Gould (7 page)

it was just sexual frustration that motivated it, I think that would have been the end of it after the first time, as I'm satisfied easily that way and one time can hold me for a week, even without the end all punch. Let's see what develops in my belly before we make any plans. If nothing does then I don't see why we can't hook up someplace for a few days, and without John; Harry's done it several times with his girls and once for a month. Have you ever been to the Grand Canyon?” and he said he never had any desire to: “You get up to the edge and look into it and what do you see: an enormous ditch and trickle of water winding through it and ruddy rock and dry brush and stuff and maybe some Western-garbed people on donkeys lumbering down a narrow path, and I could never afford it,” and she said “It's much more, yours is just travelogue, but all right, then I can drive east or even fly here, but let's wait and see. One day  .   .” and two months later (he'd look for a letter from her almost every time he opened his mailbox) she wrote saying everything's been confirmed except the gender, she's already started to show but only a bump, and rather than risk never getting pregnant again and for all the other reasons she gave she's going to go through with it; “Harry's more than for it, he's delighted with the prospect and also that he isn't the biological father. He might be an egomaniac some ways but he doesn't think there's anything genetically useful, especially not his narcissism and cockiness, he can pass on except his intellect, and I told him you're his equal in that regard and you're substantially more creative and artistic than he, which he wants more of in his progeny. He said to convey his congratulations to you and that unlike me he hopes it's a girl,” baby's due in March. He wrote back saying that, clubby as this insipid remark sounds, he sends his best wishes to Harry too and appreciates his temperance—how ‘bout dat for a word? Thanx, Roget—in the matter and if there's anything he can do for them regarding the pregnancy and birth, to let him know. He doesn't have much cash socked away and Harry, only a teacher though he hears law professors do okay, must still be in a much better financial position than he, but he'd be willing to part with a little if they needed it, and please keep him informed. He thinks of her fondly and has missed her, he's sure she's not interested to hear, at least a few minutes of every day of every week since. A month later she sent him a photo of herself from the side, naked from the hips up and showing mostly her slightly swollen stomach, with her arms covering her breasts and the top half of her head cropped. In a note she said “If you wish I can send you one of these Polaroid shots every month though never with my face fully shown, for obvious reasons: ‘Wife Disseminates Porno Photos, Law Prof Hubby Loses Job.' I shoot them myself with a delayed timer, but I'm sure that clicking and running into position will become increasingly strenuous with each succeeding month, so I don't know how long I'll be able to keep it up. But this will be as close as I can get you to the experience of my gravidity other than for reporting various particulars of it, e.g., I'm nauseated daily while at the same time pining for you a little a couple of times weekly (figure out the math of that yourself). Those two, nausea and nostalgia, aren't necessarily linked but were only written poorly here—your influence, I think, which seems to have continued with this sentence (can the father's genes be transferred to the mother via the fetus?). Harry sends his best and wishes you were rich.” He wrote back saying he hoped her nausea had passed by now—he heard it usually lasts only a month—but if it hasn't he's including a recipe composed mainly of cranberries for an antidote he got out of his woman friend's book of natural self-healing remedies. He still thinks of her fondly, maybe a minute to two more a day than a month ago and about three minutes more than when he first started to—at this rate his mind will be totally consumed by her in twenty to thirty years—hopes his genes haven't been transferred via the route she said for that conjures up horrific incestuous possibilities that for health and moral reasons—anyway, she gets the point. Tell Harry he'd love to be better fixed but doesn't know anyone holding down more poor-paying jobs at one time for so long as he and little appreciation from the woman he's supporting, though for her dear son he'd work his butt off, with no thanks needed, till his father started to or he was twenty-one. He'd love a month-by-month Polaroidized pornographic account of her pregnancy—he had to go to the local university library's biggest dictionary for “gravidity”—if she's still up for it. “By the way, I thought you looked fine in the photo. I was going to say ‘great' but I know how you hate compliments of any sort. By the way two, you never asked and I never said how the woman I live with reacted to my meeting you in N.Y. and your getting gravid—I hadn't planned on telling her but it all sort of came out in front of the washing machine when she saw the lipstick on my collar and smelled the perfume on my hanky. She said it was just what she expected from me: that my primary pursuit in life is not art nor scholarship nor the deepest things men think but ‘to sniff out the vaginas of every well-stacked and/or beautiful woman' I meet, though if she and I are still together after the child's born (it isn't true about me and vaginas of any kind, by the way three, as I haven't bedded with anyone else but her and you in a few years, though my eyes have; maybe that's what she's saying but since she knows that, why did she refer to my nose?) she'd like—she's periodically fantasized having a second child but knows she'd abort the first real sign of one, since it'd put a few more wrinkles on her stomach and crimp in her noncarcer—for it to spend half the year with us once it's around three or four. I'm just repeating her words, as she also said that probability's probably an impossibility or the opposite, because you wouldn't go for it—‘What non-doped-up rational mother would?'