by John Crowley
Stan, looking within, as people tend to do in the course of conversations like this one, sensed an odd vacuity or absence down there where the old tripartite unit ought to be felt. Maybe he really was getting superannuated. My get up and go got up and went. Or maybe his wasn’t the attitude that needed changing. “It seems, I don’t know, a little shaming,” he said.
“Oh cut it out, Stan.” Dr. Beha finished his drink, shook the ice in the glass, and sipped again; then put it down. “Come by the office,” he said. “I have a passel of free samples. Try it out and see if it’s for you.”
Stan knew himself to be a hypochondriac, or at least frequently fussed about his health, but his hypochondria consisted mostly not in talking himself into believing he was sick but in obsessive recountings of the good reasons why he surely wasn’t. Sort of a glass-half-full hypochondria, Terry thought. The idea of a new pill with sudden major effects and unknown consequences set off his alarms, even as it stirred his hopes. Dr. Beha said—as on an afternoon of the following week he handed over a blister pack of four pills—that he understood porn stars used it, to reliably get wood (their term, good Lord). Dr. Beha had a way of being cheerfully frank, no harm in it really; before he’d done Stan’s vasectomy long ago he’d told him that it was usual at this point to give some psychological counseling, but he’d never seen that it made a difference, and so with Stan’s permission he’d skip it.
Get wood. Of course Terry couldn’t be told; he’d have to keep it from her; she mistrusted any resort to pills, she hadn’t wanted the HRT at all until her situation got so bad, and he was sure a sex pill would turn her off entirely, she’d be disgusted with him for falling for it. But then what if he had a bad reaction in her presence, fainted or something, how would he explain? What if he counted on a night’s certainty of its working and then it didn’t? How much could worry about the pill’s effects actually offset the effects? Driving the deeply familiar curling road back up from the valley in the softening light, Stan fell into that late-afternoon flow of word and image, logicless and dreamlike. He pictured himself, or saw someone like him, fired up and eager, grinning as he popped his pill, young wife in a baby-doll so happy for him. Nubile. His old-coot habit of letting something lie where he’d put it down, or putting it carelessly away, on the assumption he’d remember later what he’d done with it—what if he hid his new pills and then forgot where he put them? Yes, hold on a minute, honey, I’ll be right there. Stan turned downward onto the village road, feeling like the town would be shocked to know what he had in his pocket, if it could only know it; but why would he think that? Maybe in every old couple’s bathroom drawer.
Said the old coot on his way to Niagara
To his young wife, “Just can’t wait till I shag ya!”
He’s sure he’ll get wood!
But his memory’s no good
And he’ll find he forgot the
Stan swerved a little sharply to avoid an SUV appearing before him at a turning, using up more than its lane. Ugly fatass cars, why were they so selfish, alpha male at the wheel, Stan realized he actually knew the guy. Heart quickened, he settled down and made it home.
The pills were pretty things, kite-shaped and softly rounded, a dull azure. The long microscopically small list of warnings and side effects stirred Stan’s fears; he’d need a magnifier to read them, and so didn’t. He revolved in his mind the right time to swallow the first of the pills—apparently it took a while to kick in, so to speak, longer in fact than any sex act he was likely to be capable of, hopped up or not, it’d be all over or given up on well before he got the help; he’d have to take it in anticipation, or expectation. Or hope. Would he remember that he’d put them in this old travel shaving kit? Some other place better?
“Hi, babe, you here?”
It was Terry, entering the house on little cat feet; she trod lightly on the earth, disconcerting sometimes actually.
“Yes! Be right there!”
“How was your doctor?” she called, coming closer.
“Oh, fine.”
“The thing you were worried about?”
“That? Oh, nothing. He said treating it would be just a bother, it’ll pass.”
“Oh.” Terry at the door of the bathroom regarded him, smiling just barely, her thoughts unreadable. She wore a loose cotton sundress he hadn’t seen on her in years; once he’d told her he thought it was sexy, which amazed her. What was sexy about it? It was sexy, he’d said, because it looks like it would come off easily.
The summer solstice had passed but the sky was light till late, by now you were used to it as though it had always been so; the last dim blue at nine o’clock and then stars and then a golden moon appearing in their bedroom window as though taking turns coming on stage.
In the dark of the morning Stan got up to pee, and on an impulse dug out the pills from where he’d put them, and took one. He went back to bed and lay open-eyed on his pillow, waiting. He heard thunder, or thought he did: trucks down on the road? No, there it was again, thunder, a dull far-off throat-clearing. First of the spring. Harry Watroba had told him that in many American Indian languages birds are related to thunder. Because when they go away in the fall the thunder stops; it begins again when they return. Makes sense. Thunderbirds, arising at its rumble, up from the dark mountain’s slopes into the red air. You could see, from these ramparts, the lightning dully flaring. No, said Harry: bombs. The bombs are falling out there, see, coming closer, the birds fleeing.
Stan awoke as though shaken, feeling weird, not himself, and couldn’t think why. Ill? Fever? None of that.
Oh yes the pill.
