Toad, page 16
“He didn’t mind about the cats. He let them stay,” she said.
She was easily lured. Perhaps because she so rarely found herself with a willing audience, she forgot who I was, or felt glorified by it, as though we sat with our chipped glasses on some Olympian plane of civilization in which there was no rivalry or jealousy. Or maybe she felt a cruel pride herself in dealing out her memories to the supposed official owner of the burgled property. We found it hilarious to discuss his capacities.
“He always ejaculates too soon,” she lisped.
“Yes!” I laughed. “And he has never heard of the clitoris!”
“Couldn’t you have told him?” Ray asked.
“Could you?” I answered, and we both laughed at his complacence.
“I told him he was the best ever,” she smiled.
“Naturally. So did I.”
Finally I had played enough. She had gushed every detail of their four meetings in her big bed. She had renounced his skills and confessed that it was the friendly exercise that soothed her and insured her a good night’s sleep. In this I concurred wholeheartedly. We refilled our glasses. I raised mine and looked at Moira over the rim.
“You really are,” I said, “just like the toilet in the house. Everybody knows where to find you when they need you.”
She giggled, but a nervous crease formed between her eyebrows.
“And, like the toilet in that house of yours,” I continued solemnly, “you are too dirty to use except in an emergency.”
She frowned at me, her eyebrows forming an anxious peak.
“Did you really imagine that I liked you?” I inquired ironically. “Did you suppose I could find anything about you even tolerable?”
Her lips opened as if to answer; some quick word came up as far as her teeth and then stopped. I waited, coolly, offering her the chance to defend herself. I let my hands dangle between my knees, on call for specific emphasis.
“Have you never realized that these feelings of inferiority that you are swamped with are legitimate? Why is it that your odd, slimy romp is always initiated with a knock at the door of your room in the middle of the night? Hasn’t it occurred to you that the men who take you to bed never take you anywhere else? Never let anyone know about it? Never, ever, allow themselves to be seen with you? Don’t you think it possible that they would be ashamed to have it known that they were forced to stoop to the likes of you as much as if they had used a sheep or a dog that way?”
The gently insistent inquiry of my voice still deceived her. I was very proud of that control over my voice. It allowed her to feel, even then, that she dealt with something familiar and might yet prevent any major damage, circumvent my intentions somehow. The words that had clotted in her teeth spilled out in the second that my interrogation voice ceased.
“I always thought it was because they were living with someone who didn’t satisfy their sexual needs, but whose feelings they didn’t want to hurt,” she said. Her gall enraged me. My blood surged through my head. I glared at her and felt a small stirring from the place where Ray was sitting. He thinks she’s right. I knew it and felt the fear of shame scoring my face. I sipped at the wine, rolled it against the top of my mouth.
“No,” I began calmly, “it is something else, you know. To begin with, there is your phony accent. Three months of speaking another language does not account for five years of polluted English. Then there is your personal hygiene. I had always heard that there was nothing dirtier than a dirty woman, but I never realized what that meant until I met you. Have you ever washed your sheets? Or are you lying in two years’ accumulation of crusty semen and mucus and sweat? And how many times a month do you take a bath? Or is it that often? In all the dozens of times I have seen you on every day of the week at any time of the day I have never once been near you when you didn’t smell like an overloaded outhouse. That’s why no one wants to eat your cooking. They’re all afraid of food poisoning.”
She was feeling it by then. She drew her pudgy feet beneath her skirt to hide their grime. She clenched her hands in her lap and then slid them beneath her armpits to conceal her stained fingertips and the gray dirt beneath the nails. She even folded in her lips to protect her teeth from view. She trembled.
As I recall this night again—it has had so many midnight performances in my sleep—I always wonder why she did not just get up and leave. She must have been very curious about it, all my vile talk, directly and specifically aimed at her and derived from her. She couldn’t often have been the subject of such intense disdain. Whether she only felt it or could identify it, she had produced in me a powerful effect. I had always condescended, chuckled, and sympathized, and nodded distantly, but at that moment I was filled with hatred for her, glutting my eyes on every detail of her person. I would find that degree of attention flattering, myself.
