Toward The End Of Time Part 8

INDEPENDENCE DAY: my American flag flapped noisily on the pole in an east wind off the sea. For a time it was tangled in its cord and twittered like an insect with one wing stuck on flypaper, until I loped across the lawn and lowered the striped and starred cloth and sent it back up the halyard free. Out there on the blue width of water, sailboats tilted in the morning breeze and sleek white stinkpots gathered on the evening calm to see the fireworks sent up from the public end of the beach. You could hear the sounds and music of beery parties already in progress. I wondered how my boys were doing collecting tolls along the path. Downtown, around the convenience store, white boys in droopy loose shirts and shorts and girls in tighter foxy duds watched the holiday seep away like spilled soda on hot concrete. The insouciance and innocence of our independence twinkled like a kind of sweat from their bare and freckled or honey-colored or mahogany limbs. Sometimes I think the thing I'll mind about death is not so much not being alive but nc longer being an American. Even for the losers there is a liberation in the escape from divine order.

In Gloria's rose bed the blooms, so red and white and pink against the sea, are tired, their blown petals littering the smoothly mounded mulch of buckwheat hulls; but her back garden is profuse with odd-shaped flowers I cannot name. Yarrow? Artemisia? Snapdragons and nasturtiums in any case, nasturtiums with a curious flower-shaped blazon on their petals, the dirty tint of a tattoo. The clematis on the sunny side of the garden shed is amazing, clambering on its quick red stems up the lattice I had made and drenching the clapboards in a density of lush purple flowers banded like church vestments. Gloria cuts it down to a virtual stump every spring, and her faith is always rewarded.

Within the garage, the barn swallows, so slow to start their nest, have in a few weeks' time hatched their eggs. It happened today: the air was suddenly full of careening baby birds. They fly swervingly up and down, on the edge of control, like children first on a bicycle. There are three, and they rest from their adventure perched on the wooden gutter of the house as tightly together as if still packed in the nest, frightened by all the transparent s.p.a.ce around them. Gloria and I had observed them, as we pa.s.sed in and out of the garage, from the day they were hatchlings, blind mouths held preposterously wide open above the nest's edge, their tiny bald bodies wholly devoted to the strain and distension of sudden post-ovum appet.i.te. Tirelessly the dapper mother and father dipped back and forth across the lawn and shrub planting, harvesting invisible insects. In a mere two weeks the helpless and hideous babies have been fed into feathers and wingpower enough to be launched, blue-backed and roseate-bellied, as darting, dipping predators in their own right.

The baby birds had swiftly become complete, down to their flickering white-flecked swallowtails. For a time they will stay on our property, learning from their parents (how?) the fine points of survival, but the mud cup of a nest, given fibrous strength with gra.s.s wands and pine needles, has been emptied. How do birds teach birds, elephants elephants, without language? Even imitation implies a simian brain. In less than a month our babies will fly to Peru, and the dry brown leaves of the crabapple will acc.u.mulate in the open garage, and the thin breath of autumn dull the verdure. The asphalt of the driveway takes on a different texture then, and sc.r.a.pes differently under our shoes. Our shadows are drier, more dilute, and an expectancy of closure flavors the shortening days when the swallows are no longer here. But for now they are still with us, holding a family seminar in mosquito-catching, and the Fourth of July fireworks burst into sight a second ahead of their m.u.f.fled bangs, as viewed from our front yard, on the sea side, in the moon-bleached sky above the trees' silent, merged, beseeching silhouettes.

Gloria went in almost immediately, saying the mosquitoes were biting her to death. I stood on the flagpole platform as our bedroom lights came on and the air conditioner started to hum. The town fathers, whoever they were, had managed to sc.r.a.pe from their depleted budget a handsome display. There were types quite new to me-hovering white flares that shot out from a two-leaved orange b.u.t.terfly shape and encircled it for some lingering seconds; a giant silent chrysanthemum whose rays were blue at the tips and gold at the source; drifting constellations of cold white twinklers; and several fireworks that unfolded from within their packet of chemical reactions a sharply violent color I had never seen in the sky before, thus spilled on blackness in transient splinters. Combusted salts of strontium, barium, sodium, magnesium, and mercurous chloride etched their signatures on the dark firmament, an infernal rainbow owing nothing to the sun. Gloria's golden window clicked off just as the finale of overlapping bursts died away to a chorus of grateful toots from the a.s.sembled stinkpots. I felt chilled and bitten in the dark. Where was I to go? She hated it when I crept into bed and disturbed in her the fragile succession of steps whereby consciousness dissolves. As I turned away to tread the damp lawn, something rustled in the sunken area of wild roses beside the platform-where we had once thought to dig a swimming pool, a dream that lives only in our still calling it the "swimming-pool area"-and I sensed that another presence had been watching with me. The deer.

And a week or less after this, by daytime, the giant dim torus in the sky, the ghostly watermark on the atmosphere's depthless Crane's blue, grew larger, moving toward Earth. Vast and then vaster, it stealthily expanded until its lambent rim touched the sea's horizon and disappeared behind the treetops; it was encircling the visible platter of Earth; we were within it; our round planet was like a stake to its quoit. The torus's blue hole, for these many months no wider than ten suns across, had swelled to become the empyrean itself; the upper edge of its "matter"-for matter is just what it seemed not to be-sank, distending, and lost itself, a line of faint pallor, behind the lateral stretch of distant, mountainous summer clouds. All the while a creamy, weightless sense of irreversible rea.s.surance was flooding me. It was near noon; I had stepped out onto the lawn in obedience to an impulse. The young swallows were still careening, a bit wildly, about, but the other birds were hushed, as during a solar eclipse, with its out-of-sync dusk. I remembered standing on a hillside in the Berkshires under a shouting clarity of stars and seeing a comet through binoculars handed me by my father's work-worn hand: a tailed ball of fuzz, not seeming to move at all.

