A Fan's Notes (54 page)

“
Freddy is our son,
”
he
’
d offer in mock protest to her demands that I get my fat ass off the davenport and out looking for work.
“
Our baby,
”
he
’
d protest, sticking out his tongue and elfishly rolling his eyes around in their sockets.
“
Isn
’
t he an adorable little fatty-watty?
”
Then the Counselor and I would giggle and pour ourselves another drink from the bottle purchased with the money earned by those thrilling legs.
“
Our baby,
”
the Counselor would repeat for emphasis, and again those eyes would go flitting about their sockets. He
’
d sigh and wag his head with weary and resigned exasperation; heavy with responsibility he was. Only he, that mock head-wagging seemed to say, understood the burdens of raising children.

I never ceased to marvel at the Counselor
’
s relationship with women. Though he had reverence for them, he never had any understanding of the homey things that hypnotize then\ and wasn
’
t truly happy unless he and the girl were running helter-skelter on the edge of the abyss: the Counselor wanted them to gather some glimpse of what hell permanent relationships can be. Two nights before Christmas the dancer tumbled into the abyss. Beginning with some harsh and ferruginous clanging of pans in the kitchen, to which the Counselor snapped,
“
Quiet, hon, you
’
ll wake the baby,
”
the scene ballooned to encompass a flashing butcher knife, a broken kitchen window, the wail of a police siren. Having fled the hysteria, the Counselor and I stood among some moon lit orange trees in the back yard, dramatically wringing our hands and looking at each other with feigned and horrified dismay, as though quite unable to imagine what had sent the poor girl round the bend.
“
And after all we
’
ve done for her,
”
the Counselor said. That night she moved out and into an apartment with some fellow chorines. By Christmas Day the Counselor and I were without money, beer, cigarettes, or food and were forced to dine off some cookies, wrapped in brilliant gold and silver paper, with which our late hostess, in one of her jollier moods had thoughtfully decorated the Christmas tree. Attempting to ease our financial predicament, we had the night before telephoned the two Watertownians we knew in the Miami area, high school classmates who had fled both the cold and the responsibility of families. Offering to help, the first was extremely solicitous, his voice nearly breaking in sympathy with our plight. He was beautiful. Fearing that he might not find our apartment, he ordered the Counselor and me to stand in front of a drugstore he knew on Collins Avenue. Before telephoning him again, we waited three hours. Without any explanation his
“
wife
”
said he
’
d simply changed his mind about helping us, at the moment was taking a bath in preparation for midnight Mass, and couldn
’
t be disturbed.

The other man we knew, a would-be musical comedy star who was always bouncing breathlessly in and out of the apartment announcing that he was flying to the Coast on Monday for a screen test or becoming a newscaster on TV for five hundred a week the first of the month, was living with and off of a wealthy refugee from Castro
’
s Cuba named Chiquita. Deciding to circumvent our friend, who was generally so busy studying himself in the mirror he never listened to one any way, we went directly to Chiquita for the dough. She said it wasn
’
t nice to ask for money on Christmas Eve. At three in the morning, three nights later, we heard a guttural, falsetto baritone singing,
“
If I loved you, Tiiimmme and again I would try to say …
”
Opening the front door, we found our friend and Chiquita heavy-laden with three cases of beer, Ritz crack ers, potato chips, cheese dip, and cigarettes. The Counselor and I ate, drank, and smoked voraciously while, to the ap proving and adoring nods of Chiquita, our friend sang the entire scores of
Carousel, Oklahoma!
and
Show Boat
. He was beautiful, too. By telephoning acquaintances about the country and prevaricating outrageously about misfortunes that had befallen us, we managed to get by wire enough money to live comfortably a few more weeks. Then we exhausted our acquaintances and went home.

Because he had been so long away from his practice, and it seemed to make little difference where he set up shop, the Counselor made the gravest error of his career and decided to hang his shingle in Watertown. Neither of us understood that for us home had become a place we envisioned in much too nostalgic a way. Tail tucked in, I came back to the farm, refinished and sold a few antiques, and still without a job in August, and even after the humiliating interview with the superintendent, I signed a contract to teach at Glacial Falls. Which is what I was doing when at the New Parrot Restaurant I had what, at the time, I took to be a heart attack.

It would be nice if I could say that on walking out of the receiving room of the hospital that Sunday I foreswore drinking, returned to Glacial Falls, made the students worship me for my sense of dedication, and became a different man. I didn
’
t. Each weekend I continued to journey to Watertown where, to my consternation and dismay, I found that no matter with what unctuousness I forced myself to cheer I had no interest in the game, which meant in effect no real interest in anything. As a result I took, furtively sticking my tongue out at the superintendent, to drinking during the week (which I had promised him I wouldn
’
t do, a promise he had no right to extract from me), twelve, fourteen, twenty glasses of beer a night. Fearing another nutritive failure, I followed this beer by gorging myself on thick cuts of prime rib or pork chops, on Italian bread larded heavily with butter, on spaghetti, linguini, or ravioli. Crowning these caloric orgies with two or three black coffees containing Tia Maria, a syrupy, cocoa-based cordial, I was home in bed within moments after eating. I took twelve hours of sluggish, dreamless sleep. Rising more lethargically than ever, and furiously gargling some mouthwash, I now faced the children without even the grace of complete sobriety. In a condition of alcoholic asperity I passed the days in the classroom, in the faculty and department meetings, and at the Italian saloon where I could invariably be found at the bar within ten minutes of school
’
s closing; passed the days impatiently waiting for June, when, as prescribed by school policy, I could affix passing grades to the students
’
reports and get the hell out. Not being in the least needed, I sensed in cashing my pay checks th
e exhilaration which must accom
pany highway robbery. Physically I became as protean as a chameleon, able to discern the almost daily expansion of my waistline, the way my neck was increasingly sagging over the folds of my collar. After that unremitting spring of beer, pasta, Tia Maria, and futility, I found my body thirty pounds overweight, my cerebrum as dopey as a eunuch
’
s dong.

To sustain a modicum of stability over the spring I went back to Hawthorne, and especially to The Scarlet Letter. My previous readings of Hawthorne had been hostile and sneering; and since so many better qualified to judge him than I esteemed him a writer of the very highest order, I went to him with the uneasiness of one prepared to make cloying amends. His obdurate and unrelieved probing of the evil in men, particularly his so shackling the characters of his somber world with scarcely bearable yokes of guilt, had aroused in me an understandable distress. In the modern and enlightened sunshine of Freud, in this Aqacreontic milieu where we were all going to be absolved of guilt and its ensuing remorse, Hawthorne had seemed to me irrelevant and spurious. Reading Hawthorne anew was revealing.. Having prostrated myself before the Freudians and found no relief there was only one of the reasons. It seemed to me I had lived long enough in the world to see that sin and remorse are as much a parcel, and a necessary parcel, of men as love and forgiveness are; moreover, not only are there certain things from which, this side of heaven, men should not be absolved (does one ever forgive the German his final solution to the Jewish
“
problem
”
?), but employing all the psychological ploys available there are acts from which men never completely absolve themselves. Read ing him in the light of this belief, I soon developed a crush on Hawthorne. I forced unanalogous parallels between his life and mine. Because these pages had begun to form themselves in my mind, the parallel I most cherished was his Custom House description of the languor which prevented him, while working surrounded by men whose existence was bounded by the succulence of past and anticipated meals, from sitting down to write
The Scarlet Letter
.
“
Teaching
”
children granted immunity from failure, attending meetings chaired by a man who believed what O. Henry was up to was writing, in the teachers
’
room overhearing my colleagues discuss the previous night
’
s episode of
Ben Casey
, their notion of high and endur ing drama (oh, Dr. Casey, talk about the brain
’
s malignancies!); these things, I told myself, were producing in me a similarly impotent languor. When the summer holiday finally came, I returned to the farm, waddled my pasta-bloated body about the wide yard, looked up at the unvarying blue of the sky, and re-experienced that top-of-the-world feeling. Then I entered the house and slowly ascended the stairs to this room. Which I created, and which I love.

