The Stone Diaries Part 11

Also there's something endearing about a man who knows all the words to "Ivan Skavinsky Skavar." I couldn't help being pleased he and Mel had so much in common. Isn't it bizarre, all of us having beaux at our age, though I guess Mel doesn't quite qualify as a beau now that he's a husband. By the way, Beans and Brick are talking wedding bells. Wish I could warm to him, but can't somehow. What do you think? It isn't just his name and those G.o.dawful neckties is it? Maybe it's the way he sneers at the Kennedys. Maybe it's that Sigma Chi ring. Maybe it's everything.

Love, Fraidy Ottawa, June 6, 1963 Dear Mrs. Green Thumb I agree absolutely that peonies are beautiful but stupid. The dumbest thing about them is the way they resent being moved-which is why my husband and I welcomed your suggestions last week. Many thanks. You're the greatest.

Audrey LaRoche (Mrs.) Ottawa, August 15, 1963 Dear Mrs. Green Thumb, Your piece on hollyhocks was terrif. I liked the part about their "frilled dirndl skirts," and their "shy fuzzy stems." I haven't had hollyhocks in the yard for years, but after reading your column I ran straight out and bought a bunch of seeds, even though it's too late for this year.

Thanks a bunch, Lydia Nygaard Ottawa, November 25, 1963 Dearest Dee, Couldn't reach you by phone, hence this quick note. Most of the Sports and Home section will be cancelled next week because of the Kennedy coverage-so we'll be using your rock garden piece the following week. What a world this is, everything falling to pieces.

Yours, J.

Ottawa, January 25, 1964 Dear Dee, I'm so sorry about this misunderstanding. I realize now, of course, that telling you on the phone was a mistake. I knew you'd be disappointed, but I had no idea you would take it this hard. You've been talking about wanting more time to yourself, more time to travel, maybe a trip to England to see your daughter. Hope we can get together as usual on Tuesday and talk this over like two sensible people.

Yours, J.

Ottawa, February 6, 1964 Dear Mrs. Flett, I've read your letter carefully and I can a.s.sure you I understand your feelings. But I believe Jay explained the paper's policy to you, that full-time staffers have first choice of columns. As you well know, I've been filling in with the gardening column from time to time, all those times you've been away, and, to tell you the honest truth, I've had quite a lot of appreciative letters from readers who especially like the fact that my columns are ill.u.s.trated and take the male point of view. Personally, I like the feel that a regional newspaper is a living, breathing organism that resists falling into rigid patterns. Think of it this way: our readers are always changing, and so must we. After nine years of being Mrs. Green Thumb, I feel sure you too will welcome a change.

With best wishes, James (Pinky) Fulham February 20, 1964 Dear Dee, I am so terribly sorry about all this, and I do agree the policy of the paper is ridiculous, but it's a policy that has been in force since the time of my predecessor. None of this has anything to do with your competence as a contributor, you know better than that. The issue is that Pinky, as a full-timer, has a prior claim to any regular column as long as he can demonstrate capability in the area. I can't tell you how much I regret all this, but I'm afraid my hands are tied.

Please let's get together soon and talk of other things. You are, if I may say, taking this far too personally.

Your J.

February 28, 1964 Dear Mrs. Flett, Thank you for your letter. I am afraid, though, I am not at this time willing to change my mind. Frankly, I've been covering city politics for some ten years and am in need of a change. Even my personal physician has advised a change. I should think you would be eager for a change too after so many years. Change is what keeps us young.

Yours sincerely, Pinky Fulham P.S. As I said to you earlier, I hope this disagreement won't interfere with our friendship.

Bloomington, Indiana, March 28, 1964 Daze, Beans and I are just wondering if you've broken your wrist. Neither of us has heard from you in ages-how about a line or two?

Fraidy Hampstead, England, April 10, 1964 It's weeks since you've written. Hope all is well. Spring has come to England, glorious, and Judy's already up to twelve pounds. Is everything okay? I'm a little worried. There hasn't been a letter from you for weeks. Is anything wrong?

Love, Alice, Ben, and Benje and wee Jude

CHAPTER SEVEN.

