The Royal Family

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In addition to his cottonwood business, Mr. Brady was, as we see, an impressario. Why should I beat around some whore’s bush? He was the founder, chief executive officer, and fifty-one percent owner of Feminine Circus Enterprises, dedicated to the philosophy that love is the first and final cause. When I looked him up in Who’s Who in Retail Management, I read a competitor’s description of his face: “as vividly ugly as a fast food parking lot at night when a security light glares down on the pitted asphalt.” But the competitor, who was bankrupted by Feminine Circus, was hardly handsomer. Let’s not get in the way of love; let’s not halt love’s caravans, sexual traffickings. Love’s poison makes us strut like birds; then a woman’s ten outstretched fingers slide slowly down a man’s back. What comes of it? Wait nine months, till the baby sits serene on its mother’s lap, utterly contented by the writhing of its fingers. Is that love? Now the creature walks; again and again the mother bends faithfully down to the child whose hand she holds. Not much longer, and the child pulls away to be swallowed up in child armies. In the playground love marches with little boys stalking birds slyly, to pelt them with sand; when the birds scatter, little boys throw sand in little girls’ eyes instead, loving their screams. As soon as the weeping’s over, back come the boys, grinning, sand dribbling between clenched fingers, and the girls suspect no evil; being only at the beginning of life’s tortures, they haven’t yet learned to read the malignancy of other faces. Some never do. We call them retarded. This is the story of Brady, Tyler, and the Queen; but first it’s the story of a man who loved retarded girls, loved them with the tranquil smile and faraway glance of a doctor, not the other way at first, the way people leap up to watch a car accident, and I will tell you what happened on his journey for dear love when the world divided into armies.

(Could you allow me a driblet of authorial commentary right here, please? I merely want to say how embarrassed I am to introduce a new character so late in this novel — moreover, a character without a name. Dan Smooth and the FBI both know who he is, but his name is one hundred percent irrelevant; he’s but a puppet, a placeholder for our plot, a supplier to the grand machine known as Feminine Circus. I’m of two minds as to whether we even need him at all, and if I let his name slip, he might take up more than his allotted space, or possibly we’d get attached to him. Most of the chickens and pigs I’ve eaten didn’t have names.)

Growing up in hot California towns, our hero didn’t yet know himself because trees hung heavy and silent, obscuring the children from their shadows; overhanging roofs nipped the light like hatched clamshells, eating children every evening when the bicycles came home. He and his best friend used to masturbate together at his house or his best friend’s house because that was how the soldiers in love’s fight impelled each other, lying side by side in the stench of suspended breathing, not yet driven to attack for the booty of breasts and soft thighs; in those days when it was just beginning he knew only his self and his craving that he had to release with both hands. His best friend said that a special way was to hang naked from pull-up bars until the penis swelled and jetted; he never tried that. That autumn when the rains fell like blood he began to think beyond the fact of his yearning, trying to imagine what girls’ bodies must be like, how to kiss without butting noses, which way the slit went, who opened whose legs which way. The ransom that he’d soon take drew him to devour any distance between himself and girls; he glared at his best friend for getting in his way. Mustered armies faced off at school, watching, wanting, not yet grappling the veterans’ tricks of fawning and pleasing; they knew only desperation. — Some say it’s but compensation, this awardment of flattery’s skills, for the sagging breasts and soft-ons which veterans must bear, but that’s not so, for the great captains, soul-takers, hymen-breakers, phallus-notchers, own both tricks and strength. They take the prize night after night. — His best friend joined that detachment, learning how to scan the swish of skirts, seeing which leg was past, which leg to come, but our hero, less lucky, was doomed to fall victim to one of the girl-captains who charged, mauled him to the ground and bridled him with the golden bridle. Her brain crawled like a balled-up octopus, writhing with need, straining to possess him forever. Suckered attractions burst from her eyeballs, flickering like lashes to lure him in; they licked out of her ears, eavesdropping on his every word’s weakness; they pried her lips apart into a smile, stretched down into her fingertips to caress the world hummingly, and then, full-bent, bowstringed her invasion. Stalking him even as he hunted others, she gobbled up his shadow, gained nourishment from that meal, crouched behind his unwary heels. There is no one quite so self-absorbed as a girl squeezing out her blackheads in front of the mirror. Yet even then she never stopped thinking of him, prizing him from the corner of her eye. He looked back at her and heard her high loud laugh and was embarrassed that others would hear. Discerning that he meant to flee, she closed in on him with licking and sucking little kisses, and struck him down into her conical mound of brown ring-ivy.

That night she slept with one leg over him, but he lay open-eyed, scheming how to return to his own lines. There was a girl he sought to prey on — not this one who’d defeated him. He lay stifling, panting for her, and the one who’d got him, exulting in her dreams, dreamed she was coursing him again, making him groan between her perfect white buttocks. At last he fell asleep again, only to be awoken by her fingers reconnoitering him, crawling up his leg like crabs. He could see her cruel teeth shining in the starlight. Her smile of exposed belly heaved; her navel blinked. As gently as a mother slows the arc of a swing to pluck her child out, he lifted her leg in his hands, thinking to roll free, but she sprang on him at once, rubbing her crotch against him until his weak-willed penis sprang up strong. When he’d satisfied her again she fell back on the bed’s sweaty battlefield and began to breathe more evenly, her eyes closing, the octopus-tentacles retreating back inside her skull to hug themselves like a ball of dormant roots. Asleep, dead asleep, she straddled the wartorn sheet-ridges in that hot black night whose stars winked out one by one. Now the wily one she’d thought to keep slid away inch by inch, down to the foot of the bed where it was cool by her softly clenching toes. He rose and stood above her; she was his fallen enemy now, and he gloated. Stalking into her bathroom, he closed the door, turned on the light, raised the toilet lid. When he turned to wash off crusted love-gore, his mirror-face knew him, and for the first time he felt that he could trust himself like a holy image; he was friends with himself. Together they’d keep watch, strike, take the incarnadine plunder. They smiled at one another, and the double reached out a palm for him to touch, mirror-cold, glass-hard. Then he sidled out, dressed as silent as a breath, and left behind his grisly work. Unable to wake, paralyzed by the joy he’d given her, she lay still even when the back door opened and shut; only her eyeballs whirred uneasily beneath the sleep-sealed lids—

