The Wallcreeper (3 page)

“I thought you were addicted to codeine.”

“Listen, man, I went to state running the mile. There are a lot of hours in the day when you’re a kid.”

I had to admit the truth of that statement. I replied, “The most ambitious thing I did at that age was let these girls pierce my ears.”

“I would have done anything in the world I thought would piss my parents off,” Stephen said. “Eagle scout was a conscious trade-off to keep my dad from killing me.”

I realized that he was not like me at all. I only did things I felt strongly moved to do. As a child I consistently felt I had no options and was surprised by my parents’ strong reactions to the entirely inevitable things I did. My life moved forward in ineluctable leaps. The only smart leap I had ever made, in their opinions, was marrying Stephen. It was what set me apart from my sister, since secretary and bikini barista are not really such different professions when you get right down to it. I mean, I’ve served plenty of coffee in my day.

“Were you in a band at Temple?” I asked.

“No. Once I moved out of my parents’ house, I calmed down a lot. I just didn’t like having people breathing down my neck.”

That made sense. It would be a reason to marry someone too shy to ask personal questions. It was also a way of saying: I wasn’t doing drugs when you met me and I’m not doing drugs now, but if you breathe down my neck, I’ll do drugs.

“Isn’t it hard,” I asked, “getting up so early in the morning on weekends after you worked all week? I mean, it’s hard for me, and I’m just writing a screenplay.” (I had intimated that I was a writer with industry connections so he wouldn’t make me work.)

“Oh, I feel great,” he said. “It’s great getting out of the lab. I feel exhilarated. I feel like I can concentrate for hours. I feel on top of the world right now. This is a really good time for me.” He reached out and clamped his hand lovingly on my leg. He was shaking.

When we got to the river, I helped him set up his blind. It was a bit cramped, so first he would get in, and then I would hand him everything he needed before going back to the car to read.

He saw a greenshank, linnets, and a poacher. He made me look at the guy. We took a picture through his spotting scope, but it didn’t turn out.

It was soon after that that I started saying, if he asked me what I was doing, “Oh, breeding and feeding.” The majestic simplicity. It always made him laugh. But I couldn’t envy the birds. Their lives weren’t as simple as mine. My life was like falling off a log comfortably located somewhere light-years above the earth.

At Elvis’s suggestion I took a course in Berndeutsch. I learned ten verbs for work: work hard (
drylige, bugle, chrampfe, schaffe, wärche
), get stuck with jobs no one else wants to do (
chrüpple
), work slowly (
chnorze
), work carelessly (
fuuschte
), work absent-mindedly (
lauere
). Stay at home and putter around doing little harmless chores (
chlütterle
). I learned fast and the teacher said maybe it was an advantage my not knowing any German. Then the ten weeks of the course were over and I didn’t know anything anymore, except that I would never look for a job. When people other than Stephen asked me what I did, I could say, “
Chlütterle.
” Another laugh line.

Elvis said he wanted to go dancing, which would involve staying out very late. Going dancing was his reason for being, and he wanted to share it with me. I wasn’t sure I could get that past Stephen, but I agreed to try. Stephen said, “That sounds like a date.”

“It totally is a date. Obviously this guy wants in my pants. But I mean, when’s the last time you went dancing? For me I think it was my sophomore year. And I wouldn’t know where to go. He’s a nice guy. I’m sure you know him. The guy with the beard at the gas station. He’s totally harmless. He’s a disciple of Slavoj Žižek.”

Stephen snapped the
International Herald Tribune
tight to turn the page. “That is the tiredest line in Christendom,” he said.

“I know. It’s not his fault he’s a tragic figure. It’s never a tragic figure’s fault. That’s what makes them tragic. But he says he knows this really fun place to go dancing, not a disco but, like, a bar where they play all kind of ‘mixed music.’”

“Do you need a chaperone?”

“Would you please?” I said. I couldn’t really say no. We picked Elvis up at his place. I had never been there. It was farther out of town, up at the edge of the woods. An old house. He came out as soon as the car pulled up. The street obviously didn’t get much traffic late at night. Elvis directed us to the most pitiful bar I ever saw. Young men unlikely to be in the possession of Swiss passports danced with eyes half-closed, snapping their fingers, while women in various states of disrepair jockeyed into their axes of attention. Lumpy, lantern-jawed, pockmarked, bucktoothed, short, tall, or simply drunken women, here to pick up devil-may-care subaltern gigolos for a night of horror.

