Sputterpub's Blog

Claude had been kind of a wild guy in college. When he had a car he drove it fast. When he got the chance he climbed fences, buildings, once even, at 3:30 in the morning, the cables of the Golden Gate Bridge. His political ideas were outlandish, but he wrote like an angel. They thought his fantasy about bombing the ROTC building a bit strange, but no more so than Angie’s unwillingness to walk in the shadow of the campanile, or Mal’s aversion to long-haired dogs.

Although Angie and Mal and Winnie formed a perfect triangle and needed no one else, when Angie and Claude became an item the others were glad. They tried to expand to a rectangle. Claude probably would have gone with them to Israel if he hadn’t had gotten a good job right out of college.

But nothing Claude did would have stopped his mother from killing herself. He just would have heard about it in Israel instead of in Berkeley. And no matter where he heard of it, the news probably would have pushed him the way it did push him, over the edge into his mental illness.

He lost the job. He bounced up, down, and sideways while the doctors fiddled with his medications. He forsook the meds for a combination of strict diet and Catholicism but by then Angie had married him. She’d gotten those desperate letters and wires from him when she and Mal and Winnie were on the kibbutz. His agony had powered her home, had pulled her arms around him, had made her into a nurturing care-giver for twenty-nine years. While Claude became more Catholic, more aesthete, more rigorous and self-denying. While wild Claude turned into a hunched-over timid opinionated man, who drove annoyingly slowly with his lights always on. While Claude turned increasingly to prayer.

Twenty-nine years. She might have continued till death did them part. But recently Claude began to have visions. He concluded that he must jettison his earthly possessions, and he started the process without informing her. She returned from work a week ago to find him negotiating with some couple to take their living room furniture. A few days later he told her they must leave the Bay Area and become missionaries. That night, just four nights ago, she saw the scabby X’s from self-flagellation on his back. She called Winnie and Mal.

They flew in from Atlanta and Ann Arbor. They each had to endure delays at their airports but once in the air they crossed most of the continent in four skyblue hours. The Mississippi River appeared to each like a creek in Berkeley. They were only aware of the Rocky Mountains because the updrafts produced some turbulence.

The three old friends were together at last again, and not because any of them was dying. They sat in Angie’s study, confident that Claude would be in church for at least another two hours, and they took the measure of their adult lives.

“Who knows how much more time we have,” mused Mal.

“So let’s go for it,” said Winnie. The other two looked questions at her.

“You know I have enough to take care of us,” she said. “Let’s go measure the earth like we always meant to do. Let’s turn away from that Jordan River culvert, that drainage ditch, and visit the Sierras, the high desert, our wild coastline. Let’s go together and measure South America, and Africa.” These were amazing words from Winnie. Winnie was not impulsive.

“Anyway, let’s get you out of here,” Winnie said to Angie, and Mal nodded in agreement.

Then they rose from their seats as one, still in triangle formation, each shocked at how old the other two faces had become, each warmed by the way those old faces still bore the lineaments of youth. When they met they had two decades behind them, and every year seemed an age. Now they had two decades before them, and a year seemed like months. They each reached out two ways, and clasped a friend’s arm. They couldn’t believe it.

But I could. They all think I’m a Luddite but I can use tech when I’m called to. By God. Spycams are so widely available now. I heard their blasphemy and I witnessed what can only be deviant attraction between them.

I’ve had my suspicions for awhile. The first real trigger was when Angie came in that day last August and announced she had to be a good Muslim and wash her feet. She tried to cover that statement with a laugh and a comment about how dusty her toes got in sandals all day, but it made me watch her more. Then I caught her reading the Koran. Sure it was an intellectual exercise. Sure.

My old friends have warped. We were all iffy in college and I’ve been deluding myself that they are more like me than is actually the truth.

I can do tech and I can do weapons. The old ROTC fantasies were not just academic (hah!); they didn’t lack research. And now that the house is almost empty, only an old structure, really four corrupt old structures, will be laid waste. I just have to detonate soon.

“It’s not like the sex is any good, or he’s the father of your kids, or anything,” Mal said.

“Malcolm!” Winnie made like she was going to toss her water at him.

