Christopher Hacker - The Morels

“Don’t you need somebody to mind this stuff?”

“It’s fine. People like looking at it, but no one actually wants it.”

It seemed they’d straightened up for the occasion, which for some reason I found touching, and set two armchairs next to each other facing the sidewalk, so that after we unpacked our equipment and the Morels took their seats, it appeared that, in answering our questions, they were addressing not only us and the camera but all of New York City’s passersby.

It was agreed that Dave would handle the sound, Suriyaarachchi would handle the camera, and I would conduct the interview. As this was our first real break in the project and the first footage we would get, we spent a great deal of time planning in the days leading up to it. We watched Grey Gardens several times and all of Errol Morris’s films. We brainstormed a list of questions that we hoped would bring out their craziness. We wanted to hear about the wild seventies, their theory of parenting, the Permission Room, and what Cynthia fed her six cats.

But, in the end, they insisted on answering their own questions and, in so doing, related to me, to us, to the city at large, the peculiar story of their lives.

IT BEGINS IN NEW JERSEY,early fifties. Doc is a husband. The wife is not Cynthia but rather someone named Dolores. They have married young, Doc and Dolores, when he is just out of dental school. Happy years, these first living in Trenton, an apartment near Cadwalader Park. Dolores bears him a daughter. The birth of their second coincides with a move out to the new suburbs of Plainfield. This occasion also marks for Doc an end to that happy period in their lives. This second child, a boy, brings with him a deep and lasting depression for Dolores. Doc comes home to find four-year-old Sarah racing around the house naked, infant Benji in his crib, screaming. His wife can be found in bed with a pillow over her head, weeping. When they leave the children with her parents for the evening and go out to a nice restaurant, she ends up staring mutely into her salad, weeping. When they invite their friends over for drinks, Dolores ends up locked in the bathroom, weeping. When they drive to her parents’ for the holidays, Dolores won’t get out of the car because she doesn’t want her parents to see her weeping. Benji is weeping; little Sarah is weeping; the whole goddamned car is weeping! Dolores is not unhappy with Doc; in fact, as she tells him again and again, he is the only thing keeping her sane. If she didn’t have him, she just didn’t know what she might do.

Dolores had always been needy; it was what drew him to her in the first place — that and her enormous breasts. In college, her neediness was romantic. He’d sneak her into his dorm room, and she would refuse to leave. He humored this, enjoyed it even. It appealed to an essential quality in his maleness to be relied on like this, to be needed — that her need bordered on dangerous? All the better, all the more exciting. Before the kids, before the suburbs, when they were free — they’d indulge in weeklong “vacations” in which they wouldn’t leave their Trenton apartment. Out, he would forage the grocery for ice-cream sandwiches — fifteen minutes, ten if he hurried — and when he returned Dolores would pounce on him, and they’d have sex; she would tell him that these minutes he’d been gone had been too long away from her. After sex, they would pick up the book they’d been reading aloud to each other — Dickens or Brontë—an ecstatic mixture of gloom and comfort that, in those first years, felt so much like the love they read to each other about. After a men’s night out, having stayed overnight on a buddy’s couch, he came back to the apartment to find Dolores had downed a bottle of aspirin with an entire bottle of cough syrup. The cough syrup in those days had codeine. She was in a near coma, facedown in a pool of vomit. This incident should have sobered him, should have warned him against kids. But he was in love.

Over the years, through the birth of their two children, the move to the house, the start-up of his practice, there were moments of peace, of happiness. But the neediness, the dependency, out here in the suburbs, calcified into a jealousy of all people with whom he came into contact — men and women — but women especially: women patients, other mothers, her own women friends. His receptionist becomes a particular point of contention, and after firing three, he decides to live without. Where he worked, back then it was difficult to find a man with that particular skill set who would work for what he could afford to pay.

His home becomes a prison, his wife the warden. They are alienated from their friends. The children spend increasing amounts of time at their classmates’ houses. Home life is reduced to minor repairs and fighting with Dolores. His one solace is his practice, and he spends as much time there as he can, booking appointments as early as six forty-five in the morning and as late as seven forty-five in the evening. She is jealous of his patients, too, the time he spends with them, in intimate contact with their open mouths, their tongues, their pain. What do you want from me! he exclaims. Are you married to me or your patients, she asks. He points up, which has become in this recurring argument shorthand for the mortgage, the maintenance, the food and clothing and general well-being his salary can afford; and in response she gives her shorthand, a different finger.

“It wasn’t even like she wanted to spend time with me anymore,” Doc said.

This need for him to account for his whereabouts replaced her need for his actual presence. Jealousy replaced desire.

“And these were arguments I couldn’t win, of course. The conversations were rigged. They were torture. Really, they were a form of psychological torture. There’s a woman in the supermarket parking lot. Drop-dead gorgeous, dressed to kill. ‘You think she’s pretty,’ she says. First off, it’s not a question. It’s a statement, so already I’m trapped. To deny it is to disagree with her. But to agree with her is to admit feelings for another woman. Second, it’s a fact; she is pretty. To deny this is to deny your senses. Like if it was raining and Dolores had said, ‘It’s raining.’ Of course it’s raining! You bet your ass it’s raining! So I offer a noncommittal, ‘She’s okay.’ Not good enough. She wants a real opinion, a firm opinion. Then it’s on to ‘Would you have sex with her?’ ”

It’s no use. Whether or not he engages her in the discussions, the outing would be ruined, and depending on his performance, later there’d be broken dishes or appliances. A best-case scenario is a black hole of days without speaking to each other.

Inevitably, this suspicion becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Her statements— you don’t love me anymore; I repulse you; you want to have sex with her —become facts.

“You know, Doc,” Cynthia interjected, “it’s entirely possible that she was just ferreting out something you were already feeling. Maybe the way you looked at women was dangerous in some way. Some men look — and that’s it, nothing threatening about it. Other men look, and it’s predatory, a prelude to something else. You don’t think it’s possible that she was attuned to things about yourself and your marriage that you weren’t ready to admit — she wasn’t just helping you along?”

Doc shrugged. “Whatever the case, I found that sex — and I was never an especially horny guy before this — was suddenly all I could think about. Every girl on the street or who’d pass through my office, every magazine ad — it was as though her jealousy had unleashed this in me, had woken up something in me that had lain still for a long time. I was all of a sudden masturbating three or four times a day. It used to be a couple times a week, most, but no more. And before I was okay with having sex with my wife — our sex was fine, in spite of everything. Not fantastic, but fine, perfectly fine. Well, no more. ‘I repulse you,’ she said. Well, yeah, now she repulsed me. ‘You don’t love me anymore.’ It was true. I wanted to leave, but I was afraid of what she might do. At this point Sarah was fifteen, Benji was eleven. Mama’s boy and Daddy’s little girl. This was where the lines were drawn.”