Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale (3 page)

Because her loverboy coach
was balking about abandoning his retarded baby daughter, Judy told
him to just forget it, and somewhat relieved, she joined her
husband in California to launch a new life.

At the end of his fellowship
period, Jim was offered a three- year appointment as a Jones
Lecturer, which did not pay beans, true, he acknowledged to Judy,
but the prestige of teaching at Stanford would enable him to secure
very promising teaching positions in the future, he assured Judy.
Jim’s first novel, a sort of revenge upon his childhood, had been
published by then to generally good reviews, but had sold less
than a thousand copies. For months after the novel was published,
the first thing Judy would ask Jim when she arrived home each
evening from work at the end of her rope was were there any calls
about the book? Nope, Jim would inform Judy, nope, no phone calls,
no big paperback sales, no calls from tinsel town.

Then one evening at dinner
Judy informed Jim that it was time they started planning their
family. She hated her job as a sportswear buyer, hated traveling,
hated flying in airplanes. She wanted to be at home with babies,
like most of her college girl friends were. She wanted a brick
house. She wanted furniture of her own. Their rented life had run
its course with her. Jim’s doggone dream of becoming a famous
writer was dragging her down. Jim had been a Stanford lecturer two
years and had published a novel, so if he got off his butt he
could surely secure some promising teaching position for the
following fall and begin supporting his family like the husbands of
her college girl friends did. Meanwhile, they should take advantage
of their insurance benefits and the facilities at Stanford.
Stanford had an advanced medical program in artificial insemination
techniques, Judy informed Jim, and she announced that she had
talked with a doctor at the clinic on campus that very
day.

They were sitting at the
kitchen table talking after a dinner of squabs stuffed with liver,
bacon, and wild rice, a side dish of French stringbeans, Belgian
endive salad, and ambrosia served in scooped and scalloped lemon
halves. From earlier phone-call comments, Jim had suspected some
relationship shit was going to hit the fan that evening, and Jim, a
henpecked former tough guy, had slaved over dinner in a tizzy. Now
Judy took several pamphlets from her purse and pushed them across
the table in front of Jim. Then she handed Jim a small plastic
jar.

Well, how was dinner,
honeybunch? Jim asked Judy. —Do you think that stuffing was too
dry? What about that currant jelly, did that hit the spot? Judy
told Jim dinner was dandy and she was stuffed to the gills, and
then she told him to read this literature on artificial
insemination before the doctor’s appointment she had scheduled for
him the following Tuesday. He’s a real nice doctor, Judy had told
Jim. —You’ll like him. He makes you feel real relaxed, she said.
The little plastic jar had Jim’s name typed on a label taped to its
side. It was for a sample of Jim’s sperm, which would be analyzed
to determine his sperm count, Judy explained. Jim would have to
time things right, because he had to get his sperm sample to the
clinic by a certain deadline after he did it. It? Jim had asked
Judy. It, Judy said, and wiggled her eyebrows suggestively. Judy
told Jim she would accompany him herself, except she would be out
of town next Tuesday. You’ll like this doctor, she repeated. —I
told him, she said, that we had sex about twice a week. I read in
Cosmopolitan that sex twice a week is about average for a normal
couple our age. In case he asks you, too, so we’ll have our stories
straight.

Sex! Jim hooted and hopped
up from the kitchen table. —Twice a week! Who says that’s any of
that bastard’s business in the first place? Jim inquired as he
snapped open a beer he had grabbed from the refrigerator; it foamed
over his hand onto the floor and he tossed it into the kitchen
sink. —Our stories straight! Christ, we’re not applying for a
fucken loan. That sumbitch better not ask me nothing like that if
he knows what’s good for him! Jim informed Judy as with shaky hands
he filled his Mickey Mouse Club collectible glass to the brim with
vodka. Normal couple! Jim said. —What’s that supposed to mean? And
how can you spring something like this on me, anyway?

You’re the so-called writer
around here, Judy reminded Jim. —You know what normal is supposed
to mean, all right. And if you don’t, well, buddy, go look it up in
your hundred-dollar Webster’s Dictionary. And you’re a fine one to
talk about somebody springing something on somebody. You owe me,
buster, Judy reminded Jim. You better do this, she said.

