Morris said, “Very well, you bitch. You want to box me, fine.”
And he did not hesitate another moment. He reached down quickly to grab the gloves, slapped them into Jo’s fleshy middle, and went into the laundry room to retrieve his own gloves—gloves his father had bought for him when he was a freshman in college and still being victimized daily by barbarous Italians and those Irish disgruntled over Britain’s meddling with their motherland. Of course, he never did learn to box; the gloves were simply his father’s way of saying that he needed to be testosterone-led, more in touch with the sadistic early days of Homo sapiens, perhaps searching for that part of him—of you, of me—that was still Homo erectus, or Homo habilis, or perhaps the jaw-jutting australopithecine that bore us. Shaddai, the Lord’s name in the Bible, means, as Dr. Donne put it, “spoyle and violence and depredation.” Let’s not forget this, people.
I thought Wanda would veto this duel, but, as Shavan laced up the gloves on Jo’s hands, Wanda seemed resolved to this inevitability. She stood beside me with crossed arms and pursed lips. No dissuading, no talking-sense-into. Morris, as well, was resolute.
“Darley,” he said, handing her the gloves, “assist with my weaponry. I shall smote and slay and be glad for it.”
Smote and slay: that’s what I’m talking about.
But I don’t think it occurred to him that Jo was at least twenty pounds more advanced than he, nor did he seem to be doubting his noodle limbs, nor bothered by the fact that he had obviously never before engaged in fisticuffs with another mortal. True, there was Semite righteousness on his side, Yahweh in his corner, the memory of Israelites fuel for his ire. Plus he had once admired Bruce Lee. This heathen Gentile and disobeyer of the procreative plan didn’t stand a chance. Still, I could see his knees were not happy.
“Let me warn you,” Jo said to him, “there is judo and pillage in my childhood.”
I couldn’t help myself; I said, “And Hammerstein has various forms of mathematics, plus the films of martial arts champion Chuck Norris. Mercy is a stranger to his ways.”
“You’re next,” she told me, smacking gloves together. “After him, you’re next.”
“No, please, I’m sorry.”
Wanda laced up Morris’s gloves with a fortitude seldom seen in suburbia. This preparation for battery was accompanied by the Chopin coming from their daughter’s bedroom; I think it was the “Funeral March”—appropriate and apocalyptic.
Jo licked her lips in anticipation. This lip-licking only served Morris’s fury. Keep in mind that all this was happening with speed, too speedily for any of us to assimilate properly; randy Jo had been in their home for only twenty minutes at this time. As far as I knew, this was the way events transpired in other nooks of the universe, at the other end of the black holes Stephen Hawking is always robotting on about.
All four gloves were laced; Morris clapped his together as he had seen countless boxers do.
Wanda said, “You two are going out to play in the backyard. I won’t have smashed furniture or shattered vases.”
Morris and Jo went out the sliding glass door in the living room, onto the deck, and into the backyard. It took every calorie I had to get my body off the couch. They stopped near Mocha’s jungle gym, an elaborate log concoction that looked to me like an invitation to spinal injury. Morris no doubt heard in his noggin the theme song to Rocky and maybe the immortal cry, Yo, Adrian, as anyone wearing boxing gloves must. The noises coming from him were those the barbarians had uttered as they ravaged a village of weaklings. For some reason I thought of Pancho Villa.
The sisters stood shoulder to shoulder at the sliding screen door, and I stood behind them, still looking, I’m sure, how I felt: dismayed and much bedeviled by the fact that tempests followed me from place to place, that the solid objects I touched seemed to turn very swiftly to shit. Who’s the Haitian priestess that pushed pins into the doll of me, and why? One of the sisters smelled of coconut lotion; I brought my nostrils very near their necks in order to know whom.
“Wanda,” I said, “pardon me, but I’m curious. Why aren’t you stopping this folly?”
“Of all people, you should know, Mr. Homar.”
Of course I asked her what in the Sam Hill I was supposed to know.
“When Morris gets to feeling prideful and slighted, nothing in the world can change his mind. I’ve learned you just have to let him do his thing, what you men always do.”
