The Marriage Hearse Read online

  It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to see castles and churches and Kim did, that I didn’t want to rent cars or sleep in hotels, or eat three square meals a day and call them “breakfast”, “lunch”, and “dinner”, and become upset if food came about some other way. I did have different designs on Europe than Kim but above all, I did not want to be half of a couple. Feeling as I felt about Kim, I may very well have been flat and miserable without her, drifting and killing time; then again, I may not have been anything of the sort. I still had some youth, then, youthful ways of moving into situations. I could have met out of the way people in out of the way places, whole circles of such persons, worlds and underworlds in every city and village—guitars and wine, tobacco and coffee, bedrooms and terraces and small cafes in the cobblestone courtyards behind the shops. All the informal sprawl of life taken on the fly, old myths come to fruition! On the road, the great historical bum, a girl in every port …

  And so with half the world starved for affection I had found the most charming lass of them all—sharp without hardness, utterly distracting without a trace of vanity, and funny as Chaplin in a downtown elevator—found her and indeed loved her madly, and yet there I was absolutely drowning in hatred, despising her more every day. Mind, I say all this in retrospect. At the time, we were both pretty damned confused.

  We landed up in a cheap hotel room in Paris (not so cheap, actually, but a crummy hotel room in Paris at any rate), our candle burning awfully low and both sick as dogs with Spanish dysentery. In Madrid and Barcelona I somehow kept eating horse-steaks, kept getting them brought to me in varying disguises. The first time it was simply a language problem, I ordered by mis-steak and was just plain saddled with it. After that it was more a matter of pure phenomenology; whatever I ordered, horse-steak came. Deeper and deeper into disease I was driven until finally, by the time we hit Gay Paree, Kim had caught it too and we settled in for quite an unusual stay at the Hôtel Étoile.

  As I recall it, we spent a lot of time in the musty corridor pushing and pulling hair in an attempt to get at the bathroom first. The other Étoile patrons were surely nonplussed. They must have been shitting into paper bags in their rooms, or into newspapers like the Yugoslav peasants, because if I ever wasn’t in the bathroom, Kim was, and if she wasn’t I was. This we had in common, along with the fact that for convenience sake we read the same book that week, War and Peace, passing it back and forth in the corridor like a baton. Otherwise there was a distance and animosity to defy every good intention, and to quickly o’ermaster any attempt at decency or tact.

  We felt so much better when we finally shook the bug that we actually went out and had fun one night. Saw a good American film with French sub-titles, ate Vietnamese food, and browsed in the teeming bookstalls along the left bank of the Seine. It was not real, though, and it did not last. By bedtime we were at each other’s throats again, and after a few more days of the familiar hostility, we concluded it was real and might very well last, so we grew decisive.

  The plan was this: we would stroll down to the café-tabac on the Rue de Raspail and there we would separate. Kim would pick up a man, I would pick up a woman, and we would see each other next in a week, at our scheduled flight home. This plan we put into operation at once and at once Kim netted her fish, and vanished. But the plan had less to do with ideas of romance than with the exorcism of bile and I soon realized I would need a fresh plan to reflect more accurately what is called in psychiatric parlance “my needs”. My new plan was to go straight back to the hotel room alone, read a couple of Simenons and get some sleep; then do whatever I felt like doing, if and when I woke. Pretty smart, right? It is probably true that if you have been beating a head of yours against a wall, merely to stop can make you feel quite at the top of your game, and I did for the hour or so my eyes stayed open. Then around midnight, as I lay peacefully dreaming of autumn nights in America, Kim came back to the room too.

  We decided to go home a week early if we could book a flight. We agreed to a six-month separation, after which we would see what if anything was left. We flew out of Paris at lunch-time, were back in the States well before dinner, and parted after breakfast at the Pine Street Diner, no longer extant. Our six-month separation lasted six days, from Sunday to the Saturday following, and after that we took the flat together …

  “Benny would like another kiss,” says Kim. She is still at her desk swimming in pages, and the coffee I brought in earlier stands untouched. Seeing me see it, she remembers wanting it, and takes it down at room temperature in two hearty swallows. I duck in, kiss Ben, and return to dress for my drive to Concord.

