Time's Arrow (7 page)

So she'll settle at the table, flushed, exalted, imperious, resolute—anyway, thoroughly pissed off—and I'll get the ball rolling with something like, "Don't go—please."

"Goodbye, Tod."

"Don't go."

"It's no good."

"Please."

"There's no future for us."

Which I greet, I confess, with a silent "Yeah yeah." Tod resumes:

"Elsa," he says, or Rosemary or Juanita or Betty-Jean. "You're very special to me."

"Like hell."

"But I love you."

"I can't look you in the eye."

I have noticed in the past, of course, that most conversations would make much better sense if you ran them backward. But with this man-woman stuff, you could run them any way you liked—and still get no further forward.

"Please. You can sleep over."

"This is goodbye, Tod."

"Beth," he'll say. Or Trudy or whatever.

"It just doesn't sit well with me anymore."

"Give me one more chance."

Then they launch into this routine. It lasts from nuts to soup. Don't get them wrong: Tod has his good points. He is, it is widely allowed, "very affectionate" (I think I know what that means. But how would
they
know?). And they don't go on about his obvious flaws, like his being a doctor and having three dozen girlfriends. No, the trouble is, apparently, that Tod can't feel, won't connect, never opens up, always holds something back. What Trudy and Juanita and the rest of them are trying to say, it seems to me, is that Tod gives them the creeps. But whatever it is, whatever it is they're saying or trying to say, it never cramps Tod's style.

He likes to make love in the deathly hour of dusk. He won't let them sleep over—another much-discussed shortcoming. Only Irene ever sleeps over. . . . On her lap Beth's handbag yawns. She's miserable that it all has to end. Me, I'm miserable that it's all beginning. By the time we're on the other side of this, I know (I'm experienced), by the time I've become really fond of them and their pretty ways, they will start to recede, irreversibly, fading from me, with the lightest of kisses, the briefest squeeze of the hand, the brush of a stockinged calf beneath the table, a smile. They'll be fobbing us off with the flowers and the chocolates. Oh yes. I've been there. Then, one day, they just look right through you. Next thing you know they switch jobs or cities. All of a sudden they have kids to put through college or they're shacked up with some old wreck of a husband.

Rounding it off with a cocktail, we finish our meal and sit there doggedly describing it to the waiter, with the menus there to jog our memory. Silence in the car on the way back to his place and the act of love in the hour of dusk. Preceded, as I said, by the moment of horror. And it isn't without its pathetic aspects anyway, this evening scene with the two mature parties, their spectacles, their hair, their heavy old shoes, and the extra trust that she in particular will be needing to feel, and may not feel. Here it comes, like a chime. A naked female stare. Her body is probably naked by now but there is nothing as naked as human eyes: they haven't even got
skin
over them. Like a chime, the moment of intense focus. That same look—full understanding, unwelcome wonder—as if they have just seen everything, even the figure in the dream with his white coat and his black boots and, in his wake, a night sky full of souls. Well, whatever they've seen, it can't bother them all that much. Who knows, it may even work as a kind of sick turn-on. Seconds later they will attest with a sigh to his incredible invasion. And they soon get over it. Thereafter it's no more than a recurrent talking point, or a way of
talking down,
with all this
I
don't feel I really
know
you
and
What's really going
on
in there?
and
Show me the
real
you.
The real Tod. Of course, I'm curious too. The real Tod: show me it. But am I sure I really want to watch?

Perhaps Irene puts it best—she certainly puts it most often—when she tells Tod that he has no soul. I used to take it personally, and I was wretched at first. Yet she sticks around. Can Tod be so bad, if she sticks around? She doesn't have to. She's not our mother. . . . Needless to say, Tod has neglected to regale Irene with accounts of his new relationships, his invasions, his conquests, his quiet annexations. But she knows what he's like. She's observant. It was Irene, for instance, who pointed out something I'd never been able to put my finger on: that Tod can't talk and smile at the same time. But maybe he never wants or needs to. ... He copes okay. With all his ladies and their different bodies, their different odds and ends. Meanwhile, I suffer. I find I am very vulnerable to confusion and regret. If I were given my head, which I never am or will be (for I am impotent. I can make no waves), I would remain faithful to Irene. At least until my wife shows up. It happens to be a matter of principle. One man, one woman: I think we owe this to the human body. I feel like an ardent ghost, like a mute shedding tears of eagerness, as Irene lies in our arms. "Tod may be two-timing," I want to whisper, "but I'm true to you. I am constant. I am true."

