The Summer Without Men (7 page)

Dr. S. waited.

I thought, Could she be right? Had I been clinging to an idea of wretchedness while I was secretly enjoying myself? Secret amusements. Unconscious knowledge.
There was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very, very good …
“You might be right.”

I could hear her breathe.

“There was a storm last night,” I said, “a big one. I liked it.” I was rambling, but that was good, free association. “It was like listening to my own rage, but rage with real power, big, masculine, godlike, magisterial, paternal bangs in the heavens, the kind of thundering rage that makes the lackeys hop to, a baritone roar shaking the sky. I could almost feel the town move.”

“You think if your anger had power, paternal power, you could shape things in your life more to your liking. Is that what you mean?”

Is that what I meant? “I don’t know.”

“Is it perhaps that you felt your father’s emotions had power in the family, power over your mother, your sister, and you, and you were always stepping around his feelings, trying not to upset him. And you’ve felt the same thing in your marriage, perhaps reproduced the same story, and all the while you’ve gotten angrier and angrier?”

Lord, the woman is sharp, I thought. I answered her with a small, meek “Yes.”

*   *   *

Try at another sex entry:

It started in the library with Kant. Libraries are sexual dream factories. The languor brings it on. The body must adjust its position—a leg crossed, a palm leaned upon, a back stretched—but the body is going nowhere. The reading and the looking up from one’s reading brings it on; the mind leaves the book and meanders onto a thigh or an elbow, real or imagined. The gloom of the stacks brings it on with its suggestion of the hidden. The dry odor of paper and bindings and very possibly the smell of old glue bring it on. It wasn’t difficult Kant:
The Critique of Practical Reason,
much easier than
Pure,
but I was twenty, and
Practical
was quite difficult enough, and he leaned over me to see which book it was. His warm breath, his beard, very close. Professor B. in his white shirt, his shoulder an inch from mine. My whole body stiffened, and I said nothing. Then he was reading in a low voice, but the only word I remember is
tutelage
. He said it slowly, enunciating each syllable, and I was his. It ended badly, as they say, whoever they are, but his eyes watching me as I undressed—
No, your blouse first. Now your skirt. Slowly
—his long fingers moving into my pubic hair, then withdrawing, teasing me, smiling, creating desration—these wanton pleasures in the library after it had closed, these I keep safe in memory.

*   *   *

“George is dead,” my mother said, and pressed her index finger to her mouth for a moment. “They found her this morning on the floor in the bathroom.”

“Poor George,” Regina said. She pursed her lips. “I doubt I’ll get to one hundred and two; it’s really extraordinary when you contemplate it, even for a moment.”

Did people contemplate for a moment?

“Not with my leg,” she continued. “I had never heard of what I have, you know. The doctor told me if I’m not careful, one day it goes right to your brain or your lungs or somewhere and you’re dead, instantly.” Her eyes looked moist. “If I forget the Coumadin, then, well, it’s over.”

“She loved to tell people her age.” Abigail was steadying her hunched self with one hand on the edge of the table. She turned her head in my direction. “Never tired of it. Her oldest daughter’s seventy-nine.” She breathed in. “It seems another one goes every day. Alive one minute. Dead the next.”

Peg examined her hands on the table. They were heavily spotted and lined with great protruding veins. “She’s with her Maker.” Peg had a true warble in her voice, like the throaty sound of a pigeon. “And Alvin,” she added.

“Unless they’ve remade the man in heaven, God save her from Alvin,” Abigail said forcefully. “The most persnickety little tyrant I’ve ever seen. His pens had to lie just so, an inch apart, his collars had to be ironed flat, flat, flat. The bed, Lord, the bed and its corners. George was lucky to be rid of him. Had twenty-seven blessed years without that bald, nasty little despot.”

“Abigail, it’s not right to speak like that about the dead,” Peg said, her voice lilting sweetly.

