Roger's Version (37 page)

I prayed the girl wouldn’t accept; the sordidness of this evening was sinking in, and her noisy grief and confused self-defense reminded me of why I, too, had been glad to leave Cleveland: these heartland people have such an inexhaustible, tiresome gift for
self
—self-defense, -deception, -dramatization. Self-examination and moral acrobatics all day long; every bedroom, every breakfast nook an apologetical forum haunted by the hand-wringing ghosts of Biblical prototypes, hairy-nostrilled old Jews that would never be admitted to the country club but that enter into every event from mortgages to masturbation. Our Puritan heritage. How did those old Israelites get their hooks into us so deeply, sticking us with their frightful black Bible and its imprecations while their modern descendants treat the matter as a family joke, filling their own lives with violin music and clear-eyed, Godless science?
L’Chaim!
Compared with the Jews we Protestants do indeed dwell in the valley of death.

Verna’s voice in the shadows of the Audi was so quiet I could hardly hear it above the muffled explosions of the idling engine. “No, I don’t want to do that, Nunc. But couldn’t you come up for a minute?”

Streetlight fell on the edge of her ragged cloud of hair, but her face was a featureless oval from which this husky small voice emerged as if from a gray hole. “Please. I can’t stand to
be alone with myself just yet. I feel lousy and scared. I know I’ve been a pretty crummy human being.”

A musty warm attic smell had come into the car, from the heater. The clock on the dashboard said twelve-eighteen.
Pretty late, to be out on a playground
. The hospital visit had taken only two hours; it could just as well have taken three. The sly hand of Providence pulled a card from its sleeve: under the streetlight just ahead a car was pulling out, leaving a free space. I asked Verna, with an edge of scolding, “Why would my coming up make you feel less crummy?” I spoke as if to one more poor or failing student who has used up her hour yet still clings to the professor’s presence in the vain hope that this proximity may magically achieve what in fact can only be done alone, in work and study.

Her voice had shifted; hysteria had evaporated and a soft deadness, a knowing calm, had drifted in. She had become the teacher. As if we had entered some scalded and parched terrain where only she knew how to live. “I think you want to come up,” she said, almost singsong. “It might make you feel less crummy, too, and that might help me.”

“Who says I feel crummy?”

“Everybody can see it. Look at your frowny face sometimes, Nunc. Those eyebrows. The way you look at your own hands all the time. Come on up.” Her voice had gained authority. “Give something to somebody for a change.”

Her voice and not my hands and feet seemed to glide the automobile forward into the space of asphalt beneath the streetlight; the space was so long I did not even have to back in.

The project felt deserted; the human presence on Earth was reduced to vestiges: burning light bulbs, old graffiti, use-worn stair treads. In the apartment, Paula’s strange absence greeted us; that the child was not there, asleep behind the maroon curtain, could be tasted in the air of the place, its familiar
peanut-husk scent as still as pondwater where the silt has settled.

Ignoring me, her shoulders hunched in elderly, plodding fashion, Verna punched through the curtain and disappeared. I could hear her open faucets, close a door, sniff, cough, begin again—a suppressed and furtive noise, like that of her retching earlier—to cry. I stood in her living room looking toward the tall crystalline center of the city, marvelling at how many of the skyscraper windows were lit. The waste. I felt numb, my body swollen by blows it had forgotten receiving.

“Nunc?” her snuffly voice called. “Aren’t you coming in?”

“I thought you might be coming out,” I said, and carefully sidestepped through the curtain.

This room had only one window, over in the kitchen area, beyond the black edges of a cabinet and small fridge, and my eyes took some seconds to adjust and find her. She was on the floor, in her bed, her futon. All but her wide pale face was beneath the covers: a child waiting to be tucked in with a kiss and prayers. I had to squat to her; both my knees loudly cracked.

“Aren’t you going to take off some clothes?”

“Oh, I don’t think so, surely,” I said. “I must be getting back almost immediately.” As my pupils expanded, I could make out a shine on her face, more tears or the dampness of a washcloth. The musty smell was strongest here, and comforting. Perhaps it was something the futon was stuffed with.

“I wish you’d just stretch out and hold me a minute,” she said.

“It would muss my shirt and trousers,” I said. The words as I pronounced them had the firmness of a slightly doubtful fact in a lecture (
e.g.
, Pelagius was born in Scotland).

“That’s why you should take them off.”

What she said made sense. I obeyed, as far as my underclothes
and socks, and lay down on top of the covers and put an arm around her blanketed, shapeless bulk. Like me, she felt swollen. Her breath, so close to my face, had the innocence of mint, a whiff of antiseptic mouthwash. I remembered hearing her spit catlike as in the other room I watched an airplane descend like a gently dislodged star. I could see the white of her eyes as she stared at the ceiling. After a minute of our lying still she asked, “How shitty a person do I seem to you?”

“Not at all,” I lied. “Just a little, ah, in over your head. I think the way people were designed originally the tribe used to raise the children, once the young mother had them. There was an overall program and everybody shared it. Now there is no tribe. There is no overall program. It’s hard.”

“Yeah, but other people don’t make a mess like I just did.”

“Who’s to say,” I asked her, “what’s a mess? When I left my first wife for Esther, it looked like a mess but it was really very clarifying. In God’s eyes”—I corrected myself—“according to the Bible, what looks like a mess may be just right, really, and people that look very fine and smooth and shiny from the outside are really the lost ones.”
A stool may be high enough and the longest ladder too short
.

“I like it,” she said, “when you talk about God.”

“I gave it up years ago.”

“Because of Esther?”

“She was an effect, not a cause.”

“You sound very natural when you talk about these crazy things.”

“I was much admired, actually, in my pulpit days. Raise the doubts, then do the reassurances. People have no idea what they’re hearing, they just want a certain kind of verbal music. The major, the minor, and back to the major, then Bless you and keep you, and out the door to the luncheon party.”

She shut her eyes; her curved eye-whites were eclipsed. “Sounds nice.”

I changed the subject. “I’m sorry you don’t like Esther.”

“No you’re not” was the flat answer.

I changed it again. “It’s getting cold out here in my underwear.”

“You’re cute, Nunc. Come under the covers.”

“No, I think you’ve cock-teased enough now and I should be heading home.”

“You think I cock-tease?” The idea seemed to awaken her, to sparkle on the surface of her numbness. “Maybe you pussy-tease. Take off those funny boxer things and fuck me.”

“I’m scared,” I said.

“What of, baby?”

“Of getting VD. There seem so many new kinds, since I was a boy.”

“Boy, you just ain’t kidding. Do you think AIDS is going to gobble us all up? I do.”

“Well, if not it, something else.”

“If that’s really the hang-up, I could just blow you.”

It had once enchanted me to discover, in my sneakered seminary days, when Latin and Greek were fresh springs in my desert of ignorance, that, far from its taboo meaning’s being derived from any inexact and displeasing analogy with wind instruments, “blow” is etymologically kin to the Latin
flāre
and the Greek
. Verna’s plump and naked arms had snaked out from beneath the covers and she was pulling at my maligned undershorts, trying in clumsy sorrowful fashion to undress me, while her uncovered breasts slewed about on her chest. At her attack, the delicious flutter of ambiguity beat its wings, necessarily two, through all my suddenly feminized being. Not either/or but both/and lies at the heart of the cosmos. “This isn’t right,” I ventured, limp in some parts, stiff in others.

“Nunc, it’s no big deal,” my childish seductress reassured me. “I mean for me; it is for you. You wanted to fuck my mom all those years. Fuck me instead. I’m a better piece of ass, honest.”

“How do you know?”

“It goes with the times. Screwing has made real progress. Come on. Let me do something nice for somebody today; otherwise my self-image will be totally crappy.”

