Gould (8 page)

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in it, but that's all I know.” “Miriam's last name then—it's been a while,” and the man said “Hildago, but she dropped it for her hubby's. If there are any further questions about her, all I can say is I've been out of touch with her for years—call it a falling out,” and he said “Miriam had a friend from college with her at the party and I've lost touch with her,” and gave the woman's name and described her and the man said “She I never knew, not even by name, and I must have seen her with Miriam on and off, but can't picture her from your description. It might help if you could give me her original name at school. But tell me about you. How have you been faring these past dozen years? Marriage, lots of squealing infants, or because of one reason or another are you a confirmed bachelor or just unsure about being one?” and seemed to be making a pass by what he said and way he said it and used his lips and eyes and Gould said “None of them,” and excused himself. Four years later, when he was married and his first child was around a year and a half, he received a letter from the woman. She'd read a book review he'd done—it was good, she said, illuminating in parts and never stodgy but didn't go deeply enough into the reasons he disliked the book so much, which she thought he could have done with very little added effort as well as given a clearer summing up as to what the author was trying to say—and the contributor note indicated where he taught, which is why this letter's coming to him by way of his institution. “Preface completed as to how I got to you after so many years, as well as unasked- and perhaps uncalled-for capsulized review of your review, now let me explain why I'm writing. Naturally (as you can see I've adopted your old irritating habit of asides, which I think is the most honest way for me to write since it's how I think when I'm writing, though I realize the momentum and interest of what I write are often lost in these digressive interjections) I hope this letter finds you well. You're probably married by now—I hope you are or have been married at least once (my own feeling, based on the experiences of friends and partly on my own experience, is that it takes a bad brief rancorous first marriage to make a good harmonious second one, and that most first marriages are brief because they're rancorous, wrongheaded, misguided and destructive almost from the start and the relationships leading up to them aren't much better) and have children or a child, and if so I congratulate you (shades of my shade Harry, if you can remember back that far) which may be the most belated and surely the most recent congratulations you've received on the matter, unless you were just married or remarried or had your first child yesterday and this letter arrived the day after. All foolishness aside—all, if I can manage it, asides aside—and also because (there goes that resolution, made in earnest but which you should take as an exemplar of how much you can trust me regarding this, and after what I have to tell you, which I'm sure I'll eventually come to, regarding anything, perhaps) I don't believe any letter should extend beyond a bladderful of ink (as you can see, one habit of yours I haven't adopted, convenient and time-saving as it would be if I wasn't so inept with almost any kind of machine, is the typewritten letter)—but let me continue (this goes back, incidentally, to the previous page and that ‘all foolishness aside' start) and a gold medal to you—it's Olympics time again and my entire brood's influenced if not, in how we use our hours, governed by it—so a gold medal in stick-to-itiveness if you've kept up with me in all this). About two months ago my youngest son Timothy was going through my personal library for a book—any book; he simply wanted to read something (and I've two sons, by the way, and no girls, and no child of mine has ever died or been taken away from me at birth or anytime after and tragedies like that, so this is all the children I've had and have or ever will; you'll understand what I mean momentarily—I'm sure it'll take a leap of faith for you with that ‘momentarily'—if you haven't understood already) and found one that interested him because of its cover (you may not be able to tell a book by its cover but it can start you reading it—excuse me, I'm such an impoverished poor punster who's always tripping overself in the attempt, and four or five words into that pun I regretted having begun, and same with the overself, which is more a neowart or carnage than a pun) and he opened it (the book, if you forgot, and I'm not blaming you) and an old postcard from you to me dropped out. There, I've finally gotten to it. Do you know what I'm going to say next? I suppose that depends on how well you remember what you used to say too publicly at the time (though now I wouldn't care less) in your postcards, and what I just said wasn't what I was going to say next. Now I've given enough hints. If you haven't caught on yet then something, I'm afraid, and I say this lamentably, has happened to your once-snappy brain. You had drawn something on it—are you getting