Stanley Elkin - The Dick Gibson Show

“I didn’t know Methodist families were this warm and close,” she broke in during a lull.

“What, are you kidding?” Arthur said. “Methodist families are the closest families there are. The closest. We’d kill for each other. Anything, anything at all. One for all and all for one among Methodist brothers. Right, kid?” He punched his brother’s arm.

“Right,” Marshall said. “Right, kid.”

“You know,” Carmella said shyly, “you all make me feel ashamed.”

“Ashamed?”

“Of what, dear?” Papa asked. In a sudden seizure, his fingers leaped across her cleavage to her far nipple.

“Of the way I’ve deceived you.”

“Deceived?” Arthur said.

She covered her eyes with her hands. “We’re not really married,” she said, and peered out at Arthur from behind what would have been her ring finger.

Marshall had been expecting a widower, someone with children in high school. He had looked jealously on the balding and pot-bellied and pin-striped. Love would come from that quarter, he thought. And it would be love, hearts erupting in floozy passion, Carmella the Queen of the Cocktail Lounge and Wild West, a Claire Trevor knocking like last opportunity on Mr. Right’s storm doors and aluminum siding. He had been wary of just such a juxtaposition; even at Mama’s funeral he had steered her clear of all avunculars, his brother’s corny cronies, men in liquor, furniture, restaurants and automobiles. He had been rude, accepting their condolences with perfunctory replies as he jerked Carmella next to him as if for support — though the gesture was vicious, like a man with a beast on a stage doing hidden, close-order things with the leash. For the truth was he loved her as much as the man in liquor ever could — perhaps even more since it was still rare and grand for him to be with a woman. It was lovely waking up beside her. On those mornings when she was out of bed first he felt deprived of some special treat he had come to depend on. It was lovely to be in rooms with her or to sit with her in taxicabs, lovely to share space. It was lovely to have her with him in restaurants, to see her head bent over the big menu as in prayer.

Carmella loves Arthur.

In an instant his brother had been transformed. From a life-long kibitzer he had become one of the earnest of the world. Suddenly he seemed to acquire wrists, great rawboned red things that hung from hick cuffs. He had become all that Carmella wanted merely by Carmella’s wanting it.

But now Arthur took them for lovers and grew shy. Even his father had to find some other role to play. It was all right to feel up a daughter-in-law but a mistress was a perfect stranger. Carmella’s strategy in revealing the true state of their arrangement was superb. What followed was inevitable. Arthur grew more sedate and Carmella more ardent, his humility like a sign to her from an astrologer. Now she had a focus for her needs. She was convinced — and so was Marshall — that Arthur was the one and only. For Marshall it was as if all the torch songs he had played all those years on the radio were suddenly coming true, a delphic Tin Pan Alley. His heart was breaking. It was terrible, but not unpleasant.

One day he told Arthur — they were in Arthur’s solarium—“She’s set her cap for you.”

“Aw, come on,” Arthur said, “what are you talking about? I’m your brother, for gosh sakes.”

“She’s got a crush on you, kid.”

“Blood is thicker than water.”

“You’re the apple of her eye, I get a feeling.”

“Say, what do you think I am?” Arthur said. “We grew up together. We lived under the same roof. We’re flesh and blood.”

“My impression is the love bug has bit her. That’s the long and the short of it.”

And it was love. Seeing it in her, Marshall was as embarrassed and awed in its presence as his brother. It was profane, it was passionate. Ah, his heart. Breaking, breaking, broken. He had the blues. He had the blues to his shoes. He moped. He moped and hoped. He saddened and baddened. He felt the terror of exclusion and loved Carmella the more, estrangement dislocating him and making him feel as he had as a child tuning Atlanta, St. Louis, Cleveland or Toronto.

Carmella joined them, and Arthur, decent but flustered and guilt working in him like a decision, went off to fetch tea.

“I suppose you haven’t actually slept with him yet,” Marshall said miserably. Of course he knew that she hadn’t, that she wouldn’t dream of going to bed with his brother until he was out of the picture, so that by her propriety the adultery became deeper than the mere technical one of flesh.

She seemed as miserable as he did, her pain — she wasn’t very intelligent, the strategy had been a lucky stroke — conceiving how to get out of her difficulties. “What are you going to do?” he asked her.

“Oh Richard”—he hadn’t told her he was no longer Dick Gibson—“what’s going to happen? He loves you.”

“Blood is thicker than water. I’m the apple of his eye.”

“He’s so ashamed. Sometimes I think he hates me for what he’s doing to you. I could be a good Methodist wife to him — I know I could. Redemption happens, people change. We could have kids. The house is marvelous, but there’s a lot that needs to be done. Once we were married we might even be able to talk Dad into staying with us. Children need grandparents. Did Arthur have grandparents?”

“He used mine.”

“Oh Rich, forgive me. I didn’t mean—”

“Has he made his move?”

“He’s too good. He wants your word that it’s all right.”

He hadn’t thought Carmella would stay with him after she blew their cover, but if anything she was with him more than ever now. Their lovemaking grew wilder in the last days. It was as if she understood the criminal source of Arthur’s feeling for her and tried to make herself worthy of it.

One night about a week later, she put him to sleep with the most incredible lovemaking of all. He rode Carmella about the room like a horse, slapping at her ass as she, bucking and running, strong as a wrestler in her passion, carried him. Later, he inexplicably woke up. Knowing he wouldn’t be able to fall asleep again, he got up without even looking toward Carmella’s side of the bed and went up to the big solarium at the top of the house and entered the great diced glass room. He had never been there at night before. Rain fell heavily on the glass ceiling and he kept ducking his head involuntarily. Remaining dry under the steadily ticking rain seemed another facet of the illusion. Great storm-trooper shafts of lightning flashed all about him and he blinked timidly. He walked to one huge vaulting wall of glass and looked out. Though he was higher than the trees and saw nothing moving, he sensed a great wind. The rain simply appeared, visible only as it exploded against the glass. It was if he were flying in it. He thought of radio, of his physics-insulated voice driving across the fierce fall of rain; it seemed astonishing that it ever got through. Now, though he was silent, it was as if his previous immunities still operated, as if his electronically driven voice pulled him along behind it, a kite’s tail of flesh. He stood in the sky. He raised his arm and made a magic pass.

“This is Dick Gibson,” he whispered, facing the thunder, “of all the networks, coast to coast.” The lightning burned along its fuse. “Latest flash from Dick Gibson: Dick Gibson loves Carmella Steep.” It exploded and made an electric alphabet soup of the wet, dark sky. “This is not Dick Gibson,” Dick Gibson said. “This is God,” he called softly across the heavens and raised his right arm and threw a thunderbolt at downtown Pittsburgh. It was just possible that because of all this turbulence his voice would get through, that someone might pick him up on the rib of an umbrella or the buckle of his galoshes. And he thought of Carmella as of some mortal woman he had loved, the memory of his recent ride apt, as if he’d had to change her into a horse in order to love her.