Gould (14 page)

 

S
he put an ad in the newspaper of the university he'd been a grad student at: “Garden and lt. handyman work for room and bd; 2 months minimum, 3 preferred.” He calls, says that if she does take him he can only give her two weeks. That he was driving to New York with a friend in the friend's car and his apartment lease will be up in three days and he'll need a place to stay. She won't even have to provide him bed linen; he has a sleeping bag and pillow and pillowcase, though he would like a real bed or mattress to sleep on and to have his own room to write in a few hours a day before or after he does the work she wants done.

She says to be honest the ad's been running for several weeks and no one's answered it so far and she'd like to get the work started, so could he come by for an interview and to see if he'd like staying here? She has a young son; he has nothing against children, does he? and he says “No, why ever would I?”

He bikes over that afternoon, rings the bell, nobody answers. Walks around the house calling her name. “Mrs. Tylic? I'm here, Mrs. Tylic—Gould Bookbinder, at the time you said.” “In here,” she says when he passes a screen door at the back of the house. The laundry room. A beautiful blond boy, around two years old, is sitting on top of the washing machine, stretching inside for clothes and dropping them into the laundry basket on the floor. She pretty, girlish-like; in shorts, T-shirt, long hair in pigtails, thin, almost no breasts, though a bra on, small, five-two at the most, bright blue eyes, black hair, pale skin, holding clothespins, one in her mouth which she takes out, shy smile, very white teeth and perfectly formed it seems, slender muscular legs, high behind, young, twenty-two, twenty-four. They talk while she sticks certain clothes in the dryer and hangs on a line above his head other clothes: man's sweatshirt, seems an extra large; two bras, several small underpants, but a woman's, not a kid's, and all with bloodstains in the crotch; leotard, the boy's socks, which he'd think would go in the dryer. She says another reason she'd like a man here is for her son, since he's missing even a semi-steady male image with his father almost never around. He points to the boy, shakes his head a little and she says “Bronson knows; his biological pa, B-senior, pops in every third month for lunch to bitch as to how much of his inherited dough he's given us and to spin Brons-J around in his newest nifty sports car. Now it's a psychedelic-painted Lotus; that goofer's loaded.” She doesn't work, for the time being takes marketing courses at a community college and is also trying to sculpt and pot, lives off the little money her ex-husband is forced by law to give their son and what she manages to pad on the kid's medical and daycare expenses, which her ex also pays; the house was bought with the money she got from the divorce settlement. “So I don't have much; the meals will be skimpy. Lots of pasta and canned tomato paste and jug wine, unless you feel like springing for the real McCoy and also one night treating us to a restaurant meal. I need lots of work done that I can't afford anyone to do. I don't expect major plumbing repairs but I do want simple electric jobs beyond just changing light bulbs, and the fence fixed, some bamboo dug up from a friend's property and replanted here, and if there's time, help in wallpapering the two bathrooms, besides all the ugly old rose bushes removed. Their roots go deep, I want you to understand before you sign on.”

She takes his references, calls that night to say they all checked out and could he start in two days? and he says “As I said, my residence is only a single small room in a large house full of other small rooms filled with rowdy grad students and at night their loud mates, so I can even move in tomorrow. I've almost nothing to pack and I can use the sleep too before the long mostly sleepless drive back to New York.”

Years later, maybe twenty, she writes “Why are you still writing me? I don't think our correspondence is healthy. It's been enjoyable hearing from you. You always wrote interesting and occasionally witty letters, not that I was ever interested in anything that happened in your rat nest of a city or thought that wit was such a great thing to have. I prefer sincerity and plain-spokenness and not to think of cockroaches and rowhouses. But you're married now and your wife probably resents your writing me and I don't want to be the cause for any strain in your marriage. I know I'd resent a husband who was getting letters from a former lover he says he was once in love with and almost married to.” He wrote back saying “Sally accepts what I say, that we're only friends now. And how often do we exchange letters, three times a year? I get the feeling the main reason you want to end the correspondence is because there's nothing in it for you; in addition, you don't like the act of writing: it takes too much of your energy and time. The phone would be far simpler and less physically taxing if all you want to know about is what's happening and not what I'm thinking. So okay, I'll stop, and a long good life to you and of course always my love to B-J.” She sends him a postcard: “That was extremely UNFAIR!!! Don't be the louse and bastard you once were; I thought you had climbed out of that. And sure: ‘good life' to me but ‘love' to Brons. You couldn't be more obvious. You're a fuck!” He sends her a picture postcard of the New York skyline, and says “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I apologize; I swear my remark on the physical cost of letter writing was only a little dig I was giving and I meant no deep harm. As for the good life instead of my love, I thought saying anything approximating affection to you would be inappropriate after what you said about it. I hope this clears it up. Best ever, Gould.” She doesn't write back, so her postcard was the last he ever heard from her.