—and I've also told her I love you more than I do her (I actually don't love her at all but how am I to say that?) and she wants me out of her house soon as I can cough up the next quarterly mortgage payment for it and leave enough money behind for that period's utility bills (she thinks she'll be ready by then to look for a job to support herself and her son). I know I sound as if I'm ridiculing her but please understand, we've been at the edge of that Grand Canyon's highest precipice for a year with each of us contemplating shoving the other off. I never should have stayed out there that long since she's much more vehement, vengeful and grievance-stricken than I. Cheers to Harry, love to you. How come, by the way four, you don't sign off with anything resembling a ‘Ta ta,' ‘Sec ya,' ‘¡vaya con Dios!' ‘Happy landing' or ‘Write soon'?” He didn't hear from her for a few months. By this time he was living alone in the city in a single room. He wrote asking how she was—wrote several times—wrote he was getting worried she hadn't written back—wrote he was now even more worried she hadn't written back after his last letter about it—wrote he was thinking of calling her but thought that'd be intrusive, was he right?—wrote that for the last time, answer him if everything's okay, Harry, her boy, she, and yes, is the baby okay?—wrote saying he's sure everything's okay, as she can see from his last letter he just gets worried that way, but please write and tell him a little of what's going on      if she in fact doesn't want him writing her anymore     and he forgot to tell her in any of his letters the last two months, though assumed she guessed by his change of address, that he and the woman split up before either of them pushed the other off that canyon cliff or jumped or did both but he takes her son once a week for a night and day, something the kid's beginning to shrink from as he'd rather be free all weekend for his friends—and she finally wrote back saying she had a miscarriage and, to be honest, Harry and she are relieved, as the baby was putting a strain on their marriage much worse than any affair or love involvement would. “Harry wanted the child to know as soon as it was able to (a year? two? for one not so comprehending, three?) the identity of its biological father (or so out of it: four? five? Though I took a new kind of amniotic-fluid prenatal test and it was a girl who was destined to be, unless there were delivery snags, healthy and learned) and, if possible, for you to see it once or twice a week for—I mean ‘twice a year for a week' (that unpremeditated slip should in no way be interpreted as to how I occasionally feel about you, if you'll excuse). He said you could even stay with us and, if you also liked, sleep with me but not every night, or not the ones he wanted to. I wouldn't have gone for that, thank you, being passed around like a felt hat—'Orgasms for the needy and poor!'—but I know what was on his mind: he wanted to continue to putter around outside, especially those nights you and I were supposed to be doing it here: maybe he believed it'd make his own sex more exciting or it was part of his misguided ideas of husbandly liberation. As for me, I wanted my children to grow up as bonded same-parents siblings and for the new one never to see or speak to you and surely not to know what you are to it. I thought it would have a disadvantage, being both a bastard and genetically connected to the family only by half, besides what Harry might say to it in one of his drug- or booze- or rage-induced stupors and that its brother would also from time to time make sure it knew of its liability too. If I got my way it'd mean I'd have to lie to this second child about its origins which is antithetical to the only life rule I have (and then, of course, by my husband or son, be refuted), or the only one I regard high enough to want to pass on to my children: Never lie, cheat or steal (‘cheat' in money, swindle, defraud, violate rules deliberately, gull, betray, double-cross). And I thought it would have to eventually find out (if not by Harry & Son then someone) its parents had been lying to it about its parentage all this time and confront us with it. Harry would be his usual cavalier self. ‘Oh, it was for your sake,' he'd say to it (if it wasn't his blundering stupor that revealed it, then he'd be too blind to speak and think clearly), or ‘Your mother thought it best for you, and it's been ten to fifteen to twenty years already so be cool and forget it, babe. And we brought you up well and without privations, haven't we, so what more do you want?'—but it'd devastate me. Incidentally, I'm no longer nostalgic for you and this is no lie (I don't lie!). The truth is I wish I'd never met you, or met you but said after a while ‘Enjoy the party, Gid, or Gold, or Gould—sorry, I'm bad with names—and nice to meet you and toodle-oo,' because then none of this would have happened. And what good came of it? Did I pick up a sizzling piece of wisdom? Find my way out of a blind spot from my youth? Have my first adult orgasm, o-lay! So I pray—and I'm dead serious about that: with my back on my bed last night and eyes closed and mouth open and lips soliciting to the Lord—this letter will terminate our correspondence. I know I'll never respond to you if you write again, and if I happen to answer the phone if you call, then immediately on knowing it's you I'll hang up with eardrum-damaging finality. Be a pal, as you used to say to me to get your way and said your dad did too to you, and tear