Full of Life
John Fante
This book is for
H. L. Mencken
with undiminished admiration.
I
T WAS
a large house because we were people with big plans. The first was already there, a mound at her waist, a thing of lambent movement, slithering and squirming like a ball of serpents. In the quiet hours before midnight I lay with my ear to the place and heard the trickling as from a spring, the gurgles and sucks and splashings.
I said, “It certainly behaves like the male of the species.”
“Not necessarily.”
“No female kicks that much.”
But she did not argue, my Joyce. She had the thing within her, and she was remote and disdainful and quite beatified.
Still, I didn’t care for the bulge.
“It’s unaesthetic,” and I suggested she wear something to pack it in.
“And kill it?”
“They make special things. I saw them.”
She looked at me with coldness—the ignorant one, the fool who had passed by in the night, a person no more, malefic, absurd.
The house had four bedrooms. It was a pretty house.
There was a picket fence around it. There was a tall peaked roof. There was a corridor of rose bushes from the street to the front door. There was a wide terra cotta arch over the front door. There was a solid brass knocker on the door. There was a 37 in the house number, and that was my lucky number. I used to cross the street and look at the whole thing with my mouth open.
My house! Four bedrooms. Space. Two of us lived there now, and one was coming. Eventually there would be seven. It was my dream. At thirty there was still time for a man to raise seven. Joyce was twenty-four. One every other year. One coming, six to go. How beautiful the world! How vast the sky! How rich the dreamer! Naturally we would have to add a room or two.
“Do you have whims? Peculiar tastes? I understand it happens. I been reading up on it.”
“Of course not.”
She was reading too: Gesell, Arnold:
Infant and Child in the Culture of Today.
“How is it?”
“Very informative.”
She looked through the French windows to the street. It was a busy street, just off Wilshire, where the busses roared, where the traffic sounded like the lowing of cattle, a steady roar sometimes zippered down the middle by the shriek of sirens, yet detached, far away, two hundred feet away.
“Can’t we have some new drapes? Do we have to have yellow drapes and green valances?”
“Valance? What’s a valance, Mother?”
“For God’s sake don’t call me that.”
“Sorry.”
She went back to Gesell, Arnold:
Infant and Child
in the Culture of Today.
There was solid reading comfort in pregnancy. The mound made a superb place to prop books, almost chin high, easy to turn pages. She was very pretty, with gray eyes incredibly bright. Something new was added to those eyes. Fearlessness. It was startling. You looked away. I glanced at the windows and found out what valances were because that was the only green at the windows, the skirt on top, ruffled.
“What kind of valance do you want, honey?”
“And please don’t honey me. I don’t like it.”
I left her sitting there, the gray eyes bright with menace, the tight mouth around a cigarette holder, the long white fingers clutching Gesell. I walked out into my front yard and stood among roses and gloated over my house. The rewards of authorship. Me, author, John Fante, composer of three books. First book sold 2300 copies. Second book sold 4800 copies. Third book sold 2100 copies. But they don’t ask for royalty statements in the picture business. If you have what they want at the moment they pay you, and pay you well. At that moment I had what they wanted, and every Thursday there came this big check.
A gentleman arrived about the valances. He was queer, with pellucid fingernails and a Paisley scarf under his belted sports coat. He wrung his tapered fingers and there was an intimacy between him and Joyce I could not share. They laughed and chatted over tea and cakes and she was delighted to have the companionship of a cock without spurs. He shuddered at the green valances, squealed in triumph as he tore them down and replaced them with blue. He sent for a truck, and the furniture was hauled away to be re-covered to match the valances.
Blue soothed Joyce. Now she was very happy. She
began to wash windows. She waxed floors. She didn’t like the washing machine and did the laundry by hand. Twice a week we had someone in to do the heavy work, but Joyce fired the woman.
“Ill do it alone. I don’t need help.”
She got very tired from so much work. There were ten shirts piled up, carefully ironed. There was a red place on her thumb, a burn. Her hair hung down, she was haggard and indeed very tired. But the bump was firm, right out there, not tired at all.
“I can’t go on much longer,” she groaned. “This big house and all.”
“But why do you do it? You know you mustn’t.”
“Do you like living in dirty surroundings?”
“Call somebody. We can afford it now.”