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She woke weeping in that empty sweaty bed, already knowing she’d been routed, but her octopus held tight to patience regardless of dismay; it sent shock-troop fingers to caress her fibrulating heart until the frantic beats slowed; then, slithering between her ventricles with an invertebrate’s fluid beauty, it exposed and blotted her sequestered grief. In the bathroom, octopus-fingers wiped her tears and washed her face; ringing themselves with silver and gold, they dressed her in the perfumed garments of a sacred pledge. They found his five fingerprints on the mirror and tasted that spoor, but it was cold. Long tendrils flowered out of her in all directions to find the one she hunted. Eye-suckers, budding optic nerves, reached through the windowpanes and scanned dawn’s streets, greedy to see where he lurked. Octopus filaments bloomed through the telephone wires, and the steady yellow phone light showed that information was being transferred to her ear. By the time she’d made up her mouth and eyes (they’d be her battle-shield’s device), her pet, exhausted by emboldening her, had itself become nervous. Now it was her turn to take in trust those skinny octopus-arms that were swarming in her heart again (not stroking this time, but darkly flickering like a girl’s armpits up her short sleeves); so she damned the quarry aloud, swearing she’d find means to drown him in the dark blood of love. She combed her hair until it shone like the sun’s tiny triple gleams upon a sand-bound ant, patted powder on her cheeks and smiled into the mirror, not to commune, as he’d done, but to command herself; then, studying the loveliness of her throat, the sure wake of golden light on her forehead, her red-waxed lips, new soft sweater crackling with electricity, tight pants, she laughed aloud. She put on two earrings which would catch the sun like fishing-lures. Then she slung her purse over her shoulder and set out, far ahead of the sleeping platoons.

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He was long away by then, in strange shaded places near the church, reaping other girls by the armload, sweeping them down on top of him to do his will. He netted them like birds, kissed them in a roar of lust that rolled their eyes up. They panted shining in his arms. By the time they were able to weapon themselves, he’d rushed off on other forays, and though they tracked him like wolf-dogs, hungry to gulp his blood back into their hollowed hearts, they’d become so crazed in their distress as to break ranks, rounding on each other to dispute the right to sniff his footprints, rending each other’s throats for panicked malice; meanwhile, he was tongue to tongue with some new victim, hypnotizing her to draw him into her house. He went in the front door, exited the back, came in the back door and went out the front, lunging, seeking only to spend himself. But the girl with the octopus mind, more prodigious in pride and lust than any battalion, sought him with rampant cunning. An effeminate boy in suit and tie sat on a shrub-bench with his knees spread like a frog, a cigarette between them. He turned his head in a series of alert little jerks. She bore him home for a little sport, soldiered him, digested him and spat him out — she’d get the one she wanted in the end. Wetting her lips replete, patting her hair, she went out again, and this time almost won him, but he saw her first, and wisely bolted; there was another girl he lusted to strip. Would it surprise you to learn that he caught that one and pierced her well, drinking up her cries of joy? When he’d robbed her of everything but her broken heart, he retreated to his own lines where his best friend slapped his shoulders laughing, bushwhacking east with him along the north rim of the Grand Canyon, descending gulleys between steep tree-islands, then climbing step by slipping step up the slopes of slipping pine needles, breasting sunny walls of poison oak, climbing lichened limestone stairs and squeezing between oaks and pines that smelled like bees’ nests where birds sang and flies twanged like rubber bands and wide white rainclouds watched the two friends from each hill. They could see the canyon blue and red and purple-banded and vast and striated and old, so old, and a cold breeze wrapped itself around a lightning-struck tree behind which salmon-colored shards of limestone lay, and behind them were the great ridges and spurs of the canyon, and the air came rushing upward and there was a sound of seashells. Here they threw themselves down side by side to compose new strategies of covert penetration for future wars, inflaming each other with more longings for girls with eyes of blue enamel, chewing over the memory-fat of other live-plucked girls; but by then the girl with the octopus mind had fished up the latest jilted one, the corpse stripped empty of its encarnadine prize; her she bribed with sumptuous sympathy to tell all; that was how she learned of his habit of kissing girls’ eyes. — Yes, he kissed mine, too, she said to herself; that was the one thing I didn’t make him do. — At once, casting her new friend back into the pit of grief, leaving her to wail and rot, she returned home behind her bulkheads where the octopus was free to show itself; here, in sight of the bed where she’d been defiled, she tinctured her eyes with various drops until they dazzled the day: beautiful craft, the twin irises blue with green rays as light and narrow as minnows, the pupils glittering like polished hematite! Next she painted with cool marine colors her eyelids which not so long ago had been red with weeping. At last she fluffed her lashes out like lethal spears, and their points caught light and glittered. Thus armed, thus horned like a male gazelle, she set out for the front where her enemy roved. She marauded down the sidewalk-lipped trenches of blackness, spying out the porches, decks and lawns that hid behind the breeze-blown trees, hunting the couples sipping slurpies, prowling past the fatsos who swallowed down another Big Gulp, searching everywhere, stalking him with coaxing bombshells wrist-flipped into his mailbox just as a gas grenade might be launched behind the foe’s lines; in the moon-ridden heat of her frenzied nights her fingers scuttered from page to page of the phone book; and so, unsurpassed in mobility, eye-elevated in striking power, she flushed him out like the judgment of Heaven. Instantaneously she closed on him, raking and slashing with those love-lashes of hers, hooking him deep with every lash-point until he hung gape-mouthed like a trout, impaled and bleeding with admiration for her eyes; but just when he seemed defeated he somehow wrenched himself away, and his best friend sprang into the breach to woo her, see if she’d let him sow his crop while the other boy stanched his wounds in safety behind the lines. Whirling him aside, she pursued her prey, ripping her gaze through walls and windows to ground him, but he knew full well what to do, shielding himself behind a sweetfaced fat girl who kept pulling her sweatshirt back down her glistening paunch. Soon enough he was sucking out of her all the bird-notes of mounting suspense. Just as some women in anger rip down handfuls of air, so the girl with the octopus mind lashed her furious blood with the wiry tentacles of crazed desire. Like some farseeing bird she found the fat girl stripped and vanquished, sobbing with desire for the one who’d loved her. Another new friend! Quickly, now, spread the snares of friendship! Artfully rubbing her back with tentacles that vibrated and veered, opening her up with tradecraft, she recruited the fool’s intelligence. So it all came gurgling out, in between sobs, how he’d kissed her belly, worshiping the soft bulk as if it were a god… That was the next weakness of his she learned about. When she’d finished listening shrewdly, milking her drop by drop, as if for affection’s sake, she whelmed the fat girl back down into the grave of sticky tears, leaving her to moan to her heart’s content. For those who regard solidarity in the wars of love will gain only ordinary prizes. Home she sped to her command post, there by that four-poster bed where she’d killed him once; if she carved out her future the way she meant to, he’d soon be tied there again. Behind the mirror where she kept her war-gear, she ran her glance down the ranks of unguents, selecting at last a bottle whose contents, pressed from the fruits of death, she thought to hang her next sortie on. Up with the sweater; expose the torso’s implacable turrets. Take them in hand, aim the nipples straight ahead, lock into place those gunbarrels of sizzling milk. Now for the lotion, worked in with a fingertip, round and round the aureoles that glistened like target rings; the hard nipples, ready to fire, bulged menacing and pink — an easy trick, once she had him, to make him charge her with milk to machine-gun him with while her belly swelled with new love… and she tied on her brightest bikini, knowing that multicolored breasts are far more dramatic than when the bathing suit comes off to reveal the same old lumps of gelatinous flesh like the fat girl’s belly: wait till she locked his mouth on those; the luna-moth green and yolk-yellow of her breast-cups would rush out at him like fast-moving troops! Lipsticking herself with no less care than those Greek athletes getting oiled before the wrestling bout, she set out mercilessly, and the door slammed behind her like thunder. This time she thought he’d not dodge her, no matter if he’d whizzed away in Broncos and Amigos with monster wheels, windows open, smog in, radios at maximum volume. From far away she intercepted his nocturnal emissions. Thinking he’d slipped away for good, he was browsing on girls like a buck deer grazing on the steep sunny slope, slowly lifting his legs, puckering his lips, leaning, stretching his neck most incautiously, while his best friend knelt in the high grass, with the sun brightening his antlers. She charged him very quickly, halting him with her eyes like a back-road poacher with his headlights, spearing him with the tips of her hot-colored nipples that dazed and wounded him right through her breast-cups, whistling into his heart to knock him down so that he convulsed and fouled himself with his own blood and the world went clammy, murmurous, but again his best friend roared and covered him with penile fire until he shook his head stupidly and got away from her one last time, the way you elude a breaking wave by swimming out past it, into the place where waves are only rolls of the sea’s fatty belly, lurching and quivering, lifting you effortlessly on ocean bellylaughs. But he was bleeding badly; everything dizzied him hot and smooth like her sun-girl’s breast.