up the naked photo of me. I no longer look like that—what was in is out—and it could be of no use to you now—certainly not of the masturbatory kind either—and it's the last appeal I'll ever make to you and I do so most genuinely. Matter of fact, not the last: tear it up and send it back noteless but agglomeratively intact. Will you do that? Thank you, Gould. Good-bye.” He kept the photo (at first, when he was still living with the other woman, around her house here and there but out of sight: in his desk or dresser drawer or favorite hardcover poetry anthology; after he moved out: faceup in his night table drawer so whenever he opened it he saw her, then facedown when he got tired of seeing it so much: her shy smile, or qualmish one, or reluctant or whatever-it-is kind of smile that's pulling back as it's being given—“I know I look absurd,” it seemed to say, “or the bottom of my face that's left does, since I also know I'll be snipping the top half of my head off this photo, and if I was going to do it right I should have stuck a Coke bottle in my cunt, but as it is it's somehow wrong and can probably be used against me in the future or the baby—you could say ‘Look at her, she's a whore who also poses for porno photos and I should have the child'—but I think I have to do it anyway, which makes no sense, okay?”—tiny belly bloat on her lanky frame, but it got permanently dirty and a part of it scratched across her arms over her breasts so he turned it faceup again; a short time later when he moved back to New York: in a see-through bag of most of his old photographs he kept in his shirt and sweater drawer and which included baby shots of him sitting up in a pram and on his mother's shoulders with her holding out his hands and looking as if she's doing a Jewish dance and as a summer camper and Boy Scout and several of him over a number of years sitting on a curb watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade and pictures of old girlfriends or girls he wanted to be his girlfriends and half the photos in the bag taken on his European trip when he was nineteen and had his first camera, of girls he met and places he saw and road signs where he
waited for a hitch and many of him in a sport jacket feeding pigeons in the Piazza San Marco and his folks at a table in the same piazza ten years later on their first European trip which had to be cut short because his father got very sick and also when they were young and on their parents' laps and uncles' and brothers' shoulders and together when they were courting and several don't-take-me-I-look-repulsive ones of his mother in maternity clothes; for a while in a letter envelope at the back of his socks, underwear and handkerchief drawer, keeping it hidden from some woman he might meet at a party or bar, let's say, and invite home and her coming upon it accidentally or because she liked to snoop or was looking for a pair of socks to wear because his apartment in winter was usually cold, which is what he meant by “accidentally,” and maybe even questioning why, after explaining how she found the photo by accident, he had one of a slightly pregnant otherwise spindly meek-looking nude woman (some distinctive kind of kink?) and then lost it after a few years but doesn't know how: he removed all the dresser drawers several times that year thinking the envelope might have slipped behind or under them, once emptied out all the clothes and unfolded them and searched through the shirts and inside the pockets of the shorts and shook every garment out and things like that. Did masturbate to it a few times, usually—after the first three or four times—when nothing better was around like a just-bought or week-old issue of a men's magazine that was also known for its fiction and had a potentially interesting article or interview. He felt he needed a naked woman's body or several of them in different poses to do it to, focusing his attention when he did it to her photo (to the magazines' photos there were vaginas, clitorises later on, spread legs, raised rears, brushed bushes, nipples that had probably been rubbed with ice, he heard, just before being photo graphed or both breasts dunked in frigid water) to the little that was visible light pubic hair. Every year or so, then every two, three, three to four, but really at the most two to three he'd think something like his child would be one now      two      three      five .     seven      ten .     thirteen or fourteen. Would it have been a girl? Chances are, because of that test, which was new but not as reliable then and of what she felt at conception, yes. What would he have preferred? Both. Either, he means. Twins of opposite sexes he would have loved, for then he'd have it all in one. A healthy baby, that's all, isn't that what he's supposed to say? And it's true too; his father said first thing he did when he saw him after he was born was count his fingers and toes and check that his testicles had dropped. But after that: probably a girl. Easier, he's sure, meaning less conflict, they take fewer risky chances, like to read more and play indoors, theater, dance, voice, piano, imaginative games, other things that make it easier, and they seem to get sweeter and more compassionate and tender than boys as they get older, or stay that way more, or most, or maybe he doesn't know what he's talking about, and she'd have her mother, much more important to her than her father, while with a boy there's always that comparing, challenging, matching, outdoing. Would he have tried to see it, taken an interest in it? Boy or girl, he would have, as it got older, or tried, and often as it wanted or its parents let him. Would have even taken it a few weeks every summer, if permitted, car trip around part of the country, two weeks in a rented cabin in New Hampshire or Vermont, things like that if he had the money, maybe even camping—he'd learn how to do it—and he'd send presents every birthday and Christmas and books throughout the year: classics, poetry, things he'd find out it was interested in. About twelve years after he last saw the woman he tried contacting her when he was going to be in Madison but neither she nor Harry was listed with information. He sent a letter to their old address, having transferred it to each new address book, thinking maybe it could still be forwarded—they might have moved only within the last year or two and the expiration date on forwarding their mail hadn't been reached—but the post office returned it: addressee unknown. He phoned the university's law school and the secretary there said Harry had left teaching for private practice seven or eight years ago and she didn't know where. Could she find out? he said, and the next day she said all she could learn from personnel was that the law office he joined was in Milwaukee. He called Milwaukee information but neither was listed. Maybe they got divorced and Harry had left the state and she was still living in Madison or Milwaukee but under her maiden name or new married one. He didn't remember her maiden name and called the law school again for any information on the woman but the secretary said she didn't know anything and none of Harry's former colleagues still taught here and even if she had their phone numbers and names she couldn't give them out. He was seeing someone now, nothing very serious—dinner, movies and bed—and about once every three weeks called someone else or was called by this person for the same thing, so maybe the woman and he, if she was no longer with Harry and hadn't remarried, could get together for a couple of days in Madison; they had been attracted to each other once, she in her way, he much more so in his, and not that many years had passed where they'd be so physically changed unless she'd gone through some major health problem or illness; some people even said he looked better than he ever had and he felt he was a more reasonable and interesting person than when she knew him and in much better physical shape: he ran and exercised vigorously every day. But he didn't know anyone who knew her. He couldn't remember the name of the friend she stayed with when he first met her in New York or exactly where she lived: some number Downing Street in the Village—he remembered he got off at the Christopher Street subway station and that it wasn't the same number as the British prime minister's residence; that, he thinks, would have stuck with him. He could go down there and maybe he'd recognize the building and then he'd look at the tenant roster or mailboxes and maybe recognize the friend's name, but he didn't think it worth the trip: she had probably moved by now too; in twelve years everyone he knew around his age had moved three or four times. A year later he was at a small wedding reception of a woman he'd dated for a short time that same year. They had split up amicably—she liked him and sleeping with him and thought he was intelligent and all that—he liked her too and loved her body—but she thought him unmarriageable and she wanted to get married and have children with someone who made a lot more money than he or at least whose prospects for it were better and who was readier for marriage—in other words, she said when she told him all this, and nothing that other women haven't said to him, she was cutting off their little romance to give herself the opportunity to meet other men before she got too involved with him—and though he didn't know why he'd been invited—they hadn't remained friends, seeing each other for coffee or talking on the phone or anything like that—he went out of curiosity and the chance of meeting a woman. A man came over to him and said “Don't I recognize you—were we once acquainted?” and he said “Not that I know of, I'm sorry, what's your name?” Their names weren't familiar to each other but the man was sure he knew him from someplace and that Gould even might have had an important impact on his life—“Something you said or did, I'm almost positive”—and Gould said “I don't see how that could be, unless something I said related to something else and you took it the way you wanted or needed to at the time—that can happen, though I'm not claiming to be a psychologist; and believe me, nothing I've ever done, or I'm aware of, I don't think could have altered anybody's life in the kind of way you said,” and the man said “Let's see,” and they went back where each had worked and lived and gone to school the last fifteen years and it turned out the man had studied with the host of the party Gould had met the woman at and that the man was at that party and had once been a good friend of Miriam's. “Miriam, that's right, I don't know why but I'm always forgetting the name,” and the man said “Just think of the original Miriam's place in the Bible and you'll always have it,” and he said “Excuse me, I don't mean to sound ignorant, but I don't recall a Miriam in it—in the Old, anyway, and I've never read the New except some quotes you see on Baptist signs along the road and maybe what was read to us at public school assemblies,” and the man said “In the way you allude to them, she was in the Old T, sandwiched between Moses and Aaron, but I'll let you guess or do the research on the rest; granted, though, Gould, she wasn't the most significant sororial biblical figure. And I'm still wondering what it was that could have impressed me so much about you at that party, but it could be my memory of my own history's starting to flag too,” and he said “Anyway, whatever happened to Miriam?—I know she once lived on Downing Street here,” and the man said “Married a Canadian doctor whose family's reputed to own half a province or so, and moved to Montreal.” “You know his last name?” and the man said “A French one with a