By this time I had come to recognize two facts that guaranteed my survival. The first was his detestation of solitary exercise. He liked games well enough but he did not like gymnastics. Each morning he would go to the bathroom and touch his toes ten times. His buttocks (there’s another story) scraped the washbasin and his forehead grazed the toilet seat. I knew from the secretions that came my way that this experience was spiritually crushing. Later he moved to the country for the summer and took up jogging and weight lifting. While lifting weights he learned to count in Japanese and Russian, hoping to give this performance some dignity, but he was not successful. Both jogging and weight lifting embarrassed him intensely. The second factor in my favor was his conviction that we lead a simple life. “I really lead a very simple life,” he often said. If this were so I would have no chance for prominence, but there is, I think, no first-class restaurant in Europe, Asia, Africa, or the British Isles to which I have not been taken and asked to perform. He often says so. Going after a dish of crickets in Tokyo he gave me a friendly pat and said: “Do your best, man.” So long as he considers this to be a simple life my place in the world is secure. When I fail him it is not through malice or intent. After a Homeric dinner with fourteen entrées in southern Russia we spent a night together in the bathroom. This was in Tbilisi. I seemed to be threatening his life; It was three in the morning. He was crying with pain. He was weeping, and perhaps I know more than any other part of his physique about the true loneliness of this man. “Go away,” he shouted at me, “go away.” What could be more pitiful and absurd than a naked man at the dog hour in a strange country casting out his vitals. We went to the window to hear the wind in the trees. “Oh, I should have paid more attention to spiritual things,” he shouted.
If I were the belly of a secret agent or a reigning prince my role in the clash of time wouldn’t have been any different. I represent time more succinctly than any scarecrow with a scythe. Why should so simple a force as time—told accurately by the clocks in his house—cause him to groan and swear? Did he feel that some specious youthfulness was his principal, his only lure? I know that I reminded him of the pain he suffered in his relationship to his father. His father retired at fifty-five and spent the rest of his life polishing stones, gardening, and trying to learn conversational French from records. He had been a limber and an athletic man, but like his son he had been overtaken in the middle of the way by an independent abdomen. He seemed, like his son, to have no capacity to age and fatten gracefully. His paunch, his abdomen seemed to break his spirit. His abdomen led him to stoop, to walk clumsily, to sigh, and to have his trousers enlarged. His abdomen seemed like some precursor of the Angel of Death, and was Farnsworth, touching his toes in the bathroom each morning, struggling with the same angel?
Then there was the year we traveled. I don’t know what drove him, but we went around the world three times in twelve months. He may have thought that travel would heighten his metabolism and diminish my importance. I won’t go into the hardships of safety belts and a chaotic eating schedule. We saw all the usual places as well as Nairobi, Malagasy, Mauritius, Bali, New Guinea, New Caledonia, and New Zealand. We saw Madang, Goroka, Lee, Rabaul, Fiji, Reykjavík, Thingvellir, Akureyri, Narsarssuak, Kagsiarauk, Bukhara, Irkutsk, Ulan Bator, and the Gobi Desert. Then there were the Galápagos, Patagonia, the Mato Grosso jungle, and of course the Seychelles and the Amirantes.
It ended or was resolved one night at Passetto’s. He began the meal with figs and Parma ham and with this he ate two rolls and butter. After this he had spaghetti carbonara, a steak with fried potatoes, a serving of frogs’ legs, a whole spigola roasted in paper, some chicken breasts, a salad with an oil dressing, three kinds of cheese, and a thick zabaglione. Halfway through the meal he had to give me some leeway, but he was not resentful and I felt that victory might be in sight. When he ordered the zabaglione I knew that I had won or that we had arrived at a sensible truce. He was not trying to conceal, dismiss, or forget me and his secretions were bland. Leaving the table he had to give me another two inches, so that walking across the piazza I could feel the night wind and hear the fountains, and we’ve lived happily together ever since.
MARGE LITTLETON would, in the long-gone days of Freudian jargon, have been thought maternal, although she was no more maternal than you or you. What would have been meant was a charming softness in her voice and her manner and she smelled like a summer’s day, or perhaps it is a summer’s day that smells like such a woman. She was a regular churchgoer, and I always felt that her devotions were more profound than most, although it is impossible to speculate on anything so intimate. She was on the liturgical side, hewing to the Book of Common Prayer and avoiding sermons whenever possible. She was not a native, of course—the last native along with the last cow died twenty years ago—and I don’t remember where she or her husband came from. He was bald. They had three children and lived a scrupulously unexceptional life until one morning in the fall.
It was after Labor Day, a little windy. Leaves could be seen falling outside the windows. The family had breakfast in the kitchen. Marge had baked johnnycake. “Good morning, Mrs. Littleton,” her husband said, kissing her on the brow and patting her backside. His voice, his gesture seemed to have the perfect equilibrium of love. I don’t know what virulent critics of the family would say about the scene. Were the Littletons making for themselves, by contorting their passions into an acceptable social image, a sort of prison, or did they chance to be a man and woman whose pleasure in one another was tender, robust, and invincible? From what I know it was an exceptional marriage. Never having been married myself I may be unduly susceptible to the element of buffoonery in holy matrimony, but isn’t it true that when some couple celebrates their tenth or fifteenth anniversary they seem far from triumphant? In fact they seem duped while dirty Uncle Harry, the rake, seems to wear the laurels. But with the Littletons one felt that they might live together with intelligence and ardor—giving and taking until death did them part.
On that particular Saturday morning he planned to go shopping. After breakfast he made a list of what they needed from the hardware store. A gallon of white acrylic paint, a four-inch brush, picture hooks, a spading fork, oil for the lawn mower. The children went along with him. They went, not to the village, which, like so many others, lay dying, but to a crowded and fairly festive shopping center on Route 64. He gave the children money for Cokes. When they returned the southbound traffic was heavy. It was as I say after Labor Day, and many of the cars were towing portable houses, campers, sailboats, motorboats, and trailers. This long procession of vehicles and domestic portables seemed not the spectacle of a people returning from their vacations but rather like a tragic evacuation of some great city or state. A car carrier, trying to pass an exceptionally bulky mobile home, crashed into the Littletons and killed them all. I didn’t go to the funeral but one of our neighbors described it to me. “There she stood at the edge of the grave. She didn’t cry. She looked very beautiful and serene. She had to watch four coffins, one after the other, lowered into the ground. Four.”
She didn’t go away. People asked her to dinner, of course, but in such an intensely domesticated community the single are inevitably neglected. A month or so after the accident the local paper announced that the State Highway Commission would widen Route 64 from a four-lane to an eight-lane highway. We organized a committee for the preservation of the community and raised ten thousand dollars for legal fees. Marge Littleton was very active. We had meetings nearly every week. We met in parish houses, courtrooms, high schools, and houses. In the beginning these meetings were very emotional. Mrs. Pinkham once cried. She wept. “I’ve worked sixteen years on my pink room and now they’re going to tear it down.” She was led out of the meeting, a truly bereaved woman. We chartered a bus and went to the state capital. We marched down 64 one rainy Sunday with a motorcycle escort. I don’t suppose we were more than thirty and we straggled. We carried picket signs. I remember Marge. Some people seem born with a congenital gift for protest and a talent for carrying picket signs, but this was not Marge. She carried a large sign that said: STOP GASOLINE ALLEY. She seemed very embarrassed. When the march disbanded I said goodbye to her on a knoll above the highway. I remember the level gaze she gave to the line of traffic, rather, I guess, as the widows of Nantucket must have regarded the sea.