So he was lying there watching the book get ruined by seeping lemonade, watching ants scurry up and occupy the pages, and his mother came out into the yard. It was Sunday, her day off. She must have seen, known, just from the way he was lying there, maybe from the way he’d acted when he first came home, that something was wrong. She sauntered out into the yard, it was a huge yard, not fenced, just acres of grass overlooking the valley, sauntered out checking on her flowers, then sauntered over to me, easy, nothing special, and tapped my behind and I slid over and she sat down next to me on the hammock and I wanted to scream at her because I knew she’d try to make me feel better and I knew she couldn’t make me feel better and I couldn’t stand her trying. Because she cared and that made it seem all her fault.
And she sat there and talked about how beautiful it was there and how she loved it there and how most people didn’t get to live in places as beautiful as that and how we ought to be grateful. And I wanted to puke, she sounded so dreamy-creamy, god, but she didn’t know anything, anything at all about what life was really like. And then she asked me what I wanted for my birthday, my god, did she think I was nine years old to be bribed out of a sulk by the promise of a birthday present, this wasn’t a sulk it was despair, something she knew nothing about, always singing around the house and worrying about the stupid flowers and the stupid library. So I said that was months away and how was I to know. So she said I should think about it because she wanted to start saving for it, so I said
A car, I want a car.
Sarcastically. Even if they could have afforded it, there weren’t many cars available then, in the midst of the war.
And she turned to me and said: “You think that will help?”
I turned away from her fast because I was going to bawl. I couldn’t stand it that she knew, that she could
see.
It was humiliating.
Then she started talking, she had a meandering way of talking, she went round and round and you never knew where she was going, but she always ended up where she wanted to, and she was stroking my back and reminiscing, and saying, “God, I remember being sixteen, it was the worst time in my life. My mother felt so sorry for me, she gave me a sweet sixteen party even though she couldn’t really afford it. And I invited all the kids in my class, there were twenty, and you know what? Only seven came. We were really ‘out,’ because we were so poor. And Mom had gotten all that food in and worked for three days to prepare it. I was heartbroken for myself, humiliated in front of her, but my heart ached most because she’d spent so much money she didn’t have, and I knew it.
“I think it’s a bad time for most kids,” she said. “Oh, there are always the roaring boys like your father, nothing ever seems to daunt them!” she laughed. “But I wish I knew what pill they took to get that way!” She moved her hand to my face and caressed it a little, and looked in my eyes, and her face was very tender, full of love and I wanted just to reach up and hold her but I couldn’t because that would be a kid thing to do, but god, I loved her, and she said, “You know, honey, the only good thing I can say about being sixteen is that you live through it.” And she laughed and then Shandy came bounding out through the screen door and she jumped up and ran with him awhile, zigzagging around the shrubs and trees, and Shandy was barking, and I watched her, her hair bounced, and she had a beautiful round ass and beautiful breasts then, she hadn’t gotten plump yet, and she was laughing with the dog and as I watched her I felt the most tremendous desire I’d ever felt in my life. I sank down on the hammock, listening to Shandy barking, her giggling, then the bang of the screen door. My groin was hot and aching. Shandy came running over to me, he licked my hand and I lay there feeling hot and swollen and oh, god, I can’t tell you, sick, deformed, diseased, filthy—there aren’t any words.
“I
T’S COLD IN HERE
,” Dolores said, and Victor got up and turned on the fire. She uncurled and rose and carried the coffee tray back into the kitchen, while Victor opened a bottle of beer, and took it and two glasses back to the sitting room. They did not speak. Dolores put the soiled dishes in the sink and stopped it up and ran hot water over them, put the cream pitcher in the fridge, and returned to the sitting room. She curled back up in the rocker, pulling a lap robe over her knees. Victor sat on the couch again. They were both still in their robes.
“I’m not talking about anything Oedipal: I was way past that age. Or maybe I am, I don’t know. At the time I was convinced I was the only person who ever felt such a filthy disgusting thing. Ever after that, until she got old, whenever I saw my dad kiss her, I turned my face away.
“What it was, I think, was that I’d never before associated my mother with the voluptuous fevered images of my fantasy life. I used to work part time as a checkout clerk in a supermarket, and every evening as I walked home, they’d float in front of my eyes, women, girls, but not really: really, it was body parts I saw, boobs and cunt and asses and legs, I’d walk the two miles home with my head full of them and couldn’t get them out. And I knew it was wrong—not church-wrong, but humanly wrong—to see people that way, as an accretion of parts, or not even as an accretion, just as parts. But just walking along the road, I’d get a hard-on.
“And suddenly, I saw my mother in the same way. Well, it was intolerable. And it was strange, because much as I loved her that day, that was the day I began to pull away from her. I felt too guilty. I tried to stop seeing
her
, I tried to see
Mother
, a notion of motherhood, I guess. In which she was pure and unsexual and saintly and occupied with compassionate trivialities. You know? I defused her. I could look up and down at her at the same time, but I never had to look across.
“Well, I can see that only looking back. But that was an important afternoon for me, everything began there, somehow. Because I lay in that hammock for a long time, feeling disgusting and filthy and powerless and isolated and scorned, and I made up my mind I would change things. I lay there working out strategy: I was going to be different. I decided to do what the little groups did, the jerks and the intellectuals and the athletes: to see
myself
as king of the hill, to force others, by my conviction, to see me that way. I spent the rest of the summer preparing. I got together a couple of guys, and worked out at the basketball court every day I began to read the
Kenyon Review
and the writers it praised. I went back to school that fall determined to outsnob the snobs and to make the basketball team, and I did both. I learned to walk with my head in the air (like the intellectuals) and to talk down to people. It was fantastically effective. People may not have liked me, but they looked
up.
When I graduated, they voted me the class ‘Renaissance Man,’ the all-round accomplished one. Girls began to sidle alongside me, to flirt with
me:
I didn’t have to do anything but deign to answer. I couldn’t have predicted how easy it would be!
“And of course in the next two years, my body did fill out, as my mother had predicted, and the pimples vanished and hair took their place. Maybe, in some deep place in me, I was unhappy with what I was becoming, but my life was so much better than it had been that my new style seemed only a good thing. I developed then a determination to win, to win at any cost, and never to fall back into the shame and doubt of my early adolescence.
“And I went on like that, in the army, in college, and in grad school. Oh, the arrogant superiority no doubt was honed down a little with each step: I couldn’t have gotten away in the army with what I got away with in high school. But it became my attitude. I was a winner, an egotist, confident and poised. I looked down on people who were not. And I had my choice of girls, always.
“I must have been an obnoxious bastard, but I didn’t care; it had come to me that this was what a man has to be if he’s not to suffer shame and powerlessness. Every once in a while my mother would eye me in a certain way, and I knew she was not liking this son she loved so much. But I didn’t care about that either. By then, I’d completely put her down in my mind. Her trivial concerns—overshoes and jackets, the evening roast, the library board: ‘Well, now, what do you suppose they’ve gone and done! They’ve taken
Lolita
right off the shelves! I went right down there, I said to Sam Hart, now listen here, Sam Hart, do you want to make Cardon County the laughingstock of the state?’ And then my sister got married and had a couple of kids whizbang right away, and she would sit there for
hours
, literally hours, cooing and oohing over her grandchildren, talking to them and laughing at them and bouncing them when they were just, in my eyes, lumps of insentient flesh.
“She stopped seeming—
serious.
She was no longer someone I needed to please. She was irrelevant in the world of men, the world I lived in. She was nice, she was sweet, she cooked up a great roast pork, but that was all. You know?”
Victor wiped his hand across his face.
“By the time I got to college, I was a real golden boy. You ever run across one of them?”
“All the time. I advise them. They come into my office very soberly, prepared to be awed. They speak seriously, almost reverently, about ‘my career.’ They speak of it in exalted hollow voices as if the words were set in gold and mounted over the family china closet—which they probably are. They come in with a tentative schedule made up of heavy hardware: physics, math, and early Urdu.
