Typical (17 page)

No women.

Most theory.

Death by “natural causes.”

Once in a while, to be legally named Bobby Love II.

Not afraid to have my heart broken, but very afraid of thinking it broken.

Not afraid to break a heart, but very afraid to think I’ve broken one and haven’t.

The funerals of my mother and father, Mr. and Mrs. Labove.

Lubrication schedules not adhered to.

Insurance policies. Insurance itself. We had it better when there was plague, rapine, and Gaul, and that was all you could do about it. No recourse to paper. There was blood or not blood. I would not have been sore afraid then.

Candiru worms, it goes without saying.

Courage itself is a bit frightening, of course, for you’ve posited its opposite, and that is fear; therefore, you’ve posited its opposite, lack of fear, and lack of fear is fear itself, especially when detected in others, perhaps the most fearful moment of all.

Aphorisms.

Voting.

Duty in all guises, suggestions, hints, and evil, quiet hortations.

All things beyond one’s control, of course, are frightening, but the very few
within
call for duty.

And shooting from the hip. My name is Bobby Love; I sometimes call myself, and insist others do, too,
Robert,
and am curiously not afraid of pretentiousness and other forms of self-importance, for the folly is so high there is finally no joke beneath it, no failure of mind in the arrogant who lack the mentality for arrogance. My name is Bob Love II; my father pawed a thirteen-year-old bovinity of such melon-colored and abundant flesh that straps were not corralling it to the satisfaction of disguised satyrs like my poor old man. How many boys can say of their fathers, I like him? Well, I’m very afraid, more afraid than of a brain escape, a jailbreak of your wits, I am very afraid of saying I like him,
I like my old man,
who ran from a book, from a book a kook wrote who did not know him—no, he ran from a girl and the kooks that would kick him in the balls for having some, and you tell me not to be frightened? You know what is going on on this earth? Does anyone? Do you think you would not be afraid of things—can think of nothing I’m not—if your father was Labove?

Don’t give me that. Not Robert Love II.

M
R. ELLIOT HAD BEEN
under the natural strain that a young sculptor with a new wife and young child and more teaching credits than sculptures can be under. He carefully adjusted his domestic behavior to the bad so that it would substitute for the wild-side, marginal-member-of-society behavior expected of someone of his artistic temperament.

The large zones of non-participation—he liked to say non-proliferation—in his domestic behavior were anything to do with the baby, other than playing with her, and anything to do with the house, other than sleeping in it and tending its miniature wet bar, and anything to do with his wife’s parents. The house itself had come to mock him. It was not a castle and he was certainly not its king.

It was a cinder-block suburban affair, beige and white, with a nice fenced yard, three bedrooms, and sliding glass doors to the rear patio; it was the sort of house that people laugh at until they find themselves, somehow, in one.

Somehow for Mr. Elliot was this: his wife’s parents insisted they move to a safe neighborhood. That had been that, and the beginning of Mr. Elliot’s guerrilla resistance to them, the house, the wife, and the child. They, the enemy, had also, he managed to divine, decided to withhold any further aid except the rent on this safehouse, because in their opinion their daughter was too young to marry and have a child. He was forced to intuit this, and to intuit that they, the enemy, were quite well off. The pregnancy was of the accidental and overnight variety and had been more or less the
raison d’être
for the marriage, and had been certainly a
fait accompli
when all parents were notified. Consequently, he had met his wife’s parents once, at the hospital, and they had visited around each other, as had his parents her parents, and his parents
him
as well, for the three days, and that was that.

Now Mr. and Mrs. Elliot were on their own except for the safehouse, which constantly assaulted him, involved him, in particulars of class warfare. A
half day
he would have to spend getting belts for a vacuum cleaner, because the house was wall-to-wall in odious carpet that was sculpted in patterns and little mountain ranges of nap or pile or whatever it was. The floor reminded him of a groomed poodle. Before the class struggle got him, he would have had
dirty floors.
It was safe for an artist to have a drink in the morning on a gritty floor, but not on a static-giving carpet which held invisible filth.

