Reuben, Reuben, page 3
“And what you’ve got can’t seem to make up its mind what it is,” he went on with the same crucified look as he took a gulp of his Chianti. “Is it a novel? Is it a reminiscence? Is it a book of loosely strung together observations about life? Of course I’m only going on a very small sample, too little to form a fair judgement. I’d have to read a great deal more.”
“I aim to see to that,” I says with a look intended to add by way of reminder, Thirty-four clams worth to be exact, pal.
When I finally drove him back to the Successful Writers School he was in a heavily oiled condition, thanks to a few brandies he had with the coffee, and I in a thoroughly foul humor. It was while we were sitting side by side in the car rather than facing one another that he really opened up. “The thing is your too close to the subject. You lack the objectivity necessary to really pin down this society you’ve got in your crop, even satirically. By all means write. Scribble away, put everything down that comes into your head. What I mean wells up. But then let it cool off. That’s the important thing. Don’t show me anything again for six months at the very least.”
He lit a cigar and threw the match out. He didn’t have to roll down any window to do so as the Ford is an open runabout.
“I think you ought to put this car in the book. Tell why you keep it at all. Why you tool around Fairfield County in a 1926 Model T with a license plate reading SCAT. Why do you?”
I thought the question self-explanatory, but I explained it to him anyways.
The 1926 flivver was an answer to the sports cars, Rollses, Bentleys and Cadillacs with radios and even phonographs whizzing by at speeds that may sublamate sex but also endanger children on bicycles. I mean I’d rather have the children endanger me. The SCAT was my razzberries to the whole kit and kaboodle, but spesifically to the custom introduced by the commuters theirselves, whose personalized letters-instead-of-numbers license plates made my teeth ache, especially when they are cute things like CLEF, which declares the owner to be a composer, or WNBC, that he is a net exec. But most of all the letter combinations which are the inishles of husband and wife cunningly intertwined. They gave me the worst belly ache of all because one out of three of them are going to get divorced anyway and then who gets custody of the plates? Its an interesting question. I gave prolonged thought to the four-letter word I would hurl back at them, like my exhaust, settling for the stiffest the law would allow. I showed the clerk at the Dept. of Motor Vehicles a list I had made and he shook his head at all of them except SCAT and he hesitated at that a little.
“You sure hate the sheepherders, don’t you cowboy?” Flahive says. “But this Lizzie is wonderful. Where did you ever get it?”
“I never got it. I just kept it.”
Here Flahive doubled over and liked to perish with such a fit of coughing I thought the cigar had done him in, but it turned out to be amusement. Laughing like hell he said, “Wonderful. Like Proust and the woman he asked where she ever got her hats and the woman answered, I don’t get them, I just have them.” Here he had another paroxysm and I thought if he choked to death the Renasonce would really be on in Connecticut, but no such luck. He says, “Well let’s do this again sometime,” for we had come to a halt in the parking lot behind the Successful Writers School. I stopped with a jerk, and I can say that again.
Flahive asked me to pull in behind as he wanted to sneak in the rear door so as not to have to explain where he was two and a half hours for lunch. “Lets rip a chop again soon. I’ll give you a ring. And I do mean take your time with the book. Let it marinate for a while. Don’t be in any rush.” He hesitated and took me in. “I seem to have irritated you. Please take what I’ve said in the spirit in which its meant—constructive criticism.”
He started to walk toward the door of the building. Then he suddenly came back again and put his head in the open flivver. “There is no great art without compassion,” he said. He had to patter alongside the car to get in this postscript, because I had thrun in the clutch and started out the driveway, to hell with him. “And what do you really know about these people you’re attacking? I mean as people. You don’t know enough about them to hate them, let alone love them.”
“You jist said I was too close to the subject,” I says without turning to look at him, and picking up speed as I bounced out onto the road, Flahive galloping alongside the car. “Having a little trouble making up your mind which it is? A little trouble diagnozing my work, Flahive?”
