"Very funny," he observes wryly, frowning. "If I did believe in heaven, would all poor people go there?"
"They haven't a chance."
"No. Really."
"They haven't a chance in hell. What kind of place would heaven be if all those poor people were around?"
"Are we poor?" he wants to know.
"No."
"Then why can't you buy her a car?"
"That's the boy."
"I can. Let her learn how to drive."
"I'm almost sixteen."
"Then we'll talk about it. I've got the money. So don't worry about being poor. And I'll soon have more."
"I think I love money," my daughter brags daringly, "more than anything else in the world. I love it more than ice cream."
"Someone, my daughter, might think that ungracious."
"I don't care. I love it like the last spoon of ice cream on a plate."
"Money really talks, young lady, doesn't it?"
"It sure does."
"How come?"
"Because money, young man, is everything."
"What about health?" says my wife.
"It won't buy money. And that's why you shouldn't give your dimes and nickels away."
"I don't anymore."
"I would never give it away," my daughter asserts self-righteously.
"I don't think, daughter dear, that you ever have, heh-heh. Money makes the world go round, young man, and money makes history too."
"How come?"
"You take history, don't you?"
"It's called social studies."
"Money makes social studies. Without money there would be no social studies."
"How come?"
"What Dad means," explains my daughter, "is that the love of money and the quest for gold and riches in the past is what caused most of the events we read about today in all our history books. Right, Dad?"
"Right indeed, my darling daughter. You got it again. I'm glad to see you're learning something more in school than pocket pool and rolling drugs, and how to walk around the house without any clothes on."
I am more startled than she is when I see her gasp and turn white. (I don't know why I said that then. I swear to Christ I don't know where those words came from. I know they didn't come from me.)
Her voice is a whispered plea. "Did you have to say that?"
I murmur no. "I didn't."
"Yes, you did," she charges. "You always do, don't you?"
"I'm sorry."
"You always spoil things. You ruin things for everybody. Doesn't he?"
My wife looks like she's going to cry.
"You knew I was kidding."
"Should I go?"
"No. We both were. But I've told you before not to walk around the house without a robe on."
"May I please leave the table?"
"No, stay. I'll go." (I feel inept, clumsy.) "Can't we make up? I have to go anyway. Heh-heh."
She's ruining my whole day too (even though it's all my fault. And it isn't even ten o'clock). That octopus of aversion had been there in bed with me and my wife again this morning when she awoke me with languorous mumbles and by snuggling close, that meaty, viscous, muscular, vascular barrier of sexual repugnance that rises at times (when she takes the initiative. It may be that I prefer to do the wanting). I eluded it spryly: before my wife knew what was happening, I was downstairs in the kitchen halving oranges, making coffee, and breaking eggs. I don't know where it comes from or why it does (and I don't ever want to find out). It seems to come from the brain, the heart, and the small intestines in a coordinated assault. (Men with heart attacks, I know, use them to avoid having sexual relations with their wives, though not with their girl friends, unless they are tiring of them. I make coffee and break eggs. I get a feeling of tremendous personal satisfaction whenever I hear that someone I know has left his wife. It serves the bitches right. Yesterday in a gourmet store I overheard one woman tell another that some man I didn't even know had left his wife, and my mood soared. I feel despondent afterward, sorry for myself, left out of things again.
"What are you looking so pleased about?" I could hear my wife saying, as I returned to the car.
"The price of artichokes," I offer in reply, or better stilclass="underline"
"A man left his wife.")
The wall of aversion was there again in my head and my breast even as I came awake (and would not go away), and I did not want her to touch me or have to touch her. (It has nothing to do with her.) I felt I might crumble to something dry and moldy where she pressed, I was soft dough or clay and would be deformed by indentations where her hands and knees pushed. I would stay that way. It is invisible and unyielding. It is heavy. It is living and it is dead. I am living and I am dead. There is grainy paralysis. It is hollow and dense. It is airless, making breath seem doubtful, arousing head pains, nausea, and sickening reminiscences of disagreeable, musty smells. It isn't fun. I have no will to overcome it. I can't confess it to her.
"I don't feel well," I'll whine. "I think it's my stomach."
"Is your chest all right?"
"I think so."
"You work too much. We never take a real vacation."
"You go away every summer."
"I don't call that a vacation. Why can't the two of us just go to Mexico? I've never been."
I would rather surrender to it and lie docile and enslaved. I would rather succumb. I would rather bide my time and wait for it to relent and recede like some risen demon returning to an underground lair somewhere inside my glands than engage it in battle or try to squeeze my way through an opening with batrachian strivings of my feet. I am a tail-less amphibian again. I have warts, but they are small, because I am small. I see myself struggling to squeeze my way through head first like a miniature white swimmer or frogman in black rubber, and the free-floating aches in my temples filter into throbbing pains in the occipital regions behind. I might never be able to come back if I ever forced my way through an opening of revulsion that pressed closed behind me. To where? There might be no here to come back to if I were there. I have wormed my way through aversion before and it has disappeared without hurting me, as though it were not even there. I imagine conversations. I wish I never had to experience it.
"C'mon, tell me," I coax my daughter. "Heh-heh. You can talk. Are you using drugs or doing dirty things with lots of boys and girls? I'll understand."
"If you really understand," my daughter reproaches me in a calm monotone, "you'd understand that you wouldn't have to ask me if I wanted you to know."
"That's smart. I'm proud of you."
"Do I have to be smart? Would you still be proud?"
"Of course."
"Of what?"
Maybe that's why her father killed himself. (She ruined his whole day.) He was probably a modest, introverted man no taller than Len Lewis who had sent the apple of his eye away to a very good southern university from which she had been kicked out for fucking football players en masse and in formation.
"En masse and in formation," she said to me with lilting gaiety, her dark eyes twinkling. "They made me do it," she went on, with flaunting radiance (so that I was never certain if she was telling the truth. She knew I loved to hear her talk about her dirty experiences. I was stirred to question her by an irresistible and ambivalent fascination. Rape enthralls). "They held me down at the beginning. But then I began to enjoy it. I showed him."
"Were you scared?"
"No. I was really crazy about that quarterback. Was he conceited. We did it once in a canoe. Did you ever do it in a canoe?"
"Weren't you mad?"
"Of course not. But he was. At me. He didn't think I'd enjoy it, but I showed him. He was the biggest thing on campus, and I had him for a while. I think I was the only Jew there. He wouldn't see me after that."
"Show me."
"I bet you'd faint."
"I bet I wouldn't."
"I bet they still remember it at Duke. They should put up a statue. I gave them a winning season."
It did not please me entirely to hear her talk about it all that way (I missed at least a shadow of repentance), and I would have rebuked and punished her severely if I had the right and the means. I would have slapped her face. (There was jealousy.) My wife and I started to try it once in a rowboat after we were married, but she turned shy and made me row her to an island.