warmer? (And I meant the old children's game, nothing else, and shouldn't have even clarified it, since it looks as if I did mean it provocatively, when I didn't, I didn't.) And Timothy asked ‘Who's the artist?' I told him you weren't an artist, or you might be now but you weren't when you drew it, and he said ‘But he's done a nifty caricature of you as a pregnant lady standing on a doctor's scale with your head pressed up against the measuring stick attached to it. And he wrote underneath (this should all have been paraphrased or in indirect quotes, but permit me the license and also the pleasure in seeing how adept I am at replicating his voice): “Haven't heard from you in a while (that, of course, should be in the direct quotes it is). How's your confinement doing? Measuring up to scale?” So he knew you when you were pregnant with me, based on the card's dates (meaning yours and the P.O.'s). Pretty bold of him there, Mom, as if he knew you intimately. Was he,' he asked, “a lover or someone like that? (I inserted the ‘he asked' because I thought I might have lost you. Did I?) A good friend who you maybe only had some good friendly sex with and nothing else when Dad was still around? (That's right: Harry's no longer around; he's dead—'shades of my shade Harry,' several pages back?—but more about that later if the pen holds out.) I mean, Ma (here I'm trying to convey it as it was spoken, to bring the scene more to life for you so you'll be able to hear the boy, though he actually calls me Chris more than he does Ma or Mom), you say your marriage was open then, but how much so?' (‘Nifty,' from a previous page, I now realize, isn't a word I've ever heard him use; it could have been ‘neat' or ‘nice,' but don't hold me to it.) So I told him the truth: you, me, your orgasmic duplicity, my lethargy, Timothy as blastocyst, Harry as goingalongwithist, and the truth's what I'm truthfully telling you now, truthfully. ‘Not (and I also just realized Timothy would have used ‘whom' for ‘who' in that ‘good friend you maybe only' many lines ago, since it's a discipline at school he's recently relearned again for good and has been practicing on us without letup or remorse) even as a friend,' I said of you. ‘And for me, at least, not for the sex or rapport or because I was piningly lonely in New York, where your roots first started to generate, or the satisfaction and intrigue in deceiving your father either. He was just there—your father elsewhere—slippery, pushy and unstoppably priapic, and after my first few puny no's—I'm almost sure about that—I was my most typically submissive, unvocally suspicious and containable.' Principal reason I told him is because his father died in a motorcycle accident eight years ago, if one can call it that: Harry was stoned, driving with one hand, blowing kisses with the other, his lady possessor, an obsessive confessor who miraculously survived without only a spleen, reproductive system and one eye to brag about it all, giving him a handjob with Vaseline—she even said he was approaching out-of-body trans-send-your-socks-off-into-the-void ejaculation as they crashed—and having missed out having a father for so long during most of the important years for that I finally succumbed to thinking he should know he still had a biological one, feeling that if I ever died (at forty I suddenly became mortal) before he was on his own and John (my eldest, whom you met) was too encapsulated in his own life to tender to him, he could try contacting you. All this about the aborted abortion that I never gave so much as half a thought to having must come as a surprise and shock. I apologize for that, but at the time I thought it the only way to keep you from the birth and baby and then the child being raised. You were such a gushy sentimentalist about children and blood, which might be nice if one were married to you, that I knew you'd intrude deleteriously, in addition to all the other disadvantages he'd undergo which I wrote you of but now can't recall. Harry went along with my having the child so long as I continued to let him lay his many legal girlfriends (that was his profession almost: layman of lawyers) at any minute of the night and overdraft our savings and checking for his increasingly more exotic cars, two-wheelies and drugs. Then he died, I kept you a secret from Timothy, since I didn't see any point in his knowing, the secret spilled out of the bookshelf and Timothy, an aspiring trial lawyer he says but only for the money, easily grilled it out of me. But now—for instance, regarding keeping you from the birth, your adamant ideas on circumcision: that a boy shouldn't have one; he can keep his prepuce clean just by washing it and the dismemberment robs him of a sexual edge; even if his brother and both his fathers had them and preputial men are more prone to penile cancer and sometimes suffer phimosis and are also supposed to increase the chances of cervical cancer in the women they lay. You were filled with that sort of unthought-out naturalistic mischief. But now, as I was saying, Timothy would like to have a relationship of some kind with you but asked me to initiate it with this letter: flamboyant, aggressive and (no pun