This morning, a Saturday, when Tom is paying for a box of raisin bran at the local Safeway, the cashier raises her impassive young eyes, reaches over the counter, plucks a green cankerworm from his hair, and flicks it delicately to the floor, crushing it with the toe of her rubber-soled shoe. She caps her offhand charity – dispensed without emotional waste – with a lazy, expressionless smiling curse: “Have a nice day,” she says, staring numbly into the middle distance.
AND YET, three weeks later the leaves are back, thick and green, as though the trees had somehow been tricked by their old xylem hearts into performing an additional annual cycle of regeneration and doing what is expected of them, which is to flourish. To give shade. To provide nesting space and runways for small creatures. To produce the astonishing artifacts of flowers and nuts, fruit and seed, that give comfort and color to this northerly splotch on the map where by accident Tom Avery spent his infancy (that fortunate house on the river, those twenty-seven mothers) and where, for the past seventeen years, he has elected to live.
He loves this light-filled city in the same unarticulated way he loves the throwaway intimacies of Safeway cashiers, in the wordless way he expresses his most passionate and painful moments – in screeches and howls, moans and cries, the disjointed, valleyed vowel sounds of aeiiii and oweeee that mend the effects of weather and repair the damage he does to himself and to others.
AFTER THE CANKERWORM CRISIS, the mosquitoes arrive. The question to be addressed is: to spray or not to spray.
A number of “Niteline” listeners phone in and offer their opinions.
“I’m not one of your environment cranks. But I’m telling you, Tom, that last year, after they went down our street with the spray trucks, the paint peeled off the hood of my husband’s truck. Now I ask you, if it does that to a vehicle, what’s it going to do to your insides? Your arteries. Your stomach wall.”
“Okay,” another caller says, “we have to compromise with nature. We give nature some room, but we get a little room too, okay? Now, is it too much to ask to go on a picnic and enjoy yourself? How’re you going to enjoy yourself if you’ve got an army of four-pounders swirling around the barbecue, ready to take a dent out of your arm? I say, let’s be reasonable. Let’s spray.”
“Hey, let’s think of another way to blitz the little rascals. Let’s bore them to death with Michael Jackson.”
“The main thing is to get rid of breeding grounds, swamps, ponds, and so on. The Chinese – ”
“We’re already doomed. What’s a few more chemicals?”
“I say, let’s put up with a few bites and scratches. This is a beautiful planet we live on, and if God made mosquitoes, she must of known what she was doing.”
Dear Tom,
The children and I were deeply moved by your expression of sympathy in our time of sorrow, and for your kind and thoughtful words about Sammy. I hadn’t realized you knew each other that well.
I was also touched by your extremely generous contribution to the Heart Fund in Sammy’s name. Thank you.
Yours sincerely,
Fritzi Sweet
“Your heart’s fine,” Tom’s doctor, David Neuhaus, beamed after a checkup that lasted exactly three-quarters of an hour. “Your weight’s about right for someone five-foot, eleven, you could drop maybe five pounds, get down to one sixty-five, but you’re not in bad shape. Plumbing’s all in order, from what you tell me. Blood pressure on the high side of normal, nothing to worry about, but you want to keep an eye on it. Let’s face it, you live a slightly irregular life, working all night, so naturally your diet’s going to be somewhat hit-or-miss. By the way, I’ve been seeing your face all over town, those billboards, fantastic! Keep up with the fiber, fiber’s the thing at our age. Three ounces of booze a day? I spill that much, don’t worry about it. Blood’s okay, you shouldn’t be feeling tired. Could be the time of the year, feeling the need to get away, relax. You want to get yourself on a beach somewhere, take a girlfriend along. No, I mean it, you need to unwind. You’re maybe a bit tense. Give yourself a break, some sun, a little swimming. And don’t forget the girlfriend. I’m serious.”
So! It was visible. It was hanging right out there for the whole world to see. Even a white-faced eunuch like David Neuhaus had picked up on it. A little tense! Right! Blood, plumbing, unwind, fiber, working all night. So why didn’t his own doctor have the guts to come right out with it instead of standing there kvelling?
