Whether this cathartic interchange takes place before Y did whatever he did to make X so furious with him, 2 or whether the interchange took place afterward and thus signifies that Y’s stoic passivity in bearing up under X’s vituperations paid off and their friendship was restored — or whether even maybe this present interchange itself is what somehow engendered X’s rage at Y’s supposed ‘betrayal,’ i.e. whether X later got the idea that Y had maybe spilled some of the beans to Mrs. X w/r/t her husband’s secret self-absorption during what was probably the single most emotionally cataclysmic period of her life so far — none of this is clear, but that is all right this time because it is not centrally important because what is centrally important is that X, out of a combination of pain and sheer fatigue, finally humbles himself and bares his necrotic heart to Y and asks Y what Y thinks he (X) ought maybe to do to resolve the inner conflict and extinguish the secret shame and sincerely be able to forgive his dying father-in-law for being such a titanic prick in life and to just put history aside and somehow ignore the smug old prick’s self-righteous judgments and obvious dislike and X’s own feelings of peripheral nongratazation and just somehow hang in there and try to support the old man and feel empathy for the entire teeming hysterical mass of his wife’s family and to truly be there and support and stand by Mrs. X and the little Xes in their time of crisis and truly think of them for a change instead of remaining all bent in on his own secret feelings of exclusion and resentment and viva cancrosum and self-loathing and — urtication and burning shame.
As was probably made clear in abortive PQ6, Y’s nature is to be laconic and self-effacing to the point where you nearly have to get him in a half-nelson to get him to do anything as presumptuous as actually giving advice. But X, by finally resorting to having Y conduct a thought-experiment in which Y pretends to be X and ruminates aloud on what he (meaning Y, as X) might do if faced with this malignant and horripilative pons asinorum, gets Y finally to aver that the best he (i.e., Y as X, and thus by extension X himself) can probably do in the situation is simply to passively hang in there, i.e. just Show Up, continue to Be There — as in just physically, if nothing else — on the margins of the family councils and at Mrs. X’s side in her father’s sickroom. In other words, Y says, to make it his secret penance and gift to the old man to just hang in there and silently to suffer the feelings of loathing and hypocrisy and selfishness and discountenance, but not to stop accompanying his wife or going to visit the old man or lurking tangentially at the family councils, in other words for X simply to reduce himself to bare physical actions and processes, to get off his heart’s back and stop worrying about his makeup and simply Show Up 3 … which, when X rejoins that for Christ’s sweet sake this is what he’s already been doing all along, Y tentatively pats his (i.e., X’s) shoulder and ventures to say that X has always struck him (=Y) as a good deal stronger and wiser and more compassionate than he, X, is willing to give himself credit for.
All of which makes X feel somewhat better — either because Y’s counsel is profound and uplifting or else just because X got some relief from finally vomiting up the malignant secrets he feels have been corroding him — and things continue pretty much as before with the odious father-in-law’s slow decline and X’s wife’s grief and her family’s endless histrionics and councils, and with X still, behind his tight hearty smile, feeling hateful and confused and self-urticative but now struggling to try to regard this whole septic emotional maelstrom as a heartfelt gift to his dear wife and — wince — father-in-law, and with the only other significant developments over the next six months being that X’s hollow-eyed wife and one of her sisters go on the antidepressant Paxil and that two of X’s nephews-in-law are detained for the alleged molestation of a developmentally disabled girl in their junior high school’s Special Education wing.
And things proceed this way — with X now periodically coming hat in hand to Y for a sympathetic ear and the occasional thought-experiment, and being such a passive but overwhelmingly constant presence at the patriarchal bedside and the involved family councils that the most waggish of X’s wife’s family’s great-uncles begins making quips about having to dust him — until, finally, early one morning nearly a year after the initial diagnosis, the inoperably ravaged and agonized and illucid old father-in-law gives up the ghost at last, expiring with the mighty shudder of a clubbed tarpon, 4 and is embalmed and rouged and dressed (as per codicil) in his juridical robes and memorialized at a service throughout which a stilted bier holds the casket high above all those assembled, and at which service X’s poor wife’s eyes resemble two enormous raw cigar-burns in an acrylic blanket, and at which by her side X — to the first suspicious but eventually touched surprise of his massed and black-clad in-laws — weeps longer and louder than anyone there, his distress so extreme and sincere that, on the way out of the Episcopal vestry, it’s the weedy mother-in-law herself who presses her own hand-kerchief into X’s hand and consoles him with brief pressure on his left forearm as she’s helped to her limo, and X is then later that afternoon invited by personal telephone call from the father-in-law’s oldest and most iron-eyed son to attend, along with Mrs. X, a very private and exclusive inner-circle-of-the-bereaved-family post-interment Get-Together in the library of the deceased judge’s opulent home, an inclusive gesture which moves Mrs. X to her first tears of joy since long before going on Paxil.
The exclusive Get-Together itself — which turns out, by X’s on-site calculation, to include less than 38 % of his in-laws’ total family, and features pre-warmed snifters of Remy Martin and unabashedly virid Cuban cigars for the males — involves the arrangement of leather divans and antique ottomans and wing chairs and stout little Willis & Geiger three-step library stepladders into a large circle, around which circle X’s inlaws’ family’s innermost and apparently now most intimate 37.5 % are to sit and take turns declaiming briefly on their memories and feelings about the dead father-in-law and their own special and unique individual relationships with him during his long and extraordinarily distinguished life. And X — who is seated awkwardly on a small oaken stepladder next to his wife’s wing chair, and from his position in the circle is to be the fourth-from-last to speak, and who is on his fifth snifter, and whose cigar for some mysterious reason keeps going out, and who is suffering moderate-to-severe prostatic twinges from the flitched texture of the ladder’s top step — finds, as heartfelt and sometimes quite moving anecdotes and encomia circumscribe the inner circle, that he has less and less idea what he ought to say.
Q: (A) Self-evident.
(B) Throughout the year of her father’s terminal illness, Mrs. X has given no indication that she knows anything of X’s internal conflict and self-septic horror. X has thus succeeded in keeping his interior state a secret, which is what he has professed to want all year. X has, be apprised, kept secrets from Mrs. X on several prior occasions. Part of the interior confusion and flux of this whole premortem interval, however — as X confides to Y after the old bastard finally kicks — has been that, for the first time in their marriage, X’s wife’s not knowing something about X that X did not wish her to know has made X feel not relieved or secure or good but rather on the contrary sad and alienated and lonely and aggrieved. The crux: X now finds himself, behind his commiserative expression and solicitous gestures, secretly angry at his wife over an ignorance he has made every effort to cultivate in her, and sustain. Evaluate.