Oh What a Paradise It Seems (6 page)

Now Betsy would have noticed the music that played while she looked for Flotilla only, perhaps, if it had been music that she had danced to or music that reminded her of the pleasures of dancing. Betsy was of that generation for whom the air was, oftener than not, filled with music. She heard music everywhere; she sometimes heard music on the telephone while she waited for her call to be completed. In some ways this had left her imperceptive. She would never have noticed that morning that the air of Buy Brite was filled with some of the greatest music of the eighteenth century.

This music had been chosen by a nephew of one of the majority stockholders, who seemed to think that there would be some enjoyable irony between eighteenth-century music and the tumult of a contemporary shopping center. He was, spiritually speaking, a frail young man who would amount to nothing, and the irony he so enjoyed would be discontinued
and forgotten in a month or so. There is no irony, of course. The capital of Brandenburg was a market village and on a summer’s day when the doors of the cathedral stood open the great concertos must have been heard by the grocers and merchants. Betsy pushed her cart toward the express lane to the music that has contributed more, perhaps, than any other voice to our concept of nobility. Betsy pushed her cart toward lane 9—the express lane.

Maria Salazzo was also there. Having, for as long as she could remember, examined the price of everything she bought, and tried not very successfully to cut their expenses by collecting coupons, to go to the store with a hundred dollars or more to spend was for her a new experience, a sense of freedom and power that was quite heady. It was because of this exciting sense of power perhaps that she headed for the express lane, in spite of the fact that her cart was heaped with groceries. She headed for the lane at the same time as Betsy. The scene with the wind chimes had left some enmity between them and they did not speak. They were neck and neck but Maria, moved perhaps by her sense of wealth, passed Betsy on her right. The queue was fairly long because at that time of day—twilight—shoppers were picking up what they had forgotten for dinner. First was a young man with two cans of cat food. Next was a black man with a bag of potato chips, a box of cheese, a can of apple juice and a novel about sex life in Las Vegas. After him was a woman with a dozen oranges in a bag, followed by Maria with a week’s groceries. The clerk was too tired to send her away and began to check her groceries through on the register.

Betsy saw through the window that a light rain had
begun to fall. She was worried about having left the children alone. Maybelle was the name of the checkout clerk and she wore a large pin that said so. “Maybelle,” said Betsy, “would you kindly explain to this lady that this lane is the express lane for shoppers with nine items only.”

“If she can’t read I’m not going to teach her,” said Maybelle. The twelve or so members in the line behind Betsy showed their approval. “It’s about time somebody said something,” said a black.

“You tell ’em, lady, you tell ’em,” said an old man with a frozen dinner. “I just can’t stand to see someone take advantage of other people’s kindness. It’s like fascism. It isn’t that she’s breaking the law. It’s just that most of us are too nice to do anything about it. Why do you suppose they put up a sign that says nine items? It’s to make the store more efficient for everyone. You’re just like a shoplifter only you’re not stealing groceries, you’re stealing time, you’re not stealing from the management, you’re stealing from us. People like you cause wars.”

“Will you shut up,” said Maria. “Will you mind your own business!”

“It happens to be our business,” said Betsy. “It’s everybody’s business. That sign up there says it’s for nine items or less and it’s for anybody who can read.”

“They don’t care,” said Maria.

“What did they put the sign up for if they don’t care?”

“Well, I know one thing,” said Maria. “They didn’t put the sign up so that troublemakers like you could interfere in other people’s business.”

“It is everybody’s business,” said Betsy. “It’s just like
driving on the right-hand side of the road. There are a few basic rules or the business of life comes to a standstill. I’ve left my two children at home alone because I counted on being able to check through the express lane without waiting for someone with a week’s groceries.”

“You tell her, lady, you tell her,” called a man way back in the line. “You’ve got my vote.”

“This line is for nine items or less,” said Betsy, “and I’m going to see that we stick to the rule.” She picked a dozen eggs off the counter and put them back into Maria’s cart. Maria grabbed her hand and the eggs fell to the floor and broke.

“You keep your hands off my groceries,” shouted Maria. “You keep your hands off my groceries or I’ll call the police.” She reached into Betsy’s cart, took out a dozen eggs and threw them onto the floor.

Then Betsy, in an overwhelming paroxysm of anger, seized Maria’s cart and, drawing it toward her, tipped all of the groceries onto the floor. Maria, quite as overwhelmed, and passionate as if she felt herself to be a figure in some ancient patriotic or religious contest, came at Betsy, swinging. Their raised voices, the screaming, drew a crowd, and perhaps a hundred shoppers, with their carts, gathered to watch these women fighting over groceries and precedents. The manager, helped by some members of the crowd, finally succeeded in parting the two women and sending them out on separate ways into the rainy dusk.

A
T
the time of which I’m writing, vogues in healing were changing swiftly, and many of the old-line of yesterday’s therapists were wiping windshields in carwashes. While the nomenclature “shrink” was long out of fashion and had been replaced by the old term “psychoanalyst,” the conviction that one could master the mysteriousness of life through the interpretation of dreams and an exhaustive analysis of one’s early life was perhaps the most prevalent form of belief in the Western World. This stood, of course, four-square upon the ruins of the legitimate confessional and the reformation of the roles played by parents in one’s coming of age. The Freudian vocabulary had sunk well into the vulgate, and when the waitress at a truck drivers’ diner spilled your beer she would say: “Oops. That was a Freudian slip.” If you asked her what she meant she would say: “What’s the matter with you? Born yesterday? Freudian means slippery. Get with it.”

Sears, seeking counsel, thought of the word “alienist” because it had been in use when he was a young man and because it described that anguish that had racked him when he stood with his roses by the unanswered door. There had been nothing, absolutely nothing unfamiliar in the scene and yet he had felt himself more cruelly estranged
than he had ever felt on an overcast Monday morning in some mountain village in the Carpathians. His doctor had given him a list of psychiatrists and he chose a doctor named Palmer because he had known a happy family of that name in the elm-tree-shaded lanes of his serene coming of age. Dr. Palmer answered the telephone himself and Sears made an appointment.

The doctor’s office suffered that netherness that Sears had observed in Renée’s office. He shared a waiting room, a toilet and some old magazines with a number of other practitioners. He was a tall man whom Sears would have described as ill-favored. Dr. Palmer was quite bald and the impression that he gave was mostly of bulk. He seemed to Sears mysteriously shabby, considering his East Side address, but Sears would blame this on his own parochialism. He was mistaken. Dr. Palmer was shabby because he was desperately in need of money. He was quite unsuccessful, plagued by the intensely internecine politics of his profession and worried about paying the rent. Considering the area in which Sears sought counsel, his choice of Dr. Palmer had been unlucky. Dr. Palmer was a homosexual spinster.

By “spinster” one means that Dr. Palmer, by a combination of ardent desire and pitiless repression, had exacerbated his feeling on the subject. He had, it seemed, from time to time endured random erections for a naked and anonymous male torso or the declivity of a male spine, and he had treated these arousals with vigilant repression. Indeed, he had crushed these random swellings as if they breached that paradigm that furnished his equilibrium. He was the victim of an erotic distress that in earlier and more
traditional societies had characterized the unmarried woman who played out a role that was marked by bitterness, suspicion and loneliness.

While Sears told the doctor about the day he had bought the yellow roses for Renée and what he and the elevator operator had done the doctor squirmed in his chair. “You seem to think it neurotic of me,” said Sears politely, “to be anxious about being homosexual, but in retrospect it seems to me probably the most sensible anxiety I have ever entertained. I’ve never really had any reason to be anxious about money or friends or position or health, but I did enjoy myself with the elevator man and if I should have to declare myself a homosexual it would be the end of my life.