“No, Winnie. He’s right.” Angie used her hands on the wooden chair arms to scoot herself back, and she crossed her right leg over her left at the knee. She shook her auburn-dyed curls back and realized that she was the only one of the three who crossed her legs closed and open. Mal had crossed his legs the square way when they met him, but over the years he gave that posture up for the legs-together position. Winnie had gone the other way, from a knee-on-knee woman to Fred, who usually sat legs splayed, but who when she decided to cross always opted to rest her right ankle on her knee and hold it there with her left hand.

“The sex never has been spectacular,” Angie continued, referring to Claude’s unwillingness to experiment. “And you know he got himself sterilized at twenty-three.” Claude’s mother, grandfather, and two of his aunts had been alcoholic suicides. His father’s brother had MS. Claude was convinced his genes were defective, and he took steps to avoid reproduction. Later on, after his commitment to Catholicism, he had the vasectomy reversed, but by then his dad had been through so many recovery programs that Angie didn’t want to take the genetic chance; she used birth control pills till her hysterectomy.

“It’s all so surprising,” Winnie blurted. Mal and Angie turned toward her simultaneously. “Life, I mean,” she added, and blushed. “I know it sounds corny, but I really thought it would be more, more… momentous, I guess. One day follows another, mostly the same, and they add up to years and before you know it decades…”

“Sometimes there’s a spike of surprise, though,” Mal added. “Like when you came out. Or the Jordan River… Remember how amazed we were at its tininess? Fuckin’ culvert…”

“Or how about Mt. Sinai? About as ‘mountainous’ as Tamalpais.” Angie leaned back and grinned. “Funny you should mention it. I’ve been reading the Bible lately and remembering that trip. I’m still in the Old Testament and the book seems small to me. So obviously written by these nomadic types who thought their little plot of grazing land as big as the universe.”

“Why are you reading the Bible?” Mal’s tone was suspicious.

“Oh just because I haven’t. I figured it was time. I mean, it seems to be some source of contention between Claude and me, and I never have read it… Actually, I’m starting to think almost no one has read it all. Especially when I got to 1 Samuel.”

“What’s it about?”

“Nothing less than God smiting the Philistines with hemorrhoids! Tell me that’s not funny!”

“More evidence that Jehovah is homophobic if you ask me.”

“Oh lighten up, Mal. You’re almost as obsessed with anti-religion as Claude is with his church.”

Winnie stopped rocking and held both hands up for attention. Like she was signaling a touchdown. It was a habit she developed in the beginning with her forceful friends; she had to, or she never would have been heard. “Back to surprises: isn’t it weird that none of us had any kids? That surprise kind of crept up on us. Isn’t it surprising that no one managed a decent long-term relationship? Even you,” she added, with a meaningful look at Angie.

“And another crept-up surprise is that you and I didn’t come back to the Bay Area,” said Mal. “But a spike surprise was your success at business.” Winnie had always thought she was going to be a ceramicist. She did throw pots when she was married and continued part-time while working to support Kim, but after Kim left, all the debt propelled her into opening a co-op gallery in Atlanta, which grew to a franchise-type operation nationwide. Winnie was set for life. Mal did okay as a periodontist but he was bored with it. Angie wanted to write but had a career in San Francisco office administration; between that and Claude rarely working, they could never get ahead of the Bay Area cost-of-living.
“The biggest surprise is Claude’s disability,” said Angie. She looked sad, and Winnie rocked forward to pat her knee. “Who’d a thought it?”

“He was always weird.”

“Sure, Mal, but you never warned us how weird.”

“Hey I’ve been as blown away as anyone.”

They couldn’t believe they’d let so much time pass. They were shocked at how quickly it went. The three of them had been inseparable in college, incorrigible in Israel, and full of plans when they returned home, twenty-two and immortal.

That was twenty-nine years ago.

Then Malcolm went to Michigan for grad school. Winnie made the mistake of marriage, and moved to Atlanta with her husband. Angie remained in Berkeley, with Claude, near her parents.