In the dream there's always this room, something like a gardener's hut or a potting shed. The implements are wrong. The atmosphere is badly wrong. People are gathered there. It is a room in which something mortal will be monotonously decided.

Tod's hidden mind insists, in dream form, that Tod feels pain. The dreams tell us this in their miserable iteration. And fear. Tod is a big depositor in the bank where fear is kept.

Around midnight, sometimes, Tod Friendly will create things. Wildly he will mend and heal. Taking hold of the woodwork and the webbing, with a single blow to the floor, with a single impact, he will create a kitchen chair. With one fierce and skillful kick of his aching foot he will mend a deep concavity in the refrigerator's flank. With a butt of his head he will heal the fissured bathroom mirror, heal also the worsening welt in his own tarnished brow, and then stand there staring at himself with his eyes flickering.

—————

I have spoken of the three triggers, those stimuli on which Tod's
body
gives judgment. That coppery twang on the emergency cord that hangs tight in his gut. There is a fourth trigger. Like the scorched fingernails, it emanates from fire. Is fire itself a trigger? Fire, which painfully heals and floridly creates out of the slimiest reek and chaos . . .

Once a year the same letter is born from the flames. Tod sits there, direly staring at the grate, and watches the fire's rumor of bared throats and wagging tongues. His larynx gives the complicated click of nausea. Into Tod's mind, of course, I cannot see. But I am the hidden sharer of his body. What's it going through? This: a torment, an outright sepsis of the lowest fear. And relief—ignoble relief. Then the letter unbuckles, turning from black to even white in the heat and delivering itself into our outstretched hand.

The letter always has the same thing to say. Yes, it's rather the kind of correspondence one might expect Tod Friendly to go in for: unvarying, humorless, and one-way, like junk mail. It has this to say:

Dear Tod Friendly:

I hope you are well, as we are. It pleases me to inform you that the weather here continues to be temperate!

Yours sincerely.

Then the hysterical signature, under which the following name and title is complacently typed: The Reverend Nicholas Kreditor. "Here" (where the weather is ever temperate) is New York, according to the letterhead—more specifically the Imperial Hotel, on Broadway.

And that's it. All the letters get from me is an annual gasp of inanition. But Tod comes on as if New York were next door, and as if temperate weather meant rat showers and devil winds and the mad strobes of Venusian lightning.

He'll sit there by the fire for a long time, with scotch bottle, with alerted chemistry. In the morning, we'll leave the letter on the mat with all the other trash, and it will go away, like Tod's fear.

How will he take it if the weather in New York turns really bad?

It is significant, I am assuming, that nearly all our love affairs come to an end in the consulting rooms of Associated Medical Services. A professional formality prevails as we stand there with one or another of our girlfriends, against a background of height and weight graphs, nutrition rosters, scan and smear tips, and signs saying things like Do You Have Endometriosis? Don't Panic. Nothing much happens, physically, except for some brow-touching and pulse-taking. Oh yes: Tod does his minor violence with the pins: "Any numbing?" Our girlfriends seem to enjoy the charade, at least to begin with; they are flirtatious and collusive. I think it must be Tod's questions that eventually put them off. "How long have you been married?" "Is your husband an active man?" "Do you lead a ... do you lead
full
life?" Our girlfriends never lead full lives. They all claim, rather hurtfully, to lead empty ones. Anyway these questions go down like a lead balloon.

Or maybe it's simpler than that, and has to do with their seeing Tod in his natural environment, the doctor, the gatekeeper, with his white coat and his black bag. Our lady friends back out of here forever, with rewritten faces, pausing beyond the closed door and softly knocking, softly knocking, on love's coffin.