Thinking about it soon after, he was glad to be through with the correspondence. He always answers when anyone writes him, so he felt stuck in it. But she was cutting him up too much in her letters and for no reason he could see and he'd wanted to say something about it but hoped she'd stop on her own. “You were usually such a sourpuss and at times acted like a fruity prude. Everyone we knew here felt that but they also thought there were decent and worthy things to you too.    . You bitched too much when we were together, but about everything (especially the music and movies I liked and what I read and how I was raising B-J) and I've been wondering if you complain as much now to your wife.     Nothing was ever good enough for you and I doubt that anything will ever be. You thought California culture the dimmest but you never convinced me that your depressing falling-apart East was superior or even its equal. And as for Europe: oh, you loved that place despite its fastidiousness,
oob-la-la-ness
, long serious faces and cruddy toilets and all their bloody wars and what they did to your poor Jews.

Our weather was always too beautiful for you, our shores too uninhabited and pristine. The people around here too open, good-natured and lighthearted and just all-around easy to be with and relaxed. You craved New York nastiness, impoliteness, uptightness, backstabbingness and hardships of every sort and snow so cold your skinny balls froze till they cracked. Things shouldn't be so ‘naturally good.'” He doesn't remember saying that, nor does he see himself as ever saying it, since he never believed it, so if she wasn't quoting him why'd she put it in quotes? “I'm delighted you've finally found a woman to marry—not ‘delighted'; that was one of your fake poofy words. I'm just
glad
you're getting married and I hope it works and changes you for the better (like helps you mature) as every marriage should. But honestly, I thank all the stars there are that I didn't become your bride and that you're no longer hassling me.    . Brons doesn't consider you his second father anymore. He became disappointed and then disgusted with you when you refused to fly out here for a week in what had become your ritual annual visit. You said you couldn't afford to any longer because the plane fares had gone up, but do you know what it did to that kid? Now he's too busy making money to be interested in anything you do: your work, who you marry and what's on your mind. If there's one person you can bet will be a multi-m man by the time he's thirty, it's our junior B. Why deny things for yourself so much? You were the same skinflint with us too. True, you only had menial jobs then and were basically supporting us—your ‘family' as you liked to say (
that
I appreciated)—but you still could have treated yourself to something when you had a little money, or not been so penurious (cheap, man, CHEAP!). What I'm saying is that you inherited your cheapness from your father and because it is genetic it's probably impossible to eradicate.”

Years before, maybe two or three after they split up and he moved back to New York, he wrote “I'm no longer in love with you, you're for sure no longer or never were in love with me. And you're with someone, I'm with someone, and you constantly gripe about me in your letters and occasionally say how much you hate my guts. So would it be okay if this is my last letter to you and I don't get one in return? Give my love to B-J

I'll of course keep in touch with him and try to see him when I can.” “Give Brons your nothing,” she wrote back. “Keep in touch with your nothing, you great bullshit artist. Besides, although I've rarely bad-mouthed you to him, he said ‘If he's against you, Mommy, then he's against me, and I never want to talk to him again.' I told him that his relationship with you is his business and apart from me, but he doesn't see it that way. So I'm sorry but he doesn't want to be bothered anymore with my passing on your feeble greetings and bogus love. For a little unurban kid, he's hip to your schemes.” He got a letter from her two years later (he'd written Brons a few letters during this time but got no answer) saying an old letter of his popped up from behind a file cabinet she was giving to Goodwill because she's redoing her house outside and in (“I've come into some family money and this savvy stockbroker fellow I know pretty well invested it for me and I made a killing”) and she read it and thought of the days they were close and how good he was for Brons at such a vulnerable age and for so many years and she harbors no ill will to him anymore and just wanted to know how he was, and the correspondence resumed and Brons wrote and called that he wanted to see him, so he flew out, stayed in her guest room for a night and in her bedroom the rest of the week. Or a few years after that he remembered one of the many things he'd left behind in her house—a drawing several centuries old he had when he met her and hung on her wall but had never given her and now wanted—and included in the letter more than enough money to send it special delivery and apologized for the inconvenience this would cause her and swore he'd never ask for anything else of his again and she wrote back “Why not fly out to pick it up personally plus the rest of your little art treasures—none of them fit in with anything I own anymore—and see Brons along the way? He's dying to see you but is too shy to ask and can't face the hurt if you refuse. As for me, I'm comfortably with someone now (if I can be juvenile for a second: the coolest, cutest dude I've ever flipped over, and he's nine years younger than me), so I'll make and receive no demands. In other words, if you think I'm encouraging you to come because I'm lusting after you, you'd be nuts. This is all for Brons.” So he'd fly out and the new guy had gone backpacking in the Sierras for two weeks and he'd sleep with her after the first night. “Why not?” she'd say each time he came out. “We were always great together in bed and I'd only get horny in a few days knowing you're in the next room beating your meat.” Or she'd call after a year and say “I was thinking of the three of us in Portugal and Spain, hitchhiking along back roads –people there had never seen such a gorgeous towheaded boy before, it seemed, the way they kept mussing his hair. And I wondered what you've been up to, working at, reading and yes, even though she disliked me—I liked her, by the way, or admired her—how your mom was holding up too.    .” Anyway, always resumptions in their correspondence, overtures to fly out from both of them, he'd scrape up the dough to go, for a few years, annual visits in June and the same arrangements at her house every time. Till she wrote that last letter, his to hers, their postcards, then it all stopped.

