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A year ago, over lunch, Gary had told her about a married "friend" of his (actually a colleague, Jay Pascoe) who was having an affair with his daughters' piano teacher. Gary said that he could understand his friend's recreational interest in the affair (Pascoe had no intention of leaving his wife) but that he didn't see why the piano teacher was bothering.
"So you can't imagine," Denise said, "why a woman would want to have an affair with you?"
"I'm not talking about me," Gary said.
"But you're married and you have kids."
"I'm saying I don't understand what the woman sees in a guy she knows to be a liar and a sneak."
"Probably she disapproves of liars and sneaks in general," Denise said. "But she makes an exception for the guy she's in love with."
"So it's a kind of self-deception."
"No, Gary, it's the way love works."
Gary knew that he'd broken the sibling code of honor. But he was glad he'd broken it. He was glad Denise was taking heat again from Enid. He felt surrounded, imprisoned, by disapproving women.
There was, of course, one obvious way of breaking free: he could say yes instead of no to one of the dozen secretaries and female pedestrians and sales clerks who in any given week took note of his height and his schist- gray hair, his calfskin jacket and his French mountaineering pants, and looked him in the eye as if to say The key's under the doormat. But there was still no pussy on earth he'd rather lick, no hair he'd rather gather in his fist like a golden silk bellpull, no gaze with which he'd rather lock his own at climax, than Caroline's. The only guaranteed result of having an affair would be to add yet another disapproving woman to his life.
the penultimate line is annoying but the last one does make me chuckle a bit
Depressed? He was not depressed. Vital signs of the rambunctious American economy streamed numerically across his many-windowed television screen. Orfic Midland up a point and three-eighths for the day. The U. S. dollar laughing at the euro, buggering the yen. Virginia Lin dropped in and proposed selling a block of Exxon at 104. Gary could see out across the river to the floodplain landscape of Camden, New Jersey, whose deep ruination, from this height and distance, gave the impression of a kitchen floor with the linoleum scraped off. The sun was"rroud in the south, a source of relief; Gary couldn't stand it when his parents came east and the eastern seaboard's weather stank. The same sun was shining on their cruise ship now, somewhere north of Maine. In a corner of his TV screen was the talking head of Curly Eberle. Gary upsized the picture and raised the sound as Eberle concluded: "A body-building machine for the brain, that's not a bad image, Cindy." The all-business-all-the-time anchors, for whom financial risk was merely the boon companion of upside potential, nodded sagely in response. "Body-building machine for the brain, ho-kay," the female anchor segued, "and coming up, then, a toy that's all the rage in Belgium (!) and its maker says this product could be bigger than the Beanie Babies!" Jay Pascoe dropped in to kvetch about the bond market. Jay's little girls had a new piano teacher now and the same old mother. Gary caught about one word of every three Jay spoke. His nerves were jangling as on the long-ago afternoon before his fifth date with Caroline, when they were so ready to finally be unchaste that each intervening hour was like a granite block to be broken by a shackled prisoner ...
lol
Caroline didn't look up when he returned to the kitchen. He might have wondered if he'd hallucinated her panicked calls to him if there were not a lingering humidity in his boxer shorts and if, during his thirty seconds in the basement, she hadn't thrown the dead bolt on the back door, engaged the chain, and reset the alarm.
He, of course, was mentally ill, whereas she! She!
"Good Christ," he said as he punched their wedding date into the numeric keypad.
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He needed to sleep well tonight for at least six hours. To accomplish this, he planned to drink two vodka martinis and hit the sack before ten. He upended the vodka bottle over a shaker of ice and brazenly let it glug and glug, because he, a veep at CenTrust, had nothing to be ashamed of in relaxing after a hard day's work. He started a mesquite fire and drank the martini down. Like a thrown coin in a wide, teetering orbit of decay, he circled back into the kitchen and managed to get the meat ready, but he felt too tired to cook it. Because Caroline and Caleb had paid no attention to him when he made the first martini, he now made a second, for energy and general bolsterment, and officially considered it his first. Battling the vitreous lensing effects of a vodka buzz, he went out and threw meat on the grill. Again the weariness, again the deficit of every friendly neurofactor overtook him. In plain view of his entire family he made a third (officially: a second) martini and drank it down. Through the window he observed that the grill was in flames.
On the morning of Chip's conception she'd merely looked like she was shamming sleep, but on the morning of Denise's, seven years later, she really was pretending. Alfred in middle age had invited such venial deceptions. A decade-plus of marriage had turned him into one of the overly civilized predators you hear about in zoos, the Bengal tiger that forgets how to kill, the lion lazy with depression. To exert attraction, Enid had to be a still, unbloody carcass. If she actively reached out, actively threw a thigh over his, he braced himself against her and withheld his face; if she so much as stepped from the bathroom naked he averted his eyes, as the Golden Rule enjoined the man who hated to be seen himself. Only early in the morning, waking to the sight of her small white shoulder, did he venture from his lair. Her stillness and self-containment, the slow sips of air she took, her purely vulnerable object- hood, made him pounce. And feeling his padded paw on her ribs and his meat-seeking breath on her neck she went limp, as if with prey's instinctive resignation ("Let's get this dying over with"), although in truth her passivity was calculated, because she knew passivity inflamed him. He had her, and to some extent she wanted to be had, like an animal: in a mute mutual privacy of violence. She, too, kept her eyes shut. Often didn't even roll from the side she'd been lying on but simply flared her hip, brought her knee up in a vaguely proctologic reflex. Then without showing her his face he departed for the bathroom, where he washed and shaved and emerged to see the bed already made and to hear, downstairs, the percolator gulping. From Enid's perspective in the kitchen maybe a lion, not her husband, had voluptuously mauled her, or maybe one of the men in uniform she ought to have married had slipped into her bed. It wasn't a wonderful life, but a woman could subsist on self-deceptions like these and on her memories (which also now curiously seemed like self-deceptions) of the early years when he'd been mad for her and had looked into her eyes. The important thing was to keep it all tacit. If the act was never spoken of, there would be no reason to discontinue it until she was definitely pregnant again, and even after pregnancy no reason not to resume it, as long as it was never mentioned.