There is a certain middle distance at which the island that one is approaching, not having grown larger for a long interval, continues not to grow larger; and yet somehow you can see that it is growing larger. This is how the girl with the octopus mind now felt. She did not rage and tremble; she knew that next time she’d have him. Marshalling her reserves — well-plucked eyebrows, perfect ankles, dimples and fingernails and flashing blitzkrieg shoulders — she streaked on, following his tracks.

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But once again he was out of reach of her weapons, having been conquered by another, an innocent girl who won him carelessly, almost unknowingly, simply by appearing before him like beautiful death. While the platoons of other hungry girls scoured the streets lipsticked in their reconnaissance cars, turning corners with rolled-down windows to catch unwary boys with the aching lure of a licked lip, the innocent girl mauled him with a look, holding her right hand in her left, cradling her head in her soft wave of hair, gazing at him with steady brown eyes. His will pleaded to turn away, to fatten on less dangerous prey, but a single lethal toss of her hair strangled him into silence. He could not even ransom himself from her; his best friend could not pull him home; she’d infiltrated his machine-gun nests of coldblooded charm, and a raking salvo of light from her eyebrows shattered them into stutters. Continuously firing gorgeousness upon him from her flared nostrils, she sprawled him down without even a smile. He spun as he tumbled, and his neck snapped back; his mouth gaped in a silent shriek. Then she hacked his heart to pieces.

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Thoughts of her visited him all night, thickening like the echoes of her goodbye shouted from the window — her second goodbye, which came after the one by the stairs, when he’d embraced her without kissing her anymore and began to go downstairs and the innocent girl whispered to her cat: Say goodbye to him… — down the long stairs he sank to the door which he shut behind him knowing that she was at the top of the stairs watching him; he closed the door and made it sure, went down the outer stairs to the gate and closed it behind him like an astronaut leaving the airlock forever; and he began to walk into the grim loneliness of that street where a hungry man leaned into darkness watching him approach; he knew before he even passed the man that the man would stalk him for blocks; it was then that she called goodbye to him from the window. Tomorrow morning she was going away. The goodness and desperate impatience of her were being formed into some alloy as yet unknown. — (She’d told him that it was all over.)

In front of his door the girl with the octopus mind was waiting. But she could do nothing to him. He was armored against her with the ultimate armor of obliviousness.

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The girl with the octopus mind, beautiful, sat in her empty bedroom with the white white walls emblazoning her shadow of need and sadness, and with all the loneliness of nakedness she knew that she was so far away from the army of other girls now that no one could help her on this last battlefield where the vultures already waited to dip their beaks in her decaying heart, and the octopus (which was really her anguish) glared inside her skull so desperately that her mind burst into throbbing flames and it stretched its suckers just as a child stretches his arms out as he begins to weep; then the child throws back his head to let mouth and tongue gape to the heavens; now he’s prepared; in the same hopeless way, the octopus shot its tendrils out in all directions, locking them into rigid pain like a sea-creature dropped living into formaldehyde; the pale-eyed octopus was dying; the girl it was dying inside sat rocking herself and moaning and dialling to make his phone ring and ring, but nothing could drag him out of remembering one night when the innocent girl was in her pajamas.