Probably he should have said something himself. Maybe it was that skeleton diagram pinned to the wall, grinning away, and the greenish glow of its winged collarbone. Fairly inhibiting. But what about professional responsibility? Guys like Dave Neuhaus are pulling down maybe two hundred thou a year, and they can’t get it together enough to write a prescription: get out there and get yourself good and laid.
It’s been months since he’s even dreamed about sex. His last erection? He wasn’t one for keeping track exactly, but it was probably early March. A feeble one, too, that night he’d driven Sheila home from a party. Fade-in, fade-out.
His last real honest night of sex was in San Diego with what’s-her-name with the fingernails, Tracy somebody, and that had seemed more like practicing for ecstasy than the real thing. That was – God! – that was December. This was June. He was forty years old, not eighty.
So, six months, that didn’t mean he was going through the rest of his life like this, impossible. It was just some medical slippage, temporary, like a gear unwilling or unable to engage itself with his other bodily parts and needing a tuneup. Or maybe a jump start. If he owned a VCR he could rent a wringer, that would do it. Or he could go downtown and take in a blue movie, a good teenage spanker, but, God, he hated those places and the creeps who patronized them – the minute he sat down he started scratching his armpits. Well, how about a classy art-porno piece, then?
He checked the paper to see what was showing, but the only movie that seemed to qualify was a German film called Juice of the Larger Orange. However, it had subtitles, which always gave him a headache after half an hour. Well, he could buy a good girlie mag, a clencher. Mickey’s Smoke Shop on Corydon was exactly four minutes away, and Mick had a choice selection. He’d spend the afternoon browsing through a few Penthouse stories, catching up with those Midwestern frat boys squirting crème de cacao up their girlfriends’ twats and then going after them on all fours. One way to prime the pump.
Or why not phone Elizabeth? What was her last name? Elizabeth Joll? Dinner, a movie, drive her home, take a chance on his body, that it wouldn’t let him down. He had her phone number somewhere under this pile of newspapers. Hello there. Tom Avery calling. From the Newly Single Club? We went to that movie together a few weeks back?
Sure, sure.
What was it Sheila once said to him? That any time he felt like some harmless bed-a-by (her word), she was willing to help him out, no strings, no nostalgia, just a little mutual rehabilitation, her place or his, she was a free agent. But that offer was made a good five years ago, and Sheila, he suspected, was into women nowadays.
He should have leveled with Neuhaus instead of diverting him with all that heart garbage. If you can’t level with your own doctor, who can you level with? The guy had had his finger up all the orifices of his body, so why hold back out of macho pride? All he had to do was say – gritting his teeth, drumming his fingers on the table – “Ahem, Dave, you got any recipes for a weary libido?”
He could phone him right now. Reel it off fast. “Hey, Dave, there’s this one small medical problem I forgot to mention, it’s this crazy sex thing. I can’t seem to, well, you know, work up, ha ha, much interest these days.”
Or he could corner Ted Woloschuk before they go on the air tonight. Ted and Maeve, they’d been married forever, they’d probably had the odd dry patch. “I’ve got this little problem, Ted, nothing serious. I know we’ve never talked about this kind of thing, you and I, but I was wondering, do you know anything about cancer of the prostate, the early symptoms?”<
br />
He could maybe take a run down to Fargo on the weekend, go to one of those clinics, check it out. So what if it cost a couple hundred bucks? This was his life.
No.
He’d settle for Penthouse, let it work its chemical poison, and while he was at it get himself good and pissed. Think about escaping the present plot of his life. Make that plotlessness. Think positive.
Or maybe he’d just opt for the latest issue of Sports Illustrated. Fuck the frat boys.
He ached for something, but it wasn’t sex. What he wanted was something to love. Something in need of protection. Someone, some person he could love.
∼ CHAPTER 11 ∼
Love and the Absence of Love
FAY IS A BUSY WOMAN. SHE HAS A WIDE CIRCLE OF FRIENDS. Her weekends are packed. As a matter of fact, she’s out almost every night of the week.
Tonight, a Friday, she attends the end-of-season party of the Handel Chorale, hosted this year by Judy and Rory Sharpe, who live on the older end of Park Boulevard in a large mansard-roofed house made of soft-yellow brick.
