Love Me (3 page)

“Do you want me to leave?” I said.

“I want you to stay the night.”

“What for?”

“To be with me.” She nestled her head against my neck. “It’s no big deal,” she said.

“You’re telling me,” I said.

She lay, holding me. She was sweet. A social worker is used to dealing with silly predicaments. She fixed a frittata for supper and got out her Scrabble board and let me beat her. We lay curled together in the dark. “I love your voice,” she said. “You put so much feeling into the baritone part.”

The candles flickered on the windowsill, my cigarette burned in the tuna-fish can, a still small voice said, “This is where you belong. Don’t mess this up.”

 

 

 

On the night before the choir took off on our eastern tour, I took her to hear Doc Evans’s Dixieland jazz band play in the courtyard of Walker Art Center, Iris in her white summer dress, me in my chinos and sport coat. We sat on the cool grass by a hedge and she glanced at my crotch and said, “There are holes in your pants.” Which there were. You could see London and France. “You must’ve brushed against something with acid on it.”

I ignored this and lit a cigarette. It was a perfect summer night in the North, a hot clarinet, a crowd of lovers in the dark, smoking, lying on the grass and on each other, engines revving, stoplights turning green all over town, every song about sex, none about wise career choices, all about kissing and feeling your heart go boom, and meanwhile the summer breeze is blowing through the holes in my pants, which definitely are getting bigger. We head back to her apartment and I take off the pants and we go to bed and make love. So sweet and true. And the next morning, we’re on the bus heading for Madison, South Bend, Cleveland, Syracuse, and New York City. I’m sitting next to Iris and she dozes with her head on my shoulder. Everyone can look at us and see:
They’re a couple. They sleep together.
Sex written all over us.

 

 

 

We were all pumped up for the tour. This was no rinky-dink thing,
The Bobbsey Twins Sing Bach,
this was a real kick-ass choir. We’re serious about this in Minnesota. We do choir as well as anybody in the world. We were brought up for it. Stood in Zion Lutheran with folks who never said boo in real life, and the organ played
“Ein feste burg ist unser Gott”
and my God, a cathedral of sound rose up through the floorboards and out your scalp, the Sacred Harmonic Convergence of the Blessed Are the Meek, and now in a packed hall in Cleveland we sing the
St. Matthew Passion,
and there are tears glittering in the front row, noses are blown, stunned faces, and again in Syracuse—just as Bruno Phillips has told us, “We are going to sing so that they will remember this for the rest of their lives. There is no other reason to do it, folks, none”—and two nights later, at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church on Central Park West in New York City. Oh, my God. Our driver missed the exit on the Thruway and wound up on the New Jersey Turnpike and then it took two hours to turn around and come through the Lincoln Tunnel and into Manhattan, Bruno Phillips sitting tall and composed behind the driver, and in the anxiety of arriving late, we forgot to be nervous about our New York debut, we just hustled off the bus and peed and combed our hair, and filed onto the stage twenty minutes late and the audience gave us a standing ovation. There were standees in back, people sitting in the aisles. We sang the best
St. Matthew
of our lives and those New Yorkers wept openly—old Broadway actresses, crooked financiers, admen, Jewish socialists, atheists, fingers stained yellow from tobacco, breath redolent of gin and vermouth—they were transformed into angels by J. S. Bach’s faith in Christ’s sacrifice and they rose to their feet and drenched us in applause and shouts and we stood and soaked in it. People shouting “Thank you” and “God bless you.” (A Minneapolis audience would’ve turned and walked out and gotten in their cars and driven home and turned on the news, but never mind.) So we sang “Children of the Heavenly Father” for an encore. And then the “Hallelujah Amen.” The applause wore us out. We walked off in a daze and Iris and I wandered into Central Park in the dark, into the Sheep Meadow and stood holding hands and I asked her to marry me. “Tonight?” she said. No, I said, when we get home. “Sounds good to me,” she said.

