The Fool's Progress Page 4
Under Elaine’s watchful eye, I took my spoon and touched the thing on my plate. It quivered as if still alive. Elaine, I said, you’re my darling and I love you urgently more than life itself and I know this must have taken great time and effort…
She stared at me. I knew she was going to cry.
…and I really appreciate this, honey, but doggone it sweetheart I was outside all day in the cold and wind [I’d been out bow hunting with Lacey] and you know I’m kind of really hungry. I mean hungry. Can’t we—do you think maybe—I mean, could I maybe fry this hideous thing?
She rose from the table.
I didn’t mean that, I said at once, didn’t mean that, only kidding, darling, look, watch, I’m going to eat it. Watch. Too late. She groped toward the bedroom, blind with tears. Me and my big loose mouth. Honey, I shouted, you know I’m only kidding, honey. I got up from my chair. Elaine! I roared as the bedroom door slammed in my face.
She was a master—a mistress—at slamming doors. One of her favorite gestures. Every doorframe in the house is outlined with ornamental traceries of cracked plaster. I could hear her sobbing inside. I tried the door but she had turned the key in the lock.
Useless for me to hammer on the door or to attempt, prematurely, the first necessary signals toward reconciliation. I returned to our “dining nook” in the kitchen, in this tract-style travesty of a house, and looked again at the blob of inedible pink matter on my plate. That glob of misery and mystery. I set it on the floor in front of Fred the cat. He sniffed cautiously, not quite touching it, and backed off. I took the plate outside and offered the thing to Solstice our dog. (Born on June 22.) She didn’t want it either. So I flung it, plate and all, into the branches of the chinaberry tree in our front yard. The living glop oozed down from twig to twig in mucoid hockers, like snot from a sick calf, and dropped onto the defenseless pads of a prickly pear. There it gathered itself together again, coagulating on the spines, and continued its slimy progress toward the center of the earth….
That was near the end of the honeymoon, the typical ninety days of passion before the grim reality of domestic bliss begins to sink into the mutual consciousness of man and wife. It was only the first of many such incidents. One evening when I came home from work she greeted me at the door wearing a brocaded kimono.
Beautiful, I said. She smiled, bowed, led me inside. Supper was ready. But it was on the floor—or more precisely, laid out upon this foot-high end table. I sat down, Elaine pulled off my boots, washed my hands with warm rosewater in a porcelain bowl. She knelt on a cushion at one side of the low table, I knelt on a cushion opposite. But this position was uncomfortable for me. I changed to a sitting posture but there was no room for my legs—I’m six foot four inches—either in front of, beside or beneath that damnable toy table. Nor did I have anything to lean back against. I placed my cushion so that I could recline against the front of the sofa. But then I could not reach the table. I pulled the end table closer, across the carpet, and toppled a slender vase filled with fresh live—chrysanthemums? Oh damn! I’m sorry, Elaine.
She smiled and said nothing, sopped up the water with a napkin, replaced the flowers. Smiling graciously, she poured the tea, an authentic brew called soochang bing—or bong, I believe. The kind that smells like old straw soaked for six months in a horse trough. Delicious, I said, closing my eyes the better to savor its rare bouquet.
She smiled, eyes lowered, removed the lid from a porcelain pot and with matching ladle served a dark thick purple soup into tiny porcelain bowls. A tincture of iodine hovered on the air. We picked up miniature matching ceramic spoons, too short to sup from at the side, too thick and awkwardly curved to allow insertion into the mouth. The idea, evidently, is to bend the head far back and pour contents of spoon into mouth, as if feeding an infant.
I worked on it and got a few mouthfuls down. Best boiled sewage effluent I ever tasted, I thought, while Elaine observed my every move, each response, with hopeful eyes. Well? she asked, as I paused for reflection. Good, I said, good, mighty good, what is it? It’s a sort of Japanese bouillabaisse, she said, called maru tamayaki. If I heard her correctly. Really good, I said, wondering what kind of marine life was hidden in the soup.