Sorrow, 1965.

1965 was the year Mrs. Flett fell into a profound depression.

It happened overnight, more or less. Her family and friends stood by helplessly and watched while her usual self-composed nature collapsed into bewilderment, then withdrawal, and then a splattery anger that seemed to feed on injury. She was unattractive during this period. Despair did not suit her looks. Goodness cannot cope with badness-it's too good, you see, too stupidly good. A person unable to sleep for more than an hour or two at a time and whose eating patterns are disordered-this type of person soon dwindles into bodily dejection-you've seen such people, and so has Mrs. Flett, shambling along the edges of public parks or seated under hairdryers. Their facial skin drags downward. Their clothes hang on them unevenly and look always in need of a good sprucing up. You want to rush up to these lost souls and offer comfort, but there's an off-putting aura of failure about them, almost a smell.

The spring and summer of 1965-those were terrible months for Mrs. Flett, as she slid day by day along a trajectory that began in resignation, then hardened into silence, then leapt to a bitter and blaming estrangement from those around her, her children and grandchildren, her many good friends and acquaintances.

What was it that changed Mrs. Flett so utterly?

The phenomenon of menopause will probably leap to mind, but no. Daisy Flett is fifty-nine years old in 1965, almost sixty, and her hormonal structure, never particularly volatile-according to some-has been steady as a clock-according to others-since her forty-ninth birthday. Nor does she appear to be suffering from "delayed mourning," as some of her family would have it. She remembers her dear sweet Barker fondly, of course she does, she honors his memory, whatever that means; and she thinks of him, smilingly, every single time she rubs a dab of Jergens Lotion into the palms of her hands, floating herself back to the moment-a very private moment, she will not discuss it with anyone, though she records it here-in which he had extolled her smooth-jointed fingers, comparing them to wonderful flexible silken fish.

Fish? A startling idea; it took her by surprise; at the time she hadn't completely warmed to the likeness, yet she apprehended, at least, her husband's courageous lurching toward poetry. But does she actually pine for this dead partner of hers? For the calmness offered up by the simple weariness of their love? How much of her available time bends backward into the knot of their joined lives, those twenty connubial years?

To be honest, very little. There, I've said it.

Her present sinking of spirit, the manic misrule of her heart and head, the foundering of her reason, the decline of her physical health-all these stem from some mysterious suffering core which those around her can only register and weigh and speculate about.

Alice's Theory

Something happened to me. At age nineteen I was on the verge of becoming a certain kind of person, and then I changed, and went in another direction.

The self is not a thing carved on entablature. Not long ago I read-probably in the Sunday papers-about an American woman who got up one morning and started practicing a new kind of handwriting, sloping all her letters backwards instead of forwards, concentrating on smaller and denser loops. It was almost like drawing. She wrote her name a dozen times in this variant way. She wrote out the preamble to the Const.i.tution and then the Gettysburg Address, and by noon she had become someone else.

The change that happened to me went deeper than penmanship and far, far beyond such superficialities as a new hairstyle or dietary regime-although I did at age nineteen decide to let my hair grow long, which was not a popular style in the mid-fifties, and I did give up meat and white sugar and the smoking of cigarettes.

It was summertime. I had just returned after my first year away at college. It was the first morning back, in fact, and I woke up early in our family's large, quiet, shabby Ottawa house and looked straight up at the ceiling where there was a long circular crack shaped like the hunch in an old crone's back, high and rounded at the top, then tapering down. That selfsame crack had been there ever since I could remember, since earliest childhood. It was the first thing I saw in the morning and the last thing at night, this menacing inscription in plaster that roofed me over with dread.

Not that I feared the witchlike configuration, good Christ no-I knew perfectly well that such anthropomorphizing is fanciful and solipsistic; I also knew that other people, happier people, might see a river instead of a diseased spine, or a map of a buried subcontinent or, with a little imagination, a mountain topped by a Chinese paG.o.da, in turn topped by a k.n.o.b of whipped cream. We see what we want to see. Our perceptions fly straight out of our deepest needs, this much you learn in Introductory Psych, a required course at my college. No, what I dreaded about the ceiling crack was its persistence. That it was always there. Determined to accompany me. To be a part of me.

