Letting Go (8 page)

My mouth
was
tasting pink when I asked the operator for Iowa. I waited to be connected while my father’s tuneless peppy little whistle came from the bedroom. Removing my tartar had restored his belief in the future. He walked past me into the living room, a white terry-cloth bathrobe around his shoulders and oriental slippers on his feet. He was back to Yoga again. I should have guessed it.

At the other end of the line, Margie said hello.

“Marge—it’s me.”

“Oh sweetie,” she said, “how are you?”

“I’m all right. How are you?”

“I’m a little tired. I’ve been scrubbing shampoo off the walls all afternoon.”

“Have you moved back in?”

“Gabe, this disengagement policy wasn’t working at all. I was so lonely. I love you, honey.”

“Margie, we can’t keep living together. It’s bad for our characters.”

“I love you. It’s good for my character.”

“Stop being kittenish.”

“Is that kittenish
too?
” she whined.

“Marge, why don’t you go to Kenosha for a week? It’s a holiday. You’re lonely because there’s no one on the campus. You don’t miss me as much as you think. Why don’t you go home for a while?”

“Because those people bore me.”

“Margie, you just have to move out.”

“You come back, you’ll see. We’ll have fun.”

“You have to move out.”

“I miss you. Don’t you miss anything? How can you live with someone for a month and not
miss
them?”

“Missing is just more indulgence for us. The whole thing was very indulgent of both of us.”

“I feel,” she said, “very used …”

“Please, honey, don’t talk too much like a movie, all right?”

“You’re cynical about love. I’m only telling you how I feel.”

“The truth is we were both used. We used each other. Now let’s stop it.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“I love you.”

“You don’t,” I said.

“Gabe, I don’t want to fight with you. I didn’t call to fight. The campus is empty. It’s depressing me.”

“What have you been doing?” I asked.

“I’m trying to read Proust,” she said. “I think the translation must be lousy. He just doesn’t seem that great. Sweetheart, I’ve written nearly fifty letters. I think all I’ve done is wash my damn hair and mail letters. Gabe, you’ve
got
to come back—for New Year’s at least. Oh Gabe, New Year’s Eve?”

“Marge,” I said, not really knowing where to go from here, “why don’t you go out and talk to people?” It began to seem that I had found my Bartleby: I would have to go back to Iowa City and find a new apartment, leaving Marge behind in the old one. “Why don’t you go to the movies, go swimming. Make a life for yourself, baby,
please?
”

“I don’t like movies alone. I’m not being obstinate—I don’t. I had coffee with a friend of yours in the Union today.”

It depressed me considerably to hear her settling down to be chatty. “Who?”

“Paul Kurtz.”

“Herz.”

“He seemed very nice. A little lugubrious.”

“I hardly know him. What did he have to say?”

“We just chatted. His wife’s sick. I think she had what I had.
She’s in the hospital. Gabe, is she really his wife, or is he just living with her?”

“Oh, Marge—”

“Gabe, he’s the only person I’ve spoken with in
five days.
Aren’t you going to come back for New Year’s Eve?”

“I’m visiting with my father. Look, you’ve got to move out. You just can’t keep being indulgent like this.”

“Hasn’t indulgence turned
into
anything?” she demanded to know. “You just can’t walk out!” she cried into the phone.

“We’re both walking out.”

“I’m not walking anywhere! Don’t tell me what I’m doing!”

“All right, I won’t. Just call a taxi, and take your stuff, and get out.”

“You don’t respond—that’s your trouble! You’re heartless!”

“I expect you to be gone when I get back.”

“How can you say that to me if you love me!”

“But I don’t love you. I never said I did.”

“You
used
me, you bastard.” And she began to weep.

“Oh, Margie, nobody uses anybody for four weeks.”

“
Five
weeks!”

“Look, hang up now, pack your bags, and leave.”

“I’ll ruin this place, you,” she screamed. “I really will!”

“You’re hysterical—” I said, astounding nobody with the insight.

“I’ll tear up all your books! I’ll break all the rotten spines—you’ll
have
to come back!”

“I’m coming back on the first of January.”

“Oh—” she wept, “I never expected this of you.”

“Margie, you romanticized—”

“
You
romanticized!” and at her end the phone slammed down.

When my mother was alive she had done everything possible to prevent my father from assuming the Cobra Posture on her prized living room rug. However, she was gone, and I did not live with the man, so after my phone call—determined to put out of my mind those long-distance protestations of love—I sat down on the orange raw silk of our scrolly Victorian sofa, and I watched. And for the first time since my arrival, I found my father oblivious to me. It pleased me to think that we two were occupants of the same room, and that he was not investigating my plans for next month, or fiddling around inside
my mouth. Not me, but the Cobra Posture—Bhujungasana—was the object upon which he focused all his soul and all his body. Clad in a blue jockey bathing suit, he was stretched rigidly before me on the floor, his stomach down, his toes pointed back, his chest nobly arched. All that moved, while he held himself aloft on locked wrists and elbows, were the muscles in his forearms, which jiggled at a high speed against the thin pale shell of his skin. The features of his face moved around a bit too as he tried to work them into a picture of repose. It was all very familiar, even down to the hour of the day; over in the Park, everything was growing dim.