“Too close emotionally while being remote from it in fact, is my point,” he says, jumping onto the running board like a cop commandeering the car, or a crook. “It’s a question of authentisity. You haven’t the slightest idea how these people live. Don’t go away mad, Mr. Spofford. I don’t mean any offense.” I told you he was a born Irishman, now acting on the Irishman’s instinct to keep a conversation going no matter what. We were now in the thick of traffic. Flahive kind of squatted down on the running board, holding onto the top of my door with both hands, his coattails flying and his tweed hat nearly falling off. “I didn’t say you had no talent. There are primitives in art, why not in literature? You could be above sentence structure like Joyce, you have Lardner’s anti-sophistication, and you’re mean as O’Hara. Greater praise in my book there isn’t.”
I brought my fist down on his hands with all my might. I kept banging first one of them then the other, as he kept pulling one off then the other, grabbing hold again with the first, like a survivor in the water trying to climb into a lifeboat there isn’t room for and having his knuckles rapped by an oar held by who’s boss.
“Be careful who you call names,” I warned him. “I don’t take abuse from nobody, especially when their half my age.” With that I slammed on the brake for a red light, flinging Flahive around in a half circle so that his rear went to the front and his face came into view with mine. He lost his balance, getting his footing again in the street. He grinned nervously at me under the tweed hat, which he straightened with one hand. “Your wonderful,” he said. “We been through all that,” I said. We waited for the light to change, our situation becoming dreamlike. His lips twitched in a grin that was a combination of charm and despair.
“So then is it to be a novel we’re going to have, a memoir, or a volume of loosely connected pungent observations?”
“None of your beeswax.”
Just then the light changed and I put the car in gear and started off. I could see him in the rear-view mirror, standing there in the middle of the street, looking at my vanishing license plate.
I had made the mistake of consulting the enemy.
four
WHEN I GOT HOME I found my daughter-in-law and her mother, Mrs. Punck, sitting in the kitchen. They had the look of women waiting up for a man rolling in at three A.M. instead of P. There was that air about them. Mare had on the battle dress—George’s fatigue jacket from the Korean War—with which she waits on trade. I had driven around for a 1/2 hour cooling off, and trying to give honest consideration to what Flahive had said. I might even of dropped in at the libary to get acquainted with some of the authors he said influenced me—if I was going to be derivative it was time I got started on my reading—but I was miles past it by the time I cooled off. Now I felt the anger flaring up again. It was touch and go who would strike the first blow, that is who would tolerate who first around here. Of course in the last analysis all that was as broad as it was long—which I will throw in as a quick description of Mrs. Punck.
They were drinking tea, I now noticed, and she had on a striped black and white dress that had been made out of some kind of material, a hat with a veil, now turned up to sip the tea underneath, and a string of blue beads. She nearly had gloves on.
“I thought you was going to take Ma to the Golden Age Club,” Mare said. The chip she has on one shoulder for her daughter is balanced by one on the other for her mother. Like epaulets. I had to remind myself that she had none on either for herself.
“Oh that’s all right,” said Mrs. Punck. “Don’t worry too much about it, Frank. We know how things slip our mind when we gallivant around.” She beamed at me, and I could hear her corset creak as she turned in her chair to follow my movements across the room to the cabinet where I keep my bottle of bourbon. “You were probably at the libary pestering Ella and the other ladies behind the desk. That it? Nature will out. Of course what you forget is that if its women you got your mind on, theres a much wider selection at the Golden Age Club.”
“The ones in the libary are wide enough,” I says. I’d be damned if I’d explain that one, cackling like Walter Brennan on television to drive the point across. And if they’d laughed I’d probably resented that as some more domestic coziness I wasn’t in the mood for. Coziness was coming from enough directions as it was. Because watch what now happened.
