The Dying Animal (8 page)

In his last year of college he thought, correctly, that he might have impregnated one of his classmates. He was too alarmed at first to tell his mother, so he came to me. I assured him that if the girl actually turned out to be pregnant, he hadn't to marry her. This wasn't 1901. If she was determined to have the baby, as she was already insisting, then that was her choice, not his. Pro-choice I was, but that didn't mean pro her choice for him. I urged him to remind her as often as he could that, at the age of twenty-one and just graduating from college, he didn't want a child, couldn't support a child, didn't intend in any way to be responsible for a child. If, at twenty-one, she wanted the responsibility all on her own, that was a decision made by her for herself alone. I offered him money to pay for an abortion. I told him I was behind him and not to cave in. "But what if she won't change her mind? What," he asked me, "if she flatly refuses?" I said that if she didn't come to her senses, she would have to live with the consequences. I reminded him that nobody could make him do what he didn't want to do. I said what I wished some forceful man had said to me when I was on the brink of making
my
mistake. I said, "Living in a country like ours, whose key documents are all about emancipation, all directed at guaranteeing individual liberty, living in a free system that is basically indifferent to how you behave as long as the behavior is lawful, the misery that comes your way is most likely to be self-generated. It would be another matter if you were living in Nazi-occupied Europe or in Communist-dominated Europe or in Mao Zedong's China. There they manufacture the misery for you; you don't have to take a single wrong step in order never to want to get up in the morning. But here, free of totalitarianism, a man like you has to provide himself his own misery. You, moreover, are intelligent, articulate, good-looking, well educated—you are
made
to thrive in a country like this one. Here the only tyrant lying in wait will be convention, which is not to be taken lightly either. Read Tocqueville, if you haven't yet. He's not outdated, not on the subject of 'men being forced through the same sieve.' The point is that you shouldn't think that you miraculously have to become a beatnik or a bohemian or a hippie to elude the trammels of convention. Successfully doing so doesn't require exaggerations of conduct or oddities of dress that are alien to your temperament and your upbringing. Not at all. All you have to do, Ken, is to find your force. You have it, I know you have it—it is immobilized only by the newness of the predicament. If you want to live intelligently beyond the blackmail of the slogans and the unexamined rules, you have only to find your own..." Et cetera, et cetera. The Declaration of Independence. The Bill of Rights. The Gettysburg Address. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Fourteenth Amendment. All three of the Civil War amendments. I went over everything with him. I found the Tocqueville for him. I figured, he's twenty-one, at long last we can talk. I out-Poloniused Polonius. What I was telling him, after all, wasn't so far out, certainly not for 1979. Nor would it have been back when I needed it drummed into
my
head. Conceived in liberty—that's just good American common sense. But when I was finished, what did he do? He began to recount to me all her outstanding qualities. I asked, "What about
your
qualities?" But he didn't seem to hear me, just started in again to tell me how smart she was, how pretty she was, what a funny girl she was, he told me about her terrific family, and a couple months later he married her.

I know all the objections that a pure and moral young man can give to claiming personal sovereignty. I know all the admirable labels to attach to not asserting one's sovereignty. Well, Kenny's difficulty is that he must be admirable whatever the cost. He lives in fear of a woman telling him he's not. "Selfish" is the word that cripples him. You selfish bastard. He's terrified of that judgment, so that's the judgment that rules. Yes, count on Kenny for the admirable thing, whatever it may be, which is why when Todd, his oldest child, entered high school and my daughter-in-law said that they had to have more children, he became a father three more times in the next six years. At just the point when he was sick and tired of her. Because he's so admirable, he cannot leave his wife for the girlfriend, he cannot leave the girlfriend for the wife, and of course he cannot leave his young children. God knows he cannot leave his mother. The one he can leave is me. But he grew up with the list of grievances, and so, in the years immediately after the divorce, whenever I saw him I had to plead my case, at the zoo, at the movies, at the ballgame, demonstrating that I'm not what his mother says I am.