He was erect, as often after morning dreams, but good Lord the thing was hard as a broom handle, feeling to his touch to be not his but as though affixed to him. It seemed to be of no mind to go down. Stan felt like giggling. And now what? Tap Terry on the shoulder, make her look?
She rolled over and woke. “Oh God it’s late. I have to get up.”
“It’s Saturday,” Stan said.
“Oh right. Oh good.” She rolled back, and went back to sleep. Stan waited, sensing an impatience in his magic power, like it might evaporate, but if it worked as promised he could worry about that and it wouldn’t have any deflating effect, and so he didn’t worry. For a time he lay quietly and listened to her breathe, wondering where she was and what she was doing. She had the most startling and unlikely dreams; sometimes waves of chills would pass over him as he listened to her recount one. Eldritch, Harry called those chills. Awaking again from brief unconsciousness he snuggled up to her, and started in. “Oh,” she said.
“Hi.”
“Hi there.” Smiling, a smile clear and open like her son’s, just the same. Stan kissed her throat, touched her here and there, tried to assess the response he got. It seemed to be going well. Moist and open. Certainly his own side was good, no problem; he nearly laughed. He bent to her ear, whispered things, then gave attention to the parts of her he could reach, looked into her eyes. He was inside then and she was moving beneath him; she seemed, though, somewhat thoughtful or doubtful; he wondered if it was possible for her to discern a difference, from within. She twisted, grasping his arms in her hands, working. All right, he could probably go on for hours, but it began to be clear she wasn’t writhing in delight or the struggle to get off. No, definitely cooling, like molten lava in a nature film ceasing to flow, turning dark and stony. Now she was actually pushing him away, teeth grit and a wild sound in her throat. What? What? She pushed his chest, pulled back her hips, and Stan popped out, astonished, horrified; his knee slipped off the side of the bed and he went over, barely managing not to land on his ass, though ever after when these events passed through his mind it seemed that’s just what he’d done.
“What the hell, Terry! What are you, what.”
“I hate that,” she said, eyes alight with anger. “I hate it when you do all that. You know I hat
e it.”
“All that what?” Stan cried. What had he been doing? Just the stuff, the usual stuff. Sex.
“All this mem-mem-mem,” she said, waggling her fingers in the air to suggest the inappropriate or witless or insensitive things he did and had done and done. “All this, all this myeh-myeh-myeh you do.” She gave up and fell back against the pillow. “Ack.” For a while she only lay staring at nothing. Her rage and her bareness consorted badly. It was the first time in all the years they’d lived together that she reminded Stan of his first wife.
“I try,” he said, “to do what you want.”
“You never knew how to do what I want.”
“Never?”
She said nothing.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Stan asked. He stooped to pull on his shorts. Tucking in the rejected tool, its head now hanging, but still engorged. “Why?”
“I did tell you.”
“You didn’t tell me,” he said. “You only ever told me—sometimes you let me know what you didn’t like. That’s different.” He waggled his fingers at her, miming her disgust. “No mem-mem-mem. Well, I don’t know what you mean by mem-mem-mem,” he said. “Myeh-myeh-myeh.”
She laughed a little, relenting, and moved within the sheets.
“You can’t teach somebody something by negatives,” he said. It was a key doctrine of Human Resources, in which he’d worked so long. Terry’d heard him say it before; he wondered now how often. “Can’t get somebody to do right by telling them they’re wrong. There are too many ways to be wrong. Over against one way to be right.”
“I didn’t want to teach you,” she said. “I wanted you to just know.”
Breeze lifted the lace curtain at the window in a gentle arc.
I wanted you to just know. Well, that made a kind of awful sense. She said no more, he sat down on the bed, the two of them in the strange air of having said unsayable things.
“This was all along?” Stan asked.
Terry sighed, covered her eyes with her hands.
“I’m not inside your head,” Stan said. “I mean there’s always a certain amount of guesswork. I did what I thought you liked. I can’t feel the effects of it.”
“I’ll make coffee,” Terry said.
Stan watched her climb from the bed, draw on a pair of sweat pants and yesterday’s shirt. She wasn’t looking his way.
“I love you, Stan,” she said at the bedroom door, but not looking back at him where he sat. “I always will.”
He listened to her feet on the stairs, the old stairs crackling faintly as she went down.
What the hell, he thought, now what the hell. What an awful thing to do, no matter what. Wasn’t it? A wave of some black cataclysmic kind seemed to rise up behind or before him, then recede, but not vanish, not now or ever after.
He noticed that the daylight growing in the room seemed a strange shade of blue. Just spring advancing? No, couldn’t be. He turned on the lamp by the bed, and its bulb burned blue as a Christmas light.
What was he supposed to do, was he supposed to do something, mend his ways somehow? What were his ways? Myeh-myeh-myeh. He clapped his cheeks in his hands and muttered what Terry’s books called an imprecation. And then another one.