I would not die, I realized; all would be well. All the fleeting impressions I had ever received were preserved somewhere and could be replayed. All shadows would be wiped away, when light was everywhere and not confined to loci- stars, hot points, pinp.r.i.c.ks in nothingness. But just the concept of light, born of combustion and atomic collision, was too harsh for the peace that was promised within the torus. All the shards of my spiritual being united-Perdita with Gloria; the old Hammond Falls house, poor in possessions but rich in meanings, with my present mansion, poor in meanings; my children with my stepchildren and they with my grandchildren and all the world's uncomforted waifs. Time was a provision that would be rescinded; its tragedy was born of misperception, an upper limit of conceptual ability such as keeps the bee b.u.mbling among the clover and the faithful dog trotting, loving but puzzled, at his master's heels. (I have lived with dogs, though have none now. In Hammond Falls we had a mongrel called Skeezix and then a female successor, Daisy, who was part c.o.c.ker spaniel; then Perdita and I kept a succession of golden retrievers as nursemaids for the children, and once bought, not cheaply, a bronze-colored Doberman who was run over by one of the last milk-delivery trucks operating in Ma.s.sachusetts. Her back broken, Cleo writhed in the middle of the street for twenty minutes before a young town cop arrived to put a bullet in her skull; she writhed and yelped and kept begging us with her amber eyes to forgive her her misfortune, to still love her as she had loved us.) That the joy of creation, flowing through the generations of birds and bacteria, human beings and arboreal t.i.tans as they rise and fall, is not an illusion but an eternal basis, and that a heavenly economy to whose workings we are blind will redeem every one of our living moments and carry to completion each inkling of beat.i.tude: such blissful certainty of universal reconciliation travelled like a great magnetic field across the depleted planet as it was pa.s.sed, as in a magician's trick, through the cosmic ring, which receded in the midnight skies above Australia and vanished, a faintly glowing ringlet, in the vicinity of the constellation Octans. By morning it had vanished from all but the most powerful telescopes.

Everyone had seen it; everyone had felt it; yet news coverage of the event was spotty and diffident. Different people, interviewed, gave different times and durations for their mystical sensations. Exact words were hard to formulate. Scientists and psychologists were quick to jump into print with theories of ma.s.s hallucination powerful enough to affect even photographic plates. A growing school of opinion holds that the torus had never existed at all-had not hung in our heavens for years-or had been no more a three-dimensional phenomenon than the ring arond the moon on a foggy night. Doubt and mockery have become fashionable, on television talk shows and among schoolchildren. T-shirts appeared on the young, displaying the torus encircling a question mark, or diagonally barred to form the symbol for negation. Even among lovers, it was embarra.s.sing to talk about the transcendent moment. Comparing notes elicited disturbing discrepancies. It is true, the memory of bliss fades, like that of pain. I write my description not ten days after the event in order to fix my own memory, but even so, doubt has crept in. What really did I feel? People are grotesquely suggestible, to facilitate s.e.xual congress and tribal solidarity. I feel depleted and irritable, immersed in the poisonous and voracious growth of midsummer. Lately I wake twice a night to urinate, and sometimes there is only a dribble, and an icicle poke of pain in a nether recess of myself, a dark and inaccessible underside I have always preferred to pretend is not there.

Gloria brings flowers indoors-nasturtiums in shades of orange and yellow overflow a fat stoneware bowl, and the velvet purple of clematis burns for a day or two on the mahogany table in the front hall, in a swirl-ribbed vase of a blue as pale as her eyes. A burst of baby's breath hovers in a water tumbler placed on the dining-room table, between the silver quail.

While she was off at aerobics, I went out into our woods to visit the boys from Lynn. Behind the barn I startled a deer; with a thrash that set my heart to thrashing he or she- a glimpse of russet flank, a flare of white tail swallowed by the foliage-bounded into the impenetrable area, thick with th.o.r.n.y greenbrier, this side of the Dunhams' paddock. As I proceeded a bit farther, along a faint path my steps are wearing down the hill, I felt the heat of the creature's great pelted body lingering in the air. Pieces of bright gray sky clambered overhead between the treetops.

Only Doreen was in the hut, reading a textbook edition, shortened and simplified for junior high students, of that twentieth-century master, John Grisham. She was a brainy girl, it occurred to me, who had put herself only for the time being on a low road. She was sizing life up, ready to experiment with it. Her stockinged feet were up on one wire chair while she sat in another, its metal grid softened by a dirty blanket folded into a pad. In the close heat of the cabin she had taken off her T-shirt and was bare-armed and bare-bellied in a white bra. My shadow, as I entered, dimmed the glimmer of the startling undergarment; her face lifted and also looked shady, smudged, a defensive sneer beclouding her lips. With an intentional gruffhess I asked her, "Where are your buddies?"

"Out, doing deals. Jose and Ray got themselves suits like you said to."

"Does it make a difference?"

"Seems to. They say the people treat them more like they treated Spin and Phil. They cough up."

"Good. Didn't I say?"

"They look pretty silly."

"To you."

Our silence was not as uncomfortable as I would have predicted. With a sigh I sat on a third chair and looked out the square window, to take my eyes from the freckled breadth of her bony upper chest, the glossy rounds of her shoulders like inverted china cups, the single navel-dented crease across her lean belly. The square held an abstraction, a silent still gnashing of sharp-edged leaves and broken rock-faces and stabbing branches and scrabbly shapes of light-soaked sky. The boys had reinforced the stick walls with inch-thick plywood nailed to the vertical members so as to provide a crackless, relatively smooth inner surface for their shelter. This added privacy had imposed a cost: though bugs and prying eyes were better repelled, so was fresh air; when the door to the screened addition was closed, as it was now, an unstirring damp heat was sealed in. I liked it. I have always preferred the closed to the overexposed, the stuffy bed to the stinging shower.

I wondered if the boys had known I was coming. They watched me closer than I could ever watch them.

"So everything," I said, "is working out. I keep looking out my window to see if Mrs. Lubbetts' architecturally inappropriate beach house is burnt down yet."

She took a breath, momentarily erasing the crease on her belly. "They said," she said, "you could touch me wherever you wanted, but no penetration."

I cleared my throat in the sticky air, anxious to avoid a misstep. "That's very generous of them," I allowed. "Is this instead of giving me my cut of the take? And what do you you want, Doreen? Not to be touched at all, I imagine." want, Doreen? Not to be touched at all, I imagine."

"Maybe I wouldn't mind too much," she said, removing her feet from the wire chair and setting the Grisham in their place, marking her place by resting the bigger, unread half on the seat with the rest hanging down. "This book is awful macho and preachy." She stood up, taller and more womanly already, her blue jeans insolently tilted on her jutting hip bones and so low-slung they bared the hem of powder-blue underpants.

