Families and Survivors (16 page)

“What’s so funny about that?” Sally says. Adding, cruelly, “It’s what
we
did.”

Half hearing her, Andrew goes on laughing, gasping, until he realizes that he is crying. Then, pretending to choke on his laughter, he rushes from the table to the downstairs bathroom, where he is sick.

…

The Magowan divorce, like an earthquake, sent tremors through their shocked circle of friends. The Magowans? Alex and
Grace?
Although for several years, since Allison has been sick, Grace had been behaving in a way that everyone thought was odd; she took Allison on long trips instead of to doctors, she spent most of her time alone with Allison.

Alex came over to tell Sally and Andrew about it. His normally florid face had a darker, unhealthy flush, as though his blood were infected. “I thought you people should be the first to know,” he said, with no irony—in fact with considerable dignity. “Grace and I—we’re breaking up.”

As Alex said that, Andrew had an image of a ship, a wooden hull splitting apart in a storm, or tossed by a giant whale. And indeed the Magowans’ marriage had the stately quality of a ship. They were majestic: they never did the messy things that other people sometimes did: no public spats, no drunken passes at others’ mates. (Well, Andrew later thought, Sally and I didn’t do too many of those things, either.)

Sally cried out, “Oh, no,” and almost immediately began to cry.

Alex looked grimmer and darker still. One of his problems, which Andrew recognized but was helpless to alleviate, was that Alex had no vocabulary for the depth of what had happened to him. Even more than most people do, he spoke normally in clichés; things were terrific, or great, or really lousy. But how could you call a deserting wife or a mad child really lousy?

He spoke with a tremendous effort as his large hands gripped each other. “It’s really this thing with Allison. God knows I’m no expert, but I seriously think the kid should see a psychiatrist.”

“Of course she should,” Andrew said gently.

Alex looked grateful. “Well, I’m afraid I said that a few too many times to Grace. God, it’s like—like I’d insulted her. Like I’d told
her
to go to a psychiatrist. So now she wants to move back to New Hampshire with Allison. She thinks a small town is what Allison needs. God, I can’t move to a small town in New Hampshire. I’m just getting started.”

Allison by then was ten. She had more or less come out of an awful phase of not eating and of vomiting a lot. Now she got into fights. Seeming to have no notion of her own size, or sex, she physically attacked big boys, who sometimes hit her back. She was always in various forms of trouble at school. (A phase that preceded further withdrawal.) And Grace had never admitted any of this. “Oh, the kids are all fine,” she would say.

Sally was speaking to Alex. “No, of course you couldn’t move to New Hampshire,” she said softly. And then, “Alex, would you like me to try to talk to Grace?”

“That’s terrific of you, Sal. Really. But I just don’t think so. She’s become—unreasonable.”

“Okay. But if there’s anything we can do …”

And so Grace left town with Allison, leaving Alex with the two other children, Douglas and Jennifer. And the two somewhat diminished families became closer than ever. Sally made Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners for all of them. Alex, who was getting quickly rich in housing developments, sometimes took them all out lavishly, to family dinners at the Palace Hotel, or the Redwood Room at the Clift.

Once at the St. Francis, in a bar adjoining the dining room, they saw someone they all thought they knew: Louisa Wasserman. Whoever it was, she was totally absorbed in a huge red-haired man. Impressive. And Louisa, or whoever, did not see them, or perhaps she pretended not to. (And
Sally had the further—curious—impression that Andrew did not want to see Louisa.)

“If that’s Louisa, she really looks terrific,” Sally said, looking at Andrew. “I heard she and Michael got a divorce.”

“One more.” Alex scowled. Then he smiled at his friends. “I hope you people realize how lucky you are.”

They thought they did.

And so, after several more painful conversations, and more tears, Andrew moves into a bachelor pad on Telegraph Hill, with a king-sized bed and an expensive view of the city, a long way across town from the Pacific Heights where Sally and the boys remain. He has two bedrooms, one that is equipped for weekend visits with bunk beds—those ex-family rituals that by the sixties are such a commonplace. Andrew sees his life as moving into realms of situation comedy. It makes him cringe, the banality of it all. For Andrew has always had an almost artistic double vision of himself—the “almost” keeps him a professor rather than an artist.