How modest—compared to the furious locomotive—a stretch of weedy track could seem, skirting a field of late sorghum. But without this track a train was ten thousand tons of ungovernable nothing. The will was in the track.
Everywhere Alfred went in the Erie Belt's hinterland he heard young Erie Belt employees telling one another, "Take it easy!"
"See ya later, Sam. Don't work too hard, now."
"Take it easy."
"You too, pal. Take it easy."
The phrase seemed to Alfred an eastern blight, a fitting epitaph for a once-great state, Ohio, that parasitic Teamsters had sucked nearly dry. Nobody in St. Jude would dare tell him to take it easy. On the high prairie where he'd grown up, a person who took it easy wasn't much of a man. Now came a new effeminate generation for whom "easygoing" was a compliment. Alfred heard Erie Belt track gangs yukking it up on company time, he saw flashily dressed clerks taking ten-minute breaks for coffee, he watched callow draftsmen smoke cigarettes with insinuating relish while a once-solid railroad fell to pieces all around them. "Take it easy" was the watchword of these superfriendly young men, the token of their overfamiliarity, the false reassurance that enabled them to ignore the filth they worked in.
Nighttime was a different matter. By night he lay awake on mattresses that felt made of cardboard and catalogued the faults of humanity. It seemed as if, in every motel he stayed in, he had neighbors who fornicated like there was no tomorrow—men of ill-breeding and poor discipline, women who chuckled and screamed. At 1 a. m. in Erie, Pennsylvania, a girl in the next room ranted and panted like a strumpet. Some slick, worthless fellow having his way with her. Alfred blamed the girl for taking it easy. He blamed the man for his easygoing confidence. He blamed both of them for lacking the consideration to keep their voices down. How could they never once stop to think of their neighbor, lying awake in the next room? He blamed God for allowing such people to exist. He blamed democracy for inflicting them on him. He blamed the motel's architect for trusting a single layer of cinder block to preserve the repose of paying customers. He blamed the motel management for not keeping in reserve a room for guests who suffered. He blamed the frivolous, easygoing townspeople of Washington, Pennsylvania, who had driven 150 miles for a high-school football championship game and filled every motel room in northwest Pennsylvania. He blamed his fellow guests for their indifference to the fornication, he blamed all of humanity for its insensitivity, and it was so unfair. It was unfair that the world could be so inconsiderate to a man who was so considerate to the world. No man worked harder than he, no man made a quieter motel neighbor, no man was more of a man, and yet the phonies of the world were allowed to rob him of sleep with their lewd transactions ...
He returned to St. Jude in an executive car appended to an intercity freight run, and from Union Station he took the commuter local to the suburbs. In the blocks between the station and his house the last leaves were coming down. It was the season of hurtling, hurtling toward winter. Cavalries of leaf wheeled across the bitten lawns. He stopped in the street and looked at the house that he and a bank owned. The gutters were plugged with twigs and acorns, the mum beds were blasted. It occurred to him that his wife was pregnant again. Months were rushing him forward on their rigid track, carrying him closer to the day he'd be the father of three, the year he'd pay off his mortgage, the season of his death.
Entering the house through the kitchen door, Alfred saw chunks of raw rutabaga in a pot of water, a rubber-banded bunch of beet greens, and some mystery meat in brown butcher paper. Also a casual onion that looked destined to be fried and served with—liver?
On the floor by the basement stairs was a nest of magazines and jelly glasses.
"Al?" Enid called from the basement.
He set down his suitcase and briefcase, gathered the magazines and jelly glasses in his arms, and carried them down the steps.
Enid parked her iron on the ironing board and emerged from the laundry room with butterflies in her stomach— whether from lust or from fear of Al's rage or from fear that she might become enraged herself she didn't know.
He set her straight in a hurry. "What did I ask you to do before I left?"
"You're home early," she said. "The boys are still at the Y."
"What is the one thing I asked you to do while I was gone?"
"I'm catching up on laundry. The boys have been sick."
"Do you remember," he said, "that I asked you to take care of the mess at the top of the stairs? That that was the one thing—the one thing—I asked you to do while I was gone?"
Without waiting for an answer, he went into his metallurgy lab and dumped the magazines and jelly glasses into a heavy-duty trash can. From the hammer shelf he took a badly balanced hammer, a crudely forged Neanderthal club that he hated and kept only for purposes of demolition, and methodically broke each jelly glass. A splinter hit his cheek and he swung more furiously, smashing the shards into smaller shards, but nothing could eradicate his transgression with Chuck Meisner, or the grass-damp triangles of cheerleading leotard, no matter how he hammered.
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