I gave it up because I
am
what she says I am. He was her creature, and by the time he went off to college, I wasn't going to contend any longer for somebody I made sick to his stomach. I gave it up because I didn't care to feign the feminine need against which Kenny has no defense. To the pathos of feminine need my son is most cruelly addicted. During those years he was alone with his mother cultivating this archaic addiction—which, by the way, in the days of the dependent woman enslaved all the best men—he and I would always spend two weeks together in the summer at my parents' little hotel. A relief for me because my parents took over. They were starved for all the family doings, and because of our history he and I couldn't begin to make a go of it. But once the grandparents were gone, once he was in graduate school, married, a father ... Yet he always called me when one of his children was born. Kind of him, given his feelings about me. That I lost I of course knew long ago. But Kenny lost too. The consequences of my being what I am are long term. These domestic disasters are dynastic.

Though suddenly, once a month, once every six weeks, he comes to drain himself in my presence of what's poisoning him. There's fear in his eyes, there's rage in his heart, there's weariness in his voice; even his elegant clothes no longer fit. The wife is unhappy and angry about the girlfriend, the girlfriend is complaining and resentful of the wife, and the children are frightened and cry out in their sleep. As for conjugal sex, a heinous duty he stoically performs, that is beyond even his fortitude now. Arguments abound, irritable bowel syndrome abounds, placation abounds, threats abound, as do counterthreats. But when I ask, "Then why not leave?" he tells me that leaving would destroy his family. No one would survive, everybody would have a breakdown, the suffering would be too great all around. Instead, everyone must cling to everyone else.

What's implicit is how much more honorable he is than the father who walked out on him when he was eight. His life has a significance that mine does not. This is his strong suit. This is where he dominates and is superior to me.

"Kenny," I tell him, "why not finally confront your father as a reality? Confront at long last your father's prick. This is the reality of a father. We lie to a child about these things. There cannot be candor about the father's prick to a child. That many fathers cannot contain themselves in a marriage—it's just as well that's a secret from the little ones. But you are a man. You know the score. You know all these artists. You know all these dealers. You must have some idea of how adults live their lives. Is this still the biggest scandal imaginable?"

All he and I do is berate each other, though not in the established tradition. Beyond the pages of Dostoyevsky, the story is traditionally the opposite: the father's the customary constraining authority, the son is incorrigible, and the castigation flows the other way. Yet he continues to come here, and whenever he rings the bell, I let him up. "Your girlfriend is how old?" I ask. "And having an affair with a married man of forty-two, a father of four, who is her boss? So she is not such a paragon either. Only you are the paragon. You and your mother." You should hear him about this girl. A chemist who also has a degree in art history.
And
plays the oboe. Wonderful, I tell him. Even in your adultery you are better than I am. He won't even call it adultery. His adultery is different from everyone else's. It's too committed an arrangement to be called adultery. And commitment is what I lack. My adulteries weren't serious enough to suit him.

Well, that is true. I tried not to have it be serious. But for him adultery is the recruitment of the new wife. He went to meet her family. That's what he was just telling me, how he flew down with her yesterday to meet them. "You flew to Florida," I asked him, "back and forth in a day to meet her parents? But this is adultery. What do her parents have to do with it?" He tells me that at the outset, at the airport, her parents are cold and very skeptical, but by the time they all sit down together in the condo for dinner, they tell her that they love him. Love him like their own son. Everybody loves everybody. It was worth the trip. "And did you meet your girlfriend's sister and her lovely children?" I asked him. "Did you meet her brother and
his
lovely children?" Oh boy, the little prison that is his current marriage he is about to trade in for a maximum-security facility. Headed once again straight for the slammer. I tell him, "Kenny, you want license and approval both? Well, it so happens that I willingly give license and approval both." But he doesn't stop at that. It's not enough that he's got the one father in this whole big country who will endorse what he's doing and maybe even set him up with another piece of ass with a wonderful family in Florida. I must also yield to the superiority. "The oboe too," I said. "Isn't that just grand? I'm sure she writes poetry in her spare time. I'm sure her parents do too." Credentials, credentials, credentials. This one cannot fuck if he doesn't have a dominatrix over him snapping a whip. This one cannot fuck if the girl is not dressed like a chambermaid. Some can fuck only midgets, some only criminals, some only chickens. My son can fuck only a girl with the right moral credentials. Please, I tell him, it's a perversity, no better or worse than any other. Recognize it for what it is and don't feel so special.

