The Dying Animal (7 page)

The last person to take these matters seriously was John Milton, three hundred and fifty years ago. Ever read his tracts on divorce? In his day, made him many enemies. They're here, they're among my books, margins heavily annotated back in the sixties. "Did our Saviour open so to us this hazardous and accidental door of marriage to shut upon us like the gate of death...?" No, men don't know any-thing—or willingly act as though they don't—about the tough, tragic side of what they're getting into. At best they stoically think, Yes, I understand that sooner or later I'm going to relinquish sex in this marriage, but it's in order to have other, more valuable things. But do they understand what they're forsaking? To be chaste, to live without sex, well, how will you take the defeats, the compromises, the frustrations? By making more money, by making all the money you can? By making all the children you can? That helps, but it's nothing like the other thing. Because the other thing is based in your physical being, in the flesh that is born and the flesh that dies. Because only when you fuck is everything that you dislike in life and everything by which you are defeated in life purely, if momentarily, revenged. Only then are you most cleanly alive and most cleanly yourself. It's not the sex that's the corruption—it's the rest. Sex isn't just friction and shallow fun. Sex is also the revenge on death. Don't forget death. Don't ever forget it. Yes, sex too is limited in its power. I know very well how limited. But tell me, what power is greater?

Anyway, Carolyn Lyons, nearly two and a half decades later and thirty-five pounds heavier. I'd loved her old size but I soon got to like the new size, with all that monumentality at the base sustaining her slender torso. I let it inspire me as though I were Gaston Lachaise. Her wide rump and heavy thighs spoke to me of all that was female in her baled. And her movement beneath me, the subtlety of her excitement, inspired another pastoral comparison: the plowing of a softly billowing field. Carolyn the undergraduate flower you pollinated, Carolyn at forty-five you farmed. The disparity in scale between the sinuous old upper half and the substantial new lower half replicated an intriguing tension in my overall perception of her. She was for me an exciting hybrid of the intelligent, tremulous, daring pioneer who couldn't stop raising her hand in class, the beautiful dissident in gypsy drag, Janie Wyatt's most sensible sidekick, who knew all the answers back in 1965, and the assertive business executive she had become in middle age, packing the potential to overpower you.

You might have expected that as time wore on and the hothouse passion of the teacher-student taboo ceased feeding into the permissible pleasures of the present moment, our meetings would run out of nostalgic appeal. But a year had passed and that hadn't happened. Because of the ease and the calm and the physical trust inherent in a resumption of play between teammates of old and because of Carolyn's realism—the sense of proportion adult indignities had predictably imposed on the romantic expectations of a highly credentialed upper-middle-class girl—I reaped rewards that it was impossible to draw from my crazy bingeing on Consuela's breasts. Our harmonious, no-nonsense evenings in bed—scheduled by cell phone, on the run, for whenever Carolyn touched down at Kennedy from one of her business trips—now provided the only point of contact with my pre-Consuela confidence. I never needed more the straightforward satiation Carolyn so dependably afforded now that she'd been tested as a woman and stoically survived. Each of us was getting exactly what we wanted. It was a joint venture, our sexual partnership, that profited us both and that was strongly colored by Carolyn's crisp executive manner. Here pleasure and equilibrium combined.

Then came the night that Consuela pulled out her tampon and stood there in my bathroom, with one knee dipping toward the other and, like Mantegna's Saint Sebastian, bleeding in a trickle down her thighs while I watched. Was it thrilling? Was I delighted? Was I mesmerized? Sure, but again I felt like a boy. I had set out to demand the most from her, and when she shamelessly obliged, I wound up again intimidating myself. There seemed nothing to be done—if I wished not to be humbled completely by her exotic matter-of-factness—except to fall to my knees to lick her clean. Which she allowed to happen without comment. Making me into a still smaller boy. One's impossible character. The stupidity of being oneself. The unavoidable comedy of being anyone at all. Each new excess weakening me further—yet what is an insatiable man to do?

