Trailerpark

Cleaving, and Other Needs

WHEN DOREEN TIEDE MARRIED BUCK TIEDE she did not have to change her name. Her grandfather Sam Tiede, a well driller from Northwood, and Buck’s father Norman Tiede, a house painter from Catamount, were brothers. They had been born and raised in Catamount, along with a half-dozen more Tiedes of the same generation, and when Sam had moved to Northwood ten miles away and had become a well driller and after a few years had managed to borrow enough money from the bank in Concord to set him and his son up with their own drilling rig, he was regarded from then till now as the successful son of old Warren Tiede, for none of the remaining children had moved that far from Catamount and made money. Doreen, then, was descended directly from the Tiedes who had risen in the world, whereas her second cousin Buck was from the Tiedes who, generation after generation, had plowed the same old row. This is important to know, because it helps explain why Doreen didn’t have to change her last name when, a seventeen-year-old virgin, she married, and it also helps explain why they acted the way they did after they were married and divorced. It doesn’t much help explain Buck’s alcoholism, of course, and it doesn’t tell you why Doreen had such a craving for sexual love that Buck, who wasn’t much interested in sex in the beginning, got to be obsessed with it, but it does tell you why Doreen thought Buck was a better man than he perhaps thought he was, and it tells you a little something about his anger.

In the first year of their marriage, Doreen made love with three men other than her husband, who knew about only one of the men, Howie Leeke, and when it came right down to it, didn’t know about Howie for sure and was made to think that he was imagining the worst parts, the parts, that is, where Howie rides wildly atop Doreen on the waterbed he’s supposed to have out there in his trailer on Cush Meadow Road, rides her bouncing, arching, tautly sprung, eighteen-year-old body as if it were a horse he were breaking, rubbing and drifting through her while she works against him the other way in perfectly thrilling counterline, until she can’t control her movements any longer and… Well, you know the rest.

Buck knew the rest, too, but only from what he had read about sex in Playboy and other such magazines, not from what he had experienced with women himself, for he had very little experience when he married Doreen — teen-age sex in the back seat of his Chevy Nomad with girls he had gone to high school with, which meant mainly kissing and biting and then plucking and pulling and poking at each other’s private parts and sometimes sucking on each other’s private parts, which, even though such activities usually brought him and sometimes his girlfriend a deep shudder and a wet spot, nevertheless left him feeling dazed with guilt and overall feelings of inferiority; and then, later, in the service, sex with prostitutes in towns near the bases where he was stationed, in Texas and South Carolina, sex that left him feeling like a man who has just walked out to the neon-lit street from a pornographic movie; and after he had come back to New Hampshire and had gone to work for Doreen’s father and grandfather, his cousin and uncle, drilling wells in Northwood and living at his parents’ home in Catamount, sex with Doreen, who was then a senior in high school, five years younger than he. Because Buck was afraid he would get Doreen pregnant before she graduated from high school, and probably also because he wanted Doreen’s father and grandfather to think well of him, Buck Tiede of the Catamount Tiedes who never amount to a tinker’s dam anyway, sex with Doreen remained more or less of the back-seat kind, enlivened of course with a lot of talk, for they were, after all, in love.

Both Doreen and Buck were good-looking, and people thought of them as sexy because they looked the way sexy people are supposed to look, clean and healthy and symmetrical. Doreen was tall and broad-shouldered with full breasts and a firm, round bottom. She had silky-smooth, dark brown hair that hung loosely over her shoulders, and in the summer she tanned easily and evenly to a shade that made people think she might have a little Mediterranean blood in her. Her face was large, with a full, broad mouth that was good-humored, and because of the crispness of her full lips, sensual, and her brown eyes, shaded by a prominent but serious-looking brow, were set wide on her face. Her nose wasn’t quite right — a little short and narrow for such a large face, but it certainly was not unattractive. Buck’s most unattractive feature in those days was the wide gap between his front teeth. The gap was wide enough for him to spit through, which he did habitually, wide enough even for him to clamp a cigarette with, which, as a joke, he sometimes did, so that he could go on talking while his cigarette remained attached to his upper jaw by the gapped front teeth. Then he would pluck the cigarette away, and you would see that the gap was actually kind of sexy, kind of inviting, like an open door or gate, and if you were a man, you’d think, “Hmmm, I bet old Buck gets a lot of women,” and if you were a woman, you’d think, “Hmmm, I wonder what it would be like to run my tongue into that gap between his teeth.” He was also tall, a little over six feet, and in those days in good shape from his work on the drilling rig, and with his ash-brown hair cut in the military style and his clear blue eyes and straight, narrow nose, he was clean-looking, too.

Their wedding night and honeymoon — a week in a motel near Franconia Notch in the White Mountains — weren’t much fun for Doreen. They weren’t much fun for Buck, either. He was awkward and too quick and then impotent for a while and then impatiently passionate and grabby, his head so full of blood from shame and lust that he couldn’t think, so finally, because she could think, Doreen just gave herself over to him and, without feeling, let him have his ways with her. There were several ways, because of all the false starts and false stops and his difficulties with the condom, and it was with barely hidden relief for both of them when, finally, lodged up inside her, Buck grunted and his pelvis whimpered of its own accord, and he was freed to withdraw from her. Her hymen he had broken easily, without even realizing it, earlier, and though she had felt a stab of pain, it was a hot, quick and almost pleasurable pain, so she had said nothing to him. Then next morning when he got out of bed to pee, he saw the specks of blood on the sheet beneath where he had slept, and he quickly covered them with the top sheet and went straight into the shower, while she lay curled on her side sleeping peacefully.

Throughout the honeymoon week, Doreen watched and understood Buck, and she loved him. She hated to see him suffer so, and in a way she wished he would just forget all about making love to her and just let her look at him, as if he were a movie actor or maybe a stranger she had met here in the White Mountains while on vacation alone, a tall, athletic-looking man with bright blue eyes and a sexy gap between his front teeth. She could watch him at breakfast in the International Pancake House across the road from the motel. Or she could watch him in the chair in front of her as they both rode the aerial tramway to the top of Wildcat Mountain. Or, at the viewing platform at Echo Lake below the Old Man of the Mountain, he could be peering through the telescope next to hers. His quarter’s worth of viewing and hers would run out at the same time, and both their telescopes would droop at the same instant. He would turn to her and their eyes would meet above their telescopes, and he would say, “I’ve been watching you all week. I think you’re beautiful, and I want to make love to you.” The music would rise, she would let go of her telescope and take a single, delicate step forward, he would reach out his hand and take hers, and… Well, you know the rest.

Doreen knew the rest, too, but she wasn’t all that interested in the rest. And everything she was going through in bed with Buck only served to formalize her lack of interest. When they returned to Catamount and moved into the trailerpark at Skitter Lake, it only got worse. Buck tried to make love to her about once a week at first, and then once every two weeks, and then only once a month, always with the same frustrating results for her, the same depressing results for him. It wasn’t that either one of them was technically incompetent in the act. What was wrong was inside their heads. Her fantasies and his fears had no way of meshing together or of helping one another go away or even of becoming known to one another. The one thing that kept their attempts at lovemaking even remotely tender was her understanding of his fears, for when he grew angry at himself for his awkwardness or the unpredictability of his body, its sudden flights from itself, he would turn on her, suddenly snarling through the darkness that lay between them, “Goddamn it, Doreen, if you didn’t just lay there like a log I might be able to get myself more excited about the idea of making love to you,” and if, as a result of that scolding, she started licking him over his chest, fondling his inner thighs, grasping his muscular buttocks in her hands, digging into his white, tight flesh with her sharp fingernails, he’d slump and say in a low voice, “I don’t know, Doreen, it frightens me when you’re like this. All I can think of is your doing it with another man.” Doreen understood these remarks and during the days while Buck was at work in Northwood drilling artesian wells with her father and grandfather, she plotted strategies that she hoped would allay Buck’s fears at last and thereby would make him into the kind of man who could lift her up and out of her real life into the world where she knew she truly belonged, the world in which she was the recipient of a handsome stranger’s utter devotion.

Within six months, however, the only time Buck would make love to her was when he was drunk, but not every time he was drunk, for by that time he was getting drunk often. All Doreen’s strategies had failed by then — filmy negligees, soft music, flattery, faked orgasms, even marijuana. But nothing she did allowed Buck to come to her directly, good-humoredly, with simple hunger and tenderness and admiration neatly intertwined. If anything, her strategies only made it worse, because Buck always noticed them immediately and grew either desperate to respond to them or else grew angry and accused her of accusing him of being unable to function sexually without atmosphere and stimulants. That was when she committed adultery for the first time — after Buck had grabbed the two marijuana cigarettes from her hand and had flushed them down the toilet and stomped out of the trailer, leaving her alone in bed. She had got out of bed and had walked to the trailer next door in her nightgown, barefoot, to the kid she had bought the marijuana cigarettes from, Bruce Severance, thinking that what she wanted was to buy another cigarette, this one to smoke alone, defiantly in front of the TV, so that when Buck came back smelling of booze and still angry at her, she wouldn’t much care. But she and Bruce had got to talking, he loved to talk, especially about marijuana, and she had not realized that marijuana was such an interesting subject, that there was so much to know about it, and for about five minutes, standing against the wall of his trailer, the kid had made love to her. He had simply come up against her when she had started to leave, had pulled her nightgown to her hips, and then, with one quick hand, had unzipped his fly, releasing his erect penis, which he had inserted. It was over before she had realized it had begun.

“What … what if I get pregnant?” she whispered into his ear.

“Don’t worry, man. You won’t.”

“I won’t?”

“Tantric birth control, man. It takes years to learn, but it works. You won’t get pregnant,” he promised.

She felt his semen dribbling down the inside of her thigh, and she drew her nightgown back down and stepped away.

“Just don’t forget to wash, man,” the kid said, and he asked if she wanted to use his bathroom.

She stammered no, no, she’d better get back, because her husband could be coming in any minute and he would be drunk and mean.

The kid agreed and opened the door for her. He kissed her on the nape of her neck as she passed by him and went out, but she barely felt his kiss, for she was terrified that she had been impregnated by him.

For a month after that night she felt dirty and almost evil, but when she discovered that she was not pregnant, she no longer felt dirty or almost evil. In fact, she felt downright eager to do it again. Not with Bruce Severance, however, for, even though he was a few years older than she, he was a kid to her, a long-haired pretentious kid, and what she wanted was a man, a grown man who was sure of himself and had a broad smile and could explain things to her and would be kind and tolerant and patient with her when she could not understand what he explained. That was why she made love to Leon LaRoche, who lived in number 2, two trailers down from where she lived with Buck.

Leon was in his late twenties then, and he dressed nicely, because of his job as a teller at the Catamount Savings and Loan, and he was a bachelor who smiled easily and who liked to explain things slowly, methodically, calmly, with tolerance and even affection for Doreen when she seemed not to know what he was talking about. He talked politics with her, for there was an election that fall, and though her family had always voted Republican, Doreen was thinking of registering as a Democrat for this, her first election, and Leon explained to her what she should tell her family when they found out she had registered as a Democrat, which they surely would do, since the lists of registered voters and their party affiliations were required by law to be posted in public places. He told her about Roosevelt and Jack Kennedy and civil rights, which she thought fascinating, for, even though she had heard of all three, no one had ever explained them to her slowly, carefully, and with a sure, precisely accurate knowledge of what she did not know, which meant that no one had ever told her about these things without confusing her or else condescending to her.

She touched his knees with hers — she was wearing a plaid cotton shirtwaist dress, and he wore his shirt and tie and dark brown suit pants (his jacket he had carefully hung in the closet on arriving home from the bank for lunch, which he preferred to fix for himself at home rather than spend the extra $475 a year he had calculated it would cost to eat lunch in town at the Copper Skillet). Then she reached forward between their chairs and touched his knees with the palms of her hands, running her fingertips up the insides of his legs, until she was touching his crotch. He reached out and took her by the shoulders and drew her forward and down, so that her face was laid against his tightening thigh. Then he unzipped his fly, and she drove both her hands in, working and massaging him until the red head of his penis was shoving its way past the folds of cloth toward her mouth.

