Cully was still smiling. He said, “Did it ever cross your mind that when your brother and your wife left the hospital maybe they fucked before going home? Is that why you left her?”
I laughed like hell, and I knew I'd have to tell them about Artie.
“He’s a very good-looking guy,” I said. “We look alike, but he’s older.” The truth is that I’m a sort of charcoal sketch of my brother, Artie. My mouth is too thick. My eye sockets are too hollow. My nose is too big. And I look too strong, but you should see Artie. I told them that the reason I married Value was that she was the only one of my girlfriends who didn’t fall in love with my brother.
My brother, Artie, is incredibly handsome on a delicate scale. His eyes are like those eyes in the Greek statues. I remember when we both were bachelors how girls used to fall in love with him, cry over him, threaten to kill themselves over him. And how distressed he’d be about that. Because he really didn’t know what the hell it was all about. He could never see his beauty. He was a little self-conscious about being small, and his hands and feet were tiny. “Just like a baby’s,” one girl had said adoringly.
But what distressed Artie was the power he had over them. He finally came to hate it. Ah, how I would have loved it, girls never fell in love with me like that. How I would like it now, that sheer senseless falling in love with externals, the love never earned by qualities of goodness, of character, of intelligence, of wit, of charm, of life- force. In short, how I would like to be loved in a way never earned so that I would never have to keep earning ft or work for it. I love that love the way I love the money I win when I get lucky gambling.
But Artie took to wearing clothes that didn’t fit. He dressed conservatively in a way that didn’t suit his looks. He deliberately tried to hide his charm. He could only relax and be his natural self with people he really cared about arid felt safe with. Otherwise he developed a colorless personality that in an inoffensive way kept everyone at a distance. But even so he kept running into trouble. So he married young and was maybe the only faithful husband in the city of New York.
On his job as a research chemist with the federal Food and Drug Administration his female associates and assistants fell in love with him. His wife’s best friend and her husband won his trust, and they had a great friendship for about five years. Artie let his guard down. He trusted them. He was his natural self. The wife’s best friend fell in love with him and broke up her marriage and announced her love to the world, causing a lot of trouble and suspicion from Artie’s wife. Which was the only time I ever saw him angry with her. And his anger was deadly. She accused him of encouraging the infatuation. He said to her in the coldest tone I ever heard any man use to a woman, “If you believe that, get the hell out of my life.” Which was so unnatural of him that his wife almost had a breakdown from remorse. I really think she hoped he was guilty so she could get a hold over him. Because she was completely in his power.
She knew something about him that I knew and very few other people knew. He could not bear to inflict pain. On anyone or anything. He could never reproach anyone. That’s why he hated women being in love with him. He was, I think, a sensual man, he would have loved a great many women easily and enjoyed it, but he could never have borne the conflicts. In fact, his wife said the one thing she missed in their relationship was that she could use a real fight or two. Not that she never had fights with Artie. They were married after all. But she said that all their fights were one-punch affairs, figuratively, of course. She’d fight and fight and fight, and then he’d wipe her out with one cold remark so devastating she would burst into tears and quit.
But with me he was different; he was older and he treated me as a kid brother. And he knew me, he could read me better than my wife. And he never got angry with me.
It took me two weeks to recover from the operation before I was well enough to go home. On the final day I said goodbye to Dr. Cohn and he wished me luck.
The nurse brought my clothes and told me I’d have to sign some papers before I could leave the hospital. She escorted me to the office. I really felt shitty that nobody had come to take me home. None of my friends. None of my family. Artie. Sure, they didn’t know I was going home alone. I was feeling like a little kid, nobody loved me. Was it right that I had to go home after a serious operation, alone, in the subway? What if I got weak? Or fainted? Jesus, I felt shitty. Then I burst out laughing. Because I was really full of shit.
The truth was that Artie had asked who was taking me home, and I said Valerie. Valerie had said she would come down to the hospital, and I told her it was OK, I would take a cab if Artie couldn’t make it. So she assumed I had told Artie. My friends had, of course, assumed that somebody in my family would take me home. The fact of the matter is that I wanted to hold a grudge in some funny kind of way. Against everybody.
Except that somebody should have known. I’d always prided myself on being self-sufficient. That I never needed anyone to care about me. That I could live completely alone and inside myself. But this was one time that I wanted some excessive sentimentality that the world dishes out in such abundance.
And so when I got back to the ward and found Artie holding my suitcase, I almost burst into tears. My spirits went way up and I gave him a hug, one of the few times I’d ever done that. Then I asked happily, “How the hell did you know I was leaving the hospital today?”
Artie gave me a sad, tired smile. “You shit, I called Valerie. She said she thought I was picking you up, that’s what you told her.”
“I never told her that.” I said.
“Oh, come on,” Artie said. He took my arm, leading the way out of the ward. “I know your style,” he said. “But it’s not fair to people who care about you. What you do is not fair to them.”
I didn’t say anything until we were out of the hospital and in his car. “I told Vallie you might come down,” I said. “I didn’t want hem to bother.”
Artie was driving through traffic now, so he couldn’t look at me. He spoke quietly, reasonably. “You can’t do what you do with Vallie. You can do it with me. But you can’t do it with Vallie.”
He knew me as no one else did. I didn’t have to explain to him how I felt like such a fucking loser. My lack of success as an artist bad done me in, the shame of my failure to take care of my wife and kids had done me in. I couldn’t ask anyone to do anything for me. I literally couldn’t bear to ask anyone to take me home from the hospital. Not even my wife.
When we got home, Vallie was waiting for me. She had a bewildered, scared look on hem face when she kissed me. The three of us had coffee in the kitchen. Vallie sat near me and touched me. “I can’t understand,” she said. “Why couldn’t you tell me?’
“Because he wanted to be a hero,” Artie said. But he said it to throw her off the track. He knew I wouldn’t want her to know how really beat I was mentally. I guess he thought it would be bad for her to know that. And besides, he had faith in me. He knew I’d bounce back. That I’d be OK. Everybody gets a little weak once in a while. What the hell. Even heroes get tired.
After coffee, Artie left. I thanked him and he gave me his sardonic smile, but I could see that he was worried about me. There was, I noticed, a look of strain on his face. Life was beginning to wear him down. When he was out of the house, Vallie made me go to bed and rest. She helped me undress and lay down in bed beside me, naked too.
I fell asleep immediately. I was at peace. The touch of her warm body, her hands that I trusted, her untreacherous mouth and eyes and hair made sleep the sweet sanctuary it could never be with the deep drugs of pharmacology. When I woke up, she was gone. I could hear her voice in the kitchen and the voices of the children home from school. Everything seemed worth it.
Women, for me, were a sanctuary, used selfishly it is true, but making everything else bearable. How could I or any man suffer all the defeats of everyday life without that sanctuary? Jesus, I’d come home hating the day I had just put in on my job, worried to death about the money I owed, sure of my final defeat in life because I would never be a successful writer. And all the pain would vanish because I’d have supper with my family, I’d tell stories to the kids and at night I would make completely confident and trusting love with my wife. And it would seem a miracle. And of course, the real miracle was that it was not just Value and me but countless other millions of men with their wives and children. And for thousands of years. When all that goes, what will hold men together? Never mind that it wasn’t all love and that sometimes it was even pure hatred. I had a history now.
And then it all goes away anyway.
In Vegas I told all this in fragments, sometimes over drinks in the lounge, sometimes at an after-midnight supper in the coffee shop. And when I was finished, Cully said, “We still don’t know why you left your wife.” Jordan
