reconstruct and resurrect us all, every human being who had ever lived, me and a medieval stableboy and a Neandert(h)al aurochs-hunter along with all of Gloria’s ancestors and the millions of Chinese civilians killed in the recent lamentable Sino-American Conflict. It seemed an unlikely thesis, though one partially anticipated by St. Paul, and no doubt rigorous in its physics.
The intruder would have left traces, also, on Deirdre’s nervous system, while I was clumsily courting ecstasy on the ski slopes. Going downstairs, I saw the carpeted steps as neatly aligned moguls, and imagined myself dancing, knees pressed together, from one side to the other, swerving around the newel posts on the landing. As I dutifully consumed my zapped ravioli, along with some tired broccoli whose browner florets I had cut away before tucking the stalks into the microwave dish, she hovered over me uncharacteristically. She was making an effort to be agreeable, though her conversational responses were sluggish, like those of a computer whose memory is loaded to capacity. No doubt about it, she was getting more input than mine. “God,” I said, rummaging in the chaotic fridge for something else half rotten to warm up, “it feels good to have had some exercise for a change! We should do more physical stuff, now that spring’s in the air. How’s your sex life?”
This startled her. “You should know,” she said at last. “The same as yours.”
“Is it? When did we last make love?” I asked.
She had the answer, dopey as she seemed. “Eight days ago. Last Tuesday, after you got turned on by the new talking head on Channel Seven.”
A crisp blonde woman with a glassy square cleft chin she tips up toward the camera as she reads the TelePrompTer through the lens. She has thin, darkly painted long lips that she rarely smiles with, except at the end, when she releases a wide satisfied smile that says it all. She is so cool and refined that she never banters with the weatherman or the oaf who does sports. “What a terrific talking cunt she is,” I agreed. “What’s on your schedule tonight?”
“Nothing.” But she dragged the word out, teasing.
“Want to go to bed early? I mean, right after the news, before the skiing catches up to me and I start snoring.”
“Su-ure,” Deirdre said, “if you want to. I was going to wash my hair.”
“Wash it afterwards. Let me mess it up first.”
“Mess it up how?” Thinking perhaps of some perverse trick she had once turned. She was taut, like the bed she had made for a second time today.
“Oh,” I said, reluctant to give her any satisfaction, “I don’t know how. I don’t want to feel inhibited, though, like your hair is offbounds. Wasn’t there some frozen yogurt? Peach was the flavor-I can
“Who ate what?”
“The peach yogurt, you dope.” She was reminding me annoyingly of herself the night she peed in the bed and refused to become aware of it. “It’s gone. Let’s unfreeze the lemon cake for tomorrow night. Let’s get into bed first and think of a way we can mess up your hair.”
“I don’t like your tone,” Deirdre said.
“I don’t like yours, either.”
“You seem hyper.”
“You seem like you’ve snorted or swallowed or mainlined something and have something to hide.”
“I’ll be fucked if FU fuck you in this nasty mood you’re in, just because you say to.”
“Some mysterious body has eaten all my peach frozen yogurt. Who the hell are you not to fuck me when I’m begging like this, when I pay all the damn bills?”
“I’m your wife, I guess you could say.”
“I liked you better when you were a whore, frankly.”
“Of course you did. Men do. Like whores better than wives.”
“You were purer then.”
“A man would think so.”
“You used to auction yourself off, piece by piece.”
“O.K., you bastard. A million welders, to come all over my hair.”
“I don’t have a million welders.”
“Yes you do. I’ve seen the statements.”
“Only a fraction of those assets are liquid, Miss Nosy. Let’s say two million, if you tell me what you were really doing all day.”
“I was doing housework and feeling fond of you, if you must know. I was thinking how much I wanted to go to bed with you when you got back from skiing with those jerks. I swept and cleaned the whole upstairs, and picked up winter sticks and stuff outside on the lawn.” Tears, confounding me, had appeared like rheum on her lower lids, shellacking brighter the brown of her eyes. We are each a slimy apparatus of interacting liquids. Our olfactory cells are open nerve ends embedded in a thin mucus that dissolves the volatile molecules we scent. “There were these little puddles,” she went on, her voice trembling, “of little turds everywhere.”
“Deer scat,” I said, abandoning my hopes of peach frozen yogurt and giving Deirdre a timid, paternal hug. “Let’s not go to bed,” I said. “We’re both in lousy moods. Let’s see what’s on TV.”
“Yeah, that blonde bitch you have the hots for.” She added, perversely aroused now, “Ben, I’ll be a whore if that’s what you want. Let’s think of some fun way to get you off.”
“Maybe while we’re watching,” I deferentially suggested, “that bitch on TV.”
Canada geese honking overhead are so common I don’t even look up. Two visited the pond down by the mailbox, now that the ice is off some of its surface. It melts from the edges in. The geese, with their haughty black faces and pearly gray bodies, are intruding upon a pair of mallards who have been in the pond since black water opened at the reedy edges and where the flow in and out is swiftest. I stood by the mailbox watching the ducks one day; my watching alarmed them, and the little brown female tried to paddle away and ran into slush. The drake with his sumptuous green head followed, and so she found herself performing as an ice-breaker, paddling her way through the slush, beating her wings to give herself extra thrust as the ice thickened. Her struggles carved a sinuous trail-the handsome drake serenely floating in her wake-before cutting back to some open water farther from the threat that my silent presence posed.
Odd, how perfectly both duck and drake seemed to agree that the task was hers. The female of the species takes on the serious business, while the male wears the plumage.
I visited little Keith and Jennifer yesterday, in the mint-green Lynnfield ranch house occupied by my youngest child, Roberta, and her contractor husband, Tony O’Brien. Jenny is six months old, her big silky cubical head adorned now by a coating of fine fuzz that stands up with a comical erectitude, as if suffused with static electricity. As I spooned in pureed carrots, her splay-fingered, transparently nailed hands, agitated by the strangeness of this craggy old man feeding her, would wander into her mouth with the food and thus make along with the silver feeding spoon a confusion of substances and purposes. Her tiny blue fist captured and squeezed an orange blob, and then sleepily rubbed it across a gossamer eyebrow.
From my own infancy on, I have ascribed to things-toys, tools-a hostile intent, bent on opposing and frustrating me. An only child, I selfishly think of the universe as a big antagonistic sibling. Despite my gaffe of speaking to Jennifer as if she were a typically obstructive adult, I was allowed to give her the bottle, warmed in the microwave exactly one minute; Perdita and I had had to heat bottles in water simmering on the stove and then test them on the inside of our wrists, with a little kiss of blood-warm milk my veins have not forgotten. A cosmic calm descended, of food and appetite colliding. This was as close as I would ever come to having breasts. When I experimentally tugged at the bottle, I was astonished by the force with which Jennifer’s little mouth held it fast-again, serious business.
A defect in me, I fear, if not all male animals, is an inability to take serious business quite seriously. Feeding, fornicating, sleeping, dying-surely all a touch undignified and absurd. I used to marvel at the intensity with which Gloria would protest when I, at the wheel of one of our cars, would seem to her to be too close to another car, to be in the wrong lane, to be risking a slip on a patch of ice, or-and here I may have been guilty of teasing-to be