“And of course, since I think learning ought to be fun and enlarging to the entire mind, I suggest a course in literature, art, or music. They are shocked: ‘I don’t know if that would be good for
my career
.’ It’s clear to me that his career has for some time been treated as community property—by parents, teachers, counselors of all sorts. He will look at you, this dewy-faced boy who still picks his nose when no one is looking, and masturbates himself to sleep, and hand it to you,
my career
, sure that you too. will handle the sacred object with the proper deference.
“What I hear is the hollow rattle of someone who’s lost his life and doesn’t even know it. He thinks
he’s
in control.”
Victor leaned forward sharply. “Yes, but who
is
in control? Who? No one at all. It’s a train running on a track with no one directing it, no one except the track itself which was laid long ago, and no one knows by whom.”
He settled back. “I thought I was taking control of my life. It never occurred to me then that I was doing what society had determined I should do, that rather than taking control, I was ceding it.”
“What would have been taking control?”
He shrugged. “Oh, who knows? Probably just suffering, going on as I was, feeling things, observing them. Until control came naturally, from inside, the power to act on what I saw and felt. Which would have been slow and hard and humiliating. But I wouldn’t have become what I became….”
He wiped his face again.
“What did you become?” she asked him, puzzled. He did not seem monstrous to her, who was supersensitive to signs of monstrosity.
“Oh, a clear winner, you know? A go-getter. I got the peach of a job after grad school, and I moved ahead in that job faster than anyone could have anticipated. Even me. I was on my way and I could see it: I was going to be the next Mach.”
“Mach? The head of Blanchard Oil?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Oh, well, I know him. Sort of.”
He looked at her amazed. “How could you know him?”
“I get invited, fairly often, to participate on panels here and there. I’ve met Mach several times—or rather, I should say, I’ve been presented to him, because he never once looked at me as we were being introduced. At conferences intended to get academicians and humanists to
communicate
with business and industry people,” she laughed. “You know.”
He nodded.
“You
can’t
admire him,” Dolores said.
“Not as a person. But he isn’t a person, you see: he’s Mach. He’s power incarnate, the mover and shaker, the person who with one or two others moves OPEC chessmen around the chessboard that’s the world. He determines the futures of countries, not just of one industry, or one corporation.”
Dolores shuddered. “God help us.”
“Well, I wanted that. Then.” He lighted another cigarette, although he had two burning down in the ashtray. His hands were shaking.
“And what happened?”
“Well,” he tried to laugh, but his face twisted a little, “there was this girl named Edith.” He exhaled hard. “I met her toward the end of grad school at a party at the Long Island estate of some wealthy girl who was dating a friend of mine. She had class, Edith. She had short blond hair done in a pageboy, and big blue eyes, and she wore pleated skirts and cashmere sweaters and a single string of pearls. The thing about Edith was, the pearls were real.
“And I
think
what happened was that Edith fell in love with me. I can’t, now, vouch for anything. What I felt, what I thought I felt—it’s all lost in the haze of the years. I wasn’t passionately in love with Edith. I’ve never been passionately in love in my life until …” He looked at her, then continued. “So I had no grounds for comparison. I thought I loved her. She would sit and listen to me talk as if—as if I were some kind of god. And it was genuine, then—her
awe
for me, I guess it was.
“And I thought life with her would be fine, just fine. She
loved
flowers, she
loved
babies, she
loved
dogs, cats, and spaghetti dinners in little Italian restaurants. And squooshy stuffed animals and the Staten Island ferry and Kahlil Gibran.
“Her father was a VP in Burton-Trilby, the ad agency, she was used to a certain standard of life, she lived it gracefully. She would not have to learn, as to some degree I would, and she could even help me. All the while looking up to me for my superior intellect, force, and know-how. Who knows why? At the time, it seemed ideal.
“And it went on seeming ideal for quite a while. She was so much in love in the early years that our sex was terrific. I didn’t know then…. I didn’t know she was swooning with ecstasy even though she wasn’t having orgasms. How could I know? Because she really was swooning with ecstasy. And things were going well for me, for my job, we had no money worries, she was creating a home, having a baby: it seemed the American dream come true. It was a comfortable life for me—she made it so. She thought I was wonderful. Do you know,” he leaned toward her, “that there are men on this earth who have never been told anything else?”