American Pastoral Part 10

to talk about something or other, and what turns out to be on their mind is just this, plastic surgery. And without Vogue magazine. The emotional and psychological implications can turn out to be something. The relief they get, those that get relief, is not to be minimized. I can't say I know how it happens, I'm not saying it always happens, but I've seen it happen again andagain, women who've lost their husbands, who've been seriously ill... You don't look like you believe me." But the Swede knew what he looked like: like a man with "Sheila" written all over his face. "I know," said Sh.e.l.ly, "it seems like a purely physical way of dealing with something profoundly emotional, but for many people it's a wonderful survival strategy. And Dawn may be one of them. I don't think you want to be puritanical about this. If Dawn feels strongly about a face-lift, and if you were to go along with her, if you were to support her ..."

Later that same day Sh.e.l.ly phoned the Swede at the factory--he'd made some inquiries about Dr. LaPlante. "We've got people as good as him here, I'm sure, but if you want to go to Switzerland and get away and let her recuperate there, why not? This LaPlante is tops." "Sh.e.l.ly, thanks, it's awfully kind of you,"

said the Swede, disliking himself more than ever in the light of Sh.e.l.ly's generosity... and yet this was the same guy who, with his co-conspirator wife, had provided Merry a hiding place not only from the FBI but from her father and mother. A fact about as fantastic as a fact could be. What kind of mask is everyone wearing? I thought these people were on my side. But the mask is all that's on my side--that's it! For four months I wore the mask myself, with him, with my wife, and I could not stand it. I went there to tell him that. I went to tell him that I had betrayed him, and only didn't so as not to compound the betrayal, and never once did he let on how cruelly he'd betrayed me."My approval or disapproval," Sh.e.l.ly had been saying to Lou Levov, "is beside the point of whether they go to those movies or not.""But you are a physician," the Swede's father insisted, "a respected person, an ethical person, a responsible person--"353.

"Lou," said his wife, "maybe, dear, you're monopolizing the conversation.""Let me finish, please." To the table at large, he asked, "Am I? Am I monopolizing the conversation?""Absolutely not," said Marcia, throwing an arm good-naturedly across his back.

"It's delightful to hear your delusions.""I don't know what that means," he told her."It means social conditions may have altered in America since you were taking the kids to eat at the c.h.i.n.ks and Al Haberman was cutting gloves in a s.h.i.+rt and a tie.""Really?" Dawn said to her. "They've altered? n.o.body told us," and, to contain herself, got up and left for the kitchen. Waiting there for Dawn's instructions were a couple of local high school girls who helped to do the serving and the cleaning up whenever the Levovs had dinner guests.Marcia was to one side of Lou Levov, Jessie Orcutt to the other. Jessie's new gla.s.s of Scotch, which she must have managed to pour for herself in the kitchen, he had picked up from her place and moved out of her reach only minutes into the cold cuc.u.mber soup. When she then made a move to leave the table, he would not allow her to get up. "Just sit," he told her. "Sit and eat. You don't need that.

You need food. Eat your dinner." Each time she so much as s.h.i.+fted in her chair, he laid a hand firmly on hers to remind her she was going nowhere.A dozen candles burned in two tall ceramic candelabra, and to the Swede, who sat flanked by his mother and by Sheila Salz-man, everyone's eyes--deceptively enough, even Marcia's eyes-- appeared blessed in that light with spiritual understanding, with kindly lucidity, alive with all the meaning one so craves to find in one's friends. Sheila, like Barry, was on hand every year at Labor Daybecause of what she had come to mean to his folks. On the phone to Florida the Swede almost never got through a conversation without his father's asking, "And how is that lovely Sheila, that lovely woman, how is she doing?" "She is such a dignified woman," 354 .

his mother said, "such a refined person. Isn't she Jewish, darling? Your father says no. He insists she isn't."Why this disagreement should persist for years he could not understand exactly, but the subject of fair-haired Sheila Salzman's religious origins had proved indispensable to his parents' lives. To Dawn, who'd been trying for decades to be as tolerant of the Swede's imperfect parents as he was of her imperfect mother, this was their most inexplicable preoccupation--their most enraging as well (particularly as Dawn knew that, for her adolescent daughter, Sheila had something Dawn didn't have, that somehow Merry had come to trust the speech therapist in a way she no longer trusted her mother). "Are there no Jewish blonds in the world other than you?" Dawn asked him. "It hasn't anything to do with her appearance," the Swede explained, "it has to do with Merry." "What does her being Jewish have to do with Merry?" "I don't know. She was the speech therapist. They're in awe of her," the Swede said, "because of all she did for Merry." "She wasn't the child's mother by any chance--or was she?" "They know that, darling," calmly answered the Swede, "but because of the speech therapy, they've made her into some kind of magician."And so had he, not so much while she was Merry's therapist-- when he had merely found her composure a curious stimulus to s.e.xual imaginings--but after Merry disappeared and grief absconded with his wife.Thrown violently off his own narrow perch, he felt an intangible need open hugely within him, a need with no bottom to it, and he yielded to a solution so foreign to him that he did not even recognize how improbable it was. In the quiet, thoughtful woman, who had once made Merry less strange to herself by teaching her how to overcome her word phobias and to control the elaborate circ.u.mlo-cutionary devices that, paradoxically, only increased her child's sense of being out of control, was someone he found himself wanting to incorporate into himself. The man who had lived correctly within marriage for almost twenty years was determined to be senselessly, wors.h.i.+pfully in love. It was three months before he355.

could begin to understand that this was no way around anything, and it was Sheila who had to tell him. He hadn't gotten a romantic mistress--he'd gotten a candid mistress. She sensibly told him what all his adoration of her meant, told him that he was no more himself with her than Dawn was Dawn at the psychiatric clinic, explained to him that he was out to sabotage everything--but he was in such a state that he went on anyway telling her how, when they ran away together to Ponce, she could learn Spanish and teach techniques of speech therapy at the university there, and he could operate the business from his Ponce plant and they could live in a modern hacienda up in the hills, among the palms, above the Caribbean....What she did not tell him about was Merry in her house--after the bombing, Merry hiding in her house. She told him everything except that. The candor stopped just where it should have begun.Was everyone's brain as unreliable as his? Was he the only one unable to see what people were up to? Did everyone slip around the way he did, in and out, in and out, a hundred different times a day go from being smart to being smart enough, to being as dumb as the next guy, to being the dumbest b.a.s.t.a.r.d who ever lived? Was it stupidity deforming him, the simpleton son of a simpleton father, or was life just one big deception that everyone was on to except him?This sense of inadequacy he might once have described to her; he could talk to Sheila, talk about his doubts, his bewilderment-- all the serenity in her allowed for that, this magician of a woman who had given Merry the great opportunity that Merry had thrown away, who had supplanted with "a wonderful floating feeling," according to Merry, half at least of her stutterer's frustration, the lucid woman whose profession was to give sufferers a second chance, the mistress who knew everything, including how to harbor a murderer.Sheila had been with Merry and she had told him nothing.All the trust between them, like all the happiness he'd ever356.