(In fact during these personally lively years, he almost stops thinking about writing.)

By day he teaches his classes, and at night he stays at home with his guilts. (Guilt was the phase that succeeded surprise, that preceded rage.) Trying to read, staring across the spangled city, he considers his failures as a husband. He wanted her to read all his books. He insisted on making love even when she was tired or had a bad cold. He did not teach the boys to play baseball. He talked too much. “You filled up all the space,” Sally has said, in one of those penultimate conversations. “There was no room for me.” And so she is marrying silent Alex, the Westerner.

Andrew drinks too much.

One night, in the midst of his second brandy, Alex telephones. He sounds very like himself. “I—uh—wondered if perhaps we shouldn’t get together, talk a few things over.”

“Why?” Andrew realizes instantly that he does not in the least want to see Alex, or to talk things over.

“Well—uh—if that’s how you feel—.”

“Alexander, I just don’t see the point. What’s to say?”

“Well—uh—no hard feelings.”

“Well, perhaps a few.” Andrew hangs up, and thinks: You stupid bastard, I have plenty of hard feelings. And a not startling but new insight occurs to him: Alex speaks so tritely because his mind is trite. Alex is basically an ass.

Then he begins to be angry at Sally. The ungrateful bitch.

There is a period of voluptuous fantasies, a period during which, with liberated eyes, a freed libido, he observes all his girl students—in fact all girls. And here again, new cause for anger at Sally: he has been such a faithful husband that he has almost never thought of his students “in that way”—despite all the enticing literature on the subject, the proliferation of good-to-bad novels and stories on student-professor affairs.

For instance, Miss James, in the front row of his American Literature course. Miss Isabel James. Her name delights him; he hopes that none of her friends call her Iz. She has pale blue eyes and darkening blond hair, and small pretty legs. He has never allowed himself to think for long about Miss James. But now, why not?

Jill turns out to be why not, picking him up in City Lights Book Store, in front of Poetry. “Mister, would you
mind driving me home? I’ve been celebrating a suicide and I really feel rotten.”

A preposterous request, and so he asks, “Where do you live?”

“Potrero. Really—thanks.”

As though he had said yes, she starts across the basement floor, and so he follows her. He notices then that her feet are bare and that she is extremely fat. She pauses at the counter upstairs to pay for a thick paperback called Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and Other Tales of Ordinary Madness. Christ, where is he?

She and the thin black who takes her money discuss the book.

“Bukowski. Yeah, wow.”

“I really dig him.
Really.
”

“Did you hear about Bill?”

“Yeah, too bad. They find his body?”

“Not yet.”

“Too bad. I wonder what happened to his paintings.”

“He’d burned them all.”

“Wow.”

Her feet are rather small for such a big girl, and delicately arched. Dirty, of course, on the soles, with the dirt seeping upward, up the slightly calloused pink sides. Spiky blondish hairs stand out from the sides of her legs. Observing this last, Andrew thinks of two separate things simultaneously: the hairs remind him of the here-and-there spiky down on Sally’s chin, and he wonders if this girl shaves under her arms. The idea that she might not is suddenly erotic.

Following her out to the sidewalk, he is very aware of how they must look. Himself middle-aged, dark, trim, a man handsome in a not quite usual way, in conventional clothes: old tweed jacket, turtleneck, gray flannels. And this
big blond barefoot girl, who looks dirty and exhausted. Does anyone imagine her to be his daughter? Does everyone think they are going off somewhere to make love?

Is that what they are going to do?

Across Columbus Avenue, at the Broadway intersection, hawkers announce the garish start of the topless era. Big live breasts! Real ones! On girls, all kinds of girls. Even college girls. There is a place that specializes in college girls. Folks—step right up? Andrew has the quick and absurd fantasy that he does step right up and finds, in the college-girl place, Miss Isabel James. Topless. But he is with another girl.

“I’m Jill,” the girl says, settling back in his car. “Say, this is really nice of you. I wouldn’t have asked but this afternoon a friend of mine—I guess a former friend—jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Do many people jump off the Bay, do you know? He wasn’t anyone I liked any more, but it upsets me when someone dies that I ever made it with. It makes me feel a little dead. Does that make any sense? You’d better turn left at the next light.”

