I worried about these things while driving back to New Jersey, as Danny napped, or feigned to nap. Then I worried about other things. Apparently I hadn’t imbibed much tranquillity from being up on a quiet hilltop. Imbibe. I wanted to fucking imbibe
something
all right.
Martha’s Reliant, as usual, was gone. I turned off the engine, and Danny, a bit theatrically, opened his eyes. “We’re back,” I said. “Like Nixon.”
He made no move to open his door.
“So Dad?” he said. “We’re just going to stay here and go along like we were? Do Christmas and everything?”
“I guess so, Dan,” I said. “For now at least. I can’t think what else to do, can you? Unless you just feel like, I don’t know, packing your
stuff right now and just lighting out. I’d do it, if that’s what you felt like.”
“Okay, thanks,” he said. “That’s all I wanted to know.” He opened his door and got out.
“Hey,” I said. “Wait a sec.”
“I’m going to go in and see if Clarissa’s home,” he said. “I’ll help with the tree after if you want.”
“Don’t knock yourself out,” I said when I was sure he was out of earshot. Then I just sat there until it got too cold to sit there. Whatever that means. I suppose it means until the discomfort from the cold seemed worse than the other discomfort.
I dragged the treetop around back to the toolshed, found a handsaw and cut the trunk off straight where I’d mangled it with the ax. I also found a galvanized bucket, which I brought into the kitchen and filled with water. I set it outside by the kitchen door and balanced the tree on it, bottom branches resting on the rim, lopped-off stub of trunk down in the water. Dead but drinking deep. Now what we needed was a Christmas tree stand and we’d be all squared away here. Probably be easier just to go buy one instead of poking through the whole damn house looking for where Martha kept Christmas stuff. What could a thing like that run you, five ten dollars?
Thing was, I suddenly didn’t feel up to dealing with the mall and trying to find a Christmas tree stand in Caldor’s or some God damn place, with the people and the Christmas music and lines at the registers snaking back so far you couldn’t push a carriage around the front of the aisles. What I felt like doing was going to the liquor store and calling it a day.
I knew I should at least get something and clean the pine pitch off Martha’s saw. Gasoline, maybe? I always kept a hose in my trunk for emergencies; I could siphon a little out of the tank. But.
That headache wasn’t getting any better.
And I suppose, judging by what I found myself doing next, other stuff must have been bothering me that I wasn’t quite coming to grips with.
I went into the bathroom and took the last two Advils in the bottle, that’s how it began, and then two of Martha’s Pamprins. I was afraid to take the Pamprins, but that head really hurt, and I reasoned it out
as follows. Once, years ago, I’d taken one of Judith’s birth control pills to stop
her
from taking it because I was sure they were killing her. This was back before people noticed that so many other things were also killing women. Nothing had happened to me from taking the birth control pill—I mean, I didn’t grow tits and my dick didn’t shrivel—so probably Pamprin was all right too. Then I went to the kitchen, feeling as if I were watching myself doing all this, to see what alcohol there was. Zilch, as I knew already. I would have to go out. I couldn’t go out. In the refrigerator I found one beer. Drank it in four swallows, then went back to the bathroom and took six more Pamprins and drank what was left of a bottle of Nyquil.
Then down to the basement and into the death chamber. Not with the idea of trying to kill myself. What I wanted, I think, was just to do something extreme. Something that would be hard afterwards to pretend I hadn’t done. I got the gun out of the toolbox, sat down on a haybale, put my left hand palm-down on the rough hay, stuck the muzzle into that little web of skin between your thumb and the rest of your hand and shot myself there more or less experimentally. To see what it would be like. Jesus
Christ
it hurt. Oh, not the worst I ever felt: nothing to compare with, say, bright pain in a tooth. This was like hitting yourself with a hammer, hard, and knowing you’ve done damage; but with a sort of raw stinging afterwards that just seemed to get worse and worse and worse. That’s Jernigan all over: first you swallow a bunch of drugstore anodynes and then you want to
feel
something and then you bitch and moan because it hurts.
VII
1
“Good morning,” said Martha, setting something on the night table. Then she sat down on the bed. “Brought you your coffee,” she said. “And you got some mail.” She reached over to the night table and tapped a finger on two envelopes, one red, one white, next to a steaming mug.