I dipped the scoop deeper into my little bowl and came up with something dead white, a languid soft invertebrate substance. Testicles of octopus? Placenta of jellyfish? What’s this? I said. Tofu, she said; soybean curd. Soybean curd? Come on, Henry, you’ve heard of tofu, you’ll like it. She swallowed a spoonful of the stuff and watched me.
I smiled at my wife and placed the wet tofu in my mouth, swallowing quickly before I lost courage. It went down easily enough, I guess, although I felt a queasy tremor of protest from my stomach. Delicious! I exclaimed.
I knew you’d like it.
Tofu, eh? Those Japs sure are clever little fuckers. I groped for another lucky dip, feeling about for some sort of solid matter. Soybean mash, I was thinking—in America we make cattle eat it. No wonder there’s so many short people on this planet. I groped in the beet-dark soup and fished up maybe a dying squid—limp strands of purple pseudoflesh dangling like tentacles from my spoon. I looked at Elaine; she was watching.
Kelp, she explained.
You mean—seaweed?
Yes. The tears (goddamnit) already welling to the surface of those marvelous eyes. Don’t be so suspicious, Henry. I’m not trying to poison you or anything, you know.
Honey, really, it looks good. Real good. I was just curious, honest. Just never saw anything like this crawling in my soup. Before.
She stiffened.
So it’s kelp? I went on hastily, kelp, eh? Well I’ll be damned. I stared at the thing hanging from my spoon, not quite brave enough to bring it to my lips. Like the innocent North Dakota virgin who married a Frenchman and wondered, after five years of steady sex, why she never got pregnant, I could not quite bring myself to swallow the stuff.
Those little Nips are an ingenious people, I said. Sony, Datsun, Toyota, Kawasaki, Honda, kamikaze, hari-kari, seppuku, Pearl Harbor, the creeping kudzu vine—how can we ever thank them? And now kelp, seaweed in my soup, what do you know about that. Wonderful. Well, with a hundred million of the little mothers crammed onto a few islands barely big enough for one half million actual humans, no wonder they eat seaweed. And soybean curd, whales, krill, birds’ nests, labels off beer bottles.
Bird’s nest soup is a Chinese dish.
One billion of them. Eat more beef, I say.
Now she was getting angry. Her High Church blood was flowing. If we Americans didn’t feed so much grain to cattle and hogs we could support more millions of people. Billions. Africa, Asia, Latin America, we could feed them all.
There’s too many short people in the world already.
It ever occur to you maybe you’re not as smart as you think you are?
Nobody could be that smart.
You’re talking like an idiot. You don’t really believe that height makes you superior. A pause. Do you?
I shrugged. Put it this way: if those billions of short people are as good as us, how come they have such tiny heads?
You’re sick. You and Hitler should get together. You’d love South Africa. Why don’t you join the KKK? Silence. She watched me still looking at the Oriental weed hanging from my spoon. Well—are you going to eat it or not?
Elaine…I looked at her. Her eyes were wet with tears. Lower lip a-tremble. Elaine, sweetheart, I was born and bred on a sidehill farm in Appalachia. Actually bred first, then born. Ain’t we got no pokeweed greens? turnips? smoked ham? red-eye gravy? sweet corn? sowbelly? venison sausage? even beans? And I mean beans, not bean sprouts.
You were born in a barn. More likely a pigsty.
Our Lord & Savior was born in a barn, I reminded her. I recited my favorite Christian poem:
There was an old bugger named God
Who put a young virgin in prod
This amazing behavior
Gave us Jesus our Savior
Elaine put down bowl and spoon. False rhyme, she said. Daintily she dabbed her lips with napkin. She was making a patient effort to control herself, her rage, her anguish. Gracefully she started to rise—
I gulped down the mass of soggy kelp. Half choking I croaked, Good, honey, goddamn it’s good. Damn good. Delectable. My Christ but it’s good. I mean quite fucking superb.
But I was late, too late with too little. Tears streaming down her pink and glossy cheeks, she bolted for the bedroom.
Elaine! I howled. Too late again. The door slammed shut. The lock snapped to. The dreadful racked weeping sounded through the hallway.
