The Spectator Bird (13 page)

There is a feeling part of us that does not grow old at all. If we could peel off the callus, and wanted to, there we would be, untouched by time, unwithered, vulnerable, afflicted and volatile and blind to consequence, a set of twitches as beyond control as an adolescent's erections. It is this feeling creature that Ruth keeps wistfully trying to expose in me. To have me admit to yearnings and anguishes, even if they threatened her, would allow her to forgive and pity me, and since she has trouble getting me to hold still for outward affection, forgiveness and pity are not unimportant. If she can do that small thing, after years of failing to make me over into what she wishes I were, she can devote herself unselfishly to me without fear that she is pounding sand down a rathole. Catching me with my feelings showing would give her power over me as surely as if she had collected my nail parings and tufts of my hair.

Is this unjust? Obviously. In protecting myself against circumstances, or against myself, I pretend to protect myself against her.

What I felt while reading that diary, and what I somehow can't tell her or talk about with her, is how much has been lost, how much is changed, since 1954. I really
am
getting old. It comes as a shock to realize that I am just killing time till time gets around to killing me. It is not arthritis and the other ailments. Ben exaggerates those. It is just the general comprehension that nothing is building, everything is running down, there are no more chances for improvement. One of these days the pump will quit, or the sugar in the gas tank will kill the engine in a puff of smelly smoke, or the pipes will burst, or the long-undernourished brain will begin to show signs of its starvation.

I don't suppose Ruth would bear my senility any more happily than my death, and I certainly don't wish for her the job I have seen some wives saddled with, the care of a shuffling invalid, a vegetable whose time has come, whose tie is always smeared and whose zipper is always unzipped and who is always mistaking the PC&E man, come to read the meter, for a son who died years ago, or a brother who has been in his grave for forty years. What the countess has come to, actually. The trouble is that the feelings do not die. I remember Ruth when we brought her and her baby home from the hospital, her fine bones, her small wracked healing body, the tightness of her arms around my neck in the bed made suddenly roomier by the eviction of that intruder between us. And I remember my gurgling son, fat and broad-faced, happy despite a full diaper, and how he laughed and reached out his hands when I played at knocking him over with a pillow. I remember too much. I remember a futile life. Yet if I turn away from it and die, Ruth loses her lifework all at once. If I only lose my buttons, she can go on managing me, sadly but with the satisfaction of love, duty, and selflessness. It is something women get for being durable. I don't envy them.

I have put away a bottle of pills, as who hasn't, but nobody can guarantee that when the time comes he will have the wit to take them, or even remember where he hid them. Ben Alexander, with his pacemaker, has an advantage that he brags of. He has only to disconnect a wire, or so he says. He can't be betrayed by senility and forgetfulness, as I can, for when life is on a jack like a telephone there is a good chance that accident will sooner or later disconnect it even if forethought fails to. The end is the same: not even a dial tone.

I suppose I had no real chance, once I had let her know that the journal existed, of not reading it to Ruth, or at least letting her read it. She is an exorcist at heart. She believes in cleansings and purifications, and she has a dangerous theory of complete honesty in marriage. When we had been married no more than twelve hours, she told me she had made a vow never to go to sleep on a quarrel. It must be settled before we closed our eyes. Since my impulse is to close my eyes on the quarrel and sleep it off, our systems have not always meshed. What often happens is that I back down in order to avoid all that soul searching that she likes, thereby committing some dishonesties she is unaware of. I doubt that she could ever believe that a man who resists her management and does not tell her all he knows can really love her as she wants to be loved and as I am sure she loves me. Yet I do. She is the woman I share the world with, and I can imagine wanting to share it with no one else.

I could hand her these notebooks and tell her to read them herself, but then I refuse the marital communion her soul craves. If I burn the things and declare that I will not be henpecked into spilling guts I no longer acknowledge, then I burn into her a conviction that certain aspects of the Danish episode were more important than in fact they were—that they left great scars on my soul. They didn't. Denmark was only one of those queer little adventures that the life-tourist runs into—a circus where you saw a man crawl through a ten-inch pipe, a side show where the fat lady's stuffing came out, a trapeze act where the acrobat flinched and refused a jump he knew would kill him.

No, Denmark did no more than thicken the callus. It was something I survived. Left to myself, I would deal with it (I tell myself) as Catarrh deals with his leavings in the flower bed.

Ruth strikes a lot of people as a cute lively little lady, bright, cultivated, interested in people, a good listener and a chatterbox of a talker. Some of them overlook the Presbyterian missionary in her, some of them fail to see the Salvation Army lass, most of them have never seen the shrew. They all know the warmth and sympathy she feels for all sorts of human misfortune or cussedness, but even Ben Alexander, until he had acted as her doctor for a couple of years, failed to comprehend the anxious tension that both holds her together and threatens to warp her out of shape. And nobody but me knows the little girl of about six who is buried in her, as ineradicable as the uneasy adolescent who is buried in me. Tell me a story, Daddy. Tell about when you were a teenager of fifty. Tell about Denmark, where you were so sad.