I was frightened, and set my fingers on the white skin of her long waist as if testing a stovetop or iron for heat. She was cool to the touch, surprisingly, and clean-smelling. As my warming hands timidly investigated the ins and outs, the givingness of her waist, the immature firmness of her b.u.t.tocks, I had no intention of removing any of her clothes; but the skimpy elastic bra slipped off by itself with a shrug that was her idea. She helped it up over her neck and wiry ginger-colored hair ma.s.s. The shadows between her ribs flickered when she did this. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s smelled powdery like a baby's skull, and her nipples were spherical, like paler smokier versions of honeysuckle berries. In whispers we de bated if my tongue and mouth were included in the permission to touch. We decided they were. Her fingertips toyes with the whorls of my ears as she gazed down upon my poo old scalp, naked as a baby's beneath my transparently thinning white hair. It moved me, how much, in even so relatively undeveloped and flat-chested a sallow-skinned gir her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were there there, jutting, reaching, even; her sharp-chinned face loomed above mine like a mothering s.p.a.ceship as I slurped and nuzzled and groaned. She graciously offered to touch me, where I jutted, to relieve my groans, but I said no, the boys had made a bargain with me, and I had preached trust to them.

"A hand-job wouldn't be penetration," Doreen said.

"It would penetrate my soul," I said. "I would become a love-crazed pest." As a reward to myself for this renunciation I slid down her jeans along with her underpants, cupped her taut, porcelain-smooth b.u.t.tocks in my h.o.r.n.y old thick-fingered hands, and planted a tongue-kiss in her shallow navel. How white her belly was! Her pubic hair was just a ginger fuzz, thickest in the center, but even so she had shaved the sides in conformity with bathing-suit fashions. I stroked the pimples where whiskers would grow back. What is this human need to mutilate the most precious and tender parts of ourselves? Nostrils, earlobes, nipples. Circ.u.mcision. Art, I suppose. Taking the knife of criticism to G.o.d's carefully considered work.

Abandoning Doreen with her jeans not yet tugged up, I hurriedly climbed the slippery hill, away from this low part of the woods. I was panting and tumescent. I had become anxious to reinsert myself back into the slowly turning works of my orderly world. The patch of heat where the invisible deer had stood and started was still there, on its spot in the path, inflaming my face. Gloria must be home by now. She mustn't see me like this, hot and bothered. One icy-eyed question would lead to another, and there was no re-sealing the pit of truth once it was open. The curve of her car, her teal-blue Infiniti, gleamed in the driveway. The island of repet.i.tive safety I had carved from the world seemed abruptly precious. I spit the acid taste of honeysuckle from my tongue, and emerged from beside the barn with my husbandly smile already prepared.

Over at the club, I had come in to change back into street shoes after an irritating round in which Red and I were beaten by Ken and a new sidekick of his, a younger man named Glenn, Glenn Caniff, an airline freight supervisor. There was no comparison between the way Glenn hit the ball and we did-his best drives were sixty yards beyond ours and took off on a different trajectory, low to the ground and then rising along a parabolic curve induced by backspin. His shoulder turn was exaggerated and his knee action too loose, but when he brought the club flush into the ball there was no stopping it. His chipping and putting weren't bad either. Usually with my intermittently picture-book swing and Red's ham-handed forearm-power we don't lack for distance, but Glenn made us feel old and poky, and when we tried for that little extra the wheels began to come off, into the weeds. I topped two drives just up to the ladies' tee and Red couldn't stop his right hand from wrapping the ball around the left-field foul pole. The more frustrated we got the more smooth and affable Glenn loathsomely became and the more slowly and deliberately Ken played, giving u that sleepy silver-haired boyish pilot's grin. Still, I sank: long putt on the last hole, for a sandy and an extra welde on our final press, so my concluding mood was not alto gether disgruntled.

The other three, wearing soft spikes, had gone straight t the members' porch for the drinks and peanuts and payof and gleeful recapitulation of their best shots, but I was loy to real cleats (I love the menacing clatter they make on corcrete and asphalt), which are forbidden on the wooden porch. Also I needed to urinate and to be alone a few minutes. There is something photophobic in me that can stand only so many hours of the unrelieved sunshine of boon companionship and seeks the shade of ill-tempered solitude.

The locker room, newly recarpeted last winter, when in one of the renovations urged by the younger members its friendly old green metal lockers were replaced with expensive, less capacious ones of varnished beechwood, appeared at first empty. But then with a start I saw a naked man emerge from the tiled shower room. He seemed terrifically hairy, and, with his broad chest and bow legs, he crouched, like an animal thinking of pouncing. Seeing me, he also started; he had been no doubt lost in the reverie that follows a shower-the steaminess, the forceful needling water, the face blindly held up to the primeval thrash-as the large rough towel reacquainted him with his tingling surfaces. It startled me to think that the club was now admitting such brutish-looking members: but then I reflected that young men all, even I in my prime, have a brutish aspect, un-evolved since the age of tribal warfare and the naked group hunt for the sacred bear and hairy mammoth.

This menacing shadow in our renovated cave advanced toward me quizzically, blinking and dragging his towel in one hand. "Ben?" he asked in a light, civilized voice. "Aaron Chafetz."

Of course. My doctor. My new young doctor, unrecognizable in his s.h.a.ggy skin, and nearsighted without his gla.s.ses. My doctor of many years, Ike Fidelman, four years older than I, had had a stroke. It hadn't much bothered me, since he had always talked out of the side of his mouth, with slurred, impatient diction. But he had abruptly retired and moved to the so-called Oregon Wilderness-Chinese missiles had devastated the cities, the bridges, the Boeing plant-to live with his daughter, who had become a Buddhist priestess.

"Ike," I had complained into the telephone, "how can you leave me in the lurch like this?"

"It's no lurch. A great boy is taking over the practice. He'll be up on all this new stuff."

"I don't want all the new stuff."

Ike had been homeopathic in his approach; Gloria called him the only Jewish Christian Scientist in the medical profession.

"You will when you need it," he told me. "They do magic with superlasers now, Ben. Thirty years ago I'd have a flipper for a left arm and a bubble in my brain. Good luck. Easy on the coffee, the booze, the fried food, and the young girls."

Had he forgotten how I had given up, at Gloria's urging, alcohol and caffeine altogether? In her guilt at secretly wishing me dead, she took an overactive interest in my health, from vitamin pills laid out beside my morning orange juice to a constant nagging about what I put into my mouth.

