“I didn’t marry you, you gutless bitch—you married me!”
“I thought you loved me—”
“You thought! You were hot, baby, and you itched for it and you got it! And you made me marry you, don’t you forget that, ever! Four years in the Army, four years — and now this! I’m in prison! I can’t paint! I have nightmares—”
“Then why can’t you just love me—”
“You are a sly bitch, Martha Lee. You don’t love me — you know you don’t! Oh someday I’ll find your ass down in Our Holy Mother of Guadalupe and you’ll be crying out to Jesus for help — why did you get such a sonofabitching husband, why-yyy are you afflicted with such a sinful man! Well, you tell Our Holy Mother, the only sin, you conniving bitch, is this fucking prison of a marriage! Why don’t you listen to me! Leave that God damn egg alone!”
“You miserable coward — don’t tell me what to do! Everybody in the world loves each other! Every rotten secretary loves her boss! Guys fell off our front porch just from loving me, you bastard—what’s the matter with you!”
“Let’s keep it straight, America’s Sweetheart — you used my cock! That’s the why and wherefore, Martha—”
“Shut up! We have a baby, you filthy beast!”
“I told you, didn’t I? I said get a God damn abortion—”
“I’d like to cut your tongue out, you mean pricky bastard! I’ll ruin your life like you’ve ruined—”
“You hooked me is what happened, Martha — you hooked me and now you ought to be happy, you selfish, stupid—”
The train moved north, taking almost two whole days to get through Texas, five impossible meals in the State of Texas and innumerable voyages down the car to the toilet; tiny Mark cried and little Cynthia gloomed out at the never-ending brush, and then there was Oklahoma City, there was St. Louis and then Peoria, and now we are back in Chicago, we are back on Fifty-seventh Street, we are in Hildreth’s once again, perhaps in that same historic booth. Dick Reganhart is destined to make a fortune painting rectangles, for he is a child of our times, but for Martha Reganhart life is a circle. And if it ends where it begins, where is that? What’s next? Where was she going? This was not what she had envisioned for herself while she tweeked her brand new little nipples and stared up at the ceiling on those rainy, windy, winter nights in Salem, Oregon.
“Blair!” Cynthia screamed. “Hi!”
“My ofay baby! Honey chile! Cynthiapia!”
Cynthia dissolved, not entirely spontaneously, into laughter, and Mark, always a willing victim, doubled up in ecstasy, and hit his head on the table top.
Blair reached into the booth and plucked Markie out of his seat. “Hey, Daddy,” he said, jiggling Markie in the air, “you will have dehydration of the ductual glands which corroborate the factation of the tears. Is this the reactionary reaction cogetary to the stimuli, or is you pulling our leg?”
Mark squelched his tears instantly and stared into the mysterious continent of Blair’s skin; the man was brown and rangy and undernourished, with Caucasian lips and nose, dark glasses, and a manic potential that could turn Martha’s mouth dry. Cynthia went flying out of her seat toward the visitor, and her Coke wobbled across the table; her mother, years of practice behind her, caught it just before it tipped over into Sid’s lap. She looked at her companion and found him trying to throw a smile into this big pot of merriment. But then she heard him groan when Blair slid into the seat opposite them, a child in each of his arms.
“Where’s your friend?” Martha asked, conversationally.
“She’s buying her mayonnaise.”
Several seconds passed before either man publicly acknowledged the presence of the other; then Blair peered over the top rim of his sunglasses. “How’s the crime business, Your Honor? What’s swinging in the underworld?”
“How are you?” Sid asked.
“Oh me, I’m toeing the ethical norm.”
“That’s fine.”
“Man, I make nothin’ but the super-ego scene.”
Mark found the remark very funny; Cynthia curled up in Blair’s arms. Sid sat upright in his chair. There was no question about his being a hundred times the man Blair Stott was, and yet Martha discovered she could not stand him at that moment for being so proper and protective; it seemed a crushing limitation on her life.
Partly out of pique with Sid, she cued Blair. “And how’s the hipster movement in North America? What’s new?” The children looked at her with wide eyes — she was drawing out the funny man for their enjoyment.
“Well, Mrs. Reganhart,” said Blair, whose father was a highway commissioner in Pennsylvania, whose mother was a big shot in the NAACP, and whose masks were two: Alabama Nigger and Uppity Nigger, “well, to tell you the facts, we is all of us taking a deserved rest, for we expended a prodigious, a fantastic, a burdensomely amount of laboriousness and energy, as you might have been reading in the various organs, in placing in the White House that Supreme Hipster of them all, the Grand Potentate and Paragon of What Have You, the good general, DDE. It was a uphill battle and a mighty venture, and mightily did we deliver unto it. We are pushing presently for a hipster for Secretary of the State, and, of course, for Secretary of the Bread. What we are anxious to see primarily is one of our lad’s names on all them dollar bills. You know, This here bill is legal tender, signed, Baudelaire. Of course, in our moment of spiritual need and necessitation — which we is regularly having biweekly, you know — we are also turning our fond and prodigious efforts and attentions to the Holy Roman Church, and praying on our bended knees, with much whooping and wailing, that it is from amongst our ranks that the next Pontiff-to-be will be selectified. As may be within the ken of your knowledge, sugar, up till the present hour there has been an unquestioning dearth of hipster Popes — one must go a considerable way back down the road to find hisself one. Like since Peter, nothin’. The Pope we got now, the thin fella with the glasses — now in my opinion this is a very square Pope, though on the other hand I learn from our sources in Vatican that this same cat was very hip as a cardinal. What we is looking for with fervor and prodigiosity, not to mention piety and love, is someone we can call ‘Daddy’ and look up to. How many years has it been now since Rutherford B. Hayes?”
“Coolidge,” Martha suggested, fearing for the dryness of her children’s underwear; both of them were slithering about in fits of laughter.
“Hip, my dear blond bombshell, but no hipster. Markie, do you agree here with the predilections of my predigitation, or what? You sit so silent, man”—Mark was nearly on the floor—“have you no thriving interest in the life political and the heavenly bodies, or is you numb, Dad, with Coca-Colorama?”
“Coke!” Mark erupted, as Sissy made her entrance, swinging within her clinging black tights her healthy behind, and unscrewing the cap on a jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise. She sat down at the booth and offered the jar around; then she dug in while Mark, awe-struck, watched every trip the spoon made from the jar to her mouth. For Martha, his absorption opened up a whole new world of agonies. Sid looked at her. Pleadingly he said, “It’s getting late.”