The air is mild, the evening is long. “It’s almost midsummer,” at least three people remark to Fay as they stand sipping white wine or Perrier or Judy Sharpe’s iced grapefruit-and-vodka punch on the broad flagstoned patio overlooking a thick wall of evergreens and a line of young birch trees.
Fay has been singing alto with the Handel Chorale since she was twenty-five, ten years now. Her mother had been a member, too, for some years but had found the Friday-night rehearsals inconvenient, as Fay also does on occasion. Nevertheless, and though her voice is only fair, she continues, partly because she loves the music and partly because she’s fond of the thirty-odd choir members, almost all of them a few years older than she (a bit of a bonus, she thinks wryly, playing junior miss one night a week). And partly because – well, because she doesn’t have to think about Friday nights, what she’ll do with them, how she’ll fill that end-of-the-week slot, that most harrowing chunk of time for the unattached. Busy every night of the week.
Tonight Andrew Ballstaeder is seated on her right, contentedly drinking a second cup of coffee and telling Fay about how the old Caruso records have been cleaned up by an extraordinary new electronic process. What a voice! Sweet, tender, supple, with a warmth of tone unmatched by anyone since. It should be bottled and pumped into the veins of the infirm or insane. It should be shipped to the Middle East, introduced into the drinking water of the world.
Across the room Mary Ballstaeder is saying to Morley Hurst in her sharp, droll, carrying voice: “Well, he was once married to Fritzi, you know. Anyway, that went sour, but after the divorce she married Sammy, who was crazy about her, and Peter got together with Fay. Well! When that went kaput this spring – didn’t you know? I thought everyone knew – he rented a room at the Sweets’, a kind of apartment on the third floor, and he’s still there. How’s that for musical chairs!”
“Sometimes,” Andrew Ballstaeder is saying to Fay, “I get these attacks of insomnia. It comes in cycles, and when it comes, I know better than to stay in bed tossing and turning and disturbing Mary. So I get up, I pour myself a glass of milk, and I tune in to Tom Avery. That’s where I heard these amazing Caruso recordings for the first time, on the Tom Avery show.”
“Who’s Tom Avery?” Fay asks.
ON SATURDAY MORNING Beverly Miles and Fay drove up to Anne Morris’s cottage in Beverly’s old Volkswagen, and all the way, a hundred and forty miles, they talked, as they have all spring, about love and the absence of love.
“It’s a kind of perversion,” Fay said, “the whole love business.”
She doesn’t really think anything of the kind, but she likes to toss her half-formed thoughts at Beverly, who has a talent for weighing all conjectures evenly, taking them into the neat drum of her head and abstracting the outrageous along with the rational.
“Perversion?” she said. “Pu-lease. You’d better explain that.”
“Boiled down,” Fay said, “isn’t love just a form of vanity? You know, the wish to be adored. To be the absolute center for someone else.”
“Well, why the hell not? I wouldn’t mind being someone’s center. Only thing is, it’s not worth the hassle. There just aren’t enough grownup men out there.”
“Everyone’s telling me that lately,” Fay said.
“Look around. I’ll tell you what I really think, even though it hurts my heart to say it out loud – ”
“Go ahead.”
“Well, I’ve finally figured out that being male is the same thing, more or less, as having a personality disorder.”
It was a hot morning, and expected to get hotter. Beverly was wearing a long, loose, immensely ruffled sundress in corded white cotton with bands of red rickrack around the hem. Fay always wondered where she found such clothes. “So what are our options?” she asked.
“Keeping busy. Work. Kids, if you’re lucky. Good women friends. Talk. Like right now.”
“What about…?”
“What?”
“What about loneliness? Middle-of-the-night variety of loneliness. Maybe not right now, but in the future. Waiting for us.”
“Maybe it won’t be all that bad. I mean, just because you sleep in a narrow little bed doesn’t mean you have to live in a narrow little world. By the way, do you miss Peter?”
The question surprised Fay, and so did her response. “No,” she said, wondering why she would lie to an old friend, “not in the least.”
