He considered leaving the country, this land run by the heirs to ninth-grade class presidents and high-school quarterbacks. This was a favorite idea: living where no one’s sense of rectitude would interfere with your lack of sense of rectitude. He had in mind Malay, or somewhere like it so distracted with problems that no one had time for any but his own. He stood at the heavy, chain-beaten door to the bar, with Windjammer written on it by means of a heavy hawser nailed in cursive, and with conch shells stuck to it by means of epoxy, suddenly beginning to wonder: how could he live where there are women? He had loved women, and now a dark and low and trembling music began to play: he had loved other men’s daughters. The trash he had talked to people’s little girls!
He got in his car and floored it, trying to burn rubber. It had an automatic transmission and wouldn’t burn rubber, so he simply left recklessly. It was the best he could do. The moment and its sentiment became, in fact, a kind of motto for the hero from that point on. I have a daughter—I do the best I can. But it was clear to him now that whatever one did, with a daughter on earth it was not good enough. Without a daughter on the ground, there was no call to apologize for what you did. With one, what you did would always be merely the best you could do. It would not be good enough. You had blown the good enough. You had put a big bet on a big board and a big wheel was spinning and you were not going to win with a daughter in the world and fools like yourself running around after her. The hero, whether he really is a hero or is a hero only in some obscenely, lazily inaccurate sense (forgive me, forget me), had fair reason for being morose.
The door to the bar he pounded on the morning of the daughter revelation never opened, not that day or any other. The building itself was bulldozed shortly before the hero laid eyes on Tattie Elaine McGrim Bolio Pearsall, shortly before she laid eyes on Robert Higginbotham, drunk. The hero had by then stopped drinking. Young men who had not yet had the vision of daughters could carry on the inebriant tradition, as far as he was concerned.
Robert Higginbotham had not yet had the vision of daughters. In the strip club he pondered, in fact, something of the opposite: how many of the women, he wondered, were mothers?
Here is a curious truth with which to leave us: All women are not mothers, but they are daughters all. Through this truth, under its feet as it were, there walks a new blue baby boy, smiling as if he has candy, or as if he is candy. You decide, and decide before you father a daughter or mother a boy. It is only the morose, putative hero who wants to slap the boy, whether because he acts as if he has candy or because he is candy. Only the hero is perverse. You are neither, yet, and your responsibilities, which are neither heroic nor falsely heroic, are nonetheless immense.
Two Boys
ONCE UPON A TIME there were two boys. They were not boys anymore, actually, one forty-something and one nearly forty years old, but they were not stationed properly in Life as were men their age, and they were not going to be properly stationed in Life. They were not going to be bank presidents or lawyers or own car dealerships. One of them had once momentarily seemed properly stationed in Life for a man of his age; he had been a book editor. But he got into an affair with the editor in chief, under whom he worked, and she was the wife of a gangster who regularly employed the services of hit men, and this, this affair, was a very boyish thing to do. So when the editor resigned and ran, or ran and resigned thereby, he was properly a boy again on the street. He felt better all in all about resuming his true identity except that the stress of having pretended not to be a boy with a gangster’s wife who herself knew some of the hit men her husband used had given him cancer of the eyeball. It was his right eye.
The boy with the bad eyeball went through normal hoops trying to not have cancer of the eyeball, second-opinion surfing through waves of options and percentages and knives—
— Not knives, lasers! Why, hold on to that eyeball, in a few years we could save it, if it don’t kill you tomorrow—
It will—
No, it won’t—
— and then he got done with normal white-coat hoops and rag-bond letterhead and he emerged into a little dungeon where a Chinese woman who spoke only Chinese got ahold of him. “Eye poison in,” said the translator he had to take with him. The translator cost more than the Chinese woman who knew how to use the needles and squeeze the earlobes. On the fifth or so visit, well after a man properly stationed in Life would have desisted this quackery, the Chinese woman got down on her knees and thumb-wrestled the boy’s ear-lobe with more than customary vigor and the boy felt what felt like a cord twinging in his head from his ear to the eye in question and then some black stuff began to ooze from the eye in question. “Eye poison out,” the translator said, standing at a good remove. The boy was in a marvel of something like not despair. Despair had been when $200,000 worth of lasers and trips to Sloan-Kettering and having a radioactive ingot strapped to his eye in a dark solitary cell for two weeks and chemo nausea had produced only thin bones and hair loss and more coming-and-going white coats and good opinions and letterhead. For $20, black poison had come out of his eye of its own volition. This was more like it, to a boy. When you have an eyeball that is going to kill you, everything is like unto a boy again. Things begin to make original and final sense again, as they did in the beginning before you grew up and got confused. Or got half-confused, as it is proper to say of the forty-year-old boy who has resisted bank presidency. It would be a good thing, for example, after poison has come out of your eye, to go into your tree house and have a meal of chocolate milk and bologna sandwiches and maybe see a good bird. Not much else is required.
The other boy, who was a bit older, had also gotten himself tenuously properly stationed in Life for a man of his age, and was also suffering for it. He was a college teacher, a position that is not merely proper but that presumes to look askance at, if not down upon, car dealers and lawyers and bank presidents, but maybe not book editors. The college-teacher boy could not identify what was wrong with him but felt it was something like the other boy’s bad eyeball, though larger and vaguer, and he felt it was caused by the same tensions — the strain of posing as a man properly stationed in Life — as had caused the bad eyeball. There was one other link between the two boys: the college-teacher boy’s wife was having an affair. She was not having it with a book editor but with a rug merchant. The college-teacher boy wanted to go with the bad-eyeball boy to the dungeon and tell the Chinese woman to make the rugmaker ooze out of his mind, if that’s where he was. He was prepared for the Chinese woman to tell him the rugmaker was somewhere else, he didn’t care. If she said “Rugmaker in toe” it would be all right as long as she got after the toe. He was prepared to believe in any needles, any herbs, any grains, any tinctures, any thumbholds, any toeholds, any theretofore mystical non-empirical hogwash at all if it would make the rugmaker ooze away back onto the Anatolian plains, where he had frolicked with the college-teacher boy’s wife and where he belonged. “She says all trauma is cellular-deep,” the boy with the bad eyeball told the college-teacher boy. That would have sounded like an exaggeration in the direction of preciousness to the college-teacher boy before he had begun to have a rugmaker inhabit him. Now it did not sound like hyperbole. It sounded like common goddamn sense.