Ah, she detested me, gritting her teeth, bravely pushing back her fallen hair. She picked up a dustcloth and staggered into the dining room, there to polish the table, taking long desperate strokes, utterly weary, propped on her elbows, gasping for breath.
“Let me help you.”
“Don’t touch me. Don’t you dare!”
She sank into a chair, her hair hanging down, her burnt thumb aching, yet a badge for nobility, her bright weary eyes staring dangerously, the dust rag loose in her hand, a wistful smile on her lips, an expression denoting nostalgia, informing me that her thought was of a happier time, probably San Francisco in the summer of 1940, when her body was slender, when there were no back-breaking chores, when she was free and unmarried, climbing all over Telegraph Hill with her easel and paints, writing tragic love sonnets as she gazed at the Golden Gate.
“You ought to have a maid, all day long.”
For those were the fat carnal days for the scribbler, and money was piling up with Thursday coming once a week, bringing my agent full of wit and camaraderie and what was left after he and the government cut up the Paramount check. And yet, there was plenty for us all.
“Go shopping, dear. Buy yourself some things.”
God help me. I had forgotten the bulge, and I tried vainly to suck the words back into my mouth. But she did not forget and I had to pretend I wasn’t looking when she came sweeping down the stairs, a white balloon of a wife, holding back belches and pacing here and there like a prisoner.
She said, “Stop staring.”
She said, “I suppose you spend the whole day looking at slender actresses.”
She said, “What are you thinking about?”
She said, “Never again. This is the first and last.”
And sometimes I would look up to find her staring at me and shaking her head.
“In God’s name, why did I ever marry you?” I kept quiet, smiling foolishly, because I didn’t know why either, but I was very glad and proud that she had.
She got over the housework craze and the housekeeper was hired again. Now she became interested in gardening. She bought books and equipment. One day I came home to find ten sacks of steer manure in the garage. She pulled out the corridor of roses, twelve bushes, six on either side of the walk; she took a spade to them, gouged
them out of the soil and dragged them into the back yard. She hacked out the roots with a hatchet. She put on gloves and spent the days crawling under hedges, putting in bulbs, smothering them with manure and peat moss, her knees showing dark red spots, her arms scratched. She developed a passion for keeping the grounds clean. Every day she made inspections, even in the alley, going about with a gunny sack, gathering up scraps of things. She took to burning everything around the place that wasn’t nailed down—hedge clippings, leaves, pieces of wood. She dug a hole in the back yard for compost, storing lawn clippings in it, mixing manure with the clippings, watering it down, stirring it up now and then with a pronged tool.
I used to find her out there in the late afternoons when I drove into the garage. She would be standing at the incinerator, a forlorn figure with a white scarf around her head, dropping things into the fire, pieces of paper cartons stacked up, ready for burning, and Joyce staring at the flames, sometimes stirring the fire with a stick. She attained a frenzy for neatness and order around the incinerator, carefully fitting empty tin cans into each other, special boxes for the cans, special boxes for empty bottles. She made neat packages out of the day’s garbage, wrapping it in newspapers and tying it with string.
In the night I heard her wandering around the house, banging the refrigerator door, flushing the toilet, turning on the radio downstairs, walking around in the back yard. From the window I saw her moving about in the moonlight, a bulging apparition in terry cloth, the round bump moving ahead of her with majestic aplomb, a book usually under her arm, usually Gesell, Arnold:
Infant and Child in the Culture of Today.
“You can’t sleep with me any more,” she said. “Not ever.”
“Not even after he’s born?”
“It’s a girl.”
“Why do you keep insisting it’s a girl?”
“I don’t like boys. They’re nasty. They cause all the trouble in the world.”
“Girls cause trouble too.”
“Not that kind of trouble.”
“You’ll love our son.”
“Her name is Victoria.”
“His name is Nick.”
“I like Victoria better.”
“You mean, Victor?”
“I mean, Victoria.”