I saw Elvis through new eyes. “You are so much beautiful,” he would often say charmingly as he worshipped at the altar of my body. Looking around, I could only think that a bar where I am the best-looking woman by a factor of ten is not a bar where I want to be, and that beauty is apparently relative. I felt both better- and worse-looking than before. Better because I was suddenly reminded that the world is not all college girls and secretaries and trophy wives, and worse because everything in the whole universe is contagious if you look at it long enough. Just opening your eyes puts you in front of a mirror, psychologically speaking. Garbage in, garbage out. Or rather, garbage goes in, but you never get rid of it. It just lies there turning to dust and slowly wafting a thin layer of grime on to every other object in your brain. Scraping the gunk off is not only a major challenge, but the chief burden of human existence. That’s why I keep things so clean. Otherwise I would see little flecks of Rudolf-shit everywhere I looked, from Fragonard to the
Duino Elegies.

“I am not staying here,” Stephen said. “Do you want to stay?”

Elvis asked if he knew another place. Our next stop was called Mancuso’s Loft. It was running drum ‘n’ bass. The proprietor waved us in. Here I saw Stephen through new eyes. Then I ran to the ladies’ room and stuffed my ears with toilet paper. Stephen led me to the floor and yelled, “I’m going to dance a little bit!” He then proceeded to dance as if he had never seen me, or any other human being, before in his life. Cranes came to mind.

Touching my elbow, Elvis remarked, “This club is so much beautiful,” and headed for the bar. Elvis was right. In Mancuso’s Loft, I felt below average-looking and quite conspicuously ill-dressed. My pants revealed nothing whatever. My shoes were comfy. My shirt had long sleeves so thick I was soon terribly hot.

“I like your husband,” Elvis said. I said that was not really his assigned task. “No, he has something. Un certain je ne sais quoi. You know what I need? A girlfriend. By myself, I am never getting into this place. You think they let me in? A brown man alone, with a beard? Ha!”

“You’re not brown! You’re lily-white anywhere but Denmark!”

“Many times, I am standing in the queue outside clubs like this. And all the time, I think I am living in Berne. But I am not living in Berne. I am living in the Berne that reveals itself to me, okay, a white ‘Yugo’ if you please but with no connections, with nothing. A cashier in the petrol station, with nothing to his account but a few women. Yes, I say it openly. I have nothing to offer this town but my body. My body to strike the keys of the cash register, my body to find other bodies and search for warmth. My body is my capital. You, this beautiful woman, are my social capital. And then I was taking you, you particularly, to this horrible bar. I see now it is so very horrible, this bar.”

“Elvis, calm down,” I said. “You’re a model of successful integration. You even speak Berndeutsch, and you’ve only been here eleven years!”

“Are they speaking Berndeutsch in this club? No, they speak French!” I didn’t know how he had decided on that one, because I could barely hear even him, much less other people. “I speak the language of the gas station! I have shamed myself. I hoped to leverage one woman to meet another. Not to earn a woman with the honest work and the natural beauty of my body! This crazy Swiss language has made me a capitalist of women! And what is my wages? I insult you, the most beautiful woman in Switzerland. This town has made of me a body without a brain. I will leave this place and go to Geneva,” he concluded, taking both my hands.

“Don’t do that,” I said.

“No, I won’t if you don’t permit it!” he cried ecstatically, throwing his arms around me.

Stephen drifted over, bouncing on the tips of his toes, and beckoned to me. “You need ketamine?” he whispered.

“Umm, no?” I said.

“I got three,” he said. “I think I might stay here. You want the car keys? I’ll take a taxi.”

“Don’t give Elvis any drugs.”

“I don’t take drugs,” Elvis volunteered. He had never been in a band, so he could hear much better than we could. Stephen and I were always stage-whispering about people sitting near us in cafés and drawing stares.

“That’s dandy,” I said. I pocketed the keys and took Elvis’s hand. “Let’s blow this joint. That okay with you?”

Stephen mouthed the word, “Arrivederci.”

We arrived at the wind-struck farmhouse where Elvis lived with (judging from angle of the stairs) a herd of chamois and mounted to the third floor hand in hand. After a warm and harmonious session of sixty-nine (Elvis was not too tall) to the sounds of Montenegrin folk rock (East Elysium—my favorite song was “Wings [Who You Are?]”), he said, “I want to buttfuck you.”