The expression on her face? I was at her feet. I was on the floor. My own face was pressed to her flesh like a feeding infant's, so I could see nothing of hers. But I told you, I don't believe she was intimidated. There was no overwhelming new emotion for Consuela to deal with. Once we'd got past the preliminaries as lovers, she seemed able to assimilate easily enough whatever her nudity provoked in me. It made no sense to her that a married man like George O'Hearn should be kissing a fully clothed young woman in a public place at eight in the morning—
that
was chaos to Consuela. But this? This was just a novel divertissement. This was coming to her, the physical fate she so lightly wore. Surely the attention being accorded by the cultural authority down on his knees wasn't something that made her feel unimportant. Consuela had been alluring to boys all her life, loved by her family all her life, adored by her father
all her life, so that self-possession, repose, a kind of statuesque equanimity, was instinctively the form her theatricality took. Somehow Consuela had been spared the awkwardness that is given to just about everyone.

That was a Thursday night. Friday night Carolyn came right from the airport to me, and on Saturday morning I was at the table, already over breakfast, when she marched into the kitchen from the shower wearing my terrycloth robe and holding in her hand a bloody tampon half wrapped in toilet paper. First she showed it to me and then she threw it at me. "You are fucking other women. Tell me the truth," Carolyn said, "and then I'm going. I don't like this. I had two husbands who fucked other women. I didn't like it then and I don't like it now. And least of all with you. You make the kind of connection we have—and then you do this. You have everything you want as you want it—fucking like ours outside of domesticity and outside of romance—and then you do this. There aren't many like me, David. I have an interest in what you have an interest in. I understand what's what. Harmonious hedonism. I am one in a million, idiot—so how could you possibly do this?" She spoke not angrily like a wife fortified by the ironclad historical claim but like a courtesan of renown, out of indisputable erotic superiority. She had a right to do so: most people bring to bed with them the worst of their biography—Carolyn brought only the best. No, she wasn't angry; she was humiliated and undone. Once more, her bountiful sexuality had been deemed less than enough by another unworthy, unsatisfiable man. She said, "I'm not going to quarrel with you. I want to know the truth and then you'll never see me again."

I tried to be as composed as possible, only mildly curious, when I asked, "Where did you find this?" The tampon was now on the kitchen table, lying between the butter dish and the teapot. "In the bathroom. In the trash basket." "Well, I don't know whose it is or how it got there." "Why don't you put it on your bagel and eat it?" Carolyn suggested. All I said, by way of reply, was "I would, gladly, if that would make you happy. But I don't know whose it is. I think I should know whose it is before I eat it." "I can't put up with this, David. It makes me furious." "I have a thought. I have a suggestion. My friend George," I said, "has a key to the apartment. He's won a Pulitzer, he gives readings, he teaches at the New School, he meets women, girls, he sleeps with everyone he meets, and since obviously he cannot bring them home to his wife and four children, and since to find a hotel room in New York is sometimes impossible, and since he is always short on funds anyway, and since the women are married, many of them, and he can't take them to
their
houses"—every word I spoke, true so far—"he sometimes brings them here."

Now that was not true. That was the same durable lie with which I had saved myself before when, over the years, some woman's incriminating personal belonging—though admittedly never one quite so primordial—was discovered that had been either negligently or deliberately left behind. The durable lie of the run-of-the-mill roué. Nothing to boast about there.

"So," Carolyn said, "George fucks all these women in your bed." "Not all of them. But some, yes. He uses the bed in the guest room. He is my friend. His marriage is not paradise. He reminds me of myself when I was married. George feels pure only in his transgressions. His obedient side makes him sick. How can I say no?" "You're too meticulous for that, David. You're too orderly for that. I don't believe a word you're saying. Everything in your life is just so, everything is considered, everything is deliberate—" "Well, that alone should convince you—" "Someone was here, David." "No one," I said, "not with me. I really don't know whose tampon it is." It was a fierce, tense situation, but by bluntly lying right into her face, I survived and, fortunately, she did not leave me when I needed her most. She left only later, and at my request.

Excuse me, I have to take that call. I must answer. Excuse...

Sorry to be away so long. It wasn't even the call I'm waiting for. Sorry to leave you alone like this, but it was my son. He phoned to tell me how insulted he still is by everything I said at our last meeting and to be sure I got the angry letter he wrote.