So he was immediately drawn to her in the laundry room. The day?—sunny and dry. And her hair up or down?—now he's not sure. Up, he thinks. Down, he thinks. Either way, she looked great. Through their entire relationship she had bangs, so she had bangs that day, but wore the rest of her hair many different ways. And she seemed vulnerable in the room, also protective of her son, more so with both those at the same time than he thinks he ever saw since, for a while clutching Bronson's shoulders from behind, using him as a shield or device of some kind—well, literally to hold on to and hide behind—because she felt so discomposed or shy, and saying “shield” and her placing Bronson between them or keeping him there would make her less protective of him than he just said, and she also seemed interested, even attracted to Gould. Of course, the vulnerability and shyness, which he noticed when she first met other men she was attracted to, but it was probably mostly an act. And was it shorts she had on or long pants? Jeans, tight   . not jeans but these thin summerweight cotton pants, he just remembers, red, and tight to her skin, and he now thinks a yellow tank top. But long solid legs on the small short body, but perfect legs, it seemed, and if the pants were long—they
were
long—then he could see the outlines of her skin through the cloth. “So-and-so” (she mentioned a well-known West Coast writer a little younger than Gould) “once said my legs were the most amazing and dazzling—lots of z's—on earth. ‘Naturally,' he said, ‘I haven't eyed out every woman's legs, but there are just so many kinds and I doubt any pair could be better than yours.' Am I sounding too conceited and slight?” and he said “It's okay, what else did the big brain say?” and she said “That I ought to model them. Or have a fashion photog take black and white shots of me only from the top of the thighs down and to blow up the best one to poster size, stencil the word ‘legs' below the photo and to make a half-million copies of it and have someone market them to poster stores. That men would want to marry me just for my legs or pay five dollars for a thirty-second peep at them in some sideshow or porno place where just my legs were visible. Then he got really gross about my legs, where he'd like them in regard to him—he was pig rich from his novel by then and had big strong arms and a wrestler's neck and chest and beautiful bushy blond hair but an ugly face on the largest head I've seen on someone who wasn't a sad idiot and decrepit breath could that be the right word?” and he said “If you mean ‘stinky,' no, but I get the point.” “And would I mind if he told his best pal about me—the Playboy of the Potato World, he called him: a fat cat from Idaho, you see, or son of one, and all from tubers—since he thinks I'll fall for him madly and he wants to know someone who's seen my legs with nothing above or on them in bed. ‘Tell whoever you want,' I said jokingly, and his pal—Brons Sr., though without the S just yet—shows up at my place a day later, says who he is and that he's selling eros but not from door to door, just to mine, and swore he never used that line before,” and he said “Why, did he think it a good one?” “And I tell you we flashed on each other right there and were on the floor in five minutes with not even the front door closed—that must be a record—with him lapping my legs up and down and around till they were greasy from his spit, and in a month we were married and with kid. Really, I don't know what the big fuss is with men over legs. What are they, at their very best, but shapely sticks to walk on and cross. You guys get gunned up by everything. Even some with my poor chest: they must think of it as a pubescent girl's and that turns up the heat. Or they see me as a boy or something in between, the creeps, where they then get both. But I'm being too egocentric again, aren't I?” and he said “No, I swear, I love your stories.”