American Appetites (35 page)

Perhaps Denis was thinking the same thought. He hunched over his plate, and grimaced, and said wryly, “Christ. I can guess who
that
is. ‘Roberta, we just happen to be in the vicinity . . .'”

That afternoon, driving into Provincetown in Denis's car, Denis said casually that, as Ian had probably noticed, things were “unnaturally tense” between him and Roberta lately.

Ian said, “I hadn't noticed.”

Denis shrugged. He said, embarrassed, evasive, “It isn't important, really. I hate to mention it. I just thought you might have noticed and felt uneasy. This is supposed to be a holiday for you, after all.”

“It's a marvelous holiday,” Ian said quickly, his voice flat and unconvincing in his own ears. “I hadn't noticed any . . . tension.”

“We never quarrel. She doesn't have the temperament for it. A few words exchanged, and she's exhausted . . . she claims. But there is a feeling of something cold, hard, indifferent, unjudging. Sometimes I'm frantic with rage; the woman just
stands
there, won't
say
anything, just
looks
at me as if she's looking through me, with that SpiderWoman look of hers, under the eyelids . . . yet at the same time she's the woman you know, the woman we all know, patient, gentle, warm generous hospitable unfailingly good-hearted . . .
good
.” Denis pressed down harder on the accelerator, barreling along the crowded highway. His jaws clenched with feeling; his eyes seemed to strain in their sockets. “Sometimes I have the feeling, Ian, that they are all playing a game of some kind, the women we know: our women—with the exception of Glynnis; I don't care to talk about Glynnis at the moment—the women of Hazelton, the wives, playing an elaborate game . . . behind our backs.
We
are the game, but we can't see it. The way they simulate happiness, answering the telephone, opening the door to guests, where, a moment before, there was something very different . . . from happiness.”

Ian, not liking the drift of Denis's argument, said, “But we are all like that, aren't we, to a degree? It isn't hypocrisy; it's simply a sense of decorum. Our obligation to one another: to be pleasant, agreeable,
civil
.” When Denis said nothing, he added, “There is a lovely observation of George Santayana's I read years ago: ‘Masks are arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feelings once faithful, discreet, and superlative. Living things in contact with the air must acquire cuticles, and it should not be urged against cuticles that they are not—”

Suddenly Ian could not remember the rest of it. And Denis did not seem to be listening. He said, bitterly, “She said she'd forgiven me, you know, for that time a few years ago, that affair I'd had, which I think I told you about . . . that mistake I made. But it seems, beneath it all, she has not. Maybe she can't. Maybe, in her place, I would feel the same way: reluctant to forgive. There are certain aboriginal instincts in us; or maybe they are metaphysical, even linguistic. How did you phrase it? ‘Things once said can't be unsaid.' One might add, ‘Or forgotten.'”

Ian wondered, with a stab of anxiety, if Roberta had told Denis of his behavior toward her: his desperate embrace, his faltering plea. . . . She would not have been so cruel, he decided. Even if she detests me.

“So, it seems, I made two mistakes. The first, becoming involved with another woman; the second, confessing the fact to my wife. Yet Roberta assured me she
had
forgiven me. . . .”

Denis cast Ian a fleeting sidelong glance: a look, Ian thought, of raw appeal; yet there was a defensiveness in his tone, a thick stubborn squaredness about his jaws, that spoke of another motive. He was driving both aggressively and absentmindedly, often, to Ian's discomfort, lifting both hands from the steering wheel at the same time. The conversation had become a monologue to which Ian was a privileged witness.

“And then I'm so lonely sometimes. All these parties we go to and give—or used to, before last spring. And in a family, at the very hub of a family, a household . . . it can be so much more intensely worse. Because you know you should not be lonely there. Because you know you have no right to be; it's selfish, self-pitying. And, too, there is a sort of taboo about talking about it. . . .”

Ian, whose loneliness was less theoretical, murmured a vague assent.

“The boys are grown; they have their own lives, a network of friends, plans for the future that exclude us. Of course I understand completely—
I
had my own life at that age and would have suffocated if I had not—but still, when it happens to you, it's something of a shock. That they so clearly prefer not only the company of others but a type, a texture, a
quality
of company so different from our own. . . . And in the center of it, as women are invariably in the ‘center,' there stands Roberta, watching me, not even with suspicion now but with a cold unblaming unjudging eye, beyond suspicion.” He paused and said, in a burst of sudden feeling, “She doesn't love me any longer—”

Ian said, “Don't be ridiculous. Of course she loves you.”

