Christopher Hacker - The Morels

“It wasn’t the most comfortable place to have sex.”

“It was very awkward.”

“Knocked over a tray of tools, hit my funny bone on the sink. Banged my head on that articulating lamp. But it did the trick.”

“For you. It was over very quickly.”

“That’s always been a problem for me. Imagination gets me too excited for the actual deed.”

“I made a follow-up appointment, which I ended up canceling.”

Back at home, Doc waits by the bathroom window, but in the days that follow the curtains in Cynthia’s room remain shut. He thought that the encounter in the chair was the start of something, but for Cynthia it was the end of it.

Doc is beside himself. Cynthia still comes over to spend time with Sarah, and Doc makes sure now to keep a Wednesday or Thursday afternoon appointment-free so that he might come home early and catch glimpses of her when she and his daughter come into the kitchen for a snack or the living room to watch American Bandstand . Dolores has discovered therapy and is getting out more, reconnecting with old friends, making new ones.

Doc notices one day that Dolores has stopped focusing so intently on him. She tells him, I’ve come to realize that you’re not responsible for my happiness. It was her attempt at a blanket apology, some nonsense she had learned from her therapist, but it made him want to cry.

How could he tell her that it was too late, the damage was already done?

She takes a needlepoint class and stitches a slipcover that reads HOME SWEET HOME, with a picture of a house. She goes on a diet so she can fit into those outfits you used to love . She takes a class in Indian cooking at the local community college so they might introduce a little of the exotic into our lives . She no longer grills him on his whereabouts. If she catches him staring at Sarah’s best friend like the dirty dog that he is, she refrains from saying anything. She crawls on top of him in the middle of the night and rides a cock that is already stiff from dreaming about Cynthia.

“She had really turned around, the poor thing. She wanted to make things work for us so badly. I think she figured Sarah’s almost out the door (that girl was college-bound from her first day of kindergarten), and Benji wouldn’t be too far behind — with the kids gone, we had a second chance at happiness. She would talk about future trips we might take, romantic places, retirement bliss, growing old together hand in hand. Shit like that.”

So with Dolores at one of her therapy sessions or at an afternoon class, Doc has free rein at home to watch Cynthia watch television or make a sandwich — to be in the same room with her, to have her brush past him on the stairs, or to enter a bathroom she has just left. Even the lingering waft of her shit can bring about an erection. Cynthia finds Doc’s silent desperation sweet and a little sad. She turns to see him watching her and, making sure Sarah isn’t looking, gives him a quick wink. Is her pity the result of Sarah’s influence, tales of her poor father? In part, maybe. But she is also moved by his situation in general as a married man. It’s the pity she has for the beasts at the zoo, pacing their cages. All that desire and nowhere to go — it breaks her heart. And for the same reason she wouldn’t unlock a tiger’s cage, she does not indulge Mr. Morel any further. She doesn’t want anybody to get hurt.

“That was until you found out you were pregnant.”

“God, yes. But that didn’t make me want to sleep with you again. I needed to talk to you.”

“How did you know it was mine?”

“How many times do I have to have that conversation with you — forget it! I was not a virgin, no. Nor was I having vaginal intercourse on a regular basis. It was you — you, baby, you!”

“She gets touchy. I like to tease her.”

Doc and Cynthia declared it time for lunch. Suriyaarachchi opened his wallet and handed me three twenties. “Anything but Chinese,” Cynthia said.

Doc said, “There’s an Indian on Wooster that does knockout palak paneer .”

It seemed that even full-partner producers got the takeout around here. A motley crowd had developed outside of the entryway: tourists with cameras, construction workers with blue deli cups of coffee, locals with dry cleaning slung over their shoulders. They parted to let me through. One of the construction workers wanted to know what the deal was with these two.

“That’s what we’re trying to find out, I guess.”

We regarded the set together for a moment, and that was what it was, with the beat-up equipment boxes stacked to one side and cables taped to the floor. Suriyaarachchi squatted facing the camera, mounted on its low turret, lens in hand, blowing out the gate with a can of compressed air. Dave was crouched with a pair of enormous headphones, staring down at the audio equipment. I breathed deep of the manhole steam that drifted past us.

One of the tourists said, “This place, Japan, very famous.” He held out his guidebook, and we all crowded in for a look. Sure enough, on the open page was a small photo and above it in English Carriage House Theater with its address. Everything else was in Japanese.

We all nodded, impressed.

I found a place that sold soup out of an old clapboard newsstand. The line was long, but I waited, using the opportunity to pull out my list of questions and revise them. I thought of prompts that might get them talking about Arthur. I was glad to hear their story — they provided a good starting point for the puzzle of Arthur Morel, product of a teenage Warhol groupie and a philandering suburban husband — but worried about its direct connection to Arthur’s present dilemma: so far, there was none. Would it continue like this, running parallel but never connecting? This was, after all, Arthur’s story. I was reminded of Grey Gardens , the documentary about the Bouviers, the crazy mother-daughter pair that was obliquely related to Jacqueline Kennedy. The story went that the filmmakers intended to make a movie about Jackie but, quite by accident, hit on this pair in a vine-choked falling-apart mansion in East Hampton and decided to make the whole movie about them instead. Like the Bouviers, there was something monstrous and compelling about these two, hearing them relate this adulterous statutory rape like a pair of old lovebirds. But would Arthur, like Jackie, end up on the cutting-room floor?

I also had to wonder why Arthur had sent us here. I did the math and calculated that the last time he had seen them he was performing his “cadenza” onstage. In all that time — wife, child, career — with all of them living in the same city, not once had they seen one another? That took serious determination. So why now?

By the time I returned with the food, the crowd had dispersed. Doc offered us utensils. “It’s okay, they’re clean,” he said as he chipped bits of dried food off the edge of a spoon. They sat in their armchairs, hunched over their bowls, slurping away, wordlessly passing a bag of bread back and forth. It was hard to reconcile these two with their sexed-up sixties selves. They seemed so sweet here, with their heads together, murmuring to each other. But then Cynthia would open her mouth and the connection became clear.

I gathered the empty containers, and Dave did a sound check. Suriyaarachchi examined the gate one more time, and we were rolling again.

“It was May of ’68,” Cynthia said. “I was getting ready to leave. I had no interest in finishing high school. What for? I didn’t need a diploma to be a Superstar! I hadn’t been feeling well for some days. I had been out sick. I was rifling through the medicine cabinet for I don’t know what, feeling lousy — I saw the tampons and it hit me flat. What a wallop! I mean, teen pregnancy I’m sure is no picnic these days, but back then, where we lived? It was a death sentence—”