Having finished her tea Mrs. Punck shoved her chair back and reached for a basket of mending. She always did a batch of darning or some other household chore for Mare when she came to set a spell—ostensibly for Mare but really for my benefit, as she was a widow. Nobody wasted no time on subtlety around there. The first garment she pulled out to strike a domestic note with was my pajamas. I swear it. I poured myself three fingers on a cube of ice as she sewed a button on it. I was rewarded with a glare from Mare, but Mrs. Punck said, “Having a relaxing cocktail? Louie always liked his and I always encouraged it. Our system needs a bit of alcohol at our age.”
I stood behind both of them and copied Flahive’s cornered look by leaning my head against the wall between the sink and the old water boiler, now no longer used. I fluttered my eyes, rolling the balls up into my skull almost as far as he could, though of course he’s had more education than me. After sewing the button on the coat Mrs. Punck apparently picked up the pants, because she give a jolly cluck and says, “So we’ve pulled the cord clean out of our waistband again.” Mrs. Punck was famous for knowing how to work a string back through your waistband. You don’t worm the cord itself back through the loop as that would take all day, you fasten a safety pin to the end of the cord and work that through, pulling the cord along after.
While working she favored us with a running monolog about what a rewarding life she’d had with the late Louie Punck, a most uneek individual who liked his three squares a day, forgot to mail letters that he was given and would of been elected to the state legislature if he hadn’t of been defeated. The happy home she maintained for him awaited any other man shrewd enough to recognize a bargain when he seen one, was the implication. Which was right. Which was why I had to put myself on guard. She was a catch for the right man. Many a side testimony was tossed in by the fruit of that union, who was openly matchmaking. With Geneva away there was more than enough room in the farmhouse for all of us to live together in peace and harmony, not to speak of the money that would be saved when Mrs. Punck no longer had to pay the rent for the cottage she lived alone in behind the Ponderosa vineyard.
I hardened my heart. Not against Mrs. Punck or even Mare, but against a part of myself—the part that cottoned to the notion. I was of course alone myself, really, and all too keenly aware that man cannot live that way. I had strolled to the window, and looking out of it, drink in hand, I could see the lilac bushes my wife and me had planted, the hawthorn, the apple trees we had tended and eaten the fruit of. We had gardened together, always. I could see the doormat on the back stoop. It was so old and filthy there were violets growing in it. It was years now since I’d had a wife nagging me to pick it up and slap it against the side of the house, and I did not intend to shake from its rich nap what I now decided was Mrs. Spofford’s favorite flower. She had always stoutly defended the violet against the view that it is a weed, commonly held by the ish women who do their gardening in Madras shorts and kneeling beside open manuals that they have to consult while they dig and plant, as they do cookbooks in the kitchen. I could see one or two now in Punch Bowl Hollow, just beyond our back stone wall, cultivating measly little strips of tulips and iris that don’t look like flowers but like decalcomania pasted against the house and garage, their colors unreal too, like the paint jobs on the houses and station wagons. Change and decay in all around I see! I thought, gazing at the spanking new stuff. I thought what more could anybody want than flowers that grow like weeds for God’s sake? So I never wiped my feet on the mat when I came in the house, or did so sentimentally. Lashed to the back of the flivver, above the SCAT license, was a flowerbox in which it would soon be time to plant a few geraniums again. Martha always liked geraniums too—and so does Mrs. Punck.
“A good man is hard to find,” said she.
“You mean like they tell wives every day at the Missing Persons Bureau?” I says. As attractive as she was plump, as even-tempered as she was neat and able around the house, Mrs. Punck had to be resisted for a very good reason—lack of affinity. We just didn’t seem to me to have that basic rappaport that is so necessary to a union. We just didn’t see eye to eye. My tastes didn’t run to Golden Age Clubs and other functions at the Y and the church she would of dragged you to. On the other hand she might stop going to these functions herself once she had a man to stay home with. It was hard to say. She was only medium set in her ways, as those things go, and I knew already from this kind of familiarity what some of her habits were. Like reading the obituary page first when she picked up the newspaper. Martha did that too. I suppose all women do. They have this emotional connection with Things. They’re custodians of Life, hence the beeline for the death notices to see who passed away lately. But other than the newspaper all Mrs. Punck ever seemed to read was a corny anthology of poems that had been in her family for generations, whereas I was at least trying to continue my interrupted education on my own. Still there she was, well dressed and well meaning, often giving people a membership in a splendid organization for Christmas.
