“‘I told Mother and Rose what Father had said and we agreed that we had to do something fast. Well, the very next night Mother went up to Father and said, “You know, Earl, Mim and Rosie have given what you said about Roger yesterday quite a lot of thought, and Mim agreed that maybe it’s just too cold for Roger here. We did get him as a pup from that nice man that time we went down to Florida, remember. Anyway, Mim’s decided that Roger might be better off if he lived with her Cousin Ernestine down in Birmingham, where the climate’s not so harsh. We know how tender-hearted you are, Earl, and we didn’t want to burden you unnecessarily with a sad leavetaking, so we’ve already been down to the depot and shipped Roger off.” Well, it caused Father some pain to realize that I’d given up my dog, but after a while, when he saw the thing in perspective, his spirits began to brighten, and the rest of us felt better too because now we could get more sleep. In no time at all we were able to cope and shield Father again from the bad news that seemed to come from everywhere that winter.
“‘It was marvelous to see Father grow lively again. I can’t say that he recovered his health, but not having to hear bad news all the time did restore a certain confidence and vigor to the man. And the winter too seemed to be declining in its fierceness, the back of the cold spell had been broken, and though it wasn’t actually warm, the terrible snow had begun to melt — though here and there there were still high drifts and all the curbs were piled with the stuff. It wasn’t just that we knew how to handle the bad news better now that Roger was off our mind; it was that the bad news itself fell off. One day Father even felt well enough to go out for a walk. It was fun to see him in so fine a fettle — Father was a marvelous man to be with when he was feeling good — and I joined him. He was so cheerful that he didn’t seem to be the same man, and once he even bent over to gather up some snow for a snowball. I thought he might hurt himself doing a thing like that but he was up again as spry as any boy and threw the snowball all the way across the street to hit the tree there a lovely bull’s-eye. This made him so happy he couldn’t contain himself and he just stepped bold as you please into a pile of snow at the curb, but then he got this horrible look on his face, and he dropped down on his hands and knees and began uncovering whatever it was he had felt in the snow. Well, it was Roger’s frozen body and when he stepped on it he’d snapped its neck.
“‘I had to carry Father back to the house on my back, and I think he must have been dead by the time we got there. I took his body in through the back door because I knew Mother and Rose would be in the parlor, and out of habit I didn’t think they should see this.’
“The funny thing is,” Dick Gibson told his audience, “I don’t remember hearing any of this. I mean, I must have or how would I know it, but I don’t recall much of anything that went on in that room the months I was there. Was I silent the whole time she spoke? Was it a monologue? Did I ever drink the bouillon? Did Miriam get into bed with me during her story? Did I fall asleep? What happened?
“I wasn’t in love with Miriam. It’s more probable, though unlikely, that she was in love with me. She made me comfortable, more comfortable than I’d ever been in my life. Perhaps because she was a nurse. Nurses have lousy reputations because of what they do for men. I mean the bedpans, the enemas and the pubic shaves, I mean the deathbed vigils and hearing folks scream. I could be myself with Miriam, vent my gas, kiss with a bad taste in my mouth, grunt over my bowels in the toilet. So when I ask if I could have fallen asleep it isn’t out of fear of not being on my mettle as a lover. I was in a trance, a catalepsy, a swoon, a brown study, a neutral funk. I was languid, gravid, the thousand-pound kid in Miriam’s room, sensitized as human soup. And if I heard her at all it was in my ilium I listened — as deep as that — harkened in my coccyx, my pajama strings all ears, and my buttons and the Kleenex under my pillow.
“‘What is wrong with you, Mr. Desebour, may I ask?’ Doctor Pasco, the Home’s young director wanted to know.
“‘I have the falling sickness, Dr. Pasco,’ I told him lazily, dizzily. ‘I have the petit mal.’ Nor was I lying. I was in the cataleptic’s ‘aura’ state. It must have been something like that.
“Miriam noticed my passivity.
“‘Too many bed baths,’ I told her.
“‘We’ll cut them out,’ she said. ‘Are you bored here? Are you tired of me?’
“‘Christ, no. I swear it. If I didn’t know you I’d tune you in and listen to you on the radio.’
“It was the truth. That was exactly how I listened to Miriam — as if she were some new kind of radio personality. Once I realized this I tried to study her inflections, but she had no inflections. I sank deeper and deeper into my desuetude, the pit of my stomach spreading till I was all stomach pit.
“One night she asked me to leave.
“‘Just like that?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘I won’t leave. I like it here. I won’t leave until I unlock the secret of your voice,’ I told her, yawning.
“‘What are you talking about, Marshall? Why are you so difficult?’ ‘ “Please, Miriam, let’s make love. Then fix us bouillon and tell me a story.’
“‘I am not the Story Lady, Marshall. I’ve told you, I want this ended. You must get out.’
“‘If you make me leave Dr. Pasco will know we’re not married. He’ll throw you out.’
“‘We could say we’re getting a divorce.’
“‘I won’t agree to a divorce, Miriam.’
“‘We’ll see,’ she said.
“I became a laughing stock; Miriam made me a laughing stock. Oh boy, the laughs at my expense, last laughs and best laughs, up one sleeve and down the other. I was their butt, their asshole I was. Miriam’s strategy was simple: she cuckolded me. It probably didn’t amount to much more than washing the private property of a few of the chronics. From the talk I think there may have been some hanky panky with the man who came when she gave him enemas. (He was a nice enough fellow, unremarkable except for a peculiar inability to pronounce certain rs sounds which, in his mouth, came out tch.) The place fed on scandal; it was good therapy for those chronics. I could have blown the whistle on her; I could have gone up to them and said ‘Look here, I’m no cuckold. Miriam’s not my wife,’ but then I would have seemed more pathetic than foolish. It’s one thing to lose control of your wife, but quite another not to be able to handle your mistress. Besides, I hadn’t yet broken the secret code of her voice.
“But it was the strangest thing I have ever endured. For one thing, we still screwed, more than ever probably, for Miriam was determined to make her adultery seem real, and to do that she needed to preserve the illusion of our marriage which could now be maintained only by the further illusion that she was deceiving me. How complicated it all was. For the first time in my life I was involved with someone who actually had motives. I even had motives myself. (How motiveless the world is, when you stop to consider, how unconspiratorial is the ordinary bent of humanity, how straightforward that bent. Drive drives the world, simple inclination is its capstan.)
“Another thing was my standing now with the patients. How they clowned with me, how they made jokes with their joke! For instance, they would pretend that I had this enormous dick. The source of this idea, I suspect, was just the fact that of all the people in the home— patients and staff — Miriam and I were the only two who cohabited, so that even before Miriam made cuckoldry with the enema man, an aura had built up around us. We stood apart from the rest of those lame ducks and can’t-cut-the-mustards, though they didn’t see those bed- baths in the double bed with the hospital sides. The conceits they invented were elaborate and insane: