The Early Stories (144 page)

Lynne told him, “I've been so busy getting my father to die I didn't notice which bulbs were on and which were off. I haven't even read a newspaper for days.”

Martin ignored her defense. “Poor Grandpa,” he said, gazing about at the children as if one more parental duty fallen to him was to remind them to mourn.

Hate, pure tonic hatred of this man, filled her and seemed to lift her free; he sensed it, from his end of the table, through the candlelit mist of children, and smiled. He wanted her hate. But it flickered off, like a bad lightbulb. She was not free.

He helped her do the dishes. Living alone, Martin had learned some habits of housework: another new trick. As he moved around her, avoiding touching her, drying each dish with a comical bachelor care, she felt him grow weary; he, too, was mortal. In his weariness, he had slipped from Harriet's orbit back into hers. “Want me to go?” he asked, shyly.

“Sure. Why not? You always do.”

“I thought, Grandpa dead and everything, you might get too depressed alone.”

“Don't you want to go tell Harriet all about the marvellous funeral she missed?”

“No. She doesn't expect it. She said to be nice to you.”

So his offer came from Harriet, not him. He was being given a night out, like the vulgarest of lower-class husbands. And Lynne was herself too weary to fight the gift, to scorn it.

“The children are all here,” she told him. “There's no extra bed. You'll have to sleep with me.”

“It won't kill us,” he said.

“Who's us?” Lynne asked.

Months had passed since she had felt his body next to hers in bed. He had grown thinner, harder, more precisely knit, as if exercised by the distance he strained to keep between them. Perhaps only at first had it been a strain for him. When with a caress she offered to make love, he said, “No. That would be too much.” In her fatigue, she was relieved. Sleep came to her swiftly, even though his presence barred her from the center of the bed, to which she had grown accustomed. In a dream, she was holding her father's hand, and he horrified her by sitting up energetically and beginning to scold, in that sardonic way Lynne felt he had always reserved for her, the oldest; he showed her younger sisters only his softer side. She awoke and found her husband twisting next to her. It did not surprise her that he was there. Surprise came the other nights, when the bed was empty. Martin was up on one elbow, trying to plump his pillow.
“Why,”
he asked, as if they had been talking all along, “have you given the kids all the airfoam pillows and left yourself with these awful old feather things? It's like trying to sleep with your head on a pancake.”

“Can't you go to sleep?”

“Of course not.”

“Have I been asleep?”

“As usual.”

“What do you think's the matter?”

“I don't know. Guilt, I suppose. I feel guilty about Harriet. Sleeping with you.”

“Don't tell me about it. This was your idea, not mine.”

“Also, I feel rotten about Grandpa. He was so
good
. He knew something was wrong, but he couldn't put his finger on it. The way he said ‘allegedly' that time. And that day we took him to the nursing home—the way he accepted me as the boss. So brave and quiet, like a child going off to camp. This big Boston lawyer, who had always looked at me as sort
of a chump, really. I had become the boss. Remember how he kept advising me to watch out for the other cars? He had become—what's the word?—deferential.”

“I know. It was pathetic.”

“He didn't want me to hit another car, though. He wanted good care of himself taken.”

“I know. I loved his will to live. It put me to shame. It puts us all to shame.”

“Why?”

His blunt question startled her: the new Martin. The old one and she had understood each other without trying. She understood him now: he was saying,
Put yourself to shame, put yourself to death, but don't include me: I'm alive. At last
. She tried to explain, “I feel very disconnected these days.”

“Well, I guess you are.”

“Not just from you. Disconnected from everybody. The sermon today, I couldn't cry. It had nothing to do with Daddy, with anybody real. I couldn't keep my eyes off you and the boys. The way the backs of your heads were all the same.”

He twisted noisily, and looped his arm around her waist. Her heart flipped, waiting for his hand to enclose her breast, his old way. It didn't happen. It was as if his arm had been sliced off at the wrist. He said, in a soft, well-meant voice, “I'm sorry. Of course I feel guiltiest about you. Lying here is very conflicting. I felt conflicted all week, you calling me every hour on the hour to say your dear father hadn't kicked the bucket yet.”

“Don't exaggerate. And don't say ‘dear.' ”

“You called a lot, I thought. And it went on and on, he just wouldn't die. What a tough old farmer he turned out to be.”

“Yes.”

“You were in agony. And there I sat in Back Bay, no use at all. I hated myself. I still do.”

His confession, Lynne saw, was an opportunity another woman—Harriet, certainly—would seize. His taut body wanted to make love. But, as had happened so many nights when they were married, by the same mechanism whereby the television news had lulled her, commercials and disasters and weather and sports tumbling on with the world's rotation, so her awareness of Martin's wishing to make love—of male energy alive in the world and sustaining it—put her to sleep, as her father's once sitting by her bedside had.

