John Domini - Talking Heads - 77

But as for the weekend, my baby, my weekend of decision, well. Consider this mystery: Ihaven’t gone far, but I’ve visited an entirely different culture. Such are the demographics, in our packed and painful corner of the continent: in half a day’s drive you can move through three or four distinct cultures, each one in place for a good hundred and fifty years now at the least. Northward it’s Boston, Chelsea, Lynn, and Salem, which I would chart as first Brahmin, then blue-collar, then immigrant, and then finally history: the witches. Southward it’s Boston, Quincy, Brockton, New Bedford, which I would chart as first the ghettos, then the estates, then the factories, and then finally history: the whale ships. Westward it’s … well. Suffice to say that to my way of thinking, wherever you go it comes to history: there’s no stretch of the map Icouldn’t chart — until Itraveled all the way out to, for instance, Blue Earth County, Minnesota. Suffice to say that Sunday evening I headed west, more or less, to Providence, Rhode Island.

… honestly, was it only yesterday evening? not even twenty-four hours ago?

My baby, I bolted my oceanside hideaway — a Cottage, little ghost, a packed and painful corner indeed, though I must say I’m grateful for their Cutty Sark (do you know about blue laws, where you are? our Commonwealth’s Sunday laws?) — and I flew over scotch-brightened thruways to Providence, Rhode Island. In a hospital there I found someone who I think loved me once, or loved my family at least … and in that same Providence hospital I at last settled my business regarding, well — you.

A hospital? She settled her business? Kit had to fight off starkly imagined headlines, tabloids flashing ABORTION and ADULTERY. He took up the towel again. Clumsily he massaged his head, moaning now and then into the fuzzy gloom of the cloth. After a while, he recalled Asa Popkin. Come tomorrow morning, would he be talking to the lawyer about a divorce?

Though that last bit should be redone, don’t you know, that “someone who loved me”—that bit should give me a chance to exercise my Delete (maybe); because this was someone who loved someone else in my family, not me.

Indeed, Providence itself presented rather a mystery. God knows there are mysteries, and this was another, finding what I wanted in Providence, RI; I had to do rather some digging, some research. You might say that I lifted a page from your stepfather’s book. The person I was after, the person who I think used to love me — oh God, why can’t I simply say it: the one she loved was my father — at any event I’d heard she’d remained single, this person in Providence. And so I’d come to town believing the next step would be a simple one, my business with you would be over in a trice; but I at first I found myself calling strangers. In an entirely different culture …

O, I tapped my feet, on the unknown street — Delete; back in my seat, I cranked up the heat — Delete.

In this corner of the continent, don’t you know, every culture has its Women’s Crisis Center; it’s rather a new development on the local charts, and a good one too, I’d say: every culture its own Crisis Center, each with its own Service Directory, a book of one’s own. And, well, I am a woman, and I am having a crisis … “am,” yes am, present tense, my baby; the lacerations itch, they ooze (sometimes I believe I’ll never pull anything from this Apple except worms) …

And so I borrowed a page from your stepfather; he’s quite the prize muckraker, o yes; and I called a Women’s Crisis Center. After all it was a woman I’d come to Providence to find. It couldn’t very well have been a man, could it, this person who used to love my father.

She was an unusual woman, my father’s lover, though she was also, well. She was one of us — one of our kind — with the same lapsed-Episcopal pretensions as the rest of us: the jean skirts and the nic fits. She too had gone half-blind before the endless slides of Art History, and she too was forever stopping by the mailbox to see if there wasn’t another check from home; and our paths crossed occasionally, you see, our charts overlapped (though you should understand, my baby, that this was before the proliferation of Women’s etc., a significant absence)… Though you should understand, she was unusual; she was only a year older than me, a year “ahead” of me, but already this girl possessed — at least, among us lapsed Episcopalians — a rare sense of how she was going make her way: a rare, unsullen practicality about her likes and dislikes, and about their funding. And yet she was one of us: she met my father when they shared the same seat-row on the North Shore commuter train.

Now, I came to recognize this woman’s difference, her rarity, not simply because she had an affair with my father, no; also, shortly thereafter, I myself fell into a period I’ve come to call The Rampage.

More tabloids. That Bette’s father should have cheated was shock enough. The man had never made much of an impression, compared to the likes of Cousin Cal. On him, Bette’s long-boned paleness looked watery. The father had a Vice Presidency at First Boston and an avocation for Scottish genealogy. On one wall of his den hung a framed letter from some Edinborough regimental society. Yet the news about “Fudds”—a regular sex machine, that Fudds — wasn’t the real surprise in today’s printout. What shook Kit more was that his wife should bring up, for the second time in less than a week, The Rampage. The Rampage, an in-the-bedroom version of trashing the family garden, picking the men up and putting them down.

In the photos Kit had seen from that time, his wife-to-be had worn her hair like a helmet. She’d thrust out one cowgirl hip as if it were the edge of an axe. Battle-ready. Kit lowered the printout, thinking back to the letter she’d left him last Tuesday. She’d mentioned Ivan, then. One of the very few I’ve kept in touch with . Very few, to put it mildly. Bette had gone most of their marriage without bringing up Ivan or any of her other one- and two-nighters from that time. Kit would’ve thought she’d never wanted to hear about The Rampage again.

The Rampage, The Rampage! — oh, don’t the “Cut” and “Paste” keys make it easy — The Rampage, The Rampage! “Cut” and “Paste:” just the thing for lacerations, my baby. Indeed as I consider it now, as I consider my wounds, I think that perhaps you would’ve done better to discuss this, um, “difficult period” (The Rampage!) with your stepfather, if you’d ever known your stepfather. He could have handled the subject more objectively, your handsome prince of a stepfather; he might even go so far as to say there was a prince or two before him; whereas your mother, my baby, your mother can’t think of them as princes. She finds this far too packed and painful a corner of the world for princes, your mother.

Oh, who shall I mention? perhaps that violent French post-doc who’d studied with Roland Barthes? — absolutely chockfull of theories, he was, and gifted with an innate fucker’s rhythm besides, but you had to watch him once he’d cracked the absinthe, you had to make sure there was someone else in the apartment. My baby, when I think of my Rampage partners, it’s like the old song: No way my prince will come — no way, not even if he’s that sweet teenage drug fiend who later turned up in Aerosmith: a wild thing on stage but a cuddly stuffed teddy bear off it (because you see he was far too much of teddy bear, all soft and marble-eyed) … Yes, your mother believes she ran a shameful gamut: shameful, rather predictable really, and utterly devoid of princes. Your mother’s starting to think this entire section should be redone; I scroll back up the screen and I can’t help thinking of your stepfather. One marvels at the man. Before I came upon his muckraking, I’d never thought that mere newsprint could carry such fervor; my baby, you’d have done better to discuss this with him.