Afterward, Leon hurriedly drew his crotch away from Doreen’s mouth and said something about having to fix his lunch and get back to work on time, and Doreen had left his trailer in tears and had gone back to her own place and had vomited. As with Bruce, she felt dirty for about a month, although of course this time her guilt was not compounded by a fear of being pregnant, and then one morning she woke up, Buck was gone to work, and as she looked down her long, muscular legs to her feet and wiggled them deliciously, she felt fine again. It was a cold February morning, two weeks before the presidential primary, and when she went into the bathroom to shower, she discovered that during the night the cold water line to the shower had frozen solid. Water ran smoothly through all the other pipes, so she reasoned that, as the day warmed, the shower line would thaw on its own and probably was not frozen solidly enough to burst the pipe. She knew that by noon at the latest everything would be working properly again. But she also thought of Howie Leeke, the recently divorced plumber who was awfully good-looking and had a funny, raspy way of talking and quick gray eyes, so she called the plumber.

Howie liked to please women. “I always like to leave ’em crying for more,” he said with a grin (when asked how he did it, how he managed to have so many women calling him in the morning to come and fix pipes or blocked drains or broken appliances that, when he arrived, seemed to need little or no repair at all). In Doreen’s case, however, Howie was unable to leave her crying for more. She very quickly discovered that she had too much of him, that his persistent, tireless weight was smothering her, and the longer they bounced and thrashed across her bed, onto the floor, on the coffee table in the living room, on and on and on, for what seemed to her like whole days and nights, the more she wished she had never called him, had never come to the door in her blue nightgown, had never leaned over behind him when he squatted down by the tub to try the faucets. When he finally left, which he would do only after she had moaned and cried out like an animal with its leg caught in a trap, she had shut the door on him with enormous relief and gratitude for his absence. He had said, as he stepped out the door, “I’ll be back, don’t worry,” and she had answered, “No, you can’t. I love my husband,” and he had winked and strolled across the frozen ground to his pickup truck.

But Howie was a braggart, and it wasn’t a week before Buck had got told by one of the kids who worked on his crew that Howie Leeke was making cracks about Doreen Tiede down at the Hawthorne House the other night. At first Buck couldn’t believe it, that his wife, the teen-aged angel Doreen, had let that big-mouthed, nervous, skinny, twice-divorced plumber near her perfect body, that she had listened to his line, that she had seen his sex organ! That he had seen hers! That their sex organs had actually made contact with one another! Then, of course, he couldn’t believe anything else, and he knew it was because Howie was a giant in bed, a titan, while he was a shrimp, a child, and, driving home from work, as the snow started falling, Buck began to cry, to sob, to groan, to call out her name, Doreen! Doreen! while his car slipped on the snow and skidded from side to side, drifting dangerously into long, slow slides coming down the long hill from Northwood to Catamount.

Most people can either only give love or receive it, rarely both, and there’s nothing wrong with that, so long as you attach yourself to your opposite number, that is, so long as, if you are the one who can only give love, you attach yourself to someone who can only receive it. You will be able then to make each other happy. If, by the same token, you are like Doreen Tiede and can only receive love, if you have no vision of a person’s needing you more than you need that person, then you had better not hook up with someone like Buck Tiede, or you will quickly end up as they ended up — with Buck on his knees in front of his wife, snow-covered, for he had crashed his car at the turnoff from Old Road and had walked in from the road to the trailerpark, sobbing hysterically, blindly, all the way in.

Doreen was unmoved, but she stroked his head mechanically and listened to his cries, until after a while, his cries turned to wet, begging queries as to what, exactly, she had done with Howie. In her own words, he said, he wanted to hear it from her own lips. He didn’t care how bad it was, he just wanted to hear it from her own lips. He knew, no matter how bad it was, no matter where it led, even if it led to her running off with Howie, he deserved it, for he had not been a good lover for her, he had been a weak and boyish man in bed, and she was a young woman who needed steady loving, just like all the sad songs said, so go ahead, give it to him straight, at least give him that much, so he could know the truth and wouldn’t go around the rest of his life being laughed at because everyone knew what he didn’t know.

