The Morels (16 page)

“Look,” Frank said, “I don’t want this to become a territory issue. We know our place, and we don’t want to step on your toes here, and Lord knows your mother and I understand better than you would think that raising a child isn’t a black-and-white issue. But the boy is eleven years old.”

“And.”

“And he needs—”

“Discipline?”

“He needs structure. He needs to not be the one driving the ship. He can’t be his own role model.”

“I refuse to brainwash my son,” Arthur said. “I want him to have the courage to make hard choices, to think for himself.”

“He needs limits, boundaries. You can’t just do and say whatever you want!”

“Everybody has to learn to be part of society,” Mrs. Wright said, “or they end up in the nuthouse or in jail.”

“Or an artist,” Arthur said. “Picasso spent his whole life trying to recapture the free spirit of his five-year-old self before he’d learned to paint.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake! The free spirit is a myth. Even the artist has his place in society.”

“The artist who works for society isn’t an artist; he’s a propagandist. A real artist is an outsider. If he has any hope of making real art, he needs to remain that way.”

“You are a father and a husband,” Mrs. Wright said. “Where does that fit into the model of the real artist? And what’s so bad about being useful? The propagandist is a craftsman. He serves a valuable purpose. We need slogan makers as much as we need slogan busters.”

“There will always be someone to make slogans. Everywhere we turn, we’re being sold something, via slogan. And dissent is only heard when it’s made palatable by actors and rock stars. Real dissent? Real dissent is marginalized.”

“And what are you protesting exactly? The rights of pedophiles?”

“Lower your voice, Dad.”

“I have no message.”

“Arthur, you don’t have to explain yourself. He doesn’t have to justify what he writes to anybody.”

“Oh, come off it, Arthur’s employed by the university. Art is a mill, just like any other. You’ve got a market, a demographic. Just because it’s smaller doesn’t mean it’s more legitimate.”

“For God’s sake, Arthur!” Mrs. Wright said suddenly.

Everyone was quiet for a moment.

“Why did you have to go and—? What kind of smug, self-indulgent—I’m sorry, Penny. I can’t pretend anymore. It’s disgusting, what he wrote. Where is the self-respect? The decency?”

More silence. My instinct, of course, always to smooth things over. A joke, a non sequitur, anything to lighten the mood, anything to right this train that had suddenly gone off the rails. I could think of nothing.

Arthur said, “What good are those traits? Will they make me a better writer?”

“You have disgraced your family. You are aware of that, aren’t you? What you have done is disgraceful. Do you have any idea what Frank has to put up with when he goes to the—”

“Constance, don’t.”

“He should know. He should know how it affects us. We live in a small community. You have the luxury of living in an anonymous place. Nobody cares what you do here. But fine—forget about us. What about your wife? What about your son? How could you do this to them? Explain it to me so that I can understand.”

It’s the last scene in the book.

Arthur is taking a bath with Will. Will is eight. They sit facing sled fashion in the tub, Arthur in front, Will behind. Will plays with his Hot Wheels, using Arthur’s hairy back as an island. Will asks for the shampoo, with which he sudses Arthur’s back. He whips up some clouds on the bathwater. It’s a recurring setting—bath time in this bathtub—which makes these final pages feel like a culminating moment.

Will announces that he is done, and they stand and shower off the suds. Shower spray at Arthur’s back, the bathwater drains at their ankles, toy cars floating and sunken underfoot.

Quite out of the blue, Will reaches for Arthur’s penis. He caresses it. Arthur flinches, but does not pull away.

It’s soft, Will says.

Yes, Arthur says.

Mine is small.

You’ll grow up and it will be just like mine, Arthur says.

It looks like a mushroom.

It does, kind of, doesn’t it?

Will lets go of Arthur’s penis and touches his own, a newborn gerbil of a thing.

The prose is vivid here, in stark contrast to the rest of the book. It is the only scene described in this much detail, the only full conversation that takes place between two people. The rest of the book is just thoughts, interiors. It comes on almost like awakening from a dream.

Is it
whack
that my penis grows when I touch it? Will asks. Lamar says it’s whack that my penis grows. I told him that it’s perfectly normal. It
is
perfectly normal, right?

It’s perfectly normal.

Everybody’s penis does this. That’s what I said. Even yours, right? That’s right.

And when you make it grow on purpose it’s called
whacking off
.

