“You want me to be a little black boy vet with a Ph.D. and a lot of pissed-off poetry?”
“Why not?” I say. It doesn’t sound bad, it’s just the way he’s saying it. Darrel stands up and paces peevedly about the living room.
“I can’t believe it. You’re just like everyone else. You want me to be your little cultural artifact. Like a Fresh-Air child. Come off it, Benna.”
“You come off it,” I say. This is the old children’s strategy of retort. I’ve learned it from Georgianne or remembered it or maybe simply saved and practiced it. “You’re being so, well … bourgeois.”
This is the word that intelligent, twentieth-century adults use when they want to criticize each other. It is the thinking man’s insult. It is the wrong word. Don’t let your mouth write a check that your ass can’t cash, Darrel said once, and this time I truly have. Darrel’s been storing up for it and leaps on it like a wild man. “Bourgeois!?” He’s pacing quick and hard, left to right. “You!” he shouts, freezes, points at me.
“You don’t have to point at me.” He is my student. He shouldn’t be pointing at me.
“You, Benna, are the most bourgeois person I know.”
I wonder if it’s true. Behind him I imagine I see all the other people he knows, a winding queue of ethnic celebrants, weathered hitchhikers, Vietnamese women, off-off-Broadway actresses. None of them owns a TV set. They have large peasant breasts. And though they occasionally drink Diet Pepsi, they are cool, practicing Marxists, anarchists, Trotskyites, vegetarians with finished dissertations.
Darrel continues. “I don’t know, Benna. What would you have me do? Flounder through graduate school, never finish my doctoral thesis, then marry some lawyer for their money and bitch at them until they’re another drunken suicide?”
My vision snaps, sails off like a kite let go. That’s me he’s talking about. That’s supposedly what I’ve done. “You’re wrong, buddy. You’re dead wrong.” Now I struggle to my feet, up off the sofa. Darrel stops pacing, turns to face me. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“I don’t know where you got that idea about me, but it’s wrong. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m sorry,” he says again. “It’s just something that gets said, you know, around.”
“Who’s said that?”
Darrel wipes his forehead in frustrated apology. “No one in particular. It’s just what’s said … by people.”
“Well, it’s wrong. And get out of my house!” I’m screaming. “Get out!” I feel suddenly, terribly, old. Maybe now’s the time for a group sestina. I feel the parentheses around my mouth, the turmoil of exhaustion in my gut. Here are the end words: SO, this, is, what, we, are. My body, if a surgeon looked inside, would look like a drawerful of old socks and shoes. My eyes feel like stones in my forehead and my heart has blasted several sharp pains and disappeared entirely. I have always wanted to grow old with someone, but this is not what I had in mind.
Darrel picks up his things slowly, his coat over one arm, his books under the other. “You see, you can’t operate within this relationship unless it’s a little classroom for you. You need that power.”
“Get out!”
Darrel heaves his coat up onto one shoulder and before he opens and slams the door he turns and says, “I love you, but there’s one thing you’ve gotta understand: I’m not just one of your fucking students.” Then the front door swallows him up and closes like a book. I look at it for one long dumb minute before I’m out the door myself, watching Darrel get into his car, and standing on the porch, loathsome and coatless in the cold, I shout, “Yes, you are! Yes, you are! That’s exactly what you are!”
And he guns the engine and drives away. There is a wind with ice in it, and the streetlights blink on.
In nature certain species, in order not to be eaten, will take on the characteristics of something that is an unpleasant meal. The viceroy, for instance, as a caterpillar looks so much like a bird dropping, and as an adult so much like the ill-tasting monarch, that birds, as agents of natural selection, as Darwinian loser-zappers, leave the viceroy alone. Similarly, the ant-mimicking spider is avoided because it appears to have the fierce mandibles of an ant, though it’s really only a dressed-up spider making pretend. The function of disguise is to convince the world you’re not there, or that if you are, you should not be eaten. You camouflage yourself as imperious teacher, as imperious lover, as imperious bitch, simply to hang out and survive.
I sit in front of the TV and, for twenty minutes, without turning it on, stare at a woman mechanically eating a cabbage and mayonnaise salad from a large bowl in her lap. Afterward I feel nauseated, and devour an entire pound cake, its lovely topskin soft as leather. I feel like I’m part of a documentary on evolution and I’m one of the species that didn’t make it because regardless of everything else, it was just plain too stupid.
III
Gerard wasn’t at breakfast, and I had to sit there and make pleasant little faces in Hank’s direction to let him know all was well, the eggs were fine, the coffee hot, the silverware clean. Everything’s okay. The semester is winding up. Or is it winding down.
It’s Novemberish weather for December, that sort of still, ochre chill, no snow, no wind, just the old bones of trees, the damp, dead mat of leaves, the infinity of phone poles and wires along the streets. In the backyard the wrens gather and cry like kittens.
Inside the house the furnace kicks on. The living room’s warm with red and dust.
I have to think of Christmas presents: what to get George, Gerard, my dad — he’s always the hardest. George is sprawled out on a chair across from me, imitating me, limbs thrown out and apart, coat still on, body in the configuration of a slumped, crash-landed star.
“What should we get Grampup for Christmas?” I ask her.
“Get him …” She pauses, giving this great consideration. Her face looks profound and little in her new spectacles. “Get him some plates.”
“Plates?”
“Get him … get him a new car.”
“He doesn’t need a new car. He never drives over thirty-five.” Slow for a fireman; he’s retired. “I need a new car, not him.” My car is now one of those cars that will never go sixty except over a cliff.
Georgianne gets up, trudges over, sits on the edge of my chair. She is a heap of layers: tights, dress, sweater, coat. I put one arm inside her coat, around her waist, hold her. She presses her face close, her glasses knocking into my cheekbone. “Give him a big kiss!” she says, and gives me a juicy smack right near my eye, saliva getting in it, my little whimper-whamper, my Christmas elf, my mush-tush.
It is December tenth, a new moon. The phone rings and it’s not Darrel, it’s Maple. “Gerard’s in the hospital,” he says.
“Oh my god.” I sink into a nearby chair and switch the receiver to my other ear. My whole life I can think only of car accidents. “He was drunk, wasn’t he?”
“Probably,” sighs Maple. “He slipped in his tub and cracked his head open and broke a rib. It sounds appalling, but it’s serious.”
Gerard apparently had lain in his bathroom in and out of consciousness for about ten hours. Merrilee, the human Playboy magazine, discovered him there when she stopped by, after a fight, with a contrite, Yuletide loaf of zucchini bread. It is all ludicrous enough to begin with, but to have Merrilee in on it in such an heroic fashion seems preposterous, suited only to the fact of the tub, not to the gravity of the injuries, wrappings, tubes, round-the-clock watch at Methodist Central.