Stanley Elkin - Boswell

I went home improved, buoyed by an unfamiliar illusion of well-being. Margaret assumed I had been given a clean bill of health by the doctor, and I didn’t tell her otherwise. But it didn’t last, of course; these visions never do. Moments of truth are only moments of truth.

A week later I made love to Margaret as in a dream. We were alone in the house and I practically seduced her. I played the phonograph and used strategic lighting; I offered her cocktails; I rubbed her neck and read poetry. I felt myself softened, like one who has just stepped out of a warm bath. I was incredibly gentle. We might have been nymphs, shepherd and shepherdess. I spoke to her in promises, in the language of vows. In bed, I fitted a pillow tenderly beneath her, preparing her as slaves prepare a bath the caliph will enter. Then at the last minute I shouted to the escaping sperm, “Now, conceive. Damn you, conceive!”

For a time at least I was like anybody else. I had become someone to whom several things could happen at once. It was a shock to realize that the willingness to live complexly — doubly, trebly — to throw open one’s windows to all weathers, was the ordinary experience of most men.

Yielding to one human ritual is yielding to all. It is like being a sharecropper come North. We fanatics are simple men, unused to toilets, traffic. I had slums in me. Behind my life now, in its nooks and crannies and unseen corners, was a texture of domesticity, thick as atmosphere, as complexly there as government — its highways, national parks, armies — implicit in a postage stamp.

One night — we had made the book club selections for August; had decided not to take a phonograph recording that month; had chosen an alternate musical for Show-of-the-Month — I suddenly noticed that Margaret spoke with an accent. It was odd that I had never heard it before, and then I realized, Why of course, it’s new —as if in marrying me she had disfigured herself, had actually canted her tongue or ruined her mouth so that the sounds came out off-center, muffled, and with some eccentric emphasis. It suddenly struck me that Margaret was lonely — not lonely as we were both lonely together, playing our meaningless house by choosing books, recordings, restaurants and plays as others might figure a budget or decide what model car to buy, but lonely in a way that had nothing to do with me. It was frightening to be suddenly confronted with the tight, closed system of another human being; it was like watching someone asleep, mysterious, seductive as a frontier.

I began to wonder why Margaret had married me. Obliged, once I recognized her condition, to respond to it, I responded with anger.

“You don’t enjoy this,” I said, accusing her. I meant our marriage, being alive together, the peculiar primacy of her own unhappiness, but she thought I was speaking about our absurd household game. I needed time; I didn’t correct her.

“You think it’s unmanly.” I was really angry. My causes multiplied. I would never get them sorted.

“It’s all right,” she said softly. She said “olright.” It was not all right.

“I don’t know how to be married,” I said, stalling her.

“My life is therapeutic,” I said. “My life is a cure for my life.” She let me go on.

A strange lassitude had come over me. Though I still thought about The Club, though it was still urgent— indeed, the idea kept percolating in my mind — there had been in my life a sort of substitution of intensities, as when one playing with a shaped balloon absently shifts volumes of air from one of its sections to another. It was difficult for me to do so many things at once.

In August we went with the Holiday-of-the-Month Club on a weekend trip. Gathered with forty-five other couples at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, we looked, with our overnight cases and our name plates, like so many kids going off to summer camp. All the women except Margaret were wearing slacks or Bermuda shorts. The men in their Bermuda shorts and knee-length stockings (I wore trousers) recalled to me city people I had seen out West in starched, fresh bluejeans, as though summer, like a distant state, were something in which they would forever be dudes. The members milled about casually, introducing themselves to us unself-consciously.

“We’re waiting for Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Cohen of Queens,” said Eddie, the tourmaster.

“Where we going this time, Eddie?” asked Dodo Shivitz of Great Neck, Long Island.

“Dodo baby, I’m surprised at you,” Eddie said, grinning.

“It’s a regular military secret,” Lorraine Land said.

“Come on, Eddie,” Dodo said. “Don’t be like that.” She turned to Margaret. “In May Eddie flew us to Miami. None of us had swim suits or anything. It was terrible.”

“Sealed orders are sealed orders,” Eddie said, and walked off to another group.

Al Medler, a fat man from Queens, said, “I’m not too crazy about surprises. There’s too much of a strain on the heart.”

“Your first time? I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure,” said a small dark man whose card identified him only as Harris. He shook my hand.

“We just joined,” I said.

“Oh, yes.”

“All you people seem to know each other,” Margaret said.

“We know each other all right,” Harris said. “That’s crap about the Jerry Cohens. They won’t show up. Mister is still sore from June.”

“What happened in June?” Margaret asked.

“Grossinger’s,” Harris said darkly.

“Oh.”

“Look a’ Eddie, look a’ Eddie,” Mrs. Sylvia Fend said. “He’s whispering to Gloria.”

“It’s not right,” Mrs. Land said.

“Live and let live,” Al Medler said. “It’s less strain on the heart.”

“She’s a w-h-o-r-e,” Harris said.

“She is?”

“Of course,” Harris said expertly. “I’ve studied the economics of this thing. Your average trip is ninety-five miles.”

“Miami?”

“Once a year there’s a big trip. You don’t know when it’s coming up, though you can count on its being off-season.”

“What’s that got to do with Gloria?” Mrs. Sylvia Fend asked.

“Well, you got to figure it costs the company with food and lodging and travel twenty-five cents a mile. That’s $23.75 per person per trip. They usually get about sixty couples each trip, but summer is the slow season because the members go on their own vacations with the kids. So Eddie has to call out Gloria to make up the difference.”

“You seem to know a lot about it,” Dodo Shivitz said.

“I’m an actuary. I got to keep up,” Harris said.

“I can’t get nobody to write me a policy,” Al Medler said.

“You’re too fat, Al,” Harris said.

I drew Margaret aside. “Margaret, this isn’t for us.”

“Why? It’s more fun than Book-of-the-Month,” Margaret said.

“All aboard,” Eddie shouted from the bottom step of the bus.

“Where’s Jerry Cohen, Eddie?” demanded Harris.

“All aboard.”

“What about Jerry Cohen?”

“Jerry’s a god-damned puritan sorehead,” Eddie said.

Everybody laughed.

“All right,” Eddie said. “All right. All aboard for Mysteryville. What’s it going to be this time, folks? North, east, south, west? Where she stops nobody knows. The management is not responsible for stolen or misplaced property. Keep your eye on your own wife.”

“Whooopee,” everybody said.

“S-e-x,” Harris said.

Margaret and I weren’t allowed to sit with each other on the bus. As soon as we stepped aboard Margaret was commandeered by a tall, good-looking man named Marvin Taylor. Mrs. Taylor, a small, pretty woman of about thirty-five, sat down beside me.