Desire Provoked

by Tracy Daugherty

“Can you tell me what was in those drums?”

  The boy laughs. “No way of knowing. We get ‘em from all over. California, Texas, Louisiana.”

  “Who do you get them from?”

  “Chemical plants, oil refineries … you’d have to ask my dad.” He makes a loud sucking noise with the bottle.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Bo.”

  “Bo, does your dad know these things are dangerous?”

  “No, man, we steam-clean ‘em before we sell ‘em. Twice. Everything is steam-cleaned twice, kills everything, all the germs and everything.”

  “I’ve got a couple of kids at home who’ve been sick for two months—ever since my wife brought home a barbecue pit made with one of these things.”

  “Hey, we don’t make anything. We just sell ‘em.”

  Adams glances out the dirty window. In the pale sunlight, the sight of the rusty orange drums, with their thin eaten edges, tiny holes like cavities in a child’s teeth, and tarnished yellow rings, makes the back of his neck prickle.

  “When will your dad be back?”

  “Not till tomorrow.”

  Adams nods. A dust devil swirls along the edge of the highway, ripping light weeds from the ground. The collie looks up. “Okay, thanks.”

  “Hey, look, we make sure the things are clean. Maybe your kids have colds or something.”

  “I’ll be back,” Adams says.

  One night several months before their separation, Pamela read to him in bed excerpts from Paul Klee’s diary. “‘I am abstract with memories… What takes place is merely an approximation.’”

  “I admire his orderly mind,” Pamela said. “I aspire to it. He numbered every thought.

  “‘Many variations on the theme Father and Son. A father with his son. A father through his son. A father in the presence of his son. A father proud of his son. A father blesses his son.’”

  The following morning, Adams scribbled on a sheet of tracing paper:

  1) Father removes half-inch pc. yellow chalk from son’s right nostril.

  2) Father ignores wet diaper until son pours oatmeal on radio.

  3) Father teaches son to shoot BB rifle, to consternation of neighbor’s knee.

  The Better Business Bureau confirms that steam-cleaning cannot effectively neutralize all chemical compounds. Drum Corps has been receiving drums from shipyards in the Texas gulf and from a drilling company in Southern California. In addition, medical centers and utility companies have sent them barrels, some of which contain low-level radioactive waste. Traces of benzene, toluene, and sulfuric acid have been found in the “clean” barrels. Seven months ago the bureau issued a warning to Drum Corps. Adams’ efforts have closed them for good. The wholesale warehouse has been fined two thousand dollars.

  Deidre sprawls on the floor reading the adventures of Curious George and Babar, King of the Elephants. Toby wheezes, finishing his homework.

  Pamela stands with Adams over the dead spot in the backyard.

  “I’ve had nightmares,” she says. “The kids’ bones all twisted.”

  The doctors have decided there will be no permanent effects from the exposure, but Adams has dreamed disaster, too: Deidre’s ovaries knotted like thick hard rope, Toby’s lungs exploded like paper sacks. He thinks of their first child, Alan, swimming among molecules as large as billiard balls. He remembers a plastic model of DNA in a college laboratory, the double helix that resembled an unfinished staircase into the hallway of infinity. But he can’t keep his mind on infinity, or Alan, this morning. Babar, King of the Elephants, glows in the dark. Yertle the Turtle, with red unseeing eyes, lights the floor of the sea.

  Part Two

  I WANT them back.

  He wakes with this sentence. He had dreamed of his grandparents, all of whom are dead now. In the dream they were walking, the four of them together, on a rope-and-wooden bridge over a stream in a park heavy with foliage. White feathers rained from the trees and the grandparents were laughing, sharing a bottle of wine with napkins and plastic cups. Adams watched them from a distance, seated at a red cedar table, thinking how much the grandparents could’ve taught him about history, marriage, politics. But when they were alive, he was a small child, not yet ready for their lessons, and he knew in the dream that he couldn’t go to them. He began to regret that for much of his life his timing has been off with people who might’ve proved important. Relations, friends, possible lovers. People he relinquished when circumstances made friendship too difficult.