Still, there are plenty more where they came from. You find them all over. In the House of the Big One, in Alright Parking, in bars, in doorways on rainy nights, sometimes sca ved and swaddled against the wind and the cold, sometimes naked in strange apartments.

So it's almost total, this immersion in the bodies of others. And bodies are nice, are they? Is that what I'm supposed to think? Yes, well, okay—they
are
nice. They forgive everything. When they're old. They can't judge. Irene, whose white voluminousness forgives everything. She says as much.

"You don't want to know," Tod whispers in the dark, before he dreams.

"Whatever it is, I could forgive it."

"You don't want to know," Tod whispers.

She doesn't want to know.
I
don't want to know. No one wants to know.

And then there is our own body, our own corporeal instrument, which we're awfully proud of now. The bobbly briskness of our stride. My, the clarity and attack of our bowel movements. How perfectly we function. . . . It's hardly surprising, I suppose, that the ladies go for us in a big way and come across so quickly, with our impassive oblong of a face, our clean and powerful hands. If you like the type, and though I say it myself, Tod
is
incredibly handsome. . . . This body: his pride in it, I firmly speculate, is connected to the fear that someone might hurt it—might mutilate or demolish it. Now why would anyone want to go and do a thing like that? Doctors may want to; but Tod doesn't use doctors; he doesn't go near doctors. "You don't want to listen to doctors," he tells Irene, coming as close as he ever does to talking and smiling at the same time. "They'll try to get their knives in you. Don't ever let them get their

kni es in you." Sleek and colorful before the mirror in the

bat room, Tod feels pride that has a wince or a flinch in it.

Go on, I want to say. Mime it out. Bend and cringe with your hands on your loins. Cover your low heart.

Meanwhile I sit in the spacious bar-restaurant, in this drool parlor, in this fancy vomitorium. The woman has come, and now it's meat and tears, with the food growing in heat on our plates. Wait. This one's a vegetarian. She says she loves all animals—but she won't put her money where her mouth is. Soon . . . Jesus, the whole routine is like the very act of lust. First the sadness and disarray, then the evanescent transcendence; then the bodies put on clothes again, and there is a prowl of word and gesture before they go their separate ways.

Tod features another kind of dream in which he is a woman. I'm the woman too: in this dream I am participant as well as onlooker. A man is near us with his face averted, his slablike back half-turned. He can harm us, of course. But he can protect us, if he likes. On his protection we gingerly rely. We have no choice but to love him, nervously. We also have no hair, which is unusual, for a woman. I am delighted to say that we don't see any babies in this dream. We don't see any babies, powerful or otherwise. We don't see any bomb babies, babies with the power of bombs. This dream is childless.

Time is heading on now toward something. It pours past unpreventably, like the reflection on a windshield as the car speeds through city or forest.

Identical twins, dwarves, ghosts, the love lives of Caligula and Catherine the Great and Vlad the Impaler, Nordic iceclouds, Atlantis, the dodo.

Hold on. All of a sudden Tod has started reading travel brochures that praise certain semiremote areas of Canada. Yes, he finds them in the trash. Now Canada is where young

men hang out when they really ought to be in Vietnam. Maybe Tod is considering Canada. Maybe Tod is considering Vietnam. Vietnam might do him good. The gibbering hippies and spaced-out fatsoes who go there, they come back looking all clean and sane and fine, after a spell in the war, in the Nam, in what they call
the shit.

Nicholas Kreditor's latest letter reveals a hidden talent for detail and amplitude. The weather down there in New York, "although recently unsettled," Kreditor writes, "is temperate once more!" I think he's wrong. I think it's changing. I think it's definitely getting stormy.

I knew something was up the minute Tod started selling all the furniture. Throughout the whole process I looked on in wronged silence, like a wife. First every stick of furniture gets carted off, and all my labor-saving appliances, then the carpets and the curtains, if you please. Why was Tod punishing me like this? He got a real kick out of it too, always looking for new ways to uglify the home. On would come the dungarees at the weekend. He prowled around in a simian hunger, searching for things to splatter and deface.