  “Wish you were coming along?” Kim shrivels at the very mention of Adele’s house.

  “I forget the excuse—I mean the occasion. Why is it we’re going again?”

  “Will and Sadie’s problems.”

  “Which are?”

  “There’s only one.”

  “Really. One problem?”

  “No. One ‘r’.”

  “Waste my life, Locksley, go right ahead and waste it. You never said what kept you till seven.”

  “It was more like six-thirty.”

  “Was it anything special?”

  “Nope. Yup.” Remarkable that she should choose that very word, le mot juste! Special.

  “You win, get out of here. I think that this weekend Will and Sadie and I will get together and discuss your problems.”

  Some pair of garbage-brains, as previously conceded, though now perhaps you feel the gentle tug of the undertow too. And just in passing you may find it of interest (I always have) that Kim does not reduce Will or Sadie to an initial as she does with the rest of us, they are made an exception. One thing I do fervently hope, however, is that you haven’t taken a wrong idea of my bride or her disposition tonight. Oh she may seem a bit aggressive or sarcastic compared to say Ma Kettle, but she really is a sweetie most of the time. Much of what is rough in her comes of battling me, obnoxious Locksley, and when in addition “I” am your historian and sole guide to goings-on, well, keep it in perspective. Check her out sometime on a placid Sunday morning in May, or out among the turnips and potatoes of a Pennsylvania summer, in her cut-offs and kerchief, with Sadie and Ben. She’d melt your heart, reader, take it from Locksley. Did I lie to you in Selected Essays?

  Even now she has risen to take me in her arms, as though sensing a bad press. “If you get home early enough,” she says, “you might find that not all the pretty girls are becoming electricians.”

  Very few, I’m sure. I can appreciate the generosity of impulse behind this uncharacteristically kittenish overture and still I am forced to scramble a bit in the circumstances. “Tricia!” is what I say, God knows why, my muse gone balmy, for though I have a thought in my head it is a thought of Maggie Cornelius who will be waiting for me after my chat with Adele and who will through no fault of her own insure that I am home anything but early.

  “Tricia the Electrician!” I go on, staggering but clutching the ball. “A boffo spot, K. Have some cards printed up at once. ‘Nothing fishy when Tricia fishes your wires, sires. You’ll wish you had Trish, what a dish …”

  “M., you turkey.”

  “Won’t fly?”

  “Maybe in the 5th Grade it will. You’d better hit the road before you short out.”

  “Is the car still in Fennel Alley?”

  “I doubt it’s moving, if that’s the punch line.”

  “Maybe it’s been stolen. Maybe it won’t start. See you. And don’t forget to water the Rizzi.”

  “I already watered all the paintings today, don’t worry so.”

  I have kissed the crown of her head and am again winding down the four flights of familiar stair to Franklin Avenue. Sometimes at this hour, expecially after too rich a dinner or too much ale, I get logy and useless for about an hour, but tonight I am fresh and spilling over energy. Does this strike you as an indication of less than pluperfect stability? Where I tell you one minute of my crushed spirit, my nagging displeasure, only to turn around and next minute say I feel like a million quid? A trifle schitzy? Well that’s me, darlin’!

  May be it was those two ale, or possibly the bright young snow. May be it’s the special calibre of the day, not the day which began last mid-night or this morning at cock-crow but the one which began at 5:00 p.m. outside Bourbon-on-the-Charles, the day I decided to share with you in detail. May be it’s being glad to see the kids, and Adele, and Maggie C. We’ll C.

  Marvins and Melvins

  The Boston area is intriguing from the sky at night, as any coastal city is. There are the strings of light, bridges and passes, the rings of light on the island beltways, clusters of light in the parks and squares. The fainter grid of light gives way to a gradual dimming as you drift inland, till by the time you are over the distant suburbs there is a remarkable ratio of dark to light, of treeland and grassland to crushed land and macadam.

