“I must have been an obnoxious bastard, but I didn’t care; it had come to me that this was what a man has to be if he’s not to suffer shame and powerlessness. Every once in a while my mother would eye me in a certain way, and I knew she was not liking this son she loved so much. But I didn’t care about that either. By then, I’d completely put her down in my mind. Her trivial concerns—overshoes and jackets, the evening roast, the library board: ‘Well, now, what do you suppose they’ve gone and done! They’ve taken Lolita right off the shelves! I went right down there, I said to Sam Hart, now listen here, Sam Hart, do you want to make Cardon County the laughingstock of the state?’ And then my sister got married and had a couple of kids whizbang right away, and she would sit there for hours, literally hours, cooing and oohing over her grandchildren, talking to them and laughing at them and bouncing them when they were just, in my eyes, lumps of insentient flesh.
“She stopped seeming—serious. She was no longer someone I needed to please. She was irrelevant in the world of men, the world I lived in. She was nice, she was sweet, she cooked up a great roast pork, but that was all. You know?”
Victor wiped his hand across his face.
“By the time I got to college, I was a real golden boy. You ever run across one of them?”
“All the time. I advise them. They come into my office very soberly, prepared to be awed. They speak seriously, almost reverently, about ‘my career.’ They speak of it in exalted hollow voices as if the words were set in gold and mounted over the family china closet—which they probably are. They come in with a tentative schedule made up of heavy hardware: physics, math, and early Urdu.
“And of course, since I think learning ought to be fun and enlarging to the entire mind, I suggest a course in literature, art, or music. They are shocked: ‘I don’t know if that would be good for my career.’ It’s clear to me that his career has for some time been treated as community property—by parents, teachers, counselors of all sorts. He will look at you, this dewy-faced boy who still picks his nose when no one is looking, and masturbates himself to sleep, and hand it to you, my career, sure that you too. will handle the sacred object with the proper deference.
“What I hear is the hollow rattle of someone who’s lost his life and doesn’t even know it. He thinks he’s in control.”
Victor leaned forward sharply. “Yes, but who is in control? Who? No one at all. It’s a train running on a track with no one directing it, no one except the track itself which was laid long ago, and no one knows by whom.”
He settled back. “I thought I was taking control of my life. It never occurred to me then that I was doing what society had determined I should do, that rather than taking control, I was ceding it.”
“What would have been taking control?”
He shrugged. “Oh, who knows? Probably just suffering, going on as I was, feeling things, observing them. Until control came naturally, from inside, the power to act on what I saw and felt. Which would have been slow and hard and humiliating. But I wouldn’t have become what I became….”
He wiped his face again.
“What did you become?” she asked him, puzzled. He did not seem monstrous to her, who was supersensitive to signs of monstrosity.
“Oh, a clear winner, you know? A go-getter. I got the peach of a job after grad school, and I moved ahead in that job faster than anyone could have anticipated. Even me. I was on my way and I could see it: I was going to be the next Mach.”
“Mach? The head of Blanchard Oil?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Oh, well, I know him. Sort of.”
He looked at her amazed. “How could you know him?”
“I get invited, fairly often, to participate on panels here and there. I’ve met Mach several times—or rather, I should say, I’ve been presented to him, because he never once looked at me as we were being introduced. At conferences intended to get academicians and humanists to communicate with business and industry people,” she laughed. “You know.”
He nodded.
“You can’t admire him,” Dolores said.
“Not as a person. But he isn’t a person, you see: he’s Mach. He’s power incarnate, the mover and shaker, the person who with one or two others moves OPEC chessmen around the chessboard that’s the world. He determines the futures of countries, not just of one industry, or one corporation.”
Dolores shuddered. “God help us.”
“Well, I wanted that. Then.” He lighted another cigarette, although he had two burning down in the ashtray. His hands were shaking.
“And what happened?”