Here. The letter he was afraid might have been lost in the mail. Dated later the very night last week that he came to see me. As though over this past year of our trading insults I haven't got ten others like it. "You're a hundred times worse than I thought." That's the beginning. That's the boilerplate. Then this. Let me read it to you. "You keep going on. I couldn't believe it. The things you said to me. You must assert yourself all the time, prove that your choice in life was the right one and mine the cowardly one, the grotesque one, the wrong one. I came to you distressed in the extreme, and the mental violence you directed at me. The sixties—he owes all that he is today to how seriously he took Janis Joplin. Without Janis Joplin never could he have emerged at the age of seventy as the very picture of a pathetic old fool. The long white pageboy of important hair, the turkey wattle half hidden behind the fancy foulard—when will you begin to rouge your cheeks, Herr von Aschenbach? What do you think you look like? Do you have any idea? All that devotion to the Higher Life. Manning the aesthetic barricades on Channel Thirteen. The singlehanded battle to maintain cultural standards in a mass society. But what about observing ordinary standards of decency? Of course you didn't have the guts to stay in academic life and be serious; you've never been serious for a day in your life. Janie Wyatt, where is
she
now? How many failed marriages? How many breakdowns? In what psychiatric hospital has she been a patient for lo these many years? These girls go to college, and they shouldn't be protected from you? You are the living argument
for
protecting them. I have two daughters, your granddaughters, and if I thought that my daughters were to go to a college and have as their teacher a man like my father..."

And on like that ... until ... let's see ... yes, he's stronger here. "My kids are frightened and screaming because their parents are having an argument and Daddy is so angry he is leaving the house. Do you know what it's like for me with my children when I come home at night? Do you know what it's like to hear your children cry? How
could
you know? And I protected you.
I
protected
you.
I tried not to believe that Mother was right. I came to your defense, I stuck up for you. I had to, you were my father. In my mind, I tried to excuse you, I tried to understand you. But the
sixties?
That explosion of childishness, that vulgar, mindless, collective regression, and that explains everything and excuses it all? Can't you come up with any better alibi? Seducing defenseless students, pursuing one's sexual interests at the expense of everyone else—that's so very necessary, is it? No, necessity is staying in a difficult marriage and raising a little child and meeting the responsibilities of an adult. All those years I thought Mother was exaggerating. But it wasn't exaggeration. I little knew until tonight what it was that she lived through. The pain you caused her, and for what? The burden you put on her—the burden you put on
me,
on a child, to be everything in the world to his mother, and for what? So you could be 'free'? I cannot bear you. I never could."

And next month he'll be back again to tell me how he can't bear me. And the month after that. And the month after that. I didn't lose him after all. His father is finally a resource. "It's me. Let me up. Ring me in!" His situation brings him no self-irony, but I believe he gets more than he lets on. He doesn't get anything? He must. He is by no means stupid. He can't be besieged forever by his childhood drama. He is? Well, perhaps so. You're probably right. He will be raw about this for the rest of his life. One of the innumerable jokes: a man of forty-two, adjoined to the thirteen-year-old boy's existence and tormented by it still. Perhaps it's just as it was at the ballgame. He's dying to break out. He's dying to get away from his mother, he's dying to go off with his father, and all he can do is vomit his heart out.

My affair with Consuela lasted for a little more than a year and a half. Only occasionally did we ever again go out for dinner or to the theater. She was too afraid of the prying press and of winding up on Page Six, and that was fine with me, because whenever I saw her I always wanted to fuck her right away and not have first to sit through some shitty play. "You know how the media are, you know what they do to people, and if I go there with you..." "Fine, don't worry," I would say agreeably, "we'll just stay home." Eventually she would stay overnight, and we would have breakfast together. We saw each other once or twice a week, and, even after the incident with the tampon, Carolyn failed to discover Consuela's existence. Still, I was never at peace about Consuela; never could I forget about the five boys she had fucked before me, two of whom turned out to be brothers, one her lover at eighteen, the other when she was twenty—Cuban brothers, Bergen County's wealthy Villareal brothers, and another cause for suffering. If it weren't for the calming influence of Carolyn and our wonderful nights together, I don't know what would have happened to me.