So I was in her bedroom, not in the place I’d apparently been dreaming about. Which dissolved as I tried to recall it. “Bizarre,” I said.
“What’s bizarre?”
I shook my head. “Dream,” I said. “Time is it?”
“Ten?” she said. “I thought I should wake you up. It’s a beautiful day.” The two ideas seemed to have some connection in her mind. “You were out like a light when I came in last night. What did you do to your hand?”
There was a bandage on my hand.
Now I remembered.
“I don’t know,” I said. Well, that wouldn’t do. “Cut it on something,” I said. “You find the tree?” Now that she’d mentioned it, I was aware that my hand hurt.
“I saw it first thing,” she said, “when I got up to feed the bunnies. It’s beautiful.” That made two things that were beautiful. “I was hoping maybe we could get it up today.” Was the
double entendre
deliberate? I examined her face for signs of roguishness; didn’t look like it. Shame, I thought, in a way, looking at that bulge of thigh under denim. On the other hand, that was no way to extricate yourself, if what you wanted was to extricate yourself. Great: awake for what, thirty seconds, and here you are right back in the problem.
“I cut myself evening it off,” I said. “The end of it.”
I can see, reading this back, why she looked puzzled.
“With the saw,” I said. “The Christmas tree.” This sounded plausible. Plausible, that is, until the bandage came off and you had to explain a round scar. Well, maybe it wouldn’t end up being round exactly. Maybe you better go in the bathroom and find out what you did to yourself.
“Does it still hurt this morning?” she said.
I nodded. “Stupid,” I said.
“Think you should let somebody look at it?”
I shook my head. “I’ve had it with the emergency room for a while, thanks.”
That did it.
“Approximately when,” she said, “am I going to be allowed to stop eating shit?”
“Not giving you shit,” I said. “Simple observation.”
She lifted her hands, as if calling God to witness. “I
cannot
discuss this one more time,” she said. “You know, this is not 1952, Peter. It
could just as easily have been Danny, and me sitting home on
my
ass while
you
were out working.”
“As you obviously think I should be doing.”
I had now been awake for maybe a minute and a half.
“Well, it was never my vision that you would just sit in the
house
day after day, no.”
“Right. It was your vision that I was going to be a poet. ‘The Compost Heap as the Letter C’.”
“I’m sure that’s something clever,” she said. “Peter, my only
vision
was that whatever you did you might get some enjoyment out of your life for a change. I should’ve—I mean, everything I knew was literally
screaming
that you were absolutely incapable of any sort of joy whatsoever.”
Should I say
figuratively?
Better not. “A trenchant analysis,” I said.
“Fuck you too.”
“Trenchanter and trenchanter,” I said. “Repartee City around here this morning.”
“I’m going out,” she said. “I hope you enjoy your coffee.”
“Oof,” I called after her. “Slam-dunk.” As if punningly, she slammed the door behind her. I picked up the coffee. Just looking at it you could tell she’d made it too weak. Hey, work at it a little, I thought, and you could
really
get to be a monster.
She flounced back in, slammed the door again and stared at me, her back against the door and her arms folded. Shoulders rising and falling.
“Your contempt for me,” she said, “is really boundless, isn’t it?”
“Why?” I said, the hand hurting like a son of a bitch. “Is that an idea that turns you on?”
That made her eyes open so wide you could see white above the iris. “You incredible bastard,” she said. Apparently she found the suggestion worth addressing. I’d just thrown it out there to be a prick.
“Get over here,” I said.
“For what?”
“So I don’t have to be raising my voice,” I said. “Unless you want the kids to savor every nuance of this.”
That got her over to the bed. She stood stubbornly.
“So what’s on your mind?” I said.
“You tell
me,”
she said. “I didn’t do anything but be nice to you.”
“It’s
so
unjust,” I said.
“You just know
so much
, Peter,” she said. “What a
man
. Treat ’em bad and they come back for more, right? You’re a true asshole.”
“Why don’t you sit down?” I said. “You’re not in the principal’s office.”
She sat down.
I stared at her breasts and let the silence just go and go.
After a while she said, “This is too weird for me.”