  I’m not done with them. I want them back. Toby and Deidre too.

  The unfinished business with his children sends him to the kitchen. There’s only a little apple juice left in the refrigerator, so he pours a cup and stands at the window to toast his family, here and gone.

  Pamela’s hair color remains the same (rich auburn), she has gained no weight (one hundred and ten pounds, consistently, since college), but her attitudes are shading into gray, she’s reading more books, and her thoughts are changing her, physically, from the inside out. She looks younger than Adams and talks like someone he has never met. On Saturday she attended a pro-Palestinian rally; she plans to march in protest of American military presence in Honduras.

  “Where are your politics these days?” he asks.

  “On the left, where my heart is.”

  Already he has spent hundreds of dollars on Pamela’s work, and now she’s asked him for a loan. At forty-one thousand a year, with a family of four, he is nearly underwater.

  He sits in front of the TV with a bag of Doritos and a pocket calculator. Frank Gifford informs him that Tom Landry is the only coach the Dallas Cowboys have ever had.

  In the last three years his social security tax has risen from $2,346 a year to $3,407. Even with the latest tax cut he figures to absorb a net loss this year of over six hundred dollars and will have to spend part of his savings.

  The kids’ bills will be about the same—higher dental costs, perhaps—but Pamela is unpredictable. And he never knows when Kenny will have an emergency, like the time he was arrested in Buster Keaton’s old house with three actresses and a bag of coke. One of the women, subletting the house from its current owners, took the rap—“I don’t touch the stuff,” Kenny said—but the incident cost Adams five hundred dollars for bail.

  Before she left, Pamela developed a series of holograms based on the work of Dieter Jung, a German photographer and painter. She had attended an exhibition of Jung’s “Spanned Rainbows,” depictions of light in oil. The word Wirklichkeit occurred to her as she viewed the paintings. “Wirklichkeit means everything we know,” she explained to Adams. “It’s inseparable from Werk, to work, and wirken, to effect.”

  Pamela cherishes her German ancestry (her father’s mother came from Siegen) and, to Adams, her pride recalls their days at the University of Nebraska. Pamela had been a commercial photographer, active in local publishing though only a sophomore, and Adams had distinguished himself as an outstanding student in the geology department. As his graduate studies progressed, he became increasingly interested in contour charts and even secured a number of grants for surveys. At night, in the lobby of her dorm, Pamela discussed her plans with Adams. “Photography’s an art, but I can’t afford to be fancy. I’ve got to earn some money.”

  After graduation Adams went to Alaska for two months on a postdoctoral grant from Conoco, leaving Pamela to finish school. That summer she did freelance work (the AP picked up her shot of lightning striking the state capitol in Lincoln) and took a night course in the history of photography. In August she had a gallery showing with two friends. She had made a series of double exposures—celery superimposed on a farm laborers’ rally—and tinted them, each a different color. Though the response was good, she didn’t take it seriously and concentrated on journalism. Then she got chummy with a few fashion designers for whom she did Sunday-supplement ads.

  The day she returned from the Jung exhibit she leaped and sang. Her eyes narrowed, thin as almonds, and
she played with the ends of her hair. “If you make the viewer aware of the materials of art—the pigment in the paint, the emulsion on the film,” she said, “you’ve performed a critical as well as an artistic act. It’s what I’ve been looking for in my work.”

  Suddenly fashion ads were out. At dinner she lectured him on aesthetics. A grid can be centrifugal or centripetal. When Mondrian paints a vertical and horizontal grid and places it within a diamond-shaped canvas, cutting off the corners of the grid, our view is truncated but we know that the painter’s landscape continues beyond what we can see. On the other hand, grid lines can act as a divider between the world of the canvas and the space that the viewer occupies. The prevalence of the grid in modern art, and its profound ambiguity, reveal the depths to which our century is divided between the sacred and the secular, the inner and outer worlds. The grid is essentially materialistic, of course, despite what Male-vich says about Mind and Spirit or the Greek cross in Ad Reinhardt’s nine-square grids.