  The progression is also seen in the various efforts to purvey modern housing along the route. Your initial brush with the alarming notion “If you lived here you’d be home now” comes virtually in the shadow of the airport where for $65,500 (and that’s 65-5 in the parlance) you are offered two rug-over-concrete rooms with a pinch-window view of three major beltways snarled below a cloverleaf—the graying of America!

  The truth is, if you lived here you’d cut your throat tout de suite, mon ami, but things do get better as you head west and soon enough you are offered for 75-5 a four room row-house condo with a parking slot, a patch of grass, and an airtight wood-burning stove “imported from Europe”. (How else would it get here, really?) If you lived here you’d be home now too, and yet would you feel at home?

  If not, simply roll down the window, punch in the radio, and continue we
st until you eventually do bear down on a bonafide suburb—Girl Scout cookie and Little League baseball sort of suburb—where you will buy for 115-5 a “home” (not a “house”), fill the garage with 12-speed bicycles, and barbecue off the deck in back. There will be a mall nearby to meet your several shopping needs and to keep the wolf of isolation from yr dr (have to watch this realty-speak, it realty stays with you) and you will be truly home now, back in the U.S.S.A.

  Adele does better still, of course, on Blackberry Lane in historic Concord, where late the embattled farmers stood and frd the sht hrd rnd the wrld. For one thing she tapped into the Locksley millions at the time of the move—we went for a settlement based on paperback royalties from the Wockenfuss Trilogy—and then for the last five years she has been turning a buck herself as owner-operator of Locksley Arts and Crafts, distributing art supplies to the school systems of some of the richer towns out this way. If you have ever wondered where the mark-ups were, reader, then wonder no more. Oil would be a poor guess, so would gold bar or crunchy granola. Art supplies to the gifted brat, that’s where the mark-ups are, I won’t even name a percentage. Adele did not create the situation, she merely stumbled across it and leapt to take advantage. In truth she got the accounts by proffering a better line at a lower price than the older companies, and still I won’t name a percentage.

  Had we been making the move to Concord together, Adele has frequently said, she would have been leaning toward an elegant house from an earlier period, with kempt extensive grounds and charming outbuildings, immense old deciduous shade-trees and a small orchard on the hill, set back from the twisting road by a few well-spaced cedars and the hand-fashioned loose-rock wall. Since the idea of moving to Concord came subsequent to the idea of divorce, however, we were not going to Concord together, and so she bought instead the new seven-room house on Blackberry Lane, sometimes known as “Locksley West.”

  I have heard it said the pot shouldn’t presume to call the kettle black so I will describe briefly and without prejudice the housing development on Blackberry Lane. Or rather the development named Blackberry Lane, since the road itself came as part of the package. There was no such lane before they drained the swamp. Bushmill Road was there a long time to judge from the modest landed estates along it, but the 60-acre swamp had never been anything more than a skating pond before the drainage. They put the road through and raised thirty houses over the fill, and the houses were okay. They used good materials and did extensive planting so that each 2-acre lot would look different from the next and the prior. And they unloaded all thirty with no difficulty at all despite the price.

  But the swamp still haunts those thirty houses on Blackberry Lane. Haunts them especially in winter when massive, glacial frost-heaves muscle the foundations, rearranging anew each year the many ways in which the various doors and windows malfunction. Then in April and again in August the thirty basements fill up with water, from one to four feet high. Many are the tales of the heroic Marvins and Melvins who strip to the buff and swim those murky cellar waters in quest of floating pets, small appliances, and sundry other valued jetsam.

  Those Marvins and Melvins do not swim the cellar of Adele Blaney Locksley, though they would eagerly do so if asked. I am asked, generally, and I have swum, though mostly I drink Adele’s fancy coffee and argue with her about selling the house. She’s happy at West, though. She likes it, likes her job—enjoys being “out there” is how she puts it, out in the world after all those years of seeing only children and their hamsters. It was a little, she once said, like learning to walk again after a long convalescence.