I dragged the stepladder up from the bas.e.m.e.nt, hoping it would reach. (The ceilings in that old house of ours were ridiculously high.) On a shelf in the garden shed I found a box of plasterer's putty and mixed myself up a large sticky batch which I spread the length of the ceiling crack, using a spatula from the kitchen drawer, and moving the ladder forward foot by foot. I'd never done this kind of work before, but I read the directions on the box carefully and made a neat job of it. I've always been exceptionally neat.

"Very neat presentation" was what my professors wrote on the bottoms of my term papers, also "well focused" and "full of verve."

In half an hour the plaster was dry, and I sanded it smooth, letting the fine grains drift down on top of my head and into my face, breathing in the chalky dust, tasting it on my tongue. I did not find the sensation disagreeable, quite the contrary. By four o'clock that afternoon I had painted the entire ceiling, using a roller attached to an extension handle, and just before going to bed that night I gave the whole thing a second coat.

Then I lay down in the dark, possibly a little drunk from the heavy latex fumes that swirled downward and converged in midair with a mad proleptic wafting up of happiness. Sleep came quickly; I welcomed it; I was eager for morning; I wanted to wake up to the early light and observe, freshly, the transformation I had brought about.

This really happened. This event, this revelation! Not one of the various members of my family raised the least objection to my determination to repair and paint my bedroom ceiling. No one even challenged me as to why I needed the ladder, why I was scrounging around in the shed for a paint roller, whether this act of mine was a momentary whim or a charged metaphoric gesture. This surprised me, the general air of permission. My mother, of course, was preoccupied with the weekly gardening column she was writing for the local newspaper (Mrs. Green Thumb was the byline she used). My younger brother and sister looked on with interest, perhaps even a tincture of envy-why hadn't they thought of improving their ceilings!-and Cousin Beverly, who had moved in with us a year earlier, gave me a hand spreading newspapers on the carpet and some useful advice about how to reach into the difficult corner angles. As for my father, had he still been alive, he might have discouraged me from a.s.signing myself a dull and messy task, particularly on my first day home, though I can't help thinking he would have understood the impulse driving me forward.

In one day I had altered my life: my life, therefore, was alterable.

This simple axiom did not cry out for exegesis; no, it entered my bloodstream directly, as powerful as heroin; I could feel its pump and surge, the way it brightened my veins to a kind of gla.s.s. I had wakened that morning to narrowness and predestination, and now I was falling asleep in the storm of my own will. My eyes would open in the morning to a smooth white field of possibility. The ceiling that had taunted me was shrunk now to a memory of a memory. It wasn't just that I had covered it over. I had erased it. It was as though it had never existed.

I next made up my mind to grow kind. I was not a kind person, but I believed I could learn.

First I burned my old diaries in the fireplace and also the letters I had written home during my year away at college, letters full of gush and artifice. My mother caught me at this, and expressed concern. You may regret it, she said, you may want to look back and see what you were like at ten or twelve or sixteen years of age.

But I knew I wouldn't need the diaries or letters to prod my remembrance. I had grown up a mean, bossy little kid. I was selfish.

I liked to hurt people's feelings. I addressed my sister, Joan, as Miss Sneakypants and my brother, Warren, as Pimplenose. I ordered Cousin Beverly around as though she were an indentured servant and complained about the way her little girl cried in her early months; it was only colic, but I managed to suggest she was being mishandled or maybe there was brain damage or something.

I was forever clipping out dieting articles for my mother and reading them aloud to her in a cool disingenuous voice, and invariably I referred to the newspaper she wrote for as "that parochial rag." I remember the way I was. People like to think of memory as a lowlying estuary, but my memories of myself are more like a ruffed-up lake, battering against the person I became. A nice person. A thoughtful person.

I paid attention; I listened hard to the motor clicking on and off in my head; it was like doing beads, it was very intricate work. I entered the summer of 1956 a girl and came out a woman. Women, I learned, needed to be b.l.o.o.d.y, but they didn't need to be mean.

