“The monkey-head lamp?” I said. I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it. Three times before, my husband had asked me to pose with various articles of clothing removed. Once in the bedroom wearing only boots and one of his ties. Once in the bathroom with a red towel draped strategically to miss one breast. Once in the kitchen in just my bra. And today. I did this because I loved him, I supposed, but maybe I did it because I’d grown up in a trailer and guessed that this is what people did in houses, that this is what houses were for. I’m not sure. Maybe I did it because I had only five pages of a dissertation on Miltonic echoes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century children’s literature. Each time my husband had never actually taken the picture. He had put the camera to his face, squinted his eyes, bared his teeth, and grown dissatisfied. This day, however, this day of the monkey-head lamp would be the last. I stood there, naked from the waist up, fury spreading up from my gut into my face, as fury does, and when my husband turned around with only a vaguely apologetic half-smile, I punched him in the neck. “I hate you,” I said, and then went back into the living room and put on my shirt. I turned around, buttoning, and he was standing by the sofa, wide-eyed, the camera hanging from its long black strap, resting against his torso like a dark, outsized belly button, like an insect that had crawled into his abdomen and was poking its head out to look around.
“The litter bag on our honeymoon was bad enough,” I said. We had driven to Cape Hatteras. He had made me put the car litter bag in my pocketbook so it wouldn’t stink up the rented Plymouth. I have always felt that life was simply a series of personal humiliations relieved, occasionally, by the humiliations of others. But compared to my husband I had no imagination with which to fight back, with which to construct indignities. “This is the last draw,” I said. From the time I was a child I always thought people were saying “draw” not “straw.” “I despise you.” I walked toward the front door. I was going for a walk.
“I’m sorry,” he said. I stopped and turned to look. He had kind of a vegetable glaze, the look, I imagined, potatoes got in their eyes. His neck was red. “Shoot me, if I’m such a shit. Shoot me.” And then, apparently, he became quite taken with the joke, and handed me the camera, dancing around in front of me, singing, “Shoot me, shoot me.”
“George,” I said. “You’re losing it.”
“Shoot me!” he persisted, and he started taking off his clothes. I grabbed the camera and took off out the front door, across the lawn; perhaps I would throw the camera away in a trash can somewhere. “Shoot me! Shoot me!” I could still hear George cry behind me, and I turned and he was bouncing up and down on the front porch, ludicrous in his underwear. “Shoot me!”
And I shot, and the picture I took and still have, shows him ducking back inside the house, one side of him still caught within the doorframe, half of a pale blurry body embedded forever in the long dark marrow of that entrance, deep inside unseen and grinning, a monkey-head lamp in perfect light, a present only an aunt could give.
· · ·
You cannot be grateful without possessing a past. That is why children are incapable of gratitude and why night prayers and dinner graces are lost on them. “Gobbles Mommy, Gobbles Grandpa …” George races through it. She has no reference points. As I get older the past widens and accumulates, all sloppy landlessness like a river, and as a result I have more clearly demarcated areas of gratitude. Things like ice cream or scenery or one good kiss become objects of a huge soulful thanks. Nothing is gobbled. This is a sign of getting old.
“Writing is a safari, dammit,” exclaimed the teacher. “It means going out there and spotting, nabbing, and bringing home to the cage of the page the most marvelous living stuff of the world.”
Timothy Robinson sat right in front of the teacher. He was doodling scenes from Conan in the margins of his notebook.
“But those cages are small and expensive,” the teacher continued, searched, groped, not knowing quite what she was talking about.
Conan’s pectorals were like concrete slabs and in Timothy Robinson’s margins Conan’s biceps and triceps had begun to make his arms look like large croissants. Now he suddenly was getting sunglasses. Now striped thighs.
“Don’t bring back any dim-witted mooses,” she said. “Don’t put a superfluous dumb cluck of a line in your poem.” She had used her lifeboat simile in the last class: A line is like a lifeboat — only a limited number of words get to go in it and you have to decide which word-lives are most valuable; the rest die.
It was ridiculous, but the only thing she could think of to say.
When no one said anything in response, she stared out into the center of the room and said, “So, Tim. How the fuck is Conan?”
· · ·
The small, dingy P&C by campus is unusually crowded and not just with jean-jacketed students buying beer, bananas, hamburger. There are even families in here, as if from some other neighborhood. Perhaps there’s a sale. The three available shopping carts by the door are gritty with black grease, spangled with lettuce bits like a rabbit’s cage. They are all jammed into each other, a copulation of stainless steel. I unhitch the one with the least grease but the most lettuce and proceed to wheel it into the mayhem. People are crashing into each other in the narrow produce aisle, scrambling zigzag for plastic bags.
“Excuse me,” says a male student in a white turtleneck. He doesn’t have a cart, only a beige knapsack of books over his shoulder. He isn’t interested in produce. “Excuse me,” he says to me again. “I saw you outside and followed you in here because I thought you were beautiful and I wanted to tell you that.”
“Oh, my god,” I say and turn away, suddenly startled into a weird sort of terror. I fumble with the cabbage heads. Who does this guy think he is? I try to glide voicelessly away.
“Are you a student here?” the guy persists.
I can feel myself pale, jittery, glaring at a point slightly to the left of one of his ears. His heart, I know, is all chutzpah and photography. “No, I’m an instructor.” I try to pronounce it like a baroness, but it comes out faltering and wrong. “Excuse me,” I say to the student, then squeeze past him, between a center-aisle mustard display and someone else’s cartload of dog food and frozen orange juice. I cross the aisle to the apples.
The student follows. “I hope I didn’t offend you,” he says. I keep my back to him, studying the apples. “My name is John. I’m an archaeology major,” he says, examining, I can tell, the tweed back of my thrift-shop man’s coat. I examine apple after apple, taking out my reading glasses, putting them on, and then peering out over them, saying, “Hmmmmm.” I pretend to be an apple scientist. I’m unable to tell him straight out to get lost.
“Well,” says John, finally. “Good-bye,” and he ambles away.
I remain at the apples, counting, counting. I can feel my face splotch with red, my mouth clamp into a hard line. I breathe deeply, run my hand through my hair, return to my cart and quickly wheel it around, head for the checkout line, like someone who needs desperately to be alone, to be in bed, to be taking a bath, somewhere far away, conjugating verbs, memorizing dynasties.
The ants are still trafficking around the place, seemingly undisturbed by the weather’s getting colder. Georgianne keeps singing her own misheard lyrics to a Bob Dylan song: “The ants are my friends / They’re blowing in the wind.” The crack has moved a few more inches, taking a slight upward turn like a kind of graph, an optimistic poll. The plumbing, however, is sluggish, acting up, the toilet slow and undignified, churning the toilet-paper, stewing, shredding things finer. This is what it’s like to live in a house.