FRANK AND ANNE MORRIS are a hospitable couple, and Fay almost always spends two or three weekends every summer with them at the lake, sleeping rather exotically in an upper bunk, while the two Morris daughters, Jenny and Kelly, move into a tent set up on the lawn.
That phrase – “the lake” – makes Fay smile. “Lake” in this part of the world is used generically, meaning any inland body of water large or small, and the word “cottage” applies equally to a twelve-room house on the Lake of the Woods and a primitive one-room cabin without electricity or running water. The Morris’s cottage is old, dark, comfortable, and smoky, an improvisation of logs and clapboards built on stilts in the late forties by Frank’s father.
Fay and Beverly and Anne, who works as an ethnologist at the center, spend all Sunday morning on the cottage dock, Fay and Beverly stretched out on beach towels, and Anne, who has been in poor health recently, in a reclining canvas chair with a terry-cloth robe drawn over her shoulders. The Morris girls have gone around the Point for a sailing lesson, and Frank Morris is up in the cottage, which is perched on a height of wooded land overlooking the lake, preparing his specialty lunch, known as Frank’s Fish House Salad.
He is a recovered alcoholic, or a recovering alcoholic, as he insists on saying, and today is his four hundredth dry day. He wakes up every morning, he says, unable to believe his good fortune, that somehow he’s been given back his life. His counting of days is a form of thanksgiving, and his sobriety wakes him early for a swim, makes him whistle as he scythes down the grass behind the cottage, fills the hummingbird feeder by the door, tinkers with his outboard motor, and admires, proudly, passionately, the spread-out reds and pinks of the sun setting each night over Falcon Lake.
But it seems to Fay, lying on the warm pier and listening to the cool sulky slap of lake water beneath her, breathing in its flat fishy odor, that Frank Morris has been blinded by his dramatic renewal and doesn’t even see how his wife, Anne, is slipping away. Where will they all be in a year? It frightens her. Will Frank still be up there on his glory wagon, Anne still occupying that chair, her body chilly even at the height of summer? And Beverly? And herself, will she still be bluffing along, hearty and brave, posing questions, boarding buses, attending showers, buying hospitality gifts, writing thank-you notes, and trying not to get too mouthy and mean?
FAY’S GODMOTHER, Onion, has sprung an immense surprise: she is going to get married. The wedding is tonight, a Monday – and why not a Monday night, Onion says tartly – in a hospital room at the S
t. Boniface stroke unit, where over the weekend Strom Symonds has manifested several small signs of recovery. The muscles on the left side of his face have pulled back to form a leather puckering which might be a smile, or a sneer; one eye blinks and glitters; a throttled sound like a monkey’s beep comes out of his corded lips; the fingers of his left hand twitch as though all his seventy-year-old volition, all his withheld eloquence, were concentrated there in a terrace of brown knuckle-bone and grained skin.
Onion is a nonbeliever, but she’s phoned the office of the Unitarian Church, which has sent over a tall fat young woman named Dot, and it is she who stands at the foot of Strom’s bed and reads the brief marriage ceremony. The window is wide open on this warm night, and the floor nurse, Gloria – her name in the form of a brooch is pinned to her uniform – has set up a fan in the doorway. Seated around the bed with Fay are her mother and father; her sister, Bibbi; her brother, Clyde, and his wife, Sonya; and Robin Cummerford, the young doctor who has been looking after Strom since he was brought to the hospital. Strom wears a pair of blue pajamas; everyone else is in loose summer clothes, including Onion, who appears to have dressed hurriedly, in an old denim skirt and a white blouse that is rather severely cut. She wears a yellow grin, a comical boniness of tooth and jaw that says: I have lost my wits. And Fay recalls something her mother once said about Onion, that she was a darling woman (Fay’s mother called all of her friends darling women) but was possessed of a heart not easily made glad.
To Fay the wedding scene seems set into motion by the heft of accumulated postponement. Why, after all this time? Sonya has brought flowers from her back yard, phlox and daisies, and these stand in two large vases, one of them on the bed table – which also holds a water flask and what looks to Fay at first to be an interesting piece of sculpture but is, in fact, a plastic urinal. There is no wedding music, since no one could think of how to provide it without disturbing the other patients or bringing about stretches of extreme self-consciousness.