“—but she won't admit it. The words, the actual words, she can't bring herself to say:
I no longer love you
.”

“Obviously she—”

“Since last spring. Sometime last spring. I think it began when Glynnis was first hospitalized and we were all so upset, so disoriented, as if some sort of law of nature had been suspended . . . or violated. Roberta took Glynnis's death very hard, as I did, and of course,” Denis said, quietly, “it is still very much with us. It remains a
fact
prominent in our
data
. I needn't tell you that. . . . In any case, it began then, this sort of estrangement, simply not talking to each other as much as we always have, a gradual atrophying of . . . whatever it is that keeps people together. The frustrating thing is, I hear her on the telephone all the time with her women friends, or her sister, someone
not me
to whom she feels she can talk. (And she's quite close to Leonard and Paul, too;
that
kind of man, they can relate to. Glynnis was the same way.) I don't mean that I eavesdrop. I would never eavesdrop.” He looked at Ian and smiled bitterly. “But if you do overhear, you know, by accident, they never seem to be talking about anything substantial. Laughing a good deal, and interrupting each other, finishing each other's sentences. Possibly they talk in code. I wonder if anyone has ever attempted a deconstructionist analysis of women's conversation, or something in the style of
The Raw and the Cooked
.”

Ian said, “We men talk directly, is that it? In a vocabulary untainted by ambiguity.”

But his irony seemed to make no impression on Denis, who was saying, in the same hurt tone, edged now with resentment, “So long as they
love
you they are one sort of being, but when they've decided to stop
loving
you—by which, incidentally, I don't mean
liking, tolerating, enduring
you—they shift into another sort of being altogether, a wholly other consciousness. Even the way they look at you changes: the very pupils of their eyes contract! It's a weird thing, obvious maybe, even banal, maybe, but when it happens to you . . . it's a considerable shock, as if the earth had shifted beneath your feet. You can feel it
spinning
.”

Denis had begun to speak rapidly and incoherently. Ian laughed and said, “But we spin with the earth, don't we? It's all a single motion.” He laid a tentative hand on Denis's forearm: not to silence him, still less to rebuke him, but to waken him to a sense of where he was (downtown Provincetown) and what he was doing (looking for a parking place). The congestion was dismaying; even the side streets were clogged with traffic; pedestrians, many of them gay men in fashionable resort wear and styled haircuts, arms slung around one another's shoulders, were crossing streets in defiance of, or indifference to, traffic lights, passing dangerously close to Denis's car.

“She accuses me of not hearing her, when I hear her very well. Of not seeing her, when I see her very well. I ‘see' her regarding me with a look of utter pitying disdain; as if, knowing that I love her, that my life, for better or worse, is bound up with hers, out of inertia, maybe, if not out of passion—though inertia at our age
is
a passion, and should never be underestimated—she knows she has me trapped. To be separated from Roberta would be death for me, now that”—and here Denis faltered slightly, not looking at Ian—“other things in my life have come undone.”

Ian said, pointing, “There's a parking place. If you maneuver quickly—”

But it was too late. Denis blundered on and turned a corner, headed for a parking garage up the street at whose entrance
SORRY: FILLED
had been posted.

