Changing the Past (36 page)
As a child Hunsicker had a pal named Bobby Marsh, in whose company he spent every moment of life that could be so employed: sat beside him in the same schoolroom, lunched with him in the cafeteria, often suppered with him at either of their homes, and each slept over at the other's house most Friday nights. These were the years from ten to twelve or thirteen. This friendship was probably physically closer than any he had ever known except the very different kind with Martha, but the idea of touching Bobby (or Bob, as he demanded to be called on turning twelve) in any manner but with boxing gloves or in a football tackle would have been unthinkable. Staying over at Bob's house, Hunsicker slept beside him in a double bed, but they never collided, something that frequently happened in the early days with Martha, whose body, even more ample in bed, had a way, an affectionate way, of encroaching on his side during the night. When the time came that he often awakened in the morning with an erection, he and Bob gradually abandoned the sleep-overs. Very likely Bob experienced the same phenomenon, but close as they were, they would have been incapable of comparing notes on such intimate matters though they sometimes discussed sex, in generic terms when the references were personal, in frank particulars only when referring to other boys who boasted of masturbation, sex with animals, peeping through bathroom windows, and one, a precocious rake or more likely just a liar, who at fourteen was never without an account of another erotic adventure, most of them with older women: the lady next door, the prettiest teacher, even the Negress who cleaned the female lavatories at school. Hunsicker's own erotic life at this period consisted exclusively of manipulating himself to fantasies concerning the breasts of Bob Marsh's sixteen-year-old sister, whose laundered brassiere he had seen, and caressed, as it hung dripping down the shower curtain.
Obviously, growing up had been otherwise with Elliot, though his father never suspected it at the time. And what would he have done if he had? Taken the boy to a whorehouseâwhen he had never been to one himself? Anyway, in an era much different from that of his father's youth, Elliot had soon enough had sex with women. As he was to assure his father, later on when the revelation came, he simply did not care for it. There could be no answer to this, and Hunsicker had not insulted either of their sensibilities by trying to find one. As with all else of life, he had made the best of existing conditions, adjusting himself when necessary.
Steam gushed from the spout of the kettle. Hunsicker dampened the ground coffee with a generous splash, then waited the requisite minute before adding the rest of the water. Drops of amber-colored liquid began to fall into the glass receptacle from the point of the inverted cone that held the paper filter. When Hunsicker was himself a child, the baby brother of a friend of his, reaching from a nearby high-chair, tipped over one of those stacked-globe coffee pots, new in that era, and was scalded horribly to death by the boiling water. At least Elliot had lived to manhood. No doubt that was the sort of thought that would be habitual from now on.
He took his filled mug to the table. Martha was seated in her usual place, having entered, in soft slippers, while he waited, staring at the wall, for the water to boil. He was surprised but not startled. She wore pajamas and robe, a costume in which she had hitherto seldom appeared on the ground floor. Martha had always had a foible regarding appropriate attire. After she put on extra weight in early middle age, Hunsicker had never again seen her nude, except when, in the closest quarters, it was impossible to see all of her, or in abbreviated costume, not bathing suit nor underwearâeven though, as he repeatedly asseverated, he found her body more sexually appealing than ever. He had never had a taste for women with the chests and hips of boysâ¦. God Almighty, what could attract a man in a body exactly like his own? Immediately he was contritely sensitive to the cruelty of the question, though it had been asked only to himself.
He added milk and sugar to Martha's coffee and joined her at the table. Only on sitting down did he remember he had, all this while, been wearing the blue blanket as shawl. He must look like a man considerably older than he was, or perhaps even like an old woman.
“Thanks,” he said, “for thinking I might be cold.”
She touched his fingers with her own, which were warm from the sides of the mug: he had never known why she often avoided the handle nor how she could endure the heat.
He covered her hand. Because he loved her, he wished there were a means by which he could share his alternative lives with her at least as entertaining narrative, but it was also because he loved her that that could never be done: he could not alter her sense of him at this late date.
But he could ask, “Have you ever thought about what might have happened in your life if you hadn't met and married me?”
“Only when I was considerably younger,” Martha said. “There was a time when I did it a lot. Oddly enough, it was right after having Elliot. You might not think that would occur to a new mother, but it did to me. I had moments of sheer panic: I thought, God, I'm really trapped and forever!”
Hunsicker was warmed now and stood up to take the covering from his shoulders. Martha rose with him, reaching for the blanket. “You
never
fold it right. I can't stand it when the corners don't square up.”
“Yet you never make a bed good and true at the corners.”
“
I
wasn't in the army. And I've told you throughout the years that I hate to get in between tightly stretched sheets and have to fight my way down inside with my toes.”
“We agree on a lot though,” Hunsicker said uncertainly. He withstood an urge to embrace her, for it would have been physically awkward with the blanket clasped to her body, and he was too morally fastidious so to beg his case.
“As a child I wanted to be a dancer,” said she. “Then later on, in college, I wrote what I thought was poetry. Does anyone still want to be another Edna St. Vincent Millay?”
Hunsicker tenderly assured her, “You could have been either.”
“No, I couldn't have,” she said with spirit. “I fell over my own feet as a young girl. And it took no great courage when I got only slightly older to see that my poetry was silly stuff.” She looked at him with her fine eyes and said proudly, “I have no regrets. I did what I should have done, am what I should have been.”
“So did I,” stated Walter Hunsicker, “so am I.” But something still remained to be said, and he said it. “I couldn't even imagine another life.”
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Copyright © 1988 by Thomas Berger
Cover photo by Awarding Book Covers
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