So that next Tuesday found
Jim flopped naked as the day he was born in his darkened bedroom
with his sorry member in his hand, watching the soundless
television’s blue light flicker on the ceiling. Jim thought of
light escaping from our world off into cold space, reaching
someplace new forever. Jim wagged his limp, sore penis like a
little fishing pole. He looked over at the clock’s glowing face on
the table beside the bed: 10:32. His doctor’s appointment wasn’t
until one o’clock. Jim still had plenty of time. He pulled
halfheartedly on his poor penis. He took a sip of his third
screwdriver of the morning. He still had some hope.

Don’t give up the jackoff!
Jim admonished himself. Never say die! I have not yet begun to jack
off, Jim told himself resolutely.

After dropping Judy off at
the airport the day before, Jim had made trial runs all afternoon.
The first trial run, he had parked in the lot of the campus clinic
and for a half hour or so simply stared at the building’s front
doors, again and again imagining himself walking up to them. He
then drove to the Oasis on El Camino for a pitcher of beer. The
second trial run, Jim had walked up to the doors and almost
entered. The third trial run, after spending an hour at the Red
Lion downtown drinking among buddies, mostly outpatients from the
Veterans Hospital, one of whom sucked his vodka-tonic through a
straw he inserted in a hole in his neck, Jim had entered the doors
and sat in the vast lobby on a couch between potted plants and
watched people walk by with what appeared to be purpose, and he
envied them bitterly. Whenever somebody glanced in his direction,
Jim looked at his watch impatiently, as though he were waiting for
his wife, say, who could be at that very moment entertaining a test
for pregnancy, or having a biopsy, and he would sigh audibly and
gaze up at the high ceiling of relentless fluorescent lights,
affecting the attitude of a fellow bracing to accept any
news.

Jim did owe Judy. Who had to
tell him that? And he was the last person in the world to complain
about somebody springing things. Judy had been a technical virgin
when she and Jim were married, hence her experience was not immense
in the male- equipment department, so what could she really know
about normal scrotums? Not until nearly a year after they were
married did Jim’s mother, a nurse and well-meaning woman, let the
cat out of the bag, so to speak, when she mentioned to Judy that
there were astounding advances being made in medical science every
single day, especially in areas such as artificial insemination, so
couples like them always had hope. Hope? Judy had asked Jim.
Medical science? What in the dickens does that all mean,
anyhow?

Only then had Jim tearfully
informed Judy, his bride, who had not even seen an ocean until
their weekend honeymoon at Virginia Beach, that having her family
of two boys and two girls might need a little help in the miracle
department from medical science, due to this litde disability he
had been born with, through no fault of his own. Disability? Judy
had said. What dag- gone disability? You never told me anything
about any daggone disability. I have testicles, Jim assured Judy.
It’s just that those litde rascals aren’t all the way down where
they should be is all, undescended, so to speak. You can say that
again, buster, Judy had agreed wholeheartedly. Listen, Jim said,
I’ve fought in the Golden Gloves, I’ve battled with switchblades,
I’ve driven a stolen car crazily toward a cliff’s deadly edge for
no better reason than romance, I’ve pulled seven armed robberies,
lived on the lam, and survived to write about it all.

What in the world does any
of that bullstool have to do with my two boys and two girls? Judy
had been real curious to know.

Eleven thirty-eight, the
clock by the bed read, the faint sweep of its second hand luminous
as it spun around insanely in the darkened bedroom. Jim had held
his limp, sore, sad member in his hand befuddledly. What sexy thing
between him and his wife had Jim not tried to conjure? He should be
thinking about his wife while he jacked off, shouldn’t he? This
whole ordeal was for them, wasn’t it? For their litde baby-to-be,
their son, for their future. But Jim found there was nothing, no
memory, no imagined thing between them that would do the
trick.