The reverberations in my family were surprisingly minor, like the offhand ringing of distant chimes-as though all these years I'd been given the benefit of the doubt: Alice's gained in maturity, they said. Alice's a real young lady now. Alice's come into her own.

Alice's calmed down. Alice's got rid of that chip on her shoulder, come down off her high horse, lost her rough edges. But then Alice always was a lump of b.u.t.ter underneath, wasn't she? Why, she's turned out to be a regular darling. Oh, you can count on Alice, you always could.

Well!

Here is a diagram of our family structure before and after my father's death.

Before he departed (brain tumor, malignant) we were such a sweet little family: two loving parents and three healthy children.

Our father was Director of the Agricultural Inst.i.tute where his work on hybrid grains was universally recognized (honorary degrees from Guelph and the University of Iowa), and after his retirement, never one to be idle, he wrote a weekly horticultural column for the Ottawa Recorder. My mother was a full twenty-three years younger than my father; that age-gap became her hobby and profession, being a young wife to an older husband-it kept her girlish, made her a kind of tenant in the tower of girlhood.

There she remained, safe, looked after. She stayed home and looked after her children and sewed and cleaned the house-even though she could have afforded help-and did the garden. That garden of hers, it functioned like a kind of trope in her daily life, and in ours too. She made suppers-roasted meat, boiled vegetables, pies and puddings or molded Jello things for dessert. These meals were planned, they didn't just happen. Our family sat down at a table that was set. My mother was always concocting new centerpieces, she was part of that mid-century squadron of women who believed in centerpieces. We children had agreeable table manners. We kept our voices low. Always, after the dishes, Joanie and Warren and I got down to our homework without reminding.

We took piano lessons on Wednesday evening from a woman named Myrna Ra.s.smussen, the Royal Raspberry we called her behind her back-and the mildness of this epithet says a lot about who we were and what we were capable of. On Sat.u.r.days we went for family walks-no one else we knew went for family walks-and were taught by our parents, but un.o.btrusively, how to identify the various shrubs, trees, plants, and flowers that grew in our neighborhood or in the woods of the Experimental Farm.

After my father died-and even during the months following his diagnosis-things changed fast. Supper was late, or else early.

Sometimes it was served in the kitchen instead of the dining room, and we had things like corned beef hash out of a can or toasted cheese sandwiches. My mother never seemed to take her ap.r.o.n off, we had to remind her or she would have dashed out of the house like that. She got way behind on the vacuuming. Everything.

Even her beloved African violets dried up, even her ferns. Part of this household neglect can be explained by grief or disorientation, that would be only natural, but something else occurred to create all this change. A mere two months after my father's funeral, our mother took over the horticultural column at the Recorder, becoming Mrs. Green Thumb. She was, suddenly, a different person, a person who worked. Who worked "outside the home," as people said in those quaint days, though, in fact, she did her writing under our own roof, and mailed her column into the paper, walking down to the corner of Torrington Crescent on Wednesday afternoon to pop it into the mail box in time for the Sat.u.r.day paper. Whether the editor of the Recorder invited her to take on the column or whether she volunteered I have never known, but all of a sudden there she was, sitting at a desk in a corner of the living room, our father's old desk, laboring over her articles, scratching away with her ballpoint pen, looking up occasionally and rubbing her forehead like someone scouring her senses for an answer that would please her readers' sensibility but remain faithful to botanical truth. Sometimes she would rise, drift over to the window for a moment, then return to the desk, settling her widening hips comfortably in her chair, ready to begin again. It appeared she had a knack for this kind of writing. It surprised everyone. It was as though she had veered, accidentally, into her own life.

Then Cousin Beverly from Saskatchewan arrived on the train, six months pregnant, big as a barn, and moved into the storeroom on the third floor. The plan was that Beverly was going to put the baby up for adoption, but this never happened. The subject was not raised. Victoria was born, a beautiful full-term baby, and she just stayed on with the family. She slept in a basket in my room at first, but then Beverly turned the downstairs sunroom into a nursery, papering over the old ivy pattern with lambs and milkmaids.