Do you think it would be decent for me to go out like this? the innocent girl had said.

I think it would be decent for you to go out any way. You are so beautiful.

She laughed quickly. — Thank you, she said.

She never loved him. Unknowing and uncaring she whipped his heart as if it were a screaming horse. He went home aching. The phone rang, but he didn’t answer it.

After she’d flown clear, he sat overhauling his semi-obsolete love weapons, patching holes in his armor, stacking up cannister after cannister of glittering heartless love-bullets to bombard her with. Knowing he’d likely have time to fire only once, he brooded over what ammunition would be most likely to kill her heart instantly. His best friend shuddered to see him so; he thought to divert him with easier targets, unaware girls to strike and crush, but he remained alone, stricken and bleeding ceaselessly. Throwing up his hands, the best friend went out alone. That was his mistake. He wasn’t in his prime anymore. Laughing, he ploughed the enemy down, spearing and shooting all that he could get, but an adept girl finally slaughtered his heart. — We got the dogs so we wouldn’t have a kid, but we have two kids now, he said, kissing his wife’s face.

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But the one who loved the innocent girl felt no more alone when his best friend was killed and stripped. He was already alone. So the girl with the octopus mind won him. She outraced him, then she outwaited him. She got him in the chest, and down he clanged and crashed. She danced over him as he lay there dead. Then she married him.

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He never had to cook dinner for himself anymore. His wife did that, busy with her tentacles that were green like an Air King compressed air dispenser. His wife never ate anything that he cooked. If he washed the dishes his wife would go through every plate, until she found some microscopic spot; then she’d wash them all again. So he’d gotten out of the habit of doing the dishes, too. His wife was a professional woman, and when other professional women came over they’d be sure to make some pointed remark to him, such as: Boy, you sure are lucky to have a wife who does everything for you! I would never do all the cooking for my husband! He’d be ashamed if I did.

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Had the octopus died after all? On their vacations her oiled knees remained first in firm alertness when she slept in her beach chair. Whenever he made what she considered a mistake, she found it out immediately and began screaming at him. No, the octopus was still there. It didn’t know how to be happy. It tried to bask inside her victorious skull, in exactly the same way that some girls sling their bodies back against locked arms, spread palms when they sun themselves; but then it quickly began to squirm again, greedy and anxious…

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Sometimes she shivered with rage at the thought that she’d won a man who was worthless. She preferred his former best friend. (His former best friend had been working for many years as a medical technician when one day he started reading one of those inspirational books that remind you to live each day to the fullest, to remember that today is the first day of the rest of your life, and above all to be sure that you were doing exactly what you wanted to do. Reading this tract, he suddenly yelled aloud: I know what I want! I want to be a used car salesman! — So he did that, and became very happy. When nothing was going on, he’d just say they were jerking off, not really coming; a sale was an orgasm. Now for the encarnadine prize!) But the octopus-minded one knew with all her tentacles that her own husband was no good. Then she’d begin to set him tasks again. One day she decided that it was his job to vacuum. On Monday, he went down to the super’s to borrow the vacuum but the super said that it had been stolen. His wife said: Well then, we’ll have to get a cleaning lady, won’t we?

No, he said weakly, I can’t afford it.

You spend your money on pretty things, said she. You can spend your money on this.

No, no, he said.

Then you can borrow it from Bertha.

But I don’t feel comfortable with Bertha. I’ll vacuum but can you borrow it?

No.

Okay. Then I’ll do it.

On Tuesday Bertha wasn’t there. He called three times. On Wednesday it was the same. His wife was going to dinner at Bertha’s. He had spoken to Bertha on the phone and it was understood that he would pick up the vacuum. He went down when he was sure that dinner would be over and it had just started. Theodore was sitting at the head of the table, carving the turkey, and his wife was there and Bertha was just bringing in the brussels sprouts from the kitchen.

Oh, you have to stay! said Bertha.

I–I… he said, becoming tongue-tied with shame.

Sit down, beamed the octopus, glowering with pure hatred.

No, I just wanted to borrow the vacuum…

Can’t it wait until after dinner? snarled Theodore. I mean, we’re eating.

I’m sorry, he said. I didn’t mean to—

No, no, no, give him the vacuum, said Bertha anxiously.

Everyone stared at him over their ruined dinner. Bertha rushed into the bedroom and got the vacuum. Doing this she awakened the baby, who began to cry.

Oh, Theodore, said Bertha. There’s something wrong with the vacuum. Can you fix it?

Theodore leaped up in a rage, knocking over the ruined dinner…

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She had begun to accord her career the attention which it deserved. She was an engineer for a nationwide company which manufactured super-cold smart refrigerators. If she distinguished herself, they’d give her a promotion and they could move back to the west coast. She had a number of competitors for the position, but she knifed them square in the belly; she slit their livers open; she made their guts see the light of day! Her octopus quivered and listened perpetually; it was impossible to surprise her. Those who tried staggered back gushing blood, and their fate was the same as that of the amateurs whom she herself surprised. She drove them all down to death. Catnapping from year to year, tossing restlessly in that murderous marriage bed, she seized the spoils and gathered grander weapons, until at last she won the triumph; he didn’t care. Now they were all set to move into their dream house.

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They fought about where and when and how, and the next thing they fought about was the printer stand. He suddenly realized that she had moved it into the hall to be trashed. She’d gone somewhere when he noticed. He went outside, and there it was. He brought it back inside. It was his; he was using it and it would be good to have when they got to their dream house. It was ugly and lightweight and practically indestructible. As far as he was concerned it would be fine forever. No doubt she hated it for its looks. But they wouldn’t have any money for awhile. The dream house, as dream houses will, had cost more than expected, and once the closing costs were tacked on… If he allowed her to throw it out, he wouldn’t have any ugly chair when they got there. She’d be working, and wouldn’t be available. He wouldn’t have money; he’d just given her his life savings for the down payment on the dream house. So he thought he was entitled to the ugly chair. That was why he brought it back in. When she returned from wherever she’d been, he saw the hatred and anger leap into her eyes.