“Well,” he tried to laugh, but his face twisted a little, “there was this girl named Edith.” He exhaled hard. “I met her toward the end of grad school at a party at the Long Island estate of some wealthy girl who was dating a friend of mine. She had class, Edith. She had short blond hair done in a pageboy, and big blue eyes, and she wore pleated skirts and cashmere sweaters and a single string of pearls. The thing about Edith was, the pearls were real.
“And I think what happened was that Edith fell in love with me. I can’t, now, vouch for anything. What I felt, what I thought I felt—it’s all lost in the haze of the years. I wasn’t passionately in love with Edith. I’ve never been passionately in love in my life until …” He looked at her, then continued. “So I had no grounds for comparison. I thought I loved her. She would sit and listen to me talk as if—as if I were some kind of god. And it was genuine, then—her awe for me, I guess it was.
“And I thought life with her would be fine, just fine. She loved flowers, she loved babies, she loved dogs, cats, and spaghetti dinners in little Italian restaurants. And squooshy stuffed animals and the Staten Island ferry and Kahlil Gibran.
“Her father was a VP in Burton-Trilby, the ad agency, she was used to a certain standard of life, she lived it gracefully. She would not have to learn, as to some degree I would, and she could even help me. All the while looking up to me for my superior intellect, force, and know-how. Who knows why? At the time, it seemed ideal.
“And it went on seeming ideal for quite a while. She was so much in love in the early years that our sex was terrific. I didn’t know then…. I didn’t know she was swooning with ecstasy even though she wasn’t having orgasms. How could I know? Because she really was swooning with ecstasy. And things were going well for me, for my job, we had no money worries, she was creating a home, having a baby: it seemed the American dream come true. It was a comfortable life for me—she made it so. She thought I was wonderful. Do you know,” he leaned toward her, “that there are men on this earth who have never been told anything else?”
“Or never listened to anything else,” she laughed. “Of course! The Daniel Moynihans of the world.”
“I don’t know when things began to change. Maybe right away, maybe after a few years. It was all so gradual. It was years later that I was watching her—we were at some party and she was talking to someone else—and I noticed that she had this habit of smiling with only her lower lip and the corners of her mouth: she kept the upper lip stiff. And she hadn’t done that when I’d met her, and I didn’t know when it had begun, but there it was. She’d been doing it for years, by then.
“We had two kids and Edith was pretty busy with them in those years in Dallas. They were exciting years for me: moving up, power struggles, more difficult jobs. It was the game all over again, and by now I was an expert at it. But even experts get caught, trapped in infights. But it’s the infights that teach you who you are.
“I remember one in particular, it was probably the first serious one I’d been involved in at the Highland Company, I’d probably just hit near the top of middle management. There were two warring factions. I liked one group—I liked the people, I liked their … well, what you’d call their values. But they were losers, all of them, losers in the political arena if not in life. And they were losers because they believed that the world was divided into black and white and that if you had goo
d values you always lost: good guys finish last. So they were always prepared to lose, and they were resigned. So they couldn’t think up decent strategies for winning: the best they could do was plan a holding action. They could defend, they couldn’t aggress.”
“Ouch.”
He ignored her. “The other group was the Reilly group—that’s how I thought of it. A pompous shit named Reilly was its leader, and he believed that he was a wheeler-dealer who knew exactly how much ass to kiss, and who drew the line at nothing. I knew he was incompetent and hollow, but I also thought he’d win just because he was so entirely unscrupulous.
“For a long time, I managed to stay unaligned, treading a fine line, not appearing to favor either side. But you know, you can’t keep that up indefinitely: the time comes when you’re forced to take sides. And I was obsessed with all this, watching daily developments very minutely, and trying to decide which side to join—trying to decide on what grounds to decide, even. And right in the middle of all this, Edith decides to get temperamental. She is sulky, I find her crying in her room, she won’t sleep with me. She hardly speaks to me in the mornings, at breakfast. I don’t know why she’s giving me grief, and I have no patience with it, I was caught up in a terribly important situation at work.
