Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  After he had hung up, he lit a cigar stub that had gone out. He watched me through the flame as he puffed to get it going. The man in plain clothes was still jotting his notes when I turned away and started toward a bench on which to sit down and wait. “Just a minute,” the desk sergeant said. “I’d like to ask you a few more questions. Personally.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Twelve years.”

  “Have you been engaging in this practice for long?”

  “I’ve said that that seems to me none of your business.”

  “Well now just wait a second. I could make it my business. I’m only asking these things personally, not as an officer of the law, but I’m not sure that your behavior isn’t a violation of some statute or other at that. Not at all sure. I can still book you if you’re not cooperative, and put bail at five hundred dollars, which you probably can’t scare up in cash at this hour of the night. So why don’t you just try to satisfy the law’s justifiable curiosity?”

  “Am I to understand that you use your job as a cloak for peering into other people’s emotional windows?”

  “He’s got you there, Sarge,” said the man in plain clothes, moving in a little closer with his notebook and pencil. I figured he was making the full official report, and since he had such a friendly face and manner I decided to go along with him. He was a young man of about thirty-five, with a lean ferret face but twinkling blue eyes that you instinctively trusted. The diplomatic thing would clearly be to go along with him as a means of smoothing the whole matter out on an amicable basis. “You accuse the sergeant then of morbid curiosity?” he asked with an extra sparkle in his eye.

  “I wouldn’t accuse him of anything. I just raise the point.”

  “I’m only trying to grasp his exact motivaton,” the sergeant said to him, and then to me, “What exactly do you feel when you steal outside and watch your wife under these conditions instead of inside the house where you’re perfectly free to feast your eyes on her to your heart’s content?”

  “She’s my lawfully wedded spouse, and I have a right to look at her any way I wish.”

  “Do you pretend she’s a stranger or something? That you’ve never seen her before? Or that you don’t live there but it’s somebody else’s house and somebody else’s wife? Or what?”

  “I’ve never thought it through in any such detail. All I can say is, well, it puts a woman in a new light. Gives her a new dimension.”

  “Spices up a relationship. Hops up the domestic grind,” the sergeant said, nodding to himself. “Yes, I can see that.”

  “Gives an old and familiar dish a dash of the garlic of the forbidden,” the other man said. He was evidently the intellectual of the bunch. “Would you say there’s that in it? I mean that part of the thrill is the pleasure of the forbidden? Pretending that you’re an evildoer?”

  “I’ve told you I don’t analyze it that deep. I just don’t go into it. If you want to, go ahead, but leave me out of it. You’re parlaying a little thing into something it was never intended. My original defense still stands. I was picked up for skulking around private property, but it’s my property and I’ll skulk around on it all I goddam please. It’s my right under the Constitution.”

  “But what if everybody did that?” the sergeant asked. “What if this became a universal habit, and all the back yards in town were full of husbands peering at their wives through the bedroom window to give them an extra new dimension? Where would civilization as we know it be then?”

  “I have no idea, and it wouldn’t be my problem in any case. If you’ll excuse me I’ll go outside and wait for my wife. I don’t want her in a place like this.”

  “Have you ever been psychoanalyzed?” the guy in plain clothes asked, following me.

  “Not yet,” I said, going out the door, “but you may drive me to it.”

  “Do you care to amplify your statement about ‘a new dimension’? Define that a little more closely?”

  “No.”

  I was waiting for Elsie at the curb when she drew up, a few minutes later. I hopped in and told her to step on it.

  She accepted without any questions my explanation that I had gone out to check on a noise in the yard, not saying anything to her about it because I didn’t want to frighten her unnecessarily. “Well I’m glad the police department is efficient in some ways,” she said, “even though they nab the wrong person.”

  “I may sue them for false arrest,” I said, not really meaning it, but just to get it off my chest.

  “No don’t, Stan. Forget it. Just stay in the house nights after this. It’ll keep you out of trouble.”