Once in a college art class that Stan had taken for no real reason, the students were told to hold up their portraits or self-portraits to a mirror; when a portrait was reversed, you could suddenly perceive all its faults, the face hilariously misshapen, wall-eyed, broken-jawed, all wrong. It was hilarious and also mortifying. Also you didn’t know what you were supposed to do to fix it, or, if you began again, how to do it better. Just keep trying, the teacher said. Give up your preconceptions and really look.
He didn’t want to have to do that. Wasn’t he too old to? He sat immobile a long time, the unreal blue day brightening; not thinking, not doing anything. His organ had recovered from its humiliation, and Stan lowered his shorts to look at it. Wood. It rose from its base at an acute angle he hadn’t seen since adolescence, as though straining to take off. Big help that is. The odor of coffee arose from below, as it always did, as it would.
Stan worked hard that summer, his busy time. The dot-com bust cut into sales but not as badly as everyone feared; in fact for some reason or reasons that Stan couldn’t analyze, house prices around the valley went up, and the eagerness of buyers that drove them up was apparently intensifying. Sometimes Stan felt the unnerving sensation of big engines revving up in preparation for a takeoff, and wondered what he’d got himself into: he hadn’t expected his post-retirement job to be a demanding one, full of urgent labor.
Even the house that Terry had come to call the Tragic New England House, the Ancient Wrong House, tall gaunt place divided in half by warring brothers, began to get offers. The cousin who’d inherited it brought in a crew at one point and ripped out all the two-by framing and the plasterboard and Celotex so that potential buyers could at least see what they had to work with. Stan stood within it looking at the unscabbed wounds where ceiling plaster had come down with the divider walls, at the floors tiled or painted to the middle and no farther, a black line of mildew where for years the wall had stood. Forty years of not parting, not reconciling either, getting by, and now the awful makeshift exposed for what it had been. Tragic New England, land of embittered making-do. A living-room window had been split between the halves, rag of curtain on one side, narrow blind on the other; whole now, showing a nice view of the river, actually.
It sold for not a bad price, just as summer was ending.
Through this time Stan took no more of the blue pills; it was obvious what the drawback of these was, which the manufacturers had certainly foreseen, grinning as they watched their sales climb: if worrying about performance is what’s diminishing your performance, and the pill fixes that, then worrying about how you’d do without the pill would be enough to cause failure all by itself. So better stock up, take ’em early and often.
No. And for Stan the necessity to keep them secret only increased the impossibility that they’d help in any way with the big process that it seemed he was on, that he and she were on, which couldn’t have a secret plot, a concealment, at the heart of it. So it was up and down—as Stan would reply (wry smile) to an imaginary questioner who asked how it was going: up and down. Whatever it was that made them a bad match somehow in bed meant it continued knotty, sudden surprising ardor sometimes that wiped away worry, at other times ambivalence and what-now-ism that produced cascading failure, sometimes worse than that, a sadness never expected, not by him.
Meanwhile Terry went on flourishing, growing younger, wrinkles erased, skin gleaming; watching her undress and hop into bed was like one of those movies where someone’s sold her soul to the Devil and been given things she shouldn’t have, delighting in her new and luckier self while the audience knows it’s going to turn out very badly. Though to say that out loud to her without being able to laugh with her at it too—he couldn’t. The HRT regimen might keep her in youthful shape for years (years: like a bell the word struck in his breast) and so they had to work on their marriage, anyway he had to. It was as on your wedding day when you say solemnly that you will take it on, whatever comes, without knowing really what you might be assenting to, but as though all the labor that followed that day now lay once again ahead, all of it to be done as it was done but done differently.
He was trying to change his life. He knew he must. His good beautiful life.
Another bottle of Muscadet, another incipient spring. She was preparing to make nettle soup for the first time, an experiment which Stan was enthusiastic about, anyway he was on her side concerning it. She wore gloves, to keep from stinging herself.
“So the doctor,” Terry said. “There’s news.”
She wasn’t looking up from her washing and cutting, which made Stan attentive.
“About HRT,” she said. “It seems the
re are test results.”
She moved without haste around the kitchen. It was a talent she had, in tough moments, to keep at work in that calm tea-ceremony concentration, even as she said hard things.
“What results?”
“The HRT increases risk of breast cancer, Stan. Like quite a bit. In fact they had to put an end to this huge study because the number of women getting breast cancer went over the stopping boundary.”
“Stopping boundary?”
“That’s Doctor Florenz’s words. She said: too many. So you stop the study.”
“Okay,” said Stan cautiously. “And this means . . .”
She turned on him then, ceasing her all-alone-in-a-room mode. “It means I have to stop. Everybody’s going to stop, unless they don’t care about the risk.”
“Well, of course,” Stan said. “You have to stop.”
Terry went back to cutting nettles. “So that’s the answer to the question,” she said.
“Which question?”
“Whether you take them your whole life long. Now we know.”
Stan made the tsk sound, blew air, drummed his fingers on the tabletop. Complications, well you could have guessed. How strange that medicines could do this, he thought, upend your life, float your boat, overturn it too. He cleared his throat to say something about that, then didn’t.
“The cooking takes away the sting,” Terry said, as though to herself, gathering the green stuff. “I don’t know how.”