Reuben, Reuben, page 37
“Only hostility toward the woman as a woman could make a man make a remark like that.”
“It just slipped out.”
“All the more significant.”
“But it wasn’t intended to be derisive. I didn’t know it was. It was simply an inadvertent sort of remark. Question, rather,” he corrected from the other bed, lolling over onto an elbow. “Because you keep calling it a remark, which is significant on your part. It shows that basically you want a man to be hostile—or you want to believe he was hostile—because it satisfies a hostility within you. And since the war between the sexes and all that seems to be part of the normal kit and kaboodle, or so we’ve come to accept, why pick on any one specific reflection of it as being so awful? I mean if you’re going to make a federal case out of it . . .”
“This was more than just that. This was the malice of a certain kind of masculine temperament, toward the opposite sex. Only a man who hated women at bottom would be capable of a remark like that.”
“Question.”
“It was a remark, in essence. It was just a question in form. Its purpose was to ridicule something a wife had brought home. I think you ought to see these things for what they are, Alvin, if you ever want to get straightened around. You resent me as a man naturally would resent a woman who saved him from homosexuality.”
Mopworth resumed gazing sluggishly at the far wall across his turned-up toes. He waited for the moment when the dispute was ended and he could start reading. He was deep in a good book he wanted to get back to. There was an unspecifiable, but clearly minimum, span of silence after which one might safely judge it to be the end of a wrangle and not a pause in it, and turn to private concerns without a breach of decency. Instinct told you when that moment was reached. He watched the second hand swim around the face of the electric clock on the dresser. One minute, two. When it again reached its zenith he would pick up his book. It did. He opened the book stealthily and began to read. Geneva threw her legs suddenly over the side of the bed and reached for the blue leather address book beside the telephone on her table.
“I’m going to call Nectar.”
Mopworth let his head fall over the side of the bed, where, hanging out of sight between it and the wall, he resembled a passenger sick at sea. Hidden from view there, he cursed, gnashed his teeth, clenched his fists, and silently groaned. He rose before they had been put through to Gettysburg and went into the living room to avoid hearing any of the actual conversation. He was pacing there when he heard its upshot.
He walked the shag rug in bare feet, his robe hanging open, smoking cigarettes. Once he peered through the draperies to the Dumbrowskis’ house across the street. He resembled a participant in an amateur theatrical peeking through the stage curtain at the audience. For here you came to regard your neighbors quite as audiences, spectators of your life, a condition scarcely relieved by the sense of your being witness to theirs. What did he care whether Jack Dumbrowski had a fling with a tart in a smoker cake, except that it indicated an extra dividend from those rotten novels of his—something they made economically possible?
Mopworth worked out a downfall for him. He had it that Dumbrowski picked up a nail from one of the tarts, and that his wife left him. Purged and remorseful, he wandered from place to place trying to make a new life for himself, fetching up at last in Pennsylvania, where he met Nectar Schmidt, and they got married. Good! Goody goody gumdrop. Each was what the other deserved. She introduced just enough perception into his work for Dumbrowski’s next book to be a mess—too good for the cretins that had hitherto constituted his audience and not good enough for the readers who made a solid literary reputation—and they sank into dire poverty. They were last seen in, oh, Terre Haute, Indiana, where Nectar tried again to bring in a little money selling doughnuts door to door, the snow descending everywhere quietly, through the roof and onto the floor of the unheated single room in which Dumbrowski, the knack of writing a good bad book forever lost to him, and plugging away at another bad good book—
“Well, that was nice.” Geneva entered the room a good ten minutes after him, also barefoot. Her mood seemed to have cleared, and she wore a smile.
“Couldn’t begin to catch up on all the things we have to chin about,” she said. “But it was good talking to her again, and guess what. Nectar’s coming to pay us a visit. We’ve set the week end of the twelfth.”
Mopworth closed his eyes and rolled the balls behind their lids till he was nauseated. When he opened them again it was to stare at his hands, which lay in his lap with the fingers intertwined, like interlocked spikes in one of those novelty-shop puzzles which cannot be disentangled, tug as one will, unless one knows the secret, when they separate with ridiculous ease. He gazed at them for a long time after his wife went back to bed, without moving.
twenty-eight
THE TRAIN BRINGING Nectar Schmidt to Woodsmoke was half an hour late and Mopworth, down to meet her with the Volkswagen, killed the time in a bar across the street from the station. He had two beers and a thing called a meatball grinder, which some failure of the faculty of disgust enabled him to eat. It seemed to consist of two, or possibly three, boiled golfballs obscenely lurking in a loaf of bread longitudinally sawn. He doubted that Indelicato would have had it about, or that it was authentically Italian at all. It was to be numbered, in any case, among the hazards of life in contemporary America.
These were many, both physical and spiritual, but he liked to think he was doing as well as most of the natives with whom he found himself flying fraternally over the obstacle course, and possibly better than some. He was still married, though the institution was widely considered no longer to work. People continued to go in for it because there was nothing better, and besides one has invested all that pother in courtship, from which there is no place to go but forward. The whole thing was like one of those plays of which one has read bad reviews but to which one has already bought tickets. One goes anyway. One muddles through.