He got up one morning and found his wife eating white beans in ham stock, one of her favorite dishes and, before the house, one of his. There was a bean on the baby’s chin and a bean on his wife’s chin, too. She was holding the baby and could not get either bean. It set him off. The beans would have been all right over the dirty floors of a proper apartment, certainly all right in one in which he alone as an artist was eating poorly in the service of vision, but here, with … it all,
it set him off.
One of his big ideas rang in his head like a bell, a big bell with a big clapper: All women are whores.

He walked out of the house, wearing only his pants. He started his car and drove to the convenience store. It was not at all unusual to see shirtless, shoeless men in convenience stores in north Florida. Usually they were handsome young men working as surveyors or house framers with tanned washboard stomachs and bleached white hairs on them—Mr. Elliot called these men, or boys, cracker surfers. He did not look like them, but he did not believe he would be discriminated against because of his looks. His stomach did not suggest so much a washboard as laundry itself, and his hair, instead of the long, sun-bleached Ted-Nugent-dos, as the Florida boys themselves referred to such styles, was so thin that uncombed it gave Mr. Elliot the look of a man with a head wound.

His wife was beautiful, eating white beans at 8:30 in the morning or not. He believed she had the nastiest sexual past of any woman he’d ever known, and nastier than any he could imagine. They made great gustatory love—the word was his—but when he got up and saw her doing something like eating homemade pork and beans, and feeding the baby pork and beans, a food sold canned to the poor with a federally mandated tincture of pork in it balanced by a federally mandated maximum of rodent hair … if you pressed Mr. Elliot: All women were whores—he was a Catholic, he had got out of the house as soon as possible, he had had to.

He would buy a shirt by running into K mart. With the shirt on, albeit something cheap with fish-smelling dye, he’d be presentable enough to calmly stroll into
SHOES
and buy a pair of socks and vinyl shoes. Then some beer at the first joint open on I-10, and full recovery of dignity. It was possible that his wife had slept with her brother, and it was probable that she was the most beautiful woman in Florida or any other state shy maybe of New York, where there was unnatural transplanted beauty. He had a good car, a good solid four-door Chevrolet that would never let him down on the freeway.

When they made great gustatory love, it thoroughly and pleasantly ragged him out, and of her pleasure he had decided this: if it wasn’t the best she’d ever had, it was her fault. How was he to compete with … with whatever was out there in the dark? That was what she had come from, smiling like an angel. He asked her out the first time he saw her, and to marry him the second. She was quite possibly pregnant by then. Woodpile, he thought, when this aspect of things drifted before him.

After the baby was born and the bloom wore off the baby, which bloom wore off proportionately to his washing off the baby’s cream-bespinached bottom, he left his bean-eating ineffably attractive past-besmirched wife and Raphaelic infant and rented a $100 room and got a typewriter and decided to write it all down. The whole thing. How … well, the entire affair, and then some. And a lot of stuff before
that.

It went well. There was not enough paper or beer to keep him going. It got cold and he started burning the bond paper to keep warm and kept the beer outside to keep it cold. He burned paper from the bottom of the ream and typed on it from the top, and when the two dwindling supplies met he still had beer and was conscious. He would not type on an empty platen—a fair gesture where art and soul were concerned, perhaps, but it was bad for a typewriter to type on an empty platen. The money he had left was not enough for another ream of paper but was enough for another case of beer. He got that and many newspapers—financial ones were the best paper value—and burned them and drank beer and thought the rest of his novel, as he was calling it, through.

It was good, he knew. Writing the rest of it would be no problem. Two days later, it was not good. There was no point in finishing it. He began burning the extant portion, which relieved the demand on fuel money and released funds for more beer. It got even colder.

He called on a woman he knew and they went out. They went back to her place, where Mr. Elliot, expecting her to be anticipating the whole hog, took his clothes off in her kitchen and passed out. The woman called his wife, who came over in the morning. They both studied Mr. Elliot, fetally coiled on the linoleum.

“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Elliot said.

“You should be,” the woman said. She was black and she was confused by all this in a way she would not have been if Mr. Elliot had been on her floor and black. “I didn’t mean it like that,” she added. “My name’s Cleveland.”

