She had no music playing now, and this light show was not funny. The man’s mother unkissed and the coach unanswered and the father unapproached were there, in a swirl, and the impossibly beautiful woman was there, and she was crying, and she was crying for something the man had done or said to her. The man was aroused, and he looked at her — Mrs. Hollingsworth — with a piercing hunger that was at once honest and direct and simple and also hopelessly fraught with reservations and riders and provisos just beneath the surface of his leering desire. It was an irresistibly messy kind of desire. It promised as much pain as balm. He looked like the kind of cat who would bite you on the neck to hold you down and spend days kissing the wound.
Was he a man who wanted but did not need her? Since she stood in a convenient relationship to getting the truth from this kind of man, Mrs. Hollingsworth asked him, “Do you want me?”
To this he said, clear-eyed and broad of shoulder because of the grain sacks, and looking strangely elegant in the cheap shirt, “Yes.”
“Do you need me?”
“Need?”
They regarded each other a long time. The man looked at the floor. They heard a sound at the door and the man opened it and the lemon dog came into the house. It began snuffling the baseboards, raptly, undistracted. Every couple of increments forward the dog made a kind of cough, as if clearing its system, like a wine taster between tastes, and then resumed its eager inhalation of her house. It worked one of the boards until out of their sight.
“That’s a good dog,” the man said. “I had a life in which I would have needed you, once. It was not an honest life. I died. I have a new life. In it I want you, but it would be dishonest of me to need you. If I were to get succor from you, I would not be able to return it properly — I would only take. Then I would repudiate your succor and accuse you of giving it to me. The form of this accusation would be intractable, but that is its substance. You would have, in giving me succor which I could not return, exposed me to be a nonreciprocator of love, and I would have to hate you for this. This hate also would take intractable forms. One of the commoner intractable forms would be a declaration that I wanted yet another woman to do this to. I would tell you this to hurt you, and then hurt the new woman the same way. You do not want me to need you. You want me to want you.”
This was of course suspiciously convenient-looking to Mrs. Hollingsworth, given her own ruminations concerning men who wanted and needed. But it was also complicated enough that she was not sure she had generated it all. It had an integrity that was stronger than her own formulation would have been, she thought.
She approached the man and put her finger inside the hopeless shirt she had cruelly given him. It seemed a fit emblem of this new life he said he had, though. Previously the shirt would have been a nice powder-blue Brooks Brothers oxford cloth. “What I want,” she said, “is for you to take a bath with me.”
The lemon dog was working a spot on the living room carpet. It could not advance because it had to do the system-clearing cough at every sniff. It stood in its tracks, snuffling up and discarding invisible olfactory trash. “Too much weirdness in that carpet for him to know anything at all,” the man said. “He’s got the instinct to give up. He’ll move on. I must too.” Mrs. Hollingsworth did not like her man speaking this overtly — she was better than that, she thought, and he was. Still, he said it. She was going to have to get used to the idea of taking a man for what he was despite her cartoon of him. She had heard of Michelangelo’s cartoon on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, cut into the plaster, lines that he had had the genius to ignore once up there on his back with the truer paintbrush in his hand.
In the scalding tub — the man shied from the water, and whimpered and fretted getting in, almost asymptotically, and remarked that he needed to be sterilized anyway — she laid the man back against her and held him in her arms. She calmed his eyes by pressing her hot hands over his eyelids, and she held his breasts, and her own were trapped against his back in an exhilarating press of steam and heat, making them tender and alive. She pushed the man forward and checked them to see if they had turned into huge wontons, which is what they felt like. His broad back was gorgeous in that position, and she took a good coarse washcloth and good glycerine soap to him. She washed him as if, it occurred to her, they were in the nineteenth century, or whatever century it was or centuries it was that people sat in tubs and other people poured great gouts of hot water on them and washed them. How had that disappeared? Maybe that disappearance was the beginning of the hell-in-a-handcart ride the human world seemed set on. The man leaned forward and accepted this succor from her without protest.
He began to speak. He spoke at great length, and nothing he said was intelligible to the ear. Yet she understood everything he said. It was a modification of the curious phenomenon that Ray Oswald had observed in the Forrest film during the dinner party. It was talk that sounded like talk but was not talk, yet in the present case was understandable to an organ other than the ear and the brain. While he talked, the lemon dog came into the bathroom and stopped its snuffling and sat and regarded the man with its head held atilt as if it understood everything. Mrs. Hollingsworth realized she was listening in the same way.
She realized too she was not capable of reporting what the man was saying, any more than the dog was. But the man was speaking the truth of his life, and to her. It was of the pain of his life, and his smallness, and his failures, and it was offered to her not as something she would need to assume the burden of and help him with, any more than the dog would be asked to help him with it. It was being put into the air more or less as clothes are put into the air before lovers unite. He was taking his clothes off for her. Hers, she felt, were off. She realized that in this respect she was not unlike the dog. This was perhaps what was spectacularly lovable about dogs: their clothes were off at all times, and they did not even know it. People wanted to be that way.
She and the dog listened to the man go on. The room was filled with agreeable steam and the music of this confession that was so complicated, like the carpet the dog could not analyze, that you could only love it and go with it and hum along and kiss the ear of the man singing it, who was singing it not because he needed her to hear it but because he wanted her to hear it, and she did not want to hear it, but she needed to.
She began to see along with the man, to comprehend, as it were, because she could not apprehend what he was saying in the ramble of language that was not talk. The man was seeing that his father who had taken him out of football had also sold his shotgun rather than give it to him, a boy of thirteen who could have used a shotgun. So the disappointment the boy had given the father came before that. The mother was somehow approving of this, the not football and the not gun. The father was known to fight and the mother was also approving that the boy would not be known to fight, though she approved of the father’s violence. Had the father had the boy taken from him by the mother? What were the mother’s nonfootball nongun nonviolent plans and hopes for her boy, then? Plans so fond that she denied the plans the father had naturally had, in the absence of which the boy would grow up to be afraid of thick-shouldered high school boys because he had not been allowed to be one. And in the absence of which the boy would grow to look distrustfully upon the women who purported to give him succor — what were they really up to? Were they not like his mother? Did they have plans for you that were defined primarily by their not being someone else’s plans for you, that alone their virtue?