There was also this passionate need for her. I had it from the first time I saw her. She went away that first time, she walked out of her aunt’s house where we had met at tea, and I was no good without her, absolutely a cripple until I saw her again. But for her I might have lived out my life in other streams—a reporter, a bricklayer—whatever was at hand. My prose, such as it was, derived from her. For I was always quitting the craft, hating it, despairing, crumpling paper and throwing it across the room. But she could forage through the discarded stuff and come up with things, and I never really knew when I was good, I thought every line I ever wrote was no better than ordinary, for I had no way of being sure. But she could take the pages and
find the good stuff and save it, and plead for more, so that it became habitual with me, and 1 wrote as best I could and handed her the pages, and she did a scissors-and-paste job, and when it was done, with a beginning and middle and end, I was more startled than seeing it in print, because at first I couldn’t have done it alone.
Three years of this, four, five, and I began to have some notions about the craft, but they were her notions, and I never gave much thought to the others who might read my stuff, I only wrote it for her, and if she had not been there I might not have written it at all.
She didn’t care to read me while she was pregnant. I brought her sequences from the script and she was not interested. That winter in her fifth month I wrote a short story and she spilled coffee on it—an unheard-of thing, and she read it with yawning attention. Before the baby she would have taken the manuscript to bed with her and spent hours pruning and fixing and making marginal notes.
Like a stone, the child got between us. I worried and wondered if it would ever be the same again. I longed for the old days when I could walk into her room and snatch up some intimacy of hers, a scarf or a dress or a bit of white ribbon, and the very touch had me reeling around, croaking like a bullfrog for the joys of my beloved. The chair she sat upon before the dressing table, the glass that mirrored her lovely face, the pillow upon which she laid her head, a pair of stockings flung to launder, the disarming cunning of her silk pants, her nightgowns, her soap, her wet towels still warm after her bath: I had need for these things; they were a part of my life with her, and the smear of lipstick made no difference, for the red had come from the warm lips of my woman.
Things were changed around there now. Her gowns were specially contrived, with a big hole in front through which leered the bump, her slips were impossible sacks, her flat shoes were strictly for the rice fields, and her blouses were like pup tents. What man could take such a gown and crush it to his face and shudder with the old familiar passion? Everything smelled different too. She used to use some magic called Fernery at Twilight. It was like breathing Chopin and Edna Millay, and when its fragrance rose from her hair and shoulders I knew the flag was up and that she had chosen to be pursued. She didn’t use Fernery at Twilight any more: something else was substituted, a kind of Gayelord Hauser cologne, reeking of just plain good health, clean alcohol and simple soap. There was also the odor of vitamin tablets, of brewers’ yeast and blackstrap molasses, and a pale salve to soothe her bursting nipples.
Lying in bed, I used to hear her slushing around, and wonder what was happening to us. I smoked in the darkness and moaned in the belief that she was driving me into another woman’s arms. No, she didn’t want me any more, she was forcing me to another woman, a mistress. But what mistress? For years I had been retired from the jungle where bachelors prowled. Where was I to find another woman, even if I wanted one? I saw myself skulking about on Santa Monica Boulevard, drooling at free women in dark, offbeat saloons, sweating out clever dialogue, drinking heavily to hide the stark ugliness of such romances. No, I could not be unfaithful to Joyce. I didn’t even want to be unfaithful, and this worried me too. For was it not something of a custom for men to be unfaithful to their wives during confinement? It happened all the time out at the golf club: I heard it from all the guys. Then what was wrong with me?
Why wasn’t I on the town, chafing for forbidden joys? And so I lay there, trying to coax up a flicker of that flame for strange fruit. But there was none.
Still, I was glad to sleep alone. I had forgotten its pleasures. Four years we had lain side by side every night. I had become indoctrinated, accepting kicks without complaint, sleeping half-covered for over thirteen hundred nights. Of late her condition had rendered her worse. All sense of fair play had vanished. She had gone back to the primitive jungle where one fought for existence. Now she banged me with cold deliberation. At any hour of the night I found myself awakened by the snatch of a pillow from under my head, or the crunch of apples, or the refined torture of graham cracker crumbs against my side. She ate like a liberated refugee, coming to bed with big sandwiches and a pitcher of milk. Her milk consumption was staggering. She sat propped on pillows—mine and hers—eating and reading, mostly Gesell, Arnold:
Infant and Child in the Culture of Today.
Gesell, Arnold:
The Feeding Behavior of Infants: A Pediatric Approach to the Hygiene of Early Life
(with Ilg). Or Gilbert, Margaret:
Biography of the Unborn.