Adios, Scheherazade

1

When Dwayne Toppil slipped his hand under Liz’s skirt in the darkness of the movie theater, he couldn’t at first believe it. She wasn’t wearing a thing under the skirt, not a thing!

In the dim light reflecting back from the Technicolor movie showing on the screen, Dwayne saw Liz’s eyes gleaming with mischief, saw the amused grin on her lips. She pulled his head closer, till her lips were by his ear, and then whispered, “A going away present.”

“Mmm,” he said, kissing the throbbing pulse in her neck. “It almost makes me not want to go away.”

“Just so you don’t stay away too long,” she whispered back and rolled her hips slightly, moving herself against his probing fingers.

Dwayne felt a sudden wave of guilt when she said that, knowing that he intended never to return to Smithville, but the passion welling up within him kept the guilt from turning into action. And he knew that was best. It was best he leave Smithville, best he leave Liz, no matter how much they had come to mean to each other since graduation from high school two years ago.

Somehow it seemed incredible now to Dwayne that he could ever have thought of making his life here in Smithville. This wasn’t the place for him. No, and it isn’t the place for me either. I hate Dwayne Toppil and his fantasy fuck Liz and Smithville and everything.

So I got laid, and I saw a movie, it’s tomorrow, and here I am back on the old treadmill again. I saw a book once, in a used bookstore I went to with Pete, called Treadmill to Oblivion, by a radio comedian called Fred Allen. The title was so great, so beautifully great, that I right away bought the book; and discovered that Fred Allen was a great man. He spent his entire life in the wrong place, simply because that’s where circumstance put him, and he always knew it was the wrong place, and he never knew how to get the hell out of there. Treadmill to Oblivion. Right.

Every once in a while there’s a movie on Channel 2 at four-thirty in the morning with Fred Allen in it, and I wait up and watch it. It’s usually terrible, but Allen is fascinating to watch. You can see him acting out his dilemma, being a basically nice guy who doesn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings but who thinks he and all the other people around him are involved in a piece of shit, which they are.

Which aren’t we all.

The movie I saw last night was called Point Blank, which could also be the title of my life, particularly if you reverse the order of the words, and it was about Lee Marvin being a gangster of some kind and the gangster syndicate owes him ninety-three thousand dollars and he wants it. The whole movie is about him trying to get his ninety-three thousand dollars. It was sort of spoiled for me because all the way through I kept thinking, Lee, what if you get the ninety-three thousand dollars? Do you think that’ll make you happy? It won’t. You’ll just spend it, and then next month you’ll need ninety-three thousand dollars more, and you’ll have to go through all this shit all over again, and after a while you’ll just give up and move to San Francisco and jump in the bay, because San Francisco has the highest suicide rate in the nation, and I know why. It’s because when people are desperate they move somewhere else, and because the sun goes from east to west so do people, and eventually they wind up in Los Angeles, where they either go crazy or to San Francisco. If they go crazy they can live in Los Angeles for the rest of their lives, but if they go to San Francisco there’s no place to go after that, the only thing westward is the ocean, so plunk they go. So forget the ninety-three thousand dollars, Lee, you and me and all of us we’re just rats in a maze, the only thing to do is stop the world I want to get off. Therefore, Lee, go to San Francisco, go directly to San Francisco, do not pass Go, do not collect ninety-three thousand dollars.

The movie left it open, at the end, whether or not he got the money, which was the truest thing about it. Anyway, after Betsy and I made up we thought it might be a good idea if we went out to a movie, take a break from work (no, she doesn’t know the truth, she thinks I have two chapters done) and come back to it refreshed and with a better attitude. I said fine, and this Point Blank was playing at the Floral in Floral Park so we drove over through the rain and saw it. We got Angie to baby-sit, and the girl in the movie with Lee Marvin was Angie Dickinson, which is one of those pointless concidences life is full of, and I don’t even know why I mention it.

Well, I suppose because I laid Angie. Her father drops her off here when she’s baby-sitting for us, but I drive her home, and a couple months ago we started in necking, me feeling her up and like that, and this new generation of kids doesn’t seem to mind doing its own grabbing. I mean, the first time I felt her fumbling around between my legs I about fell over. I’m not used to the girl being aggressive. She’s seventeen, she’s only eight years younger than me, but I feel ancient with her. She’s part of the hippie generation, which I just missed, and I miss having missed it, if you know what I mean. Anyway, the point is she gave me a blow job a couple weeks ago, and tonight I finally got it into her. What a nice little body. We were in the back seat of the Buick, all cramped up, and she still managed to be great. Smooth legs, nice tight ass, good muscles. I lasted, which is sometimes a problem, and she had a good loud come. I can hardly wait to have her baby-sit again.

In the meantime, Betsy and I had made up and the idea was we were going to put the icing on the cake in bed, so driving back from Angie’s place I was a little worried. Would I get it up twice in a row? But it was all right. It had been a couple weeks since we’d made it, so Betsy was kind of horny too, so the whole thing worked out just fine. Except, of course, I didn’t get back to work last night.

Today, frankly, I’m a little bitter about that, and it’s just as well she’s out of the house. She took Fred to see the parade, and I’ve got the house to myself for a few hours.

The parade, gang. It’s Thanksgiving, let’s count our blessings. Well, it’s raining, how’s that for a blessing? Raining all over the parade. And I really don’t think I’m going to make nine hundred dollars out of Dwayne and Liz, I don’t think I can write that book again.

It’s funny, but every once in a while when I’m making love to Betsy I smell Christmas trees, but seeing a Christmas tree doesn’t necessarily make me horny for Betsy.

I know why I smell Christmas trees, of course. It’s that truck of her brothers’, Birge and Johnny. Have I mentioned how Birge and Johnny make their living? They drive Christmas trees to New York.

Do I hear you say that this seems unlikely, that there’s maybe six weeks a year when there will be a call for Christmas trees to be driven to New York, and that Teamsters’ Union or no Teamsters’ Union a truck driver cannot possibly earn a year’s living in six weeks of driving Christmas trees to New York, is that what I hear you saying, partner? Then let me tell you the surprise. Inside every truck load of Christmas trees there are other things. Radios. Luggage. Television sets. Typewriters. All sorts of things like that, on their way to New York City for the Christmas season.

Stolen.

I don’t mean that Birge and Johnny steal things, because they don’t. But other people steal things, and when they do they take them to Birge and Johnny, who have a barn north of Monequois on the old Montreal road, not far from their father’s Esso station, which by the way is doing rotten business since the new Montreal highway was put in and old man Blake would love to sell the station if you’re interested. He lives at 216 Clinton Street, Monequois, New York. I don’t know the zip code. His first name is Chester.

Anyway, all year long that barn of Birge and Johnny’s fills up with stolen goods, and at Christmastime the stolen goods are packed in the truck with the Christmas trees, load after load, and all driven down to New York, and sold to some people there.

When I first heard about this I said, “Is nothing sacred?” and laughed and laughed, because I thought that was funny. Christmas being sacred, you see, but the Christmas tree actually being pagan and not part of the religious aspect, so when I said, “Is nothing sacred?” I meant it as a joke, and I myself thought the joke was very funny. Betsy didn’t. First she didn’t get it, and then when I explained it to her she didn’t think it was funny. Neither do I, looking back at it. I see the humor of what I was trying for, but I don’t think I made it.

How I got to this, I was remarking how sex with Betsy sometimes makes me smell Christmas trees, and that’s because that truck of Birge and Johnny’s, since it rarely carries anything but Christmas trees, smells like Christmas trees all year long. So the first time we had sex, in the back of her brothers’ truck on a warm May night in 1963, was with the smell of Christmas trees all around us.

Betsy was very cold-blooded in setting that up, now I come to think of it. Up to and including whispering to me, as we stretched out on the blanket in the back of the truck, “It’s okay. It’s safe.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about. “What’s safe?” I said.

“It’s a safe time of the month,” she said. “I can’t get pregnant.”

“Oh,” I said, and felt a chill finger of belated apprehension run up my back. Pregnant. I hadn’t even thought about it.

I think that was when I decided I loved her. Not because I finally got into her, though that was a lot of fun at the time too, but because she’d remembered about getting pregnant, which I thought meant she was being considerate of me. I know, I know, but that’s what I thought. Also, I took her word for it. I took her word for it that night, and on every occasion after that for thirteen months, and then one night in June of 1964 I took her word for it once too often, and along about March 21st, 1965, along came Fred. Elfreda.

I don’t mean we played Vatican roulette all the time. Times she said it wasn’t safe I wore a rubber, but I always hated to wear one and she didn’t like it much either, so whenever she thought it was safe I’d go at her naked. Boom, Elfreda.

Anyway, after that night in the truck I couldn’t get enough of Betsy, and for a while she couldn’t get enough of me either. We were at each other every chance we got, and as the spring got warmer and warmer the chances got more and more frequent. I finally did sneak her into my room in the dorm, in the middle of the day, and on two memorable occasions she snuck me into her bedroom in the middle of the night. Also I didn’t go home to Albany for summer vacation, I got a cheap furnished room in town and a job at the makeup factory that was Monequois’s only attempt at local industry, and I spent all summer rutting atop my Betsy.

I also, because I was around her house all the time, got to know her family. Her father wears railroad engineer overalls, and is small and wiry and sour-looking, and is one of those people with so much grime encased in his skin if he stands still you feel like planting rows of beans up and down him. Her mother is fat, and wears flowered dresses that I believe she buys already faded. Pre-shrunk and pre-faded. She’s fat in the mind, too, being one of the dullest women on earth, who talks in a very slow monotone about things she saw on the television. What she talked about before television is anybody’s guess, but these days one hundred per cent of her conversation is what she saw yesterday or last Sunday or Tuesday afternoon on the television. Not on television, on the television. That’s how she speaks of it, the television. Like the Bronx.

I suppose, come to think of it, before television she used to talk about what she’d heard on the radio. But what would she have done if she’d been born a hundred years ago?

Anyway, besides those two there’s Birge and Johnny. Birge is eight years older than Betsy, and Johnny is five years older than Betsy, and they’re both big and ugly and rangy and mean-looking, and they hunt a lot, and they wear the kind of clothes worn by people who hunt a lot. They have both of them always intimidated me, Birge mostly but Johnny too. They stopped in here once last Christmastime, the middle of December. They drove the truck out from the city after delivering a load of Christmas trees, and they sat around and drank beer and we tried to find something we could talk about. We managed to talk about pro football for a while, but naturally Birge used to play semi-pro ball in Canada and all he wanted to talk about was ripping people’s nostrils, and against that my talk about watching the Giants screw up the game with the Packers on television last Sunday was pretty damn tame. As a matter of fact, I always have the feeling with Birge and Johnny that sooner or later they are going to get exasperated and then they’ll come over and stomp me to death with their boots because I’m soft. They make me nervous, and I’m glad they only came by that one time.

But I was talking about fucking Betsy. After that first night, we both of us got this terrible letch for each other, we’d stand around with our hands shaking waiting for a chance to get at each other again, we screwed and screwed and screwed, we tried every position I’d ever heard of, and Betsy was so hot she actually began to grab hold of me. In places like standing on line in the cafeteria. She’s in front of me, we’re holding our trays, and subtly she backs up, slips a hand behind her, gives me a squeeze. I jump, and look embarrassed, and she giggles at me with sidelong looks, and we rush through lunch and go over to the dorm and I sneak her in and lock the door so Rod won’t break in on us, and we hump all over the room.

Rod. Of course, I was reporting all this to Rod. Betsy doesn’t know it, naturally, but I told Rod everything. I told him how she liked it, what she did when she came, how many times I made her come, how she tasted the first time I went down on her, I told him everything. I was making up for all those times I had nothing to tell, of course, so I was overdoing it a little. In fact, I even lied a few times, exaggerated this and that. Like, I told him she was blowing me months before she was.