She was already in bed, without a book, waiting, when I came into the bedroom after turning down the thermostats and switching off the lights. The storm had blown itself out in the afternoon, but the clogged downspout was still dripping through whatever clogged it, and big regular drops
thunked
against the turned tin at the bottom. She had me go out and stuff a wash-cloth into the spout to kill the noise, and when I came in she was all business. “Well,” she said. “Where were we?”

A good question.

I got into the chair and opened up the second notebook and found where we had left off the night before. “I told you I'm a burn diarist,” I said. “There's nothing here for ten pages but quotations from the wise men.”

“Read them. Isn't it important to know what you were thinking about?”

“Is it? It looks pretty gloomy from here.”

“Still.”

“All right. Here's Thucydides: ‘Having done what men could, they suffered what men must.' ”

She said doubtfully, “I guess I don't ...”

“Having lived as long as they could, they died. Having fought as long as they could, they were killed. We should all have it engraved on our tombstones. Maybe you'll like this one better. This is from Marcus Aurelius:

I flipped the page and glanced up. Ruth was staring at me, frowning. “Why would you write down something as morbid as that?”

“What's morbid about it?” I said. “It isn't very cheerful, maybe, but it's wisdom. I suppose it struck me because I was a little tired of carrying the carcass up and down.”

She continued to stare at me for what seemed a long time—four or five heartbeats, I suppose. Then she folded back the covers and jumped out of bed and wrapped her arms around my head, hugging my face into her breasts.

“Why, Ruthie,” I said when she eased up and let me breathe.

“I didn't know you were that ... I thought you were just tired out!”

“Well, I survived.” I pulled her down in my lap and we had a little cuddle. The cheek I kissed was wet. “Oh, now, come on,” I said.

“You ought to
tell
me more!”

“I wonder. Look what even a hint does to you.”

“But when I think of the
difference
it might have made!”

“Yes,” I said. “It might have made you so anxious about me you'd have driven me off the Knippelsbro. Now why don't you hop back into bed before you get cold.” The fact was, I had pulled her down on me when I was kinked, and my knee was twisted and my hip ready to pop out of joint. If she had been sorry for me another minute she'd have broken me up like a Tinker Toy.

Ah, me, the complexity of being married to a woman you dearly love and automatically resist. I inevitably evade her management. I even evade her sympathy and affection, or meet them with my guard up. Martial is the anagram for marital. The grapple is everything, and I don't mean the sex grapple that so obsesses the seventies. That is only the signature for something much more complicated.

“All right, that's better,” I said when she was back under the covers. “Ready for more gloomy wisdom?”

“I guess.”

“Here's something from Kazantzakis: ‘When a Greek travels through Greece, his journey becomes converted ... into a laborious search to find his duty.' ”

“That's you, for sure.”

“Duty? Me? I follow pleasures and grails and lines of least resistance.”

“Like fun. I never saw anybody so set on finding his duty as you. You're like somebody hunting for the key to his house that he's hidden somewhere, when he comes home at night and can't get in.”

“All right, if you say so. I never deny what I wish was true. So here's another one from Kazantzakis: ‘Never return to success; return to failure.' And still another one: ‘Cursed be he whose thirst is quenched.' ”

“I like those a lot better than Marcus Aurelius,” Ruth said. “They're more like you, for one thing.”

“Never disparage Marcus Aurelius,” I said. “Did you know he was one of the earliest environmentalists? You could quote him to the Sierra Club. Here he says, ‘That which is not good for the beehive cannot be good for the bee,' and under that, in Allston's crabbed hand, is written, ”The world suffers from an increment of excrement,' which you might render into the vernacular as 'The world is full of shit.‘ “

That dried up any excess sympathy that might have been yearning toward the surface. “You know I don't like that word,” she said. “Are there a lot more of these quotations?”

“Pages.”

“What were you doing, making notes on everything in Penguin Books?”

“Looking for the house key. Want to skip the rest?”

“All right. I get the idea.”

I flipped pages until I came to solid scribbling again. “So. There's been a gap. It's now May 13. The Allstons have just returned from a ten-day automobile trip to escape the Danish rain. They have driven (in the rain) through Hamburg and Hannover, with one splendid evening in a wine cellar in Celle. They have circumnavigated the East German border and traversed (in the rain) the Romantic Road through towns named Dinkelsbühl and Rothenburg, with mottoes and scriptures on their gables and Riemenschneider altarpieces in their churches. They have driven (in the rain) through a lot of blossoming apple trees to Innsbruck, where the Inn was full. Remember that green glass river, and the way the streets were full of lilacs and horse chestnuts blown off by a storm? Remember the Munich company that was singing Così
Fan Tutte
in the opera house? Then back (in the rain) through the Rhine-Mosel country, a fine experience because 1953 had been one of the best vintage years in history, and even the dollar-a-liter grocery store wine was marvelous. And so back to Copenhagen (in the rain) with the Rover's boot full of smuggled wine to beat the Danish taxes, and the old lady quaking all the way for fear they'd be thrown in jail. We rejoin them in the apartment on Havnegade, in the company of their interesting but troubled friend the Countess Astrid Wredel-Krarup, abandoned wife of the celebrated quisling.”

“Idiot,” Ruth said. “Read.”

“Cursed be he whose thirst is quenched,” I said.