Steve Katz - The Compleat Memoirrhoids - 137.n

But I sat tongue-tied in Elaine’s. All around us I could overhear geniuses engaged in easy conversation. I looked into Kurt Vonnegut’s face and thought this was, as Hart Crane described Chaplin, “a kind and Northern face.” I would have enjoyed a break-through to get to know him. I might at least have got Jill Krementz to include me in her book of portraits of authors at work. Whatever ridiculous opinion I had once about his writing, I finally came to recognize him as a humane and righteous advocate of truth and clarity. He carried his burden of fame with Twain-like wit and rumpled ambassadorial dignity. I left the geniuses, and headed back downtown in New York twilight. That was how I didn’t get to know Kurt Vonnegut. So it went.

I can’t stay away from her. I can’t let her go. First of all I’m married to Jingle. We have two great kids so far, and I love them all; but I can’t keep myself away from Connie. She is so blonde, so pretty. I am totally en-webbed in her, in fucking her. I dream about her sensual mouth, her horny advances. I have a blind potentate in my pants. I can’t keep my body off her. She begs me to come in her mouth. I promise I promise. I am so unfaithful. I am the philanderer, a womanizer, and I’m proud of it. Pleasure trumps guilt at every turn. I married too young. I tied myself to wife and kids too young, too young. I owe this to myself. I’m self-righteous as the politicians. She tells me the first time she noticed me was in a laundromat and she wanted to jump me then. Jumped in a laundromat has never been one of my erotic fantasies, but Connie made it seem like a hot idea.

I work at The Branding Iron, a steakhouse, the only restaurant in Eugene, Oregon that hires waiters. The Pacific Northwest is in the throes of a recession in the logging industry, but there are still enough doctors, lawyers, dentists, undertakers, to keep the restaurant busy. Waiting tables is great. You meet many different people casually and with just a modest obligation to serve them. If you have some charm, you can exert it, and perhaps make it pay off. I always have money in my pocket, feel rich, particularly after a year of teaching-assistant poverty. My mother is staying with us on a long visit, and with the general chaos of two little kids, I am quite selfishly happy to be at work. And the bar buys a couple of cases of Laphroaig single malt Scotch whiskey, discontinued by the Oregon liquor commission. They stock it just for me. I drink most of it, after work. I hang out after we close and enjoy this gilded elixir, the taste of peat, the smolder of its inebriating smoke. Often Connie meets me in the parking lot, and we steam up her car right there behind the restaurant.

In your twenties your loose circle of friends is a strong influence on your life. Its ameboid spread quickly engulfs and digests every bit of personal information, gossip, behavior you would rather keep outside the membrane. My people know all about my Connie romp. One evening at a party a woman who is dealing with her own philandering husband takes a moral stance and dumps all the contents of the icy punch bowl over my head. As I stand there, soaked, confused, guilty as drenched, Jingle arrives at my side, holding her own bucket of ice water. I am sure she too will dump on me. I’m a man too horny for his own good. I’m a disgrace. Dump it now. Dump it on me. To my total shock Jingle turns the bucket over the woman’s head, and remains by my side. It’s a country music moment. This is nobody else’s business, she is saying. This is my man, and my problem. My wife, Jingle, always proves awesome. I stand there like a wet twelve year old caught swiping quarters from his mother’s laundromat stash. My punishment is that I am compulsively doing something that can lose her to me. I keep doing it, knucklehead led around by unbridled uncontrollable stiffy.

I get drunk on the freedom of Connie’s bachelorhood. She’s single and smart, a student with brains and body. I’m tied to little kids and family. However, every relationship forges its own chains. I can’t easily get loose of her. She too is smarter than I am. One time I arrive at her apartment and comment on the painting on her easel. “I didn’t know you were so left-brained,” she says. “Yes,” I reply. I haven’t yet heard of the bicameral mind etc. etc. I don’t know what she means, but I don’t want to lose face by asking her. Everything is sweet for me, as long as we be fucking. Suddenly she tells me she needs an abortion. It seems strange to me that she doesn’t first say she’s pregnant. This is before the procedure is legal, before Roe vs. Wade. Abortions are practiced in damp basements and dark alleys. Eugene, Oregon has its safe abortionist, well known among abortion age people. His name is Dr. Gentle. He is a real medical doctor, and that’s reassuring. Everyone appreciates that he does this community a service. He requires that the guy visit him first to make the arrangements, pay in advance. You have to get to his office after five, after his nurse/ receptionist has gone home. I reread Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” This is a totally different story. I get to his place a little early. His nurse is just leaving. She nods and grins knowingly. Dr. Gentle sits behind his big walnut desk, and fusses with a mechanical pencil.

“Sit down,” says he. “Don’t be nervous. You look nervous.” He’s a balding, grey-haired, avuncular type, in a rumpled white shirt and yellow tie. His pocky red nose snitches on his drinking habit. He puts down the pencil and slides some papers from one side of the desk to the other, lifts a glass paperweight in the shape of a football and plops it on the stack of paper.

“So you got yourself a girl in trouble?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t worry. Don’t be nervous.”

“I’m not.”

He picks up the pencil again, and unscrews it. “That’ll cost you a hundred and fifty bucks, son.” The pencil springs apart, dropping leads and a spring and other metal parts onto the desk. “That’s a pretty expensive piece of ass, I’d say.”

We arrange the date, an evening. He plies his craft only in the evening. He would do it at the end of the week, as Connie requested.

Dr. Gentle, his wife, and another couple have dinner at The Branding Iron on the Saturday after the procedure. They are seated at Charlie’s, the other waiter’s table. I notice at one point that the good doctor has ordered our largest porterhouse, a pound and a half of tender marbled beef, charred on the outside, rare on the inside. I look at him from across my station and think should I do it, stop by his table, ask how he’s enjoying his dinner? Will he recognize me? Will that embarrass him? Scare him? It seems a piece of mischief I’ll enjoy. It’s not what I’d call a nice thing to do; after all, he’s Doctor Gentle. “Hello Doctor Gentle,” I say. He lets go of the knife stuck erect in the meat, and squints at me. I want to say, “Don’t be nervous.” His face turns as red as his nose. He says hello, and finishes cutting off a rare red hunk and slips it into his mouth. Chew, doctor, chew, thinks I. He doesn’t look at me again. That night Connie shows up in the parking lot. So soon after the abortion, I can’t believe it. Maybe she never took the procedure. I ask her. She says she did, that it wasn’t so drastic. I tell her the process gave birth to a giant porterhouse.

I know Jingle knows about us. She must smell it. What wife wouldn’t? What husband wouldn’t, roles reversed? I feel like a toad, exposed, ugly, toxic. But I can’t stop. I’m too weak. I need everything. I ask for nothing. I do anything. Connie suggests we go to the coast for a long weekend. The idea is thrilling. She’ll bring her lingerie. We’ll wander among the tidal pools. We’ll get stoned on wine and lie naked in bed all day, and she’ll pop sweet grapes in my mouth. Dionysis is her god. I’ve never known a woman so Dionysian. We make the plans and I tremble with anticipation. It will be so delicious. I’m ready, but the time comes and I can’t do it, can’t defend myself at home behind a whole weekend of transparent lies.