“What’re you thinking about, old Mr. Man?” She has attached her pair of pink earphones around her neck.
“About what a sweet thigh you’ve got and how much I’d like to pull it my way.”
“Well you surely can. Won’t nobody see you but Suzie and little Barbara, and they don’t care long as no clothes come off. That wasn’t what you were thinking anyway. I know about you, old tricky.”
“I was thinking about Candid Camera. The talking mailbox. I think that’s about the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“I like ’em, too. Ole Allen Funk. I thought I saw him one day in the hospital. I’d heard he lived someplace around. But then it wasn’t. A lot of people look alike now, you know it? But that still isn’t it. I’ll just let you run on.”
“You’re a smart girl.”
“I got a good memory, which you need to nurse. But I’m not really smart. I wouldn’t have married Everett if I had been.” She fattens her cheeks and smiles at me. “Are you not gonna tell me what you’re sitting there worrying?” She takes a good two-armed hold on my arm and squeezes it. She is a girl who likes squeezing. “Or am I gon have to squeeze you till you talk.” She is strong, which I think would also be a requirement for a nurse, though I am sure she doesn’t really care what’s on my mind.
In truth, of course, I have nothing to answer. Undoubtedly I was thinking something, but most things I find myself thinking seem to fly right out of my mind and I can’t remember them at all. It is a trait of character which made being a writer hard and often downright tedious. I either had to sit down and write out whatever I happened to be thinking about at any time of the day or night I happened to think it, or else just forget it all, which is what happened at the end of the time I was working on my novel. Finally I became happy to forget everything and let it all lapse. Real writers have to be more attentive, of course, and attentive was what I wasn’t much interested in being.
I do not think, in any event, it’s a good idea to want to know what people are thinking (that would disqualify you as a writer right there, since what else is literature but somebody telling us what somebody else is thinking). For my money there are at least a hundred good reasons not to want to know such things. People never tell the truth anyway. And most people’s minds, like mine, never contain much worth reporting, in which case they just make something up that’s patently ridiculous instead of saying the truth — namely, I was thinking nothing. The other side, of course, is that you will run the risk of being told the very truth of what someone is thinking, which can turn out to be something you don’t want to hear, or that makes you mad, and ought to be kept private anyway. I remember when I was a boy in Mississippi, maybe fifteen years old — just before I left for Lonesome Pines — a friend of mine got killed in a hunting accident. The very night after, Charlieboy Neblett and I (he was one of my few friends in Biloxi) sat out in Charlieboy’s car drinking beer and complaining about our having thought, then forgiving each other for thinking, that we were glad Teddy Twiford got killed. If Teddy’s mother had come by just then and asked us what we were thinking, she would’ve been flabbergasted to find out what lousy friends of Teddy’s we were. Though in fact we weren’t lousy friends at all. Things just come into your mind on their own and aren’t your fault. So I learned this all those years ago — that you don’t need to be held responsible for what you think, and that by and large you don’t have any business knowing what other people think. Full disclosure never does anybody any favors, and in any event there are few enough people in the world who are sufficiently within themselves to make such disclosure pretty unreliable right from the start. All added to the fact that this constitutes intrusion where you least need to be intruded upon, and where telling can actually do harm to everyone involved.
I remember, in fact, the Lebanese woman I knew at Berkshire College saying to me, after I told her how much I loved her: “I’ll always tell you the truth, unless of course I’m lying to you.” Which at first I didn’t think was a very good idea; though stewing over it after a while I realized that it was actually a piece of great luck. I was being promised truth and mystery — not an easy combination. There would be important things I would and wouldn’t know, and I could count on it, could look forward to it, muse on it, worry about it if I was idiot enough, which I wasn’t, and all I had to do was agree, and be forever freed.
She was a literary deconstructionist and had a mind trained for that kind of distinction. And she managed to make a policy out of a fact of life: how much of someone you can actually get to know about. Very little. Though I don’t think in the three vertiginous months we spent together she ever lied to me. There was never a reason to! I saw to that by never asking a question whose answer wasn’t already obvious. X and I might in fact have made a better go of it if she could’ve tried that strategy out on me by not asking me to explain anything that night I stood out in the rhododendrons marveling at Gemini and Cassiopeia, while her hope chest was fast going up the chimney. She might Ve understood my predicament for what it was — an expression of love and inevitability, instead of just love’s failure. Though I will not complain about it. She is fine now, I think, in most ways. And if she is not as certain about things as she once was, that is not a tragedy, and I think she will be better as time goes on.
By the time the copilot pokes his head through the tourist class curtain and gives us all the high sign, Vicki has drifted off to sleep, her head on a tiny pillow, her mouth slightly ajar. I intended to show her Lake Erie, which we’re now passing high above, green and shimmering, with gray Ontario out ahead. She is tired from too much anticipation, and I want her full of energy for our whirlwind trip. She can see the lake on the flight home, and be a slug-a-bed on Sunday night when we return from her parents.
An odd thing happened to me last night, and I would like to say something about it because it touches on the whole business of full disclosure, and because it has stayed on my mind ever since. It is, of course, what I wasn’t prepared to tell Vicki.
For the past two years I have been a member of a small group in town which we got together and called — with admirable literalness — the Divorced Men’s Club. There are five of us in all, though the constituency has changed once or twice, since one fellow got married again and moved away from Haddam to Philadelphia, and another died of cancer. In both instances someone has come along at just the right time to fill in the space, and we have all been happy to have five since that number seems to strike a balance. There have been several times when I have nearly quit the club, if you can call it a club, since I don’t think of myself as a classic joiner and don’t feel, at least anymore, that I need the club’s support. In fact, almost all of it bores the crap out of me, and ever since I began to concentrate on becoming more within myself I’ve felt like I was over the shoals and headed back to the mainstream of my own lived life. But there have been good reasons to stay. I did not want to be the first to leave as a matter of choice. That seemed niggardly to me — gloating that I had “come through,” whereas maybe the others hadn’t, even though no one has ever admitted that we do anything to support one another. To start with, none of us is that kind of confessional, soulful type. We are all educated. One fellow is a banker. One works in a local think tank. One is a seminarian, and the last guy is a stocks analyst. Ours is much more a jocular towel-popping raffish-rogueishness than anything too serious. What we mostly do is head down to the August, puff cigars, talk in booming businessmen’s voices and yuk it up once a month. Or else we pile into Carter Knott’s old van and head down to a ball game in Philadelphia or go fishing over at the shore, where we get a special party deal at Ben Mouzakis’ Paramount Show Boat Dock.