Then all of a sudden I was marrying her, and I wished I’d kept my big mouth shut.

But I am, as we writers say, leaping ahead of my story. First I have to leave Betsy forever, then we get married.

I graduated from college in June of 1964. My mother and Hannah came up. Hester was supposed to, but she disappeared that day. She disappeared frequently, so my mother didn’t worry about it, she just took it for granted Hester didn’t want to go see her big half-brother graduated. For which I don’t blame her, particularly since that was also the year Hannah and Hester had their own graduation, from high school. It was two weeks after mine, and I suppose Hester figured one graduation a June was sufficient evil unto the year thereof, or whatever.

Anyway, I introduced Mom and Hannah to Betsy, and Hannah and Betsy hit it off right away. They started talking about making your own clothes, and if that wasn’t enough to alert me to start running I don’t know what would have done it. Hester’s the only one in my family with the sense to disappear when the disappearing’s good.

I’d like to call Hester, but I don’t know exactly where she is. Somewhere in San Francisco, last I heard. If she has a phone, she’s probably pawned it.

Anyway, Hannah and Betsy got along like a house awater. Mom and Betsy were sort of cool to each other, I’m not sure why. It might have been a simple generational gap, or Mom might have had that mother thing about competition with the son’s girl friend, or maybe she just looked at Betsy and said to herself, At that girl’s age I was a swinger, and this one’s a bore. Whatever the reason, it was nervous-making to be around them, so for the two days that Mom and Hannah were up it tended to be Betsy and Hannah going off shopping together and Mom and me walking around town and the campus and all and looking at the sights.

Anyway, I graduated. I got the diploma, I shucked out of the black robe, I told Betsy I’d write every day I was in Albany and I would come up in August to see her, and I went away with Mom and Hannah and planned never to see Betsy again as long as I lived.

Because it was over. My lust had gradually worn itself out inside her, and once the lust was gone there wasn’t anything else to take its place. We had talked about marriage once or twice, or that is to say Betsy had brought the subject up, and every time I had talked about the unsettled state of both the world and my career, not knowing if I’d get to graduate school or not, and so on. And Betsy still had two years to go at Monequois, which I knew she would be only too glad to give up for a husband, but I refused to see things that way. I was trying to avoid the commitment without losing the steady lay, which was, I suppose, a sort of practice for fiction-writing. And my ultimate argument was that by August I’d know a lot more about what the future had in store for me, so I’d come back up to Monequois and we’d talk things over and decide our rosy tomorrows together.

Sure.

My mother and Hannah and I went back to Albany, to the house at 50 Slingerlands Street, and there was Hester, smoking cigarettes. She gave me a hello smile that was worth forty of Hannah’s dutiful trips, and she also right away arranged a double date for us, her with some football player she was screwing and me with a friend of hers called Charlotte, with whom I learned why the french kiss has become so popular. That was the first date. On the second date, Charlotte went down on me in the back seat of the football player’s Chevrolet while the football player and Hester were doing various obscure things up front, and Betsy receded in my mind like Smithville as seen from the observation car of the Twentieth Century Limited.

When the phone rang about suppertime one day and Hannah answered it and came out to the kitchen and said to me, “It’s for you,” and I walked into the living room and picked up the receiver and said, “Hello?” and this thin voice said, “Hi, Ed, how are you?” I had no idea at first who it could possibly be.

Then she said, “I know you have a lot of things to think over, Ed, and I wouldn’t have called you, but I thought it was important,” and then I knew who it was.

“Oh, hi, Betsy,” I said, trying for delight, and feeling very nervous because it hadn’t occurred to me it might be difficult to split from Betsy. It still hadn’t occurred to me it might be impossible.

But it very soon did, because the next thing she said was, “The thing is, Ed, I think I’m pregnant.”

We now have silence, the kind of silence that follows the last receding thud of a landslide that has just covered an Alpine town with several tons of rock and snow. No hope for survivors.

But hope doesn’t know there’s no hope. “Are you sure?” I said.

“Pretty sure,” she said.

All I could think of at first was her brothers. I knew Betsy had sort of broken with her family when she’d insisted on going to college, I knew none of them had looked upon her as being entirely respectable after that, but I didn’t know how deep this animosity ran. Would they decide that higher education had already so sufficiently ruined her that out-of-wedlock pregnancy was hardly worth considering, or would they decide she was still a Blake and family honor had been trampled in an affair that could only be settled with shotguns?

The silence ran on and on, and finally she said, in a very small and very thin voice, “I’m sorry.”

And my mind melted into my throat. I cleared it, and, “I’ll come up,” I said.

“Ed—” she said, and I knew she was going to give me an out, she was going to make a gesture and give me an opportunity to crawl through the letter slot and take off.

But I didn’t want it. Ten seconds earlier, yes. Ten minutes later, yes. But not then. I interrupted her. I said, “I’ll be there tonight.”

“All right,” she said.

We said a few more words, one at a time, and then we hung up and I went back to the kitchen and sat down and put some mashed potatoes in my mouth and they sat there on my tongue like a ball of mud. Mom was looking at me and Hannah was carefully not looking at me, both waiting to hear what the call had been, and Hester was drinking beer with dinner, which she said she was doing because she wanted to put a little weight on her hips.

Finally I swallowed the potatoes. I said, “Remember Betsy?”

Mom nodded. “A nice girl,” she said, noncommittally.

Hannah looked at me. “Did something happen to her?”

“She’s pregnant,” I said.

Hannah recoiled, and Hester said, “Hah!” She laughed, Hester did, and said, “You better pack, Ed.”

I grinned weakly at her, as though I thought she was joking, but I knew she was absolutely serious and absolutely right and I was absolutely not going to do anything about it.

Mom, with something grim in her voice, said, “You are going to marry the girl, aren’t you?” I suppose she was remembering my father, who’d maybe had second thoughts in his time, too.

“Oh, sure,” I said, as though nothing else had even for a second occurred to me. “I’m going up there,” I said, and looked at Hester, hoping to see understanding on her face, but she was drinking beer and it was several weeks before I could catch her eye again and then there was nothing in it.

Would it be ridiculous to say Hester is my father figure?

That evening I took the eight-ten bus out of Albany, and Betsy met me at the bus stop diner in Monequois at eleven-forty. She had her brothers’ truck, which I had never learned to drive. We didn’t kiss, and we looked at each other very solemnly, and I thought vaguely about murdering her. But then I thought. Could I get away with it? And then I thought, I know damn well I couldn’t. If I can’t even get away with fucking her, I’m certainly not going to get away with killing her.

She drove me to the Northway Motel, where Mom and Hannah had stayed in June, and I got a room, and she came in with me, and we talked. We discussed things, different people’s attitudes, where and when we would get married, that we were going to live for a while with my mother in Albany, and all the time we sat side by side on the single bed without touching, without very often looking at each other, and we didn’t kiss. I had no more desire for her than for a goat. Finally she asked me if I was hungry and I said no and she said she’d see me tomorrow and she left. She paused in the doorway, and I understood she wanted me to kiss her then, not because she wanted to be kissed exactly, but because at that moment that was the required gesture, and I couldn’t do it. I had come up here, I would take the blood test and get the license and marry her, but I couldn’t kiss her. I just couldn’t do it. And I didn’t.

The marriage took five days. The day before the wedding, in the early afternoon, I was over at Betsy’s house and her father said his first complete sentence to me. He said, “Can you spare a few minutes?”

“Sure,” I said. I wasn’t doing anything, I was just standing around waiting for the cement to harden.

“Good,” he said. “Come on.”

I followed him out of the house, and his dark blue Edsel station wagon with the greasy metal things lying in the back was parked out by the curb. You understand that that Edsel was at least fifty per cent of his character, or anyway I hope you understand that. An Edsel, for God’s sake. What was it then, eight years old? I understand he has a Pontiac now, so if you have any GM stock maybe you ought to sell.