  Adams didn’t know what she was talking about.

  She traced the roots of Wirklichkeit. Originally, she discovered, Werk and wirken meant to wrap with wicker. To medieval Germans, the empirical world was woven from a variety of materials, including earth, air, water, and fire. Each man or woman was a knot or straw.

  Next, Pamela tested the limits of her equipment. With nails she scratched patterns on her negatives. On long exposures she alternated light and dark, oscillated color, and formed swirls—like fingerprints or cloth swatches—with different intensities of light.

  Within a month she had borrowed holographic equipment from her friend Cyndi. “A hologram looks three-dimensional, but it’s not. It’s formed by curved space and pulsating light,” she explained. “A map of our cognition.”

  Her first images were conventional: butterflies, cats, sparkling rocks, each structured like a feather. One chilly night in February, sleet pelting the windows, Pamela called Adams into the garage. “Look,” she said, switching off the light.

  In the air, twisting above the vise grip, the word Wirklichkeit. Aquamarine. Wrapped in wicker. Rippling like a wave, or Adams’ breath.

  She was making progress. It made him uneasy.

  Adams asks Carter’s secretary, whose name is Jill, to dinner. She accepts. He makes reservations for two at the Ivory Rose, which has the best Indian food in town. It turns out that Jill is, like Adams, a world traveler. Over curry and chutney she tells him she once had an Algerian lover. In Algeria there were no working toilets. She had to squat over an open hole, wipe herself with her left hand.

  Since returning from Algeria she has attended a number of est seminars. “I was raised a Baptist, but their ideas about women are skewed. I mean, be submissive and all that. Don’t have sex. Shit. Who are they kidding? The Gospel writers—excuse me, this isn’t good dinner conversation, I know—but they didn’t have to walk around with tampons between their legs, know what I mean? The preachers don’t know what it’s like. So I figure, whatever the church says about women’s bodies and sexual behavior and all that, they don’t know the first thing. Those decisions I make for myself, est is hokey in a lot of ways, but they let you make up your own mind, and you can walk away anytime you like.” She sugars her tea. “A lot of people are turned off by est.”

  “I don’t know much about it.”

  “Be honest. What did you think when I brought it up?”

  “I wondered if you were—”

  “A fruitcake, right? Be honest.”

  “Yes,” Adams says. “I did.”

  “That’s okay. est has that reputation, but it’s an easy target, you see. Anything really personal is easy to laugh at, don’t you think?”

  “Sure, because nobody knows what it is.”

  “Exactly.” She looks away, suddenly shy. “I’m sorry, Sam, I probably am coming on like a fruitcake. It’s been a long week, you know? I haven’t had a chance to unwind.”

  “It’s okay. I’m enjoying it.”

  “Me, too.” She smiles. “I just don’t want you to think I’m one of those dizzy secretaries or anything. Actually, I think est is pretty stupid. It gave me something to do when I first got back to the States. What really interests me is the stock market. I watched it for a year, then started investing. Made thirty-two hundred bucks the first five months.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “You got to watch these high-tech industries. They’re springing up everywhere and if you hit the right one you’re off and sailing, but lots of them go bust right away. I wish I’d been old enough to get in on air conditioning in the early days. That’s the place to be. What about you?” she says. “What are your values in life?”

  The question is troublesome, but not without charm. “I like my work,” he says.

  “Yeah, but Carter’s a smoothie, isn’t he? I could see him in the Nixon administration or something. He’ll make a lot of money for the company, but I wouldn’t vouch for his ways and means.”

  “I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels that way.”

  At home, Adams offers her Drambuie. For the first time he looks carefully at her body. He’d found her attractive at work, but any slender woman with blond hair who is the boss’s secretary achieves a kind of status. He senses that, in sexual matters, she is not a patient woman.

  Her left shoe has come off. Discreetly, Adams nudges the shoe away from her foot. “Would you like to go to bed?”

