Being in love with Sukie made Clyde drink more; drunk, he could sink more relaxedly into the muck of longing. There was now an animal inside him whose gnawing was companionable, a kind of conversation. That he had once longed for Felicia this way made his situation seem all the more satisfactorily hopeless. It was his misfortune to see through everything. He had not believed in God since he was seven, in patriotism since he was ten, in art since the age of fourteen, when he realized he would never be a Beethoven, a Picasso, or a Shakespeare. His favorite authors were the great seers-through—Nietzsche, Hume, Gibbon, the ruthless jubilant lucid minds. More and more he blacked out somewhere between the third and fourth Scotches, unable to remember next morning what book he had been holding in his lap, what meetings Felicia had returned from, when he had gone to bed, how he had moved through the rooms of the house that felt like a vast and fragile husk now that Jennifer and Christopher were gone. Traffic shuddered on Lodowick Street outside like the senseless pumping of Clyde's heart and blood. In his solitary daze of booze and longing he had pulled down from a high dusty shelf his college Lucretius, scribbled throughout with the interlinear translations of his studious, hopeful college self. Nil igitur mors est ad nos neque pertinet hilum, quandoquidem natura animi mortalis habetur. He leafed through the delicate little book, its Oxford-blue spine worn white where his youthful moist hands had held it over and over. He looked in vain for that passage where the swerve of atoms is described, that accidental undetermined swerve whereby matter complicates, and all things are thus, through accumulating collisions, including men in their miraculous freedom, brought into being; for without this swerve all atoms would fall ever downwards through the inane profundum like drops of rain.
It had been his habit for years to step out into the relative quiet of the back yard before going up to bed and to gaze for a minute at the implausible spatter of stars; it was a knife edge of possibility, he knew, that allowed these fiery bodies to be in the sky, for had the primeval fireball been a shade more homogeneous no galaxies could have formed and had it been a shade less the galaxies would have billions of years ago consumed themselves in a heterogeneity too rash. He would stand by the corroding portable barbecue grill, never used now that the kids were gone, and remind himself to wheel it into the garage now that winter was in the air, and never manage to do it, night after night, lifting his face thirstily to that enigmatic miracle arching overhead. Light sank into his eyes that had started on its way when cave men prowled the vast world in little bands like ants on a pool table. Cygnus, its unfinished cross, and Andromeda, its flying V with, clinging near the second star, the bit of fuzz that—his neglected telescope had often made clear—is a spiral galaxy beyond the Milky Way. Night after night the heavens were the same; Clyde was like a photographic plate exposed again and again; the stars had bored themselves into him like bullet holes in a tin roof.
Tonight his old college De Rerum Natura folded its youthfully annotated pages and slipped between his knees. He was thinking of going out for his ritual stargaze when Felicia barged into his study. Though of course it was not his study but theirs, as every room in the house was theirs, and every flaking clapboard and bit of crumbling insulation on the old single-strand copper wiring was theirs, and the rusting barbecue and above the front doorway the wooden eagle plaque with its red, white, and blue weathered in the rain of atoms to rose, yellow, and black.
Felicia unwound striped wool scarves from around her head and throat and stamped her booted feet in indignation. "There are such stupid people running this town; they actually voted to change the name of Landing Square to Kazmierczak Square, in honor of that idiotic boy who went off and got himself killed in Vietnam." She pulled off her boots.
"Well," Clyde said, determined to be tactful. Since Sukie's flesh and fur and musk had flooded those cells of his brain set aside for a mate, Felicia seemed diaphanous, an image of a woman painted on tissue paper that might blow away. "That area hasn't really been a boat landing for eighty years. It got all silted in the blizzard of '88." He was innocently proud to be specific; along with astronomy, Clyde, in the days when his head was clear, used to be interested in terrestrial disasters: Krakatoa blowing its top and shrouding the Earth in dust, the Chinese flood of 1931 that killed nearly four million, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 that struck when all the faithful were in church.
"But it was so peasant," Felicia said, giving that irrelevant quick smile which showed she thought her words inarguable, "up there at the end of Dock Street, with the benches for the old people, and that old granite obelisk that didn't look like a war memorial at all."
"It might still be pleasant," he offered, wondering if one more inch of Scotch would mercifully knock him out.
"No it won't," Felicia said definitely. She stripped oil her coat. She was wearing a broad copper bracelet that Clyde had never seen before. It reminded him of Sukie, who sometimes left her jewelry on but nothing else and walked in nakedness glinting, in the shadowy rooms where they made love. "Next thing they'll want to be naming Dock Street and then Oak Street and then Eastwick itself after some lower-class dropout who couldn't think of anything better to do than go over there and napalm villages."
"Kazmierczak was a pretty good kid, actually. Remember, a few years back, he was their quarterback, and on the honor roll at the same time? That's why people took it so hard when he got killed last summer."
"Well I didn't take it hard," Felicia said, smiling as if her point had been clinched. She came near the fire he had built in the grating, to warm her hands now that her mittens were off. She half-turned her back and fiddled with her mouth, as if disentangling a hair from her lips. Clyde didn't know why this by now familiar gesture angered him, since of all the unattractive traits that had come upon her with age this one affliction could not be construed as her fault. In the morning he would see feathers, straw, pennies still slick with saliva stuck to her pillow and want to shake her awake, his own head thundering. "It's not ath if," she insisted, "he was even born and bred in Eastwick. His family moved here about five years ago, and his father refuthes to get a job, just works on the highway crew long enough to get another six months of unemployment. He was at the meeting tonight, wearing a black tie with egg stains all over it. Poor Mrs. K., she tried to dress up so as not to look like a tart but I'm afraid she failed."
Felicia had a considerable love for the underprivileged in the abstract but when actual cases got close to her she tended to hold her nose. There was a fascinating spin to Felicia and Clyde couldn't always resist giving a poke to keep her going. "I don't think Kazmierczak Square has such a bad ring to it," he said.
Felicia's beady furious eyes flashed. "No you wouldn't. You wouldn't think Shithouse Square had such a bad ring to it either. You don't give a damn about the world we pass on to our children or the wars we inflict on the innocent or whether or not we poison ourselves to death, you're poisoning yourself to death right now tho what do you care, drag the whole globe down with you ith the way you look at it." The diction of her tirade had become thick and she carefully lifted from her tongue a small straight pin and what looked like part of an art-gum eraser.