Abigail was not listening. She was pressing a piece of paper into my hand under the table. I closed my hand around it and tucked into my pocket.

My mother shook her head. “I’ve never thought it was right to turn people into paragons of virtue after their deaths, either.”

I murmured an agreement.

“Nothing wrong with looking on the bright side.” Peg’s voice lifted a whole octave on the penultimate word. She smiled.

“Not at all,” Regina said in her oddly accented voice. “With my leg I must His pens n bright and hopeful. What else can I do? If it bursts, that’s it, straight to my brain or my heart, dead in a second.”

We were sitting in the game room, around the bridge table. The summer light came through the window and I looked out at the clouds, one of which drifted upward like a smoke ring. I heard a dryer flapping clothes somewhere down the hallway and the low sound of a motorized scooter, but that was all.

Four Swans.

Mia,

I have more to show you. Would Thursday be suitable?

     Yours,

     Abigail

Each word was a tremulous but careful scrawl of letters. I remembered what my mother had once said: “Getting old is fine. The only problem with it is that your body falls apart.”

*   *   *

“Your poetry’s cracked,” my anonymous tormenter had written. “Nobody can understand it. Nobody wants twisted shit like that. Who do you think you are?!#*

Mr. Nobody.”

*   *   *

I read the message several times. The more I read it, the more peculiar it became. The repetition of Nobody followed by the pseudonym, Nobody, made it sound as if he, Nobody, did understand
it
and did, in fact, want
twisted shit
.
Who do you think you are?
became another question entirely in that case. Sliding meanings. It seemed unlikely that the phantom was ironic, making some superior joke about the
novis dictum
for “accessible” poems or playing with the words
twisted shit
and
cracked.
Unless it was Leonard, released from South, and annoying me for some preposterous reason of his own. It was true that for years I had been toiling away at work few wanted or understood, that my isolation had become increasingly painful, and that I had harangued Boris with my diatribes about our shallow, debased, virulently anti-intellectual culture that worships mediocrity and despises its poets. Where was Whitman Street in New York City? I had whined about the poets who wrote for the few remaining middlebrow folk in the United States who bothered to glance at a feeble line or two in their copy of the
New Yorker
and satisfy themselves that they had just nibbled on a morsel of “sophisticated” poetic sentiment or wit about lawns or old watches or wine because, after all, it was
in
the magazine. Rejection accumulates; lodges itself like black bile in the belly, which, when spewed outecomes a screed, the vain rantings of one redheaded lady poet against the ignoramuses and insiders and culture makers who have failed to recognize her, and poor Boris had lived with her/my bawling ululations, Boris, a man for whom all conflict was anathema, a man for whom the raised voice, the passionate exclamation scraped like sandpaper on his soul. Paranoia chases rejection. During the days of my complete clinical derangement, hadn’t I been paranoid?
They
plotted against me. Now the words on the screen, the words of Nobody, had taken the place of the accusing voices in my head. Everyone hates you. You’re nothing. No wonder he left you. It was as if Mr. Nobody knew, as if he understood where to strike. I thought of George lying dead on the bathroom floor that same morning, and the future turned suddenly both vast and barren, and doubt, the deforming constant doubts that my poems were shit, a waste, that I had read my way not to knowledge but into an inscrutable oblivion, that I, not Boris, was to blame for the Pause, that my truly great work, Daisy, was behind me seemed all to be true. Now, menopausal, abandoned, bereft, and forgotten, I had nothing left. I put my head on the desk, thinking bitterly that it wasn’t even my own, and wept.

After a couple of minutes of full-throated sobbing, I felt someone’s warm breath on my arm and flinched. Flora and Giraffey were standing very close to me. The child’s eyes were round with attention. A piece of her own light brown hair stuck out from under the wig and the skin all around her mouth had been stained pink from some unknown substance. We looked at each other. Neither of us said anything, but I felt she was observing me with the cool eyes of a scientist, a zoologist perhaps. Her sober gaze was digesting the whole animal, pondering its behavior, and then, without a word, she acted. She lifted up Giraffey and held him out toward me. It wasn’t at all obvious what she intended by the gesture so, rather than take him, I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and patted the filthy creature on the head.