She talks almost all the way to her house on Potrero Hill, and by the time they get there Andrew has heard a lot of crazy stuff. She used to make it with her brother, as she puts it. George. In fact she also has several friends named George. She grew up in Hollywood, and she has reason to believe that George, or someone named George, was or is also making it with her stepmother, or is it her mother? George has this curious quirk: he likes to do it standing up, and really best in a shower.

She is much too crazy; never mind what she does under her arms.

Outside her house, still in the car, he says good night to her. He asks her, “Are you okay now?”

“Yes, but come on in. I’ve got sort of a nice place.”

And so, again, he follows her.

Into a small low house, which, when she switches on a light, appears to be entirely inhabited by ferns and some other indistinguishable fernlike plants. Everywhere rows of small wrinkled or curly leaves, a feathery profusion of fronds. Andrew is somehow touched: how she must care for her plants! (He is later to see her make slow gestures over them, blessing them, saying good night.)

Now she turns to Andrew. Reaching, she takes his face in her small firm hands. She takes his mouth with hers.

“I’m very square; I really like to do it best in bed, do you? Come on, put your clothes over there. Do you want the light off? Take it easy; we have all night, at least, don’t we? You’re not married or shacked up or anything? Do you like me to kiss you there?”

By the time Jill has said all that, they are in bed, and Andrew is discovering the firmness of all that flesh, how smooth she is, and her sweet clean unexpected smell of baby powder.

Propped on an elbow, she later says, “You know, this isn’t a criticism or anything, but when you kiss me here if you’d touch me there at the same time I’d really like it.” Taking his hand, she illustrates, and then she says, “Poor Bill—the guy who committed suicide. I honestly think he hated sex, another person’s body. God knows he liked his own, but he didn’t have the guts to be a fag. Always wanting to be kissed, giving it to me like some kind of prize. An honor. But it really is interesting, isn’t it, the different things different people like to do. I’m absolutely fascinated.”

Andrew sleepily agrees that he is, too. He is glad she could not know how few girls actually, he had any experience of—merely a handful of college affairs, then years of Sally.

“Would you like to do it again? Well, I guess you would. You know, you’re really cool.”

That night, waking in some small hour next to Jill, Andrew experiences a kind of delusion, almost hallucinatory in its intensity—and it is only the first in a series of identical delusions. Simply, he believes that Jill is Sally. He is sufficiently awake to know that this is not true—he knows who Jill is, more or less—but the message that his flesh receives is a message from Sally’s sleeping flesh, dry flesh, so dissimilar to Jill’s. It is almost as though Jill were somehow inhabited by Sally. Or perhaps as though he were.

Then, and relevantly, he remembers that often in dreams he still lives in his parents’ house, the Long Island home of his boyhood; in dreams he spends rainy afternoons on the glassed-in veranda, watching the lashing gray Atlantic. In dreams he still quarrels with his parents, at their formal dinner table.

In the morning he and Jill make love again and then from the bed he watches her beneficent gestures over her ferns, and he feels great tenderness for this fat, improbable, and generous girl.

At breakfast (delicious eggs, tasting mysteriously of curry and onions and cream cheese and sherry) she tells him more of her experiences, all sexual, some fairly bizarre.

Andrew observes his own reactions curiously; this is a conversation that normally he would find unattractive. But he finds this one simply interesting, and often very funny.

Jill’s attitude (he thinks), despite an impressive bulk of experience, is childlike still; she is never worldly or weary about it all. (Only much later does he wonder how much of what she said was true.)

Nor, strangely, does it then occur to Andrew to wonder what she would find to say about him. He is too replete, too proud. He asks, “Can I see you tonight?”

“Oh? Well, sure.”

Partly because he is used to monogamy, Andrew falls into a pattern of seeing Jill every night, or almost every night. They do not see each other on the weekends when he has the boys. If you sleep with someone, you sleep with them every night, he not quite consciously thinks.

He brings food and wine and sometimes flowers—he knows flowers are superfluous in that ferny bower, but he likes to bring flowers to a girl—and together they cook and eat and make love among the ferns, in that small hillside house. A pleasant pattern—it resembles love.