“That rug,” my mother used to say, dying to kick one arm out from under him, but knitting instead, “was woven by an entire village in North Africa, Gabriel, so that your father could make a damn fool of himself on it.” She had a strategy of making certain matters that were important to her sound unimportant; but she was, after all, a strenuous woman and I knew she wasn’t kidding. She had disapproved of his Yoga, as she had disapproved of his Reichian analysis, his health foods, and his allegiance in 1948 to Henry Wallace. She was a dedicated opponent of the impossible, which my father happened to be for; but he was for her too, and that was what had weakened him. Even so, it was no easy job for her to restore him to reason. It had finally been necessary, where his orgone box was concerned, to shame him out of the thing by hinting of its existence one night to a group of his colleagues at a convention of the American Dental Association in Miami. What had forced her to such a cruel extreme was something my father had done with his box one afternoon in her absence: he had put me in it. After the ADA convention, a length of wooden rod was purchased, some nails driven in the right places, and the next thing Millie knew she had a zinc lined wardrobe closet in the corner of her room. The end result of my mother’s maneuver was that it managed to bring my father back into his family living room in the evenings, the proper place, my mother told him, to be collecting sexual energy in the first place.

As for the avocado and fresh vegetable dinners, she had put up with them and put up with them, until finally she had forbidden Millie to set
anything
green and uncooked on our table. We all had to go without vitamin C until it was certain that my father was on the wagon. My mother claimed she would hold out until the entire family had scurvy, though my father gave in before the first symptoms of the disease made an appearance. Henry Wallace is a more complicated story. He had been entertained in the Wallach apartment, and
treated graciously. My father, as I had told Marge, had been chairman of an organization of doctors and lawyers in New York City who had dedicated themselves to campaigning for the third party. One would imagine, of course, that my father would then have voted for Wallace, but he did not; election eve my mother had kept him up, feeding him coffee, until she had finally convinced him that a vote for Wallace was a vote for Dewey. What a moment it must have been for him in the booth, pulling down that Truman lever. How he must have hated the woman he loved.

It was Hatha Yoga that she had not been able to lick. Even when my father had ceased being a damned fool on her Moroccan rug, his nurse reported persistence after hours in the waiting room. The fact was that his wife could have as easily shamed him out of Yoga as out of dentistry. He was much too attached to the idea of healing. At least that was the way he might have thought of it himself. More likely, for all his belief in restitution, progress, reform, reconstruction—he
had
rebuilt some of the most talked-about mouths in New York—he was more attracted to ideas of disease. Wilhelm Reich, Henry Wallace, leafy green vegetables: all somehow were antibodies. And the disease? He apparently blamed some bug, some germ, for his perennially swollen heart. The disease was the doctor’s feelings. Not that he ever said this to anyone; to the worlds, professional and lay, he claimed dedication only to science. To the upper Fifth Avenue rabbis who made their way through our apartment, he was open-faced about his atheism. I have myself heard him explain his high colonic Yogic enema to the biggest internist in New York, absolutely physiologically, no mention of the soul at all. And Bhujangansa, of course, stimulated the autonomous and sympathetic nervous systems.

Well, that all may or may not have been so. My own suspicion, even as a growing boy, was that my father’s particular trouble wasn’t with his sympathetic nervous system at all. It was, as a matter of fact, with his sympathies: his passions ached him. Whatever terror he saw in life, whatever turbulence gave him inward hell, he was unable to answer it with reason. So he took to magic.

My mother was a different kind of person, which may be obvious by now. She was the one in our family with the expressive face—baggy eyes, long nose, wide clown’s mouth—but she had controlled it like a master. On the surface she was neither overly affectionate nor overly retiring, and as for surface manners, people have said on occasion that I take after her. Love her as I did, I don’t know how
much that pleases me. What with my father’s steely physiognomy and my mother’s crafty rule over her responses, I don’t suppose I look much like a young man giving things away. I don’t believe I look out-and-out mean, so much perhaps as self-concerned. My mother was more fortunate: she looked self-aware. She gave one the feeling that she knew precisely what she was doing when she made her offer of reason to my father. It was that—reason—which she had given him. Since no marriage is so simple, there were of course other offerings as well; but it was reason more than anything else, for that was what my father seemed most desperately in need of. And that may have been what she had an excess of herself.

She checked cockeyed enthusiasms left and right, and for those of us up close it was almost impressive. During the early years, however, my father did not apparently understand fully the exchange he had entered into. From time to time he would try to model himself after the handsome woman he had chosen, and for two or three weeks would defect from Yoga and charge at life from a reasonable angle. It was a change his very essence deplored; exercising a painful self-control, he wound up constipating himself. It was clear even to me, the child in the house, that he was not a logical man; while I listened to his explanations I knew that truth, whatever it was, plunged deeper than what he was telling me. But the difference between reason and unreason was for a child nothing more than a distinction. In the beginning I had no favorites. It was eventually under my mother’s tutelage—and that consisted primarily of just being around her—that I came to have attitudes toward the objects of my father’s passions. But then all the young finally get sophistication and go around the house feeling themselves surrounded by second-rate minds; it is to first-rate hearts that they cling, with innocence and greed. Red twilights in the park, every last patient having taken home his reconstructed jaw, my father would toss his darling son up toward the branches of the trees. Miles below me the grass would twirl, so that even
I
knew it was too high for safety. My father, however, was a turbulent man, and since nine in the morning he’d been working in millimeters.

But one evening, which it seems I will not forget, I came down into his arms wailing not with joy, but with fright. Up near the trees I had looked still higher, and from our living-room window I had seen a pair of hands stretching out and down, toward me. The hands were my mother’s. I came back to earth whimpering, and my father had to hold me and then to carry me home on his shoulders, chattering
all the while of circuses we would go to and fun we would have. I quickly got over my fantasy, but that made it no less significant: there
had
always been a struggle for me in the Wallach household. Each apparently saw my chances in life diminished if I grew in the image of the other. So I was pulled and tugged between these two somewhat terrorized people—a woman who gripped at life with taste and reason and a powerful self-control, and a man who preferred the strange forces to grip him. And still, I managed to move up through adolescence and into manhood without biting my nails or wetting my bed or stealing hubcaps off parked cars. Whatever it was in that apartment on Central Park West that had been compounded out of the polar personalities of my parents, I myself experienced it as love.