"Dr. Chafetz," I said, absurdly formal but unable to address him in any other way. A doctor is a doctor. We thought of shaking hands but thought better of it. Our costumes were disturbingly reversed: usually I was the undressed one. I had never seen his body before; its thickness and hairiness did not go with his thin ascetic face, his somewhat receding hair, his gold wire-frame spectacles. Without the spectacles he had had to come close, to identify me. I ignored the b.e.s.t.i.a.lly bared body and concentrated on his face, pale and sensitive and shaven. He had a deferential, hushed manner never more so than when he was testing my t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es for hernia and probing my prostate gland with a greased forefinger The last time he had done this it had rather scaldingly hurt, which I wasn't sure was normal. I had hoped he had not taken my tears for those of erotic grat.i.tude. I can just barely make out, at the fuzzy far rim of my psychosomatic universe, how male h.o.m.os.e.xuals could get to depend emotionally on penetration of the narrow, fragile a.n.a.l pa.s.sageway, which makes the v.a.g.i.n.a look like a tough old catchall.

Another universe, thinner than a razor blade, sliced into the sinister locker room. Chafetz was a naked Jew, and I a uniformed good German recruited to guard an extermination camp, thus releasing a younger member of the master race to the Russian front, where the Slavs had shown themselves perversely reluctant to embrace the blessings of the Third Reich. The sky was low and smoky day after day. The sun was hiding its face. All color had ebbed from the world save the dull brown of dead underbrush and, nearer at hand, the occasional bright splash of blood. It was Poland in early 1944, winter. Iron ruled the bitter air-the iron of guns and of barbed-wire fences and of the rails upon which the steam engines dragged their crammed human cargo in iron boxcars. Thin snow on the hard earth was quickly flecked with particles of ash. The view from the watchtowers was of monotonous and swampy terrain that in the distance reluctantly lifted in low rows of blue hills that mirrored the low blue clouds, viscid and wavy, close above them. In between lay a bar of silver light, scored by slants of weak sun. Winter rooks circled above snow-dusted fields of stubble.

A sickness had settled in our bowels as the news from the Eastern front, however brazenly presented as strategic triumphs over helpless barbarians, ever more clearly spelled defeat. Allied airplanes, though downed in devastating numbers, kept bombing the homeland: droning flocks of them cruelly seeking to obliterate our wives and innocent children. The mongrel brutes of the Jew-polluted earth were pressing upon us with a sullen weight not all of the Fuhrer's magic could dispel. A complicity of doom was coming to exist between us and the verminous prisoners. They stank of illness, of vomit and the yellow s.h.i.t of dysentery, though we endeavored to keep them clean with frequent hosings in the open air, even on those mornings when the p.i.s.s in the latrines was frozen solid. To this one as he stood nearest to me in the shivering line I said, camaraderie rising to my lips like the acid of nausea: "You will die, sicherlich. Ohne Zweifel sicherlich. Ohne Zweifel, you are going to die. Verstehst du?" Verstehst du?"

What sick demon inside was making me talk such gibberish? There was no response from the young Jew. Perhaps he was not as young as he seemed at first glance. The young men generally died before the older, who were more gristly, less easily broken, their spirits longer welded to their bodies. This one stared past me, through me, with eyes like globules of black oil, the oil for which the Reich is starving. His white skin in the biting cold had a sallow waxen l.u.s.tre repugnantly different from the clean pink purity of Aryan skin. His eyes were infuriating in their shining opacity. Even men totally a our mercy were capable, I saw, of insolence.

I continued, "Schwein "Schwein, you must die, because you are evidence. Loathsome evidence. Abscheulicher Beweis" Abscheulicher Beweis"

Even in the freezing air his waxen skin gave off a warr human aroma. I wondered how many treacheries and ob scene acts in the bunkhouse had kept the fat on his bone There was something horribly animal about the way h hunched neck thrust forward from his white shoulders, with their hideous Jewish epaulets of black hair.

"With all such evidence destroyed" I told him chummi "the world will never believe what we did to you people." And I fought a nauseating impulse to throw my arm around his shoulders, in a camaraderie of hopelessness, and to fiddle with the hanging weight of his circ.u.mcised p.r.i.c.k, shaped like a t.u.r.d leaving a warm a.s.s but bluish-white, its skin thinner and finer than that of a woman's body anywhere. Instead I lifted my st.u.r.dy Mauser rifle and smashed the b.u.t.t into the side of his expressionless, b.e.s.t.i.a.l, liquid-eyed face. He staggered but somehow kept his feet. "Answer when I speak, Jewish swine!" I shouted. The other captives, and the other guards, and even the rooks drifting overhead, did not flinch, as if they were from a still photograph and the two of us from a scratchy, twitching movie. The movie was not black-and-white, for the red smear on the prisoner's temple grew brighter as I watched, and two rivulets trickled in parallel down across his gaunt cheekbone.

I was beginning to panic in the search for something friendly to say. A taste of iron had appeared in my mouth, though no time at all, time as we understand it, had pa.s.sed. I brought out, "How was your game?" Having taken a shower, he must have played a game-tennis, most likely.

"Good, Ben," he said in his thoughtful, preppy, deferential, and delicately hesitant way. "We got three sets in. And yours?"

"Lousy as usual. It's like I have an enfeebling disease and don't know it. I sank a putt on the last hole, though; that'll bring me back." My auditor resumed rubbing himself with the towel, discreetly keeping his genitals covered as he did so. He was about to turn away; I blurted, "Seeing you here reminds me, I must be due for a checkup."

Dr. Chafetz turned his back. Black fur covered his shoulder blades with symmetrical whorls like hurricane clouds and formed a dark downy triangle at the base of his spine, above his b.u.t.tocks with their more transparent gauze. "Sure thing," he said over his epauletted shoulder, with his accommodating, preppy ease. "Call my office for an appointment, Ben. We'll work you in."

The midsummer refulgence takes to itself the dust of days. The trees' green is a duller tint, as if in a Barbizon painting whose varnish has darkened. Purple loosestrife, acres of it, blooms in the broad marsh we see from the fourth fairway, as its dogleg curves around a pond choked with lilies. Gloria's garden holds a fluffy, morning-wet profusion of cosmos and daisies, veronica and salvia, black-eyed Susans on their wavy stems and tall thistles with their little blue sea-urchins. This year, for the first time that I can remember, she has brought to vegetable health a single dahlia of an indecently vivid pearly pink, the lush electric flesh-blush of a maiden's l.a.b.i.a.