I knew so little about her. She was a good person, a good alto. A true-blue feminist and Democrat out to save the world like her heroes Dorothea Dix and Jane Addams and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and also a Golden Gophers hockey fan who leaped to her feet when the team scored and whooped and yelled and sang “Minnesota, Hats Off to Thee” and shouted out the
Rah rah rah for Ski-u-Mah.
Her father was a Lutheran minister from Wisconsin, so she knew the power of principled blockheads to drive you nuts, and her maternal grandfather led the plumbers out on strike in 1915 crying, “If they won’t pay a living wage, let them shit in the streets!” so she also knew the power of united action to bring about change. She got her degree in social work and was hired by Lutheran Social Services as a caseworker and discovered her calling in life, which was to rescue old people from the ravages of longevity. She became the Susan B. An thony of demented geezerdom. She was a great woman. She went out one day to track down somebody’s lost grandpa, and found him living in filth in a plywood shack near the Dayton’s Bluff freight yard. He’d been a mover and shaker in the Republican party, a federal judge for twenty-five years, a patron of the arts, a man who once dined with Ike at the White House, and now he was filthy and out of his mind, and she roped him in and brought him to the hospital and made sure that his needs were attended to and that the newspapers wouldn’t find out, and took the afternoon off and married me, at the courthouse in Hudson, Wisconsin, August 4, 1966, with a.bouquet of dandelions in her hand. No fancy wedding for her because the expense was ridiculous and what did we need it for? Dandelions are fine.

We called our parents from a coffee shop and gave them the big news. My father said, “What did you go and do that for?” He was miffed, but then he always is. My mother said, “I hope you’ll be happy” in a tone of voice that said,
Six months. A year at most.
They were on their way to play in the 3M Parade of Plaid golf tournament. My parents live in their own little world. May to October at Dellwood, winters in Palm Beach. They golf eighteen holes three or four times a week and attend a cocktail party every single night and in their pink lady and martini haze are honestly not aware that some people do not have two homes. We don’t talk except when absolutely necessary and we haven’t come to that point yet.

 

 

 

We attended Iris’s dad’s church in Hopkins that Sunday and he introduced us from the pulpit and people clapped and he had us come up front for a special blessing and then he preached on fruitfulness. It was a twenty-five-minute sermon and all through it I thought about how nice it would be to get back into Iris’s pants. The Rev. and Mrs. O‘Blennis took us to dinner at the Tremont and the Rev was still revved up about fruitfulness; he asked Iris if she had a bun in the oven. She said no. “What do you do, if I may ask?” he said to me. “I am a writer, sir,” I said. “I’m working on a novel.” For all the work I had done on that novel, I might as well have said, “I am working on a cure for the common cold,” but he seemed satisfied with my being a novelist and keeping busy novelizing. They were sweet old birds. He said to the Missus, “Well, it’s a big occasion, our little girl going off and getting married,” and he ordered a bottle of red wine and they got slightly potted and then he had a big glass of tawny port and I thought he might burst into song. “When can you two come up to the cabin?” he cried. The Missus fussed over the fact that Iris was keeping her last name, which was customary among young progressive women in those days. Her mother worried, “How does Larry feel about that? What’s wrong with Wyler?” Larry felt fine about that and everything else. Had no dough and no great prospects, but I had the girl, and that was good enough for me.

We lived in a string of one-bedroom apartments in southeast Minneapolis, and I washed dishes, worked in a mailroom, tended kids at a day camp, and at night I stayed up late, writing short stories with characters who talked like my sweet Iris—who said, “Ya, shur,” and “What kinda deal is that?” “Well, all right then.”
Anyhoo. Sounds good.
I worked at nothing jobs by day and spent the evenings at my Selectric. She and I made love more or less constantly but nobody in my stories ever did, they mostly sulked. Sometimes they got in a car and drove around. I tried out pen names:
Lawrence Wyler, Carson Wyler, Wyler Lawrence.
And then (unconsciously) signed my real name, Larry Wyler, to one that
The Carleton Miscellany
bought and there I was. It took me five years to get three stories published in little literary magazines with no readers. I sat
rap-tap-tapping
until 3 or 4 A.M. and smoking many many Pall Mall cigarettes and praying,
O dear God, please give me a success. Don’t make me live my life as a nobody. I am terrified of monotony. Let me be a somebody. That’s all I’m asking. That’s it. Make me the Turgenev of the Tundra, the Prairie Proust, the Poor Man’s Maupassant. Don’t let me die a

schnook.
I woke every morning in a prayerful state and Iris went off to help old people in pee-stained pants who were pushing their shopping carts around, combing the Dumpsters for collectibles. She was their champion. She was a bulldog on the phone. She was good at harassment. She stood up to the big cheeses in the blue suits. She fought for the underdog. After someone had been in a fight with Iris, he wasn’t anxious to go again. The mayor, for one. He was a slippery little sucker with a big pickerel smile and a quick hand and he’d grab your elbow and massage your back and murmur endearments in your ear even as he was planning how to dispose of your body. A one-time antiwar radical who became a liberal Democrat and then a Republican. He slid across the floor playing his squeezebox and loved anybody within ten feet of him and was in complete agreement with the last five things anybody told him and he kept his promises for up to one half-hour. He was a Smile on Wheels and 100 percent Content Free. When he slipped his hand around Iris and told her how much he admired her and her work in the community—work he had tried to sabotage in every way he could—she said, “Norm, if you don’t quit doinking around, I am going to cut you a new asshole.” His smile faded. He turned away and he found somebody else to love for fifteen seconds.

 

 

You don’t talk like that in Minnesota. But she did. And then she came home and fixed tuna hotdish or her famous Not So Bad Beans with ground beef and ketchup and onions and Worcestershire and was her own sweet self. She kept in touch with her old pals from the U, Bob and Sandy and Katherine and Frank. She took up the recorder and played in the Macalester Groveland Early Music Consort. She read Doris Lessing. We subscribed to
Whole Earth
and attended Pete Seeger concerts and joined Common Cause and believed in people of all races and religions working together to make a decent world. We believed that, deep down, people really are good. Or she did. And I believed in her.

She was big on birthdays and anniversaries. She told me once, “I would forgive you if you decided to be a Republican but I couldn’t if you forgot my birthday. So don’t.” So every March 8, we celebrated with supper at Vescio’s and a U of M hockey game and I wrote her a poem.
Happy birthday, dear Iris. I would write it on stone or papyrus. My heart is on fire since I met you in choir, and it’s either romance or a virus.

 

 

 

Every July we made the pilgrimage to her parents’ cottage on Cross Lake north of Brainerd, a family shrine crammed with historic furniture. The authentic original linoleum floor that Grandpa Guntzel laid in 1924. The novels of Booth Tarkington and Cornelia Otis Skinner and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey. Antique dinnerware and a broad assortment of forks and spoons. Embroidered dish towels that deserved to be in the National Museum of Washing & Drying. Iris’s craft projects from grade school. We sunned on the sandbar and fished for bluegills and sunnies and fried them up in cornmeal and drank gin and tonic, which the Rev referred to as “a beverage,” and we put vodka in his, instead of gin. He couldn’t bear arguments. Politics was not for the dinner table. He and the Missus took a long walk after supper—“so you young people can be to yourselves”—and that was so we could have sex. There was a stuffed lynx named Wal ter which, whenever somebody farted, they looked at and said, “Cut that out.” And a jar you put a quarter in for every cuss word and at the end of summer, the 75 cents (or a dollar) went toward ice cream cones at the superette. Iris liked to stand in the open door just before the place was locked up on Labor Day and say, “Any vandal who breaks in here, goddamn the goddamn son-of-a-bitch to fucking hell, the ice cream’s on me.”

Every August 4, we observed our wedding anniversary with a canoe trip on the St. Croix. My frugal wife fixed an elaborate picnic lunch of fresh guacamole and cold roast sirloin, rare, on kaiser rolls, an Oregon Pinot Noir, chocolate ice cream. We lunched on an island upstream from Stillwater, got a nice buzz, napped in the shade, and paddled on to Hudson, our destiny, site of our marriage. Every August, this was a sacred day.