calculated) cocksure in the courtroom as he's sure to be, he's preternaturally shy outside it, something I was in every setting and still am, except when I'm writing, and you said you were once too, which amazed me because you were so fundamentally forward and backslapping. So what do you say, Gould? He'll write back if you jot him a few lines. Just say who you are and what you do and you heard he wanted a letter from you, and if you have a wife and children or child then something about them. He loves animals so if you have a pet or two or your children do, tell him of it. Where you live and have lived and what kind of place it is: Ping-Pong table, swimming pool, little lawn where you might play ball or run around with your kids, what sports you might attend: all those things. In other words, what you're most interested in if it's clean, and if you mention me then simply refer to the place where we met: kids his age love hearing about parties and New York. Or write what you like—who am I to inscribe your lines? He'll be thrilled to get any thing, though please don't feel you're committed to this forever. If you want to withdraw after the first letter or think your other obligations preclude any to him, even an exchange of letters, tell him so and he'll just have to understand. He's fifteen and quite mature and other than for his blond hair and if my memory serves me faithfully—too bad we never got to the stage in our relationship of exchanging photos, if only so he could have some idea what you looked like then and must still resemble a little now—he looks like you of sixteen years ago, minus fifteen or so (did I make my math too confusing to follow, as well as this labored sentence?). For certain he looks like no one else in his family, Harry's included, except for his hair, which is mine though now mine is a fading blond-gray (let's face it: I've aged and I swear I don't care; it's only a man or two who knew or screwed me fifteen-twenty years ago who do). Now he's standing beside me, and when I asked him to move because I hate anyone looking over my shoulder, then beside me, and is reading and now has read this page and after telling me I'm being too harsh on my facial lines, corporeal spread and dehydrated hair (those are my words; his were just ‘face, body and hair'), wants to read all the previous pages. But I'm telling him and have just told him they're private and it's something he knows better than to ask. And he's telling me and has just told me and, because I didn't catch it all and it seems to be serious enough that I should, told me again to say he'll write you first if you will only give the thumbs-up in a letter or card to me or him that you're willing to receive (you don't even have to be eager, he said) and that you might even answer him (though just that you'll open his letter will be enough, he said; ‘If you want, don't even read,' he just yelled). He's also saying—but let me get this straight (and fill, to be completely honest with you, and though I didn't want to go past one and after my second, thought I was being dishonest in not telling you, my third bladderful of ink—has it been that long; can you hold out?). Now: something about law and legal things I think he was saying—yes, that's what he was saying, he's now saying, and that you should never fear, the junior trial lawyer says, that your personal correspondence (his words) will be used in court against you. That he will never ‘institute' a son's (he just told me to put quotation marks around that possessive) equivalent of a paternity suit, though for all he knows, he added, that's what it might be called. He only wants the two of you to know something about the other: it'll make him feel good and ‘more whole.' Speaking personally—he wants me to strike out that last quote; says it makes him seem stupid for ‘whole is whole, like unique's unique and pregnant's pregnant,' but it's my letter, Timmy, I just told him—he hates when I call him that; has said it sounds as if he's still a child. But, speaking pregnantly—
personally
(that was intentional)—‘Get out of here now, Tim,' I just told him—he's a great kid (but isn't getting out. ‘Out, Tim, I said out!'), decent, sensitive, witty, gentle, polite, way-above-average intelligence and sensibility, the boy of boys and all the other standard things people say about their children. (I hate that last passage: so bourgeois.) (And that last use of ‘bourgeois': so bourgeois.) I just wish Harry had lived (of course I also wish it for other reasons) so Timothy would never have been shoved into this stew. (Such odd word usage, a stew itself, and if I'm preternaturally anything in this letter—why did I use such an unnatural word there, a question which acts out what I was about to say? The first time to show off, the second to poke holes in myself. And why did I think I had to answer my question, which is still portraying what I was about to say and that was if I'm preternaturally anything in this letter it's self-conscious. Meaning that I am, and not because you mean so much to me, if I can beg your pardon, because you don't. I'm self-conscious because I feel guilty withholding his existence from you till now and also that abortion trick I did, and withholding you from Timothy too. I've done the absolutely wrong thing, I think, which I hope this letter will begin to correct.) A boy needs his father (this goes back to my wish that Harry had lived), and whatever Harry wasn't to me (other than for the boys, begetting one and fathering them both, what a pointless marriage!) he (already said in the last paragraph) was always there for his sons. (So: sort of said. And John's in sleepaway college, by the way, and indifferent that his brother is only his half brother now.) Now Timothy thinks of you often, says he's dreamed of you, wants to go—what am I saying?