Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

So the adultery was inevitable and placed an extraordinary burden on Dick Gibson (now, as he had been twenty-one years before with Miriam, Marshall Maine again, having, in his own mind, retired “Dick Gibson” when he lost the Hartford show), because the assumption ordinarily made about two people who live together without being married is that the relationship is invulnerable to outside pressures. For a man the least approachable woman is the woman who already has a lover. She seems inviolate as a newlywed or nun. Carmella’s open flirting confused men; they never comprehended their eligibility. (Shy men, decent men, why would they?) As often as not they thought themselves toyed with. The burden of proof was on Carmella. She had to allay their fears, and she allayed them at Marshall’s expense, cuckolding him out of wedlock. He dreaded their public appearances together. More than once, even before they left Hartford, he thought of calling the whole thing off.

Yet Carmella’s very need of the normal was the most fascinating thing about her. It was pathological. To the degree that she yearned for respectability she lacked it, so that as long as he stayed with her he enjoyed a heady sense of the forbidden. For all her absent-minded doodles of electric frying pans and steam irons, she seemed to him the most abandoned woman he had ever known, wilder than the Creole girls of Mauritius, crazier than the brutish whores he had been with in London during the war. It was her need to convert everything into the routine and domestic, her necessity to pretend even with him that they were just the nice couple next door, that fueled his lust. It was very clear; she was inviting him to play House, a game which she played so ferociously that there was something sinful in their supper- times, a wickedness in her burned meats and scorched vegetables, something so tantalizing in her bridey pout over a failed cake that he grew hard contemplating the unrisen dough. A vagrant smell of the amiss from the oven was often enough. For him Carmella was a French maid come to life out of pornography. In his imagination her bare behind bloomed just out of sight beneath her pinafores, and he often thought he could see the wide twin grins of her rump. Their arguments — it never went this far; they didn’t have arguments — would have had to have been settled by sexually seditious spankings. Sometimes she made perky mouths at him, as if she was his daughter as well as his bride, and it was both his torment and a source of his pleasure that she never stopped thinking of the day when she would have a real husband.

They had gone to Pittsburgh for his mother’s funeral, but Carmella liked the city and it was she who decided that they would not return to Hartford. Then she wept, understanding that she could make such a decision only because her life was so irregular.

Though Marshall’s father was an old man by this time — Carmella told him that they were married — he still enjoyed performing as much as ever. Only a week after he had buried his wife he was playing the role of a dirty old man, and Carmella was an ideal prop for him. Leering, he might pretend to a sudden palsy. Then, his right hand twitching uncontrollably, he would bring it up to the level of Carmella’s breasts. In this way he managed to brush them at least a half-dozen times a day, or, in passing, to strum her behind every hour or so. Lest he be misunderstood — his peculiar pride wanted it made perfectly clear that he was lascivious and not physically impaired — he occasionally arranged to get his hand tangled inside Carmella’s skirt, where it thrashed about like a fish in a sack making rash plunges and rushes. All Carmella said at these times was “Please, Dad,” or “Now Dad, you know that’s just perfectly silly.” She probably assumed that every family had its eccentric, and that it was perfectly normal for old men, even supposititious fathers-in-law, to turn lewdly on their sons’ wives.

With his brother Arthur it was something else again.

Like Marshall, Arthur had never married. In real estate now — they were staying with him until they found an apartment — Arthur lived in a big house in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh. After his mother’s death he had tried to convince his father to come and live with him, but had been unable to budge the old man. Carmella and Marshall were present on one such occasion, Carmella sitting on the sofa between Arthur and the father.

“Be reasonable, Papa. Why do you need the aggravation of a house? List it with me. I’ll give it my special attention. We’ll put it on the market for twenty thousand, add another thousand realtor’s fee, and when I dump it you can keep the extra grand yourself. The buyer doesn’t have to know I’m your son. Then you come in with me. There’s the solarium, for God’s sake. Remember how you and Mama used to enjoy sitting in the solarium when you came out to see me in Squirrel Hill? You don’t need this cave.”

“Cave? You call where your Mama and me lived our lives and raised our children a cave? Are you a cave man? Is your brother a cave man? Am I? Did I ever pull your mama around — may she rest — by the hair? Did I hit her on her head with a club? Music you had. Every Saturday afternoon these walls were alive with the sound of the Metropolitan Opera on the radio. What’s the matter, you don’t remember Milton Cross? Is music like that heard in a cave? Carmella, tell him.”

Carmella, looking from one to the other, was taking it all in.

“That’s not the point, Papa. What I’m—”

“It’s not the point? It’s not? Big shot, what’s the point? What’s the point, teddy bear? That you got a solarium, that my big-shot son owns the sunshine? You don’t own the sunshine. I want sun I go in the yard. My backyard is covered with sunshine like a lawn. You think you get more in your solarium? In fact you get less.”

“Papa, why are you so upset?”

“I’m not upset, sonny, I’m not upset. But when you ask me to give over my memories, you ask something which will never happen. Your mama’s spirit is in this house. A woman don’t live in a home forty-two years so her spirit can be listed with her son for twenty-one thousand dollars.” Here his hands flew up like a bird to Carmella’s tits, one finger getting caught in the décolletage.

“Mama’s dead, Papa. When are you going to face that?”

“Mama’s dead not even two weeks, Arthur,” Marshall told his brother quietly. “You’ve got to give Papa time.” He had never called them Mama and Papa in his life. Neither had Arthur.

“Now, Dad, you know that’s perfectly silly,” Carmella told the old man, pulling his hand out from where it had become caught in her brassiere.

“Time,” Papa said fiercely, turning on Marshall. “You could give me a million years. I’ll never forget her.” His palsied old hand floated down to splash about in Carmella’s crotch.

Carmella took the hand and held it in both of her own. “Please, Dad,” she murmured sweetly.

The two sons were having the time of their lives. Biblically ferocious, they shouted back and forth at each other like Italian sons in melodrama. They glowed with a Fifth Commandment intensity. Meanwhile the old man was now a wild Greek patriarch, now ancient Bulgar, now wily WASP whittler and fisherman, now proud old chief, between the peaks of his wrath declining to mournful Jew, actual tears in his eyes when he spoke brokenly of his dead wife, the late lady who for years had led him a merry chase with her Maw Green stunts. Carmella might have been on the sidelines of some three-sided tennis match as she followed the volleys from father to son to brother to father to brother. For her their vaudeville turns were like a dream come true; the vague religiosity of their syntax was holy to her. There was gemütlich in the room like sunshine in the backyard.