“Mom!” Jack cried, stricken. “You can’t mean that! You can’t leave me!”
“The hell I can’t,” Mom told him. “And I’ll knock you down if you get in my way.”
Bitter, betrayed, deeply hurt, Jack raised himself to his full height and spoke with slow, mature grief. He said, “You don’t love me. You never loved me. You never loved anybody. You don’t know how to love.”
With impatient asperity, Mom said, “Well, who ever said I did? I never wanted children in the first place. It was all your father’s fault. He could never do anything right his whole entire life long. Though I do have to admit he was right when it came to this.”
“When it came to what?” Jack asked.
“You,” Mom told him. “We didn’t have children, we had you. Mewling and puking, whining about yourself from the day you were born. A weakling and a coward. You’ll never amount to anything.”
“But—” Jack stared at her, not knowing where to start. “I make millions!” he cried. “I’m rich and famous! They write me up in magazines!” Madly, wildly gesturing at the house, he cried, “Look what I bought you!”
“You’ll never buy me, Sunny Jim,” Mom said. She threw the empty milk carton at his feet, spun about, and marched back into the house.
Jack, devastated, slowly sank to his knees, staring through the glass doors into the house. On his knees, he kept going, curving slowly in over his stomach, his torso bending downward until his forehead touched the warm wood of the deck. He stayed in that position, hands folded over stomach, forehead and knees and toes touching the deck. A faint moaning sound came from him.
A faint moaning sound comes from me. I close my mouth over it, and when that doesn’t work I close my throat. This time, that’s all it takes. (Sometimes, I have to close my hands around my throat and squeeze real tight to make it stop. I’m glad I don’t have to do that in front of Michael O’Connor, intrepid reporter.)
Calm again, I say, “Well, I felt I had to go along with Mom’s wishes.”
Sympathy in his voice, O’Connor says, “She was a little rough on you, wasn’t she?”
“We all have our needs,” I assure him, feeling how placid I am, how easy in my mind. “I bought those airline tickets for Mom and Dad and said good-bye. Buddy drove them to the airport. All that was left was to have Constanza stop the milk deliveries, and it was as though the whole episode had never been.”
“But—” O’Connor says. “You wanted them there. That was the whole point, wasn’t it?”
“Their needs were different from mine,” I say, smiling and smiling. “Besides, it all worked itself out, finally. It meant the house at the beach was available soon after that when I needed it.”
“Needed it?”
“Yes.” Remembered sunshine floods my eyes. “Just around that time, you see,” I say, “I fell in love again.”
Flashback 17
The living room of the beach house looked much as it had before, except that now the walls were completely lined with bookcases filled with heavy serious tomes. These bookcases caused the furniture to be moved inward, cutting down on party space, making the room cozier but less open. The television set was gone. The fire in the central white-brick fireplace was the same as before, a neat construct of large logs, burning slowly with lovely dancing flames in orange and red that gave more beauty than heat.
Lorraine Morriswood entered the room. A tall, slender, beautiful, brainy young woman in tailored tweeds and dark-rimmed glasses, Lorraine moved with a kind of horsy assurance that was simultaneously elegant and very erotic. She circled the room, obviously looking for something, and just as obviously not finding it. Finally she stopped, raised her head, and called, “Darling?”
From somewhere else in the house, Jack’s voice answered, calling, “Yes, darling?”
“Darling,” called Lorraine, “where’s Kierkegaard?”
Jack strolled into the room, wearing black loafers, dark slacks, tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, and a paisley ascot. “Gosh, darling,” he said, “I haven’t seen it.”
Pointing to a nearby end table, Lorraine said, “I’m sure, darling, I left it right there.”
Jack looked around, then snapped his fingers and said, “I know, darling. I bet Constanza put it away when she was in here cleaning.”
Lorraine turned in a slow ironic circle, on her face an expression of mock despair as she gazed helplessly at all the bookcases. “Oh, dear, darling,” she said. “And Constanza’s hopeless when it comes to the alphabet. Lord knows where poor old Keirkegaard’s got to.”
Jack, with a merry laugh, took her by the elbow, stopping her steady circling motion, turning her toward him. “I tell you what, darling,” he said. “Let’s let poor old Kierkegaard just go hang for a while.”
“Why, darling,” Lorraine said, with an arch look, “whatever can you mean?”
“You know, darling,” Jack told her, and his hand stroked slowly up and down her arm.
She laughed, a rich throaty sound, her head thrown back. Removing her glasses, she dropped them on the table from which Kierkegaard had disappeared, then reached up and back to remove the barrettes holding her rich full hair. Auburn waves shook loose, framing her face, reflecting deep reds from the fireplace. She threw her long arms around Jack, and passionately they embraced. Laughing, kissing, fondling, licking, murmuring, stripping the clothes away from each other, they descended toward the fur rug stretched before the fire. A warm musk filled the air....
There. See? There are happy memories. In isolation, there are moments in one’s history one can look back upon with pleasure, saying to oneself, of oneself, “Then it was good to be alive.”
I smile at Michael, who will never in his drab life know even one moment like those evenings in front of the fire with sweet Lorraine. “This is how we met,” I say. “Lorraine Morriswood was doing her doctoral thesis at Chicago on Post-Camp Male Nonaggression in the Popular Arts. Naturally, I was one of the people she had to interview.”
“Sure,” O’Connor says. “Makes sense.”
“Just like you’re interviewing me now, Michael,” I say. “Only, that time it led to greater things.”
“She was your second wife,” O’Connor says. The brilliant researcher struts his stuff again.
“That’s right,” I agree. “Lorraine and I sensed right away we were meant for each other. It was a whirlwind romance, taking us both out of our mundane concerns, our everyday affairs.”
“I guess you figured you were due for some happiness right around then,” O’Connor says.
“Very good, Michael,” I say, smiling upon him, pleased to find in him this unexpected capacity for the dramatic mot. I may even read the piece he writes on me. “Anyway,” I say, “we had, Lorraine and I had, a small private wedding at the London Registry Office.”
“I remember,” O’Connor says, “the news footage of the two of you coming out of there, protected by the bobbies, with the big crowd of fans in the street.”
“They’re there all the time,” I say modestly. “I believe they camp out there. Some say they’ve been there since the Paul McCartney wedding, others that it goes back as far as Elizabeth Taylor. Some scholars suggest a Druid connection, but I myself don’t go that far. In any event, as you may have surmised, Lorraine introduced me to a world I’d never known, a world of the mind. Through Lorraine, I met some of the foremost thinkers of our time, men and women who could understand a universe in a grain of sand. And Lorraine... Lorraine understood me more deeply and truly than anyone ever before, or since.”