What’s this? she said.

I brought it back.

Where are you going to put it?

I don’t know. Where do you suggest? he said wearily. (All evening he’d been following her suggestions.)

Out, she said flatly. We’re not taking it.

Look, he said. I don’t have to justify everything I take. You went and put it out without consulting me. It’s mine, and—

No, it’s not yours. We found it together, in the garbage. I tell you, we’re not taking it! You just want to get the moving costs up. You don’t care. It’s not your money anymore. The costs keep going up with every stupid thing you try to save—

I’m not getting rid of it, he said then. (He’d hardly ever noticed it before.)

Now she started screeching at him. He bore it as patiently as he could, for as long as he could. His stomach began to ache. Then he told her to stop. That pleased her. Now that she’d gotten a rise out of him, she could abuse him in earnest.

He was sitting at his desk. She was standing by the table, yelling.

Please stop now, he said.

You sonofabitch, she said. You fucking sonofabitch.

She went on like that for a while.

I’m asking you for the last time to stop, he said.

Now a crisis was approaching. That was what she longed for. She refined the cruelty of her insults as she increased their volume. He did everything he could not to hear, but he heard just the same.

I’m almost at the breaking point, he said. Please stop, or I’ll push you out the door.

You leave, you fucking sonofabitch.

He could actually push her out, but that would only make a public scene, and anyway he didn’t want to be brutal. He just wanted her to stop. There was no use talking to her and she wasn’t going to shut up. He couldn’t bear it. He could leave himself, but he was very tired and had nowhere to go. Now that his money was gone, he couldn’t stay in a hotel. She was going on and on, and he snapped. On his desk, ready to hand, was a textbook of hers. He looked at it. He was very angry now, and could barely control himself.

If you don’t stop now I’m going to throw something, he said.

Go ahead. Throw the ugly chair. Then you’ll break it and I’ll throw it out.

Will you shut up?

Listen to that. The man who never does anything tells me to shut up.

He picked up her book knowing now that he was going to throw it, terrified lest he throw it directly at her and hurt her. He couldn’t stop himself from throwing it anymore. He aimed at a chair near her and launched it and saw it hit the chair with a grand thud. The binding ripped. She swooped down on it and cried in a heartrending voice: You ruined it!

She set it down on the table so gently. (She never touched him like that.) Then she ran to his bookshelf and snatched one of his rarest books.

Well, he thought to himself, now she’s going to throw that. I might as well resign myself.

She ran up behind him glaring and raised it over his head. He wondered if she would bring it down on his face or whether she’d shatter the computer screen. He stared away stonily.

She slammed it harmlessly down on the carpet.

How’d you like it if I broke your book in two? she wept.

She went into the bedroom and he heard her weeping — a weird, not unpleasant musical wail of ooh-oohs that almost made him smile. It went on for half an hour. He knew that if he didn’t go in there she’d add to her hoard of resentments, citing coldhearted abandonment (that had happened before), but if he did go in he’d become the lightning rod of more abuse. So he sat staring at the blank screen of his computer. There was no place to go.

After a while she came out, crying more loudly now, to get Scotch tape to repair the book. She came near him, wailing inconsolably for her poor dear book. No doubt she wanted to make sure that he was paying attention. So he braced himself and went in.

Can I comfort you or make it up to you in any way at all? he said.

Get out, you sonofabitch! she screamed. Fucking sonofabitch!

All right, he said.

She followed him out, screaming.

Please leave me alone, he said. I got out, didn’t I?

She went back in and slammed the door and cried for a while. Then she came out and rummaged in his tool box a foot behind him, loudly. He didn’t look. She took something. Then he heard a loud thud. She’d thrown the ugly chair down on the floor and was trying to smash it with his hammer. It was comical. He had to dig his fingernails into his palms to keep from laughing. Finally something broke. It was the shaft of the hammer. She cried out and flung the pieces into the garbage and left the chair lying by the door, an upside down monument to battle. He felt affection for the sturdy thing. It was his heart’s proxy, just as her book had been; she could not destroy it.

In the morning he found that she’d set it outside again. He brought it in. But she got her way in the end, of course—

| 275 |

They started from Massachusetts where fog-wisps grew like grass on the surfaces of the ponds because it had just rained and he asked her: Are you a happy creature? and she said: Yep. — Then talk like a happy creature, he commanded. — Beep beep beep beep beep, she said. They drove through the hot afternoon rain and crossed into New York where it wasn’t yet hazy; descending into a bowl of dark green and light green trees, they swallowed a blue mountain in their rear view mirror. The mountains there were infinitely thin, each progressively more sky-colored and transparent, until the farthest one was only the sky. As they neared them to eat them up, the mountains swelled, hardened and darkened to viridian. And then they were eaten and fell behind. They crossed the Hudson River, which was blue-grey and wide, and pierced the sumac walls to eat more mountains. Double-decker porches, towns and green tree-hills steadily lowered before them like horses’ heads. Almost Pennsylvania. His wife ignored him like a sun-reddened girl smoothing her hair with a close-eyed smile. She’d walled herself into one of those temporary worlds used by people on beach towels, every sunbather alone. The tree-miles stretched leaves overhead, clutching at him and her on the narrow turns. Now at this deer crossing they began to get away from bleached Hudson River colors, into mists and browns, denser forests, leaves slicked down over more leaves like a teenager’s hair, and the glimpse he got of a river through the trees was strange to him like the misty cornfields, none of which she saw; she was driving. Wide-porched general stores rolled over for them but she never stopped. She drove over squashed roadkills sticky and grey; she devoured the plastic cow on the roof of the steakhouse and shat it out through the rear view mirror and then they were in Pennsylvania. On the BBQ billboard, the man’s face was covered with sauce. He thought: Now if I blew her head off, if I made her face explode into a thousand bits and blotches and spray blood all over the ceiling and still be screaming after it was apart; if I beat her and raped her and cut her; if I burned her, tortured her, smashed her, crushed her, ground her into the floor, chopped her up, smeared her into nothing like one of these roadkills; if I disarticulated every dead bone and broke it over my knee like a dry stick, would my face be happily covered with her gore like that? — Grand hazy schoolyards, wild tiger lilies, multitopped mulleins like chandeliers. — Music, she said to him without looking. He put on a Japanese chromium dioxide tape for her, and it was the soundtrack of his life’s movie: calm, instrumental, intellectual muzak. Hopeless to ask her to stop at the Snake Farm — yes, they whizzed right by that; for him only a glimpse through the open door where the cages were stacked, cratelike affairs of used barnboard, very dusty… They hurtled past quick round-edged tree-gaps cut by power poles, and devoured the sudden sunny flashings of meadow and ridge. It was after a rain at dusk, and the sky was a magnetic blue; the yellow headlights of approaching cars sparkled like tears, and the road wound back and forth like the final drawn-out convulsions of some pompous symphony, the trees now becoming jungle-dark blotches of steam and crime…