•  •  •

When Lynne awoke again, he was still fighting with the pillow. By the quality of the moonlight, time had passed, but whether two minutes or an hour she couldn't tell. She knew she had failed once more, but the quality of this, too, was different. It was not so grievous, because everything was steeped and flattened in the moonlight of grief. She asked, “How can you be still awake?”

“This is a very unsuccessful experiment,” he said, with satisfaction, of their sleeping together. “You do something to the bed that makes me nervous. You always did. With Harriet I have no problem. I sleep like a baby.”

“Don't tell me about it.”

“I'm just reporting it as a curious physiological fact.”

“Just relax. Re-lax.”

“I can't. Evidently you can. Your poor father's being dead must be a great relief.”

“Not especially. Lie on your back.”

He obeyed. She put her hand on his penis. It was warm and silky-small and like nothing else, softer than a breast, more fragile than a thumb, yet heavy. Together, after a minute, they realized it was not rising, and would not rise. For Martin, it was a triumph, a proof. “Come on,” he taunted. “Do your worst.”

For Lynne it had been, in his word, an experiment. Among her regrets was one that, having held her dying father's hand so continuously, she had not been holding it at the moment in which he passed from life to death; she had wanted, childishly, to know what it would have felt like. It would have felt like this. “Go to sleep,” someone was pleading, far away. “Let's go to sleep.”

Problems
 

1
. During the night,
A
, though sleeping with
B
, dreams of
C. C
stands at the farthest extremity or (if the image is considered two-dimensionally) the apogee of a curved driveway, perhaps a dream-refraction of the driveway of the house that had once been their shared home. Her figure, though small in the perspective, is vivid, clad in a tomato-red summer dress; her head is thrown back, her hands are on her hips, and her legs have taken a wide, confident stance. She is flaunting herself, perhaps laughing; his impression is of intense female vitality, his emotion is of longing. He awakes troubled. The sleep of
B
beside him is not disturbed; she rests in the certainty that
A
loves her. Indeed, he has left
C
for her, to prove it.

P
ROBLEM:
Which has he more profoundly betrayed,
B
or
C?

2
.
A
lives 7 blocks from the Laundromat he favors. He lives 3.8 miles from his psychiatrist, the average time of transit to whom, in thick afternoon traffic, is 22 minutes. The normal session, with allowances for preand post-therapy small talk, lasts 55 minutes. The normal wash cycle in the type of top-loader the Laundromat favors runs for 33 minutes. The psychiatrist and the Laundromat are in the same outbound direction.

P
ROBLEM:
Can
A
put his laundry in a washer on the way to his psychiatrist and return without finding his wet clothes stolen?

P
ROBLEMS FOR
E
XTRA
C
REDIT:
If the time of the psychiatric appointment is 3 p.m., and a city block is considered to be one-eighth (⅛) of a mile, and if
A
arranges the 2 purgative operations serially, placing the laundry second, and if, further, the drying cycle purchasable for a quarter (25¢) lasts a quarter of an hour (15 minutes) and the average load requires 2 such cycles or else is too damp to be carried home without osmotically
moistening the chest of the carrier, at what time will
A
be able to pour himself a drink? Round to the nearest minute.

Calculate the time for 2 drinks.

Calculate the time for 3, with a wet chest.

3
.
A
has 4 children. Two are in college, 2 attend private school. Annual college expenses amount to $6,300 each, those of private school to $4,700. A's annual income is
n
. Three-sevenths (
³
/
₇
) of
n
are taken by taxes, federal and state. One-third (⅓) goes to
C
, who is having the driveway improved. Total educational expenses are equivalent to five-twenty-firsts (
⁵
/
₂₁
) of
n
. The cost each week of a psychiatric session is $45, of a Laundromat session $1.10. For purposes of computation, consider these
A
's only expenses.

P
ROBLEM:
How long can
A
go on like this? Round to the nearest week.

4
. The price of pea stone is $13 a cubic yard. A truckload consists of 3¼ cubic yards.
C
's driveway is 8′ 6″ wide and describes an ellipse of which the foci are 2 old croquet stakes 31 yards apart. A line perpendicular to a line drawn between the stakes and intersecting this line at midpoint strikes the edge of the driveway in just 9 paces, as paced off by the driveway contractor. He is a big man and wears size 12 shoes. The average desirable depth, he says, of pea stone in a suburban driveway is one and one-half inches (1
½″
). Any more, you get troughing; any less, you don't get that delicious crunching sound, like marbles being swished in a coffee can.

In addition to the ellipse there is a straight spur connecting it to Pleasant Avenue. The length of the spur is to the radius of the ellipse as
is to.