Just as she worked the safety pin through the other end of the waistband with a triumphant “Ahh!” a car stopped in the driveway and a customer got out. Mare quickly joined me at the window, and seeing Mrs. Beauseigneur spring out of her blue Jag she said, “I’ll go wait on her.” Mrs. Beauseigneur was an ish woman, very slim and pretty and bright, of the kind I liked to stop and chat for a few minutes with before saying we were fresh out. Mare had me spotted as an appeaser, you see, a collaborator with the enemy. She shouldered past me and made for the door to the salesroom before I could. She closed it behind her as she went down the two steps leading into it.
Now I was alone with Mrs. Punck. But nothing very friendly went forward between us, because I stood at the closed door straining to catch the conversation beyond it, and unable to for Mrs. Punck’s attempts to keep the ball rolling here. It irked me no end.
“The difference between success and failure is often so slight,” she said, sewing away at something else. “Two hundred more votes and Louie’d been elected. And maybe alive today, as I think it broke his heart.”
“I voted for him twice,” I says.
“But he only ran for Assemblyman once.”
“I felt his kind of integrity should be supported in every way possible by the decent element.”
“Well there’s many a slip betwixt cup and lip,” she sighed.
“Betwixt cup and what?”
“Lip.”
“That was very neatly put, Mrs. Punck. You have a turn for phrases.” Mocking Mrs. Punck about her everlasting maxims was one way I had of reminding myself of our incompatibility, and one as to which I considered myself absolved of cruelty since she didn’t know she was being mocked. She didn’t seem to realize any more than her daughter did when she was being ribbed. She twisted around in her chair to see what I was doing. Finding me standing with my ear to the crack she said, “Mare giving somebody a hard time?”
I got another ice cube and then walked to the cabinet to pour myself two more fingers.
“Since commuters were two-thirds of our business, it don’t take no Einstein to figure what this retaliation is costing us. Talk about cutting off your nose despite your face. Boy. Not to mention the chicken we have to eat ourself to keep up with the inventory. I don’t appreciate it running out of my ears just because we can get it wholesale.”
“She’ll get over it, Frank. Give her time. She’s been hurt, and she’s a girl who don’t heal easy. And remember it’s not on her account she’s doing it—for herself she don’t care. She’s never wanted anything for herself. Give credit where credit is due. You’ll find in life that people’s virtues are often mixed up with their vices. We must be patient with her.”
“And for variety we can always eat the laying mash.”
“Why don’t you come to dinner tomorrow night? Over to the cottage. I mean just you and me. I’ll fix you a roast of beef and Yorkshire pudding.”
Sipping my whiskey at the window, I see Mrs. Beauseigneur come out of the salesroom empty handed and walk toward her car. She was blonde, in her early forties, with trim bare legs showing under a gray tweed coat. As she sprang in behind the wheel I drew the lace curtain aside and the motion must of caught her eye. Because her red mouth popped open in a smile, her teeth like white seeds bursting from a pod, and she waved at me through the windshield, ducking her head a little to see me. Then a peculiar thing happened I must say. A kind of crazy pantomime went on between us. First she shrugged and spread her hands as though to say, “No dice again.” I shrugged back against my will. Then a series of expressions was rapidly exchanged—raised eyebrows, nods and smiles, as though some secret understanding existed between us that the treatment she was getting here wasn’t my doing, and that she would probably be back in the hopes of better luck next time. It was all over in less than a second. She backed the Jag out of the driveway and then we could hear Mare returning.