Too late the phalarope. Grabbing the bottle of sake, which tastes no worse than Gallo’s hearty chablis, I got up, got out, drove to Ferrigan’s Bar & Grill, ordered a hot turkey sandwich with mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, Green Giant corn niblets. And a bottle of beer. (The waiter brought the bottle itself for my inspection, as customary in a high-class place, showed me the label—Coors—and with due ceremony and graceful flourishes opened the bottle right there, at the table, in my presence, as tradition requires.) I topped off the meal with a Dutch Masters cigar, Walgreen’s best. Satisfied, I asked myself a question: Lightcap, How can you be so rotten? How can you be such a rotten obnoxious swine? After a moment’s thought I answered, It ain’t easy.
It took me only a couple of months to cure Elaine of gourmet cookery. We went back to basic American fare—the pig and the egg for breakfast, the cheese and crackers and tuna for lunch, the cow and chicken and lamb for supper. With mashed potatoes and gravy, with turnips and blackeye peas, with beer and red wine. A good diet for me, I was working outside in the open air in those days, helping Harrington build his house, but poor Elaine began to put on weight at thigh and hip. That did not trouble me; I liked her plump, well rounded; but she, like millions of other females here and abroad, had been trained to believe she must have the flanks of a whippet, the buttocks of a boy. Hated androgyny again! She trimmed her diet down to salads and yoghurts while her husband carved his protein and chomped on carbohydrates. She became a jogger.
She bought the uniform: the Nike shoes, the flimsy erotic Adidas track shorts, the heavy-duty reinforced breast sling, the long-billed sunshade, the AM/FM Walkman radio headset, and commenced to laboring up and down the streets with Eric Clapton and James Taylor bawling in her ears, the jogger’s look of smug pain and spiritual fortitude on her face. Favoring her sore foot, she gulped the dust and grime and noxious gases of the passing motor traffic.
Conserve energy, I pleaded. Running is wasteful. All joggers should be chained to treadmills and compelled, under whiplash, to generate electricity.
Bug off.
I’ll buy you a new ax. A maul. Wedges. A sledgehammer. We need more firewood. More rocks for the garden wall.
Drop dead.
I dropped the subject.
The euphoria of running wore off after she’d dropped five pounds and gained a shin splint and two bulging calf muscles.
Next move? I braced myself.
Feminism reared its fearsome head, a fright wig crawling with serpents, eyes to paralyze Achilles, the grievance of a million years of servitude glaring from the dark recesses of the female mind.
She came under evil influence at the University, as I should have anticipated. Led astray by bad companions, she began reading Woolf, Greer, Steinem, Firestone, Millet, Schulman, Hite, Brownmiller, Rich and other restless Hebraic natives from the rubyfruit jungle. Virginia Woolf had suddenly become—that very year—one of the world’s great writers. But not Jane Austen: Austen condones marriage, even urges its pursuit as a legitimate option for upwardly mobile bourgeois-type girls. Furthermore Austen had refused to be born Jewish and who but the Semites, from Moses and Jesus and Paul and Mahomet to Freud and Dr. Brothers and the Ayatollah Khomeini, have succeeded in making of sex so gruesome a rack of torture? Five hundred million decapitated foreskins. Half a billion vaginas dentata. Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Me—I am.
Combat in the erogenous zone.
VI
I was dozing off to sleep one night, deplete and satisfied after a brisk little bout in bed with Elaine, when she muttered these curious words in my ear:
We’re going to change that old format.
Pardon?
Change that old format.
Sure, honey…. My heavy lids dropped down again. I was a happy man, ready for the blissful dreams that follow spendthrift sperm. What’s this post-coitus regret bullshit? In the sweet hiatus after sexual love I tend to hear little thrushes calling from magnolia trees in Paradise. (“Paradise”—another word for man’s original garden, the preagricultural wilderness.) After making love I feel not sadness but serenity, hear bluebirds in an alpine meadow, dream mystical daydreams in the out-of-doors.
But I was attacked by an unkindness of ravens. Not a dissimulation of birds or exaltation of larks but a gaggle of geese, a murder of crows, a school of hagfish, a coven of witches:
Did you hear me, Henry?
What?
Did you hear me?
Sure, honey, you bet.
What did I say?
I struggled against my drowsiness, sensing danger. You said, Did I hear you.
