Letters (91 page)

Well,
Jane growled, back in the car. She of course was as at ease in the Second Ward as in the
me
boardroom, but miffed that Yvonne was learning discourtesy from Drew, and cross that we couldn’t after all just Wrap the Whole Thing Up, Damn It.

Not my night for seeing the nose on my face, Dad: Drew in deep conference on the eve of Marshyhope’s commencement ceremonies, the disruption whereof we’d feared since September last! But I was too preoccupied by now with the incremental deflation of my
plan du soir:
Cap’n Chick, the
O.F.T.,
Jane’s invocation of her affiancement and of the Cambridge race riots, which put me in mind of my adventure on the New Bridge with Drew and dear brave Polly. I was ready to call it quits—even formed that phrase in my head without hearing what I was telling myself. But now Jane was hungry! Now she was up for a
real
dinner! At the cottage! Let’s pretend the whole stupid evening hasn’t happened! Let’s start over and do it right this time!

If only she’d not made that last exhortation. But now her girlishness was determined, and her language came straight from the Author:
Late as it was, it was not too late to save our evening.

Back out to Todds Point! Bye, bye, John: Mister Andrews will fetch me home! I found myself asking, like a scared adolescent, Was she sure she…

She was sure.

Attend now, Father, my last evening as a late-middle-aged man. I fooled with drinks and charcoal briquettes and rémoulade while Jane ummed and hummed about the place, not so much unimpressed by what I’d preserved, restored, or remodeled as uncertain which was which. No time to bother with the fresh asparagus; it would be rockfish and a simple salad. But I was watching Jane; forgot to oil the fish grill; clapped my brow at the late recognition that my creamy garlic dressing for the salad was redundant, given the rémoulade; neglected to preheat the oven for the French bread; saw Jane, finger at her chin, begin to inspect the bedroom just as it was time to fork the fish.

A debacle. The fish skin burnt to the grill; the splendid animal overbroiled to a flayed, licorice-flavored mush; the sauce unappetizingly curdled; the salad indifferent; the bread doughy; Jane’s airy compliments insulting; her banalities about bachelor cooking particularly silly. I guzzle the wine (its back broken by overchilling) and chew a bread crust, too gloomy either to apologize or to correct her. She stuffs herself, chiding my want of appetite. She is beautiful. My spirits are plummeting. Ten-thirty.

Well, I say, and begin to clear the table. The president of Mack Enterprises takes my arm and purrs a directive: Let ’em soak.

That is how our Author works: having put us exquisitely out of sorts, he then brings to pass our dearest fantasy. Bitterness smote me; Jane’s extraordinary body (zip-zip, Dad: there it was) was a positive affront. I was surly; I was glum—and, of course, absolutely, almost belligerently impotent. Jane Patterson Paulsen Mack: Jane, Jane! So altogether, so
impersonally
self-willed and -centered, you could not only be “unfaithful” without a qualm, perhaps without even acknowledging to yourself that Infidelity was what was transpiring; you could (I realized to the bowels) even “love” a man and somehow be untouched by your own emotions! Cold as that Appalachian Chablis, I seized the hands that tried to rouse me; my voice came clotted, furious.
Did she remember,
God damn it? That this was the bedroom she’d strode naked into on the afternoon of August 13, 1932, Virginia Dare’s birthday, to fuck me while Harrison went for ice? Did she remember that we’d been lovers from that day till March of the following year, and again from July 31, 1935 (Pony-Penning Day in Assateague, Va.), till the Dark Night of June 21 or 22, 1937? God
damn
it, did she not recall that Jeannine Patterson Mack Singer Bernstein Golden was very possibly my daughter? Had she never understood that—together with certain other, itemizable causes—it was love of her that had brought me, on that last-mentioned calendar date, to an impotence and despair not unlike those I was currently entertaining, thence to a resolve to blow up myself, her, Harrison, Jeannine, and the entire Original & Unparalleled Floating Opera? Finally, finally, did she not bloody understand, as
I
had come since the spring of this year to understand, that I still loved her desperately—there was the exact adverb—that I still loved her desperately desperately desperately?

