“Not similar. They are German shepherds.”
“Then why not call them that?”
“For a long time, if you called anything German in England, nobody bought it.”
“Oh. So they just-”
“Changed the name.”
“Fantastic,” he said. He flicked ashes at an azalea. “How come you know all these things?”
How come you don’t,, I very nearly said. Why, I wondered, am I so fucking hostile this morning?
Instead I said, “I think I’ll chance the slavering Alsatians. That’s probably just to keep hunters off his property, wouldn’t you think?”
“Probably.”
“And I feel in the mood for a walk in the woods.”
“Maybe I’ll lock up my pen and come along.”
“No, don’t do that,” I said. It was absolutely maddening-all I wanted to do was go for a walk and now everybody on earth wanted to keep me company. I felt like a character in a Gothic novel whom nobody wants to let out of the forbidding old manse.
“To protect you from the mad Alsatians.”
“Oh, I’ll manage,” I said. “I’ll insist I lost my way. That I am a stranger in these parts, kind sir-”
“Some kind sir. Bloody old robber baron.”
“A stranger in these parts, kind baron-”
“You want to go for a walk by yourself.”
“Yeah, kind of. A walk by myself, she explained, lowering her eyelashes bashfully at the handsome young cartoonist. Yeah, that’s it, I guess.”
“You vhant to be alone,” he said, not too much like Greta Garbo. And he looked at me oddly, but just for a moment, and then he laughed it all away.
“Take care, kitten,” he said. “I’ll get back to the serious business of mining salt. Watch out for bear traps.”
“Oh, I will, kind sir.”
“For that matter, watch out for bears.”
“They prevent forest fires.”
“They also eat Boy Scouts. Where else do you think they get those hats?”
“Well, fella, I ain’t no Boy Scout.”
“Don’t worry, honey. Somebody’ll eatcha.”
“I can hardly wait.”
“Well-”
I laughed and he laughed, and I was only laughing to get to the end of the scene, and so was he, and he went back to the shed while I walked on to the back line of the property and climbed over a couple strands of barbed wire that were strung from tree to tree at the property line.
I trespassed, but benignly. I didn’t pick any wildflowers or leave any litter behind. I just walked around in the silence, enjoying the loneliness, and wondering if I would ever stop being lonely, in or out of the woods. And wondered, for that matter, if I would ever really be out of the woods, so to speak.
Because it seemed to me, on that otherwise unimpeachable morning, that this was not my house, or my family, or indeed my life. That I had slipped it on as easily as I slipped on Prissy’s loafers, and that it was comfortable in about the same way, but that it was not mine and that sooner or later I would have to give it back. I had not been made for it, I did not own it, and it was not mine.
I sat down on a fallen tree and looked at mushrooms, wishing I knew how to tell the poisonous ones from the edible ones. It struck me as though it would be great fun to gather one’s own mushrooms and take them back and cook them, but that the delight of this form of amusement would be seriously muted if one were by no means certain of surviving the meal. There would have to be books on the subject, I decided, and perhaps I could read up on it and learn something about it. God knows I had the time.
And nothing better to do with it.
Yes, it kept coming back to that, didn’t it?
I spent quite a bit of time in those woods, and found myself returning to them several times that week and the next, when I needed a few minutes or an hour of peace and quiet. They did the job rather well, I must say. Sometimes I walked around, sometimes I sat quite still and listened to birds, sometimes I tried to coax a squirrel to my side-he knew better-and once or perhaps twice I sat on my fallen tree and cried. If a tree falls in the middle of the forest where there is no human ear to hear it, has it in fact really fallen? This one did, for otherwise how could I have been sitting upon it?
And if a girl weeps in the middle of the forest with no human ear to hear her, are her tears real?
Oh yes. Yes, they are.
My moods faded in and out, in and out. What Harry has taken to calling the Magic Days were largely over now. The same intense triangular love still very definitely existed, and moved us all deeply, but now it was more a sometime thing, not a preoccupation that dominated every waking moment.
Well, this has to happen. In any form of activity, not merely sex. But when it happens, it is almost impossible not to worry about it.
I remember, early in my marriage, the first time that Robert Keith made genuinely unsuccessful love to me. It took less than a month of marriage for this to happen. It was night, and time for bed, and we went to bed, and he rolled over and took me in his arms, which was his usual subtle way of telling me that it was time we got down to the serious business of screwing.
And for the tiniest moment I stiffened in his arms-and he did not seem to notice, subtlety truly not being his long suit-and even as I did so I realized what I was doing, and why. I did not want to make love to him.
Now what’s so remarkable about that, really? One cannot be always in the mood for sex unless one is so mindless as to be never in the mood for anything else. At that particular point in time I was deeply involved with private thoughts all my own. What the thoughts were doesn’t matter, and I certainly don’t remember anyway, but in any case what I wanted was to be let alone while I explored the insides of my head, and then to slip off into an alone kind of sleep. But RKD wanted to make love, a wholly legitimate aspiration for a husband of less than a month, and of course it didn’t even occur to me to ask him if he’d as soon take a rain check.
Partly, I guess, because I rightly expected this would dismay him to hell and gone. Partly too because I was bitterly ashamed of myself, convinced that my failure to want him every moment of every day meant I was making a botch of the marriage. And finally because it seemed to indicate to me that I did not really love him (which I didn’t, but there were other better signposts than this one.)
So we made something easily distinguishable from love, and just as I had not wanted it to begin with, so did I find it impossible to get into the swing of it. So of course I pretended to. (I’m sure who the first woman was to do that: Eve.) I faked passion, and I faked enthusiasm, and ultimately I faked orgasm, timing my fake to coincide with his real coming. Then he went to sleep and I didn’t, and the pattern of our marital relationship was firmly (?) established.
When Harry and Priss and I made love, and one of us had other things on his or her or her mind, it was a different matter. For one thing, one of the three of us could drop out of the game without destroying the game altogether. One less player still left two, which is, let us face it, a perfectly adequate number for most amorous activity. Whereas if one partner in a two-person sex relationship drops out for the evening, all the other one can do is masturbate-which may be fun or may not, but which isn’t what people get married for.
I remember a Wednesday late in May. It is mid-morning, Harry is in New York, and I am outside with Priss, watching her doing something agricultural with a trowel. I am smoking, and coughing every second or third puff, which marries guilt to discomfort. I threw the cigarette away and went on coughing, and Priss took the opportunity to tell me I was smoking too much, and I got even with her, clever me, by lighting another cigarette and getting my throat in an uproar all over again.
“Well, I guess Harry must be in the city by now,” I said.
“I’m sure he is.”
“That’s a long trip to make every week.”
“Well, it’s important for him to keep up personal contacts. With editors and other cartoonists and people in other areas of the business.”