William Vollmann - The Royal Family

As soon as he could, therefore, he said that he had to take a shower. He took the longest shower he had ever taken in his life. Then he told them he had to go to bed. With the door shut, his ground chosen, he robbed the bed of one of its four pillows and lay down on the carpet, his body half in the closet to be as far away from her as he could; for a moment it seemed he owned himself again. His wife stayed up until midnight. He lay awake wondering if she were telling them of all the wrongs he’d done her.

The next morning, rolling away through the hot pig-scented winds, they began getting ready to pretend that the quarrel hadn’t happened. They were not absolutely unspeaking and unhearing like walled-up statues anymore, although it is true that they didn’t make unnecessary talk, either. They answered one another politely but succinctly. He never looked into her face, although he occasionally glimpsed her shoulder move when her right hand moved upon the steering wheel. They were going to Denver. She had another colleague there. This was a woman who was developing the prototypes for smart lamps. With a little luck, while his wife and the colleague ignored him he could steal some of the colleague’s dirty underwear and sniff it—

Devouring the boneparched sandbars on the Platte, they drove on to where the grass was lighter, the corn smaller, the highway faded almost white. There were sandhills in the fields now. At Cornfield Creek with its occasional stains, each from a single tree, his wife ate a young boy, tanned and naked to the waist, who was walking along with a fishing pole over his shoulder. Near the site of Buffalo Bill’s grave the first dry ridges started twisting out of the flat ground, the dirt all the different colors like the fireworks that the twin blonde girls were selling at their stand. A man bicycled in a cowboy hat. Swallowing heat-crisped grass and dustyblonde fields of hay bales, they rode the ricket-fenced roadside whose ranches rambled painted and unpainted, hoarding dust-manured corals.

Suddenly his wife patted his arm, gazing at him with a loving smile.

When they got to Colorado, the sun, waiting just behind a thunderhead, sent misty chlorine rays down a grey and orange fogbank; beneath this cloud-spider, below the smell of spruces, beehives and water, below the chittering of aspen leaves like TV static or fish scales in waves, Denver stretched hot and flat and smoggy. They went to to the colleague’s house. He remembered her as a girl drinking pink magaritas with his wife when she was not yet his wife. Now her prettiness had tightened, like his wife’s, and when he moved to embrace her he saw a grimace split her face from top to bottom, and he saw that the line it followed was a habitual line; she was a professional now. At least when he’d hugged her he’d made her breasts go squish…

He’d tucked his shirt in, and at once his wife came to pull it out again. He shook his head, moved away and tucked it in again. She followed him and pulled it out. He pushed her away so hard she almost fell.

Down the twirly mountain highway, past Leadville, the gorges were corrugated with dark green trees. Valleys, bowls, and overlooks bored him. Bare mud-peaks were snow-striped like skunks’ tails. Twin-stacked diesel-snorters raced down green horse meadows. They had a fight whose anguish diffused through him just as altitude sickness begins from between the eyes and then spreads inside the skull, but by then, descending the sandy cutaways puffed and dotted with desert shrubs, they’d lost all the altitude they ever would, she flicking him an eye-corner’s worth of her contempt, just as she might flick a dead fly off a piece of paper; thus his octopus-minded wife, her heart plated with chitin. They came down into blue-salted canyonland that was goosebumped like a chilly girl’s legs; and cocoa-colored sandcliffs, topped with old cracking rocks, nosed down at them and their fate. Sharp-tongued mountains growled around, snapping at the sky like famished dogs. The dinosaur buttes pierced the sky with their sharp and dusty backbones. She said something, but her words buzzed by him like flies by a shady pool. Not far from the aluminum-sided “café” where they sold pliers and soda and “authentic” Navajo souvenirs (the trash can was too hot to touch), they came into Utah, his wife driving faster and faster, whirling down the highway like a sudden twister of tan dust. He choked down lopsided outcroppings lumped, bumped and swollen into dolmens beneath the clouds, all of it reddening into postcard quivers. Lumps and bumps, that’s all it was, utterly impervious, all gypsum and concrete and halfbaked pyramids and hundred-foot dogshit fossils, Disneyland ramparts and piss-yellow plaster casts of tits and cups, mountains of dried feta cheese now mold-grown with sagebrush; and clouds as smoothly twisted as the country they hung so mushily over. The day’s last sunbeams were eyelashing down. They crossed a country’s dozen of horizons all in a row, purple, red, brown and blue. Zealous at the wheel, she stuffed sandstone chessmen and Nazi rubble into her mouth, and then they came down into the green ranches of evening.