  As it turned out, I stayed in not only nights but days as well for some time to come. Because while my explanation held water on the domestic front, there was a story on page five of the Slow Rapids Blade the next day. The young fellow in plain clothes with the trustworthy eyes taking all those notes was a reporter, as you may of guessed. That I never tumbled is indicative of my state of mind at the time.

  eight

  THE STORY WASN’T featured or played up in any way, and thank God not on page one, but it was long and detailed, and followed by opinions of my behavior from local leading authorities. The reporter had got right on the blower and asked lawyers and judges and psychologists to give their views on exactly what constitutes disturbing the peace, and just how far a man’s privileges on his own property go—to what extent, in other words, a man’s home is his castle. The head of the psychology department at the local college, Polycarp, gave his slant on my behavior.

  “I would say there is nothing morbid in this practice,” his statement ran, “not seriously so at any rate, except to the degree that it may be a kind of fetishism. Although here too we must proceed cautiously. Fetishism, classically defined, is the compulsive use of some inanimate object in attaining sexual gratification, such as a shoe, a lock of hair, an undergarment, etc. Here the object is not any of these, but the naked body, which can, of course, also be associated with sexuality. Perhaps new ground is being broken here, or should be broken in our continuing attempt to understand the whole complicated mechanism of special detail in sexual gratification. Simultaneously, there is another and contrary element to be taken in consideration. In obtaining sight of the sexual object under simulated surreptitious circumstances such as these, there is doubtless also at work the degradation principle; that of making a member of an alliance a temporarily anonymous object, and so reducing her in status, a form of violation in itself. Even more cardinally, perhaps, is the wish to divest her of familiarity as such. The husband symbolically converts her into a stranger. This may be the beginning of a trend. A woman in Pennsylvania was recently granted a divorce on the ground that her husband insisted on giving her a new name each week. These attempts to freshen up a familiar object, even confer a new identity, by imposing a novelty it does not intrinsically possess, is a reversal of the usual function of fantasy. Instead of living in an imaginary world, one makes the real world imaginary. But it remains to be seen whether any new ground is really being broken here, whether the incidents cited are straws in the wind. Certainly a close watch should be kept to ascertain whether a trend is in the making.”

  There were several angry letters from readers, some demanding a return to the McKinley and Coolidge eras when life was less complex, some asking when it would be safe for women to go out on the streets at night. As I say, I kept out of them even during the day except when absolutely necessary, walking and even driving around when I had to in smoked glasses and a soft hat pulled down over one eye. The guys at the office razzed me, talking about what some people will do for hacks, but Stella looked at me askance, casting apprehensive glances at the vault. Finally I said to her one day, “I’m going away on vacation.”

  “You’re going away on vacation?”

  “Yes. For a few weeks. You’re in charge of the office and Art Salerno of the crews. He can do the esti
mating too. And while I’m gone you might be thinking how things aren’t all black and white. There are intermediary grays.”

  “There are intermediary grays?”

  “Oh my God!”

  I went to Florida. But I no more than stepped off the plane than I realized you can’t run away. I telephoned home every evening I was there, which turned out to be exactly three. Then I packed up and went back. That was just as frustrating. Nothing was said about the recent events—which was the trouble. I wanted to talk about them but Elsie wouldn’t. I wished she would tell me what she was really thinking instead of maintaining this patient and enduring—and no doubt Christian—silence. As a sheep before his shearers is dumb. Every time I started to explain the newances of the thing she’d say it wasn’t necessary. She understood. It was perfectly all right. My hunch was she secretly thought any scrape I got into got me that much nearer the fold. In the end I would stumble into the everlasting arms. It was the kid I was most worried about. All he still ever did was grin, so nobody could have the slightest inkling what he was thinking. I’m sure we kept the newspapers from him till that part of the notoriety blew over, and he never brought the subject up himself or gave any hint he had ever heard about it. But it would be too much to ask that he would never in later life learn about his father and the blot on the family escutcheon. That his name had a stigma attached to it.

