Born Again
RALPH SAID THAT HE’D EXPERIENCED A MORAL REBIRTH when he married Inez, a marriage that seemed incomprehensible to me and to many others who knew these somewhat fragmentary people — perhaps sketchy is a better descriptive. And while Ralph may have been reborn, morally or ethically or otherwise, this pious state did not prevent him from beginning an affair with Claire, a beautiful and somewhat unsettlingly placid woman who was, quite perfectly, one of Inez’s oldest friends. This surrender to the flesh, as the increasingly insufferable Ralph, in all his evangelical glory, might have put it, occurred just eight months into his conjugal annus mirabilis. To rehearse the ups and downs of this shabby amour, Inez’s suspicions — mundane, at best — the usual tears and quarrels, etcetera, would be tedious for me, and for you as well. It’s enough, perhaps, to say that the affair never quite attained even the lowest level of banality, the “star-crossed,” but wallowed just outside it, much as the lukewarm souls who are not permitted to enter hell congregate in its anteroom, bitching and moaning. In any event, Ralph and Claire blundered into her pregnancy, at which news Ralph, predictably and immediately, recoiled from any and all responsibility for his part in this misfortune. That Claire was surprised and hurt by this is, quite probably, a testament to her lack of acumen; that is, it seems clear that she never had an understanding of Ralph’s character, or, more accurately, his lack of character. After a few afternoons of sobbing and shouting and laying blame, mixed with loathsome prayers in which he begged Jesus to make Claire see her sins, he cut Claire out of his life. And then for some inexplicable reason, he put out the base story that Claire had been sleeping with her younger brother, Ray — a dim bulb, indeed — for a year or more, and was pregnant with his child. Perhaps Ralph thought of this as a narrative to set nicely in place as a counter to what may have been Claire’s desperate threat to tell Inez about the affair, such as it was. Nobody believed Ralph about Ray, most notably because he and Claire as an “item” had been an open secret for some time — to all, apparently, but Inez. If Claire were pregnant, the idea of Ray as the incestuous culprit was beyond absurdity. So Ralph, by this odious act, not only elaborated his petty, mean self, he also established that self as monumentally dumb. As someone said, not even Jesus on a good day could forgive such a prick. Claire, however, did go to see Inez, and, amazingly, told her that, yes, she were pregnant, it was true, and by Ralph! He had raped her in the bathroom at a party that they’d all been at a few months earlier, well, he didn’t rape her, but he took advantage of her drunkenness. This was, of course, a lie in every respect. Inez, who had never been reborn in the sublime mystery of marriage as had her spouse, believed it in all details, down to Claire’s description of looking at the black-and-white tiles on the bathroom floor as the deed was done. She took it in hook, line, sinker, float, rod, and reel. She wanted to. She began sleeping, quite openly, with Bill, a very bad guitar player but profoundly dedicated smoker of marijuana, hashish, kif, rope, old rags, hay, and newspaper; he introduced himself as “Tripper"; as Groucho Marx said, “Ah, he was a witty man.” Ralph soon left her, Bible and all—“I have my pride!”—I like to think of him saying, and went to San Francisco, Land of Heart’s Desire, where he worked for a time in the Classifieds department of the
Chronicle. Claire’s child was stillborn and she and Ray moved to Phoenix. Soon after Ralph left town, Inez told Bill that she’d been having second thoughts and felt it was best for her to be alone for a while. Bill understood, surely, and asked her if maybe she could let him have fifty bucks or so, he had some dry cleaning and laundry and, you know. Sure, she said, you need clean clothes. Right, he said, his terrifying guitar slung over his shoulder.