“What we do?”
“Go crazy with overweening love and then get punched for it.”
“So you think Morris is going to get punched out there?”
“And how.”
“Shavan,” I asked, “do you have anything to say for yourself?”
“The fifth,” she said, by which she meant, I think, pleading the fifth.
Out back: No more prefight taunts or tough-guy parlance. An imaginary bell rang. Jo’s punches were pain, her moves magic. I knew after just twenty seconds or so that Morris was hopeless; I’m not sure he landed even a single blow. The stars and other flashes of light should have made him feel at home, but a guy is never at home when his own blood is pooling in his mouth. It was all he could do to keep his gloves near his face to block her onslaught, never mind retaliate. There was a whomp and a poomph. Important pieces inside him were getting loosened; others were snapping. I thought I heard a rib pierce his liver. Shavan kept saying “Oh,” Wanda “Ouch.” Curious neighbors on either side, we saw, had rested their noses on the wooden fences between back lawns.
Morris yelled, “Compassion, care,” and Jo responded, “Wreckage, waste.”
His only source of self-respect was the fact that he managed to stay vertical for nearly ninety seconds. Indeed, this was how the world ended, not with a bang but a whimper, and I heard poor Morris give that whimper.
Would Jo really win his wife, filch her away from him and his child? Would she go to honor the deal? In just another minute Wanda would rush outside to stop the bludgeoning of Morris’s person, and I would run out to help him to his feet, but, blacked out and swollen, he wouldn’t see any of it. He wouldn’t see Wanda clobber the gal Negress-style, as they do in the ghet-tos of Detroit or Harlem, but he’d cherish her for it always, I’m sure.
Jo’s final punch landed evenly on his temple, and as Morris dropped to the ground, the last thing he saw before the blackness was not his wife, but his child in the upstairs window, her round face only slightly traumatized, and rather strangely resolved to the fate of her overzealous father, a fate he himself had commanded. When this was all over, Morris would say to me, “I remember my exact thought at that moment, as I was falling, about to pass out. I hoped my darling child saw the lesson in all this scuffle, and I hoped that later she might be sweet enough to tell me what it was, to tell me the story of love.”
BUT—LOVE AND LASTING was his story to tell this day; a fraught isolato had driven from Seattle to Boulder to be dished the facts of endorphins that were Morris’s to dish. Wanda had thrown out Shavan and Jo while Morris lay recovering on the leather sofa in his library with an ice pack on his face. I sat in the armchair next to him, one leg crossed over the other and very far from the living. A painted portrait of Carl Sagan grinned atheistically above Morris’s desk. Wanda, bless her, was just then detraumatizing their child, who no doubt had questions about paternal blackouts and how a man arrives at a place where a butch lesbian batters him on the back lawn.
Morris was the one who had just been despoiled and yet he said he felt pangs of pity for me. He was implying, I think, that I looked gaunt and gone, just moments away from a postmodern meltdown.
“Morris,” I said, “you have wonderful books here. Why does leather soothe? Something in our Cro-Magnon past, no doubt. The view through this window is stupendous. What are those?”
They were the Flatirons at Chautauqua Park. He told me this with a speck of pride, as if he had assembled them.
“Lovely. And that was impressive out there, Morris. No Sonny Liston,
but still, my admiration swells.”
“That,” he said—putting aside the ice pack and sitting upright on a sofa that made leather sofa noises—“was lesson number one for you, Charles. Always defend your lady’s pride, with dynamism and dash if need be. Have standards, go to battle for them. Let her see. It’s sexy and shows your worth.”
“Yes,” I said. “Dynamism and dash. I know what you mean.”
“No, I don’t think you do, Charles. You drove to Virginia and to a dock in Maine to commit capital crimes. That’s not what I mean. It grounded you in jail for several months and without your prize. Not good.”
I would need ibuprofen soon, I could see.
“Why not? That’s dynamism and dash, like you say. Defending my gal.”
“No, it’s desperation and dearth—not the same thing. It defends you and your meager heart, not your lady. Those homicidal excursions had nothing at all to do with Gillian and everything to do with your own grievance. You fail to win her as you failed to keep her because you misunderstand female hormones and what it means to seduce.”