In the meantime we got into the car. It was very huge inside, the seat seemed to be impossibly far back, and of course everything in the car was grimy and greasy and looked as though it was carefully rubbed down every day with used crankcase oil.

Betsy’s father started the engine and pulled away from the curb and looked out the gray windshield as he said, “I told them we were going. I told them we’ll get back soon.”

“Good,” I said.

He’s a lousy driver, of the sort who is somehow too far removed from the actions of the car. The car seemed to lumber through Monequois on its own momentum, sagging around the curves a little too fast, drooping along the straightaways a little too slow. After a while I stopped looking through the gray windshield and spent my time studying instead his right thumb.

Betsy’s father has a habit of chewing the nail of his right thumb, gnawing on it while the complexities of life wash sluggishly over him, and as a result that right thumb is clean. He is five feet four and a half inches of unrelieved grime in baggy engineer’s overalls, with right in the middle of it this pink thumb tip. It’s like a beacon, like Rudolph’s nose. If he were ever totally demolished in an automobile accident, which seems to me only inevitable, and I was asked to identify him, I’d say, “Let’s see his right thumb.” It wouldn’t even have to be on his hand, it could be torn off in the collision and I’d know it. They’d open this little box like you get a pen and pencil set in, and there would be this jointed penis sort of thing, all greasy and grimy with a gleaming pink tip, and I’d turn to Betsy and say, “I’m sorry, Betsy, but I’m afraid there’s no hope. It is Dad.”

So that was what I looked at, his right thumb, and after we’d driven three or four minutes he abruptly said, “You took a lot off my mind, you know.”

I thought I knew what he meant, so I said, “I did?”

“It’s been tough, the last few years,” he said. “Prices going up. And that goddam highway.”

Then I understood. In marrying his daughter I’d eased his economic burden. Isn’t that wonderful? It’s what they always say, every cloud has its silver lining.

I said, trying to appear sympathetic because I felt it necessary to be on good terms with my bride’s parents even though they were as alien to me as Martians, I said, “I guess it has been kind of rough.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” he said. “Sometimes, I don’t know what to do. I can understand those Jewish businessmen in New York that burn their places down for the insurance. I can understand them.”

Why Jewish businessmen? Why New York? But he was my father-in-law to be, so I said, “Sure, I can see how it happens, a businessman gets in a bind.”

“That’s right,” he said. “That’s right. You can see it.”

I looked out the windshield, and we were turning now onto the old Montreal road, and I had a sudden numbing thought. I thought, he’s going to bum the gas station down, and kill me, and make it look as though I was the one did it.

Not too paranoid. I even looked out the back window to see if Birge and Johnny were following in the truck to help out, but of course they weren’t.

But we did stop at the station. He parked against the picket fence at the back of the property and said, “Come on,” and got out of the car.

You understand this gas station, I hope. White tile front, the normal thing, with red trim, Humble over the door and Esso here and there. Blacktop out front, and the pumps. All as grimy as the owner.

There’s a halfwit named Buck who’s Dad Blake’s only employee, and who was changing a tire when we came in. Had it mounted preparatory to taking the tire off the rim and was banging away at it with several sledges.

As we walked in, Betsy’s father patted the outer wall and said to me, “Tile. Over concrete block.”

We went into the garage part, where Buck was bludgeoning the tire. Betsy’s father put his mouth close to my ear, pointed at the floor and shouted, “Concrete!”

We walked into the office part and he shut the door and things were quiet. “Well,” he said, “you see the problem.”

“I’m not sure—” I said.

“You’re a college boy,” he told me. “You got your diploma, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“You know all about this science stuff,” he said.

I considered trying to explain to him what an American Lit major is, and gave it up at once. “I studied some science,” I admitted, thinking of the biology course I’d been required to take.

“Okay,” he said. He made an exasperated gesture with his right hand, the one with the thumb. “How do I burn this fucking place down?” he said.