Harris was back in Panama, dancing and raising a loa. The Harris in Panama could not see into the future, but even if he could, it was already too late. Raising a loa had not been his real mistake. By the time the loa came, everything here had already occurred. Harris had made his real mistake when he took the toad. Up until that moment, Harris had always played by the rules. Harris had been seduced by a toad, and in yielding to that seduction he created a whole new world for himself, a world without rules, just exactly the sort of world in which Harris himself was unlikely to be comfortable.
“Come on,” his wife said. “What do you really think?” She was so excited. He had never seen her so animated.
She was going to be old someday. Harris could see it lurking in her. Harris would still love her, but what kind of a love would that be? How male? How sufficient? These things Harris was unsure of. For these things he had to look into himself, and the cartoon looking glass didn’t go that way.
He held the cartoon panels between himself and his wife and looked into her instead. He had never understood why Carry Nation appealed to her so. His wife was not religious. His wife enjoyed a bit of wine in the evening and thought what people did in the privacy of their own homes was pretty much their own business. Now he saw that what she really admired about Carry Nation was her audacity. Men despised Carry Nation, and Harris’s wife admired her for that. She admired the way Carry didn’t care. She admired the way Carry carried on. “I always look a fool,” Carry wrote. “God had need of me and the price He exacts is that I look a fool. Of course, I mind. Anyone would mind. But He suffered on the cross for me. It is little enough to ask in return. I do it gladly.”
“I know it’s not literature,” Harris’s wife said, a bit embarrassed. “We’re trying to have an impact on the American psyche. Literature may not be the best way to do that anymore.”
Harris’s wife wanted to encourage other women not to care whether men approved of them or not, and she wanted and expected Harris to say he approved of this project.
He tried to focus again on the surface of the glass, on the cartoon panels. What nice colors.
“Kapow!” Harris said. “Kaboom!”
We come from the cemetery,
We went to get our mother,
Hello mother the Virgin,
We are your children,
We come to ask your help,
You should give us your courage.
— Voudon song
CONTENTION
Some of us are dreamers.
At dinner Claire’s son asks her if she knows the name of the man who is on record as having grown the world’s largest vegetable, not counting the watermelon, which may be a fruit, Claire’s son is not sure. Claire says that she doesn’t. Her son is eight years old. It is an annoying age. He wants her to guess.
“I really don’t know, honey,” Claire says.
So he gives her a hint. “It was a turnip.”
Claire eliminates the entire population of Lapland. “Elliot,” she guesses.
“Nope.” His voice holds an edge of triumph, but no more than is polite. “Wrong. Guess again.”
“Just tell me,” Claire suggests.
“Guess first.”
“Edmund,” Claire says, and her son regards her with narrowing eyes.
“Guess the last name.”
Claire remembers that China is the world’s most populous country. “Edmund Li,” she guesses, but the correct answer is Edmund Firthgrove and the world’s most common surname is Chang. So she is not even close.
“Guess who has the world’s longest fingernails,” her son suggests. “It’s a man.”
Well, Claire is quite certain it’s not going to be Edmund Firthgrove. Life is a bifurcated highway. She points this out to her son, turns to make sure her daughter is listening as well. “We live in an age of specialization,” she tells them. “You can make gardening history or you can make fingernail history, but there’s no way in hell you can make both. Remember this. This is your mother speaking. If you want to be great, you’ve got to make choices.” And then immediately Claire wonders if what she has just said is true.
“We’re having hamburgers again.” Claire’s husband makes this observation in a slow, dispassionate voice. Just the facts, ma’am. “We had hamburgers on Sunday and then again on Thursday. This makes three times this week.”
Claire tells him she is going for a personal record. In fact it is a headline she read while waiting with the ground meat for the supermarket checker that is making her rethink this issue of choices now. “Meet the laziest man in the world,” it said. “In bed since 1969… his wife even shaves and bathes him.”
Claire imagines that a case like this one begins when a man loses his job. He may spend weeks seeking new employment and never even make it to the interview. He’s just not a self-starter. Thoroughly demoralized, on a Monday in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War, he refuses to get out of bed. “What’s the point?” he asks his wife. She is tolerant at first. He needs a rest. Fine. She leaves him alone for a couple of days, even brings in trays of food, changes the channel of the TV for him.
This is no bid for greatness, this is a modified suicide. “Man collapses watching game show.” But staying in bed turns out to have pleasant associations for him. He begins to remember a bout of chicken pox he had as a child — how his mother would bring him glasses of orange juice. He feels warm and cared for; his despair begins to dissipate. “I’ve got such a craving for orange juice,” he tells his wife.
Months pass; he has been in bed an entire year before he realizes what he has become. He’s not just some schlub who can’t find work. Suddenly he’s a contender. With stamina, perseverance, and support he can turn tragedy into triumph. He tells his wife that the only thing they have to fear now is a failure of nerve.
How does she feel about this? In the picture which accompanied the story she was shown plumping up his pillow and smiling, a beefy sort of woman, a type that is never going to be fashionable. She may feel, like him, that this is her only shot. His greatness is her greatness. His glory is her glory.
Or her motives may be less pure. Out in the world more, she is bound to be more worldly than he is. He has a vision. He is extending the boundaries of human achievement. She is speculating on the possibility of a movie made for TV. She may suggest that, as long as he is just lying there, he could be growing his fingernails, too.
She is an ignorant woman. You don’t just grow your fingernails because you happen to have time on your hands. It requires commitment, a special gelatinous diet, internal and external fortification. A person’s nails are, in fact, most at risk during those precise hours a person spends in bed. She has her own motives, of course. She is tired of clipping his nails. “Why don’t you grow your beard out?” she suggests, rouging her cheeks and donning a feathery hat before slipping out to a three-martini lunch with the network executives. She will order lobster, then sell the exclusive rights to the tabloids instead. “Why don’t you make a ball out of twine?” The largest recorded string ball is more than twelve feet in diameter. That will keep him in bed for a while.
At the restaurant she meets Solero don Guillermo, the world’s fastest flamenco dancer. She forgets to come home. Her husband grows hungrier and hungrier. He makes his way to the kitchen five days later, a smashed man. He contemplates slitting his wrists. Instead, while preparing his own breakfast, he manages, in twelve seconds, to chop a cucumber in 250 slices, besting Hugh Andrews of Blackpool by four cuts. The rounds of cucumber are so fine you could watch TV through them.