“Morris,” I said in a yawn, “you confuse me. And I’m looking for clarity, not confusion, of which I own plenty.”
“And that’s precisely why”—he clapped here—“we’re taking a little ride up to the Flatirons at Chautauqua Park, just past the university. Some stellar rock faces where you will be able to look down and see what I mean.”
“Please don’t get all naturey, Morris. Have you ever tried to read Thoreau? It’s like listening to someone with Alzheimer’s try to tell you about his high school prom. Nature and I have never really got along. You should have seen me in the woods of Washington chasing after Sasquatch. Plus I hear people in Boulder do draconian yoga, eat granola, subscribe to discordant fitness creeds. And don’t you have a headache from the beating you just took?”
“True,” he admitted. “Have you read the Kama Sutra lately?”
“Vishnu pornography.”
“Not at all. A tome about female psychology and how to harness affection from the fairer of us. You should try it, because that’s your dilemma, Charles: your relationship with Gillian Lee was all about Charles Homar, regardless of how you loved her and thought you worshipped her.”
Christ, not this again. “It’s all my fault, I suppose. You sound like Sandy M.”
“Let me read you a little line from your first Gillian story,” he told me, and stretched over into his stack of magazines to retrieve an old issue of New Nation Weekly, the week that contained “Antihero Agonistes,” about my unwise trip to Virginia.
“This is a line,” he continued, flipping pages, “that you do not realize the importance of and have never come close to mentioning again. It appears about halfway through the essay, comes and goes very quickly, but it’s the gist of your trouble and you’re too myopic to realize it. Here it is, right here. It reads this way: And lastly, Gillian and I have never had a single argument (although, yes, there was that one time we agreed to disagree about having children: she said two sounded nice and I said they sounded like smallpox).”
He slapped shut the pages and eyed me as if I’d just been caught with a hooker in a convent. “What?” I said, and then I said it again.
“What? Charles,” he declared, “that is the reason Gillian left you. She couldn’t give birth to her own children and so you forced her to give birth to the giant squid.”
My face was an ink-drawn circle, two dots for eyes and one for a mouth.
“Are you a Romeo or a Winnicott?”
“And that,” he said, “is what you neglect to fathom, my friend: a successful husband and lover is both. Didn’t you see me here today? Don’t you see what I’ve built? My wife, my child, my home, the way it all harmonizes and thrives. You think that’s an accident, a dart thrown in the dark?”
“I must admit,” I said, “it’s admirable, and mysterious. Love oozes from this house.”
“Charlie,” he said, leaning forward for some much-needed emphasis, “I’ve kept Wanda enthralled by keeping her pleasured, and not just with my man-bat and tongue, but with her child—every woman, if she’s a woman, wants children. It’s the tick of nature. Here, wait here a minute, let me get Wanda. I want her to tell you herself.”
He left, I stayed, looked at the Flatirons through the window, wondered if the fall would shatter my skull sufficiently, about the quickest route from hari to kari, and then Morris came back with Wanda, which was fine with me, since readers had complained to my editor that there were too few female characters in my memoirs, as if I had control of that. “This isn’t fiction,” I had told him, “I can’t just invent female characters and drop them into my life,” and he said, “Remember that most of the readers in this country are women and unless you’re female-friendly you will not sell,” but I never could remember it.
So Wanda and Morris stood over me and Morris instructed her to tell me how their marriage thrives. She said, “Well, he’s malleable, I suppose. He can subject himself to humiliation when necessary, as you just saw, and stand strong when necessary, as you also just saw. He avoids routine when possible and shares my lust for the hair-raising guitar riffs of Hendrix. We go to concerts and can dance like hedonists with the best of them. He knows me, in addition to loving and licking me. That’s all.”
Was I in Colorado or the Crab Nebula?
“Thank you, Darley,” he said, “that’s precisely what Mr. Homar needed to hear.”
“How’s your head?” she asked, touching his arm as Gillian used to touch mine. “I think your hook is broken. It’s twisted.”