  She has a pretty good man too, I’ve met him a number of times and can’t say a bad word about him. Oh maybe one: Bob Berger is too nice. He is so nice he cannot be forceful. If I barged in on them in bed and ordered him out of the house, I’m pretty sure he’d go. Jump up, dress nervously, and depart, saying “Yes yes it’s true, you knew her first …” He is a guy so dedicated to letting it all run smoothly that for smoothness’ sake he will bear any indignity. You could smother him with a fart and he wouldn’t bat an eye or make a move, not even shade away on the sly. I’m talking about a bone-crushing fart here, reader, of the sort that might level any other mortal and old Berger will forge bravely past to the next topic of conversation.

  Merely good manners, you may say, and of course you could argue it that way. But I have a feeling Adele can’t love him. She will try, for she knows his points and she knows one can’t have everything. Often she has noted that he’s a deal better to her than I could ever have been and that’s so, it’s all too obvious. And still I fear she can’t love him, though he worships the wall-to-wall she walks on.

  Will’s fond of him, though, and I’m proud of the lad for that. Berger doesn’t know a basketball from a cowsquash and for Will that makes the man a conversational zero. But Will loves Berger, he protects the guy’s feelings all the time in little ways, tries to make him feel right at home out there at Locksley West. Will’s a good one, all right, he’d bring tea and toast to a cloth monkey. First time he met Kim he was only seven. I could see he really took to her and that he just wasn’t sure if it was okay to like her. He asked his mother that night and she told him, if you like her you like her, so Will gets on the phone straightaway to let Kim know he likes her. Tells her he forgot to say it before but that he really does. Kim cried hideous tears that night, reader, touched by my son’s sincerity, as I was too.

  But Berger will have his troubles with Sadie. I haven’t said too much about Sadie thus far and I may never because she is in many ways a mystery to me. Also because she is so strong and independent. Two years younger than Willie, she seems almost free-standing, like a sculpture, tough as pig-iron. So I really don’t worry about her a lot and though we have always been close in the past, just this year she seems more inward or peerward or something—just-got-my-first-bra, nothing-left-to-say-to-pa sort of daughter maybe—and I have resolved to wait her out. I know we’ll be great pals when she comes out the other side, in her twenties.

  Sadie all but spits at that guy Berger though, as I say, lately she looks like she’d as soon spit at me too. All this spitting! But wait, Sadie hasn’t actually spat at anyone yet, it’s just a face she puts on now and again. I can see Berger doesn’t know what to make of it, or how to handle it, and I have also seen Will try to guide him past it, nursing Berger along with polite questions about his work (I believe he teaches history) and in somewhat a reversal of their expected roles bracing up, as it were, Berger’s incumbency.

  The bland suburban life is not as much of a comedown for Adele as you might suppose. We never lived the life of celebrity at all, never went to parties or promotions or to the colony of Hollywood where the swells like to take a Creative Person to lunch. It was business as usual for us, not life in the fast lane but life in the breakdown lane, laundromats and pizza and cars that had to go black-market for an inspection sticker. We lived a bland suburban life in the city, in which I came home from work at 5 p.m. as I do now. Like everyone else, we took an occasional trip but for the most part we stayed home and raised the kids.

  Over the years I was unfaithful to Adele only once, or with only one woman, the redoubtable Karen Comiskey. Like the Venus de Milo, K.C. had no arms, literally. But to go along with this affliction, she had been provided with a most dramatically female body, such round firm thises and thats, and only God can say why it amused him to clip her wings. Of course I do not do pornography, even in the leanest years I wouldn’t touch it, and yet K.C. always struck me as the perfect gimmick around which one might build such a book; plus cą change, plus c’est la même chose sort of porno, you know.

  When I met Karen she told me she restored antique furniture, that’s how she worded it exactly. This was her test for me and I passed, by gaping at her. Bob Berger would have nodded and smiled, packed his pipe and maybe faintly reddened in spite of himself, but I gaped and stared down at the places where her arms weren’t and she accepted me, she let me inside her world. “I’ve always enjoyed working with my hands,” she said, a line I resorted to myself early in this account and no doubt to less effect. It was another test and I passed again, by laughing, though I shook my head in amazement too, for this was brass with a capital b (so make that Brass), this was one tough lady and I was very much taken with her.