—he's gone to the local library and run a computer check on your publications in the hope there'd be a jacket or newspaper photo of you and found that you haven't been productive the last fifteen years ago and that this seems to be only your second review in a publication that's important enough to be on a computer readout (Timothy told me the term). If that's so, I told him, then it could be that most of your work time goes into classroom teaching—which he immediately saw as a ‘definite plus in biodad's favor'—or else our library hasn't the resources it claims it has. But Gould, like facing age—oh gosh, I was about to get philosophical. What I'm saying is face it, you have at least one son who, I believe, in addition to all the other reasons he's drawn to you (flesh and blood, a writer of at least two published reviews, etc.) secretly admires you for winning his mother over (fucking her in one night, though I told him two, and it was two, wasn't it? Since you can't count the first day we met; and I didn't, of course, say ‘fuck' to him; I think I said, stumped for the moment as to how else to put it, ‘when we were joined together as lovers') and knocking her up that first night too (I didn't tell him that; he just assumed). Because I think I lied—I did lie, didn't I?—and said that was the only time we were joined together, since the next day, I told him, I drove back to Madison with John. Who knows if that admiration for you isn't his way of getting back at his real dad—the nonbiological one—though for what, I don't know, other than—and this would be too ironical—his treatment of me, though pummel me with pumice stones for trying to get psychological on you too. Other than that (I'm in the closing mode, I swear) if you don't write either of us back I'll write you again. If you don't answer that letter (I'll give you a few weeks with both) I'll phone your university to make sure you're still teaching there or not on sabbatical or leave somewhere. If you are there or on leave but not writing back (first I'll phone your department's secretary to make sure you're picking up your office mail or having it sent to you and that you're not in a foreign country where it's rare for the mail to get through) or you write back you want nothing to do with any of this, I'll understand, even if I can't guarantee Timothy will; though that should be, after all I did (lying, disappearing, hitting you with this news, perhaps subconsciously inducing you to bed sixteen years ago with whatever whining and self-hurting and other unwily wiles I used to make you feel sorry enough for me to) of no concern or problem to you. You're in the clear as people say (I can't for the life of me, like that ‘for the life of me,' get genuinely colloquial—maybe curtailing the adverbs and swanky verbs would help). Timothy, incidentally, is no longer in the room reading this and hasn't been since I ordered him out that second time (I'm afraid, since Harry's death, I'm able to get scolding, revolted and fierce). As you can see by the skipping light script in the last sentence, the pen's running dry again. I want to leave enough ink (to be honest, this is the end of my third—all right, to be absolutely honest: fourth—bladderful) and three (since it's a much handier if not facile number to make comparisons and analogies with and so forth) has always been enough, hasn't it? (‘always' meaning ‘usually' here), if not more dramatic: on a match, three strikes and you're out, three-time loser, Holy Trinity, is a crowd, etc., to address the envelope as well as forge a facsimile of a first-class postage stamp on the top right corner of it (naturally, not true and the end, you'll be glad to hear, of any of my fourth-class jokemaking attempts). So thank you (why'd I say that? I suppose in my hope you'll accept my apologies for all my wrongdoings to you) and very best, and if you do have a wife and child(ren) you're currently living with, my humblest regards to them. (Not ‘humblest,' but you know what I mean.)” He showed the letter to his wife and said “Something, huh? I feel like I don't know what. Still shaking inside and like an ice pack's been dropped through my body to my feet. I mean, before I read it I had one kid and now I've two. What should I do about it?” and she said “Want me to make a joke about the ice pack or just give you a straight serious answer?” and he said “Both if you want,” and she said “Well, I'd say you have an unusually—and I ought to be careful with my jokes here after what she had to say about them and also hold back on my aggressions—