They stopped at a hotel, and she switched on the TV immediately and lay smiling at it in the huge cold bed so that she wouldn’t have to talk to him. The next morning they enjoyed together the innocent delight of speeding past the solemn personages in station wagons who chew chicken legs while they drive. His wife’s head was nodding and smiling to the music of the new cassette; her index finger tapped itself on the steering wheel; she sang la- la-la-la-la. As far as he could see, cars rolled along in parallel, as if pulled by the same string.

| 276 |

Green fields and red barns sped across his eyes like sleep as his octopus-minded wife drove them west past roadkills more rare, flattened and hairless than before. The grass along the median strip was browner and drier. He saw twin white horses by a stagnant pond. Just as a moth squashed on the windshield is at first a splash of gorgeous yellow-green, but gradually darkens as it coagulates until it is little different from the yellow painted line at the road-shoulder’s edge, so his anxieties baked hard hour by hour on the bloodcaked grill of his heart. Fearing he’d already met the worst, he tried to embattle himself more proudly, as if he could turn the tables again the way he had that first night, when she’d had him and slept, and then he’d stood above her, to go back among the other girls. But no, she was his day’s eternal nightmare. Speeding sunpoints rushed from leaf-spike to leaf-spike of the corn like falling dominoes. In Indiana, where the irrigation lines were as rickety as drunken airplane struts, they devoured rolls of yellow grass, racks of snubby drooping trees. They ate up brown hay cylinders and rubbery green mud together. The radar detector never beeped, not even at seventy-five miles an hour. He wondered what had been in those cages at the Snake Farm. He peered up through the bays of cumulus clouds, finding birds and bugs. Purple cloud-udders hung over them. Someday her breasts would turn ancient and hang down like that, purple, wrinkled and veined; they’d resemble his balls — proof of the homology of the sexes. Would he still be her slave then? Maybe he’d get lucky, and she’d have a car accident. They were now approaching Gary, rusted and trestled, a tower with fire coming out like an orange windsock; they ate smoke and bridges and more fire, leaving soot and emptiness behind them. The smells of oil and gas and sulphur throbbed inside his skull, and she turned the air conditioning up a notch, not that that would do any good, but what was the use of saying anything to her; she was as impervious as these white round oil tanks that led them into forests of transformers and power poles; in a split second they slurped up a polluted pond, lipsticked with algae bloom; then they were on the Illinois side, choking down huge rusty tanks as big as apartment houses, condensers, beaked downpointed bird-skeleton machines, funnels, gallowses a dozen storeys high, poles bearing resistors like antlers; they snacked on things like a tin man’s arms coming out of buildings; he ate the ones on the right; she ate the ones on the left; the things were spotted with corrosion like birdshit. Now came the brick tenements, incinerator chimneys, and like a dream the thin blue skyscrapers of Chicago rose so far away.

| 277 |

The plan of his octopus-eyed wife was to sleep that night at the condo of one of her colleagues who designed smart microwaves whose black glass jaws slammed shut on refrigerator foods shrunken hard like cold turds, then spat them out transformed into hot and lethal nourishment; she and the octopus-minded one had once charged boys together, splitting their heads open with needle-sharp eyelashes, ripping the boys’ struggling tongues from their mouths to suck on. He thought the colleague had liked him once. Maybe he’d lock her in flirtation’s skirmishes, stinging her heart just a little with temptation, winning a drop or two of blood, not the full encarnadine prize. So he smiled, the Amtrak rolling beside them in a fury like a caterpillar on its tiptoes, and his wife didn’t notice him smiling; he knew she wouldn’t; and they munched unspeaking on idle smokestacks still laddered and ringed for nothing; his wife yawned and ate a Metro train that came smashing down a hot wind among the weedy shrubs; she ate the shrubs, too, for garnish; in that hot breathless breeze he ate the smell of pavement and diesel-smoke; a child spread his hands in the diesel van ahead; the tail-light winked like the eye of an insect pimp. With their bulging bleary eyes he and his wife ate the freeway miles littered with glass, half-melted scraps of tires, hubcaps; a faint fishy breeze condensed on a passing car and he ate that for dessert… The traffic stalled. On the opposite side, across the barrier, a redbrown-skinned woman in a sleeveless blue dress raised her arms above her head to stretch, and he was almost close enough to smell the musk in her armpits — no reason why he’d never see her again, but he wouldn’t; he’d been stripped of his gear years ago. He gobbled up a fenced-off little beach on the right, whose trash cans everywhere cast interlocking shadows between which people lay “sunning” themselves and trying to cough; while his wife drank up the unearthly lake-shimmer beyond, silent and metal-eyed; yes, she drank that pale pale blue’s green. — Park and lock. — The colleague met them at the door to her engraving-hung condominium (ceramic leaves, a view of dark trees and bricks, brass fittings on the windows) whose floors creaked threateningly beneath his tread, making everywhere he stood a lost island. Her piano was barnacled with multitudes of figurines so fragile that too potent a breath would sweep them to ashes. Her clocks, terrier-faced cushions, chandeliers and bone-white knicknack excresences prohibited him from touching anything. The colleague embraced his wife. She looked at him as if he smelled. She’d arranged a little reunion for his wife, an intimate little party, a nothing fancy under the chandeliers. Here came the designer of smart showerheads who kissed his wife, perhaps a hair too fondly; here came the two ladies who were installing smart microphones for the Justice Department; then the famous man they’d all learned from, the gallant old one who’d married young; he’d made his money in smart syringes and smart toxics, but now in his semi-official retirement he dabbled in smart rosebushes; his young wife was the only other one there who wasn’t an engineer, so after an hour of their shop talk he leaned across the table and said to her smiling: So, how have you learned to cope with these conversations? — Oh, she replied, so far (she’d been shifting her head from side to side as if out of boredom, but she kept doing it while she was answering him and he saw that she was doing it to follow what they said, nodding like a graceful snake) so far, she said, I try to listen and learn. If you don’t mind, I’m trying to listen right now.