They were so in love I wanted either to applaud or else call a chemist to explain it.
“Morris,” I said when Wanda left, “I need to lie down. I drove hundreds of miles to get here, plus I’ve chased UFOs and Bigfeet, witnessed a lesbian thwack you, and everything else you already know about. And from what I now comprehend I’m a man who lived with a woman for years and failed to know a single strand in her. If I die in my sleep, just dig a hole and dump me in it. I never asked to be born in the first place.”
Morris Hammerstein covered me with a colorful blanket, and a minute later I got flattened by the munificent steamroller of sleep, no closer to nirvana than I was when I had arrived—exactly what I had expected all along. Everything Morris had just tried to sell me was a fabrication through and through, swift tricks he had learned from his bullshitting freshmen who couldn’t make it to class or hand him papers on time.
Here’s what the astronomer should have told the likes of me: The awful and exquisite truth is that I have not the slightest inkling how I’ve managed to keep Wanda all this time—absolutely none. Every day I wake up and shake my grateful head in surprise to find her still here with me. Some guys are lucky, I suppose, good-ole-fashioned lucky, and Charles Homar, you simply aren’t one of them.
MORRIS WOULDN’T LET me drive away that afternoon because he believed I wasn’t well, so for two days I roved the streets and bike paths of Boulder, Colorado, sleeping on their library sofa both nights after terrific meals with the Hammersteins at their dining room table fit for banquets. Listening to their three-sided cheerful yammer cracked a dam in me: their plans and memories, complaints and compliments, amusements and scowls, sports and academics, all the while passing red potatoes and rice, buttered bread and corn on the cob, sautéed veggies and grilled shrimp (they were vege-quarians)—this was living in a way I had not seen except synthetically at the tables of sitcom actors failing to convey an actual family.
When I was growing up the dinnertime dialogue between my parents and me—especially after Bartholomew’s death—was curtailed by my father’s nightly business phone calls: he’d yak and eat while my mother watched sideburned television newscasters and I tried to read Gulliver’s Travels or The Invisible Man or Robinson Crusoe: a paperback in one hand, a fork in the other.
So the Hammersteins amounted to a real show for me. Maybe I was just tottered from Morris’s suggestion that Gillian ha
d wanted children and I, as flippant and self-concerned as always, had denied her an important piece of the blueprint. Still: I felt salubrious and safe in their dining room and suspected in my cells that this lifestyle was possible. The family-value wonderments I witnessed there! So this is what the GOP is always blathering about (minus the interracial element). Mocha made me promise I’d forswear meat, anything at all that goes moo or bah, cluck or oink. She had done a report for school on the holocaust that is the meat industry and was now mailing her allowance to PETA. In gratitude, I gave the gal my word.
And Boulder—here was a town I could die in and be glad: the mountains jutting up just beyond the foothills; Boulder Creek charging down from the canyon; all those young and youngish dwellers, so many of them UC Boulder students, making merry and biking shirtless or in bikini tops, throwing Frisbees near the creek by the library. Shoeless hippies harmonizing with suited professionals; artists and musicians performing on cobblestoned and carless Pearl Street. Boulder Book Store: I roamed the aisles of that singular haven and missed reading, missed my own books alphabetized by subject and century. The altitude: it entered me as if I were perforated straight through, front to back, side to side. The new air, the closer sun, mountains near enough to brush, graffiti and litter nowhere in sight: everyone was so young and beautiful and athletic, joggers and bikers, skateboarders and rock climbers—I had never entered a town like this before and so it appeared to me like a kind of happy hallucination or the mirage of a parched traveler, a place to make a home if a person had a home to make.
On the afternoon of my final day there, I roosted on the stone slab steps of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMOCA, I was told) and watched the creek cut through a many-treed patch of land across the street, the bikers on the path pedaling along the creek up to and down from the canyon. I wouldn’t say that a small peace had seeped into me during my two days strolling that town in all directions and eating granola, but the tempest turning in the mess of me had calmed a little and I didn’t feel either milliseconds from the tears of self-pity or else on the brink of being torpedoed by forces beyond my hold.
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