And so his current work, beyond its somewhat mischievous, even malign capacity to fill him with an ennui so profound as to exhaust him, appeared to him to cast a shadow on his earlier work, to demean it, sully it, in a sense to sabotage it. With every sentence he wrote, it seemed, an earlier sentence, a glittering and suave sentence, decayed a little. But this was all he knew how to do. He wasn’t much good for anything else, and what he did know how to do — even when, he smiled ruefully — even when he knew how to do it, proved nothing, changed nothing, and spoke to about as many people as one could fit into a small movie theater.
And so he continued to do it, correcting and revising each newly made page with a feeling of weird neutrality, with a feeling that he was simply passing the time: this or solitaire — all right, this. Surely, the other old writers he still knew felt precisely this way. Did they? He surely wouldn’t ask such an impertinent question.
He had recently received a letter from a dear friend, who, it so turned out, died soon after. He took the letter from his files one morning, before he started what he now thought of as “work,” scare quotes flaring, and found in it what he was sure he had read. The friend had confessed to him that his last book was, indeed, his last book, that he had given up or lost — it made little difference — the ability and the desire to write another word. His friend lamented the fix that he was in, but his frustration seemed forced, it seemed a position taken because of proprieties, the old truisms about art: a writer who cannot write, how sad, how tragic. It was a role his friend was playing. So it seemed, so it was.
He sat as his desk, and read the letter again. He wished, oh how he wished it wasn’t so, but he was choked with envy of his friend’s sterility: not to be able to write, not to want to write, to be, as they say, “written out,” or, more wonderfully, “burnt out”—lovely phrase! But it was a gift that had not been given him, and, he knew, despairing, that it would never be given him. He was doomed to blunder through the shadows of this pervasive twilight, until finally, perhaps, he would get said what could never be said.
— XLIV —
He’d stopped abusing alcohol years ago, although he disliked the word “abusing,” and used it only with people he didn’t know or didn’t care to know. He thought it a spurious word, a kind of self-help, onward-and-upward, simperingly Christian word that conjured up an image of a frenzied drunk assaulting a bottle of whiskey in a perverse madness. He hadn’t “abused” alcohol, but had spent almost four years sitting in a chair drinking jug wine around the clock and looking, variously, at the wall, the window blind, and the TV screen. Now he was sober and had been for more than five years. What he discovered was that being sober meant no more than being sober: he certainly was no more content, no more serene, nor had he found anything wonderful to fill his “leisure” hours, no God, in whatever costume. He went to work, came home, ate his frozen dinners, drank tomato juice with a lot of tabasco in it, and watched television. He smoked less, but that was because his salary was pitifully low at the prussianly anti-union retail outlet he worked at.
He lived alone, as might be surmised, his three failed marriages having taught him nothing about women or sex or give and take or, for that matter, anything at all. He had no children, thank God, and now, at sixty-eight, fantasies of erotic adventures in which the ex-wives lasciviously collaborated, or substituted for each other, or were blurred together with other insatiable women, real or invented, were his entertainment. Who performed what perversion and when, and how did she do it and where were they all when it happened? It was pitiable entertainment, of course, but he didn’t care one way or another; he was concentrated, obsessively, on his self, his actual body and flesh, and he accepted the knowledge that he was sick, not of any disease, but sick of himself, of his self. It surely must be a common ailment, so he thought. How to reach one’s late-sixties and not be self-loathing?
He had considered the possibility that he might actually be ill with some spectacular, malignant, fatal disease, lymphoma perhaps, or something even more devastating. Yet the thought of going to “see” his doctor filled him with a boredom and unease strong enough to bring on nausea. For a few years, soon after his last marriage had imploded in slow-motion misery, he’d gone regularly to his doctor, and to other doctors referred to, had tests and more tests, blood panels and urinalysis, examinations and biopsies, for a pain here, a twinge there, irregular bowel movements, fluttery heartbeats, shortness of breath, difficulty sleeping, weak urine flow, and on and on: he had become, that is, an official patient, whose responsible job it was to worry about his health and juggle doctors’ appointments and ask questions about his medications and their possible side effects (there was one drug that could, it was thrillingly advised, cause a fatal reaction after just one dose!). It was a job much more fulfilling than the one he made $12.43 an hour at, where nobody would look seriously into his face and suggest that he might have chronic prostatitis — or worse.
But one day he realized that no matter how militantly — or weirdly — obsessive he was or would be about his health, he was, at sixty-eight, good for (a nice phrase) maybe ten more years, if that, and then oblivion. It was the neurotic and worried people between thirty-five and forty-five who thought that diet and exercise and meditation and the avoidance of cigarette smoke and excessive alcohol use (alcohol abuse!) would keep them from death; and that industrious and puritanical attention to their aging bodies would take them into their happy nineties, their euphoric hundreds, into a deathlessness as groggily sweet as a California chardonnay. Their bodies would repay them for their scrupulous care.
He knew better than this, although he considered that he might well be wrong, but, sick of himself, bored with himself, there was no regimen of health to which he could subscribe without embarrassing himself deep within his psyche, or what was left of it. He of course, like any reasonable human being, considered suicide, for who would miss him? But he refused the idea when he thought that perhaps one day an actual terrible, serious, rampaging disease would enter him or awaken within his body where it had been dozing all these years, a disease that he and his doctors could “battle,” or, better, “bravely battle,” but to which he would at last grudgingly succumb. In the meantime, he decided to start drinking again, to abuse alcohol, and with abandon. Christ knows that he’d wanted a drink every hour of every day for years. If he was sick of himself and waiting for the possible declaration within his body of the presence of some malignant destroyer, why not wait drunk?
— XLV —
There once was a man who coveted his friend’s wife, and even though he was an Evangelical Christian, complete with closed eyes, raised arms, enraptured visage, and a well-burnished hatred of Satan, and in despite of the ninth commandment, his lust grew and flourished. So much so that he set about, with much sweaty praying in the night for his pal, God’s, personal assistance in his travails, seducing the woman. This was not as hard as he thought it might be, for she had a touch of the whore about her. And so he violated the sixth commandment: in for a nickel, in for a buck. After a time, the man had become thoroughly obsessed with the woman, mad for her, as they say, and wished no more than to be inside of her day and night. The woman’s husband was oblivious to this sexual carnival. He was the perfect cuckold; he no longer desired his wife, so believed her undesirable to others.