“My sexual nature seems to contain some self-destructive elements and I’ve come to you to have these explained. There seem to be contrary polarities in my constitution. I think my sexual conduct moral only in that it reflects on my concept of love. This seems to be of the first importance. Renée had hanging, in one of her windows, a small crystal cut with many facets. When this filled with light it threw a spectrum on the wall, and one late afternoon I said to her, quite sincerely, that my love for her was quite as important, as iridescent and as insubstantial, as the beam of colored light. She said that I didn’t understand the first thing about women but she always said that. She once took my cock out of her mouth only long enough to tell me that I didn’t understand the first thing about women.”

The doctor’s offices were on the fourth floor of an old-fashioned building with windows that opened and shut, and through these windows Sears then heard the loud,
cheerful voice of a man calling some other man to throw him a ball. It was a voice from the playing field but the depth of his longing and nostalgia was not only for his youth but for the robustness, simplicity and beauty that life could possess; and how far he had strayed from this! He was paying the doctor’s rent in a sincere attempt to recapture this simplicity and usefulness, but the distance he had come seemed grievous.

“What are you thinking about?” asked Dr. Palmer.

“I heard a voice from the street,” said Sears. “It reminded me of summer days and happier times.”

“Infantilism is obviously one of your greatest handicaps,” said the doctor.

“I mean,” said Sears, “that it reminded me of a fourth down with something like twenty to go. All you can do is to punt but how marvelous it is to punt, that feeling of booting a ball way down the field on a fourth down is such a hopeful feeling, such a feeling of beginning that I’ve often wondered why football never caught on in other countries.”

“Did you ever make the first team?” asked Palmer.

“No, no,” said Sears, quite sadly. “I was always second squad and a substitute some of the time.”

“You’re getting a little heavy,” said the doctor.

Sears stood and said, “I’m wearing the belt I wore when I played football.”

“Did you ever think of marrying?” asked the doctor.

“I was married twice,” said Sears.

“Divorced?” asked the doctor.

“Both of my wives died,” said Sears.

“Hmmmm,” said Dr. Palmer.

Sears had met his first wife—beloved Amelia—at the intermission of a concert in Boston. Her hair was that light-brown hue that, early in life, turns a lovely yellow during a long summer spent sensibly on beaches, boat decks and tennis courts. This crowning with yellow passes swiftly—that may be one of its charms—and the gift is lost in one’s early twenties. Their encounter came late in October; she was barely twenty and her hair was streaked with gold. This contrasted with her eyebrows. These were uncommonly heavy and dark and she carried her head in a lifted manner as if her eyebrows were something of a burden. Her figure was superb and she wore that afternoon a black velvet dress and carried a copy of
Paris Match
, folded to a page where there was a recipe for codfish served with cheese sauce. Sears felt at once that he had known her in some other life and he would never have any occasion to question the authority of this sensation of familiarity. When she lay dying in his arms, twenty years later, his grief was unassuageable but there was a sense that she was returning to some stratum of existence where they had first met and where they would meet again.

His second wife was not so much his choice as he was hers. She had ended an unhappy, childless marriage with a divorce, and when she proposed to Sears he simply accepted. She claimed to have great insights into the future, and she assured Sears that they would be very happy together. After their marriage Sears discovered that Estelle, his wife, considered herself a professional in occult matters. She defended her prescience competitively as if supernatural insights were a field sport. Sears’s only other experience in this area
had been in Eastern Europe, where there was a celebrated prophetess named Gallia. Sears had heard of her mostly from American businessmen who traveled to the cave where she lived and paid large sums of money for her advice.

One evening, in Eastern Europe, a chance American drinking companion had described Gallia’s powers to Sears. She had prophesied an accident at their New Mexico mines, where millions of gallons of radioactive mill tailings would have been spilled. She had also, that year, prophesied that uranium prices would fall. Sears had been told that she had been blinded by lightning as a child and that she lived in an extinct volcano, not far from where one of the most famous oracles of the ancient world had lived. The Minister of Information had often offered to try and arrange a meeting with Gallia, but Sears’s lack of interest in the occult was genuine. Returning one late afternoon to his hotel after a tiring day, he found an aide to the Minister of Information in the lobby with the message that Gallia would see him. He asked if there was time to change his shirt and he was told there was not. He got into one of those large cars that cabinet ministers enjoy in socialist countries.