Look, I never thought that it would be easy for us, and for all I know he might have started hating me even without encouragement. I knew it was a difficult escape, and I knew I could take only myself over the wall. If I'd taken him, had that even been possible, it wouldn't have made sense because he was eight years old and I couldn't have lived the way I wanted to. I had to betray him, and for that I am not forgiven and never will be.

This past year he became an adulterer at the age of forty-two; ever since he's begun showing up unannounced at my door. Eleven, twelve o'clock at night, one, even two in the morning, and there he is on the intercom. "It's me. Let me up, ring me in!" He argues with his wife, storms out of the house, gets in the car, and, despite himself, he winds up here. After he'd grown up, we hardly saw each other for years on end; for months we didn't so much as speak on the phone. You can imagine my surprise at his first midnight visit. What are you here for, I ask him. He's in trouble. He's in a crisis. He's suffering. Why? He has a girlfriend. A young woman of twenty-six who recently came to work for him. He runs a little company that restores damaged works of art. That was his mother's occupation until she retired: art conservator. He went into her field after getting his Ph.D. from NYU, joined forces with her, and now the business is quite successful, with eighteen people working for him in a SoHo loft. A lot of gallery work, private collectors, auction houses, consultant to Sotheby's, and so on. Kenny's a big, good-looking man, dresses impeccably, speaks authoritatively, writes intelligently, converses easily in French and German—out in the art world he's obviously impressive. But not with me. My deficiencies are at the root of his suffering. Put him anywhere near me and the wound within begins to hemorrhage. At his work he's active, healthy, solid, not insufficient in any way, but I have only to speak and I paralyze everything strong in him. And I have merely to remain silent while
he
speaks in order to undermine everything that makes him effectual. I'm the father he can't defeat, the father in whose presence his powers are overwhelmed. Why? Perhaps because I wasn't present. I was absent and terrifying. I was absent and entirely too full of meaning. I failed him. That's sufficient reason to make a calm relationship out of the question. There's nothing in our history to impede the filial instinct to lay every impediment at the father's feet.

I am Kenny's Karamazov father, the base, the monstrous force with whom he, a saint of love, a man who must behave well all the time, feels himself wronged and parricidal, as though he were all the brothers Karamazov in one. Parents play a legendary role in the minds of their children, and that my ordained legend has been Dostoyevskian I know from as far back as the late seventies, when I received in the mail a copy of a paper Kenny had written as a Princeton sophomore, an A paper on
The Brothers Karamazov.
It wasn't hard to ascertain the book's relevance as an exaggerated fantasy of his own condition. Kenny was one of those overheated kids for whom whatever he read had a personal significance that eradicated everything else germane to literature. He was by then wholly preoccupied with our estrangement and, inevitably, the focus of his paper was the father. A depraved sensualist. A solitary old lecher. An old man with his young girls. A great buffoon who sets up a harem of loose women in his house. A father who, you may remember, abandons his first child, ignores all his children, "for a child," Dostoyevsky writes, "would have gotten in the way of his debaucheries." You've not read
The Brothers Karamazov?
But you must, if only for the amusing portrait of the profligate wickedness of the shameful father.

Whenever Kenny would come to me distraught back in his adolescence, it was always over the same issue. It still is: something has threatened his idea of himself as a punctiliously upright person. One way or another, I would encourage him to modulate that idea, to temper it a bit, but suggesting that would make him furious and he would turn around and run back to his mother. I remember I asked him once, when he was thirteen and starting high school and beginning to look and sound like something more than a child, whether he would like to stay with me for the summer in a house I'd rented up in the Catskills, not far from my parents' hotel. It was an afternoon in May and we were at a Mets game. Another of our painful Sundays together. He was so chagrined by the invitation that he had to rush off to vomit in the men's room at Shea. In the old days, in the Old World, fathers used to initiate their sons into sex by taking them to the whorehouse, and it was as though that was what I had proposed. He vomited because if he came to be with me, one of my girls might be around. Maybe two. Maybe more. Because in his mind my house
was
the whorehouse. Yet his vomiting bespoke not just revulsion with me but, even more, revulsion with his revulsion. Why? Because of what he desperately wanted, because even with a father with whom he's angry and disappointed, the moment together with him is so powerful and the yearning for him is so great. He was still a boy in a helpless predicament. This was before he cauterized the wound by turning himself into a prig.