"How would you like me to describe it?" I inquire, with a lordly air of inexhaustible tolerance. "Do you think it would help him much if I called it genius?"
"It's heartless." She shudders, pale and close to tears. "Mean. I get so frightened when I see you so cold."
It is ungodly the way I am able to forget about him for long periods of time, even when he is close by. (I blot him out and try to keep him out.) I think of myself as having just two children. One says:
"What would you do if I came home with a Black boyfriend? And wanted to marry him."
The other asks:
"What would you do with me if I couldn't speak?"
"But you can," I've answered.
"If I fell down the ropes one day in the gymnasium when I was trying to climb them and hurt my head and Mr. Forgione had to carry me home and I couldn't speak anymore, either?"
"I used to be afraid of rope climbing and falling down too," I try to explain encouragingly. "And of swimming naked in the pool in the high school also."
"I never said anything about swimming naked in a pool," he protests firmly (as though that fear had not yet taken root in him, and I had just implanted it). "Did I?" he demands.
I am embarrassed.
"Suppose I had an extra set of car keys made after I got my license," says my daughter, "and used the car when you were away. You couldn't stop me, could you? What would you do, have me arrested?"
The third one doesn't speak to me at all.
I have conversations that do not seem to be mine.
I feel afloat (legless). Legless, I walk around with headaches that do not seem to be mine (on feet that do. Arches ache and seem to be crumbling, I have a spur on one heel, middle toes are hammered, others are gnarled and require Band-Aids or corn plasters frequently, the tender pads of flesh on the bottom of my toes chafe and inflame if I do not switch pairs of socks and shoes, the soles itch dryly in cold weather, the tissue between the gnarled end toes splits and peels and I have to pour talcum powder in. There is no limit to the ills I could describe). I do not always feel securely connected to my legs or to my own past. The cable of continuity is not unbroken; it is not thick and strong; it wavers and fades, wears away in places to slender, frayed strands, breaks. Much of what I remember about me does not seem to be mine. Mountainous segments of my history appear to be missing. There are yawning gulfs into which large chunks of me may have fallen. I do not always know where I am at present. I sit in my office and think I am at home. I sit in my study and think I am at my office firing Johnny Brown or retiring Ed Phelps, in Penny's or some other girl's underthings, rolling them off, or in a bank, hotel lobby, or police station searching my pockets for some form of evidence or identification required of me. It may be that I talk to myself already without being aware of it. How debasing. No one has said so, but I don't think I do it when I'm with someone who might. I think I do it only when I think I'm alone. Maybe I am senile already and people are too kind to tell me. People are not kind and would tell me. (Maybe people have told me, and I'm too senile to remember. Ha, ha.)
"What? Did you say something?" one or the other of the members of my family has shot at me when I assumed I was alone and unobserved in my study or in some other room in my house, deep in thought.
"What? Nothing," I reply, startled and shamefaced. "I was just thinking."
Or:
"I was just reading the paper."
(Probably I was deep in thought imagining myself orchestrating rhythmic, polysyllabic replies to Green's thrusts without tripping over a single vowel or consonant.)
"You were laughing in your sleep again last night," my wife will say.
And I won't know if she's toying with me or not. It's the sort of lie I might make up for her, if I had thought of it first. I can never remember what it was I was laughing about when she tells me I laugh in my sleep. I wish I could. I could use a big laugh on days when I have these headaches that do not seem to be mine.
I get the willies in my spare time; I don't normally sleep well (although my wife tells me I do); I get the blues I can't lose; they decide when to leave (I either talk to myself or believe I might); I get depressed and don't know why; I mourn for something and don't know what; (legless) I walk around with jitters, headaches, and sadnesses ballooning and squiggling about inside me that seem to belong to somebody else. Is this schizophrenia, or merely a normal, natural, typical, wholesome, logical, universal schizoid formation? (I could plead temporary insanity. They would call it a mercy killing. There would be testimony under oath that it was done to put him out of his misery. He isn't miserable.)
I have these perfectly controlled conversations with Arthur Baron about Andy Kagle and with Andy Kagle about Arthur Baron, and I find myself wondering even while they are taking place, just what the fuck I am doing in them. (Is that really me there talking and listening?) I'll float away outside them a few yards to watch and eavesdrop and begin to feel I am looking down upon a pornographic puppet show of stuffed dolls in which someone I recognize who vaguely resembles me is one of the performers, and I have no more idea of why I am taking part in them, even as this separated spectator, than I do of these weird melancholies, tensions, and arid impressions of desolation that come upon me when they choose in my spare time.
"I have nothing to do," I whimper also in my spare time.
I have too much spare time. The same thing often happens with sex. I like to try to move outside our bodies and watch me. I go blind. I allow myself to be obliterated and am resurrected so slowly it takes a while to remember who I think I am and resume the role effectively. (It's all so silly it can't really be me.) I used to be able to watch me all the way through. That was nice too. Am I demented already, in what I genuinely feel to be the prime of my life? Or maybe I am that somebody else Ben Zack keeps declaring I am.
I feel strange.
"You look strange," my wife says, trying guardedly to draw me out.
"No, I'm not."
"Funny."
"You are."
"You've got that funny look on your face I can never figure out."
"Why aren't you laughing?"
"You look depressed."
"I'm not."
"Is anything wrong?"
"No."
"I'd love to know what you're really thinking," she hazards with a frowning smile.
No, you wouldn't.
(I'm thinking of death and divorce.)
Today at lunchtime a man fell dead in the lobby of my office building as he was coming toward me. He was a large, portly, elderly man with woolly white hair and a gray pinstripe suit, and he was carrying a slim, black umbrella in one hand and a brown attachй case in the other. He was a majestic, attractive figure who looked great enough to be president of General Motors until his face hit the floor. He was too old to be me.
I don't think I feel different now than I've ever felt. She's the one who seems to be changing: she fidgets more noticeably when I'm silent and she thinks I am angry or dissatisfied. (Am I silent more often? She is afraid of me.) She is rattled when I'm feeling too good. (She thinks I harbor secrets. I do.) I'm glad I've got golf to turn away to now. I want a hole in one someday so I can talk about it forever. I don't want to go to movies or plays, and my wife concludes I don't love her anymore. I don't even want to go to parties. We see the same people. I wish I had an interesting friend. My wife is bored too. My wife likes variety and movement and would prefer to mix around her different kinds of boredom. I'm content with the boredom I have. (If I kill my wife, who will take care of the children? If I kill my children, my wife can take care of herself. A prudent family man must plan ahead toward possibilities like that in order to provide for his loved ones.) I almost wish my wife would go ahead and commit adultery already so I can get my divorce.
(I'm not sure I can do it without her.)
My wife is at that stage now where she probably should commit adultery — and would, if she had more character. It might do her much good. I remember the first time I committed adultery. (It wasn't much good.)
"Now I am committing adultery," I thought.
It was not much different from the first time I laid my wife after we were married: