“I have. They got color TV in prison.”
He was high on something, but he had never been more serious. He was ready for his life to be over and resign himself, with relish, to the high-gloss realm of somebody else’s vision from now on. I could barely reply. I’d never known how he hated himself and his life so much. Even in my worst depressions I was still snob enough to know I would take out myself in my own act, in my own show, never by the congealed vision of others who need you half-dead in a chair to own the world. Then I asked Jane something that had bothered me and I was afraid to know.
“You said I was priceless. That I had something priceless. But what is it? Why am I special?” The fear was creeping. I was hard bothered all over again.
She thought too long, as if it weren’t really that big a question and she’d forgotten.
“Well … I saw that painting of yours you didn’t want me to see, under your bed in your townhouse apartment, about a year ago. I really like it. It’s very great art. I loved you even more for thinking it was no good. Your very high standards, all private like that.”
But it was wretched and derivative and never got much past simple meanness, like much of my work. The only reason it had any merit was I’d done a fair cartoon in the Thomas Hart Benton mode showing ghouls — my customers — with long arms and grief-stricken faces pulling out automobile parts from their bodies — you saw the outlines where they’d been ripped out, bloody — and demanding replacements. All of this with a hideous backdrop, too yellow. I kept it as a reminder, sleeping over it, that it was as far as I would ever push in creation. It was only a milestone. I had no vanity about it.
“You made those people out the real Frankensteins they are, like those people around those wrecks we saw. Thank God we’re not like them at all, what a world. You cutey.”
“But we were there. They made us hot, Jane, remember?”
“I got hot loving that I wasn’t them. It still gets me hot knowing you’re not my ex-husband. He was so dumb and dull. Never once did he say my cunnie was the best in the world, like you do. I’m so so really happy you’re not him, baby. He was good, he was successful,” she began tearing up, and I was amazed, “but let me tell you this: he never had high standards. He accepted just about anything the way it was and just had these tired grunts every now and then.”
It’s impossible to overdeclare my disdain for dying a wise old man, knowing every salient point, sitting there in my last room as with a multistory library in a cone over my ears. I was hugely sorry I’d asked about my pricelessness, having learned only what I was not. That our love was going along so well out of spite, like how many other loves? — the same, no different. “Living well is the best revenge.” “Prepare to make the memories,” say the beer and camera ads. All you need is beer, camera, and revenge and you’re a player.
I walked out of the house down the hill toward the lake. I needed to talk to Mary, but then I found a gift by accident. I was sitting on the dam getting bit by chiggers and mosquitoes and deer flies but refusing to move or get in the water, which I needed to do.
An animal came up next to me, which I believed to be an apparition in my periphery. It was about the size of a big house cat. It kept moving slowly towards me the two hours, it must have been. But I looked ahead, not even a weed in my mouth, nothing in front but a blind thousand yards. I finally felt it so close that I looked around. It was a large and handsome raccoon, regarding me and not moving now as I stared straight at it. Its hair was so deep and rich, brown and black, it seemed beyond real, so prosperous out here on the beaches of the encroaching shore lots with their moody houses on the hill. I stood, and after retreating only inches to gather itself back, it took stock of me without nervousness then eased up closer and closer — a yard away — and decided I was no threat. It was without the ordinary panic of these careful beasts. Did it know me? Was I something like a body washed up out of a deep lake, the odor of a sunburned slug? He looked to be truly working me for a few minutes. I got uncomfortable and started walking around the lake. This lover of marine carrion fell in step just a little to my right on the water side.
Lovers, even middle-aged lovers I guess, may not be good people, but if they were like me just now, after the physical ardor of two months after a wait of over a year, they do have innocence. They’re so worn out there is hardly anything left but the sleepy wonder of infants. I was stumbling along as if on the ground of the moon, reading everything with intense color in a doubled hurtful light, near the result of those drugs I took just a few of at Columbia, but with more suspense because I was clean. The raccoon paced along. When I knew it did not want to eat me, I think we became chums. We walked around the lake and back to where I was, and this thing we repeated three or four times a week in the last of the winter, which was mild.
Everybody knows raccoons are graceful. I regard them as so refined in beauty they are almost like a work of art let out to eat, especially this big sleek friend who wouldn’t seem to mind going back and watching television with me when Jane was out of the house. I felt better, going around the shore, sometimes watching the animal freeze, poke, and snatch when it wanted something tasty out of the water.
The élan of the Indian tennis players occurred to me as I looked forward to the European tournaments on the big-screen Toshiba. I hoped there were some Indian tennis players left to watch, with their sweet moves, their gentlemanship, a power beyond victory and defeat to me, much in rebuke to our wearisome national jocks and deranged narcissists like McEnroe. I didn’t give the raccoon a name even as he became nearly a walking roommate. You should not name something more elegant than you, I thought. I didn’t even know its sex. Maybe it was a newly mated older boy like me taking a couple hours off from the little woman back at the castle.
I was near broke again, with all my buying for the house, back to the lower class. I’d never taken money from Jane and didn’t intend to. Our house felt like a rented thing to me, with none of my purchased future in it. I’d built a muscadine arbor one morning out of heavy stakes with lattice board for a roof. We would see it from our rear bay window on the slope into the lake. It was my first yard idea ever. I wanted a grape bower with a love couch underneath — somehow an all-weather one, if they made them. I wanted the raccoon to visit and eat the grapes, maybe even bring his family over. I expected the thing, in fact, to one day give up his beastly quietness and begin chatting with me. Or I would become a whole new animal, enough to chat in its language. Jane and I could ravish each other on the couch even into old age. I was sad, but so what? This was my only marriage and I didn’t intend to retreat from it. Maybe I was copying the decorator, the old granny with his erotic room ideas, or competing with him. I was proud.
But when Jane looked down in the yard at it she didn’t show delight. I could sense there was something wrong with it now. It wasn’t on television.
Then I got back from a trip to Kansas City one afternoon. Jane embraced me at the door, all bright, and said she had a surprise for us. I spied down toward my old arbor construct. It had been torn down and replaced by one in green metal exactly the shade of the trees. The granny had told her where she could get one, the whole outfit, and his men had put it up for her. I went almost insane. It was our first large fight — nearly all one-sided by me — but I felt eternity in it. I almost struck her, there with her eyes seeming dead and glib to me all of a sudden. I told her the raccoon wouldn’t likely come near that thing.
“The raccoon? The what raccoon?!”