In town, hydrangeas flourish by the porches, in color mostly that rinsed blue which suggests b.a.l.l.s of laundry. Vacant roadside s.p.a.ces play host to goldenrod and chicory. The goldenrod nods, bowing to its own allergen-rich weight, while the chicory aspires, its stems darting upward like lines connecting dots. On the walk down to the mailbox I admire the cl.u.s.ters of orange rowan berries on the two spindly trees that Jeremy and I spared last fall by the stone retaining wall, orange berries that, along with the tiny white berries, like beads of frost, on the cedars, suggest Christmas From my bathroom window as I shave I notice a rusty ting to the topmost leaves of the burning bush that has over grown the path the previous owners had laid through their rock garden. Here and there in the woods, a sugar maple flashes the merest pinch of yellow while the other trees-the oak, the beech, the sa.s.safras shaped like a Tiffany lampshade-hold on to their green monotone. On the little pears a few worm-warped bubbles of fruit are shaping up, and the blueberry bushes, I noticed the other day, are producing more cankers than berries, and their leaves have been chewed to lace by j.a.panese beetles.

In early August the dusks start shifting in, so there is an elegiac, dimmed, dry quality to the seven-thirty hour, which in July still abounds with blue sky, high clouds, and mental lemonade. The garage is silent-the swallows and their cheeping, dipping trio of hatchlings have departed for Peru, leaving the nest woven of mud still cupped against a rafter. The dew-whitened cobwebs of earthbound spiders are conspicuous on the morning lawn, as ominous as the streaks of cirrus where c.u.mulus yesterday ruled. Monstrous fungoid growths have overnight appeared in the gra.s.s, some resembling the toadstools in children's books but others shaped, like cancers, by nothing but the random outward push of greedily growing cells. At a kick, the brown ma.s.s, tougher than it looks, scatters into meaty shreds.

Several days after my appointment, Dr. Chafetz called to say that the PSA test on my blood had come back with a reading of 11. He paused.

"Is that bad?" I asked.

"Not, not extremely extremely bad," he said, with his deferential hesitancy, a preppy near-stutter. "But it bad," he said, with his deferential hesitancy, a preppy near-stutter. "But it is is high." high."

"What's considered normal?" I felt I was dragging information out of him. He was already deep in a medical crisis that hadn't yet pulled me in, and down. My mind was darting about within the meagre facts, looking for a way out.

"Anything under four", he said. "Even five asks for a second look."

I held stubbornly silent, annoyed at his embarra.s.sment on my behalf. Whose PSA count was this, mine or his?

He offered, "Your prostate didn't feel unusually enlarged in my manual investigation. Or seem to have any rough spots."

Seem to have? What was he doing up there-gathering vague impressions? "Well, O.K. What's the next step?" I asked, so briskly his voice came out as not just deferential but boyishly scared. I was the Kapo, he the naked, shivering, doomed prisoner. to have? What was he doing up there-gathering vague impressions? "Well, O.K. What's the next step?" I asked, so briskly his voice came out as not just deferential but boyishly scared. I was the Kapo, he the naked, shivering, doomed prisoner.

"A biopsy. In Boston. We have ties with an excellent man at MGH, a urologist. We'll set you up with an appointment."

Where did this "we" he was suddenly hiding behind come from? "What's his name?"

"Carver."

"It would be." I laughed, encouragingly. I had to bring the boy through this.

"Dr. Andrew," he, interrupted, went on.

"Handy Andy," said I, irrepressible, unkillable, immortal Hanging up, I wandered through the rooms of the house It was as if each had been given a scrubbing; a film of tin drearily familiar had been removed. The house appeared splendid, ample, priceless. It came to me as I pa.s.sed through the rooms that I was and always had been a slightly different person in each one. In the dining room, with its torn an stained antique wallpaper of fantastical vistas through the ages-temples, grottoes, castles, cathedrals; Rome, Jerusalem, Athens, Nineveh; Alps and the Alhambra, snow peaks and spiky cypresses-and its standing platoon of Gloria's shining mahogany antiques, I was courteous, host with lurking eighteenth-century graces and a grave gray-haired timbre. In the kitchen, where I microwaved a cup of water hot enough to soften up a teabag and extracted a low-sodium pretzel from the breadbox, I was Everyman, a stomach on legs, a trousered relic of the paleotechnological era when refrigerators and electric stoves still had weight and thick skins. In the dark little library I became a crabbed squire, a cranky country hobbyist, a nineteenth-century-minded custodian of uniform sets of Balzac and d.i.c.kens, O. Henry and Winston Churchill (the statesman, not the American novelist). In the living room, which I moved through on my way to the veranda, I was momentarily a breezy, translucent person, a debonair proprietor of mirrored and velvet-hung s.p.a.ces carpeted by a single great rose-and-blue Tabriz; I became a throwback to a romantic time of gin parties and yachting, a light-hearted b.u.t.terfly emerged from the narrow and dour chrysalis of that asphalt-shingled farmhouse lonely in its tilted field of drab winter stubble, on the edge of a dying industrial town. From Hammond Falls to Haskells Crossing: not much of a pilgrimage, really, considering that I had had nearly sixty-seven years to nudge my way along.

The out-of-doors, too, as I settled on the wicker sofa (which creaked under my new weight of dread), loomed with a defining distinctness, a dazzling room of another sort, in which I was an insignificant insect rapturously enrolled, for these brief bright instants of my life, in a churning, shining, chirping, birthing, singing, dying cosmic excess. From the quasars to the rainbow shimmer on my dragonfly wings, everything was an extravagance engraved upon the obsidian surface of an infrangible, eternal darkness.

My pulse fluttered. I felt girlish with my secret. I told Doreen before I told Gloria. Doreen couldn't understand that it was a big deal yet; she had no idea where the prostate gland was and her whole face wrinkled with disgust when I told her. Gloria statuesquely enlarged at the news into the tragic grandeur of eventual widowhood. Long cast in the role of wife, she had endured years of dull lines, but now at last the part was proving worthy of her gifts. She foresaw her new, elevated status and wished to do nothing henceforth less than impeccably wifely and loving: I could see the determination written on her otherwise smooth, broad forehead. She would see me through to the next world and then take as her reward a singular dignity, no longer regent on behalf of a senescent male but queen absolute. She would pour forth the melody from the center of the stage.

