Now I know why that hooker wouldn’t take off her bra.
Why do I say that’s me back there, weeping and sniggering on those dusky boobs? Because it is out of the adolescent garbage in men’s heads that I have made my living for almost three years. The adolescent garbage in my head feeding the adolescent garbage in their heads, a real meeting of minds, a real communion, so when you come right down to it what I have been doing is closer to the definition of art than anybody in that jazz section will ever get in his entire life.
Phooey. That’s garbage, too. I have never risen above the material any more than my readers have, and if you can’t rise above the material you ain’t an artist. And it’s tough to rise above quicksand.
Only now it’s tough to get down into the quicksand. Am I going to write this Paul chapter or what am I going to do?
I’m going to wander around for fifteen pages, same as ever. Same as before Betsy left, in that way her leaving made no change at all.
You know what I’ve been thinking about? The time Betsy and I got married, the day after the day her father took me out to the gas station. I wrote about that earlier, in the part I threw away. “How do I burn this fucking place down?” Remember?
You thought that was a gag. I swear to God, it’s the absolute truth. I know I did it like a joke, making it the chapter ending and all, but that was just because fifteen pages worked out to there, I was planning on telling about the wedding then and everything. Also, I must admit I have enough respect for a punch fine to want to give it some breathing room if I can, and I know damn well “How do I burn this fucking place down?” is a grade A punch line. About the only real punch line of my life, and I suppose it’s meaningful that it was said by somebody else.
Anyway, when I finally convinced Betsy’s father that I didn’t know how to burn down his gas station, he wanted no more to do with me, and in fact he didn’t even come to the wedding. He pretended to have an ulcer attack, and Betsy believed it, but I knew the truth. He was disgusted with me, he was gaining a son who combined higher education with abysmal ignorance, and he couldn’t see the point of it.
So it was Johnny, Betsy’s brother, that gave her away. A funny phrase, that, gave her away. They didn’t exactly give her away, her family, they sort of let her get away. She became an alien, as separate from her family as a flower from a tree. I’d look at Betsy and I’d look at her family and I could just never draw the lines between them. In fact, I wondered sometimes if she was adopted, but knowing how cheap her folks are that seems unlikely. Of course, she might have been kidnaped from her real family, that might make a degree of sense. Born to this cultured and well-to-do couple, kidnaped by desperate men in thin black suits and hats that need blocking, men who smoke roll-your-owns, who turned the baby over to the Blake family for safekeeping. But then something went wrong, the ransom wasn’t paid or the kidnapers ran away, and the Blakes were stuck with this little kid. They couldn’t give it back without admitting their own complicity, and they’re too feebleminded to work out any indirect way — like leaving the kid in a church — so they’re stuck. And Betsy grows up, a flower on a dungheap, the colors showing through the shit, and she strains toward better things, and goes to college despite the Blakes’ disapproval...
And marries me?
Do you suppose — this is a brand new thought, now — do you suppose she felt as trapped as I did when we got married? Do you suppose she called me not because she wanted to but because there wasn’t anything else she could do, she married me not because she wanted to but because there wasn’t anything else she could do?
Maybe it was over for her, too, back there in the summer of 1964, maybe she was just as glad as I was that the school year was over and I was going home to Albany.
Maybe she was just as much of a poor fish wriggling on the line as I was.
That’s a sort of a lonely thought. I know I have never in my entire marriage given myself completely to Betsy, I’ve always held myself back, I’ve always been alone on the inside, but I never thought the same might be true of her. And if it is, how lonely I feel. How cold and thin-skinned, shivering in this wind. Is this how it always was for her? Has she been living on this thin gruel for over three years? Or did she never know it till she read those chapters?
Oh, I’m sorry, Betsy, I am honest to God sorry, if I could have reversed the roles before this, understood things before this, a lot would have been different.
Or would it?
We should never have married, that’s all. We were going through ritual tribal motions, like the characters in a Greek tragedy, slowly and methodically and portentously doing senseless things because they were required by the script. On learning she was pregnant, Betsy should not have phoned me. There were other things she could have and should have done. On getting the phone call, I should not have offered marriage. There were other things I should have and could have done. (Hester understood that, she has always been the one to understand the multiplicities of possibility.) And on our seeing each other again in Monequois, Betsy and I should both have known the whole thing was doomed.
For five days, from the time of my arrival in town till we walked into that church together, Betsy and I were as silent and distant and indrawn from each other as strangers sitting together on a bus. If the minister hadn’t been such a silly ass, we might have gone into the honeymoon that way, but he saved our bacon, though inadvertently and perhaps not permanently. Perhaps not for good, I might say, punning a bit.
Anyway, this minister, the Reverend Doctor R. Eugene Plunkett, was the white-haired, round-faced, steel-spectacled, mild, gentle, inoffensive moron sort of country minister, and I met him for the first time on the day and the hour of the ceremony. We trooped into the church, Betsy and her mother and Birge and Johnny and me, and Rev Plunkett shook everybody’s hand, smiling and nodding and just as pleased as punch to see people happy, and then he asked Betsy and me to come into his office with him a minute while the others waited outside.
(My family wasn’t represented, as perhaps you already noticed. Mom couldn’t get away from her job at the restaurant, Hannah had started already at the hospital, and Hester didn’t give a reason. She didn’t have to. I was just as glad none of them were there, anyway.)
Rev Plunkett’s office was neat and fussy, with a rolltop desk and a squeaky swivel chair. There was a bench with a slat back, and on this we sat, while Rev Plunkett sat in his swivel chair and squeaked around to face us.
I wish I could remember dialogue, I wish I could recall every word of that meeting, but I can’t. My mind doesn’t work that way, which most of the time is a blessing but which right now is a loss, because the build-up was what did it, the listening to his soporific talk in the too-warm office, almost going to sleep with him talking along, earnestly and incomprehensibly, and then beginning to wonder what he was leading up to, and then waking up again because he had to be leading up to something, and it was taking so long, he was talking about “sailing into the future” and “braving life together” and “solving the problems of marital stress” and “planning not only for yourselves but also for your children” and all this stuff was going on and on, every sermon he’d ever preached all shuffled together into one fifteen-minute brand X brainwash. After a while I began to think, Well, he’s building up to the fee. I had a five-dollar bill folded and tucked away in my shirt pocket where it would be easiest to get at, because I was nervous myself about that part of it, sure it would be an awkward moment, and if it was going to be awkward for Rev Plunkett too, God help us all.