As Will is talking, he is fingering his own penis and walnut scrotum, and when he takes his hand away, his small hard-on is as stiff as a pencil shaft.

It feels good when I touch it, Will says.

Yes, Arthur says.

The air fills with Will’s boy breaths and Arthur’s own thumping heartbeat. The moment becomes strangely charged. In the way that an enticing smell can make someone aware suddenly that he is ravenous, this moment stirs in Arthur an appetite that has lain dormant until this very moment. Arthur becomes aware that his hand has been mirroring Will’s at his own penis. He looks down at it, the speckled mushroom cap of the head poking through his fist. Arthur lets go and it stands out stiff, quivering. He is aware of himself as a father, of Will as his son, but they feel like arbitrary designations, suddenly, or as Arthur puts it in the text, he loses the
moral relevance
of their roles for a moment.

There is only arousal.

He feels the bulge of ejaculate, wanting release, and when Will reaches out and touches the underseam of Arthur’s penis, a single soft stroke, it comes—an initial startling shot of sperm that hits Will in the face.

The rest pulses out into the now-empty tub.

M
Y FACE HAD BECOME HOT
and my heart hammered in my chest. I felt like I should excuse myself from this moment but feared that, if I did, Mrs. Wright would cast the spotlight of her fury on me, that I’d be called on to defend Arthur, to explain his actions. And at this moment, I couldn’t. Arthur, on the other hand, seemed relatively calm. I was reminded of his easy demeanor at the Concerto Concert, just moments before he pulled down his pants.

The refrigerator shuddered, cycled off. In the new silence I sensed Will behind the closed door of his room, listening.

“I was writing out a deep-seated fear I had.” Arthur looked down at his plate. His sleeve was still rolled up, hairy arm bared. “By writing about it, I was hoping to dispel it.”

Frank said, “You’re afraid that you might molest Will?”

“Dad,” Penelope said, “it’s a work of
fiction
.”

“It’s got his name, your son’s—our
grandson’s
—name. Don’t tell me about fiction. Your husband’s telling me he’s worried about molesting
your
son. Doesn’t that alarm you?”

“No,” Arthur said. “What I mean to say is—okay, take this knife.” He reached across the table to the platter and picked up the carving knife. Everyone flinched. At his empty plate, he began slicing imaginary vegetables. “You’re going about the ordinary
business of making dinner. You’re chopping and you’re cutting—and the knife slips, almost slitting open your thumb. But it doesn’t slit open your thumb. So you continue about the business of slicing and dicing, dicing and slicing, and yet now you’re thinking about your thumb, slit open by that knife. It’s an image, suddenly, that you can’t shake—it’s visceral, gory—it makes your gums ache, makes your knees weaken with its bloodred vividness. You try thinking of something else, you turn on the radio, but that image persists, still in your mind as you continue to chop and chop and chop. At times like these, when your brain is stuck like this, the only way to get that image out of your mind is to touch that knife to your thumb”—and here Arthur touched the carving knife to his thumb—“lightly, so that it doesn’t draw blood, because after all you
don’t
want to cut yourself, but just firmly enough to satisfy whatever compulsive itch your brain can’t seem to scratch. And once you do, once you’ve pantomimed that act of cutting yourself, the image vanishes. Do you see?”

“You married a lunatic,” Frank said. “You realize that, don’t you?”

“Art has nothing to apologize for. It’s literature; it’s not real life. You’re all confusing the two.”

“Your mother’s not asking for an apology, Penny. She’s asking him to help her understand. But once again he offers this psychobabble. It’s meaningless. Arthur, don’t you see? We need to hear from you that this
did not happen
.”

“Of course it didn’t happen,” Arthur said, almost grudgingly, as though he were giving something away. “It’s fiction.”

“Then tell us why—
why
this was not just some pointless stunt.”

“They’re just words. Come on, Frank. I’m still me. Nothing’s changed.”

“I wish that were true, son. But saying something doesn’t make it so.” He stood, stared down at his plate. “I’ve got to get out of here. I need to think.” He grabbed his jacket off the back of the couch and strode to the front door.

“Frank, you’ll freeze,” Mrs. Wright said.

As soon as Frank was gone, Will opened the door of his room. He stood there in his powder-blue pajamas and yelled, “Stop fighting about me! I didn’t do anything wrong!” He was crying. He held his pillow clenched in his fists as though he might smother any one of us seated at the table.

“Honey,” Mrs. Wright said, but Will had already retreated and slammed the door.

I looked at Penelope, who was looking down at her plate. Arthur was observing his mother-in-law steadily. She was shaking her head, looking back.

Arthur turned to me and said, “I think I might have a cigarette.”

I patted myself down and pulled a pack from my back pocket. “Two left.”

“I didn’t know you smoked,” I said, once we were out on the patio.

“I don’t. I tried once and found it disgusting. But the moment seems to require it, don’t you think?” I gave him one and lit it, watching as he sucked and coughed doggedly. He stepped out past the overhang and tilted his face to the misting rain. “Thanks for coming,” he said. “Sorry to get you involved in the drama.”

“Looks like Penelope was right. You really did need an ally.”

“Don’t get them wrong about art. They like art. They’re genuinely curious people. To browse their bookcases is to know this about them. Edith Wharton, Hemingway, Michener, Mailer. Writers who tell us the story of ourselves as Americans. Who entertain and enrich our understanding of the world. They are avid readers of American literature.
House on Mango Street, Interpreter of Maladies
. Asian writers, gay writers, black writers. They allow in the great democratic bounty. They’re not snobs either. Tom Wolfe and detective fiction—Hammett and Chandler.” Their bookcase, Arthur said, was evidence of the usefulness of art, each book a powerful statement in support of its usefulness and, when it came down to it, damn fine reads, each and every one. If there were any evidence required to prove society’s enrichment through literature, one had only to look at the books in the Wrights’ bookcase.
They were living proof of the relevance and power and usefulness of literature.

“So? What’s the problem?”

“What’s not there,” Arthur said. “The gaps in their collection speak for themselves.” There was Steinbeck but no Stein. Bellow but no Burrows. No Faulkner, no Pynchon. None of the great American experimenters. Gass or Gaddis, Barth or Barthelme. And with the exception of a single hardbound volume of the complete Frost, no poetry. “What good are they? They are books that tell difficult stories—if they tell stories at all!—that are difficult to follow and that don’t necessarily make you feel better for having read them. The Wrights’ belief about the usefulness of literature makes no room for these books. They are not useful books. They do not confirm our understanding of ourselves and in fact often leave us more confused about ourselves than we were to begin with. They are voices from the margins that are better left to the margins. Society would not be worse off without them.”

“So it’s the limits of their taste that prevent them from liking your book.”

Arthur smiled.

This talk pissed me off. At the time, I didn’t know why, but later when replaying the conversation in my head, I imagined myself shaking Arthur, just taking him by the shoulders and shaking him.
Cut the intellectual bullshit! Your family’s in real trouble here!
I said, “So what are you going to do?”

“Do?”

“They’re pretty upset.”

“Should I apologize?”

“What would be the harm in it? Even if you don’t see eye to eye, they’re important people in Will’s life, in Penelope’s life.”

“But I’m not sorry.”

“Does it matter? Convince them you are. For the sake of peace.”

“I can’t undo what I wrote, and apologizing won’t make it disappear. An apology is an admission I’ve done something wrong. It would only further justify their anger.”

“You don’t think you’ve done something wrong?”

“The book is good.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I don’t see how anything else matters. We don’t read Hemingway any differently because he was a bully and an absentee father. Do we? The author is human and has human failings and eventually dies. He is irrelevant. Mortal. In the end the book is judged on its own merits. It is judged not against the author but against other books. The author is the husk, out of which the book sprouts.”

“This is an evasion, and you know it. I’m not talking about your book.”

“You think this is some quarter-life crisis.”

“I don’t know what to think, Arthur. Why do you need to make things so complicated? All these years have passed and, as far as I can tell, you haven’t changed a bit. Still squandering your good fortune. Still dumping on the people who champion you. Of all the subjects in the world available to write about, Arthur. Why would anybody choose to fictionalize the incest of his own prepubescent son? It’s self-destructive and, as a statement, opaque. What’s the point? I’m going to have to agree with your in-laws on this one—I get the fear part, voicing a fear in order to dispel it? Fine, so you see a therapist, or you write it down in your supersecret journal. And then
burn
that journal. You don’t
publish
it! I don’t understand it, Arthur. I mean, is Frank right? Are you mentally ill? Or is there something you’re not saying, some key to understanding all this?”