My mouth was tasting pink when I asked the operator for Iowa. I waited to be connected while my father’s tuneless peppy little whistle came from the bedroom. Removing my tartar had restored his belief in the future. He walked past me into the living room, a white terry-cloth bathrobe around his shoulders and oriental slippers on his feet. He was back to Yoga again. I should have guessed it.
At the other end of the line, Margie said hello.
“Marge — it’s me.”
“Oh sweetie,” she said, “how are you?”
“I’m all right. How are you?”
“I’m a little tired. I’ve been scrubbing shampoo off the walls all afternoon.”
“Have you moved back in?”
“Gabe, this disengagement policy wasn’t working at all. I was so lonely. I love you, honey.”
“Margie, we can’t keep living together. It’s bad for our characters.”
“I love you. It’s good for my character.”
“Stop being kittenish.”
“Is that kittenish too?” she whined.
“Marge, why don’t you go to Kenosha for a week? It’s a holiday. You’re lonely because there’s no one on the campus. You don’t miss me as much as you think. Why don’t you go home for a while?”
“Because those people bore me.”
“Margie, you just have to move out.”
“You come back, you’ll see. We’ll have fun.”
“You have to move out.”
“I miss you. Don’t you miss anything? How can you live with someone for a month and not miss them?”
“Missing is just more indulgence for us. The whole thing was very indulgent of both of us.”
“I feel,” she said, “very used …”
“Please, honey, don’t talk too much like a movie, all right?”
“You’re cynical about love. I’m only telling you how I feel.”
“The truth is we were both used. We used each other. Now let’s stop it.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“I love you.”
“You don’t,” I said.
“Gabe, I don’t want to fight with you. I didn’t call to fight. The campus is empty. It’s depressing me.”
“What have you been doing?” I asked.
“I’m trying to read Proust,” she said. “I think the translation must be lousy. He just doesn’t seem that great. Sweetheart, I’ve written nearly fifty letters. I think all I’ve done is wash my damn hair and mail letters. Gabe, you’ve got to come back — for New Year’s at least. Oh Gabe, New Year’s Eve?”
“Marge,” I said, not really knowing where to go from here, “why don’t you go out and talk to people?” It began to seem that I had found my Bartleby: I would have to go back to Iowa City and find a new apartment, leaving Marge behind in the old one. “Why don’t you go to the movies, go swimming. Make a life for yourself, baby, please?”
“I don’t like movies alone. I’m not being obstinate — I don’t. I had coffee with a friend of yours in the Union today.”
It depressed me considerably to hear her settling down to be chatty. “Who?”
“Paul Kurtz.”
“Herz.”
“He seemed very nice. A little lugubrious.”
“I hardly know him. What did he have to say?”
“We just chatted. His wife’s sick. I think she had what I had. She’s in the hospital. Gabe, is she really his wife, or is he just living with her?”
“Oh, Marge—”
“Gabe, he’s the only person I’ve spoken with in five days. Aren’t you going to come back for New Year’s Eve?”
“I’m visiting with my father. Look, you’ve got to move out. You just can’t keep being indulgent like this.”
“Hasn’t indulgence turned into anything?” she demanded to know. “You just can’t walk out!” she cried into the phone.
“We’re both walking out.”
“I’m not walking anywhere! Don’t tell me what I’m doing!”
“All right, I won’t. Just call a taxi, and take your stuff, and get out.”
“You don’t respond — that’s your trouble! You’re heartless!”
“I expect you to be gone when I get back.”
“How can you say that to me if you love me!”
“But I don’t love you. I never said I did.”
“You used me, you bastard.” And she began to weep.
“Oh, Margie, nobody uses anybody for four weeks.”
“Five weeks!”
“Look, hang up now, pack your bags, and leave.”
“I’ll ruin this place, you,” she screamed. “I really will!”
“You’re hysterical—” I said, astounding nobody with the insight.
“I’ll tear up all your books! I’ll break all the rotten spines — you’ll have to come back!”
“I’m coming back on the first of January.”
“Oh—” she wept, “I never expected this of you.”
“Margie, you romanticized—”
“You romanticized!” and at her end the phone slammed down.
When my mother was alive she had done everything possible to prevent my father from assuming the Cobra Posture on her prized living room rug. However, she was gone, and I did not live with the man, so after my phone call — determined to put out of my mind those long-distance protestations of love — I sat down on the orange raw silk of our scrolly Victorian sofa, and I watched. And for the first time since my arrival, I found my father oblivious to me. It pleased me to think that we two were occupants of the same room, and that he was not investigating my plans for next month, or fiddling around inside my mouth. Not me, but the Cobra Posture — Bhujungasana — was the object upon which he focused all his soul and all his body. Clad in a blue jockey bathing suit, he was stretched rigidly before me on the floor, his stomach down, his toes pointed back, his chest nobly arched. All that moved, while he held himself aloft on locked wrists and elbows, were the muscles in his forearms, which jiggled at a high speed against the thin pale shell of his skin. The features of his face moved around a bit too as he tried to work them into a picture of repose. It was all very familiar, even down to the hour of the day; over in the Park, everything was growing dim.
“That rug,” my mother used to say, dying to kick one arm out from under him, but knitting instead, “was woven by an entire village in North Africa, Gabriel, so that your father could make a damn fool of himself on it.” She had a strategy of making certain matters that were important to her sound unimportant; but she was, after all, a strenuous woman and I knew she wasn’t kidding. She had disapproved of his Yoga, as she had disapproved of his Reichian analysis, his health foods, and his allegiance in 1948 to Henry Wallace. She was a dedicated opponent of the impossible, which my father happened to be for; but he was for her too, and that was what had weakened him. Even so, it was no easy job for her to restore him to reason. It had finally been necessary, where his orgone box was concerned, to shame him out of the thing by hinting of its existence one night to a group of his colleagues at a convention of the American Dental Association in Miami. What had forced her to such a cruel extreme was something my father had done with his box one afternoon in her absence: he had put me in it. After the ADA convention, a length of wooden rod was purchased, some nails driven in the right places, and the next thing Millie knew she had a zinc lined wardrobe closet in the corner of her room. The end result of my mother’s maneuver was that it managed to bring my father back into his family living room in the evenings, the proper place, my mother told him, to be collecting sexual energy in the first place.