“Well it’s just what I thought would happen what I thought would happen and it happened.”
“He’s a free human individual not bound to us.”
“Maybe we’re too much for him maybe he needs more of a one-on-one thing see what I’m saying?”
“It may be just a temporary aberration that won’t last very long like when suddenly you see somebody in a crowded Pizza Hut or something and you think, I could abide that.”
“But if she’s a poet then she won’t keep him poets burn their candles down to nubs. And then find new candles. That’s what they do.”
“I don’t know I still feel threatened I mean I’m as generous as the next man but I still feel emphatically that our position here has radically altered for the worse. Somehow.”
“Poets eat up all of experience and then make poems of it is she any good?”
“He thinks so.”
“What does he know he’s an architect.”
“He was doing Comp Lit before he got kicked out of USC.”
“What’d he get kicked out for?”
“Slugged a dean in a riot, it was a First Amendment thing he says.”
Tim comes in wearing a dark-blue flannel suit with a faint pinstripe. He leaks prosperity.
“Tim!” Veronica says. “What’s happened to you?”
“This is from Paul Stuart,” Tim says. “Seven hundred bucks. Do you like it?”
“You look like a new man. A new and better man.”
“I got something going,” Tim says. “I’m president of this new outfit we’re putting together. Medlapse. It’s a law firm.”
“But you’re not a lawyer,” Dore says. “Are you?”
“The concept was mine,” he says, “lawyers you can Xerox on any street corner. We’re specializing in malpractice, it’s everywhere. I estimate that forty-seven percent of all patient-physician encounters have elements that would tend to support a successful action. We project a ninety-eight percent rate of recovery over two years.”
“Veronica’s been going to this guy over on Hudson Street,” Anne says, “he’s kind of peculiar.”
“You think he’s peculiar I don’t think he’s peculiar,” says Veronica.
“What’s…” Tim reaching into his jacket for a notebook.
“He insists on being paid in cash only.”
“Diddling his taxes.”
“He doesn’t have a nurse.”
“Violation of AMA guidelines on sexual oversight, he’s OB-GYN?”
“His name is Linh pronounced Ling he’s Vietnamese he was a general in Vietnam.”
“They were all generals in Vietnam,” Tim says,
“What’re you seeing him for if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Just various things he’s cheap, twenty dollars for an office visit.”
“When you’re ready, Medlapse is ready, can I take you ladies out to lunch, rip up a chop?”
“Where did you have in mind?”
“Blimpie’s?”
“You’re not going to Blimpie’s in that suit?”
“Our cash flow is not on line as yet.”
He’s chopping garlic. Six big cloves of garlic. He minces the garlic and sautés it in olive oil. Meanwhile he’s cooking a package of frozen broccoli in a half-cup of salted water. He drains the broccoli and places it in the sauté pan for two or three minutes, at the same time heating a can of chicken broth and half a can of water. He adds chopped parsley to the pan, lets it cook for a bit, then scoops the contents of the sauté pan into the chicken broth and adds a number of slices of hot cooked Italian sausage. He cooks this for a time and then pours it into bowls and adds generous portions of grated parmesan.
A simple soup. Anne says she likes it. “The best soup I’ve had in decades. I thought I hated broccoli but it just kind of falls apart in this soup and becomes vague green stuff, very tasty. Is it artificially colored?”
“Why do you ask?”
“It’s too green.”
“That’s God’s own sun.”
“You’re sure it’s not Union Carbide.”
“I don’t think Carbide does broccoli.”
“This household is a classic case of exploitation by inadversion.”
Simon scratches his head like Lionel Barrymore in an old movie. “Tarnation take it,” he says, “if I get your drift.”
“The male manipulation of every dimension of experience for the suppression and domination of female-kind.”
“Right,” Simon says. “A big subject.”
“Getting bigger every day,” she says, suddenly cheerful.
“You see a lot of suppression and domination around here?”
“No this setup doesn’t fit the model because it’s so laissez-faire. But if we got into its deep structure —” She stops and begins again. “You don’t care about anything, Simon. You just go along cooking dinner and fucking us indiscriminately and reading The Wall Street Journal. Your vital interests are not involved here. You don’t give a shit.”
“How do you know?”
Once he’d been in the kitchen with Anne in the early morning. She was wearing a thin transparent shift, nothing else. They had already made love and in the kitchen scuffled for a long time alternately embracing and struggling, Simon running his hands over her breasts, her back, between her legs, Anne hugging him and then jumping up and wrapping her legs around his waist. “This is a female fantasy,” she had said, “love in the kitchen.” “Love instead of the kitchen,” he said, and she said, “But I like the kitchen.” Her buttocks were such as to drive men wild, drive men wild, he said, and she said that when she’d been in high school she’d worn extremely short shorts with just that in mind, had in fact been sent home a time or two. “My mother couldn’t control me,” she said, “I was uncontrollable.” He picked her up and seated her on top of the refrigerator and she threw an avocado at him and he caught it as it smushed in his hand. He spread her legs and ate her as she sat atop the refrigerator, her arms cradling his head. “Play is what it’s all about,” she said, “what does it taste like?” “Little bit salty,” he said, his tongue laving her belly button, “must be those blackeyed peas we had last night or maybe just your temperament in general.”
“So she kicked you out,” Anne says.
“She didn’t kick me out, exactly.”
“Was she better than we are?”
“It was kind of a detour.”
“Are you sorry?”
“No.”
“It would be nice if you were sorry.”
“Everybody always wants somebody to be sorry. Fuck that.”
“Veronica had a little thing with a fireman.”
“Where’d she get the fireman?”
“A & P. His name was Salvatore. He let her slide down the pole.”
“Did he.”
“He was married.”
“That’s tragic. Is it tragic?”
“Just a detour.”
He hugs her. “Frolic and detour, the lawyers say.”
“But a real poet.”
“She’s no realer than you are.”
“Do you like women more than music?”
“A little.”
“You came back because you love us more than you loved her.”
“Well, I do.”
A: I thought people weren’t supposed to have more than three or four nightmares a year. I have them every night, there is no night in which I don’t have something that can fairly be described as a nightmare. Many of them have to do with clothes.
Q: The wrong clothes.
A: Not so much the wrong clothes as not being able to get dressed. In particular, the trousers, in dreams I have great, enormous difficulty bringing the trousers up over the knees. The shoes, for some reason I have put on my shoes first and then try to put on the trousers, try to pull them over the shoes…
Q: I often dream that my rifle isn’t clean. You can clean it and clean it and then the sergeant looks down the barrel and decides it’s not clean, it’s got very little to do with whether the barrel is or is not clean, it’s a metaphysical proposition related to the Art of War, your poor place within that scheme…