They stayed in touch but the touch loosened over time; long-distance calls were expensive and writing letters was tiresome. Both Mal and Winnie visited the Bay Area every so often, at least while their respective parents lived, and Angie always saw them, but their visits never coincided till now.

Lately it seemed there was too much catastrophe. Mal didn’t have AIDS, and neither woman had pancreatic or ovarian cancer, but each of them had plenty of sick peers. Angie had spent the last four months helping a neighbor die. All three were feeling softly sad, slowly sentimental, sensitive. When Winnie and Mal learned of Angie’s latest Claude-crisis, each decided to visit her. That’s how they came to be gathered in her small study, marveling mostly at how old they’d become: grownups with traces of youth in their rippling faces.

Any witness could have seen the triangle they made. They were positioned at equidistant points from each other in the small room. Angie sat on the squeaky swivel chair in front of her old oak desk, Winnie went back and forth in the cane-and-oak rocking chair, and Mal draped himself variously over Angie’s stationary bicycle. The way they conversed made a triangle too; it had only taken them three hugs and five minutes to resume the old pattern. Angie swivelled, Winnie rocked, Mal pedaled, they all talked.

“You have to leave him, girlfriend,” Mal stated in no uncertain terms. He flailed his arms upward in an emphatic vee. He and Angie had always been more definite than Winnie, but Mal was the expressive one. They’d all known he was gay when they met as Cal freshmen, and he’d only become more so over the years. Winnie, on the other hand, presented herself as straight until a year into her marriage to Jack, when she blew everyone away by running off with Kim and changing her nickname to Fred. In time and after Kim she returned to her old name, but she never returned to heterosexuality. “This is the last straw,” Mal continued, “and we are not going to sit around and watch it break your back or any other part of you.”

“I kind of know it, Mal,” Angie sighed. She turned the chair to him, lopsiding the triangle. “But after all this time…shit: it just seems like a big deal to leave him. You realize we’ve been together over thirty years?”

“Yeah. And how many of them have been good years?” Mal asked the question with a sardonic tone, pedaling a few times and nodding his handsome head. His hair was still thick and wavy, but it had gone from darkest brown to streaky silver.

Angie swivelled toward Winnie and gave her an exasperated smile. “What do you say?”

“About good years?” Winnie smiled back. Her hair had grayed too, but she’d started out a blonde so her gray looked dull. Angie had been trying for years to get her to color it, but Winifred was one of those lesbians who believed that any cosmetic beyond hand lotion was a capitulation to the male-dominated commercial world. She was pleasantly plump, sweetly serene, and had the softest hands in the county, but above the neck she looked older than her fifty-one years. “Normally I’d stay out of it and say I wasn’t sure,” Winnie answered more seriously, “but really, Ange, you’ve done it long enough. I think it’s time for you to get out.”

It was serious advice, coming from those two. Mal had been Claude’s accidental roommate in the dorm, just as Winnie and Angie had been fortuitously paired. The four of them spent a lot of time together, and Mal and Winnie had loved Claude, who was then crazy- brilliant. He was the only one not from the Bay Area, having come to Cal from Delaware of all places; that was one of the small things that alienated him from the other three, and made a triangle instead of a square. But they knew Claude, they accepted him as Angie’s mate, and they thought they understood him as well as anyone alive: theirs was a dire recommendation.

“Bathroom’s all yours, Mom.” Sharon strides silk-aswish into her favorite room. She makes music water on water, and lovely in the mirror. She takes a hundred moments to appreciate herself. Then she thinks again about Saul’s prose.

He writes well. She smiles as she imagines for an instant how she’d read him personally. But all that Judaism on Ashkenazim ad nauseam: how does a Jewess tell a Jew, in Jewish Berkeley, to get off it already? enough is enough …

She dabs the China Musk on carefully. From the old Body Shop, before it sold its name. The stuff’s a light oil – lovely scent like old Jade East from the cheeks of junior high boys – and will stain clothes. She puts it behind her ears but high up, away from any scarf, where a nose will have to seek it. She strokes it deep in her cleavage; she hesitates and then, deciding to go without panties, she feathers it at the creases of her thighs.

She leaves the bathroom and has just opened her closet door when the phone rings. Sam answers. Her mother. Sam announces the call to her from downstairs, before leaving the house. He doesn’t let her begin her conversation until he has notified her about where he’s going and when he’ll be back.

“Fine,” she calls down to him cupping the phone in her right hand. “Have fun. I’ll probably be back before you; I’ll certainly be home by ten.” She pulls a black skirt from its hanger clips. “Hi Ma,” she says into the phone.

Her mother as usual calls her Sadie; Sharon has never been able to learn why. She wants to tell Sharon about Aunt Ruth’s elevated blood sedimentation (sediment of what? Sharon wonders, but her mother doesn’t have an answer). Also about returning some sweater set already worn for a year, but Sharon is used to that. Her mother is a master of retail return, and Sharon tends to tune her out when she talks about shopping.

Sharon is wrapping the black skirt around her and thinking about Saul A’s posture and prose. She pulls a cropped cashmere sweater off a shelf, sets it on a chair for when her head is free of the phone. She has nothing to say about Saul’s stream-of-consciousness excursion into Jewish guilt and circumcision, let alone about Aunt Ruth and merchandise returns.

Saul A on the penis. Spear shape. Gear shift knob. Acorn. Circumcision as evidence of the great sociological experiment. If dogs consent to surrender their wildness in exchange for our control of fire (warm hearth, cooked food), then it is not strange that men agree to surrender their wildness for the benefits of our community …

Ah but there’s an edge. There’s the rub. Sharon giggles. “What?” her mother asks.

“Oh. Nothing,” she says but with a smile her mother can hear.

“What’s with you?”

“I have to go, Ma. I have to meet an author for a drink.” She turns the phone off but stands with it in her hand, absentmindedly rubbing the black plastic with the edge of her thumb. She contemplates her little black sweater and concludes of a sudden that she’d be better blonde. She reaches up to her closet shelf for the tousled wig.

Sharon pulls on her sweater and fits it to her upper arms and bra before she settles the wig over her dark hair. “A modern sheitel,” she thinks. Let Mr. A think me orthodox … an orthodoxy.”

One way or the other Sharon hopes to attract him. Just because. It’s that or talk about his writing. And some writers don’t go far enough.

Sharon being the oldest child observed her parents. Being the daughter the reader, she kept a diary. She took notes. She is fortunate to have parents long into her life, and she is able to see them in perspective. Watching from her back her knees her toddling sturdy legs her magical midget self her adolescent rigor her racing worrying maturity, she has witnessed her parents from their twenties to their geriatry, and she has seen them frame their worlds in diminishing portals till everything they view satisfies them in a sad accepting way.

“I will not go gently into that sloping tunnel,” Sharon thinks, envisioning her life as a journey in a cornucopia, “but maybe I’ll go speaking quieter.”

She pushes up from her desk chair. “I will, however, have to get into that bathroom,” and listens for Sam sounds. She thinks he’s out of the shower. “Hey: buddy! Can I get in there soon?” She raises her voice but she doesn’t shout. She is modulating. Sam answers “Just a minute,” and she figures she’ll have the bathroom in five.

She is meeting a local author tonight. She reviews for the neighborhood monthly magazine/newspaper, and this guy Saul A wrote a series of short stories about his family and heritage. Sharon is trying to compose a little literary criticism about the collection, but she has also agreed to have a drink with Mr. A. Tonight. She started with hoping the meeting would inspire her writing. Now she’s hoping for else.

She kind of hates reviewing. She has a bachelor’s degree in English lit but she never read or wrote criticism. She thinks most lit crit is just gossip. It’s okay with Sharon to put the writing in historical or societal perspective. But it’s not particularly useful or germane for her to receive biographical data about the author. Let alone a picture.

She got shanghaied into writing these reviews after the little paper published a couple of her poems. Which poems she only submitted on a dare from her friend David. Not even a dare, really. David must have gotten tired of hearing her read her verses to him. He almost submitted them for her, writing up the cover letter, typing the envelope. She was so gratified at first to be published, even in a neighborhood paper, that she agreed to write the random review. And now here is Mr. A’s Yiddishe yarns.

Or Hebrew hauntings? The stories aren’t stories, and that bothers Sharon. They’re beautifully written, and they’re emotion-jerkers, but they lack plot. Nothing happens. That irks her but she doesn’t want to pan the book.

She sits back instead, and envisions Saul A. He is tall, dark, and slim. She thinks he’s in his early fifties but he still has hair: salt-and-pepper, close-cut, curly. He has dark intelligent eyes and lovely large-nailed hands. Full lips a little sneery.

She thinks she will dress up for this drink. Wear a skirt. She rises and pulls on her thigh-high black stockings under her robe. She walks around her room for a minute, feeling the rub of her inner thighs above the lace top of the stockings, and her mood softens.

Sometimes they go too far. Into the rarified air of their art. Painters do it, with cubes and splashes and excursions into the process. Composers do it, at the edges of variations, around the corners of jazz. Decadents do it, venturing through the borders into the dark side, acclimating to the hideous. And writers, even writers, have been known to go too far to follow … into the offputting paths of later Joyce, or Barth, or worse.

Rand could have stopped with The Fountainhead. She made her point when she had her hero declare that he would die for his beloved but wouldn’t live for her. She didn’t need to write Atlas Shrugged except maybe for herself. And a writing for herself doesn’t need to be published. Vanity.

“Okay if I use the shower?” Her son’s voice pulls Sharon away from her indignant reverie. His deep voice. He is seventeen, but his voice changed with never a crack four years earlier. He is checking to make sure she doesn’t want to get into the bathroom in the next twenty minutes. Sam is very considerate that way. He always tells his mother what he is planning to do, where he plans to go. He always tries to answer her query about when he’ll be back. His frequentest phrase is “Just so you know,” and he as often follows it with a recital of his intentions toward homework as he does with an out-of-the-house itinerary. Sharon never considers what activities that openness might obscure.

“Go ahead, Sam. Have a good shower.” She sends the words over her right shoulder through the study door, and then she starts chewing on her thumb. Nothing tastes better to her than the thickened skin near her fingertips, around her thumbnails and the nails on the first two fingers of each hand. Not the cuticles: no. The almost-calloused skin at the sides of the nails, where she rakes habitually with her ring fingers, where she nibbles and pulls at the tips of her index and middle fingers. She wonders if there is any calorie gain or loss in chewing one’s own skin. It hardly matters though. She can only gnaw a little bit before she pulls off the epi and exposes the dermis, or worse: draws her very blood and has to be careful not to blot it on papers, has to apply pressure squeezing her fingertip together, pushing the torn skin against the nail for an amazingly long time.

She twists her right thumb to her mouth, knuckle forward, and she gnashes her lower teeth against the roughened skin. Loving aloneness and the sound of her son’s shower a room away.

“I want you to speak more quietly.” Sharon remembers her father saying that to her three weeks earlier, seriously, while cupping her chin in his hand. Bossy old father. Always forgetting the space between his body and his kids’… her dad is an intelligent loving man but he sends out too many shoulds, and he usually reacts with indignation instead of humor.

“Take your pick,” she wishes she’d said. “Either I won’t have sex, or I’ll eat the foods you like, or I’ll lower my voice.” And as she wishes that, she knows what he’d choose. They’re old enough now her father would pick the modulated tones.

They’re old enough now she starts to understand her parents, even if they don’t understand themselves. They are bright, somewhat happy, and very complacent; they see themselves eyeglasses off, her right leg cocked ahead of left, his shoulders strong. In fact, Sharon’s mother is impatient/impulsive, burning baked goods and pushing against small barriers, all because she never had the vigor to defy her family orthodoxy. In fact, Sharon’s father tries to govern his children’s bodies because he hasn’t yet had the governance of his own. He has always been too responsible.

Oh but Sharon’s mother and father devoted themselves to raising their children. With maternal impatience and paternal control they took the job seriously. Creatively they everyday expected something to go wrong. And wrong rarely came, but they were always prepared. Sharon’s mother cut her thumb slicing cucumbers the wrong way, but the children were unhurt. Her father’s neck chords stood out in fury when his kids wouldn’t eat mushrooms or eggs, but calamity never struck.