His marriage had more pluses than minuses. He had one fine boy and another on the way. At least Mrs. Punck said it would be a boy because Geneva was carrying it broad and flat rather than narrow and projecting. Of course the experts would have to be let make what they would of the overproduction. He could already hear Nectar, after learning that this pregnancy was the result of his impetuous wooing one night when Geneva was caught unprepared. He tried it on for size. “There are men who need to turn their wives into child-bearing slaves,” he said aloud. It did not really convince him and it only alarmed the bartender, who could not distinguish what he said but saw that he had a customer talking to himself. Talking and, what was worse, laughing. There was only one satisfactory refuge from all this theory about sex, and that was its practice. Too bad you had to climb out of the sack and face the whole damned business of getting on with women all over again. Did women suspect it was in the sheer need to get away from them that one buried one’s face in their bosoms, one’s self in them?
The train could be heard rumbling in, and Mopworth paid and hurried across the street, a fragment of paper napkin snagged in the vest over which he buttoned his coat as he trotted.
Nectar was standing on the platform looking around for a familiar face. Mopworth spied on her for a bit from behind a man with massive shoulders in a red lumberjack shirt. She was dressed in a spruce brown suit flecked with darker nubs, like flakes of tobacco that wanted brushing off. She had on her dark glasses, in which she looked a little furtive, like someone hoping to be mistaken for a celebrity. She had let her black hair grow and it hung to one side, that on which she inclined her head in that gaze of spurious sincerity, the list further emphasized by the weight of the grip in her hand. It looked very heavy, as though it contained enough clothing for a month’s stay. Mopworth gave another unstable cackle. The grip was new and of smart blue leather, not at all like the wicker satchels secured with twine with which he had been visualizing her walking the streets of the city in poverty. He watched her for a moment longer from behind the fat man, sagging at the knees a little to keep out of sight. Then he danced through the crowd sideways with one arm upraised, shrieking gaily: “Nectar!”
“Hello, Alvin.”
Gossip tides us over the first constraint of a reunion, and Mopworth used theirs to feed Nectar some straight lines he had prepared, to see how closely her answers would conform to those he had mentally predicted.
“Fine . . . Fine . . . Yes, she married Dr. Rappaport, and do you know what? Old Spofford keeps calling her Mrs. Punck.”
“It’s pry his way of denying it. I think he was interested, though they don’t speak the same language.”
But were not these victories Pyrrhic, in that the very game he played with her secretly proved her charge? How did his amusement differ from the glazed malice of those porcelain chaps who more honestly ran in packs? What at the first crack of hello was he erecting against her but that seething masculinity posed now also at times, and secretly, against Geneva? What was happening to marriage that each could now be but the other’s outer landscape? That during mealtimes and even bedtime each must vanish into a private country packed with emotional contraband? Where were the sweet participants of verse and song—gone with the “yesteryears” that drifted like whiffs of old sachet through the lines of Mrs. Punck’s “favorites.” Love itself was coming apart like the spines and covers of the crumbling heirlooms she got down from the shelf or took along on sitting jobs. What was behind the human botch of mating? Did it lie deep in some failure of animal nature, or was the culprit the squiggling ego, subtly dividing what flesh would join together? And how, even were he to find an answer to all these things, could he relate them to any comprehension of Gowan McGland? On what rock had he broken? Or had he simply hanged separately because we no longer hang together? And had he died—or lived, like all of us—with fragments of antique verse yet caught in his mind, like a kite in the branches of a tree? We long to “share” experience. Yet each of us lies in darkness with his few private scraps of treasure, like those Etruscan warriors of old who were said to be buried with their nostrils stuffed with precious stones.
“We’re going to the Dumbrowskis’ tonight, you know,” was one of Geneva’s first statements on their arrival home. Mopworth disliked his noting that though she spoke to him she said it for Nectar’s benefit, a girlish desire to show her old roommate how they lived, something of the gay tissue of their lives. “You’re coming along of course, Nectar. I just talked to Minnie on the phone, and it’s all set.”
Set, too, was Mopworth’s jaw as he thought again of the six solid hours of conversation to which we maniacally commit ourselves when we accept a dinner invitation. Who do we think we are? he thought as he carried Nectar’s luggage to the guest room, tramping on the carpet to suggest to himself the barren wastes of dialogue across which they must again slog side by side with Jack Dumbrowski. Why their two households had begun to exchange invitations was one of the mysteries of a social system administered by women, which Mopworth did not feel equipped to discuss. He secretly bewailed what he had quickly perceived to be one of the curses of the suburbs: the perfect negative correlation (as the statisticians called it) between friendship and social life. The two had nothing to do with one another, as they still might, say, in such benighted back reaches as Cedar Rapids or Stoke on Trent.
“I’ve never read any of his books,” Nectar was telling Geneva over their first drink when he returned.
“Of course you haven’t,” Mopworth said. “What you admit is that you have read Jack Dumbrowski. That’s a confession.”
