Talking Heads (16 page)
“Think about it.”
The only noise was a squeak against his breastbone: her wet face, moving. Wet, yes, and he should have known what was happening the moment it started. His wife was crying, he should have known. Her shoulders quivered and she buried her face in his chest.
“Aw Betts.” He locked his arms around her. “Darling.”
Was this his deficient social skills again? Another dumb farm boy move?
“I love you. I love you.”
No answer except the squeaks between them, skin on skin.
*
1/14, 50 minutes Subject anxious. Reports dream activity. Rises from couch At street windowâ“Life, life, one mess after another.” Dream of paper sack. Bus station, everybody reading paper, he has sack on lap. Can't let go of sack. Sack seams coming apart, leaking blood. Visibly anxious. Neck massage. | MEMO: I see a Guys, you got me wicked psyched. |
Kit had thought he'd spend Saturday in the library. In winter, the room was the most livable in the house. Walls of packed shelves provided a leathery coziness, and the fireplace still worked. Ceci had even vacuumed the carpet. The boys needed a clean palace to play, the sister explained. You didn't want anybody coming home sick.
But before lunch, Saturday, she'd left the boys with Kit. She and Bette had gone into town to talk. Bette's idea.
“I think I'd like, oh, a glass of wine with my sister,” his wife had said. “Overlooking the sea, you know.”
“A glass of wine?” Ceci said. “An actual adult setting?”
Bette didn't laugh. She avoided Kit's look. Instead it was the sister who caught his eye, taking his measure.
And once Cecilia's wagon pulled out of the drive, the library no longer worked for him. Not with the boys there, playing Star Wars before the fire. They had figurines, Luke, the Princess and the Wookie, and they kept pestering him to join. Aw, wasn't he going to get a break? A moment to think? What was Bette doing, abandoning him? Kit found a few fingers of gin in dusty half-gallons left over from summer. He withdrew into the now-familiar wooze of alcohol and Percodan, browsing the spines along the farther bookshelves. He pretended an interest in the family Bible. Inked onto the opening pages was a century and a half of marriage, birth, death. The entries ended with the previous generation, a death in â51. His weddingâBette's, ratherâwasn't there.
Dream of werewolf. Werewolf in room, subject trapped behind Discussion of wife. Intimacy gratifying but threatening. Some fear of wife's intellectâ“Sex is life & death, not theory.” Some recognition of that fear, of its thrill etc. Adequate understanding re different backgrounds. Avoidance behavior re different valuesâre wife's emotional needs. Avoidance: question about wkend w/wife prompts subject memories of own childhood. Subject again mentions Minnesota Public Radio. Believes MPR root of career, listening w/family, discussing at dinner. Cites state's progressive politics, Humphrey. Repeat Q about wkend w/wife. | Integrity, guysâthat's What was key was, you worked in the So, quickly. One problem. We need It's a The project |
Maybe the library would never have worked for him anyway. Kit didn't read casually. Rather he had six or eight books he'd committed to the way other men gave themselves to a ball club or a fishing hole. He had companion books, reread so often that he could recite whole passages, savoring knockout verbs or other surprises. His choices tended to be more recent, however: Saul Bellow's
Herzog
, Tom Wolfe's
Electric Kool-Aid
. The Cottage had nothing like that. As for Kit's older favorites, the
Hamlet
was missing pages and the collection of Greek tragedies printed in double columns. Unreadable in the antique light.
Maybe it wouldn't have worked, the library. When Kit left, it had nothing to do with Ceci's boys. They'd given up asking him to play. Nonetheless, Kit drifted out of the room, out of the warmth and chatter. He began to climb the stairs.
The echo of his gin-slowed footsteps somehow seemed more in the spirit of the reading he'd longed for. He recalled a line from
Herzog
, for instance:
I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart
. He'd love to go back to that one now. Love to revisit a few of Herzog's “mental letters.” Great stuffâimaginary letters to impossible readers. Letters to Nietzsche and Maimonides and Herzog's own dead grandfather, invisible to everyone except a well-meaning but half-cracked professor of history.
Repeat Q about wknd w/wife. Subject visibly anxious. Wknd at v old house, he says. “I mean, w/a widow's walk.” Prompts more memories: Mother. M has “fine qualities.” Leftist, religious (Presby), open-minded. Q: Open-minded? Example homosex uncle? Ans: “Not talking about that.” Q: How's M feel about marriage? Example gr-children. Neck massage. Pacing. Window. | TV, guys, has to get So think about the |
The library would've suited Bette better. When it came to reading, she was an omnivore. If she suffered insomnia or a not too nasty flu, she could go through hundreds of pages at a clip. The one author Kit had known Bette to reread was Tolstoy, and she preferred
War and Peace
.
Bette. Kit might pretend he was looking for books, at first, but by the time he got above the second floor he knew better.