The mornings have a nip to them now when I walk down for the Globe Globe. Certain tall yellow-headed weeds-hawkweed, I think-have taken root in the cracks of the broken concrete drying-yard and I bend down to pull a few on my way, and throw them onto the burning pile as I pa.s.s. Since childhood I have loved this month-the flat dry taste of it, the brown-lawn look of it, bouncing the heat back up against your bare legs, and the lack of any importunate holiday marring the blank days on this side of Labor Day and the return to school On Sat.u.r.day Gloria directed Jeremy and me to dig up th Siberian iris that has flourished on the stony slope behin the two scrawny pear trees to the right of the driveway. We attacked the clump first with shovels, which met too mar stones, and then with the mattock, which I swung with powerful effect. Jeremy suddenly exclaimed and darted hand down to seize a garden snake liquidly wriggling away through the gra.s.s. The little snake's undulant motion at the sheen of its polychrome scales were so beautiful it shocked us both to see that its tail end was mangled and raw, oozing muddy reptile blood. A shovel or the mattock in my hands had caught it, a blow from heedless Heaven, as it coiled in concealed innocence. Jeremy put the snake gently back into the gra.s.s and it slithered off with unimpaired fluency, but I thought that a snake was not a ribbon that could be snipped anywhere: it had an anatomy, intestines and an a.n.u.s, and no more than I could it live long with its nether portion crushed. I hate it when our human attempts to inflict order upon the land bring death and pain and mutilation to these innocents, whose ancestors enjoyed the earth for tens of millions of years before the naked ape appeared with his technology and enraging awareness of his own sin. I blamed Gloria, for having us remove this harmless, thriving clump of iris because it offended her frosty, simplifying eyes. Who are we to say what is a weed or a pest? Now the pretty snake, stricken in its perfection, must lie in some crevice feeling its slender body dam and slowly fail; a glaze of nothingness will close upon the little jewel of its unblaming brain.

Working alongside Jeremy made me try to remember working beside my own father. He could do things, up to a point: hammer and nail, handle elementary wiring and plumbing. He worked for a time for a roofing contractor, and though he said the heights didn't bother him he would come home complaining of how roofers cheated people, even the most trusting poor widow. He had a vegetable garden out back that he would stand in at the end of the day, and a workshed on one side of the garage full of aligned jars of screws and nails getting rusty. For a time he had a job on the floor of the GE factory in Pittsfield, but the monotony of a.s.sembly, he confessed one night at supper, made him physically sick. He went from job to job, with his poor skills, his indifferent att.i.tude, his lack of a trade. We did complete a few projects together-a doghouse for Skeezix, a soapbox racer, with the number 9 in silver outlined in black-but generally he was too tired. He just wanted to sit in his brown armchair with the fake leather worn off the arms and watch television and have dinner brought to him. I vowed I would never get that tired in life.

Last night I was in the bathroom when the commuter train thundered, louder it seemed than usual, along the tracks on the far edge of the woods. In a few months, when the leaves are down, I can see the golden windows flickeringly flowing by. I clenched with love of the m.u.f.fled racket, an ecstatic sensation dating from my earliest intimations of traffic, of large things hurtling past on the road into the valley. I love thunder, too-the cascading and smashing first in the distance, like a strawberry box yielding to pressure, and then wildly, dangerously overhead, thumping the roof so the window sashes tremble in their sills and the thin clear panes shiver against their putty, and then the semi-satisfied, still irritable receding mutter, as the sated gutters gurgle. Things pa.s.sing safely by: Things pa.s.sing safely by: this intensely pleased me. Now perhaps I am the thing that is pa.s.sing, my body a skin I am shedding, with resistance at some points of attachment. this intensely pleased me. Now perhaps I am the thing that is pa.s.sing, my body a skin I am shedding, with resistance at some points of attachment.

The biopsy was neither painless nor painful. Giving myself the Fleet enema the night before and then again in the morning, on the cold bathroom floor while studying the underside of the sink and waiting for my bowels to feel revulsion, numbed my spirit to the humiliation of the ultrasound rectal probe and then the actual harvest of the tiny plugs of tissue-preceded, each one, by Dr. Carver's murmured formula, "A little pinch." A little pinch, a little pinch, and I was back in my street clothes striding, a bit tenderly, with tingling empty bowels, up Cambridge Street to State, where the old gang at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise seemed friendlier than usual-perhaps my expectations of friendliness had been lowered. I felt myself as a perambulating bushel of defective innards, and they treated me with civility as an intelligence, a faded eminence.

The urologist had been a young man with a head of receding blond fuzz and a complexion that had taken a pink humidity from the underparts that were his specialty. He had a big-shouldered, stern Irish nurse who stayed with us and, while the snipping was going on beneath the discreet blue sheet, unexpectedly held my hand. It was one of the many impersonal mercies that descend upon us, I saw, when we weaken. Our host the world is extra polite, even effusive, when with relief it sees that we are at last about to leave.

But I had not weakened. I was no snake with a mangled tail. The tingling singed sensation at the upper tip of my r.e.c.t.u.m merely goaded me to brisker efficiency, more aggressive know-how. I was there to do some shifting in my and Mrs. Fessenden's portfolios, plus some few others still in my care, away from cyclicals, which were in for a troubled time now that the Asian low-wage platforms were giving signs of revival amid the vast destruction, and into technicals-live-gene transplantation and atomic-scale miniaturization, possibilities that at last were emerging from the theoretical stage. The big windows looked down upon a Boston of slightly curved streets traced between blocks of brick-red rubble and commercial buildings abandoned- some so precipitously the windows had not been boarded up-after the dramatic population shrinkage. These empty blocks seemed from on high a great bowl of opportunity. We survivors were heirs to room for expansion, to a future of unpredictable possibilities loosed by die relaxation of order. Evolutionary change proceeds through small isolated populations; widespread species tend to stagnate in their own success. We had been horseshoe crabs and crocodiles; now we were nimble niche mammals, ruthlessly thinned, rapidly developing hooves, lemur-large eyes, and specialized gizzards. I would not see it all happen but it was in the air, a kind of planetary expectancy vibrant above the rubble.