“Oh, we’d had little tiffs, I guess you could call them, before. Every once in a while I’d find her sulking, but if I asked what was wrong, she said, “Nothing.’ Or, ‘I have a headache,’ or, ‘I’m getting my period.’ She’d seem a little snippy, is all. And a couple of times—well, maybe more than a couple—I’d had late meetings and forgotten to call, and I’d come home at ten and there she’d be, a pursed mouth in a bathrobe sitting on the living-room couch watching TV and waiting for me. And then I’d realize I hadn’t called, and I’d apologize, and she’d say, very snippy: Your dinner’s in the oven if you want it.’ Of course it was always dried up, but of course I’d already eaten. And then she’d get up and switch off TV and go to bed.
“Normally, she went to bed when I did—whether I went early or late. But on nights when I didn’t call, she asserted herself. I never really cared. On those nights I really wanted to sit with a drink and think over what had happened that day. I enjoyed sitting there alone, quiet, not having to make perfunctory conversation about the kids or the house or the neighbors. That was my only time of solitude, those nights when Edith was angry with me.
“Anyway, the next day she’d always be herself again, smiling. She seemed to forget. I thought she had a sunny nature.
“But this time, it was a Monday morning, I remember, she got up in the morning with a frown on. I had no idea why. We’d spent a quiet weekend, I was exhausted and I’d sat out by the pool and read the papers and slept most of the time. I was getting ready to go to work, and she was tossing me dirty looks. I didn’t want to get into it then. I had a demanding day ahead. So I ignored them, her. And as I was about to leave, she suddenly burst into tears. All the shit I had to face at work, I didn’t need this. I yelled at her: ‘What is it now!’ As if she was always giving me grief. But truthfully, Dolores, that’s how it felt: she didn’t, of course, but it felt as if she did. I’d come home and the house would feel electric, on the brink of some hysterical outburst. But when I yelled, she just stood there blubbering, and I said, ‘For God’s sake, Edith, can’t it wait until tonight?’ And she opened her mouth and she screamed at me! What a shock! She shouted: ‘You want to go, go! Go to your beloved office, go, go, go! But don’t come back!’
“Well, of course, that was sheer idiocy. I grabbed my briefcase and stormed out the door. I didn’t get back until very late that night, and I hadn’t called. That was purposeful, though, to teach her a lesson. Except when I got home, the house was dark, and Edith and the kids were gone. There was a note, written in her”—he looked appealingly at Dolores—“don’t get mad, now, huh? I’m trying to tell you how I felt then.”
She nodded.
“Written in her large stupid female script, flowing and careful, with a long swing up at the end of each word. On perfumed stationery with little flowers in the corners. You know? Well, I just picked it up and felt such contempt for her, such disgust…. I didn’t know where it came from, what she’d done to deserve my feeling that way about her, and I hadn’t even known I had felt that way about her until that moment….
“She wrote that it was clear I didn’t love her anymore, so she had taken the children and gone to her father’s, in Scarsdale. I threw the letter down, I poured myself a nice big Scotch, and sat down in my chair. I tried to go over in my mind what could have caused this, but I couldn’t figure it out. I wasn’t screwing around, I didn’t drink too much, I provided for her and the kids very well. So there was no excuse, none at all. It was a power play: she wanted to get me under her thumb.
“She knew I was in a bad spot at work, that I was worried. She also knew that in those days corporation executives did not get divorced. So she was smart, she chose that moment to undermine me. I had to hand it to her for cleverness, whatever else I felt. I couldn’t imagine what she wanted, though, except to get an upper hand over me, to—well, what I told myself was—castrate me. Make me the deferential one, like her friend Phyllis’s husband Harvey. Well, I was damned if she was going to win that one, and double damned if I’d give in to her.”
He started another cigarette, leaned back, put his hand over his eyes.