“And then again, people do not care to hear what you told your psychiatrist. No one wants to know what he told you. But you complain and moan and confide your internal irregularities. When someone treats you rudely you produce a tantrum and harrow everyone else in reach with it, including those people whose parents brought them up to be kind to freaks. There’s only one solution. You are stupid.”
Tears streamed down her face, dripped onto her forearms. She didn’t sob or moan. Her nose did not run.
“I know I’m not as intelligent as you…” she said. Her accent was still heavy, still fluttering the cadence of her high, thin voice. I took it then as an admission, as a vindication of all I said. Now it sounds in my skull like a plea, and the beginning of some small self-defense.
“I don’t blame you, really, for taking whatever comes to your door at night. You don’t have any choice. I wouldn’t blame a starving man for stealing bread. But in a way I have to be grateful to you. I could never allow anybody who has screwed you to touch me. Once a prick has been dipped into that rotting meat of yours, it’s permanently defiled as far as I’m concerned. So, in a way, that is a loss. But I’m glad to know that Dusty isn’t worth a damn before I spend any more time or effort on him. Any man who would even consider baring himself to a woman like you, any man who could manage to get it up over you, even in the dark, is too desperate for notches on his cock to have any character at all. The syndrome, I believe, is known as pig fucking.”
I couldn’t tell her how fat she was, how grotesque her hips and legs were, pegged onto her merely plump top. Any mention of her fat would lead to comparisons to me and redound to my sorrow. Any reference to rudimentary ugliness would do the same. I sat watching her cry. She didn’t look at me anymore. She seemed to know I was finished. I drained off my wine and refilled the glass. I turned and poured more wine for Ray without looking at him. I sipped. A delicious fatigue was leaking through me. I had done precisely as I had planned.
“Go, now,” I said. “I’m through with you.”
She scrambled about her for her coat and purse before getting onto her knees and then onto her feet. She closed the door softly and I listened to her heavy clogs on the stairs all the way down. When the quiet came I turned to Ray. He lit a cigarette. I waited until he’d exhaled.
“What did you think of that?”
“A bit like hitting a fly with a two-ton truck,” he said.
From the moment he spoke the vile sensation in my chest began. He had been curious enough to stay for the show, but indifferent to whatever reason I had for wanting him there to witness it. The reason has been lost to me now, too. It was forgotten the precise moment that Ray spoke. The unpleasantness in my innards was the conviction, born full-grown, that I had been behaving despicably and that, given the slightest encouragement, I would have continued to do so. If he had only sat reviewing the scene with me, if he had only been impressed by my leonine ferocity and restrained delivery, that harangue, so magnificently purging, might have stood as one of the great pleasures of my life. As it is, the incident, even after many years, remains bitterly humiliating and is the true cause of my lack of correspondence with Ray.
It is not Moira Clancy that bothers me. She was a groveling, glutinous beast and any wound she picked up that day was at least genuine rather than imagined. It certainly did not drive her anywhere near suicide. If I had gone to her room and said those things, I would regret none of it. I could sit over coffee in the morning light and click my tongue proudly at having once in my life said what I thought to the person involved.
But I had to have an audience. And not just an audience, but an ally as well. Without his presence would I have dared to do it at all?
There is something basically disgusting about needing an audience. The finest performers give us the impression that they would be behaving just the same if they were alone. The charm of a child is strongest when it prattles, unselfconscious, unaware of being observed. But the same child at the same game seems sly, unpleasantly precocious, and self-serving when we see that it knows we are watching. The ancient suspicion of actors, the denigration of their morals and the general disdain for their psychic makeup (insecure, suffering from massive inferiority complexes, no personality of their own, egotistical) all derive from that dependence on the audience, despite the specifying of their intentions by the formal act of stepping onto a stage. It is, I propose, the basic wariness of all those things that smack of duplicity. Doing something not for its own sake but for the sake of attention or approval is dishonest and considered showing off. Then, too, we despise that which is dependent, weak, cowardly.
Ray, in his tidiness, in his ingrained decency, left after the debacle. His retreat dispelled my fantasies of a righteous attack and left me alone with the drip of my own slime. If he had not been there, I would have conceived of saying, wished to say, and perhaps bragged to friends of having said, all the same cruel phrases without ever muttering a syllable in actuality. The thought and the deed bearing totally dissimilar consequences in real life, these ephemerals would have distracted not an iota from my self-esteem. Faced with Clancy alone I might have elicited the same account of her relations with my friend Dusty in precisely the same way, ushered her out with the warm sentiments of alliance and avoided her and the man forever after. That smarmy bit of grande dame behavior would have been a satisfaction. Instead I have this fewmet of the craven bully to carry, tucked inside my helmet, melting down my neck in the sun, and cascading chills in the rain.
* * *
I didn’t see them before they left. I drank grape soda under the skylight and read trash. After a week or so I thought they’d be back so I went out there. I walked up from the highway. I could hear the music from half a mile away. There were cars in the drive all the way out to the dirt road. I must have rubbed bellies with twenty-five car bumpers getting up to the house. As I came closer to the house, the music had the same effect on my ears as a jet engine. The hens in the wire outside the living room crouched, petrified, their yellow eyes frantically staring. Angelina was running crazy between the dancers on the lawn, her barking grown hoarse as she was chased by a nipping, noisy, ragged ball of white fur half her size. I recognized most of the people from the school, but mingled with the leotards and beards were a few pairs of sheer stockings in low-heeled pumps, a few deliberate hairstyles.
I may have imagined a white shirt and tie.
It was late afternoon. There were bedrolls piled by the kitchen step. I recognized Liz Fink, a woman from school, presiding over the rice pot. Two girls in fluffy sweaters and matching skirts sat on the one kitchen chair clenching the knees of their blank legs. On their faces were identical expressions of shock. Liz carefully munched rice off a crusted fork.
“Hello, Sally. A little more thyme.”
She pinched green dust from a paper box and sprinkled it over the rice. She bent down to smell the mixture. She wore a black sweatshirt and a tent skirt. She turned from the pot, snorted, and scratched idly between her huge flattened tits with the fork.
“Sally, you can testify for these innocents. Is it or is it not true that I blow Charlie every night of the week?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“He’s ruptured, you know. I think of it as Heloise consoling Abelard.”
The two girls looked at me. It was not the act they doubted, it was the actress. Liz combed her black fetlock with the fork and smirked.
“They don’t even know such things exist.” She took a sudden lunge at the little window and pointed through it.
“See him? Right out there with that bitch poetess Lerner. The tall guy with the Nazi boots. That’s the one.”
The girls obediently gandered at old Charlie Bigelow hee-hawing out on the lawn. Liz struck a professional pose and waved the fork.
“It’s not at all unpleasant for the woman. Very exciting, actually. You start by murmuring into the hollow of his shoulder and kiss and nuzzle on your way down.”
I opened the door to the living room and breathed in the noise with relief. It was dim. The incense was thick in the hot air and made me feel sick. I pushed through a mass of bodies dancing or clumped together talking. I bumped up against Rennel, who was leaning his head out the window and breathing. I tried to speak to him, but it was impossible. He motioned toward the door. Then I spied Moira Clancy in Carlotta’s leather tunic. She followed us out through the crowd.
We had to go down the drive a little way to keep from being stepped on. Clancy leaned against Rennel.
“Where are Sam and Carlotta?”
Rennel smirked. I smirked back.
“They’re not here. They haven’t got back from New York yet.”
“I thought this must be their wedding party.” Clancy swayed her hips to the music and gazed adoringly up at Rennel. The hem of the tunic dragged on the gravel. The rest rolled and creased over her flesh. The seams were spreading and opening in little puffs down the sides.