“Right,” I said. “You didn’t do anything but be nice. That husband of yours ever hit you?”
She began to sob. I watched it for a while, wondering what the hell I thought I was doing, then told her come here. She wouldn’t and I grabbed her; she tried to twist away and I wrestled her down, which got me hard. I should add, not that it makes the whole thing any less sick, that I get hard over nothing when I first wake up. Oh no, not life reasserting itself or anything; it’s just because I haven’t pissed. Pressure of bladder on whatever it is, prostate? Or some explanation equally—what’s the word? Opposite of mystical. I got the jeans and underpants down around her knees. Give her the old Norman Mailer.
“I’m really going to be sorry someday”—she inhaled, hissing through her teeth—“that I showed you so much.”
Afterwards, we lay there not saying anything. That hand really starting to worry me. Finally she said, in a small voice, “Do you remember when I used to have my names?”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said. You had to wonder sometimes: yesterday, talking to Danny, I’d been all set to get out, well almost all set, and now this. Sick and brutal? No question. But still, a way of drawing closer. Unless what I was doing was simply drawing closer in order to increase the tension for another recoil; this time, perhaps, a recoil strong enough to achieve escape velocity. Thinking about that
Star Trek
where they head straight into the sun so its gravitational force will help them spring away on the rebound—the slingshot effect, they call it—and back into their own time period. See, they’d been flung back into the past by getting too close to a
black star and its gravitational forces. Another thing I was doing was watching too much
Star Trek
.
I pissed, then grabbed a towel down from the shower curtain rod, slung it over my shoulder and took a wad of it between my teeth. I bit down and tore off the bandage. Angry red hole, scab starting to form at the edges, a little thick blood still oozing. I would have the scar from doing this insane thing for the rest of my life. This time I made a better bandage than the drunk one the night before: a fold of gauze covering both entrance and exit wounds, and tape going all the way around the hand. Then I unbit the towel and took four Pamprins.
I went back in and lay down next to Martha. “You all done in there?” she said.
“For now,” I said.
“Okay, I’ll be right back.”
“I’ll count the moments,” I said.
I was still staring at the ceiling when she came back and lay down next to me. Trying to imagine that the branching cracks made pictures, as the ancients found archers and shit in the random stars. The closest I could come to anything was sort of George Washington’s profile.
“So how many moments?” she said.
“Seventeen hundred and seventy-six,” I said.
“That’s an awful lot of moments.”
“You think
that’s
a lot,” I said, “try subdividing it into instants.”
“I think I might try counting sheep,” she said. “You mind if I nap a little? I’ve been up since five-thirty.”
A nicer man would have asked why.
“Would you stay with me till I drop off?” she said.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said.
She rolled on her side, her back to me, and began the deep, slow breaths she used to relax herself. I picked up the cup and had a sip of cold, weak coffee. I stared back up at George Washington. Then I did that thing you do when you’re a kid where you imagine the ceiling as the floor, stepping high to climb through a doorway, squatting by the light fixture as if at a campfire.
Martha’s breathing got quieter and her shoulder rose and sank. I sat up and reached for the envelopes. My Christmas cards, apparently, judging by the squareness. Usual guilt over never sending any; usual
contempt for those who still bothered. The white envelope was postmarked California: therefore from Rick, who had never blamed me for his sister. Which I thought said something creepy about him. I put it back, unopened. The red envelope said Warriner/Kaplan. (Now I remembered: I’d been dreaming of Uncle Fred’s funky old trailer. That combined with my father’s house in Woodstock sort of, because the rooms had just gone on and on and on.) It was one of those kitschy gilded cards: Mother and Child and Wise Men and the Star of Bethlehem and a gold-haloed angel looking down. Uncle Fred had doctored it up with faces he’d cut out of somewhere. The Virgin was a lipsticked Madonna, the Wise Men were Curly, Moe and Larry, the angel was Liberace, the Christ Child, for some reason, Nixon. Must’ve taken the son of a bitch hours to find all the pictures. And he’d cut them out so carefully, with nail scissors or something. God I missed Uncle Fred. He was the still point of the turning world. I mean, there was Uncle Fred, right? Still thinking blasphemy was funny.