known (like the killing of Fred Conlon--like everything), had been an accident.She'd been with Merry and said nothing.And said nothing now. The eagerness with which others spoke seemed, under the peculiar intensity of her gaze, to strike her as a branch of pathology. Why would anyone say that? She herself was to say nothing all evening, nothing about Linda Lovelace or Richard Nixon or H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, her advantage over other people being that her head was not filled by what filled everybody else's head. This way of hers, of lying in wait behind herself, the Swede had once taken to be a mark of her superiority. Now he thought, "Icy b.i.t.c.h. Why?" Once she had said to him, "The influence you allow others to have on you, it's absolute. Nothing so captivates you as another person's needs." And he had said, "I think you are describing Sheila Salzman," and, as always, he was wrong.He thought she was omniscient and all she was was cold.Whirling about inside him now was a frenzied distrust of everyone. The excision of certain a.s.surances, the last a.s.surances, made him feel as though he had gone in one day from being five to being one hundred. It would give him comfort, he thought, it would help him right then if, of all things, he knew that resting out in the pasture beyond their dinner table was Dawn's herd, with Count, the big bull, protecting them. If Dawn still had Count, if only Count. ... A relief- filled, realityless moment pa.s.sed before he realized that of course it would be a comfort to have Count roaming the dark pasture among the cows, because then Merry would be roaming among the guests, here, Merry, in her circus pajamas, leaning up against the back of her father's chair, whispering into her father's ear. Mrs. Orcutt drinks whiskey. Mrs. Umanoffhas BO. Dr. Salzman is bald. A mischievous intelligence that was utterly harmless--back then unanarchic and childish and well within bounds.Meanwhile he heard himself saying, "Dad, take some more steak," in what he knew was a hopeless effort--a good son's ef-357.

fort--to get his self-abandoned father to be, if not tranquil, less insistently chagrined over the inadequacies of the non-Jewish human race."I'll tell you who I'll take some steak for--for this young lady." Spearing a slice from the platter that one of the serving girls was holding beside him, he dumped it onto Jessie's plate; he had taken Jessie on as a full-scale project.

"Now pick up your knife and fork and eat," he told her, "you could use some red meat. Sit up straight," and, as though she believed he could well resort to violence if she did otherwise, Jessie Orcutt drunkenly mumbled, "I was going to," but began to fiddle with the meat in such a clumsy way that the Swede feared his father was going to start cutting her food for her. All that crude energy that, try as it might, could not remake the troubled world."But this is serious business, this children business." Having gotten Jessie taking nourishment, he was in a state again about Deep Throat. "If that isn't serious, what is anymore?""Dad," said the Swede, "what Sh.e.l.ly is saying is not that it's not serious. He agrees it's serious. He's saying that once you've made your case to an adolescent child, you've made your case and you can't then take these kids and lock them up in their rooms and throw away the key."His daughter was an insane murderer hiding on the floor of a room in Newark, his wife had a lover who dry-humped her over the sink in their family kitchen, his ex-mistress had knowingly brought disaster upon his house, and he was trying to propitiate his father with on-the-one-hand-this and on-the-other-hand-that."You'd be surprised," Sh.e.l.ly told the old man, "how much the kids today have learned to take in their stride.""But degrading things should not be taken in their stride! I say lock them in their rooms if they take this in their stride! I remember when kids used to be at home doing their homework and not out seeing movies like this. This is the morality of a country that we're talking about. Well, isn't it? Am I nuts? It is an affront to decency and to decent people." 358 .

"And what," Marcia asked him, "is so inexhaustibly interesting about decency?"The question so surprised him that it left him looking a little frantically around the table for somebody with an opinion learned enough to subdue this woman.It turned out to be Orcutt, that great friend of the family. Bill Orcutt was coming to Lou Levov's aid. "And what is wrong with decency?" Orcutt asked, smiling broadly at Marcia.The Swede could not look at him. On top of all the things he could not think about there were two people--Sheila and Orcutt-- he could not look at. Did Dawn consider Bill Orcutt handsome? He never thought so. Round face, snout nose, puckering lower lip ... piggy-looking b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Must be something else that drove her to that frenzy over the kitchen sink. What? The easy a.s.surance? Was that what got her going? The comfort taken by Bill Orcutt in being Bill Orcutt, his contentment in being Bill Orcutt? Was it because he wouldn't dream of slighting you even if both you and he knew that you weren't up to snuff? Was it his appropriateness that got her going like that, the flawless appropriateness, how very appropriately he played his role as steward of the Morris County past? Was it the sense he exuded of never having had to grub for anything or take s.h.i.+t from anyone or be at a loss as to how to behave even when the wife on his arm was a hopeless drunk? Was it because he'd entered the world expecting things noteven a Weequahic three-letterman begins to expect, that none of us begin to expect, that the rest of us, if we even get those things by working our a.s.ses off for them, still never feel ent.i.tled to? Was that why she was in heat over the sink--because of his inbred sense of ent.i.tlement? Or was it the laudable environmentalism? Or was it the great art? Or was it simply his c.o.c.k? Is that it, Dawn dear? I want an answer! I want it tonight! Is it just his c.o.c.k?The Swede could not stop imagining the particulars of Orcutt f.u.c.king his wife any more than he could stop imagining the particulars of the rapists f.u.c.king his daughter. Tonight the imagining would not let him be.359.

"Decency?" Marcia said to Orcutt, foxily smiling back at him. "Much overvalued, wouldn't you say, the seductions of decency and civility and convention? Not the richest response to life I can think of.""So what do you recommend for 'richness'?" Orcutt asked her. "The high road of transgression?"The patrician architect was amused by the literature professor and the menacing figure she tried to cut in order to appall the squares. Amused he was. Amused!

But the Swede could not turn the dinner party into a battle for his wife. Things were bad enough without colliding with Orcutt in front of his parents. All he had to do was to not listen to him. Yet each time that Orcutt spoke, every word antagonized him, convulsed him with spite and hatred and sinister thoughts; and when Orcutt wasn't speaking, the Swede was constantly looking down the table to see what in G.o.d's name there was in that face that could so excite his wife."Well," Marcia was saying, "without transgression there isn't very much knowledge, is there?""My G.o.d," cried Lou Levov, "that's one I never heard before. Excuse me, Professor, but where the h.e.l.l do you get that idea?""The Bible," said Marcia, deliciously, "for a start.""The Bible? Which Bible?""The one that begins with Adam and Eve. Isn't that what they tell us in Genesis?

Isn't that what the Garden of Eden story is telling us?""What? Telling us what?""Without transgression there is no knowledge.""Well, that ain't what they taught me," he replied, "about the Garden of Eden.

