Q: You must be tired. Fatigued.
A: No I’m not a bit tired.
Q: All of that… activity must have left you a bit tired.
A: Yes I suppose you could think that.
Q: You’re not tired.
A: You mean mentally tired?
Q: Physically.
A: No I’m not tired. I feel fine.
Q: How are the headaches?
A: Haven’t been having them.
Q: That doesn’t mean they won’t come back.
A: The aspirin did the job.
Q: It wasn’t aspirin it was Tylenol. Extra-Strength Tylenol.
A: Did the job.
Q: Yes it’s supposed to be quite good. The drug houses send people around, detail men, they leave me samples of all sorts of things, I give them to patients. Free.
A: That’s extremely generous.
Q: Well otherwise they’d just rot, wouldn’t they? I mean I have buckets and buckets. All brightly colored.
A: I assume you don’t drink. Except in moderation.
Q: Also, I’ve given up smoking. It was quite a battle. The second finger on my right hand used to be brown, a yellow-brown. Now it’s not.
A: You feel better.
Q: I feel a little less stupid. So you were pretty much in hog heaven, there, with the three women, for all those months…
A: As a situation, as a domestic situation, it was not unstressful. There were, naturally, competing interests, people whose interests at any one time were not congruent —
Q: You mean they fought.
A: They were sisterly most of the time. Once in a while they fought.
Q: Using what means?
A: Mouth, mostly.
Q: Not laceration of the skin by fingernails, hair-tearing, bosom-bashing…
A: None of that. They were, most of the time, very good to one another.
Q: Remarkable.
A: I thought so.
Q: When I was first married, when I was twenty, I didn’t know where the clitoris was. I didn’t know there was such a thing. Shouldn’t somebody have told me?
A: Perhaps your wife?
Q: Of course she was too shy. In those days people didn’t go around saying, This is the clitoris and this is what its proper function is and this is what you can do to help out. I finally found it. In a book.
A: German?
Q: Dutch.
Dore sitting in the back of the house, watching a bird-fight. Two black birds are struggling in midair near the ailanthus.
“That one sucker is going to get the other sucker,” she says. “Going to clean his clock for him.”
“That’s the way it is in this world,” says Tim. “What does he win if he wins?”
“Don’t know.”
“You think Simon’s been all right lately?”
“Morose,” she says. “I get a definite moroseness.”
“Yeah. That’s kind of what I was talking about. Some people can’t stand prosperity.”
“You think he wants to go back to Philadelphia?”
“He hasn’t said yea or nay. I gather things weren’t so wonderful in Philadelphia.”
“Where did you go to school?”
“Cornell.”
“What did you study?”
“Electrical engineering.”
“Is that a good place for it?”
“It’s okay.”
“What’s your wife’s name?”
“Carol.”
“Everybody’s wife is named Carol. You ever notice that?”
“I didn’t know that, no.”
“Is she pretty?”
“No. Maybe kind of.”
“Oh. What’s she like?”
“I can see her in long red robes with a little red yarmulke on her head and a big gold cross on a chain around her neck and a ring that you have to kiss. Standing just to the left of the throne and whispering into the ear of the king.”
“Is that Machiavelli?”
“I was thinking more of that guy who worked for Nixon.”
“What does she think of you?”
“Not much. I work at the car wash, remember?”
“But that’s only temporary.”
“By me everything’s temporary. Good things and bad things.”
“That must be fascinating. The indeterminacy.”
“It’s fascinating.”
He lost nine pounds (a great blessing) during the eight months they lived in the apartment. They had not been slow to criticize his toes, teeth, belly, hair, or politics. “It seems to me,” Veronica had said one day, “that you have no social responsibility.” “My first social responsibility,” he had said, “is that the building doesn’t collapse.” “Right right right,” she said, “but you are after all a creature of the power structure. You work for the power structure.” This was true enough, revolutionaries didn’t build buildings, needed only closets to oil their Uzis in, no work for architects there. On the other hand Veronica and the others derived their own politics from a K-Mart of sources, Thomas Aquinas marching shoulder-to-shoulder with Simone de Beauvoir and the weatherbeaten troopers of Sixty Minutes. They were often left and right during the same conversation, sometimes the same sentence.
His headaches had gone away but had been replaced by early-morning vomiting. A few ounces of yellow bile produced each morning. He meditated on too much, thought carefully about a sufficiency. When the women had been living with him he had thought of himself, very often, as insufficiently virile, or insufficiently ambitious. Who needed this much excitation? On the other hand, who could resist it? Anne sometimes looked like a twenty-year-old, especially when she’d just bathed, the small breasts, the small hips, the dark hair. Dore was tall and bossy, there was no other word for it, and Veronica was, take your choice, sassy or critical, great lip on that kid, never without a spiked remark. He had the sense that he was a hotel, didn’t mind being a hotel, okay I’m a hotel. Two of them sucking his cock in the early mornings, taking turns, five or six o’clock, he was drinking white wine, not very good white wine, and smoking, this went on for a long while, sometimes they’d turn to one another and one would begin to lick the inside of the other’s legs up near the cunt, quite near, Simon with his hands on that one’s buttocks, around her waist and then moving down over the buttocks with slow appreciative strokes, raking them with his nails at intervals, but softly, little bites, but softly, the flesh is so delicious Dore said, or Anne said.
“You’ve been bad Veronica.”
“No I haven’t that’s not bad that’s hardly bad at all.”
“I agree with her. You’ve been bad.”
“No I haven’t I don’t call that —”
“Very bad.”
“I don’t call that bad that’s not hardly bad at all you should see what I’ve seen if you want to talk about —”
“Yes Veronica yes of course of course Veronica I didn’t think you’d admit it why should you? C’mon Anne there’s no reasoning with her.”
“Dore don’t go I haven’t been bad she’s just trying to tell you I’ve been bad but I mean are you going to believe her? Just because she says —”
“Well how do you feel?”
“Bad.”
“You see.”
“Oh God Dore now you’ve made her feel bad just talking about everything you’ve made her feel bad that she’s done something some little something she shouldn’t have done some little something that warrants horrible contrition —”
“I don’t mind making her feel bad. She’s bad.”
“Veronica, are you essentially what she says you are? Bad? You can tell me I’m your friend. I have other bad friends, if that —”
“Well spit. That’s what I think.”
“You’re not going to talk is that it?”
“Hit her.”
“I’m not going to hit her she’s a sister you can’t hit a sister even a bad sister that’s one of the eternal rules not even a terribly, terribly bad sister. Like Veronica.”