| 278 |

The next day they found themselves driving into the stem of a gigantic cumulus mushroom whose restful purple underbelly loomed closer and closer, blue sky vanishing on either side. Ahead fell streams of violet rain. His wife licked her lips and devoured the first drop that struck the windshield, the second; now the car was shaken by rain; the hood danced with it. Two smart eyelashes swept back and forth across the car’s rectangular eye. Raindrops boiled on the pavement ahead and on the hood. Rain washed squashed bugs away, and they came out clean and new.

Each day the knot in his stomach tightened. They hadn’t been speaking for the last hours, after she’d screamed at him you asshole and then ordered him to read out the directions, and he said: Not until after you apologize and she said: Not until you apologize for being an asshole.

The cornfields and cumuli of Iowa showed him purity unequaled (he didn’t know what his wife thought), and he said to himself: There ought to be a saying: as pure as a cloud in Iowa. His stomach ached. They passed a waterslide amusement park in the middle of the cornfields—

| 279 |

That night they were to stop at the house of one of her colleagues, who’d just moved to Omaha, and he dreaded it because if there was not to be a scene before the colleagues there must be false cheeriness; fortunately he barely knew them; the hypocrisy would not be as grave. He dreaded it eating the clouds that boiled up in towers and pointing fingers; he dreaded it rolling across the wide brown rivers of low fat trees. There were so many things she was required to apologize for now that he supposed he’d better buy a little black book to keep track of them all in. But then she’d get a black book, too, and she’d write down lies about him. Then he’d have to find her black book and erase the lies. They’d end up hiding their black books from each other. Someday soon he must start taking revenge by the breasts. A goose and three goslings tried to cross the freeway. His wife swerved to avoid them. They danced back into the other lane, and then a car came round the bend and squashed them. At twilight, approaching Council Bluffs, the road began to sing, a steady breathless aaaaah whose cadence wavered with the angle of the road; the shoulder glowed white in the sun; trees and prairie grass vanished in the sun’s hurtful orange glare, which leaped from tree to tree, always the same spot of ferocious blindness. When they pulled up before the just completed house, which lurked in a gated labyrinth of just completed houses already Kentucky bluegrassed into permanence, when they rolled into the three-car garage, the colleague came out smiling and went over to the driver’s side where his wife was unstrapping herself from seatbelt coils. He got out before she did and went around to the driver’s side and said to the engineer: Well, Ernest, how are you? — Linda! cried the engineer, beaming as the driver’s door swung open. — What a lovely house! the octopus wife said. (He hadn’t heard her voice for eight hours.) — How are you, Ernest? he said again. — The engineer didn’t even look at him. He wondered if there was something wrong with his face. He wondered if his face was the same as it had been the night that his wife and the engineer had graduated together from the refrigerator institute and his wife had been screaming at him asshole and fucking asshole and bastard just before the graduation and then it was time to put on his suit and tie in her honor. He had considered not going, but this was an occasion that would never come back for her; he had no right to do that unless he was going to leave her and he couldn’t do that because she’d won him and spread her hands over him night after night, widening her fingers like muskets aimed from behind a wagon-train. He got dressed. She never told him anything about her work, so he didn’t even know who was graduating and who the other people were, and his feet hurt in the dress shoes because the reception was being held in a concrete warehouse filled with the latest smart refrigerators that talked back to you when you asked for a glass of milk, so finally he went into the buffet room where it was just him and the piano player; misery stabbed him and twisted, but his chest strained hard against the point of it, strained by habit so that no harm was done. Misery shot casts at him but could not hurt him because he knew that it was there; he hardened himself, expressionless. He sat down at at a table weighted with romantic candle flames, awaiting the hour for dinner, and when it came, when the others gathered there (no dodging them now), his wife sat down beside him. His callus-armored heart split open in a great cracked clang of pain, and the soul-blood spurted; so he rendered up to her the incarnadine prize. He would not change his face. They stared at him and talked to him as if he were an imbecile and finally ignored him. She was the class president. After dinner it was time for her speech, which he also dreaded like a shower of scorpions because last year’s class president had thanked his wife in his speech, but this wife of his would not thank him. Of course he hoped she would. As she drew closer and closer to that part of her speech, he began to believe that her colleagues were eye-raping him just as courtroom spectators will watch the accused when the foreman of the jury rises to give his verdict. Now she was at that part, and it gave him bliss beyond words to know that she wasn’t going to thank him; that way he could go on hating her. When her speech was over, and she hadn’t thanked him, the leaden-headed clawshaft of humiliation hammered him almost backward, impaled him to his seat. Looking at his plate, he saw that he hadn’t eaten any dinner. When the engineer’s wife said goodbye to everyone, she kissed everyone else’s cheek, but she only shook his hand and told him loudly that she was leaving, as if to a senile grandparent. It was to her magnificent new house (which had been lived in for less than a week) that he and his octopus wife had now driven. The house was so huge that all the couple’s possessions barely made a dent in it. Fierce sunlight zigzagged down the carpeted stairs; carpeted rooms of oceanic vastness bore nothing on their down but a child’s ball, were sunned by no lamps yet; genesis had not finished; there were so many rooms! The garage had arch-shaped windows. Moldings and central vacuum units and doors leading to great caves confused him. Outside there were other lawns and other new houses; nothing else but a smoldering humid sky. — How are you, Ernest? he said a third time, at the next lull. The engineer never looked at him. He began another conversation with the octopus-minded woman, who was raptly stroking the engineer’s new car. — Glad to hear it, Ernest, he said softly.