Gary Gray was the one who dealt with me. He seemed less wispy-indeed, he had developed a little pot belly, rather preeningly displayed in the logoed T-shirt which has become standard business wear for his generation. I still feel naked without a suit, though my suits in retirement are going stiff and shabby on their cedarwood hangers. "Where's Ned, on vacation?" I asked.

"You could say that," he said, and his sidelong glance did not encourage me to ask more. My heart leaped up gleefully, to think that Ned had come a cropper. One's own rise offers a precarious happiness, shadowed as it is by the threat of reversal and others' greater triumphs; but the downfall of another provides permanent satisfaction.

"I could say that, but it wouldn't be the case?"

"Extended vacation would be the optimistic formulation." Gary grayly smiled. "He got in the way of the number crunchers. He had too verbal a way of expressing himself."

"And Pat? She was his a.s.sistant."

"I know who Pat Pat was," he said, in an overemphatic, peevish manner that may have been a parodie declaration of his own s.e.xual preferences. "She's made a sideways jump, to Sturbridge, Morrissey, and Blaine. They promised her some accounts, and a cubicle of her own, if she'd take night courses in financial management." was," he said, in an overemphatic, peevish manner that may have been a parodie declaration of his own s.e.xual preferences. "She's made a sideways jump, to Sturbridge, Morrissey, and Blaine. They promised her some accounts, and a cubicle of her own, if she'd take night courses in financial management."

"She seemed very promising," I said. "A people person" I have never understood h.o.m.os.e.xuals: they make their choice, or have it biologically made for them, and then become very caustic and indignant about the party they have chosen not to attend-the party of breeders, of fertile male-female friction.

"She was a tramp," tramp," Gary told me. "You can use this office. But all the transaction codes have been changed; there's a hard-copy printout in one of the drawers. The crunchers don't like their numbers used by outsiders, even cherished former insiders like yourself. She really made your heart go pitty-pat, didn't she, Ben boy?" Gary told me. "You can use this office. But all the transaction codes have been changed; there's a hard-copy printout in one of the drawers. The crunchers don't like their numbers used by outsiders, even cherished former insiders like yourself. She really made your heart go pitty-pat, didn't she, Ben boy?"

He took his leer and his bellied-out logo (EXCREMENT OCCURS, it read) away. As I fiddled and fumbled my transactions into the data bank, I felt suspended in s.p.a.ce, with my stinging tail, and a touch agoraphobic. I wanted to scuttle out of this cubicled brightness into a friendly dark crevice. More and more, off my own chronically paced property, I feel frightened and disoriented. Boston for forty years was my second home, but now it seemed hostile and featureless, a void beneath my feet.

This was true even of a golf game in Brookline which Red arranged with a member of the Country Club whom he knows. When Red picked me up in his Dodge Caravan, and began to talk on his cellular phone with Durban, South Africa, and then Perth, Australia-what fish there are on the planet are in the Southern Hemisphere, like sparkling snowflakes settling in a gla.s.s globe-I felt vaguely kidnapped. Fear raced at the back of my mind like the trickle of cold water that murmurs throughout the whole house when the rubber stopper in a water closet is imperfectly seated. Ken Dixon sat in the back seat, silent, whether from a wish not to interfere with Red's loud, rambling discussion about evanescent schools of "product," or because he, too, on my transmission frequency, heard the murmur of fear, of a fatal leak in things that was draining the world of substance. The course-its limar outcroppings of black pudding-stone, its par-fives wandering past cliffs and up sand-bunkered slopes like metaphors of life's dreamy, anfractuous journey- seemed hollowed out, a shared illusion composed of electrons and protons spinning in a s.p.a.ce that was ninety-nine percent vacuum.

Our host was named Les, for Lester Trout, one of Red's financial catches when he was trawling the Boston financial community for investors, before the war, in an enlarged freezing-and-packing plant. Les was a happy rich man, in shape and fine fettle. Golf had become his life; he attacked the course once a day in order to bring his handicap down from an eight to a seven, and next year a six. He uncoiled into the ball with a wonderful compact force; and after an especially successful shot would flash a predatory smile, inviting you to share his delight in his game.

On the par-three twelfth, I suffered a moment of delusion: I expected to see his nicely drawing nine-iron shot plunge through the elevated green as if through a drum of green paper or the sc.u.mmy skin of a pond. But no, there was terra firma there, our ancient accretion of sedimented rock. The ball hopped, and stopped. I kept picturing how an orange forgotten at the back of the produce drawer in the refrigerator shrinks to a grayish-green orb that emits puffs of smoke like a pod of pollen.

My sense of unreality, as I moved through the veils of maya maya, helped me play a little better than usual; I felt indifferent to everything but returning myself to the matrix of my home surroundings-the curving driveway, the white house, the leafy woods, the kids in the woods, the deer, the wife, the flowers-and so swung easily, winning praise I could hardly hear through the murmur of terror leakily running at the back of my brain.

I exaggerate. The dynamics of the match did burn through to me. I was partnered with our host, who with his expensively developed superiority was giving so many strokes to the rest of us that when he faltered-and he was bound to falter often, with a putt that lipped out or a drive that sucked too far left-the burden fell on me. Whenever the pretensions of our low-handicapper were punctured, it became a match of Red and Ken versus Ben. In my betranced state I held up better than when paired with Fred Hanover against these same two buddies. The three of us, equally strangers to this pudding-stone paradise, had a certain furtive solidarity, though I was the evil host's ally. My distracted golf took on a quality I can only call coziness. The path the ball should follow was marked as if by broad troughs in the air; it was the reverse of that frequent agonizing feeling of a narrow correct path, a kind of razorback ridge which the ball keeps slipping down one side or the other of. Especially on the second side, beginning with pars on the short, blind tenth hole and the long eleventh with its sheer cliff and gra.s.sy transverse ditch, did I help my team; we wound up collecting two welders, which Les Trout tucked into his wallet as gleefully as if he had made another million.

I marvel, writing this down, at with what boyish games we waste our brief lives.

Time, I have read, was believed by Pythagoras to be the soul and procreative element of the universe. And it is true, rail against its ravages as we will, that we cannot imagine our human existence without it: nothing would happen-we would be glued flat against s.p.a.ce like the schematic drawings with which mathematical gamesters ill.u.s.trate the odd consequences if our three dimensions were reduced to two. Descartes claimed to believe that time is a series of ever-perishing instants continually renewed by G.o.d in split-second acts of deliberate creation. This grotesque idea occurred to me as a child, and perhaps to most children as their brains awkwardly widen into metaphysics. Science begins with keeping track of time. The Mayans had calendars more accurate in arranging leap years than our own. Dwellers in the Andaman Islands keep a calendar based on the odors of seasonal plants as they bloom and die.

