Man Descending

screen are gambolling around a grey, wrinkled elephant in artificial gaiety, trying to make an audience of children laugh. Cleo is still belting it out on the stereo. I can hardly hear myself think in this bedlam.

“I repeat, I am working on a novel.”

“Misdirected, wasted effort,” she says.

“Take that back!” I shout.

“Misdirected, wasted effort,” she repeats calmly, enunciating each syllable slowly and distinctly.

“This coming from a person who considers running around in thirty-degree weather an activity worthy of a rational being. Talk about misdirected, wasted effort,” I say acidly.

“You just aren’t capable of understanding, are you, Ed?” Victoria coolly asks. She begins to lecture in her professional voice. Victoria is a social worker and doesn’t often forget it. “You won’t allow yourself to understand because you intuitively sense that what’s behind it all is self-discipline. And self-discipline is something you don’t have and never will have.”

“Judge not lest you be judged.”

“To hell with you, Ed. You wrecked our marriage. I kept giving and giving -”

“To anyone who asked,” I interrupt.

“No, to you. And you kept taking and taking. Well, I’m through giving, and I’m through holding my breath watching you drift, hoping something will happen and that you’ll take your life in hand.” She pauses and says somewhat sadly, “You’re just like one of those goddamn jellyfish, Ed. You just drift along with the tide and when anyone gets within range of your tentacles you sting them. All you know how to do is float and sting.”

“Old Ed and the great Muhammad Ali,” I say sarcastically, miffed by this unflattering comparison, “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”

“I rest my case.”

I walk to the window and look out at the patchwork of roofs. I am near the end of my tether but I won’t let go. “I don’t like the way I’m living now,” I manage to say in a voice that is all counterfeit normalcy. “I want us to live together again. I don’t sleep very well. I’ve gained twenty-three pounds.”

“Ed,” says Victoria, not unkindly, “I’m sorry. But I do sleep well. I’ve lost five pounds. I can make friends without worrying about what you will eventually do or say to them. I haven’t gone to pieces and I won’t go to pieces. You look after yourself now. I’m through begging you to watch your weight and be nice to people. You can eat fudgy-wudgies until you can’t get through the door. You can insult nuns on the street for all I care. Do what you wish. But I’m not going to be there typing your resumes or pressing your suits so that you appear presentable at interviews for jobs you don’t make the slightest effort to land. You’re a big boy, Ed. Sink or swim. I always believed you could make something of yourself. I’m not so sure any more. I don’t think you have the guts it takes.”

Her tone is not really callous but I am alarmed. Things have come to a dreadful pass. How my wife has changed! And I am in part responsible for what she has become. I feel a great sadness. How I have disappointed her. I remember how, when first married, we lay in one another’s arms and talked about what the rest of our life would be. Sun, shellfish and wine in Spain. The click-clack of my typewriter as I wrote the Big Novel. The click of her camera shutter as she photographed the sober, dignified peasant faces of Spain.

My throat hurts terribly. Something, maybe my heart, is swelling ominously in my chest.

“Where’s the bathroom?” I ask abruptly, afraid that I might shame myself by beginning to sob in her bright, modern and airy living-room.

Victoria directs me.

I discover she has turned the bathroom into a hothouse, surrendering to the female impulse to demurely disguise its basic function. The place is a veritable hanging garden of Babylon. Potted plants suspended from the ceiling, potted plants on the toilet tank, potted plants on the vanity. All are signs that the ancien regime is eclipsed. I would never have tolerated any of this had I been resident.

My hairy face stares palely and uneasily back at me from the mirror. This tropical atmosphere, this humidity, this rank foliage, awaken in me some primal jungle fear. I am overcome with stark anxiety; I feel watched and hunted. It is all I can do to prevent myself from casting about in search of two yellow cat-eyes blazing behind a fern frond, or prevent myself from surveying the floor for sign of fresh leopard scat.