  “Yes, I think so.” She places her glass on the coffee table. “We should make a process note first.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s kind of silly, but sometimes you learn something. We should admit to each other, honestly, how this evening affected us.”

  “All right.”

  “How do you feel,” she asks.

  “Fine.”

  “Can you elaborate?”

  “I’d like to make love to you.”

  She wants to know why. Adams doesn’t say anything. She accepts that.

  Chopping vegetables for the children’s dinner, Adams listens tight-lipped to Toby complain about congestion in his chest.

  “Mom gets me these pills.”

  “What kind of pills?”

  “Oxydol, I think.”

  “That’s a detergent, Toby. What about an antihistamine?”

  “They don’t work.”

  His seditious illness. When he was smaller, rather than do what Adams said, he gasped like a sun-bleached fish. I was born wrong, his face seemed to say. “I’ll dream for you a day of air,” Adams promised. “Leaping, running, baseballs falling slowly in the blue, blue sky.” But at night his lungs glowed blue with exertion through the sheets. This was Toby’s way of fighting him. Adams thought of Alan, pink fists flailing in the air, waving good-bye.

  Deidre’s body is as strong as a missile. Setting the table, she stretches as if health were as easy to hold as a fork. But Adams anticipates failure. He pictures Deidre a few years older, chipping away at her body piece by piece with PCP and pot, group sex and artificial coloring agents. Driving her home from dance class one evening in late winter, he passed a young boy walking barefoot in the snow, shirt unbuttoned, mouth open to the cold and sleet. Deidre pointed, frightened. “What’s wrong with him, Dad?” Adams pulled up beside him, rolling down his window. “Are you all right?” he said. “Can we help you?” The boy didn’t even know they were there. He plowed through drifts of snow, flapping his arms in the headlights.

  “Is he crazy?” Deidre said.

  “I think he’s taken some kind of drug.”

  They followed him slowly for half a block, then three squad cars surrounded him in the middle of the street, spotlighting him with their flashing lights. He put his arms over his eyes and began to scream; four policemen were needed to subdue him. Deidre started to cry. For a long time after that she refused to take even aspirin, and is still wary of medicines, but Adams, exercising his fatherly right, imagines the worst for her teenage years.

  Isohyet, from t
he Greek: isos, equal; hyetos, rain. A line drawn on a map to indicate equal rainfall along its length.

  Twice a year the employees of On-Line Information Systems are required to see the company psychologist, a muttering, bent man named Mayer. He does not submit anyone to rigorous testing, merely asks questions related to work. A week later he types a psychological profile of each employee, listing his/her managerial strengths, social limitations, etc. In rare cases he recommends that someone attend a personal growth seminar, tax-deductible.

  Adams is scheduled for Monday morning at eleven. At 10:55 he sits waiting in the foyer. Jordan bolts from Dr. Mayer’s office.

  “What’s the matter with him,” Adams asks.

  “Nothing, nothing,” the doctor says.

  “Bad day?”

  “He’s under a bit of a strain right now. As who isn’t?” Mayer says.

  “I’ve been worried about him for a long time.” “Oh?”

  “Yeah. He seems a little weird to me.”

  “You all know I’m here. If he’s having problems, he knows where to come.”

  Adams nods. “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, but I think he’s been standing in my yard.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, not lately. But I’m sure it was him. And there’s nothing to see, I mean, I don’t know what he was looking for. It gave me the creeps. I called the police but they wouldn’t do anything.”

  “Have you spoken to him about it?”

  “He denies it.” Jordan, in fact, had merely laughed in his typical offhand manner.

  “Let me know if you see him again.”

  The doctor asks Adams a series of questions, such as, “When you are under deadline pressure and fear you won’t make it, do you (a) give up, (b) request an extension, (c) work harder to finish, (d) other.”

  The following Monday, Adams receives his profile in the interoffice mail: “A conscientious worker and careful listener. A tendency toward abstraction, even in the most casual conversations. Best production when allowed to proceed at his own pace, though he responds well to pressure. Uncomfortable in groups, prefers to work alone.”