Up here, the Cottage passageways were darker. Shades had been drawn at the end of summer. And when Bette had finished making love to him, she'd shut down as well. Later, when Kit's nightmares woke him, she'd refused to be roused. Now when Kit came out on the widow's walk, he heard the hunters in their blinds. Distant guns. Bette too was off in that distance, firing away.
The weather made the Cottage grounds invisible, and Kit flashed on his father in his Sabre jet, high over foggy Yalu river land. But his father never felt like this, the worm on his back, the world a wet bedlam in his face. His father never felt so wrecked. The thought of suicide, Nietzsche said, is a great consolation (another line Kit had first come across in
Herzog
). Yet now, the thought struck him just that way: stale and secondhand. Suicide felt like the most cornball idea he'd ever had. Like imitation honor, imitation pain. And in stark contrast, beyond imitation, there emerged the wife he loved, the work he believed in. So they felt at least out in this hard, cleansing winter, as Kit tossed the last of his gin over the railing.
Husband and editorâhe was nothing if not both.
Subject again talks Mother. Lovesâ“I mean, of course.” But never understood M, never gave M credit. Since prep sch (S left home at 14) he's surrounded self w/ diff kind of womanâ“All these bony ticking types.” Never saw M's “integrity.” | But Kids Real |
*
Someone must have been reading to Hans about the heroes of ancient Rome. The boy insisted that everyone call his character Darth Caesar. Kit was wondering about it when the women returned.
When he'd come back downstairs, back to the library hearth, at first Hans and the Rucky-Rat had wanted him to play the Monster. They played Star Wars all the time, they said. Kit's stitches, they said, made him a cooler Monster than ever. No, my tough guys, no. Uncle Kit has had enough of the Monster for one weekend. Instead he took up the Wookie and jumped between the bad guy and the princess. He bellowed and made phaser noises: phew,
phew
.
He'd just noticed the Caesar thing when there came the groan of Ceci's wagon, the tick-tock of Bette's Fryes.
Hans was still into James Earl Jones: “Nohh one eh-scaapes Dahhrth Caeess-ar!”
“Darth Caesar?” Bette asked, already overhead. “As in, the divine Julius?”
“You should have heard them this morning,” Ceci said, squatting. “Princess Leia was a Vestal Virgin.”
This morning
âKit might have heard something in the sister's tone. He and Bette hadn't come out till nearly eleven, after which Bette had wasted no time asking about lunch. Now the mother hooked both boys into a prolonged hug. She kissed their hair and murmured how she'd missed them. Seemed like an unnecessary fuss, and she hadn't yet met Kit's eye.
“God,” Bette went on, “Darth Caesar. It's an image for the American â70s. The dying Empire tries to preserve itself as a high-tech fairy tale.”
Her nerves were pretty obvious too.
“The new Caesar wants to make himself immortal,” she went on, “and so he turns to Industrial Light and Magic.”
On your feet, Viddich. If the weekend's going to amount to anything, on your feet. Five minutes later he and Bette were back in the cold. Their unmatched strides crunched first over the walkway's oyster shell, then over the frozen beach. There was sun by then, a break in the weather, but the wind seemed to flatten it, dirty it. Kit and Bette left no shadow.
“So you told her, right?”
“I'm afraid I did, Kit.”
He squatted and took up a stone. He chucked it into the surf and reached for another.
“You must have expected it,” she went on.
He nodded but didn't stop, chucking sidearm.
“And surely you realize, KitâCeci's discreet. You've seen how strong she can be. I believe it's surprised us both, this weekend, seeing how strong she can be.”
Over the fogged crossing, the Woods Hole channel, gulls hovered unmoving. Kit let his throwing arm drop.
“Oh, honestly.” Bette paced behind him. “Kit, I had to talk about it. I had to talk about that and, well. I had to talk about everything. There's this business of having babies, for instance. This very strange business of, well, maybe you and I are trying to have a baby and maybe we're not. On that little matter we're coming across rather
impressionistic
, I'd say.”
“I'm closing the paper,” Kit said.
Her pacing stopped. Still in his squat, he twisted, finding her face.
“I'm closing
Sea Level,
” he said. “Temporarily for starters, but maybe permanently. Maybe for good, Betts.”
Bette had a lot of color. Out here her hairâshe'd forgotten her hatâwas less hay, more frizz.
“I've gotten too close,” Kit said. “It's what this time away was about. It's integrity, it's real life.”
“Kit,” Bette said, “won't you let me have this?”
“Integrity and real life.” Kit shook his head. “Hoo boy. Believe me, Betts, I know what those words sound like.”
“This moment Kit, just this one moment. Please. Won't you let me have it?”
“I'm not a bad guy, Betts. I'm a good guy.”
“My moment, Kit. Mine. Let me
have
it.”
Aw, Viddich. As Kit got to his feet he resisted the impulse to put his arms around her. He resisted the impulse to apologize, to tell her he loved her, to blurt out more examples of what a hero he was.