Each morning, I observe, the day displays a few more dead leaves on the driveway, a few more yellow patches in the stand of young maples reflected in the pond. Shaving in my bathroom mirror, I glance down and perceive a slightly more reddish tinge than yesterday's to the top of the burning bush, Euonymus atropurpureus Euonymus atropurpureus, which grows in the terraced area visible from this window.

Gloria points out that I shave badly, for all the times I have done it. I skip bristles beneath my jaw and just under my nose; I don't go far enough down my neck, so unsightly long white hairs protrude above my shirt collar. She also claims, observing me through the rivulets in the steamed-up gla.s.s door, that I don't know how to shower-I don't use enough soap, and I don't pull back my foreskin and scrub. The wives of uncirc.u.mcised men get cancer of the cervix seven times more than women with circ.u.mcised husbands, she claims. So, go marry a Jew or be a nun, I think. It wasn't my decision; it was taken by old Dr. Hardwick and my mother, back at Pittsfield General on a September afternoon in 1953. Maybe they plotted to give my wives cervica cancer. There was some kind of collusion between dark browed, young-old Doc Hardwick and my pet.i.te, sandy haired mother; I could feel it in the way they paired up at my bedside when I had the chicken pox or mumps. I could hear it in their chatting over coffee downstairs, my father off at work and house calls already all but a thing of the past. In the more than three score years that I have had to ponder it, I think being uncirc.u.mcised perhaps the most valuable thing about me. My sheathed glans imparts a responsive sensitivity to the entire stumpy stalk that embarra.s.sed me now and then in youth but served me well into advanced maturity; I am h.o.m.o naturalis h.o.m.o naturalis, man unscathed, Adam before the covenant; and I am deeply hurt that Gloria levels these criticisms. Perdita never complained of my poor c.u.mbersome body, though her silences, her increasing reserve, her way of grimacing and keeping her own sweet counsel in the end were more devastating than any utterance.

To Gloria I am a kind of garden, where she must weed, clip, tie, deadhead, and poison aphids. She can't believe that, after all these years, I sometimes set the fork on the right and the knife and spoon on the left; it would affront her no less if I came to the table without trousers on. At the weddings we now and then attend, to see time feed the younger generation into its procreative mill, when she and I dance she tells me to take big steps and to stop jiggling my shoulders. Slurping my soup, picking my nose even in the dark of the movie theatre, putting on a striped tie with a checked jacket-all these harmless self-indulgences excite her to flurries of admonition, and perhaps I am wrong to take offense. She merely wants to train me, like a rose up a trellis. As I age and weaken, I more and more succ.u.mb to her tireless instruction. She finds my driving doddery and dangerous, so it seems simplest to let her drive when the two of us are in the car. Docilely, before putting them on, I hand her my pajamas to verify that they are clean enough to wear for one more night; she sniffs the collar, makes a face, hands them back to me, and says, "The hamper."

Yet I do not fail every sniff test. Sometimes, usually just before dinner, when her biorhythm enters an amorous patch, she presses her nose into my neck and says, "You smell right right. You smell mine mine. It's like a mother-she knows her baby by the smell. And the baby knows the mother." These elemental animal facts never lose their charm for her; she is so conversant with the language of scent that I fear she may catch on my face a whiff of Doreen's crotch, which I have won the right to nuzzle, down in the shack, and, her glossy thighs propped on my shoulders, to stir with my tongue-the scarcely musky, gingerly furred pink folds of it-as the closest approach to penetration that I will allow myself, or that my unstated compact with the boys from Lynn allows me. It is a rare event-they are branching out, taking their moll with them-and I scrub my face afterwards, with soap enough to mask a rotting mummy.

The other amorous peak of Gloria's biorhythm comes at night, between four and five, when she awakens in a nervous state. She hugs me, kisses my neck, murmurs invitations. Her aristocratic fingers timidly seek my p.e.n.i.s; I slap at her hand, trying to preserve my dreaming state. Her nightie has ridden high on her body; she makes me curl my arm around her; her b.r.e.a.s.t.s glide into my hands as if leaping; her b.u.t.tocks push at my slumbering manhood, which dully considers answering the call, weighing the pluses and minuses. "It's the middle of the night," I groan.

"I know, I know," she says pityingly, apologetically.

"Couldn't you save all this for daylight, darling?"

"I will, I will-good idea," Gloria says, breathily, meekly yet with a heartbreaking lilt of unquenched hope, as if I might pounce after all. We both know she will not feel this pa.s.sion in daylight, there is too much to do, the world presses at too many points-gift shop, garden club, newspaper, telephone-and her pa.s.sion is based in part upon my being asleep, babyishly defenseless and pre-s.e.xual, exciting perverse desire. My brain fumbles at the cozy coverlet of the dream I was having (I was back in Hammond Falls playing pick-up baseball) while wondering if my duty as a man and an American was not to gouge myself awake and serve my needy wife. She whispers, "I'll go to the other room and read," and I fall gratefully back asleep. All my old playmates are there in the dream-Poxy Sonnen, Billy Beckett, Fats Weathersby-and the red-brick smokestacks downtown, by the river, are visible beyond left field as it slopes away.

It is not just me that Gloria finds exasperatingly imperfect. The lawn boys have no idea how to mow a lawn, the cleaning ladies leave cobwebs in all the high corners, and the dentist has placed in her mouth a grotesquely mismatching crown-too yellow, too big. Her smile is in fact her foremost charm, brilliant and broad, her teeth apparently perfect. My mother, who was still alive then, regretted my leaving Perdita and the children, but admitted, upon meeting Gloria, "Those teeth are worth investing in." Her own teeth had given her much trouble, and by her forties were mostly denture.

Since my encounter with Dr. Chafetz in the locker room and its medical follow-ups, my wife has tried to soften her criticisms. She looks me in the face after smelling my neck and abruptly her eyelids redden. I clasp her to me, knowing she is counting the days, the weeks, the years it may be; but the end of her captivity, her espousal to one unmannerly helping of male flesh, is in sight. I hold her, forgiving the unspoken. "You're so precious, so precious to me," she murmurs in her dear confusion.