William Wharton - Ever After

‘It really makes us unhappy seeing you do this to yourself. Do you know why you smoke?’

God, he could be so hard and mean in his quiet, tension-filled voice. I promised I’d stop but I didn’t. He knew I wouldn’t but he’d done what he felt he had to do. That’s the way Dad is.

Then, with sex, he told me to be careful for health reasons, make sure the guy wears a condom. But he had to go on.

‘More than anything else, Kate, sex is one of the greatest joys on earth, like Christmas. But it can be the same as having Christmas every day in the year if one becomes promiscuous. There won’t be any thrill left.’ He tried to talk to me about the difference between romance and sex, that when sex came in the door, too often romance went out the window, cornball things like that.

I didn’t know what the word promiscuous meant. When I told some of my friends what he’d said, they thought it was cute, and awfully funny.

With the drug thing, they were having a big crackdown at school: even the president of the Board of Trustees’ and the Headmaster’s kids got busted. Sometimes I think there was more pot than cigarettes in the smoking area. This was the early seventies and we were all trying to catch up to the sixties. Dad cornered me in my room again. He pulled out a small bottle with about three ounces in it.

‘Look, Kate, do you know what this is?’

He didn’t wait for me to answer.

‘It’s Mexican golden, some of the best pot you’ll find. A friend of mine sold it to me. He was going back to America and was afraid of customs.

‘This bottle will always be on the top shelf in my closet in the bedroom. Any time you want to smoke, take some, but only smoke it in the apartment here, and with none of your friends around.

‘The French are very tough on this stuff. If you get caught, since I’m not with a big company, we’ll all have to leave France in forty-eight hours. I really don’t want to do that. We like it here. You have to think about our lives, too.’

He considered pot, and all other drugs, a cheap shot at what can be earned the hard, real way by personal creative activity. He was convinced it stopped people, chemically, from making the tremendous effort to get a personal ‘high’ based on their own capacities.

‘You see, Kate, when I was an art student at UCLA, I read Huxley’s Doors of Perception and was deeply impressed. I volunteered to participate in some experiments on LSD 25. That’s what they called acid back then. They wanted artists, and paid us thirty-five dollars a day to be guinea-pigs. I did it twice. They injected the stuff into my arm. After about five minutes, I became aware of the clothes on my body. It was really erotic. I could hear the clinking of neon lights, and was fascinated by the shadow of a typewriter being used by a secretary across the room.

‘They took me to the LA County Museum where they asked me to describe the paintings. The colors seemed phosphorescent and in different layers. On the way back to the university in the car, driven by the experimenters, I was suddenly on the edge of a bad trip and curled up on the seat.

‘The cars out the window seemed to be getting bigger and smaller. It was only normal perspective changes but my mind wasn’t up to that kind of rational realization.

‘I went back one more time when they wanted me to try painting after the injection. I thought I was painting the most beautiful painting in the world and was so happy I cried.

‘But after they’d cooled me off in a dim room for a few hours, I came out to look at the painting I’d done and it was just paints smeared together into a uniform brown, the kind of thing an untalented kindergartener might do.

‘I think I learned something, Kate. What happens with those drugs is the thinking part of the brain is repressed so feelings are very strong. The ability to discriminate, to make decisions, to understand the nature of the physical world is distorted.

‘Now, that’s fine if you have an ordinary brain and don’t have any plans for it. But you have a fine brain, Kate, and I’d hate to see you screw up the wiring, short-circuit yourself.

‘You know, after that experience, it was almost two months before I could work up the enthusiasm necessary to do any valid painting. Remember the word “enthusiasm” comes from the Greek for “with the gods.” It takes real discipline and involvement to paint well and I’d almost lost that.

‘I wouldn’t touch any of that stuff again for love or money. It’s only a way of saying you don’t have any confidence in your own identity. In a certain way, I think people who become dependent on drugs are like alcoholics. They have so little self-respect, they want to escape from themselves. It’s a form of psychic suicide.’

He stared at me with those marbled blue eyes of his sunken under his chimpanzee brows. But he convinced me, and I stayed away from it all. I might be one of the only ones of my generation who got through the test-by-fire without getting burned.

That’s the way Dad is. He’ll be so laid back most of the time, sometimes you think he just doesn’t care. But he respected us. He wanted us to make our own world but he didn’t want us to get hurt.

When I told him I wanted to divorce Danny, I knew I was probably in for a bad time. He came to visit, and I spent about half an hour trying to explain. He sat on a little stool with his legs spread apart, his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands. He watched every movement in my face or else he just looked down between his legs. He didn’t say a word until I was finished.

‘Do you think Danny loves you?’

‘Yes, I think so, but …’

He held out his hand lightly.

‘Does he love Wills?’

‘You see him, Dad. You know he does.’

‘Do you have reasonable sexual relations? I don’t mean whammers every time, but good married sex?’

I didn’t think he’d ask that. Mom would never ask anything in this area. I took a deep breath.

‘I guess, compared to most other women I’ve talked with, we have as good sex as most.’

‘Do you have orgasm?’

He looked me straight in the eyes.

‘Not always. But I can get it off myself when I want. I don’t need Danny for that.’

I never thought I’d be able to talk about this with either of them.

‘He doesn’t beat you, or drink secretly, or take drugs or anything, does he? Does he have other women?’

‘No to the first questions. The last one, I don’t think so, so far. I think I’d know.’

‘So it just comes down to your being bored with him. Do you think you’d be bored with some other man?’

‘I don’t know. Dad, I’ve been all wrapped up with Danny since I was sixteen. I don’t know how I’d feel around another man.’

‘Maybe you ought to find out, before you do anything drastic, Kate. Remember you’re going to hurt both Danny and Wills, probably yourself as well, if you do go through with this divorce. These are some pretty nice people. Make sure.’

‘But, Dad, you aren’t really asking me to go out and have affairs are you? I don’t think I’d like that.’

‘Well, then why not make the most of what you have? It isn’t the worst situation in the world.’

‘You aren’t asking me to live my life out with a boring man?’

‘Lots of other people do. Men live with boring women and women with boring men. Sometimes boring women live with boring men, that’s the way it is.

‘You know, Kate, you can’t say you didn’t really know Danny when you married him. You two had been like married for two years before you actually went through the formalities. It was a free choice. You must have had some idea.’

I grew quiet. I knew I had to stick it out some more. I didn’t want to. I wanted to take Wills and just split. Dad then asked me if I’d spoken to Camille, my younger sister.