I run some cold water into the basin and splash my face. Momentarily and profusely I give way to tears. In a moment it is finished. Perhaps I am more aggrieved than sad. Certainly I am troubled and uneasy. My wife is no longer the woman I had remembered. Or perhaps more correctly, living in isolation from me has made her more of what she was. Independent, collected, realistic.

A person could give way to paranoia. The two people with whom I once lived, Benny and Victoria, are in league against me. I feel betrayed by the fact that they have changed while I remain faithful to the past and old loyalties. Benny is not the person I once knew, and neither, apparently, is Victoria. They have entered the long, dark tunnel of personal histories from which I am excluded. I feel left behind. A man standing on a tarmac watching my holiday plane lifting off for a brighter, sunnier, more welcoming place.

And because these people change, because they are in a state of flux, they seem unreal to me. Sam Waters is much more real. I put my faith in him. I think of his example before I go to sleep and when I wake.

Sam Waters made his appearance in that sad time after the failure of the second Big Book, and like Pallas Athene springing fully armed from the forehead of Zeus, he arrived on the scene unaccompanied by the normal pangs of artistic birth. Perhaps it was automatic handwriting. Or, put more poetically, the Muse in her beneficence gave me a sentence. In any case, I don’t know where it came from. There I was, sitting at my kitchen table on a bleak, lonely Sunday afternoon, doodling dispiritedly – mostly hanged men – when I heard this sentence. Actually heard it.

“Sam Waters had been a plainsman, a buffalo-hunter, a wind-drinker, a free man before he became the sheriff of Constitution.”

I wrote that down and looked at it very hard. There it was. Yes, I said, nodding to myself, sure he had. And?

“And because of the long vistas he had looked steadily into and the clean rain he had tasted, he didn’t care much for towns. Sam Waters was too big a man to feel easy in towns. They made him feel pinched and cramped and restless. And worst thing about them was that their smells made it difficult for him to breathe, and no town smelled worse than Constitution, because Constitution stank with the worst smell of all – hypocrisy.”

I edged forward in my chair and began to scribble in a white heat of composition. No more Flaubertian search for the bon mot. It flew fast and furiously. I was tapping some strange vein in my psyche, and pressing on for the mother lode.

“The good, honest citizens of Constitution had wanted Sam Waters as sheriff because of his hard fists and big heart and quick draw. They wanted a man tough enough to have undergone the Blackfoot manhood trial, twirling crazily around a lodge pole suspended on bones skewering the muscles of his chest, arms and legs. They wanted a man wily and cunning enough to have stolen ponies from the best horse thieves of all the Plains Indian tribes, the Pawnee. And they wanted a man cool enough to have faced down Doc Holliday in Abilene, relying only on a poker face and a Colt Peacemaker with six empty chambers to make a coldblooded killer who was wasting away with consumption and so didn’t have much to lose anyway, quail when he looked into a certain pair of cold, blue eyes.

“Such a man, the good, honest citizens of Constitution felt, would be a match for the whiskey-crazed Texan drovers who tore apart Constitution each year when they reached the railhead with their herds and tried to forget all the hard miles with rotgut, Madame Louise’s fancy ladies and general, unbuttoned hell-raising.

“But at the moment the people of Constitution looked on their sheriff as a liability and a danger. Men stepped aside and looked at the toes of their boots when they met him making his rounds, and women pursed their lips in disapproval when he touched the brim of his Stetson to them. They didn’t want anything to do with him ever since that fateful day when he had eliminated three perils to public safety and content in the space of six short hours.

“They had applauded the first. On a hot August afternoon, while everyone watched from the safety of their homes and stores, Sam Waters had stepped into the dust of mainstreet toting his Sharps breechloader and drilled a slavering, rabid dog who had lurched toward him, jaws snapping. That had made him a hero. The Mayor had insisted on having his picture taken shaking Sam’s hand beside the carcass of the poor dead brute.