“What is it with guys?” I said. “You’re all obsessed.”

“I never mentioned it before!”

“So where did you get the idea? From bad porn with stock footage from the sixties? From daring postmodern novels like
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
?”

“From doing it.”

“FYI, it’s no fun, so forget it.”

“Just forget it?”

“Forget it.”

Elvis said mournfully, “If you loved me, you wouldn’t care that it’s ‘no fun’ That’s the difference between our thing and a real love.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “I don’t mean to sound like a crank, but are you saying that what makes our relationship valuable is my willingness to suffer for you? Are you aware that I’ve never suffered for you for even, like, one second? That’s what makes our relationship so optimal, in my opinion.”

“You must have done buttfucking to know that it’s ‘no fun.’ So you suffered for someone else, right?”

“So now you want to move up in the world?”

“I’m in love with you. I want a sign that I mean so much to you.”

“You asked me if I’d move to Geneva with you, and I said no. You accepted that right away.”

“I can’t ask so much of you. That’s too much.”

“Are you aware that if you gave me a choice, like if I actually had two options in life, anal sex and moving to Geneva—”

“You would move to Geneva?” He threw his arms around me again, quivering with spontaneous joy.

“You’re not understanding me,” I said, pushing pillows in the corner so I could sit up. “There’s suffering, and then there’s boring stuff, and then there’s stuff that’s just plain stupid. I’ve done my share of suffering for Stephen. And other guys. Like crucifixion, I mean that level of suffering. Like St. Laurence. ‘Turn me over! I’m done on this side!’ I don’t see what that has to do with having a good relationship. It should be about getting through difficult stuff together. Difficult stuff the world throws at you, not difficult stuff you do to each other. The difference right now between me and St. Laurence is, he didn’t have the option of taking his hand off the hot stove.”

“You are fierce,” he replied, pulling the blanket up around his naked body to hide it. “I am never asking another woman for buttfucking.”

“Are you bisexual?”

He frowned. “I am polymorphous pervert! Where I find love!”

I shifted back into neutral and once again accepted the need for negative capability in this world. We had loving, beautiful sex just as soon as we could get ourselves to stop talking—loving and beautiful in the expressionist, pathetic-fallacy sense in which you might say a meadow was loving and beautiful even if it was full of hamsters ready to kill each other on sight, but only when they’re awake. I mean, you just ignore the hamsters and look at the big picture.

The next day, around six P.M. after he woke up, Stephen said, “Let’s make a baby.”

“I feel like Saint Laurence on the gridiron,” I said.

“No, you’re mixed up. Miscarriage is nothing compared to childbirth. You got off easy. You’re like Saint Laurence saying he doesn’t want to go to Italy in July. I’m asking you right now to risk your life and health for my reproductive success. I feed, you breed. Come on!”

“Sounds tempting,” I said. “If I could lay eggs and you agreed to sit on them, I might even do it.”

“Can we fake it?” he said. “Are you fertile?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then meet the father of your triplets!”

“You’re totally insane,” I said approvingly. Stephen was actually sort of interesting when his mind opened the iron gates a crack and let the light out.

“The central ruling principle of my life,” Stephen explained in a grandfatherly way, “is ‘Let’s Not And Say We Did.’ Most people don’t give a fuck what you’ve done and not done. If I put a picture of you and a baby on my desk, I can get promoted. All anybody wants to know is little sketchy bits of information, strictly censored, and that’s enough. It’s more than enough. Did you ever sit down and actually make a list of what you know about, like, Togo? ‘Is in Africa.’ That would be the grand total of your knowledge. But when people say the word ‘Togo’ you let it pass, the same way you let hundreds of people pass you on the street and in the halls every day. And every one of them is as big as Togo, inside.”

“That’s pure bathos, and I know nothing about Togo,” I said. “But somebody like, say, Omar’s wife, I don’t know her either, but what with my life wisdom and mirror neurons and all that, I figure I have a pretty good sense of what she’s about. But only because I’ve met her. I mean, if I said, ‘Togo is charming,’ you’d get the idea that you liked it until further notice, but if then I said, ‘Togo brags about doing those impossible word puzzle things in the
Atlantic
and dropping out of Harvard med to get a doctorate in nutrition,’ you’d think, who is it trying to impress? But you haven’t even begun to talk about its secret sorrows or whatever.”