“Shit,” he said, braking at the entrance. He backed up, turned another corner, drove on. He said, as if his monologue were uninterrupted, “There is a sense in which Roberta's accusations have some grounding in fact, because lately I have had trouble seeing: I mean quite literally with my vision. It's the left eye that gives me the trouble. Most of the trouble. I went to the optometrist and he seemed baffled: it isn't nearsightedness, or farsightedness; in fact my eyes are rather good, he says, for a man of my age—I don't need reading glasses yet, and there are friends of ours, for instance Vaughn, who have had bifocals for years. And you?—yes?—you have bifocals, don't you? In my case it's something else, as if, now and then, the light and color drained out of things, I keep glancing up at the sky as if the trouble were there, a massive cloud over the sun, or an eclipse. Then there is a glowering hazy light,
this
light in fact, as if a photograph were overexposed. A scrim of bubbles, sparks, emptinesses, like black holes—except they are filled with light, blinding light, and not . . . nothing. I'm on the stairs and suddenly the stairs disappear, and I reach for the railing that both is and is not there; not that I stumble, exactly, because ninety percent of my life is automatic; I'm on automatic pilot like most of us, I suppose; but
I
know, and it's disconcerting. When I read there sometimes seem to be patches of blank on the page, that are filled in, slowly, with words; or, if I manage to read quickly enough, at my usual pace, I can keep ahead of the patches of blank. Even my dreams are affected, sometimes,” Denis said, laughing, “fading out, blanking out, dissolving to nothing. Have you ever heard of anything more absurd?”

Ian said, “But didn't the optometrist refer you to a—”

“Oh, yes. Of course. An ophthalmologist. I'll see the bastard after Labor Day. But I doubt he'll be able to help me.”

“Why do you say that?”

Denis shrugged loftily. “It's a feeling I have.”

He found a parking place at last, brazening out, to Ian's embarrassment, a young woman in a Volkswagen who had gotten there first but had pulled too far forward. And in the grocery store, and in the beer and liquor store, he was all business: brisk and genial and in no mood to linger. “Don't you hate it sometimes, this constant buying, spending, consuming?” he asked Ian, who had to fight lapsing into a mild trance in such places, dazed by an excess of stimuli. “A steady stream of food and drink processed through us as through reeds. Was it Pascal who said, ‘Man is a thinking reed' or was it Aristotle?”

“Aristotle said, ‘Man is a thinking animal.'”

“Thinking
an
imal, thinking
reed
, what the hell. It comes to the same thing in the end.”

The cashier, a college boy with long straggly hair gathered into a ponytail, had been listening to their conversation, observing them through his eyelashes. As he rang up Denis's purchases he said with a shy smile, “My favorite philosopher is Lucretius. ‘The swerve of the atoms.' He had no instruments, but he knew it all.”

“He did,” Denis said, enthusiastically. “The son of a bitch, he did. Left nothing for the rest of us but filling in the blanks.”

ON THE WAY
home Denis drove less compulsively; their talk was of professional matters: news of the Institute, who was coming for fall/winter residencies and to give symposia; who was traveling where and doing what and for what purpose. They drank Anchor Steam, a beer new to Ian, from cans, and Ian quite liked the dreamy hazy air through which Denis's car moved, punctuated by stops and starts and the intrusion of other vehicles as a dream is punctuated by external sounds, yet not interrupted. He liked too the sharp darting pain between his eyes that accompanied his first beer of the day, especially if he drank it down quickly. Was it the beer itself or its metallic iciness? he wondered. She was waiting for them at the beach. Her eyes would lift smiling to his when he appeared.

Denis was talking of being courted—“with a truly flattering aggression”—by the Arhardt Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, one of those mysteriously funded foundations that address themselves, usually quite publicly, to such issues as the defense budget, antiterrorism, nuclear stockpiling and World War III, and the like: pimping for the generals, Ian thought it, since it was no secret that the Pentagon funded certain of these foundations or arranged for funds to be channeled into them. Before the ruin of his reputation, Ian McCullough too had been approached, upon occasion, by the Arhardt Center—or the Georgetown Center, or the La Jolla Center, or the McIntyre Center: invited to participate in symposia, to act as a consultant, to accept a full-time position as a “senior fellow” in such seemingly academic divisions as Third World population growth. Of course, like all his liberal-minded colleagues, Ian had politely declined these invitations.

Now Denis complained dryly, “I wish the bastards would leave me alone; I don't quite see myself ending my career as a professional Père Joseph,” and Ian said, “I don't quite see that either,” though he felt uneasy with the subject and wondered what Denis was getting at. It was no secret that, having been passed over as a candidate for the directorship at Hazelton, and having been interviewed no less than three times by the prestigious Mellon Foundation for a high-ranking position there, and again been disappointed, Denis was feeling professionally slighted: personally wounded, if not insulted, in one of those career phases in which abrupt, dramatic, but not invariably wise decisions are made to spite those who have valued us less than we imagine we deserve.