But then I never got past eighth grade.""What did they teach you, Lou?""That when G.o.d above tells you not to do something, you d.a.m.n well don't do it-- that's what. Do it and you pay the piper. Do it and you will suffer from it for the rest of your days.""Obey the good Lord above," said Marcia, "and all the terrible things will vanish." 360 .

"Well . . . yes," he replied, though without conviction, realizing that he was being mocked. "Look, we are way off the subject--we are not talking about the Bible. Forget the Bible. This is no place to talk about the Bible. We are talking about a movie where a grown woman, from all reports, goes in front of a movie camera, and for money, openly, for millions and millions of people to see, children, everyone, does everything she can think of that is degrading. That's what we're talking about.""Degrading to whom?" Marcia asked him."To her, for G.o.d's sake. Number one, her. She has made herself into the sc.u.m of the earth. You can't tell me you are in favor of that""Oh, she hasn't made herself into the sc.u.m of anything, Lou.""To the contrary," said Orcutt, laughing. "She has eaten of the Tree of Knowledge.""And," announced Marcia, "made herself into a superstar. The highest of the high. I think Miss Lovelace is having the time of her life.""Adolf Hitler had the time of his life, Professor, shoveling Jews into the furnace. That does not make it right. This is a woman who is poisoning young minds, poisoning the country, and in the bargain she is making herself the sc.u.m of the earth--period!"There was nothing inactive in Lou Levov when he argued, and it looked as though just observing the phenomenon of an opinionated old man, fettered still to his fantasy of the world, was all that was prompting Marcia to persist. To bait and bite and draw blood. Her sport. The Swede wanted to kill her. Leave him alone!

Leave him alone and he'll shut up! It's no big deal getting him to say more and more and more--so stop it!But this problem that he had long ago learned to circ.u.mnavigate, in part by subduing his own personality, seemingly subjugating it to his father's while maneuvering around Lou where he could--this problem of the father, of maintaining filial love against the onslaught of an unrelenting father--was not a problem that she'd had decades of experience integrating into her life. Jerry just 361 .

told their father to f.u.c.k off; Dawn was driven almost crazy by him; and Sylvia Levov stoically and impatiently endured him, her only successful form of resistance being to freeze him out and live with the isolation--and see more of herself evaporating year by year. But Marcia took him on as the fool that he was for still believing in the power of his indignation to convert the corruptions of the present into the corruptions of the past."So what would you want her to be instead, Lou? A c.o.c.ktail waitress?" Marcia asked."Why not? That's a job.""Not much of one," Marcia replied. "Not one that would interest anyone here.""Oh?" said Lou Levov. "They'd prefer what she does instead?""I don't know," said Marcia. "We'll have to poll the girls. Which would you prefer," she said to Sheila, "c.o.c.ktail waitress or p.o.r.n star?"But Sheila was not about to be engulfed in Marcia's mockery, and with eyes that seemed to stare past it and right on through to the egotism, she gave her unequivocal reply. The Swede remembered that after Sheila had first met Marcia and Barry Umanoff here, at the Old Rimrock house, he had asked her, "How can he love this person?" and instead of answering him as Dawn did, "Because he's a ball-less wonder," Sheila had replied, "By the end of a dinner party, everybody is probably thinking that about somebody. Sometimes everybody is thinking that about everybody." "Do you?" he'd asked her. "I think that about couples all the time," she'd said.The wise woman. And yet this wise woman had harbored a murderer."What about Dawn?" Marcia asked. "c.o.c.ktail waitress or p.o.r.no actress?"Smiling sweetly, exhibiting her best Catholic schoolgirl posture--the girl who makes the nuns happy by sitting at her desk without slouching--Dawn said, "Up yours, Marcia.""What kind of conversation is this?" Lou Levov asked."A dinner conversation," Sylvia Levov replied. 362 .

"And what makes you so blase?" he asked her."I'm not blase I'm listening."Now Bill Orcutt said, "n.o.body's polled you, Marcia. Which would you prefer, a.s.suming you had the choice?"She laughed merrily at the slighting innuendo. "Oh, they've got big fat mamas in dirty movies. They, too, appear in the dreams of men. And not only for comic relief. Listen, you folks are too hard on Linda. Why is it that if a girl takes off her clothes in Atlantic City it's for a scholars.h.i.+p and makes her an American G.o.ddess, but if she takes off her clothes in a s.e.x flick it's for filthy money and makes her a wh.o.r.e? Why is that? Why? All right--n.o.body knows.

But seriously, folks, I love this word 'scholars.h.i.+p.' A hooker comes to a hotel room. The guy asks her how much she gets. She says, 'Well, if you want blank I get a three-hundred-dollar scholars.h.i.+p. And if you want blank-blank I get a five-hundred-dollar scholars.h.i.+p. And if you want blank-blank-blank--'""Marcia," said Dawn, "try as you will, you can't get under my skin tonight.""Can't I?""Not tonight."There was a beautiful floral arrangement at the center of the table. "From Dawn's garden," Lou Levov had told them all proudly as they were sitting down to eat. There were also large platters of the beefsteak tomatoes, sliced thickly, dressed in oil and vinegar, and encircled by slices of red onion fresh from the garden. And there were two wooden buckets--old feed buckets that they'd picked up at a junk shop in Clinton for a dollar apiece--each lined gaily with a red bandanna and br.i.m.m.i.n.g with the ears of corn that Orcutt had helped her shuck.

Cradled in wicker baskets near either end of the table were freshly baked loaves of French bread, those new baguettes from McPherson's, reheated in the oven and pleasant to tear apart with your hands. And there was good strong Burgundy wine,half a dozen bottles of the Swede's best Pommard, four of them open on the table, bottles that five years back he had laid down for drinking in 1973-- according to his wine register, Pom- 363 .

mards laid down in his cellar just one month to the day before Merry killed Dr.

Conlon. Yes, earlier in the evening he had found 1/3/68 inscribed, in his handwriting, in the spiral notebook he used for recording the details of each new purchase . . ."1/3/68" he had written, with no idea that on 2/3/68 his daughter would go ahead and outrage all of America, except perhaps for Professor Marcia Umanoff.The two high school kids who were doing the serving emerged from the kitchen every few minutes, silently offering around the steaks he'd cooked, arranged on pewter platters, all carved up and running with blood. The Swede's set of carving knives were from Hoffritz, the best German stainless steel. He'd gone over to New York to buy the set and the big carving block for their first Thanksgiving in the Old Rimrock house. He once had cared about all that stuff.

Loved to hone the blade on the long conical file before he went after the bird.

Loved the sound of it. The sad inventory of his domestic bounty. Wanted his family to have the best. Wanted his family to have everything."Please," said Lou Levov, "can I get an answer about the effect of this on the children? You are all way, way off the topic. Haven't we seen enough tragedy with the young children? p.o.r.nography. Drugs. The violence.""Divorce," Marcia threw in to help him out."Professor, don't get me started on divorce. You understand French?" he asked her."I do if I have to," she said, laughing."Well, I got a son down in Florida, Seymour's brother, whose speciality is divorce. / thought his specialite was cardiac surgery. But no, it's divorce. I thought I sent him to medical school--I thought that's where all the bills were coming from. But no, it was divorce school. That's what he's got the diploma in-- divorce. Has there ever been a more terrible thing for a child than the specter of divorce? I don't think so. And where will it end? What is the limit? You didn't all grow up in this kind of world. Neither did I. We grew up in an era when it was a different place, when the feeling for 364 .

community, home, family, parents, work . . . well, it was different. The changes are beyond conception. I sometimes think that more has changed since 1945 than in all the years of history there have ever been. I don't know what to make of the end of so many things. The lack of feeling for individuals that a person sees in that movie, the lack of feeling for places like what is going on in Newark--how did this happen? You don't have to revere your family, you don't have to revere your country, you don't have to revere where you live, but you have to know you have them, you have to know that you are part of them. Because if you don't, you are just out there on your own and I feel for you. I honestly do. Am I right, Mr. Orcutt, or am I wrong?""To wonder where the limit is?" Orcutt replied."Well, yes," said Lou Levov, who, the Swede observed--and not for the first time-- had spoken of children and violence without any sense that the subject intersected with the life of his immediate family. Merry had been used for somebody else's evil purposes-- that was the story to which it was crucial for them all to remain anch.o.r.ed. He kept such a sharp watch over each and every one of them to be certain that n.o.body wavered for a moment in their belief in that story. No one in this family was going to fall into doubt about Merry's absolute innocence, not so long as he was alive.Among the many things the Swede could not think about from within the confines of his box was what would happen to his father when he learned that the death toll was four."You're right," Bill Orcutt was saying to Lou Levov, "to wonder where the limit is. I think everybody here is wondering where the limit is and worrying where the limit is every time they look at the papers. Except the professor of transgression. But then we're all stifled by convention--we're not great outlaws like William Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade and the holy saint Jean Genet.

The Let Every Man Do Whatever He Wishes School of Literature. The brilliant school of Civilization Is Oppression and Morality Is Worse."365.

And he did not blush. "Morality" without batting an eye. "Transgression" as though he were a stranger to it, as though it were not he of all the men here-- William III, latest in that long line of Orcutts advertised in their graveyard as virtuous men--who had transgressed to the utmost by violating the unity of a family already half destroyed.His wife had a lover. And it was for the lover that she'd undergone the rigors of a face-lift, to woo and win him. Yes, now he understood the gus.h.i.+ng letter profusely thanking the plastic surgeon for spending "the five hours of your time for my beauty," thanking him as if the Swede had not paid twelve thousand dollars for those five hours, plus five thousand more for the clinic suite where they had spent the two nights. It is quite wonderful, dear doctor. It is as though I have been given a new life. Both from within and from the outside. In Geneva he had sat up with her all night, held her hand through the nausea and the pain, and all of it for the sake of somebody else. It was for the sake of somebody else that she was building the house. The two of them were designing the house for each other.To run away to Ponce to live with Sheila after Merry disappeared--no, Sheila had made him come to his senses and recover his rect.i.tude and go back to his wife and as much of their life as remained intact, to the wife even a mistress knew he could not wound, let alone desert, in such a crisis. Yet these other two were going to pull it off. He knew it the moment he saw them in the kitchen. Their pact. Orcutt dumps Jessie and she dumps me and the house is for them. She thinks our catastrophe is over and so she is going to bury the past and start anew-- face, house, husband, all new. Try as you will, you can't get under my skin tonight. Not tonight.They are the outlaws. Orcutt, said Dawn to her husband, lived completely off what his family once was--well, she was living off what she'd just become. Dawn and Orcutt: two predators.The outlaws are everywhere. They're inside the gates.366.H,.h a d a phone call. One of the girls came out of the kitchen to tell him. She whispered, "It's from I think Czechoslovakia."He took the call in Dawn's downstairs study, where Orcutt had already moved the large cardboard model of the new house. After leaving Jessie on the terrace with the Swede and his parents and the drinks, Orcutt must have gone back to the van to get the model and carried it into Dawn's study and set it up on her desk before proceeding into the kitchen to help her shuck the corn.Rita Cohen was on the line. She knew about Czechoslovakia because "they" were following him: they'd followed him earlier in the summer to the Czech consulate; they'd followed him that afternoon to the animal hospital; they'd followed him to Merry's room, where Merry had told him there was no such person as Rita Cohen."How can you do this to your own daughter?" she asked."I've done nothing to my daughter. I went to see my daughter. You wrote and told me where she was.""You told her about the hotel. You told her we didn't f.u.c.k.""I did not mention any hotel. I don't know what this is all about.""You are lying to me. You told your daughter you did not f.u.c.k me. I warned you about that. I warned you in the letter."Directly in front of the Swede sat the model of the house. He367.

could see now what he had not been able to envision from Dawn's explanations-- exactly how the long shed roof let the light into the main hallway through the high row of windows running the length of the front wall. Yes, now he saw how the sun would arc through the southern sky and the light would wash--and how happy it seemed to make her just to say "wash" after "light"--wash over the white walls, thus changing everything for everyone.The cardboard roof was detachable, and when he lifted it up he could look right into the rooms. All the interior walls were in place, there were doors and closets, in the kitchen there were cabinets, a refrigerator, a dishwasher, a range. Orcutt had gone so far as to install in the living room tiny pieces of furniture also fas.h.i.+oned out of cardboard, a library table by the western wall of windows, a sofa, end tables, an ottoman, two club chairs, a coffee table in front of a raised fireplace hearth that extended the width of the room. In the bedroom, across from the bay window, where there were the built-in drawers-- Shaker drawers, Dawn called them--was the large bed, awaiting its two occupants.

On the wall to either side of the headboard were built-in shelves for books.

Orcutt had made some books and put them on the shelves, miniaturized books fas.h.i.+oned out of cardboard. They even had t.i.tles on them. He was good at all this. Better at this, thought the Swede, than at the painting. Yes, wouldn't life be so much less futile if we could do it at the scale of one-sixteenth inch to a foot? The only thing missing from the bedroom was a cardboard c.o.c.k with Orcutt's name on it. Orcutt should have made a sixteenth-inch scale model of Dawn on her stomach, with her a.s.s in the air and, from behind, his c.o.c.k going in. It would have been nice for the Swede to have found that, too, while he stood over her desk, looking down at Dawn's cardboard dreaming and absorbing the fury of Rita Cohen.What does Rita Cohen have to do with Jainism? What does one thing have to do with the other? No, Merry, it does not hang together. What does any of thisranting have to do with you, who will not even do harm to water? Nothing hangs together--none of it368.

is linked up. It is only in your head that it is linked up. Nowhere else is there any logic.She's been tracking Merry, trailing her, tracing her, but they're not connected and they never were! There's the logic!"You've gone too far. You go too far. You think you are running the show, D-d- daddy? You are not running anything!"But whether he was or wasn't running the show no longer mattered, because if Merry and Rita Cohen were connected, in any way, if Merry had lied to him about not knowing Rita Cohen, then she might as easily have been lying about being taken in by Sheila after the bombing. If that was so, when Dawn and Orcutt ran off to live in this cardboard house, he and Sheila could run off to Puerto Rico after all. And if, as a result, his father dropped dead, well, they'd just have to bury him. That's what they'd do: bury him deep in the ground.(He was all at once remembering the death of his grandfather-- what it did to his father. The Swede was a little kid, seven years old. His grandfather had been rushed to the hospital the evening before, and his father and his uncles sat at the old man's bedside all night long. When his father arrived home it was seven- thirty in the morning. The Swede's grandfather had died. His father got out of the car, went as far as the front steps of the house, and then just sat himself down. The Swede watched him from behind the living room curtains. His father did not move, even when the Swede's mother came out to comfort him. He sat without moving for over an hour, all the time leaning forward, his elbows on his knees and his face invisible in his hands. There was such a load of tears inside his head that he had to hold it like that in his two strong hands to prevent it from tumbling off of him. When he was able to raise the head up again, he got back in the car and drove to work.)Is Merry lying? Is Merry brainwashed? Is Merry a lesbian? Is Rita the girlfriend? Is Merry running the whole insane thing? Are they out to do nothing but torture me? Is that the game, the entire game, to torture and torment me?369.

No, Merry's not lying--Merry is right. Rita Cohen does not exist. If Merry believes it, I believe it. He did not have to listen to somebody who did not exist. The drama she'd constructed did not exist. Her hateful accusations did not exist. Her authority did not exist, her power. If she did not exist, she could not have any power. Could Merry have these religious beliefs and Rita Cohen? You had only to listen to Rita Cohen howling into the phone to know that she was someone to whom there was no sacred form of life on earth or in heaven.

What does she have to do with self-starvation and Ma-hatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King? She does not exist because she does not fit in. These are not even her words. These are not a young girl's words. There are no grounds for these words. This is an imitation of someone. Someone has been telling her what to do and what to say. From the beginning this has all been an act. She's an act; she did not arrive at this by herself. Someone is behind her, someone corrupt and cynical and distorted who sets these kids to do these things, who strips a Rita Cohen and a Merry Levov of everything good that was their inheritance and lures them into this act."You are going to take her back to all your dopey pleasures? Take her from her holiness into that shallow, soulless excuse for a life? Yours is the lowest species on this earth--don't you know that yet? Are you really able to believe that you, with your conception of life, you basking unpunished in the crime of your wealth, have anything whatsoever to offer this woman? Just exactly what? A life of bad faith lived to the hilt, that's what, the ultimate in bloodsucking propriety! Don't you know who this woman is? Don't you realize what this woman has become? Don't you have any inkling of what she is in communion with?" The perennial indictment of the middle cla.s.s, from somebody who did not exist; the celebration of his daughter's degradation and the excoriation of his cla.s.s: Guilty!-- according to somebody who did not exist. "You are going to take her away from me? You, who felt sick when you saw her? Sick because she refuses to be captured in your s.h.i.+tty little moral universe? Tell me, Swede--how did you get so smart?"370.

He hung up. Dawn has Orcutt, I have Sheila, Merry has Rita or she doesn't have Rita--Can Rita stay for dinner? Can Rita stay overnight? Can Rita wear my boots?

Mom, can you drive me and Rita to the village?--and my father drops dead. If it has to be, it has to be. He got over his father's dying, I'll get over my father's dying. I'll get over everything. I do not care what meaning it has or what meaning it doesn't have, whether it fits or whether it doesn't fit-- they are not dealing with me anymore. / don't exist. They are dealing now with an irresponsible person; they are dealing with someone who does not care. Can Rita and I blow up the post office? Yes. Whatever you want, dear. And whoever dies, dies.Madness and provocation. Nothing recognizable. Nothing plausible. No context in which it hangs together. He no longer hangs together. Even his capacity for suffering no longer exists.A great idea takes hold of him: his capacity for suffering no longer exists.But that idea, however great, did not make it out of the room with him. Never should have hung up--never. She'd make him pay a huge price for that. Six foot three, forty-six years old, a multimillion-dollar business, and broken for a second time by a ruthless, pint-sized s.l.u.t. This is his enemy and she does exist. But where did she come from? Why does she write me, phone, strike out at me--what does she have to do with my poor broken girl? Nothing!Once again she leaves him soaked with sweat, his head a ringing globe of pain; the entire length of his body is suffused with a fatigue so extreme that it feels like the onset of death, and yet his enemy evinces little more substance than a mythical monster. Not a shadow enemy exactly, not nothing--but what then?

A courier. Yes. Does her number on him, indicts him, exploits him, eludes him, resists him, brings him to a total bewildered standstill by saying whatever mad words come into her head, encircles him in her lunatic cliches and is in and out like a courier. But a courier from whom? From where?He knows nothing about her. Except that she expresses perfectly the stupidity of her kind. Except that he is still her villain, that her37i hatred of him is resolute. Except that she's now twenty-seven. Not a kid anymore. A woman. But grotesquely fixed in her position. Behaves like a mechanism of human parts, like a loudspeaker, human parts a.s.sembled as a loudspeaker designed to produce shattering sound, a sound that is disruptive andmaddening. After five years the change is only in the direction of more of the same sound. The deterioration of Merry comes as Jainism; the deterioration of Rita Cohen comes as more. He knows nothing about her except that she needs more than ever to be in charge--to be more and more and more unexpected. He knows he is dealing with an unbending destroyer, with something big in someone very small. Five years have pa.s.sed. Rita is back. Something is up. Something unimaginable is about to happen again.He would never get across the line that was tonight. Ever since leaving Merry in that cell, behind that veil, he has known that he's no longer a man who can endlessly forestall being crushed.I am done with craving and selfhood. Thanks to you.Someone opened the study door. "Are you all right?" It was Sheila Salzman."What do you want?"She pulled the door shut behind her and came into the room. "You looked ill at dinner. Now you look even worse."Over Dawn's desk was a framed photograph of Count. All the blue ribbons Count won were pinned to the wall on either side of the picture. It was the same picture of Count that used to appear in Dawn's annual ad in the Simmental breeder's magazine. Merry had been the one to choose the slogan for the ad from the three Dawn had proposed to them in the kitchen after dinner one night, countCAN DO WONDERFUL THINGS FOR YOUR HERD. IF EVER THERE WAS A BULL TO USE, It's COUNT. A BULL UPON WHICH A HERD.can be built. Merry at first argued for a suggestion of her own-- you can count on count--but after Dawn and the Swede each made the case against it, Merry chose a bull upon which a herd can be built, and that became the slogan for Arcady Breeders for as long as Count was Dawn's stylish superstar.372.

On the desk there used to be a snapshot of Merry, age thirteen, standing at the head of their long-bodied prize bull, the Golden Certified Meat Sire, holding him by a leather lead shank clipped into his nose ring. As a 4-H kid she'd been taught how to lead and walk and wash and handle a bull, first a yearling, but then the big boys, and Dawn had taught her how to show Count--to hold her hand up on the strap so that his head was up and to keep a bit of tension on the lead and move it a little with her hand, first so as to show Count off to advantage but also to be in communication with him so that he'd listen a little more than he might if her hand was slack and down at her side. Even though Count wasn't difficult or arrogant, Dawn taught Merry never to trust him. He could sometimes have a strong att.i.tude, even with Merry and Dawn, the two people he was most used to in the world. In just that photograph-- a picture he'd loved in the same way he'd loved the picture that had appeared on page one of the Denville- Randolph Courier of Dawn in her blazer at the fireplace mantel--he could see all that Dawn had patiently taught Merry and all that Merry had eagerly learned from her. But it was gone, as was the sentimental memento of Dawn's childhood, a photograph of the charming wooden bridge down at Spring Lake that led across the lake to St. Catherine's, a picture taken in the spring suns.h.i.+ne, with the azaleas in bloom at either end of the bridge and, resplendent in the background, the weathered copper dome of the grand church itself, where, as a kid, she had liked to imagine herself a bride in a white bridal gown. All there was on Dawn's desk now was Orcutt's cardboard model."Is this the new house?" Sheila asked him.

"You b.i.t.c.h."She did not move; she looked directly back at him but did not speak or move. He could take Count's picture off the wall and bludgeon her over the head with it and she would still be unruffled, still somehow deprive him of a heartfelt response. Five years earlier, for four months, they had been lovers. Why tell him the truth now if she was able to withhold it from him even then?373.

"Leave me alone," he said.But when she turned to do as he gruffly requested, he grabbed her arm and swung her flat against the closed door. "You took her in." The force of the rage was in no way concealed by the whisper that rasped up from his throat. Her skull was locked between his hands. Her head had been held in his powerful grip before but never, never like this. "You took her in!""Yes.""You never told me!"She did not answer."I could kill you!" he said, and, immediately upon saying it, let her go."You've seen her," Sheila said. Her hands neatly folded before her. That nonsensical calm, only moments after he had threatened to kill her. All that ridiculous self-control. Always that ridiculous, careful, self-controlled thinking."You know everything," he snarled."I know what you've been through. What can be done for her?""By you? Why did you let her go? She went to your house. She'd blown up a building. You knew all about it--why didn't you call me, get in touch with me?""I didn't know about it. I found out later that night. But when she came to me she was just beside herself. She was upset and I didn't know why. I thought something had happened at home.""But you knew within the next few hours. How long was she with you? Two days, three days?""Three. She left on the third day.""So you knew what happened.""I found out later. I couldn't believe it, but--""It was on television.""But she was in my house by then. I had already promised her that I would help her. And that there was no problem she could tell me that I couldn't keep to myself. She asked me to trust her. That was before I watched the news. How could I betray her then? I'd been her therapist, she'd been my client. I'd always wanted to do374.

what was in her best interest. What was the alternative? For her to get arrested?""Call me. That was the alternative. Call her father. If you had gotten to me right there and then, and said, 'She's safe, don't worry about her,' and then not let her out of your sight--""She was a big girl. How can you not let her out of your sight?""You lock her in the house and keep her there.""She's not an animal. She's not like a cat or a bird that you can keep in a cage. She was going to do whatever she was going to do. We had a trust, Seymour, and violating her trust at that point... I wanted her to know that there was someone in this world she could trust.""At that moment, trust was not what she needed! She needed me!""But I was sure that your house was where they'd be looking. What good was calling you? I couldn't drive her out here. I even started thinking they would know she would be at my house. All of a sudden it seemed like it was the most obvious place for her to be. I started thinking my phone was bugged. How could I call you?""You could have somehow made contact.""When she first came she was agitated, something had gone wrong, she was just yelling about the war and her family. I thought something terrible had happened at home. Something terrible had happened to her. She wasn't the same, Seymour.

Something very wrong had happened to that girl. She was talking as if she hated you so. I couldn't imagine . . . but sometimes you start to believe the worst about people. I think maybe that's what I was trying to figure out when we were together.""What? What are you talking about?""Could there really be something wrong? Could there really be something that she was subjected to that could lead her to something like that? I was confused too.

I want you to know that I never really believed it and I didn't want to believe it. But of course I had to wonder. Anyone would have.""And? And? Having had an affair with me--what the h.e.l.l did you find out, having had your little affair with me?"375.

"That you're kind and compa.s.sionate. That you do just about everything you can to be an intelligent, decent person. Just as I would have imagined before she'd blown up that building. Seymour, believe me, please, I just wanted her to be safe. So I took her in. And got her showered and clean. And gave her a place to sleep. I really had no idea--""She blew up a building, Sheila! Somebody was killed! It was all over the G.o.dd.a.m.n television!""But I didn't know until I turned on the TV.""So at six o'clock at night you knew. She was there for three days. And you do not contact me.""What good would it have done to contact you?""I'm her father.""You're her father and she blew up a building. What good was it going to do bringing her back to you?""Don't you grasp what I'm saying? She's my daughter!""She's a very strong girl.""Strong enough to look after herself in the world? No!""Turning her over to you wasn't going to help any. She wasn't going to sit and eat her peas and mind her business. You don't go from blowing up a building to--""It was your duty to tell me that she came to your house.""I just thought that would make it easier for them to find her. She'd come so far, she'd gotten so much stronger, I thought that she could make it on her own.

She is a strong girl, Seymour.""She's a crazy girl.""She's troubled.""Oh, Christ! The father plays no role with the troubled daughter?""I'm sure he played plenty of a role. That was why I couldn't... I just thought something terrible had happened at home.""Something terrible happened at the general store.""But you should have seen her--she'd gotten so fat.""I should have seen her? Where do you think she'd been? It was your responsibility to get in touch with her parents! Not to let the 376 .

child run off into nowhere! She never needed me more. She never needed her father more. And you're telling me she never needed him less. You made a terrible error. I hope you know it. A terrible, terrible error.""What could you have done for her then? What could anyone have done for her then?""I deserved to know. I had a right to know. She's a minor. She's my daughter.

You had an obligation to get to me.""My first obligation was to her. She was my client.""She was no longer your client.""She had been my client. A very special client. She'd come so far. My first obligation was to her. How could I violate her confidence? The damage had already been done.""I don't believe you are saying any of this.""It's the law.""What's the law?""That you don't betray your client's confidence.""There's another law, idiot--a law against committing murder! She was a fugitive from justice!""Don't talk about her like that. Of course she ran. What else could she do? I thought that maybe she would turn herself in. But that she would do it in her own time. In her own way.""And me? And her mother?""Well, it killed me to see you.""You saw me for four months. It killed you every day?""Each time I thought that maybe it would make a difference if I let you know.

But I didn't see what difference it would really make. It wouldn't change anything. You were already so broken.""You are an inhuman b.i.t.c.h.""There was nothing else I could do. She asked me not to tell. She asked me to trust her.""I don't understand how you could be so shortsighted. I don't understand how you could be so taken in by a girl who was so obviously crazy.""I know it's difficult to face. The whole thing is impossible377.

to understand. But to try to pin it on me, to try to act like anything I could have done would have made a difference--it wouldn't have made a difference in her life, it wouldn't have made a difference in your life. She was running. There was no bringing her back there. She wasn't the same girl that she'd been.

Something had gone wrong. I saw no point in bringing her back. She'd gotten so fat.""Stop that! What difference did that make!""I just thought she was so fat and so angry that something very bad must have gone on at home.""That it was my fault.""I didn't think that. We all have homes. That's where everything always goes wrong.""So you took it on yourself to let this sixteen-year-old who had killed somebody run off into the night. Alone. Unprotected. Knowing G.o.d knows what could happen to her.""You're talking about her as if she were a defenseless girl.""She is a defenseless girl. She was always a defenseless girl."

"Once she'd blown up the building there's nothing that could have been done, Seymour. I would have betrayed her confidence and what difference would it have made?""I would have been with my daughter! I could have protected her from what has happened to her! You don't know what has happened to her. You didn't see her the way I saw her today. She's completely crazy. I saw her today, Sheila. She's not fat anymore-- she's a stick, a stick wearing a rag. She's in a room in Newark in the most awful situation imaginable. I cannot describe to you how she lives. If you had only told me, it would all be different!""We wouldn't have had an affair--that's all that would have been different. Of course I knew that you might be hurt.""By what?""By my having seen her. But to bring it all up again? I didn't know where she was. I didn't have any more information on her. That's the whole thing. She wasn't crazy. She was upset. She was angry. But she wasn't crazy." 378 .

"It's not crazy to blow up the general store? It's not crazy to make a bomb, to plant a bomb in the post office of the general store?""I'm saying that at my house she wasn't crazy.""She'd already been crazy. You knew she'd been crazy. What if she went on to kill somebody else? Isn't that a bit of a responsibility? She did, you know. She did, Sheila. She killed three more people. What do you think of that?""Don't say things just to torture me.""I'm telling you something! She killed three more people! You could have prevented that!""You're torturing me. You're trying to torture me.""She killed three more people!" And that was when he pulled Count's picture off the wall and hurled it at her feet. But that did not faze her--that seemed only to bring her under her own control again. Acting the role of herself, without rage, without even a reaction, dignified, silent, she turned and left the room."What can be done for her?" he was growling, and all the while, down on his knees, carefully gathering together the shattered fragments of the gla.s.s and dumping them into Dawn's wastebasket. "What can be done for her? What can be done for anyone? Nothing can be done. She was sixteen. Sixteen years old and completely crazy. She was a minor. She was my daughter. She blew up a building.

She was a lunatic. You had no right to let her go!"Without its gla.s.s, the picture of the immovable Count he hung again over the desk, and then, as though listening to people unabat-edly chattering on about something or other were the task a.s.signed him by the forces of destiny, he returned from the savagery of where he'd been to the solid and orderly ludicrousness of a dinner party. That's what was left to hold him together--a dinner party. All there was for him to cling to as the entire enterprise of his life continued careering toward destruction--a dinner party.To the candlelit terrace he duteously returned, while bearing within him everything that he could not understand.

379.

Dishes had been cleared, the salad eaten, and dessert served, fresh strawberry- rhubarb pie from McPherson's. The Swede saw that the guests had rearranged themselves for the last course. Orcutt, hiding still the vicious s.h.i.+t that he was behind the Hawaiian s.h.i.+rt and the raspberry trousers, had moved across the table and sat talking with the Umanoffs, all of them amiable and laughing together now that Deep Throat was off the agenda. Deep Throat had never been the real subject anyway. Boiling away beneath Deep Throat was the far more disgusting and transgressive subject of Merry, of Sheila, of Sh.e.l.ly, of Orcutt and Dawn, of wantonness and betrayal and deception, of treachery and disunity among neighbors and friends, the subject of cruelty. The mockery of human integrity, every ethical obligation destroyed--that was the subject here tonight!The Swede's mother had come around to sit beside Dawn, who was talking with the Salzmans, and his father and Jessie were nowhere to be seen.Dawn asked, "Important?""The Czech guy. The consul. The information I wanted. Where's my dad?"He waited for her to say "Dead," but after she looked around she mouthed only "Don't know" and turned back to Sh.e.l.ly and Sheila."Daddy left with Mrs. Orcutt," his mother whispered. "They went somewhere together. I think in the house."Orcutt came up to him. They were the same size, both big men, but the Swede had always been the stronger, going back to their twenties, to when Merry was born and the Levovs moved out to Old Rimrock from their apartment on Elizabeth Avenue in Newark and the newcomer had showed up for the Sat.u.r.day morning touch-football games back of Orcutt's house. Out there just for the fun of it, to enjoy the fresh air and the feel of the ball and the camaraderie, to make some new friends, the Swede had not the slightest inclination to appear showy or superior, except when he simply had no choice: when Orcutt, who off the field had never been other than kind and considerate, began to use his hands more recklessly than the Swede considered sportsmanlike--in a way that the Swede 380 .

considered cheap and irritating, for a pickup game the worst sort of behavior even if Orcutt's team did happen to have fallen behind. After it had occurred for two weeks in a row, he decided the third week to do what he of course could have done at any time--to dump him. And so, near the end of the game, with a single, swift maneuver--employing the other person's weight to do the damage--he managed at once to catch a long pa.s.s from Bucky Robinson and to make sure Orcutt was sprawled in the gra.s.s at his feet, before he pranced away to pile on the score. Pranced away and thought, of all things, "I don't like being looked down on," the words that Dawn had used to decline joining The Orcutt Family Cemetery Tour. He had not realized, not till he was speeding alone toward the goal line, how much Dawn's a.s.sailability had gotten to him nor how unsettled he was by the remotest likelihood (a likelihood that, to her face, he had dismissed) of his wife's being ridiculed out here for growing up in Elizabeth the daughter of an Irish plumber. When, after scoring, he turned around and saw Orcutt still on the ground, he thought, "Two hundred years of Morris County history, flat on its a.s.s--that'll teach you to look down on Dawn Levov. Next time you'll play the whole game on your a.s.s," before trotting back up the field to see if Orcutt was all right.

The Swede knew that once he got him on the floor of the terrace he would have no difficulty in slamming Orcutt's head against the flagstones as many times as might be required to get him into that cemetery with his distinguished clan.