Mrs. Elliot wondered what she did mean, and Cleveland wondered what she had meant, too. Mrs. Elliot did not want to find out. She knew enough to let a black woman named Cleveland with someone else’s white husband passed out on her kitchen floor think whatever ill she wanted. Cleveland, for her part, though, wanted to find out what she had meant by her own rudeness.

“Let’s have some coffee. He hasn’t blocked the stove.” Mr. Elliot whimpered and his hands quivered. “He looks like a dog dreaming.” They both laughed.

Cleveland put condensed milk and more sugar—five teaspoons—in her coffee than Mrs. Elliot thought physically possible. Will it dissolve? she wondered, sipping hers black. She declined additives herself. She sat there in a state of mind that may be fairly and accurately abridged
weirded out.
She could not think of appropriate things. That was the fault, or the price, she thought, of being there at all when you should have called an ambulance or the police on your alleged husband and got out. She had imprudently ignored judgment and the madly whispering voice of sense and sat down for coffee. “I’ll need no sugar, thanks,” she said to Cleveland, thinking: Yours will somehow sweeten mine.

Mrs. Elliot hoped several things while Cleveland finished up her thick stirring. She hoped Mr. Elliot would not come to. She hoped she would not ask, or find out, what he was doing there. She hoped this Cleveland had better sense than to ask questions herself. She wanted to just sit there and have coffee in the sunny little dining room like a couple of housewives in their mid-morning lull.

“What is that?” Cleveland asked.

“What?”

“What you’re humming.”

“Was I humming?”

“I know the song but can’t think of it.”

“I didn’t know I was humming.”

“Ah,” Cleveland said. “Are you in school?”

“Yes.”

“Which one?”

Mrs. Elliot told her. Cleveland was a graduate student at the same school. In the same department in which Mrs. Elliot was an undergraduate and in which Mr. Elliot taught. This explained their sipping coffee together a room away from where Mr. Elliot whimpered naked on the floor.

“Well,” Cleveland said. “Enough of that.” Then she announced, “You
are
beautiful,” and slapped her knee.

This should have been odd but was not. Mr. Elliot had talked some before retiring, it would seem. It made perfect sense. Mrs. Elliot’s beauty was something she no longer was self-conscious about. She had never
used
it, but she had been for a while embarrassed by it and tried to slough it off. Now she accepted it. Cleveland accepted it. How had her soft-bellied passed-out husband had the grace to go rutting on an
intelligent
woman?

Cleveland stood up and stretched. “I think I have tendonitis, or something,” she said, and sat back down.

“Did you play volleyball?” Mrs. Elliot asked.

“No. Tall enough, but didn’t. It wasn’t …”

“Yeah.”

“How’d you hook up with him in there?”

“He was cute.”

“You want more coffee?”

“Yes.”

When Cleveland came back with the coffee she said, “Safe and sound. I’ll hand you that, he’s cute.”

“He’s cute.”

They both laughed again.

“God Almighty,” Cleveland said.

“Do I leave, try to take him, or what?”

“Just leave. I will, too. He’ll get up on his own self.”

Mrs. Elliot said, “You’ve been … correct.”

Cleveland looked at her and said nothing.

Mr. Elliot after that was his own master. He was in control. He was prescribed some medicine designed to address polar-brain disorder, which one doctor said he had, and some other medicine to block beta waves, which another doctor, laughing at the first, said he had too many of. He took the one medicine, then the other, then both, then neither, and went back to beer.

When he moved back in, which he did in a straight line from the linoleum floor of Cleveland’s kitchen, saying to Mrs. Elliot only “Whew. Rough night,” and nothing of the week he’d been gone before that, writing his novel and burning it, both before and after it was on the page, he delivered himself of a speech.

“I will be a good husband,” he said. “And observe these rudiments of good-husband behavior. I will—” He stopped and said, “Here,” taking from his jacket—which he noticed at that moment he had never seen before, how remarkably well it fit, and it appeared to be well made—a note. He handed the note to Mrs. Elliot. It said, in pencil: