Boswell (46 page)

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “The fact is that when I was fifteen years old, on my first try,
on my first try,
I made a girl pregnant.”

Dr. Green looked dubious.

“I did,” I said.

“Who?”

“What does it matter? A girl.”

“Your girlfriend? A virgin?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.”

“There, you see?” the doctor said.

“Do I see what?”

“Well, sonny, you may have been taken for a ride, that’s all. Did you marry the girl?”

“No.”

“Good for you. Good for you. Sure, that’s what it was, you were taken for a ride. Oh, sure, the sperm count could go down over the years, but it’s an unlikely thing. The first time out? Seven million? Such a high proportion of short-tails and long-tails? It’s hardly likely, and that’s my professional opinion.”

“What do I owe you?”

“Hey, are you sore?”

“What do I owe you?”

“Come on, don’t get sore.”

“What do I owe you?”

“You are sore.”

“He lives with me,” I said.

“Oh,” the doctor said.

“He’s my son.”

“Well, he probably is. It could happen. Sure he is. Certainly.” -

“He’s my son!”

“I’m certain of it,” the doctor said. “The father would know a thing like that.”

“What do I owe you?”

“Fifty dollars,” Dr. Green said.

I put the money on the desk and got up to go. When I walked out of his office Dr. Green followed me. “Listen,” he said, “the next time you make love to your wife, relax.” I pressed the button for the elevator. “Your sperm are a little sluggish. Copulate only once a week. Have her use a pillow under her ass—it makes for a better angle. Make sure the room is warm but not overheated. Cut out fatty foods. Meat is very important.”

I started to walk down the stairs. The doctor stood at the top and called after me. “Try wheat germ. Get in shape. Don’t be anxious.”

“He’s my son,” I repeated to myself.
“My
son.”

I didn’t want to go home; I didn’t want to see David until I had figured it all out. I went to a bar, and as I drank I thought about Dr. Green. I was a little surprised that I wasn’t really angry. He’s my son, I thought. I began to giggle. Seven million, I thought. Father of my country. I laughed. Short-tails, I thought. Long-tails. I told the barman to leave the bottle. Only one will get through, men, but I’m asking for seven million volunteers. Who swims? Not you, short-tail. Not you, long-tail. I went into the men’s room to pee. You worthless prick, I thought. I went back to my stool at the bar. We’re dead a long time, I thought. How rare a thing it is to be alive, I thought. I told the barman about it. He shrugged. “You laymen give me a laugh,” I said. But really, I thought, how rare a thing it
is
to be alive, how really rare. It was almost clever of us to manage it. Everything was against it: a hostile solar system, booby sperm, short-tails, long-tails, fatty foods, the wrong angle, cold rooms, overheated rooms. Finally, ultimately, death itself was against it. I felt liberated, almost gay. It wasn’t unlike that sensation one has of self-congratualation at the death of a friend. What did it matter not to have sons? “All the better to hoard one’s life, my dear.”

I went home improved, buoyed by an unfamiliar illusion of well-being. Margaret assumed I had been given a clean bill of health by the doctor, and I didn’t tell her otherwise. But it didn’t last, of course; these visions never do. Moments of truth are only
moments
of truth.

A week later I made love to Margaret as in a dream. We were alone in the house and I practically seduced her. I played the phonograph and used strategic lighting; I offered her cocktails; I rubbed her neck and read poetry. I felt myself softened, like one who has just stepped out of a warm bath. I was incredibly gentle. We might have been nymphs, shepherd and shepherdess. I spoke to her in promises, in the language of vows. In bed, I fitted a pillow tenderly beneath her, preparing her as slaves prepare a bath the caliph will enter. Then at the last minute I shouted to the escaping sperm, “Now, conceive. Damn you,
conceive!”

III

For a time at least I was like anybody else. I had become someone to whom several things could happen at once. It was a shock to realize that the willingness to live complexly—doubly, trebly—to throw open one’s windows to all weathers, was the ordinary experience of most men.

Yielding to one human ritual is yielding to all. It is like being a sharecropper come North. We fanatics are simple men, unused to toilets, traffic. I had slums in me. Behind my life now, in its nooks and crannies and unseen corners, was a texture of domesticity, thick as atmosphere, as complexly
there
as government—its highways, national parks, armies—implicit in a postage stamp.

One night—we had made the book club selections for August; had decided not to take a phonograph recording that month; had chosen an alternate musical for Show-of-the-Month—I suddenly noticed that Margaret spoke with an accent. It was odd that I had never heard it before, and then I realized, Why of course,
it’s new
—as if in marrying me she had disfigured herself, had actually canted her tongue or ruined her mouth so that the sounds came out off-center, muffled, and with some eccentric emphasis. It suddenly struck me that Margaret was lonely —not lonely as we were both lonely together, playing our meaningless house by choosing books, recordings, restaurants and plays as others might figure a budget or decide what model car to buy, but lonely in a way that had nothing to do with me. It was frightening to be suddenly confronted with the tight, closed system of another human being; it was like watching someone asleep, mysterious, seductive as a frontier.

I began to wonder why Margaret had married me. Obliged, once I recognized her condition, to respond to it, I responded with anger.

“You don’t enjoy this,” I said, accusing her. I meant our marriage, being alive together, the peculiar primacy of her own unhappiness, but she thought I was speaking about our absurd household game. I needed time; I didn’t correct her.

“You think it’s unmanly.” I was really angry. My causes multiplied. I would never get them sorted.

“It’s all right,” she said softly. She said “olright.” It was not all right.

“I don’t know how to be married,” I said, stalling her.

“My life is therapeutic,” I said. “My life is a cure for my life.” She let me go on.

A strange lassitude had come over me. Though I still thought about The Club, though it was still urgent— indeed, the idea kept percolating in my mind—there had been in my life a sort of substitution of intensities, as when one playing with a shaped balloon absently shifts volumes of air from one of its sections to another. It was difficult for me to do so many things at once.

In August we went with the Holiday-of-the-Month Club on a weekend trip. Gathered with forty-five other couples at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, we looked, with our overnight cases and our name plates, like so many kids going off to summer camp. All the women except Margaret were wearing slacks or Bermuda shorts. The men in their Bermuda shorts and knee-length stockings (I wore trousers) recalled to me city people I had seen out West in starched, fresh bluejeans, as though summer, like a distant state, were something in which they would forever be dudes. The members milled about casually, introducing themselves to us unself-consciously.

“We’re waiting for Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Cohen of Queens,” said Eddie, the tourmaster.

“Where we going this time, Eddie?” asked Dodo Shivitz of Great Neck, Long Island.

“Dodo baby, I’m surprised at you,” Eddie said, grinning.

“It’s a regular military secret,” Lorraine Land said.

“Come on, Eddie,” Dodo said. “Don’t be like that.” She turned to Margaret. “In May Eddie flew us to Miami. None of us had swim suits or anything. It was terrible.”

“Sealed orders are sealed orders,” Eddie said, and walked off to another group.

Al Medler, a fat man from Queens, said, “I’m not too crazy about surprises. There’s too much of a strain on the heart.”

“Your first time? I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure,” said a small dark man whose card identified him only as Harris. He shook my hand.

“We just joined,” I said.

“Oh, yes.”

“All you people seem to know each other,” Margaret said.

“We know each other all right,” Harris said. “That’s crap about the Jerry Cohens. They won’t show up. Mister is still sore from June.”

“What happened in June?” Margaret asked.

“Grossinger’s,” Harris said darkly.

“Oh.”

“Look a’ Eddie, look a’ Eddie,” Mrs. Sylvia Fend said. “He’s whispering to Gloria.”

“It’s not right,” Mrs. Land said.

“Live and let live,” Al Medler said. “It’s less strain on the heart.”

“She’s a w-h-o-r-e,” Harris said.

“She is?”

“Of course,” Harris said expertly. “I’ve studied the economics of this thing. Your average trip is ninety-five miles.”

“Miami?”

“Once a year there’s a big trip. You don’t know when it’s coming up, though you can count on its being off-season.”

“What’s that got to do with Gloria?” Mrs. Sylvia Fend asked.

“Well, you got to figure it costs the company with food and lodging and travel twenty-five cents a mile. That’s $23.75 per person per trip. They usually get about sixty couples each trip, but summer is the slow season because the members go on their own vacations with the kids. So Eddie has to call out Gloria to make up the difference.”

“You seem to know a lot about it,” Dodo Shivitz said.

“I’m an actuary. I got to keep up,” Harris said.

“I can’t get nobody to write me a policy,” Al Medler said.

“You’re too fat, Al,” Harris said.

I drew Margaret aside. “Margaret, this isn’t for us.”

“Why? It’s more fun than Book-of-the-Month,” Margaret said.

“All aboard,” Eddie shouted from the bottom step of the bus.

“Where’s Jerry Cohen, Eddie?” demanded Harris.

“All aboard.”

“What about Jerry Cohen?”

“Jerry’s a god-damned puritan sorehead,” Eddie said.

Everybody laughed.

“All right,” Eddie said. “All right. All aboard for Mysteryville. What’s it going to be this time, folks? North, east, south, west? Where she stops nobody knows. The management is not responsible for stolen or misplaced property. Keep your eye on your own wife.”

“Whooopee,” everybody said.

“S-e-x,” Harris said.

Margaret and I weren’t allowed to sit with each other on the bus. As soon as we stepped aboard Margaret was commandeered by a tall, good-looking man named Marvin Taylor. Mrs. Taylor, a small, pretty woman of about thirty-five, sat down beside me.

“Your lovely wife and yourself aren’t Jewish, if I may ask, are you” —she leaned across my chest and read my card—“Mr. Boswell?”

“No, we’re not, Mrs. Taylor.”

“If I may say so without giving offense, we Jews are usually better sports than you gentiles. Do you play badminton, sir?”

“No.”

“It’s not important,” she said. Sighing, she settled back into the deep seat.

“It’s just that a nice game of mixed doubles helps to break the ice,” she said suddenly. She laughed and turned around to address the couple behind us. “I was just telling Mr. Boswell here that a nice game of mixed doubles helps to break the ice. Pass it on.” She turned back to me. “Your wife is very lovely. I noticed it. You two must be very happy. But tell me, she isn’t native-born, is she?”

“She is the former Principessa Margaret dei Medici of Italy,” I said.

“That’s very funny,” she said. “That’s really very funny.” Then she startled me by reaching over and taking my hand. “I like
goyim,”
she said, leaning back against the seat dreamily.

“Some of my best friends are Jews,” I offered gallantly.

We had come out of the tunnel and were driving down the New Jersey Turnpike through country that looked like a huge, well-kept golf course. Mrs. Taylor had fallen asleep holding my hand and I took it back as gently as I could. Behind and around me I could hear the mixed doubles speculating about our destination. There seemed to be a strong feeling that we were going to Washington, D.C. Sylvia Fend didn’t believe this. “Washington in the summer?” she kept saying. “Are you kidding? The heat is terrific.” In two hours we had crossed into Pennsylvania and in another half hour the bus had left the turnpike. After a while the driver pulled off onto the side of the road and Eddie, who had been sitting in the back with Gloria, went up to speak to him. As he passed through the bus he was booed. He held up his hands good- naturedly.

“We’re lost,” Al Medler said. “The thing to do is keep calm.”

“It’s a rest stop,” J. Y. Krull said. “Come on, Gloria, it’s a rest stop.” Everybody laughed. Gloria thumbed her nose at J. Y. Krull. “Gloria!” he said.

“Well, come on then,” she said and stood up and stepped into the aisle. J. Y. Krull bolted out of his seat and everyone laughed.

“Oh, sit down,” Emma Lewen said, pulling at J. Y. Krull’s arm.

Mrs. Taylor had awakened and was rubbing her eyes. “Why’ve we stopped?” she asked. “Are we there?”

“Al Medler says we’re lost,” I said.

“What a way to run a railroad,” Mrs. Taylor said.

The bus turned around ponderously; apparently the driver had made a wrong turn ten miles back. Harris leaned across the aisle toward me. “Eddie’s sore,” he said. “The company lost about five bucks because of that mistake.”

“Really?” I said.

“Figure it out,” he said.

In another hour the bus turned into a twisting, pot-holed, narrow trail. After about twenty yards it was clear that the driver would not be able to go further.

“We’ll have to walk the rest of the way,” Eddie announced. “It’s not far.”

No one knew where we were, but clearly we were in the country. In the wooded foothills of something. Eddie made an announcement: “The Holiday-of-the-Month Club has brought you all for an unforgettable August weekend to beautiful Camp Starglow, just outside Windsor, Pennsylvania.” He explained that it was a kids’ summer camp but that we’d have it all to ourselves because the first session had just ended and the second wouldn’t begin until the middle of the next week. “Be careful what you leave lying around, won’t you?” he said. Everybody laughed.