Rennel watched the moving figures on the lawn. “I don’t know exactly what it is. Sam called me from the airport the day they left. He said Laura had decided to come with them and would I come here every night and feed the animals. I came out to stay because I’d finished work and have two months off.”
Clancy gave me an anxious smile. I ignored her.
“But what’s all this?”
“I don’t know. They all started coming in yesterday saying Laura invited them weeks ago. They brought their own drugs and food. It’s like an Italian movie, isn’t it?”
“Or a dormitory beer brawl.”
“But don’t you think it’s good for people to release their inhibitions and seek a lifestyle in harmony with the rhythms of their existence?” Clancy said, with her most winsome accent.
I smirked gleefully at Rennel.
He glowered and shivered theatrically. “Oh, shut up.”
Clancy winced and jerked her hand away from his back. Her lips parted and her glasses started to mist over. She hobbled away, pulled awkwardly at the skirt of the tunic to keep from tripping. Rennel stood, making his most ferocious face. I waved distractedly, shook my head. My own nastiness made me sick; it was time to go home.
It’s nice shitting in the woods
I sit here all snug and smug in my bungalow. Look down my nose at whatever doesn’t please me. Bigotry is a comfortable state well-suited for recluses, hermits, and trolls. I was in the attic putting my flannels in mothballs the other day and got to reading the old newspaper lining the bottom of the trunk. Found I have hard opinions on all sorts of things I’ve never thought about. What the town council should have done in June four years ago. Who of that year’s court should have been elected Miss Crawdad of 19—. That’s the ingrained skill of the experienced bigot, to have a prejudice ready-made for any and all occasions. “I don’t like her face, I tell you. Mouths like that give me the flux.”
I’ve been sitting here being prejudiced about the house. It isn’t mine. I rent it. Mail the check to a box number every month and nobody comes to throw me out. Nobody changes the locks on me. But these things inside are mine. I chose them. This place reminds me of my grandmother’s widowhood house. I saw it once when I was ten or so. It had the same summer camp look, clapboards and a low porch. Living room, kitchen, one bedroom, and an afterthought bathroom. Even the furniture is the same. Overstuffed vintage with a Salvation Army or Goodwill veneer. My walls are deep colors, but hers were all pastel. She had a lot of starched doilies and antimacassars. She had a lot of little glass junk. Nothing was worth much, no crystal or china. Just the little variety store cats and mushrooms and pink, sequined ballet dancers that old ladies of a certain sort seem to exhale. There were also fancy cologne decanters sitting empty on the windowsills, a green glass locomotive with three plastic carnations coming out of the smokestack. I never knew her very well, but I remember her house.
My place has a similar fussy feel to it. Lots of souvenirs. No lace doilies, but a lot of signed books and empty envelopes with significant postmarks. But even the souvenirs seem to have failed me. Like this old clock I purchased for myself one Christmas when I was twenty-odd. It ticks. I time my bread with it. I have to work myself up, concentrate, and say out loud, “Why, that is the clock I bought with so-and-so in the snow with the bells of the charity Santa Claus outside. I couldn’t afford the one I wanted, which had dragons on the dial, and had to settle for this one with the flowers. I hated those flowers for years before I got to like them,” etc. And still it doesn’t set me off. The words themselves have become things associated with the clock now and not with me in these old days. It’s the same with the coal scuttle and the salt shaker, and my womb-shaped sugar bowl. When the phallic cream pitcher broke a few years ago I was depressed for days—but that was just loss, not nostalgia. But I go through the motions. I’ve put Mr. Geddoes’s last order form in the Death and Taxes drawer of my desk, so I’ll have a spur to think of him every spring or so when I get to clearing things away. But the spurs and hooks I assemble are no help to me yet. For now, at least, I don’t need them. I cling to them for the future. I wouldn’t throw the clock away even if it didn’t tick. I’d put it away in case someday I can’t remember the so-and-so who stood beside me in the snow that day. In case the sight and shape of him manage to slip by me as my brain slows, I might need the touch or look of the clock to bring it back.