“Why do you say that, Alvin?” Mopworth knew Geneva was trying to telegraph him a warning to shut up, but he perversely avoided her eye. Instead he watched Nectar, who was having a spot of sport with Mike. Sitting on the floor saying “Kitchy koo” through the slats of the playpen, she looked really quite absurd.
“They’re full of characters saying ‘You mean—?’ to one another,” he said. “And that junky lyrical ‘somewhere’ writers stick in for atmosphere. ‘Somewhere a bird sang,’ or ‘Somewhere a screen door twanged,’ or ‘Somewhere a woman’s laughter broke the stillness of the night.’ You know the sort of thing I mean, Nectar.”
Nectar gave him a laughing nod over her shoulder. A sense of complicity with her began to dissolve his dread of her visit. He might have an ally in the war with Geneva over Dumbrowski. A belief that it might all be yet all right leaped up within him. It was partly the drink he was himself putting down, partly hope springing eternal, and though it had involved for the moment nothing more than her single laugh and the lamplight sliding along the silk scarf at her throat, it seemed enough for an evening, and possibly a lifetime. His attempted rape, or murder, of her seemed never to have occurred. It was one with all the dust we collectively and willingly sweep under the rug. His spirits rose, he turned to face Geneva with a smile. “Come on now, ducks, you’re being much too polite. You don’t like his novels any more than I do. They’re not written. And of course I don’t mean Nectar won’t find nice people at their parties.”
Geneva laughed. “Well, that’s right. None of his readers.” Then they all laughed together, and Mopworth, proud of his wife’s pleasantry, went on: “He has these tens of thousands of readers, you see, Nectar, but nobody’s ever heard of him. He’s got no reputation.”
Geneva shook her head, deploring their amusement with a smile at the floor, then changed the subject while Mopworth took the glass out of her hand to refill it. They were all quite gay by the time the sitter arrived. This turned out to be no less than Spofford, bundled in a plaid overcoat and with the earflaps of his tweed cap down as far as he could get them.
“Hello, all,” he said. “Cold snap’s started. Had your car checked, Alvin? Well, well, Nectar.”
Leaving Spofford behind in the house made Mopworth rather uneasy, for he was by now able to surmise the manner in which Spofford had passed the time in the homes of others for whom he had sat. Mopworth had never expressed this misgiving to Geneva, as it would have meant betraying a confidence, so he bore the anxiety himself. He confined his objection to Spofford as a sitter to complaints that he could press no payment on him—disingenuously, because they were as glad to have the money as Spofford was of the chance to perform his great-grandparent’s role. Still, the thought of Spofford’s knowing as much about them as he did about the Wolmars and the Wilcoxes and whoever else’s premises he had scoured was a chilling thought. Therefore Mopworth kept all letters and private documents in a locked drawer, in a study itself locked (let the old poop make what he wanted of that if he tried the door). His mind was further relieved tonight by Spofford’s asking whether it was all right if he asked Emil Rappaport to drop in for a game of chess. “By all means, and help yourselves to the whiskey,” Mopworth said.
He put it out of his mind as he left the house and made for the one across the road, still filling Nectar in on their host as he bundled his two women along over the frozen ruts that lay between. “Richness of characterization is obtained by saying ‘part of her’ all the time. Part of her wanted so-and-so, while another part of her wanted such-and-such.” “Alvin!” Geneva scolded as they hurried up the walk. They were all laughing through chattering teeth when the door opened and Dumbrowski himself spread wide his arms for Geneva to run into.
“Come you in, one and all! Ah, and the extra dividend as promised,” he said, shaking Nectar’s hand in both of his. His green eyes darted from face to face like dragonflies over the surface of a pond. “Alvin. Glad to see you. Come join the throng.”
He was wearing a plaid jacket with black silk lapels, on one of which was a stain of grease which Mopworth found enormously encouraging. A sort of postscript to his reddish hair grew in a small bit of beard on the top of his chin, parted, its ends twisted into spears and possibly waxed. But that was the grooming normally given a mustache, was it not? Are we not correct in this assumption? Then why—?
“Minnie, some more guests! Minniehaha!”
Minnie was almost as tall as Jack, but a good deal thinner. Bent shoulders and a pale face consumed by the strain of getting a counterfeit passed in the world as a true coin made her seem half her size. They had no children, but she had that look characteristic of women burdened with husbands to whom they must play second fiddle, which sometimes curiously resembles that of women worn out with childbearing. She had to sustain a hoax that Jack was a “hell of a swell egg” as well as a good writer, twin delusions still dear to himself but through which she herself may have begun to see. For lately the strain was beginning to tell; she had taken to unburdening herself to Geneva, at whose round front she enviously glanced. All this in turn made Mopworth privy to Dumbrowski’s seamy side. Minniehaha still pretended to believe that he had his little amorous indulgences coming to him—might even require them for vigor and verisimilitude in his work—but made no bones about the wear and tear of being his wife. She admitted he was selfish. The discovery that he was an ass remained yet to be made—perhaps never would be made, in keeping with those protections to the ego all women must maintain in marriage. Mopworth was touched by her valor, which in his heart he knew all wives shared, to some degree at least. Most women do their best to help us pass for men in the world, he thought.