  Because I soon realized I was a marked man. Most of all from the expressions of the people who tried to be natural about it and laugh it off. They included Art and Lena Salerno. Maybe they did look on the whole thing as a crazy lark to be laughed off. In any case they left early that winter—for Arizona of all places. That was where the firm sent him. They were out of our life. The last we heard was a card saying Art was happy as a clam servicing a flock of vending machines in and around Tucson.

  Conversations at Frank’s tavern weren’t what they use to be, or so I imagined, which came to the same thing as far as my life was concerned. People there, like everywhere else, either avoided me or went out of their way to be nice. Which of these was the more annoying I was never sure. I couldn’t be sure of anything again.

  The drizzle in which summer had passed into fall continued while autumn became winter. But just before Christmas the weather changed, and one Saturday afternoon when the house was full of Elsie’s relatives and mine, all trying to get into the Holiday spirit, it suddenly began to snow. “It reminds me of Poland,” an old aunt of Elsie’s said. They talked of the old country customs, how they had observed the approach of Christmas there in the church and in the home. They did this without trying to tread on anybody’s toes. They knew I was an atheist, and were careful not to say anything to offend me.

  Elsie clapped her hands and said, “Why don’t you all go down now and get your trees together, you menfolk. Take the kids and walk together through the snow to Pete Lubek. He’s got a lot full down by Sycamore Street.”

  “Why, yes,” I said, “I’ll help observe the pagan custom of taking a bit of green into the house, which is one of the heathen odds and ends that the Christian religion was put together out of, some of which also include the birth of a god witnessed by shepherds, a ceremonial last meal—a notion that was knocking around the ancient world before the Galileans took it over—and Poseidon walking on the water, all of them and a lot more adapted from heathen cults flourishing at the time. Sure, let’s go. Get your coats and hats everybody!”

  But throwing myself into the spirit of Christmas didn’t help much, and bursts of enthusiasms always wore off soon. My mood would fall back into one of brooding anxiety and concern, always on Tom’s behalf, always in terms of his future. I didn’t want him to grow up and find he had a name with qualifications passed on to him. Sometimes I thought of moving out of town and setting up a business somewhere far from Slow Rapids. But that was completely impractical, and it would be running away. I wanted to stay here in my home town, somehow, and lick this thing. That was why even though others forgot the incident, or seemed to on the surface, I became more and more obsessed with the idea of clearing my name.

  One evening I picked up the Blade and saw, boxed on the front page, an announcement of a poetry contest. It carried a five hundred dollar prize for the best poem submitted in a competition sponsored by the owner of the paper, Walter Wetzel, in memory of his late wife, who had been a clubwoman and ardent poetry lover herself. Since he wanted to be sure the prize went to something “of a traditional and not experimental nature, in keeping with the tastes of the deceased,” he would judge the contest himself.

  To win such a thing would certainly clear the family name. But for me to write a poem was just as certainly out of the question. Then, slowly, the idea began to creep into my head of using the poem Lena had written me and left behind. Why not? Who would be the wiser? She was out of my life and Slow Rapids was out of hers, forever. She would never hear of it away off there in Arizona, while the honor to the family would clear its name with a little left over—not to mention the five hundred dollars toward the college education I was now more than ever determined Tom would have. He was already in junior high, none too soon to think about it. As for me, the poem was now one of the more useless items among my souvenirs. I typed it over on the office typewriter, signed it, and submitted it with an entry blank cut out of the Blade.

  It won first prize, and I think it won hands down, judging from some of the runners up and honorable mentions they printed along with it. It was splashed on the front page along with a glowing letter from the publisher saying what pleasure it gave him to find he could award the honor to a sonnet “so conspicuously embodying the ancient merits of beauty and meaning which the late Leona Wetzel cherished, and to the end of her life championed against the ugly and the incomprehensible.” Alongside it was a picture of me accepting the five hundred dollar check from Mr. Wetzel.

