“Iowa, fuck,” says Gavin. Work on your work. Sometimes she talks like a five-year-old.
Reynolds gets going with the lint brush. She attacks his shoulders, then takes a playful swipe in the direction of his crotch. “Let’s see if there’s any lint on Mr. Wiggly!” she says.
“Keep your lustful claws off my private parts,” says Gavin. He feels like saying that of course there’s lint on Mr. Wiggly, or dust at any rate, or maybe rust; what does she expect, because as she is well aware Mr. Wiggly has been on the shelf for some time. But he refrains.
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use, he thinks. Tennyson. Ulysses sets out on his last voyage, lucky him, at least he’ll sink with his boots on. Not that Greeks wore boots. One of the first poems Gavin had to memorize in school; he turned out to be good at memorizing. Shameful to admit, but that’s what turned him on to poetry: Tennyson, an outmoded Victorian windbag, writing about an old man. Things have a habit of coming full circle: a bad habit, to his mind.
“Mr. Wiggly likes my lustful claws,” says Reynolds. How gallant of her to put that in the present tense. It used to be a game of theirs — that Reynolds was the seductress, the dominatrix, the femme fatale, and he was her passive victim. She’d seemed to enjoy that scenario, so he went along. Now it’s no longer a game; none of the old games work. It would only make both of them sad to attempt to revive them.
This isn’t what she signed up for when she married him. She most likely envisioned a fascinating life, filled with glamorous, creative people and stimulating intellectual chit-chat. And that did happen some, when they were first married; that, and the flare-up of his still active hormones. The last kaboom of the firecracker before it fizzled; but now she’s stuck with the burnt-out aftermath. In his more lenient moments, he feels sorry for her.
She must be finding consolation elsewhere. He would if he was her. What does she really do when she goes out to her spinning classes or off to her so-called dancing evenings with her so-called girlfriends? He can imagine, and does. Such imaginings once bothered him, but now he contemplates Reynolds’s possible transgressions — not only possible, but almost certain — with clinical detachment. She’s surely entitled to some of that: she’s thirty years younger than him. He probably has more horns on his head — as the bard would say — than a hundred-headed snail.
Serves him right for marrying a youngster. Serves him right for marrying three of them in a row. Serves him right for marrying his graduate students. Serves him right for marrying a bossy, self-appointed custodian of his life and times. Serves him right for marrying.
But at least Reynolds won’t leave him, he’s fairly certain of that. She’s polishing up her widow act; she wouldn’t want it to go to waste. She’s so competitive that she’ll hang in there to make sure neither of the two previous wives can lay claim to any part of him, literary or otherwise. She’ll want to control his narrative, she’ll want to help write the biography, if any. She’ll also want to cut out his two children — one from each ex-wife, and hardly children any longer, since one of them must be fifty-one, or maybe fifty-two. He hadn’t paid much attention to them when they were babies. They and their pastel, urine-soaked paraphernalia had taken up so much space, they’d attracted so much attention that ought to have been his, and he’d decamped in each case before they were three; so they don’t like him much, nor does he blame them, having hated his own father. Nevertheless there’s sure to be some squabbling after the funeraclass="underline" he’s making sure of that by not finalizing his will. If only he could hover around in mid-air to watch!
Reynolds gives him a final stroke with the lint brush, does up his second-from-the-top shirt button, tugs his collar into place. “There,” she says. “Much better.”
“Who is this girl?” he says. “This girl who’s so interested in my so-called work. Got a cute butt?”
“Stop that,” says Reynolds. “Your whole generation was obsessed with sex. Mailer, Updike, Roth — all of those guys.”
“They were older than me,” says Gavin.
“Not much. It was sex, sex, sex with them, all the time! They couldn’t keep it zipped!”
“Your point being?” says Gavin coolly. He’s relishing this. “Is that bad, sex? Are you a little prude all of a sudden? What else should we have been obsessed with? Shopping?”
“My point being,” says Reynolds. She has to pause, reconsider, rally her inner battalions. “Okay, shopping is a poor substitute for sex, granted. But faut de mieux.”
That hurts, thinks Gavin. “Faut de what?” he says.
“Don’t play dumb, you understood me. My point being, not everything is about butts. This woman’s name is Naveena. She deserves to be treated with respect. She’s already published two papers on the Riverboat years. She happens to be very bright. I believe she’s of Indian extraction.”
Of Indian extraction. Where does she pick up these archaic locutions? When she’s trying to be properly literary she talks like a comic lady in an Oscar Wilde play. “Naveena,” he says. “Sounds like cheese food slices. Or better — like a hair-removal cream.”
“You don’t have to disparage people,” says Reynolds, who used to dote on the fact that he disparaged people, or at least some people; she’d thought it meant that he had a superior intellect and an informed taste. Now she thinks it’s merely nasty, or else a symptom of a vitamin deficiency. “It’s so knee-jerk with you! Running them down doesn’t make you any bigger, you know. Naveena happens to be a serious literary scholar. She has an M.A.”
“And a cute butt, or else I’m not talking to her,” says Gavin. “Every halfwit has an M.A. They’re like popcorn.” He puts Reynolds through this every time — every time she trots out some new aficionado, some new aspirant, some new slave from the salt mines of academe — because he has to put her through something.
“Popcorn?” says Reynolds. Gavin flounders momentarily — now what did he mean by that? He takes a breath. “Tiny little kernels,” he says. “Superheated in the academic cooker. The hot air expands. Poof! An M.A.” Not bad, he thinks. Also true. The universities want the cash, so they lure these kids in. Then they turn them into puffballs of inflated starch, with no jobs to match. Better to have a certificate in plumbing.
Rey laughs, a little sourly: she has an M.A. herself. Then she frowns. “You should be grateful,” she says. Here comes the scolding, the whack with the rolled-up newspaper. Bad Gavvy! “At least someone’s still interested in you! A young person! Some poets would kill for that. The ’60s is hot right now, happily for you. So you can’t complain of being neglected.”
“Since when have I done that?” he says. “I never complain!”
“You complain all the time, about everything,” says Reynolds. She’s reaching the fed-up moment; he shouldn’t take it any further. But he does.
“I should have married Constance,” he says. That’s his ace: plonk! Right down on the table. Those five words are usually very effective: he might score a barrage of hostility, and maybe even some tears. Top marks: a slammed door. Or a projectile. She winged him with an ashtray once.
Reynolds smiles. “Well, you didn’t marry Constance,” she said. “You married me. So suck it up.”
Gavin misses a beat. She’s playing impervious. “Oh, if only I could,” he says, with exaggerated longing.
“Dentures are no impediment,” says Reynolds crisply. She can be a bitch when he pushes her too far. The bitchiness is a thing he admires in her, though reluctantly when it’s turned on him. “Now I’m going to get the tea ready. If you don’t behave yourself when Naveena comes, you won’t get a cookie.” The cookie ploy is a joke, her attempt to lighten things up, but it’s faintly horrifying to him that the threat of being deprived of such a cookie hits home. No cookie! A wave of desolation sweeps through him. Also he’s drooling. Christ. Has it come down to this? Sitting up to beg for treats?