All this happened fast. In 1954 we were a nice ordinary family, Mr. and Mrs. Barker Flett and their three tractable children.

Then-it seemed like a lightning flash had hit our house-there was just one parent (distracted, preoccupied) and an unwed mother and a baby with colic and three teenagers: devious Joan, sullen Warren, and mean-hearted Alice.

You'd have thought my mother would be wildly unsettled by all this, but you would be wrong. She let the chaos that hit our household in 1955 roll right over her like a big friendly engulfing wave.

She came bobbing to the surface, her round face turned upward to the sunlight, happy.

Not that we didn't grieve for my father.

He was a tall, hunched, good-looking man who, right into his seventies, kept his thick head of hair. This hair he combed straight back from his forehead in an oddly continental manner. His brow was smoothly polished, white, stony, and clean. He had a breadth of neck that took well to a collar and tie, but his long arms and legs and his rather lumbering rect.i.tude reminded you that he had once been a country boy, raised in rural Manitoba, born in another century. Despite his gentleness, his patience, I had found him an embarra.s.sing father, too polite, too given to clearing his throat, too uncomfortable in his body, too old, much too old, but when he died I missed him.

My mother missed him too. In the days immediately following his funeral she went slack and heavy as though she were gasping for air through an impermeable membrane, her history, her marriage, everything gone down the chute. But then, presto, she became Mrs. Green Thumb. Her old self slipped off her like an oversized jacket.

For years now she has sat down at her desk every morning, still wearing her robe and slippers, writing out her column in longhand, a first draft, then a second, then a third, and then checking over Cousin Beverly's typed copy. Her rusty-gray frizz fluffs out over her forehead and ears-sometimes she brushes her hair before settling down to work and sometimes she doesn't. She gets lost in what she's doing and doesn't even hear the phone ringing; none of us ever guessed she had this power of absorption. She'll do, say, the propagation of lobelia one week and how to air-layer your rubber plant the next. When she isn't actually writing, she's answering mail from her readers-she averages at least twenty letters a week-or else she's thinking up ideas or filing away gardening information in my father's old filing cabinet. She's done this for nine whole years, but now, suddenly, it's over.

She's lost her job. A man named Pinky Fulham has taken over the column, and my mother, fifty-nine years old, has been given the heave-ho. She got her walking papers. She's been fired-and thrown into a despair deeper and sharper and wider than she ever suffered over her husband's death or her children's misbehavior.

A year ago she was sitting at that desk with her hair buzzing around her head like something alive and her pen scrambling across the paper. She was Mrs. Green Thumb, that well-known local personage, and now she's back to being Mrs. Flett again. She knew, for a brief while, what it was like to do a job of work. The shaping satisfaction. The feel of a typescript folded into an envelope. And then the paycheck arriving in the mail. Now she's like some great department store of sadness with its displays of rejection and inattention and wide silent reflecting windows, out of business, the padlock on the door.

I live thousands of miles away in England-Hampstead to be precise-but I've left my darling husband Ben for three whole weeks, also our two little sprogs, Benje and Judy, and I've come all the way home to see how matters stand. I find my mother seated in the garden, gripping the arms of a wicker chair, her chin oddly dented and old, her mouth round, helpless, saying, "I can't get used to this. I can't get over this."

Fraidy Hoyt's Theory

You don't expect Alice Flett Downing to believe in her mother's real existence, do you?

It's true she loves her mother, and true she's a good daughter-didn't she come all this way across the drink to try to jolly her out of her current state of the blues? The trouble is, Alice doesn't know where to begin. In a curious, ironic way, she hasn't known her mother long enough, hasn't known her the way I've known her, since childhood in Bloomington, Indiana, when we were two eleven-year-old brats in pigtails-well, in point of fact, I was the one in pigtails and Daze had the naturally curly hair. Which she hated-Lord!-an ambulatory fuzzball, she called herself. Later, when the poodle-cut came into fashion, she was grateful, but by that time, the late forties, she was living up in Canada, married to a man named Barker Flett and the mother of three children, the oldest being Alice.