“But,” I said sharply, and her busy hands stopped tugging at my old body. “I’d like you to want it, too.”

Her face was again the featureless blur of luminous shadow it had been in the car. “Yeah, I do,” she whispered. I wondered if I had wrung this from her oppressively but then, the universe being so patently imperfect on many other counts, overrode the scruple.

What followed is less distinct in my refractory mind than my flexible wife’s many pictured infidelities with Dale. In the dark warmed space beneath the covers, the musty aroma of childhood poker beneath the attic eaves became abruptly powerful, resurging from the past; or was it in fact the futon’s stuffing, or my fifty-three-year-old flesh in a sweat of deferred pleasure? Verna’s nakedness was smooth and ample. There is lodged in my obstructed memory a sensation of billowing, of an elaborate fatty unscrolling, of something like a folded, watermarked letter fitting nicely into its creamy, lined, and well-licked envelope, though her cunt (if I may risk offending modesty in my desire to speak the truth) proved youthfully tight and resistantly dry, as if her compliance were absent-minded and her invitation had been somewhat formal. At the moment of entry I was reminded of the sensation of that plastic vagina into which, a lifetime ago, I had ejaculated (with a boost from
Hot Pants Schoolmarm
) so that my and Lillian’s joint barrenness might be analyzed into its lonely components.

When I was spent and my niece released, we lay together
on a hard floor of the spirit, partners in incest, adultery, and child abuse. We wanted to be rid of each other, to destroy the evidence, yet perversely clung, lovers, miles below the ceiling, our comfort being that we had no further to fall. Lying there with Verna, gazing upward, I saw how much majesty resides in our continuing to love and honor God even as He inflicts blows upon us—as much as resides in the silence He maintains so that we may enjoy and explore our human freedom. This was
my
proof of His existence, I saw—the distance to the impalpable ceiling, the immense distance measuring our abasement. So great a fall proves great heights. Sweet certainty invaded me. “Bless you” was all I could say.

“You’re quite a horny old fart, it turns out,” was her compliment in return.

“How’s your self-image?”

“Better.”

“Think you can sleep now?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m beat.”

As I struggled up from the floor and into my clothes, her infantile lassitude and passivity annoyed me. “Shouldn’t you be doing something about not making yet another baby? Take a douche or put in some spermicide or something?”

“Relax, Nunc. I just had my period a couple days ago. Anyways I could always get another abortion now that you’ve showed me how.”

I saw that she was teasing me with the possibility of her pregnancy and supposed that she had the right. I let myself out. The hall shocked me by being lit, as if its glaring vacuity, lined with shut doors, had been all this time eavesdropping.

Sex surprises us with how little time it actually takes. My Omega’s hands were splayed at the apogee of the dial face: five of one. I danced, considerably lightened, down the vibrating project stairs and into the Audi, its gray paint sucked empty of
color by the sulphurous streetlamp overhead. I got in and drove away. Sumner Boulevard at that hour, though not totally devoid of people—isolated hunters, poised in the doorways and spindly as Giacomettis—or of automobiles, had a rolling empty splendor and seemed wide as a noontide wheatfield. The stoplights had automatically shifted to the blink mode. A drunk hailed me as if I were a cab, and some Scarlatti, played with authentic period instruments, came on, daintily tintinnabulating, the university radio station. Music as I prefer it: on the verge of the inaudible. Go, Scarlatti, go! Keep telling it to those angels! Any Wagner or Brahms, and reality might have crushed me.

The two phosphorescent hands of my Omega had merged—five after one—as I pattered up my porch steps to face Esther. She was still up, as I had foreseen; her face looked puffy, and her wondering green eyes hyperthyroid. Her unruly hair was strangely neat, as if let down and then repinned.

“I was getting terribly worried,” she said, and I realized that though my presence gave her no pleasure my absence gave her pain. I recounted the evening accurately, allowing thirty-five undescribed minutes to be absorbed by the hospital’s white spaces and tranced procedures.