Even as I spoke I saw that of course she didn’t, couldn’t so remember, recall, understand. Jane was properly alarmed at my outburst (and offended by my coarse language); I saw her consider how to deal with me. I released her, apologized, told her I’d wait on the porch till she was ready and then drive her home. Her self-possession was at once restored. I wasn’t to be silly: it was late, she was tired; it had been an unfortunate evening, her fault;
she
should be the one apologizing. Et cetera. Come on, now. As for All That Stuff: of
course
she remembered, most of it anyhow, at least now I’d reminded her. Really, though, some of it she thought I’d made up over the years, or got from That Novel. I was such a romantic! Most men were, she supposed: certainly Harrison had been, Jeffrey had been, André was. Come on, now. The thing was, not to make a big thing out of it.

Absolutely unironically, Dad, she held my 69-year-old penis in her hand—the penultimate time that instrument shall ever be thus held—as she urged the above.

No sex? Why then, we’d sleep. Wouldn’t be the first time! She
winked,
Dad; used the bathroom; soon returned in one of my old cotton shirts; voiced her gratification that we weren’t air-conditioned, she much preferred the old-fashioned electric fan; bid me good night.

Our Author’s proclivities notwithstanding, my life’s recycling has not been slavishly mechanical. There was no Polly Lake to fart on PLF Day, 11 R. My previous Dark Night occurred in the Dorset Hotel, not the Todds Point cottage, and my impotence then was as sustained as my despair. A rather worse thing happened now. Under the glass of my desk here in the Dorset is a 69th-birthday card given me last March by Polly: a reproduction of a 1921 advertisement for Arrow shirts. Against a beige background are painted, in the handsome style of such advertisements in that period, a young couple in the cockpit of a sailboat. The vessel itself is invisible but for the highly varnished coaming over which the seated young woman negligently rests her elbows (and against which her companion stands facing her) and the attractively molded tiller on which he leans. Her auburn hair is piled Gibson-girl fashion and bound with a saffron scarf; she wears a beige middy blouse, sleeves rolled above her forearms; she fingers the end of its black neckerchief and smiles at something off their starboard quarter.
He
regards it too, benignly but more reservedly (her lips are parted; his are not, but his dark hair is, on the left); his black-belted trousers and (Arrow) shirt match her blouse, except for his starched white collar and green figured necktie, and like hers his sleeves are neatly rolled to the elbow. If the craft is under way, it is gently running before the wind, which lifts the forepart of his tie toward her face; but considering the hard angle of the tiller against which he casually leans, I judge it more probable that they’re in a slip (not moored or anchored, given the aft breeze): no sheets, spars, or sails can be seen—neither can any dock lines—and it is unlikely he’d be looking so placidly astern, with neither helmsman nor crew minding any sheets, while coming about. Quite possibly of course the artist was no sailor, or chose not to clutter his illustration with lines, blocks, and cleats, just as he chose not to paint in a background or, for that matter, a deck and topsides. The couple are the thing (particularly, to be sure, their shirts), and he has got them right: they are young, privileged, well-bred and -dressed, easy in the world, sunny, beautiful. They are Jane Mack and Todd Andrews once upon a time.

It is, by the way, a fairly erotic advertisement, Dad: “Jane” wears no bra, and the spread of her elbows thrusts her breasts at me under the middy; the slip of her fingers down that scarf is inches from my trouser fly, plainly pouched in her direction; our legs, out of sight beneath the rounded coaming, must surely be touching, if not intertwined. No wonder the knobbed tiller thrusts up at her from behind me at just hip-height and must be put hard over; no wonder even my necktie will not stay down! It is after all an
Arrow
shirt, and she its willing target. But there is no vulgar urgency. We have everything, including time; we mildly look away, perhaps at Harrison returning noisily down the dock with extra ice.

Polly sent me that card unmeaningly, I believe, beyond the obvious evocation of my sailing habits. But it was on the date of its receipt, a month after Harrison’s funeral, that Jane stopped by the office and, in a sense, commenced my recycling: indeed, our Author did not scruple to have me literally considering Polly’s card when Jane came in! Now (I mean then, this fateful Friday, out at the cottage) her reappearance from the bathroom in my old tan shirt—with, yes, a contrasting white collar, made fashionable again by the last Roaring Twenties revival—her unbelievably youthful figure even more attractive half-clothed than naked, put me irresistibly in mind of that card. Impotence might have been easier, more soporific: a fit end to a misfired evening, to be slept off. Instead, “Oh, changed his mind, did he?” she said when she noticed me, and briskly lay back, parted her lips, and steered me into her (there’s the final fingering). Half-erect, I ejaculated instantly; tried to keep going for her sake, but slipped out and couldn’t reenter. Anyhow, she wasn’t interested in an orgasm. Her eyes were closed, no doubt from fatigue, it had been a long day; she half smiled, whispered nighty-night, rolled over, and quickly fell asleep.