Alice can't help herself, she's got this fixation on work. She's not like young girls were in our era, wavering between convention and fits of rebellion; she has serious interests of her own about which she is sometimes a little sententious. She's twenty-eight years old, you'd think she'd be out there with the flower children, wouldn't you, mooning about peace and love, and lolling around in public places, strumming a guitar and smoking gra.s.s and letting her life go sweetly to h.e.l.l. But no, she's got herself properly married to a teeny-weenie professor of economics, she lives in a little fairytale English house, she's produced two perfect babes, and she's published a moderately successful book called Chekhov's Imagination and is working on another that explores Chekhov's feminine side-this new project she's outlined for me in a letter tucked into her Christmas card. That's another thing about Alice: she sends Christmas cards; she has a compulsion to hold her farflung family and friends in a tight embrace, and her charity extends to her mother's old girlhood pals, chiefly myself and Labina Greene Dukes, who has recently moved down to Florida and who once described Alice to me as Her Holy Miss Righteousness.

Alice addresses me in her little notes and cards as "Aunt" Fraidy, and in that aunt-ish salutation I read proprietorial claims.

Also benevolent respect. Also love. The last time I saw her was at little Judy's christening in Ottawa-that's one more odd b.u.mp on Alice's psyche: she's an agnostic who nevertheless christens her children; she actually brings them across the Atlantic Ocean to be anointed by pure and holy Canadian water in the presence of pure and impure family and friends. Ceremony, she says, is society's cement; ceremony paints large our sketchiest impulses; ceremony forms the seal between the cerebrum and cerebellum. Alice has a theory about every bush and b.u.t.ton and human gesture, sometimes several theories.

After Judy's ecclesiastical sprinkling in that wonderful Ottawa garden, Alice and I stood with our gla.s.ses of bubbly and had a good jabber about The Feminine Mystique. I could tell she was surprised I'd read it. Like many young people she believes we elderly types have long since shut down our valves and given way to flat acquiescence about the future. Her eyes widened when I began taking issue with Betty Friedan's exaltation of work as salvation. "We are our work!" Alice cried. "Work and self cannot be separated."

Oh, dear. I opened my mouth to protest.

"Look at my mother," Alice interrupted, lowering her voice, but not quite low enough, and gesturing toward the blooming lilac where Daze was standing in a circle of friends, her body widened out now to a powerful size eighteen, little Judy nestled in the crook of her arm. "Before my mother became a newspaper columnist she had no sense of self-worth whatsoever. Whatsoever! Really, when you think about it, she functioned like a kind of slave in our society. She was unpaid. Undervalued. She was n.o.body. Now look at her. She's become"-here Alice groped for words, waving her hand toward the nodding lilacs-"she's become, you know, like a real person."

Work is work, I wanted to tell Alice, and don't I know it. Work's not just sitting in the corners of shadowy libraries and producing beautiful little monographs every couple of years. It's the alarm clock going off on winter mornings when it's dark and cold and you've forgotten to iron the green blouse that goes with the gray suit and the car's not working right and you can't afford to get it fixed this month because it's been four years since the Official Board of the Monroe County Art Gallery thought of increasing your salary or even dropping you a word of praise, and on top of that there are whole mornings when no one comes into the gallery at all or if they do they stand around griping about the exhibitions and giggle and smirk at the abstracts, letting you know their kindergarten darlings could do just as well with a pot of fingerpaint, and furthermore (hem, hem) it's taxpayers who support this kind of thing when what people really like, only they're too d.a.m.ned intimidated to say so, is a nice landscape, fields and sky and a horizon line that looks like a horizon line for G.o.d's sake. And what else?

Well, there are meetings with the board and the books to balance and the publicity that somehow always misfires and the fund drives that peter out and the misplaced grant applications and the catalogues coming back late from the printers, and the crazies who phone at all hours and beg you to take just one little peek at their portfolio, you owe it, you owe them, who the h.e.l.l are you anyway but a glorified clerk.