An instant later I heard Lola call her daughter loudly and urgently and, taking Flora’s hand, which she accepted easily, naturally, I walked with her into the other room to greet Lola and Simon (in Snugli) outside the open screen door. I saw Lola register my face; what it looked like I have no idea—a red-gray mash of tears and mascara, probably—but her brow furrowed for a fraction of a second in sympathy. The young mother looked bedraggled at that moment, almost slovenly, in her cut-off jeans, a pink halter top, and earrings of her own making, two golden birdcages that hung from her earlobes. She had pulled her bleached hair back, and I noticed that she was a little sunburned across her nose. I remember these details because all at once I understood how glad I was to see her, and the emotion I felt has fixed the particulars of the encounter. By then it was around seven-thirty in the evening. Pete was off again and she was going to try to get the children to bed, and then, she said, with an open smile, she had a plan to break out a bottle of wine and eat the quiche she had made that day, and she would love me to join her, and I accepted with an enthusiasm that would have embarrassed me in almost any other circumstance, but which in this instance seemed entirely “normal.” My mother was at her book club discussing Austen’s
Emma
over a variety of cheeses, and I had no obligations of any kind.

And so that was the night we tackled the double bedtime together. On my side, this involved a complex strategy of rocking, bouncing, and occasionally shaking the just-nrsed Simon, who seemed to have developed paroxysms in the gut vicinity. The little red man squirmed with discomfort, spat milk on my shoulder, and then, after straining mightily, let out in one heavenly, propulsive motion a gob of creamy yellow shit into his diaper, which I happily cleaned while examining his tiny, adorable penis and surprisingly consequential testicles and tucking up his bottom in a Pamper, and then I found a rocking chair, into which we settled, and I rocked and lullabyed the small scion of the family into the arms or, rather, the lap of Morpheus. Meanwhile, Lola waged a parallel campaign with the chattering, not-yet-four fruitcake, Flora, who dillydallied and shammed and bargained her way toward what Sir Thomas Browne once called the “Brother of Death.” Valiantly, how valiantly she fought the loss of consciousness with every possible ruse: bedtime stories and glasses of water and just one more song until she, too, exhausted from the rigors of battle, collapsed, knuckle of curled index finger inside her mouth, free arm flung out across bedspread featuring large purple dinosaur, while Giraffey and his companion, a peroxide beast stolen from the head of slumbering warrior, kept vigil from the bedside table.

Lola and I ate the quiche and slowly got potted over the course of several hours. She lay on the sofa, birdcages catching the light, her tanned, round legs stretched out in front of her. From time to time she wiggled her bare feet, with their slightly dirtied soles, as if she were reminding herself that they were still attached to her ankles. By eleven o’clock I had discovered that Pete was a problem, “even though I love him.” Lola had been informed of my marital fiasco and a tear or two had dripped down both of our noses. We had laughed about our Problems as well, chortled loudly over their mutual propensity for odiferous socks that stiffened with some unknown manly secretion, especially in winter. The girl had a good laugh, a deep and surprising one, which seemed to come from somewhere below her lungs, and a direct way of speaking that charmed me. No indirect discourse or Kierkegaardian ironies for this daughter of Minnesota. “I wish I knew what you know,” she said at one point. “I should have studied harder. Now with the kids, I don’t have time.” I muttered some platitude in response to this, but the fact was, the content of our conversation that night was of little importance. What mattered was that an alliance had been established between us, a felt camaraderie that we both hoped would continue. The unspoken directed the evening. When we parted we hugged and, in a fit of affection augmented by alcohol, I cupped her round face in my hands and thanked her heartily for everything.