I was so distracted to hear from Ben Zack that I was not in the file room anymore that I left work early to drink alone in Red Parker's apartment. I began making phone calls.
I called an airline stewardess I'd met who was out of town. Her roommate had a date. I tried a model I met at a photographer's party last week who said she was desperate for help in finding some kind of temporary work, but I wasn't sure of her last name or even that she was really a model, and I was unable to locate her in the phone book or obtain a number on what I thought was her street from directory assistance. (Telephone companies are putting more and more announcements on records that are no more efficient than people.) I called an actress I've known for several years and got her answering service. I called a woman I know who's divorced from a man I knew; her son told me she had driven to the shore that day to try to sell their summer house. I called a soft hooker I know who's always glad of the chance to pick up a dinner and fifty dollars, but she was already busy for dinner (or said she was) and was leaving the next morning for a week in Barbados with a man who was older than I was and had much more money. (By then I should have gone home and fucked my wife — I thought of that. She would have been a pushover, unless she hadn't sobered up graciously from the day's imbibing. Wine gives her headaches. Whiskey makes her sick. I have my problems.
"I don't feel well," I could hear her bleat. "Can't you understand?")
So I called a widow with two children in private school instead who sounded doomed: she told me in a flat, barren voice that she was going to try getting by alone from now on rather than waste any more time going out with men like me who had no intention of ever marrying her. (She didn't enjoy sex anyway.) It was getting her nowhere. I called Jane. She was out (I was relieved). Her roommate sounded younger than my daughter and dumber than my secretary and seemed squeaky and disappointed, as though I had interrupted her timetable for putting her hair up in large pink rollers. I didn't leave my name. (I would have been ashamed to.)
"Did I interrupt you? I'm sorry."
"I thought you were somebody else."
"Were you very busy?"
"I was doing something."
"Were you putting your hair up in pink rollers?"
"That's for me to know and you to find out."
I called Penny, who had just come in from another one of her singing lessons and exercise classes and begged me to give her an hour and a half to wash up and straighten the apartment. I was there in fifty minutes. She was still damp and fragrant from her bath.
"Please, baby," she requested gently. I had opened her robe. "Go a little slow. I still get scared when I see you start so fast."
Penny has an alabaster body that never fails to astonish me with its sturdy beauty every time I see it again. I think I must gasp loudly and glare voraciously. Her white neck flushes. I came three times with her (and think I could have gone four. It was just like the army again) and was back in Red Parker's apartment with the newspapers before midnight. (It was an unqualified success.)
I really don't like spending the whole night with anybody but my wife, not even Penny. (That's one reason I never take girls with me on overnight business trips and am surprised by men that do.) I guess I'm used to my wife. I like waking up with her. I like it better than waking alone. I had to use Red Parker's apartment again because I had nowhere else to go. I did not want to go home. I may have to get a small apartment of my own. I will have to lie to my wife about it. I lied to Penny, who thought I was on the last train back to Connecticut. I made her come once, the second time (when I could take my time and work on her as scientifically as she likes — it is work), and that is all she wants. Her neck and pale face flushed. The third one was all for me. She made me coffee afterward and hinted I could stay the night. (I felt so much at home I didn't want to.) Someone like Amazonian Marie Jencks would have suctioned me right back up into the womb with a single siphoning contraction, and then puffed me out on a flat trajectory into the spongy, red catacombs of a testicle belonging to a man riding the subway trains in search of a curvy backside to splash me back out against. That's what I call dismemberment. That's regression. (It wasn't so bad living in my old man's scrotum, as far as I can recall. It was warm and humid, and there was lots of companionship. I had a ball.)
(That was a good one.)
Maybe I do love my wife. I think I would have been stricken sightless and mute and turned into a dangling form of dingy cement or sodden papier-mвchй from the top of my head down if I'd ever been forced to mate with Marie's. (She was so large and domineering.)
"I asked for number six."
I asked for Marie Jencks.
"Oh, yes," Ben Zack remembered immediately. "I'll always remember Marie."
"The sperm began to mix."
"Her husband passed away from heart trouble at a very early age. They didn't have heart surgery in those days. She married again soon after and moved with her husband to Florida to cash in on the land boom."
I was not ready for Marie Jencks then. I was not ready for Virginia. My wife has brown nipples as lovely as any I've ever seen in the movies or still photographs and a nest of curly black hair I can rest my head on snugly. I feel safe with her. I feel safe with Penny. (I wonder why I always think of Penny last.) I don't think a human twat has teeth and don't believe I ever did. I've got this idiot child of mine I don't want and don't know what to do with. He belongs to me. Little Derek. (He doesn't even know what he is.) He is small, heartrending. He is unbearable. (He cannot be borne.) What threats he will pose for me later. What hazards he poses for me now. What will they do to him? Who will take care of him if I don't? How will he survive? What will become of the poor little thing if he doesn't die soon?
There's no getting away from it. I've got to get rid of him. There's no getting away from it. (He is so sweet. People who meet him tell us how sweet he is. They are being sweet when they say so.)
I've got to get rid of him and don't know how. And there's no one I can ask. There's no one I can tell I even want to, not even my wife, who wants to get rid of him also (but doesn't dare say so to me). Especially not my wife. We blame each other for him, when we aren't blaming ourselves, and that's another thing we haven't been able to say to each other yet.
"It's your fault, not mine."
We have to try to make believe he was nobody's fault, that he was a circumstantial twist of nature, a fluke. (A fluke is a fish.) All of us want to get rid of him, but only my daughter is honest enough to say so (and is set upon like a pariah by one or the other of us).
"Is he going to have to be with us forever?" she'll complain in a temper.
"What do you care?" I'll lash back at her, as though she had said that just to wound me. "You'll be away at college."
(She might stay home, just to torture me. I sometimes feel that if not for Derek we would never quarrel with each other. I know it's a lie.)
He does not seem to be mine. He may be my wife's.
There is no idiocy in my family that I know of (or in hers). My wife has begged me not to use that word (which may be why I do. She winces every time).