And then-lately anyway, since Mel left-it's home to a gla.s.s of bourbon and a scrambled egg, or maybe stopping by at the library to see what new they've got in, and going to bed early because you've got a splitting headache and sometimes just before closing your eyes you think about your old pal Daze up there in Canada with her kids and her days to herself, how she bustles along at her own speed, spreading the gospel of Good Housekeeping far and wide and getting her rewards through the accomplishments of others who will certainly crown her with laurels and tell her how grateful they are, in retrospect, that she was a real mother, that she wasn't out working her tail off for the holy dollar like her old pal, Fraidy Hoyt of Bloomington, Indiana.

Well, once in a while a family has to surrender itself to an outsider's account. A family can get buried in its own fairy dust, and this leads straight, in my opinion, to the unpacking of lies and fictions from its piddly shared sc.r.a.ps of inbred history. With the Fletts, for instance, the work ethic has always been writ large.

Barker and his hybrid grains. Alice and her Russians. Warren and his music. Joanie and her-whatever the h.e.l.l it is she does down there in New Mexico-and so it's only natural that they should attribute Daze's breakdown to the loss of her newspaper column. I thought as much myself for the first month or so, but gradually I've come to believe that the forfeiting of her "job" was only a trigger that released a terrible yearning she's been suppressing all her life.

s.e.x is what I'm referring to, what else?

Not that Daze and I ever discuss s.e.x. Well, not for a long time anyway, not since we were young girls trying to puzzle out the mysteries of the copulative act: how long did it last? How much did it hurt? Were you supposed to talk at the same time you were doing it, whisper little endearments and so on? What did a "climax" feel like and how could you be sure you had it or not, and why did it matter anyway, and was it cheating to pretend you did even if you didn't? That kind of thing.

Then suddenly it became lese-majeste to discuss our s.e.xual lives.

I think we both wanted to; each of us, when we got together, made a few clumsy gestures in that direction, but we never managed to find any common footing. There's too much s.p.a.ce between us, too much disproportion, you might say. Our awful imbalance.

Daze with her plodding Barker, that epicene presence-and perhaps, or perhaps not, a brief flutter with an editor at her paper, Jay Dudley his name was, who ended up a regular s.h.i.t, handing her job over to someone else like a king anointing a new lord-well, that sums up Daze's erotic experience, about one and a half bean sprouts by my count. And on the other side of the fence, here I sit with my fifty-three lovers, possibly fifty-four. I've been on the side of noise, nerve, movement, and thanking my lucky stars too, and raising a toast to my army of fifty-four-that's how I see them, a small, smartly marching army with the sun shining on their beautiful heads and shoulders.

I've kept track. This is possibly a perverse admission, that I possess a little pocket diary in which I've made note of dates, initials, geographical reference points and coded particulars, going back to 1927, such as duration, position, repet.i.tion, degree of response, and the like.

My "phantom" fifty-fourth lover was encountered just weeks ago on a train to Ottawa, no names exchanged, only a pair of ragged weepy histories. We had both drunk too much bourbon in the club car, the hour was late, and we may or may not have made love before we pa.s.sed out, the two of us drearily naked on the coa.r.s.e blanket of my lower berth. I have an impression of a rosy, pleated male belly pushing against me. I have a recollection, like a black-and-white movie, that we were noisy, that we made a spectacle of ourselves. He was gone-thank G.o.d-when I opened my eyes in the morning. And my body, my sixty-year-old body (Christ!), was unwilling to report what had happened, other than a soreness "down there" that could have been anything, a dryness that puzzled. A question mark went into the diary instead of the usual data. In that question mark I read the possible end of my erotic life. Something to do with shame, though I won't yet admit it.

What do women want, Freud asked. The old fool, the charlatan.

He knew what women wanted. They wanted nothing. Nothing was good enough. Everyone knew that. Everyone but me.

The reason I was on my way to Ottawa was to offer consolation to an old friend in distress. She had written to me telling me not to come, that she had her niece Beverly to look after her, that she was not fit company at the moment, but of course I went anyway. I thought, wrongly, that I could carry her back to sunnier times, dredging up old stories, foolish or sentimental or touching on some spring of affection between us. And I believed we might, after a few days, open up this forbidden topic of s.e.x, letting our thoughts out loose and fresh.