“The rice is burning,” she said, and she pushed his head off her lap and got up. In a few seconds she came back from the stove and sat down again, and he put his head back on her lap, and she told him that she hadn’t slept with Howie, she had only let him kiss her, once, and then she had felt awful and she had sent him away.

“Kissed you? That’s all?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t believe her, of course, and his despair turned suddenly to anger, for she was lying to him, lying so she could go out tomorrow as soon as he had gone to work and do all kinds of disgusting things with her and Howie Leeke’s bodies. He saw them sweating against each other, naked and twined around each other, heads where genitals are supposed to be, genitals where heads are supposed to be, arms and hands where legs and feet should be, stomachs against backs, backs against stomachs, everything backward and upside-down, and the two of them laughing deliriously as they swallowed each other whole. “You whore, I’m going to shoot you dead,” he declared, and he got to his feet and stomped down the narrow hallway to their bedroom, returning a minute later, just as she lit a cigarette, with his.20 gauge shotgun. “You lying bitch, you deserve to die! You first, and then I’m going to shoot that sonofabitch Howie Leeke, and then I’m going to shoot myself!” He drew the gun up and aimed at her chest, which had begun to heave.

“Good,” she said. “I want you to shoot me. But don’t shoot Howie, and please, Buck, don’t shoot yourself. You’re a good man, and it’s not Howie’s fault that he kissed me, it’s mine. I’m everything you say I am, I deserve to be shot by a jealous husband, even if all I did was let another man kiss me, but you don’t deserve to die. You’re a good man, Buck, and someday you’ll make something of yourself, someday you’ll be running your own well-drilling business and you’ll be just like Daddy and Grandpa, happy and with children and a good wife and all that a good man can wish for. But I’m a rotten wife, I haven’t been good to you, I’ve let another man kiss me…” She got up from the chair and crossed the room slowly, evenly, until she drew near the barrel of the shotgun. “I let another man’s lips touch mine.” She placed her chest lightly against the mouth of the gun barrel. “A strange man’s lips were placed and pressed against mine, and I permitted it. I invited it.” Buck pulled the trigger.

They say that time stops, or goes away, and your body and the world’s body cross into one another. You have no thoughts, for once, no memories and no plans for the future, they say it’s like being born, though of course you have no memory of that and cannot know if the comparison is apt, and they say that it’s like dying, but you have not quite done that either and so cannot know if they are right, and people who have died cannot come back and tell you what it was like to die, so you will just have to imagine what Doreen felt for that instant when Buck pulled the trigger and the hammer fell, and the only noise was a gasp from Doreen as she clamped her hands onto the barrel of the gun and pressed it as tightly as she could against the exact center of her chest and then collapsed into a pile on the floor, the shotgun clattering to the floor beside her, as Buck came forward toward her, his trousers already to his knees, his hands yanking at her clothing, drawing it away from her body, until he had her naked from the waist down, her legs spread wide on either side of him, and he was moving swiftly, sweetly, smoothly into her, the two of them crooning sly obscenities and gross compliments into each other’s ears.

Doreen got pregnant that night, and both she and Buck knew it the instant it happened, or at least they claimed to know it afterward. But they did not live happily ever after. Their second year of marriage was worse than the first, and when the baby was born, a girl they named Maureen, Doreen stopped sleeping with Buck altogether, and he took to staying out late almost every night, usually at the Hawthorne House, where he would drink himself into a sullen stupor that often led him to beat his wife when he arrived home and found her sleeping peacefully alone. Doreen had three or four lengthy affairs over the next few years, none of them satisfactory to her, all of them resulting in an increased distance from her husband Buck. They were divorced in the fifth year of their marriage, when their little girl was four and right after Buck had been fired by Doreen’s father and grandfather because she had been forced to call the police one night to stop him from beating her. Doreen and Buck never forgot that snowy night and the shotgun, however, and in later years, alone, they would wish they could speak of it to each other, but they never did speak of it to each other, not even the night that it happened.