| 280 |

Inside, he and his octopus wife admired the house in separate but equal ways, praising, lying, rhapsodizing, propagandizing like performers skilled at song; talking never to each other. The engineer and his wife were so caught up in the narcissism of owning their new house that they didn’t notice, believing that their house truly was the best in the world because they lived in it; naturally the world (comprising in this case their first two house-guests) would so praise the house, holding it in such reverence that they wouldn’t talk to one another… The engineer took them to examine the back lawn. Our hero told the engineer to weather-seal the deck posts. The engineer could hear him now; he was talking about the engineer’s house. But there remained a fretful expression on the engineer’s face when he said anything to him; when he took two steps backward, leaving the engineer to babble with the two wives in those carpeted caverns, then that expression eased, and the engineer no longer tapped his foot…

As soon as he could, therefore, he said that he had to take a shower. He took the longest shower he had ever taken in his life. Then he told them he had to go to bed. With the door shut, his ground chosen, he robbed the bed of one of its four pillows and lay down on the carpet, his body half in the closet to be as far away from her as he could; for a moment it seemed he owned himself again. His wife stayed up until midnight. He lay awake wondering if she were telling them of all the wrongs he’d done her.

| 281 |

The next morning, rolling away through the hot pig-scented winds, they began getting ready to pretend that the quarrel hadn’t happened. They were not absolutely unspeaking and unhearing like walled-up statues anymore, although it is true that they didn’t make unnecessary talk, either. They answered one another politely but succinctly. He never looked into her face, although he occasionally glimpsed her shoulder move when her right hand moved upon the steering wheel. They were going to Denver. She had another colleague there. This was a woman who was developing the prototypes for smart lamps. With a little luck, while his wife and the colleague ignored him he could steal some of the colleague’s dirty underwear and sniff it—

| 282 |

Devouring the boneparched sandbars on the Platte, they drove on to where the grass was lighter, the corn smaller, the highway faded almost white. There were sandhills in the fields now. At Cornfield Creek with its occasional stains, each from a single tree, his wife ate a young boy, tanned and naked to the waist, who was walking along with a fishing pole over his shoulder. Near the site of Buffalo Bill’s grave the first dry ridges started twisting out of the flat ground, the dirt all the different colors like the fireworks that the twin blonde girls were selling at their stand. A man bicycled in a cowboy hat. Swallowing heat-crisped grass and dustyblonde fields of hay bales, they rode the ricket-fenced roadside whose ranches rambled painted and unpainted, hoarding dust-manured corals.

Suddenly his wife patted his arm, gazing at him with a loving smile.

| 283 |

When they got to Colorado, the sun, waiting just behind a thunderhead, sent misty chlorine rays down a grey and orange fogbank; beneath this cloud-spider, below the smell of spruces, beehives and water, below the chittering of aspen leaves like TV static or fish scales in waves, Denver stretched hot and flat and smoggy. They went to to the colleague’s house. He remembered her as a girl drinking pink magaritas with his wife when she was not yet his wife. Now her prettiness had tightened, like his wife’s, and when he moved to embrace her he saw a grimace split her face from top to bottom, and he saw that the line it followed was a habitual line; she was a professional now. At least when he’d hugged her he’d made her breasts go squish…

He’d tucked his shirt in, and at once his wife came to pull it out again. He shook his head, moved away and tucked it in again. She followed him and pulled it out. He pushed her away so hard she almost fell.

| 284 |

Down the twirly mountain highway, past Leadville, the gorges were corrugated with dark green trees. Valleys, bowls, and overlooks bored him. Bare mud-peaks were snow-striped like skunks’ tails. Twin-stacked diesel-snorters raced down green horse meadows. They had a fight whose anguish diffused through him just as altitude sickness begins from between the eyes and then spreads inside the skull, but by then, descending the sandy cutaways puffed and dotted with desert shrubs, they’d lost all the altitude they ever would, she flicking him an eye-corner’s worth of her contempt, just as she might flick a dead fly off a piece of paper; thus his octopus-minded wife, her heart plated with chitin. They came down into blue-salted canyonland that was goosebumped like a chilly girl’s legs; and cocoa-colored sandcliffs, topped with old cracking rocks, nosed down at them and their fate. Sharp-tongued mountains growled around, snapping at the sky like famished dogs. The dinosaur buttes pierced the sky with their sharp and dusty backbones. She said something, but her words buzzed by him like flies by a shady pool. Not far from the aluminum-sided “café” where they sold pliers and soda and “authentic” Navajo souvenirs (the trash can was too hot to touch), they came into Utah, his wife driving faster and faster, whirling down the highway like a sudden twister of tan dust. He choked down lopsided outcroppings lumped, bumped and swollen into dolmens beneath the clouds, all of it reddening into postcard quivers. Lumps and bumps, that’s all it was, utterly impervious, all gypsum and concrete and halfbaked pyramids and hundred-foot dogshit fossils, Disneyland ramparts and piss-yellow plaster casts of tits and cups, mountains of dried feta cheese now mold-grown with sagebrush; and clouds as smoothly twisted as the country they hung so mushily over. The day’s last sunbeams were eyelashing down. They crossed a country’s dozen of horizons all in a row, purple, red, brown and blue. Zealous at the wheel, she stuffed sandstone chessmen and Nazi rubble into her mouth, and then they came down into the green ranches of evening.

| 285 |

From Denver they drove to Vegas; from Vegas to the coast; the following day found them parked for good, all ready to begin happily ever after in their dream house.