“Or Mussolini making the trains run on time.” The allusion went by her; the last war had made World War II as dim as a post-office mural. I asked, “What about the nice people I used to pay protection to? Spin and Phil, and then the boys from Lynn.”
“A bunch of pathetic thugs, darling. They’ve all gone out of business. FedEx is nationwide; they have a network that can put New England into touch with Chicago and California again. It’s a Godsend, really.”
“You sound like a commercial.”
“When something is an improvement, I’m not afraid to say so, unlike some grumpy old cynics I know. You just concentrate on keeping your diapers changed, and do your exercises.”
Kegel exercises-mental exercises designed to reactivate the traumatized urethral sphincter. It was frustratingly difficult to locate with the mind those clusters of tiny muscles (there are two, one around the rectum and the other around the base of the penis) which we learn to manage not long after we learn to walk and talk, thus obtaining our ticket of admission to respectable human society. Well, I had fallen out of the club. And I had never known that Gloria regarded me as a cynic. In relation to what sunny philosophy of her own? In a marriage, as our flesh matters less, our opinions matter more. But I didn’t want to argue, I didn’t have the strength. I said, “It looked from the window as though he was packing a gun.”
“She. A very nice, competent young woman was driving the truck, Mr. Chauvinist. And yes, they do have to carry guns, with their new responsibilities. They need to defend themselves, and us, against anti-social elements. Those voices I kept hearing in the woods-I told FedEx about them, and sure enough they stopped.”
“They were children’s voices,” I said, her revelation touching some other muscles in me I didn’t know I had.
“They were trespassing voices,” Gloria said, irresistible in her clarity of purpose and conscience.
“Did it ever occur to you,” I asked her, “that I might be an anti-social element?”
“What you are is a very sick man who will get better if you do your exercises.”
“My trouble is,” I confessed, “I don’t even know if I’m doing them. I may be just tightening my stomach muscles.”
“Think prick,” she said. My fall has brought a new frankness to our relationship, a tonic simplicity as in those far off days when we knew upon meeting that, if we had smidgeon of privacy and ten minutes of time, we would fuck, cementing our bond, nailing down our hotly contested stake in each other. Think prick: nothing cynical about that.
The house is cold now in the mornings and evenings, but Gloria won’t let me turn on the furnace. Her father, a rigid, pipe-puffing Connecticut squire, never touched the thermostat until All Saints’ Day, she says. By the same calendar he switched from whiskey-and-soda to gin-and-tonic on Memorial Day, and back again on Labor Day. Seersucker suits and tweeds moved in and out of his closet as systematically as changing the guard at Buckingham Palace, and he never took his Mercedes out of the garage without checking the oil. He was a saint of proper procedures. On the coldest days before All Saints’ Day, he would set a log fire in the Wilton living room, and they would all have tea, little Gloria’s chamomile in a flowered cup, Mommy and Daddy’s smoky Darjeeling poured from the blue-green pot with evil-looking long-tailed birds on it, and little cakes served on a tray by their faithful maid Mary, named after the mother of God. She had a pointed nose red at the tip, from the master’s love of a cold house, perhaps. When Gloria touches me her hands feel icy. I wonder if I am running a permanent fever, my body furious at how it has been invaded.
Opening the kitchen cabinet to get down a mug for my morning tea (common Lipton’s, in a tagged bag), I am blinded by sunlight and fear I might clumsily break something. The slant of sun is different, lower, now. We are past the equinox. The Earth is like a ship that has slightly changed course; we would not notice but that the sun warms the panelled wood of our cabin at a slightly different spot in the grain as we dress for dinner. Last night, getting up to change my diaper, I saw the half-moon tipped halfway onto its back, and I made myself realize, in my drowsy gut, that the moon’s illumined half was turned toward the sun, which had plunged out of sight behind the Kellys’ trees hours ago, but in the slant direction from which the moon was lit. Two balls in the sky, one bright, one reflective: it’s that simple. We live among their orbits like dust mites in the works of a clock.
The storm gone northeast to Newfoundland, the weather is clear and calm. The sea has milky stripes of extra calm in it, and even the lobster boats on the far side of Cat Island look sharp and white and close. Twenty miles away, the shore of Hingham and Hull-where last July I could see fireworks go off, fuzzy and faint as comets-floats a sharp, detailed blue above a mirroring width of what seems sheer air.
Other optical illusions:
1. Shaving the other morning, I saw what seemed a giant bright-amber butterfly flapping frantically at my bathroom window, and only slowly realized that it was my stirred-up shaving water, into which I kept dipping my razor, reflecting electric light back into the window, semi-opaque at that newly shadowy 7:00 a.m. hour.
2. On the first day that I felt I had strength to walk down to the mailbox, I saw, as I shuffled (“One small step for a man…”) through the turn in the driveway, a long dark silhouette of something perched crookedly on the mailbox lid. My first thought was that a great bird, a crane or buzzard or pterodactyl, had alighted there; my next, that a package toe big to fit inside had been attached to the outside catch with rubber bands at a weird angle. Then, as I fearfully advanced I saw the shadow to be a piece of low hemlock limb intervening in my field of out-of-practice vision. It was always there. I had not taken this walk for seven weeks.
The vines in the woods-poison ivy and Virginia creeper- are beginning to redden, and the maples, each in its way. The tall red maple, so called, gradually turns a sober burgundy, while the more impulsive, larger-leaved sugar maple flashes into swathes of orange and a neon pink. The Norway maples planted downtown in the village will yield a clear yellow a bit duller than the hickories’. I saw from the car window as Gloria drove me to the Lahey Clinic in Danvers for some blood tests a splendid tall hickory whose outer leaves, basking in the mellow September sunlight, were still green, while the shaded inner leaves were already golden- a core of gold, a flickering inner life sheathed in seemly decorum; it gave the impression, as we sped by in the Infiniti, of a captive girlish soul, a twirling dryad.
Roberta brought Keith and Jennifer to visit me-my children have become solicitous, fluttering bothersomely, albeit loyally, about the wreck of my progenitive apparatus, whereby they came to be. In their adult, wrinkling faces I still see the plump cheeks and candid trusting gaze of ten-year-olds looking to me for protection and guidance and, most difficult to provide, entertainment. How can I explain that I must be left alone, without any pulling and hauling from loving kin, if I am to heal? That I have had my use of the world and my only salvation lies within, in tending the altar of my wound and waiting for nature or the force beyond it to slide me subtly away from my own disaster, by an invisible series of steps, into another world?
We fed Jennifer lunch. She kept taking the silver porringer, which cost a fistful of scrip at Firestone & Parson, and dumping its contents on the high-chair tray and then deliberately dropping the already much-dented porringer to the floor. The fourth time she did it, with her challenging slate-blue stare directly on me, I exploded. “Stop it,” I said to Jennifer, and to Roberta, whiningly, “Why does she keep doing that?”