  I don’t know whose phone began to ring first. Probably his, and not long after the issue hit the streets. Because when I got back to the office after looking at a job there were several messages waiting for me, one from him asking me to call back immediately. The phone rang as I was reading it, and it was Wetzel.

  Thus I learned from an apoplectic publisher what a plagiarist Lena Salerno really was. The best. Wetzel kept spluttering something about Browning, about whom he had just been briefed by readers eager to perform the task for him. Browning I’d heard of, of course, but I hadn’t realized he had a wife who wrote too. I said it was a rotten coincidence, and regretted the whole thing more than I could say. I would certainly give the money back, not being a crook. “It’s not the money anyway, it’s the principle of the thing,” I said.

  There was a statement in the paper the next day, Friday, rescinding the prize and talking about Sonnets from the Portuguese, which enough of his readers were familiar with to make Wetzel proud of the paper and its clientele. There were quite a few letters again. One of them complimented him on his good taste, and said his picking a classic far outweighed his ignorance of its already having been one for a hundred years. One was in my favor. It was from a guy who said he’d rather see somebody steal an old poem than write a new one. But by that time I already had my head in a bottle. And I didn’t take it out till Tuesday morning.

  This was not only the longest single bender I was ever on. There was something else about it.

  Up to now I had never suffered from hangovers. I always had a quick rebound, no morning after regrets, and a head sometimes clear as a bell no matter how much I took aboard. But this time I really did it up brown. The result was that I still hadn’t gotten out of bed by Thursday morning, or Friday, or by the end of that week—or the next.

  Elsie pitched in at the office, doing a surprisingly swell job. She turns out to be a wonderfully efficient woman with a surprisingly good business head. Also a tower of strength in a pinch. She has never bawled me out for what I did, knowing full well why I did it, except to criticize the deed as dishonest and therefore a sin—which was only to be expected
in her case.

  So far I have not only not gone back to the office—I haven’t even been out of the house. The hangover has proved chronic. Again kind friends have come forward with remedies—again the usual ones familiar to everyone—and again to no avail. The nausea, dizziness and headache persist. The room reels every morning when I awaken, and it’s an hour before I can so much as move my head, let alone get out of bed. That I accomplish joint by joint, limb by limb, very slowly, till finally I am on my feet and can stagger down to the bathroom. Because I have moved alone into the little upstairs bedroom we’ve made in the attic, away from callers. Some of these are medical men interested in my case. They have never seen an incurable hangover before. When they are let up it does no good; they are powerless to affect any change whatever in the symptoms. I lie with my face to the wall, no longer interested. All I think is, Now I’ve left a worse stain on the family name than the one I tried to wipe out. Now no girl worth marrying will ever want to marry him. No girl worth wanting will want him.

  Before Elsie goes to the office, she usually leaves a sandwich or something in the icebox for my lunch, which usually as not I have no appetite for. Sometimes when Tom can get away from high school on his lunch hour he’ll run home and fix me a little chicken soup. I can keep that down.

  So the seasons flow into one another, the years come and go, like the tide. Sometimes Tom will try to tempt me with a TV program, or regale me with a tall tale from school, or come to say that Pete Potmesil phoned again to offer to take me for a spin. Spin! With the whole room going around like a carousal. But that is not the point. The point is that I have at last learned what it is all about. It can be put in a word, the sum total of human truth and wisdom. Love. That is everything. We have simply got to learn to put up with this mortal stuff, to make do with one another. Only love enables us to go on. Simple human love that asks no quarter, seeks not itself, is not puffed up. Loyal and abiding love, love that never stints, never begrudges. Love that helps us bear with one another and that makes us do for one another—make sacrifices, even, when the time comes or the occasion calls. That at least I have learned as I sit here thinking of my wife pitching in at the office, and hearing Tom come up the stairs with a little soup for his father. Simple devotion we have got to learn to give or we are through. Sunk. Kaput.