Nell Zink: The Wallcreeper

“I can’t ask so much of you. That’s too much.”

“Are you aware that if you gave me a choice, like if I actually had two options in life, anal sex and moving to Geneva—”

“You would move to Geneva?” He threw his arms around me again, quivering with spontaneous joy.

“You’re not understanding me,” I said, pushing pillows in the corner so I could sit up. “There’s suffering, and then there’s boring stuff, and then there’s stuff that’s just plain stupid. I’ve done my share of suffering for Stephen. And other guys. Like crucifixion, I mean that level of suffering. Like St. Laurence. ‘Turn me over! I’m done on this side!’ I don’t see what that has to do with having a good relationship. It should be about getting through difficult stuff together. Difficult stuff the world throws at you, not difficult stuff you do to each other. The difference right now between me and St. Laurence is, he didn’t have the option of taking his hand off the hot stove.”

“You are fierce,” he replied, pulling the blanket up around his naked body to hide it. “I am never asking another woman for buttfucking.”

“Are you bisexual?”

He frowned. “I am polymorphous pervert! Where I find love!”

I shifted back into neutral and once again accepted the need for negative capability in this world. We had loving, beautiful sex just as soon as we could get ourselves to stop talking — loving and beautiful in the expressionist, pathetic-fallacy sense in which you might say a meadow was loving and beautiful even if it was full of hamsters ready to kill each other on sight, but only when they’re awake. I mean, you just ignore the hamsters and look at the big picture.

The next day, around six P.M. after he woke up, Stephen said, “Let’s make a baby.”

“I feel like Saint Laurence on the gridiron,” I said.

“No, you’re mixed up. Miscarriage is nothing compared to childbirth. You got off easy. You’re like Saint Laurence saying he doesn’t want to go to Italy in July. I’m asking you right now to risk your life and health for my reproductive success. I feed, you breed. Come on!”

“Sounds tempting,” I said. “If I could lay eggs and you agreed to sit on them, I might even do it.”

“Can we fake it?” he said. “Are you fertile?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then meet the father of your triplets!”

“You’re totally insane,” I said approvingly. Stephen was actually sort of interesting when his mind opened the iron gates a crack and let the light out.

“The central ruling principle of my life,” Stephen explained in a grandfatherly way, “is ‘Let’s Not And Say We Did.’ Most people don’t give a fuck what you’ve done and not done. If I put a picture of you and a baby on my desk, I can get promoted. All anybody wants to know is little sketchy bits of information, strictly censored, and that’s enough. It’s more than enough. Did you ever sit down and actually make a list of what you know about, like, Togo? ‘Is in Africa.’ That would be the grand total of your knowledge. But when people say the word ‘Togo’ you let it pass, the same way you let hundreds of people pass you on the street and in the halls every day. And every one of them is as big as Togo, inside.”

“That’s pure bathos, and I know nothing about Togo,” I said. “But somebody like, say, Omar’s wife, I don’t know her either, but what with my life wisdom and mirror neurons and all that, I figure I have a pretty good sense of what she’s about. But only because I’ve met her. I mean, if I said, ‘Togo is charming,’ you’d get the idea that you liked it until further notice, but if then I said, ‘Togo brags about doing those impossible word puzzle things in the Atlantic and dropping out of Harvard med to get a doctorate in nutrition,’ you’d think, who is it trying to impress? But you haven’t even begun to talk about its secret sorrows or whatever.”

“You can bet your buttons Togo has secret sorrows,” Stephen said. “If anybody knew what they were, the world would be filled with raw, bowel-torn howling. That’s Stanislaw Lem. I was going to say, I didn’t love you when I married you. It was like, ‘Let’s Not And Say We Did.’ But now I feel like Apu in The World of Apu , except instead of being faithful to me and dying in childbirth like you’re supposed to, you’re fucking this Arab guy. So tell me, Tiff, what is going on ?”

“He’s Montenegrin!”

“Montenegrin my ass! He’s Syrian if he’s a day! ‘Elvis’! It’s like a Filipino telemarketer calling himself Aragorn!”

I pouted.

“Ever try to make a list of everything you know about Elvis?”

“What would be the point? I was just trying to have some exciting sex.”

“Could you not try?”

I was silent.

“Could you love me a little?”

“Actually I do love you. Elvis told me. It’s breaking his heart.”

On Monday morning I bought the International Herald Tribune and some milk and said, “Elvis, I need to talk to you.” For the first time I noticed that he was reading Hürriyet. Over coffee at my place, he explained that his family had left Montenegro some generations before. But their women preserved the legendary beauty and kindness of the people of Montenegro, once immortalized so memorably by Cervantes in his lady of Ulcinj (D’ulcinea), and their men weren’t bad either. He showed me his Turkish passport. His name really was Elvis.

“Tiffany, my love,” he said. “What does it matter where I am from? You are an American! You know better than any shit European that we are all equal children of God!”

The next Saturday we went birding to an ugly artificial lake and Stephen asked me to talk about myself. “Let’s see,” I said, “being little sucked, but it had its advantages. Sledding is a lot more exciting before you turn ten. Of course I couldn’t really swim until I was eleven.”

“And then?”

“Well, my parents weren’t real particular about their choice of a boarding school, so I went to basically a home for wayward girls. I didn’t learn a whole lot. Like, our chemistry teacher was the choir director’s wife. I used to play around in the lab on weekends. I used to dump all the mercury on the counter and play with it.”

“Yeah?”

“I was supposed to go to Bryn Mawr after my junior year, but it was too much money, so I took a scholarship to Agnes Scott.”

He shuddered appreciatively.

“Then I moved to Philly and got a job, and then I met you.”

“Short life.”

“Well, life is short.”

“My child bride.”

“Hey, it’s not that bad! I had a thing with the riding coach at school, and in Philly I OD’d on heroin and they called me crusty mattress-back!”

“What?”

“I’m kidding. That was somebody else. This girl name of, um, Cindy—”

“You just made her up.”

“Okay, her name was Candy. I’m serious. Candy Hart. It sounds like a transvestite from Andy Warhol’s factory, so probably she made it up. She said she was from Blue Bell, so probably she was from Lancaster, and she said she was fourteen, so probably she was seventeen. I’ve never met anybody I can be entirely sure I’ve actually met.”

We saw bearded reedlings and a ruff. We would have seen more, but there were dog walkers there scaring everything off.

We went on a birding vacation to the lagoons of Bardawil. All the men I saw there reminded me of Elvis.

When I got back I demanded answers. He cradled his coffee in his hands and said, “Now I am telling you the truth. I am a Syrian Jew. My grandfather converted to Catholicism in 1948, but he took a Druze name by mistake and was not trusted by the Forces Libanaises, so then—”