything as specific and fantastic as the Second Coming, which is as far down the scale in probability as you can get. To punish a man for failing to draw supernatural conclusions from natural facts would be an injustice for which there is no punishment.

  “That’s what I would say then,” I told Tom. “What Professor Hook says.”

  The kid nodded, regarding his sucker with a grin before poking it back in his mouth. One minute he’d seem to be giving his mother’s notions house room, the next mine. Bed wetting had had a slight revival when his mother began stirring the place up with salvation and sin and heaven and hell, but that had subsided, and he seemed to be doing all right in school again, except that he was constantly being sent to the principal’s office for what he called “injecting a little humor into the discussion.” I didn’t dare look into that too closely, knowing full well what his humor ran to around here. “Ma did you know Pa’s arthritis comes from drinking? He’s stiff in a new joint every night.” Was this kid a Mess? He needed more of his father’s companionship—a decent paternal figure to set an example. I myself had been going to town a little oftener each week, and coming home a little more loaded every night. Why not take the kid with me?

  “Let’s go downtown and see if the nut is still there. Then I’ll buy you a soda.”

  The night was hot, and we sauntered coatless under the maples. Houses were open, people sat on their porches. I glanced into the Salernos as we went by, seeing both Lena and Art behind the lighted curtains. Main Street was half a mile down. The nut was not there. Since this was the only beat he ever worked, he was nowhere.