I rinse my mouth. Then I spot my full, white Fu Manchu and begin scraping. “Well, dear, it’s like this,” I say. “You know how I sweat. And I do get nervous about these little affairs. So I cut the time a little fine. I admit that. But one doesn’t want to appear at these affairs too damp. I like to think that my deodorant’s power is peaking at my entrance. I’m sure you see -”
“Shut up and get out of there,” Victoria says tiredly.
A last cursory inspection of the bathroom and I spring open the door and present my wife with my best I’m-a- harmless-idiot-don’t-hit-me smile. Since I’ve been unemployed I practise my smiles in the mirror whenever time hangs heavy on my hands. I have one for every occasion. This particular one is a faithful reproduction, Art imitating Life. The other day, while out taking a walk, I saw a large black Labrador taking a crap on somebody’s doorstep. We established instant rapport. He grinned hugely at me while his body trembled with exertion. His smile was a perfect blend of physical relief, mischievousness, and apology for his indiscretion. A perfectly suitable smile for my present situation.
“Squeaky, pretty-pink clean,” I announce to my wife.
“Being married to an adolescent is a bore,” Victoria says, pushing past me into the bathroom. “Make me a drink. I need it.”
I hurry to comply and return in time to see my wife lowering her delightful bottom into a tub of scalding hot, soapy water and ascending wreaths of steam. She lies back and her breasts flatten; she toys with the tap with delicate ivory toes.
“Christ,” she murmurs, stunned by the heat.
I sit down on the toilet seat and fondle my drink, rotating the transparent cylinder and its amber contents in my hand. Then I abruptly hand Victoria her glass and as an opening gambit ask, “How’s Howard?”
My wife does not flinch, but only sighs luxuriantly, steeping herself in the rich heat. I interpret this as hardness of heart. I read in her face the lineaments of a practised and practising adulteress. For some time now I’ve suspected that Howard, a grave and unctuously dignified psychologist who works for the provincial Department of Social Services, is her lover. My wife has taken to working late and several times when I have phoned her office, disguising my voice and playing the irate beneficiary of the government’s largesse, Howard has answered. When we meet socially, Howard treats me with the barely concealed contempt that is due an unsuspecting cuckold.
“Howard? Oh, he’s fine,” Victoria answers blandly, sipping at her drink. Her body seems to elongate under the water, and for a moment I feel justified in describing her as statuesque.
“I like Howard,” I say. “We should have him over for dinner some evening.”
My wife laughs. “Howard doesn’t like you,” she says.
“Oh?” I feign surprise. “Why?”
“You know why. Because you’re always pestering him to diagnose you. He’s not stupid, you know. He knows you’re laughing up your sleeve at him. You’re transparent, Ed. When you don’t like someone you belittle their work. I’ve seen you do it a thousand times.”
“I refuse,” I say, “to respond to innuendo.”
This conversation troubles my wife. She begins to splash around in the tub. She cannot go too far in her defence of Howard.
“He’s not a bad sort,” she says. “A little stuffy, I grant you, but sometimes stuffiness is preferable to complete irresponsibility. You, on the other hand, seem to have the greatest contempt for anyone whose behaviour even remotely approaches sanity.”
I know my wife is now angling the conversation toward the question of employment. There are two avenues open for examination. She may concentrate on the past, studded as it is with a series of unmitigated disasters, or on the future. On the whole I feel the past is safer ground, at least from my point of view. She knows that I lied about why I was fired from my last job, and six months later still hasn’t got the truth out of me.
Actually, I was shown the door because of “habitual unco-operativeness.” I was employed in an adult extension program. For the life of me I couldn’t master the terminology, and this created a rather unfavourable impression. All that talk about “terminal learners,” “life skills,” etc., completely unnerved me. Whenever I was sure I understood what a word meant, someone decided it had become charged with nasty connotations and invented a new “value- free term.” The place was a goddamn madhouse and I acted accordingly.
I have to admit, though, that there was one thing I liked about the job. That was answering the phone whenever the office was deserted, which it frequently was since everyone was always running out into the community “identifying needs.” I greeted every caller with a breezy “College of Knowledge, Mr. Know-It-All here!” Rather juvenile, I admit, but very satisfying. And I was rather sorry I got the boot before I got to meet a real, live, flesh-and-blood terminal learner. Evidently there were thousands of them out in the community and they were a bad thing. At one meeting in which we were trying to decide what should be done about them, I suggested, using a bit of Pentagon jargon I had picked up on the late-night news, that if we ever laid hands on any of them or their ilk, we should have them “terminated with extreme prejudice.”
“By the way,” my wife asks nonchalantly, “were you out looking today?”
“Harry Wells called,” I lie. “He thinks he might have something for me in a couple of months.”
My wife stirs uneasily in the tub and creates little swells that radiate from her body like a disquieting aura.
“That’s funny,” she says tartly. “I called Harry today about finding work for you. He didn’t foresee anything in the future.”
“He must have meant the immediate future.”
“He didn’t mention talking to you.”
“That’s funny.”
Victoria suddenly stands up. Venus rising from the bath. Captive water sluices between her breasts, slides down her thighs.
“Damn it, Ed! When are you going to begin to tell the truth? I’m sick of all this.” She fumbles blindly for a towel as her eyes pin me. “Just remember,” she adds, “behave yourself tonight. Lay off my friends.”
I am rendered speechless by her fiery beauty, by this many-times-thwarted love that twists and turns in search of a worthy object. Meekly, I promise.
I drive to the party, my headlights rending the veil of thickly falling, shimmering snow. The city crews have not yet removed the Christmas decorations; strings of lights garland the street lamps, and rosy Santa Clauses salute with good cheer our wintry silence. My wife’s stubborn profile makes her disappointment in me palpable. She does not understand that I am a man descending. I can’t blame her because it took me years to realize that fact myself.
Revelation comes in so many guises. A couple of years ago I was paging through one of those gossipy newspapers that fill the news racks at supermarkets. They are designed to shock and titillate, but occasionally they run a factual space-filler. One of these was certainly designed to assure mothers that precocious children were no blessing, and since most women are the mothers of very ordinary children, it was a bit of comfort among gloomy predictions about San Francisco toppling into the sea or Martians making off with tots from parked baby carriages.
It seems that in eighteenth-century Germany there was an infant prodigy. At nine months he was constructing intelligible sentences; at a year and a half he was reading the Bible; at three he was teaching himself Greek and Latin. At four he was dead, likely crushed to death by expectations that he was destined to bear headier and more manifold fruits in the future.
This little news item terrified me. I admit it. It was not because this child’s brief passage was in any way extraordinary. On the contrary, it was because it followed such a familiar pattern, a pattern I hadn’t until then realized existed. Well, that’s not entirely true. I had sensed the pattern. I knew it was there, but I hadn’t really
His life, like every other life, could be graphed: an ascent that rises to a peak, pauses at a particular node, and then descends. Only the gradient changes in any particular case: this child’s was steeper than most, his descent swifter. We all ripen. We are all bound by the same ineluctable law, the same mathematical certainty.
I was twenty-five then; I could put this out of my mind. I am thirty now, still young I admit, but I sense my feet are on the down slope. I know now that I have begun the inevitable descent, the leisurely glissade which will finally topple me at the bottom of my own graph. A man descending is propelled by inertia; the only initiative left him is whether or not he decides to enjoy the passing scene.
Now, my wife is a hopeful woman. She looks forward to the future, but the same impulse that makes me lock