Yes. And what did I say?
I thought. Thought hard, mastering my irritation. Irritation? Homicidal outrage: there’s nothing I hate more than being disturbed during those exquisitely languorous moments when drifting into slumber. And I have a bad temper, though I’m fighting it. I said, You said, Did you hear me.
She gritted her fine sharp teeth. In an icy voice, teeth like icicles, she said, I said we’re going to change that old format.
What old format?
Foreplay, penetration, ejaculation, sleep, she recited, as if it were a formula.
What’s wrong with it?
It’s no good. It’s obsolete.
Ominous word. I tried to be helpful. We could skip the foreplay.
I’m serious.
Save the foreplay for later.
Henry, a woman has needs too, you know. We’re serious.
We? Another ominous word. We? Who’s we, white woman?
You know what I mean. She was tense, frigid with anger, at the same time slightly fearful. This was a new sensation for her, baiting her man.
No, I don’t know what we mean. (Temper, temper.) I mean what you mean. What do you mean? You’re talking about coming? going? unloading rocks? the big round O? the holy tortilla?
She started to rise from bed. I’m leaving.
I grabbed her. Why are you always threatening to leave? Is that the only way you can carry on a discussion? (Here’s your hat, there’s the door, what’s your hurry?) You mean you didn’t come this time, is that what you’re mad about?
You know.
Know what?
What you said. Yes, I did not—come. As you so crudely put it.
Oh? Crude? (And I thought I’d put it very nicely, tactfully, as I always put it.) Really? You didn’t come?
Henry—I never come.
Pause. Silence. The words sink.
Oh God, I said. (I’m going to write a book someday: The Joy of Jerking Off. At least you don’t have to talk afterwards.) What the hell do you mean you never come. Never? Hardly ever?
I mean never, Henry. You know what never means.
Forever?
Never. Not yet.
I can’t believe this, Elaine. What the hell do you mean? Now I was getting irked, rising to my elbows, another good night’s sleep ruined, nothing for it now but aspirin, Wild Turkey, hours of Gibbon or Burton or Shakespeare under the reading lamp and that feeling by dawn of total moral and mortal exhaustion. I said, We’ve been officially married for two years, Elaine. Sleeping together, fucking together, fighting together for over three years and now you claim you never come. Never came? Never? Not once?
Fight and fuck, she said, fuck and fight, that’s all we ever do.<
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What’s wrong with that? That’s love. Pause. Not even once? In three whole years?
Not once.
You’ve been faking all this time? All that groaning and gasping and clasping and wiggling, that was a fake?
You’re the fake.
My God, Elaine. I can’t believe this.
It’s true.
Oh, God…(I was in trouble.) Is it my fault? (Silence. Pregnant silence.) What about—other men?
She hesitated in what I interpreted as a coy and calculating silence. Well—there were only two others. Before you. College boys.
What about them? Could they make you come?
Again the cruel silence. Finally she said, All men are the same.
I see. (All men are brothers.)
Most men. Some are different…or so I’ve heard. Pause. Besides a man doesn’t make a woman come, as you call it. He works with her.
I see. He works with her. (Works!) I thought of my last Chinese fortune cookie, the one I got at the Old Peking Restaurant on Speedway after I’d eaten my favorite Chinese dinner, Combination Plate #2. The joker’s cookie. All men are the same, my little slip of paper said, they only think of one thing: Luckily every woman has one. Why do girls have vaginas? So the boys will talk to them. I thought of the female sexual organ in its outward manifestation. Vulva, inner and outer labia, clitoris, etc. Never did envy the gynecologist. All those business hours spent peering into that bearded oysterlike aperture. Not that a man’s dangling apparatus is half so pretty. A nude woman, if attractive, is a pleasure to look at, but a naked man is merely a man with his pants off—ridiculous.
I thought about these things while Elaine stared wanly into space, and I said—but what could I say? I was shocked. Appalled. Devastated. Bored. I said, I’m sorry, Elaine, good Christ. What about jacking off? Can you come that way?
Don’t be crude. Girls don’t—women don’t—do that.
Oh no?
Women masturbate.
And you can come that way?
We don’t “come.” We orgasm.
You what?