From Denver they drove to Vegas; from Vegas to the coast; the following day found them parked for good, all ready to begin happily ever after in their dream house.

Staring out the corner window in the evening as white cars and blue cars drove very slowly toward him, then vanished beneath the shuddering maple tree, which was wide like Mau-Mau skin sandals, our unnamed hero remembered the innocent girl; it was the recollection of her innocence (which I said was not really innocence) that led him into his interest in retarded girls, which began one Pennsylvania night when he’d become so isolated from his hostess, lost in the forest of candles and crystal, surrounded by people with whom conversation had been exhausted like an old mine, so everyone stared in non-intersecting gazes at the hostess, who, smiling and rigid, nodded big-eyed as the guest of honor (not our lover) slipped a hand across the back of her chair; she parted her lips in wonder at his every word; but, being a good hostess, discovered the silence across the table before it had even fallen; so that while the guest of honor talked on and she nodded like an amiable puppet she was already scheming how to save him so far away across the table — and did she? Well, not until after dinner; there was no human way he could be spared that ordeal. He’d known that before he got there to be seated beneath the painting of Isis with her slender buttocks always in profile on a narrow ledge, raising her hands, groping at the Pharaoh. It had been that way ever since the time he’d spied on his octopus-minded ex-wife, who’d been waiting for him. She was sitting alone on a bench in the night, on the corner of the bench, a marble bench. She was a little hunched, with her arms linked over her purse, and he could see from behind how her blonde hair darkened steadily toward the center of her head until it almost achieved the blackness of her dress, which, being velvety, not shiny, and abetted by the stark white hem, far eclipsed the blackness of her high heels as she sat there on that bench, never moving; until a couple sat down beside her and then she moved a little farther away. After half an hour she started looking at her watch. His hatred grew. He longed for her to leave. But she was waiting for him. She waited for more than an hour. When she finally stood up, he began to cry very quietly in the bushes behind her. Now she’d be going to do the other thing, he supposed. He could see her. She had her face between the other woman’s legs, working at her with soulful sucking sounds, as greedy as a girl probling the long plastic spoon into her cup of slushy-ice on a hot lunch hour, sitting sidesaddle on a bench, hunched over the slushy to help its coolness reach her sweaty throat; in her joy she no longer sees the army of boys who drive their division of golden plastic tanks almost to her toes; when she’s scraped every little crystal of blue-green ice from the cup, she bends down further, claps it to her face, works her tongue as far down the cups insides as she can reach, pig-nosed with that cup between her eyes. That was how it must be with his wife and the other woman. This had never happened and never would, but he needed to believe in it; that was as good a method as any to invent a way she didn’t love him. So he fled as soon as he could, like a gecko fleeing a moving shadow, and the hostess was sorry that she’d asked him to her dinner party because nobody could draw him out, and the women who’d been compelled to sit beside him at that vast and miserable table were more than happy to talk to other men, and he was twitching, blinking and sweating as he got into his car. If you have ever seen a couple at a bar, she smiling with lovely white teeth and with every calligraphic eyebrow-hair, her lashes sparkling with fun, her pupils gleaming, her nostrils stretched wide, while beside her he leans droopy-eyed, his smile a purely sarcastic knife or leaf, and behind him somebody in the darkness chugs another can of beer, then you will know more or less how it had been. It was almost dark. He drove to the outskirts of that town, where American flags hung limper than used condoms, only the brass eagles nailed above doorways hanging firm; and he passed the taprooms and the rusty markets that sold Hershey’s ice cream, and his headlights massaged the portico of the Weed Hotel, turning left onto the two-lane highway whose bus just ahead got bigger and smaller. Finally the bus turned off, and then it was a van just ahead, inside which children were fighting, silhouetted in the dusty window. — Past the fence of three rusty cables at the roadside marked here and there with plastic forks and squashed possums, the grass ran richly down to river-ponds almost as warm as blood in which the teenagers bathed beneath the powerlines. He pulled over by the picnic tables, got out, locked up because he knew the ways of the Pest. Scuttling down through prickers, bending back the soft lavender sneeze-flowers, he slid into his favorite spot, a culvert whose uphill end he’d sealed off with shovelfuls of dirt; there he kept his foam rubber mattress, the moss-stuffed mailbag for his pillow, and when he lay there watching the skinnydipping girls through his binoculars, he could always be counted on to ejaculate like some stupendously stupid night-lit fountain streaming and spilling and guttering through its troughs. How innocent they seemed, too! They were innocent because they didn’t know that he was watching them; their breasts swelled with the same candor he’d seen in sneak-peek photographs. (Yes! His name was Dan Smooth.)