She slept busily as a child till morning, sometimes snoring. Not so I, on whom now, in the dark, 12 R came blackly down. As unbearably as in 1937—oh, more so, there were 32 more years of it—my emptiness, my unconnection, my grotesqueness came meticulously home, Then, though, I had thought Life devoid of meaning: luxurious, vain projection! Now it was
my
life, merely—how the boy in that sunny advertisement had misspent his mortal time. The world was what it was, and unbearable. Already by 1921 the first installment of Armageddon was astern. Farther aft lay, for example, the Napoleonic catastrophe, the genocide of native Americans, the wars of religion, the unimaginable great plagues—horror after horror, like dreadful buoys marking a channel to nowhere. Too much! The cottage creaked; the world rolled on, to no purpose. I was old, spent, silly. I was done with.

Towards first light I dozed enough to have a limpid, shattering dream. I was perhaps thirty, leaving “home” for “the office” on a luminous May morning, dressed in the manner of
National Geographic
advertisements of the time. There was the new electric refrigerator with coils on top; there were the glass quarts of unhomogenized milk on the steps. My black La Salle waited at the curb; my young wife Jane, still in her robe, held our son Drew, two years old at most, rosy and slumbrous in his blue Dr. Dentons. She wanted him to wave good-bye to me, but he was too drowsy: his fingers were in his mouth; his other arm lay loosely behind her neck; he laid his cheek against hers. I kissed them both: Drew smelled of milk and toast; Jane of soap and sleep. The light, the air, were unspeakably tender.

“Bye-bye to Daddy, now. Bye-bye? Bye-bye.”

I awoke a truly old man: shaky, achey, fuddled. Did not at first know where I was, why, with whom. Then I knew, and groaned aloud without intending to. The sound roused Jane, fresh and ready though puffy-faced from her hard sleep. She was shocked: told me I looked like death warmed over; wondered whether I was ill. I could scarcely manage breakfast for shaking; slopped my coffee, cut myself shaving, could barely tie my tie. Head hurt; heart fluttered.

“You
must’ve
had a bad night!” Jane cried, uncertainly breezy. I started up the car to take us to town and realized I couldn’t drive; Jane had to chauffeur me to the Dorset and call John from there. Marian the desk clerk was visibly startled too: both women urged me to call a doctor and forget about the commencement program that afternoon. I declared a nap was all I needed.

Good-bye then, Jane said. She’d be out of town again for a while. I’d better take care of myself; sleeping pill, maybe. Good-bye, then.

I got up the 28 steps to my room as toilsomely as Captain Osborn Jones used to, lay down fully clothed, and slept till noon. Not a whole lot better. My head was woozy; my face in the mirror astonished me. I looked exhumed; Jane must have felt she was delivering an ancient derelict to the flophouse. I redressed and took a cab out to Redmans Neck to join the foundation trustees on the platform. Drew was missing; everyone else was there, and they all Noticed, asked me jokingly had I been ill. I don’t know what I replied.

As I ought to have foreseen from Drew’s absences, the ceremony was of course disrupted after all. Ambrose Mensch, our first honorary doctor of letters, had evidently conspired with Drew and a number of non-students, as well as the Marshyhope radicals, to stop the show. I don’t believe Germaine Pitt had anything to do with it: she seemed more alarmed than I was, and indignant to the point of tears (she’s been sacked anyhow). I myself was too “strung out,” as the students say, to realize at once what was taking place. His citation read and degree conferred, Mensch launched into an unscheduled, Kurt Schwitters-ish sort of nonsense harangue, not at all scandalous I thought: a rather appropriate sort of inappropriateness, a properly nostalgic impropriety, evocative (to me) of the Dadaists and others who
didn’t
wear Arrow shirts and sail elegant sailboats back in 1921. Even when Drew and the youngsters began Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minhing and spraying the air with spray guns (to suggest our herbicidal campaigns in Southeast Asia, I presume), I thought them part of the entertainment. Granted, my wits were not quite about me; even so I was surprised to see so lively and harmless a stunt stop the show—and thus, I suppose, deny Drew the best part of his triumph. He himself hardly got into the act; he was still a hundred feet from the microphone when the campus cops nailed him.