At high noon Jim had let
himself imagine his wife cavorting with her loverboy coach back
home. He permitted himself to imagine his wife and Doc at that
motel where they met nights when his wife was supposedly
chaperoning sock hops. Jim imagined them in the shower, his wife’s
hair wet, her slick skin smelling sweetly of soap. When his wife
soaped Doc’s enormous dick, it hardened in her tiny hand. Then his
wife soaped the fingertips of her free hand, and she commenced to
run them slowly up and down the tight crack of Doc’s muscular
coachy ass. At some point Jim’s wife inserted her middle finger in
Doc’s anus and rotated it resolutely. Then Jim’s wife joyfully
soaped Doc’s enormous balls. She knelt down on the slick tile floor
then, Jim’s wife, the shower water like a warm summer rain over her
fresh, pretty petal of a face, and she took her loverboy’s coachy
coconuts, one at a time, into her mouth. Still upon her knees,
Jim’s wife moved around Doc, kissing and licking and nibbling the
wet skin of his hard thighs as she went. When Jim’s wife had
finally arrived at her boyfriend’s rump, and they were cheek to
cheek, so to speak, she had spread Doc’s muscular coachy buttocks
with her slender fingers, at which point Jim’s wife had buried her
sweet, moist, pink little tongue into that hairy abyss.

The Seven Warning Signs of
Love

When Ralph Crawford and Jim
Stark first met and became fast friends as young writers, they were
both sappy with expectation. The future seemed to loom before them
like a stupendous dream. Soon they were congratulating themselves
mightily for living like bold outlaw authors on the lam from that
gloomy tedium called ordinary life. They were both daring,
larger-than-life characters living legendary as they engaged in
high drama and hilarity, the stuff of great stories, they were
convinced, and not simply drunken, stoned stumblebums and barroom
yahoos.

The stupendous dream Ralph
and Jim shared was for fame. They were hungry for it (and who could
have guessed how famous old Ralph would become!). And nobody is
above taking shortcuts to the rewards of fame, such as enjoying
sexual congress with comely strangers. That time, for instance,
when Ralph, in the heat of a roadhouse romance, tried to impress a
beautiful barmaid by telling her he was none other than Philip
Roth, the professor of passion, the doctor of desire. The barmaid
had never heard of this Philip Roth. And Jim Stark had once told a
beer-joint beauty at a crucial moment that he was Norman

Mailer, that lionized lover
and mayor of American letters. Norman who?

Jim found Ralph’s front door
wide open as usual. Ralph’s house was a rambling, one-story,
ranch-style in a cul-de-sac of solid middle-class homes in Menlo
Park. He and Alice Ann had purchased it a few years earlier after
a surprise inheritance from Alice Ann’s natural father. It had
fallen on hard times since then. But nothing a dozen good coats of
paint couldn’t cure, and maybe a few months of professional yard
work, plus an army of good roofers, and it would have been
beneficial in the beautification department to have had Ralph’s
criminal son haul away the heap he had balanced on cinder blocks in
the driveway, a vehicle he worked on at all hours with stolen
parts.

Besides their criminal
children, the bane of Ralph and Alice Ann’s lives were the
neighbors, who complained haughtily about the frequent midnight
howls heard from that hard-luck house, so unlike any sounds ever
issuing from other houses on that quiet, residential, tree-lined
street. Not to mention the occasional police patrol car’s flashing
lights, which drew the nosy neighbors like moths to their windows,
on their moral high horses, as they observed the events of Ralph
and Alice Ann Crawford’s family life unfold before them in that
losing battle of good intentions against unfortunate circumstances
running amok and human nature.

As Jim passed back through
the house, he found Ralph’s young nephews, Ralph’s sister-in-law
Erin’s twin boys, slumped slack-jawed and drooling before the
television in the game room, and they couldn’t return to
consciousness enough to answer when Jim asked where he could find
their uncle Ralph. So Jim clomped on across the flagstoned floor
through the French doors that opened onto the enclosed back yard of
burnt grass and scraggly orange trees. The humid air was damp with
the fallen oranges’ odor and so thick with flies Jim had to bury
his face in his hands as he stumbled across the yard like a blind
man whose seeing-eye dog has run off.