Yes, something is wrong with this guy, there always was, and the Swede had known it all along-- knew it from those terrible paintings, knew it from the reckless use of his hands in a backyard pickup game, knew it even at the cemetery, when for one solid hour Orcutt got to goyishly regale a Jewish sightseer. . . . Yes, big dissatisfaction there right from the start. Dawn said it was art, modern art, when all the time, baldly displayed on their living room wall, was William Orcutt's dissatisfaction. But now he has my wife. Instead of that misfortune Jessie, he's got revamped and revitalized Miss New Jersey of 1949. Got it made, got it all now, the greedy, thieving son of a b.i.t.c.h. 381 .

"Your father's a good man," Orcutt said. "Jessie doesn't usually get all this attention when she goes out. It's why she doesn't go out. He's a very generous man. He doesn't hold anything back, does he? Nothing left undisclosed. You get the whole person. Unguarded. Unashamed. Works himself up. It's wonderful. An amazing person, really. A huge presence. Always himself. Coming from where I do, you have to envy all that."Oh, I'll bet you do, you son of a b.i.t.c.h. Laugh at us, you f.u.c.ker. Just keep laughing."Where are they?" the Swede asked."He told her there's only one way to eat a fresh piece of pie. That's sitting at a kitchen table with a nice cold gla.s.s of milk. I guess they're in the kitchen with the milk. Jessie's learning a lot more about making a glove than she may ever need to know, but that's all right too. No harm in that. I hope you didn't mind that I couldn't leave her home.""We wouldn't want you to leave her home.""You're all very understanding.""I was looking at the model of your house," the Swede told him, "in Dawn's study." But what he was looking at was a mole on the left side of Orcutt's face, a dark mole buried in the crease that ran from his nose to the corner of his mouth. Along with the snout nose Orcutt had an ugly mole. Does she find the mole appealing? Does she kiss the mole? Doesn't she ever find this guy just a wee bit fat in the face? Or, when it comes to an upper-cla.s.s Old Rimrock boy, is she as unmindful of his looks, as unperturbed, as professionally detached as the wh.o.r.ehouse ladies over in Easton?"Uh-oh," said Orcutt, amiably feigning how uncertain he was. Uses his hands when he plays football, wears those s.h.i.+rts, paints those paintings, f.u.c.ks his neighbor's wife, and manages through it all to maintain himself as the ever- reasonable unknowable man. All facade and subterfuge. He works so hard, Dawn said, at being one-dimensional. Up top the gentleman, underneath the rat. Drink the devil that lurks in his wife; l.u.s.t and rivalry the devils lurking in him.

Sealed and civilized and predatory. To reinforce the genealogi- 382 .

cal aggression--the overpowering by origins--the aggression of scrupulous manners.

The humane environmentalist and the calculating predator, protecting what he hasby birthright and taking surrept.i.tiously what he doesn't have. The civilized savagery of William Orcutt. His civilized form of animal behavior. I prefer the cows. "It's supposed to be seen after dinner--with the spiel," Orcutt said. "Did it make any sense without the spiel?" he asked. "I wouldn't think so."But of course--being unknowable is the goal. Then you move instrumentally through life, appropriating the beautiful wives. In the kitchen he should have hit those two over the head with a skillet."It did. A lot," the Swede said. And then, as he could never stop himself from doing with Orcutt, he added, "It's interesting. I get the idea now about the light. I get the idea of the light was.h.i.+ng over those walls. That's going to be something to see. I think you're going to be very happy in it."Orcutt laughed. "You, you mean."But the Swede had not heard his own error. He hadn't heard it because of the huge thought that had just come at him: what he should have done and failed to do.He should have overpowered her. He should not have left her there. Jerry was right. Drive to Newark. Leave immediately. Take Barry. The two of them could subdue her and bring her back in the car to Old Rimrock. And if Rita Cohen is there? I'll kill her. If she is anywhere near my daughter, I'll pour gasoline all over that hair and set the little c.u.n.t on fire. Destroying my daughter.

Showing me her p.u.s.s.y. Destroying my child. There's the meaning--they are destroying her for the pleasure of destroying her. Take Sheila. Take Sheila.

Calm down. Take Sheila to Newark. Merry listens to Sheila. Sheila will talk to her and get her out of that room."--leave it to our visiting intellectual to get everything wrong. The complacent rudeness with which she plays the old French game of beating up on the bourgeoisie. . . ." Orcutt was confiding to the Swede his amus.e.m.e.nt with Marcia's posturing. "It's to her 383 .

credit, I suppose, that she doesn't defer to the regulation dinnerparty discipline of not saying anything about anything. But still it's amazing, constantly amazes me, how emptiness always goes with cleverness. She hasn't the faintest idea, really, of what she's talking about. Know what my father used to say? 'All brains and no intelligence. The smarter the stupider.' Applies."Not Dawn? No. Dawn wanted nothing further to do with their catastrophe. She was just biding her time with him until the house was built. Go and do it yourself.

Get back in the f.u.c.king car and get her. Do you love her or don't you love her?

You're acceding to her the way you acceded to your father, the way you have acceded to everything in your life. You're afraid of letting the beast out of the bag. Quite a critique she has made of decorum. You keep yourself a secret.

You don't choose ever1. But how could he bring Merry home, now, tonight, in that veil, with his father here? If his father were to see her, he'd expire on the spot. To where else then? Where would he take her? Could the two of them go live in Puerto Rico? Dawn wouldn't care where he went. As long as she had her Orcutt.

He had to get her before she again set foot in that underpa.s.s. Forget Rita Cohen. Forget that inhuman idiot Sheila Salzman. Forget Orcutt. He does not matter. Find a place for Merry to live where there is not that underpa.s.s. That's all that matters. Start with the underpa.s.s. Save her from getting herself killed in the underpa.s.s. Before the morning, before she has even left her room--start there.He had been cracking up in the only way he knew how, which is not really cracking up at all but sinking, all evening long being unmade by steadily sinking under the weight. A man who never goes full out and explodes, who only sinks . .. but now it was clear what to do. Go get her out of there before dawn.After Dawn. After Dawn life was inconceivable. There was nothing he could do without Dawn. But she wanted Orcutt. "That Wasp blandness," she'd said, all but yawning to make her point. But that blandness had terrific glamour for a little Irish Catholic girl. The mother of Merry Levov needs nothing less than William Orcutt III. The cuckolded husband understands. Of course. Under-384.

stands everything now. Who will get her back to the dream of where she has always wanted to go? Mr. America. Teamed up with Orcutt she'll be back on the track. Spring Lake, Atlantic City, now Mr. America. Rid of the stain of our child, the stain on her credentials, rid of the stain of the destruction of the store, she can begin to resume the uncontaminated life. But I was stopped at the general store. And she knows it. Knows that I am allowed in no farther. I'