“I had it figured pretty well. She had two babies and not much money. I never left a great deal in the checking’ account, and she couldn’t have touched the bank accounts because I kept the books in my office safe. Now that her daddy had retired, her parents lived in a five-room apartment—a lush five-room apartment, to be sure, but too small for two screaming kids and three adults. She had majored in art in college, but had never worked. She’d gone to Europe after graduation—her parents’ gift to her—for a couple of months, and when she got back, we began to make arrangements for our wedding. So she’d never worked, and couldn’t do anything—which is to say, she couldn’t type. Even so, with two babies …
“The only thing would be if her daddy decided to subsidize her. But I knew the old man pretty well, knew how he thought about women—well, about what he would have called the family—although he really meant the place of women. And I thought there was little chance he’d support her in her flight from me, especially since I didn’t believe Edith would lie, would say I abused her or ran around. Edith, I thought in those days, was strictly honest. I have to confess, I didn’t even give her credit for that. I thought she was honest, not out of principle, but because she was naive and childlike and too simple to lie. Hah!
“Anyway, I thought she was in a weak bargaining position, and that every day she spent at her parents’ house was going to make it weaker. I never even considered hopping a plane and chasing her to Scarsdale, where I would get down on one knee and beg her to come back. Not only because I wouldn’t have done it for her, but also because I wouldn’t, couldn’t run out on the hassle at work, where such an act would have been interpreted as a failure of nerve. On the other hand, I couldn’t just sit there and wait for her to come back, make no move at all. Even her old man would have found that pretty cheeky. So I telephoned, and he answered. I played it well, asking how she was and then, as if I were bewildered and bothered—well, hell, maybe I was, but I didn’t know it at the time—asked him if he had any idea why she had left.
“It was a good ploy, made me sound innocent. Which, anyway, I was. He said: ‘Don’t you?’ and I said not an idea in hell. And he said well, you know how women are and maybe I’d better talk to her, and she got on and we chitchatted for a couple of minutes about her flight and the kids, and then I said, ‘Edith, why did you do this?’ And she burst into tears and said, ‘You don’t love me anymore!’ and hung up. Good Christ. I tell you, I was convinced all women were nuts. You couldn’t understand them.
“A couple of days later, I wrote her a letter. I told her I loved her and didn’t understand why
she said I didn’t I swore there’d never been anyone else. Strange,” he said, moving, letting his hand rest limply on the couch arm, “how that was the way you proved love: by claiming sexual fidelity. Anyway, I said I needed her and missed her. And in fact, you know, that was true. It surprised me. So often I found her presence … irritating. But when she wasn’t there … it was unpleasant, coming home to a dark house, no child noises, no food cooking, nothing. I’d eat out and come home late, but it felt … empty. And then I thought maybe this is what she’d been trying to tell me—that I did need and miss her, or would if she weren’t there. Maybe she’d been trying to get me to value her more. And that’s what I wrote.
“She never answered. But a couple of weeks later, when I came in late, I saw Vickie’s tricycle in the driveway and Leslie’s wagon near the front door. The house was quiet, the kids were asleep. Edith was sitting in the living room, but she wasn’t reading and she wasn’t watching TV. She looked sour. And I felt—shit! I was very tired that night, not up for a ringding battle. And then I thought: women. You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them. I missed her when she was gone, but I wasn’t especially thrilled to have her back. But it never occurred to me that had anything to do with me: I thought—women.
“The three weeks she’d been gone had been hellish, but fascinating and exciting, really. I had discovered a lot about myself. I found I was good at maneuvering and I also found my inclinations were to act on principle. It was a good discovery, it made me feel strong. Reilly and his crew had won the battle, as I’d suspected they would. I’d backed the other side, who found themselves out in the cold. But without our knowing it then, Highland was being sold to a conglomerate and new management was coming in. What would happen—of course we didn’t know it then—was that Reilly would end up with his little division, stuck there for the rest of his life, while the other group would move on, move away. Not all of them, but the leaders—including me.