In the afternoons I lay face up on a water mattress and watched the compact white clouds run down the sky, or face down looked into the blue-green water—chlorinated and temulent to the smell—of the mail-order, children
’
s swimming pool on which I floated. Seated in a canvas lawn chair beside me, my mother, whose face was lined with age, read to me what
McCall
’
s
and
Woman
’
s Day
and
The Ladies
’
Home Journal
had to say about fatness. Christie III sat beside her chair, watching every move I made. It was a watching which began the day I arrived and never ceased, as though, since I had left him on the day I entered the hospital, he anticipated that at any moment I would leave him again. He was old, and around his pink and brown lips a number of white hairs had sprouted. Lettuce and green beans and asparagus, my mother read to me, had been designated
“
fat blasters.
”
It had now been determined that persons have distinct metabolic patterns and can diet forever without losing weight unless, in the one known way to break the pattern and establish new dietary habits, they fast for two days. At that suggestion my mother had looked hopefully at me. Baked beans have five hundred calories per cup.
“
Can you imagine?
”
Raising my head from the mattress, I had obliged my mother by looking incredulous. What it all amounted to was that my mother saw me old whereas she imagined me still young, and, worse, uncomely, whereas against the evidence of her eyes she wanted to find me attractive. Because I hadn
’
t the courage to tell her what it was I was doing, I gave her a lie to live with, telling her that in the fall I was to teach at a high school downstate. Perhaps, though, I needn
’
t have lied. At five, morning after morning, she had heard me in the kitchen drinking coffee, had been conscious of me all the forenoons and all the evenings filling up page upon page of blank paper; and if, surmising the fury with which I worked, she sensed that I was putting down a testament, or even if she knew this and that I had no job downstate, she never said so: she held her peace. Once she asked what I was doing upstairs. When I saturninely replied that I was
“
making some notes,
”
she said,
“
Oh,
”
and we went back to the subject of my health. Mixing the dietary with the simplistic mysticism of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, she told me that it was his belief that if a man saw himself in one way, trim or triumphant or jolly, long enough and hard enough, he became that vision of himself.
“
Norman Vincent Peale,
”
I said,
“
ought to be locked up.
”
My mother was obstinate.
“
I know it
’
s true,
”
she said. So for a long time I lay on the water mattress, smelling the chlorine and slowly—as slowly as ever the clouds ran down the sky—drifted round and round in the children
’
s pool, thinking that perhaps it was so. But now that I no longer saw myself emblazoned on book jackets, now that I could no longer sustain my fantasy of my football empire among the islands, I could see myself hardly affirmatively at all. What I did see was a kind of poor man
’
s Augie seated hot afternoons at the outdoor cafe overlooking Rome
’
s Borghese Gardens and putting down words, in the hope not so much that they would be read or that they contained poignant or disturbing meanings as that, written more in negative apprehension, once dead I would be dumb forever—which, as Augie said,
“
is no reason to decline to speak and stir or to be what you are.
”
There was not much I had to be affirmative about. Having rejected grandiose ambitions at thirty-three, I saw myself very narrowly as a man with one suit of clothes, two thousand dollars
’
life insurance (
“
planting
”
dough), and four hundred bucks in my pocket, as one who had to go away from this place, this room, and find a way to live in the world. The thought of leaving disturbed me greatly.

Within a year and a half of our homecoming from Florida, the Counselor had been disbarred for forging a five-hundred dollar check which had been made payable both to him as attorney-of-record and to the client. Having business out of town and shy of cash, the Counselor and I had driven about one rain-swept afternoon seeking the client to get his endorsement. Unable to locate him, we had arrived at the bank only moments before its customary 3 p.m. closing; and in order that the Counselor not be held up at the cashier
’
s window with explanations of why he was signing the client
’
s name, without any misgivings I signed it. That we had so lightheartedly conspired on a
“
felony
”
indicates not only how far we had drifted from home but how little we comprehended the solemnity with which the Counselor
’
s colleagues wished to be taken. By the time the Counselor returned from his trip (when, as there had never been any doubt he would do, he promptly paid the client), the forgery had come to light and disbarment proceed ings were already under way. Even then the Counselor com pounded his predicament by not taking the proceedings straight-facedly enough. Imagining that he, like me, had with some of his colleagues engaged in adolescent-circle jerks; that he had known others when their countenances were being as sailed by pubescent acne (
“
whore boils,
”
we had called it); and that still others were known to him before they knew of underarm niceties and went a week at a time without under wear changes—imagining these things, I found it easy to comprehend the Counselor
’
s inability to accept their self-righteous little foot-stompings as celestial epiphanies. Unable to accept his attitude as a proper one, the executive committee of the local bar referred the matter to the Appellate Division, and after a most vigorous prosecution, the Counselor found himself without a license.