Thomas Disch - 334

thank you and god-bless for the bundle of good things, they seem practically new so i guess i should thank Tancred too for his gentleness, thanks, Tank! Remus and the other kids certainly can use clothes, esp. now. it has been the worst winter ever for us—and thats going back 23 yrs. before i arrived—but we are well dug in & cozy as mice.

my news? well, since i last wrote you i have been getting into baskets! it certainly solves the problem of those long winter evenings. Harvey who is our big expert on just about everything—he’s 84, would you believe that?—taught me and Budget, tho she has decided to return to dear old Sodom & Gonorreah (pun?) that was right at the low point of the Great Freeze, now with the sap running and birds singing— and its so beautiful, Alexa, i wish you could be here to share it—i get awfully restless sitting in front of my pile of withies, but i seem to be stuck with the job since its our biggest moneymaker now that the presents are sold, (did you get the two jars i sent you at Christmas?) i wish you’d write more often since you are so good at it. i always am so happy to hear from you, Alexa, esp. whats been happening to that Roman alter-ego of yours, sometimes i want to return to the 3rd cent, or whenever and try and talk sense into the other “you.” she/you seems so much more receptive and open, tho i suppose we all are inside our heads & the hard thing is to get those feelings working on the outside!

but don’t let me preach at you. that has always been my worst fault—even here! again you and Tank are invited to come visiting for as long as you like, i’d invite Gene too if i thot there was any chance he’d come, but i know what his opinion is of the Village….

i tried to read the book you sent with the bundle, by that Saint, i thot from the title it would be really trashy & exciting but 10 pages was as far as i could get. i gave it to elder Warren to read & he says to tell you its a great book but he couldn’t disagree more, he would like to meet you & talk about the early Christian communities, i feel so committed now to our way of Life that i don’t think i’ll ever be getting back east, so unless you do visit the Village we may never see each other again, i appreciate your offering the flight fare for me and Remus to come out but the elders wont let me accept money for so light a purpose when we have to do without so many more important things, i love you—you must know that—& i always pray for you and for Tancred & for Gene too.

your sister, Ruth

p.s. please, Alexa—not Stuyvesant! its hard to explain why i feel as strongly about this as i do without giving offense to G. but do I have to explain? give my nephew at least half a chance to live a human life!

Depression came down on her like August smog, thick and smarting. Ruth’s Utopian gush, silly as it could be at times, or sinister, always made Alexa see her own life as strenuous, futile, and unworthy. What had she to show for all her effort? She’d composed that inventory so often it was like filling out her weekly D-97 for the Washington office. She had a husband, a son, a parakeet, a psychotherapist, sixty-four per cent equity in her pension fund, and an exquisite sense of loss.

It wasn’t a fair summation. She loved G. with a sad, complicated, forty-four-year-old love, and Tancred unequivocably. She even loved Emily Dickinson to the brink of sentimentality. It wasn’t just and it wasn’t reasonable that Ruth’s letters should do this to her, but it did her no good to argue against her mood.

Bernie’s advice for coping with these minor disasters was just to go on agonizing at full steam while maintaining oneself in a state of resolute inaction. Finally the boredom became worse than the pain. Going off into the past was escapism at best and could lead to a nasty case of dichronatism. So she sat on the worn-out settee hidden in the setback of the corridor and considered all the ways in which her life was rotten through and through until, at a quarter to four, Willa came for her pies.

Willa’s husband, like Alexa’s, was in thermal salvage, which was still a rare enough specialization to have made a loose kind of friendship inevitable between them, despite their natural New York-bred reluctance to get involved with anyone living in the same building. Thermal salvage, on the miniature scale of oven-sharing, was basically all that united Alexa and Willa too, but it didn’t serve them as well for conversational fodder as it did their husbands. Willa, who claimed to have scored a prodigious 167 on the I.Q. part of her Regents, was a pure specimen of the New French Woman celebrated in the movies of twenty years ago, and indeed in all French movies. She did nothing and cared for nothing and, with a precise feeling for the mathematics involved, deployed the little green pluses and pink minuses from Pfizer’s labs to hold her soul steady at zero. By never for a moment relaxing at the effort, she had made herself as pretty as a Chevrolet and mindless as a cauliflower. Five minutes talking to her and Alexa had regained every shred of her usual self-esteem.

Thereafter the afternoon rolled down the track to evening with a benign predictability, making brief stops at all the local stations. The casserole came out looking as formidable and joyful as the last still on the recipe cassette. Loretta finally did phone and they made a new appointment for Thursday. Tancred came home an hour late, having adventured into the park. She knew, he knew she knew, but as part of his moral education Tank was obliged to invent a pleasant, undetectable fiction (a game of chess with Dicky Myers).

At 5:50 she brought out the rice pudding, which had gone all brown and peculiar. Then, just before the news, the office called and took Saturday away—a disappointment as usual as rain or dimes lost into telephones.

G. arrived not more than half an hour late.

The casserole was a religious experience.

“Is it real?” he asked. “I can’t tell.”

“The meat isn’t meat, but I used real pork fat.”

“It’s incredible.”

“Yes.”

“Is there any more?” he asked.

She doled out the last rosette (Tank got the sauce) and watched, with an immemorial indulgence, husband and son eat her tomorrow’s lunch.

After dinner G. took to the tub and meditated. Once he was deep into alpha rhythms Alexa came and stood beside the toilet and looked at him. (He didn’t like being looked at. Once he’d almost beat up a boy in the park who wouldn’t stop staring.) The too hairy body, the drooping, volute lobes and muscled neck, curve and countercurve, the thousand colors of the shadowed flesh called from her the same mixture of admiration and perplexity that Echo must have felt gazing at Narcissus. With each year of their marriage he had become stranger and stranger to her. At times—and these the times she loved him best—he seemed scarcely human. Not that she blinded herself to his flaws (he was—who isn’t?—riddled); rather that the core of him seemed never to have known anguish, fear, doubt—even, in any important way, pain. He possessed a serenity that the facts of his life did not warrant, and which (here was the thorn on which she could not resist rubbing her finger) excluded her. Yet just when his self-sufficiency seemed most complete and cruelest he would turn round and do something incongrously tender and vulnerable, until she’d wonder if it were all just her own iciness and bitchery that kept them, twenty-five days in a month, so far apart.

His concentration faltered (had she made a noise, leaning back against the sink?) and broke. He looked up at her smiling (and Echo replied): “What are you thinking, A.?”

“I was thinking—” She paused to think. “—how wonderful computers are.”

“They’re wonderful, all right. Any special reason?”