A: Every night! It’s too much. What recourse? The grinding of teeth.
Q: Where do you see yourself going from here? In life.
A: More of the same, I suppose. When I was married I’d find myself looking forward to Dumbo, you know? Dumbo was going to be on television at say seven-thirty in the evening and the kid was going to watch it and that was what I had to look forward to, too.
Q: I liked it.
A: I liked it. Bizarre, when you think about it.
Q: The part I remember is when all the storks dropped all the parachutes from the sky and all the little baby tigers and hippos rolled out of the diapers — the bundles the storks were carrying were diapers, those boys don’t miss a trick — before the eyes of their astonished tiger and hippo parents. That was cute.
A: Terrifying. Because it was so well done.
Q: I don’t want to live on a farm, to go back to the farm. It’s too risky and I don’t know what to do. Some damn cow or other is yelling and I don’t know what to do to alleviate her pain. Do I put the wheat in now or do I wait two weeks? The combine, its drive chain is acting up and I ought to be able to fix it by slamming it a few times with a hammer, but I don’t know where to slam it. I don’t know how to talk to the bank. Some guys know all this stuff and I tell myself I’m not supposed to know it because I’m not a farmer. Yet I think I ought to be a farmer or at least be capable of being a farmer. Maybe it’s atavistic…
A: I’d be perfectly comfortable living in a hotel. I take that to be the opposite pole. Not necessarily a grand hotel, a shabby but still stuffy hotel.
Q: Bedford Square. In London.
A: Never been to London.
Q: Where have you been?
A: Tokyo, Mexico City, Paris, Barcelona, Stockholm, Palermo, Reykjavik —
Q: Lots of hotels in those places.
A: Stayed in the poorer ones, for the most part. Said to the chambermaid, your breasts look beautiful this morning.
Q: Shouldn’t make fun of them.
A: I wasn’t. I lusted after the chambermaids. Not every one.
Q: Nothing wrong with that.
A: But what if they stab me in the ear with the feather duster?
Q: Would you like to try some of these little yellow guys here?
Simon was a way station, a bed-and-breakfast, a youth hostel, a staging area, a C-141 with the jumpers of the 82nd Airborne lined up at the door. There was no place in the world for these women whom he loved, no good place. They could join the underemployed half-crazed demi-poor, or they could be wives, those were the choices. The universities offered another path but one they were not likely to take. The universities were something Simon believed in (of course! he was a beneficiary) but there was among the women an animus toward the process that would probably never be overcome, not only impatience but a real loathing, whose source he did not really understand. Veronica told him that she had flunked Freshman English 1303 three times. “How in the world did you do that?” he asked. “Comma splices,” she said. “Also, every time I wrote down something I thought, the small-section teacher said that it was banal. It probably was banal.” Simon found what the women had to say anything but banal, instead edged and immediate. Maybe nothing that could be rendered in a 500-word theme, one bright notion and four hundred and fifty words of hay. Or psychology: Harlow, rhesus monkeys, raisins, reward. People did master this stuff, more or less, and emerged more or less enriched thereby. Compare and contrast extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, giving examples of each. Father-beaten young women considering extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. “We all went through this,” he told them, and Dore said, “Yeah, and you smart guys did the Vietnam war.” Simon had opposed the Vietnam war in all possible ways short of self-immolation but could not deny that it was a war constructed by people who had labored through Psychology I, II, III, and IV and Main Currents of Western Thought. “But, dummy, it’s the only thing you’ve got,” he said. “Your best idea.” “I have the highest respect for education,” she said. “The highest. I’d be just as dreary when I came out as I was when I went in.”
Howls from outside the front windows. It’s past midnight. Simon goes down the stairs to the street.
A man in an old Army field jacket is screaming something about the Supreme Court. He’s been screaming, up and down the block, for the past six months. He has an exceptionally deep voice and projects with an actor’s skill. Simon has learned from other people in the neighborhood that he’s called Hal and sleeps on a grate in front of the hospital.
“Chickenfuckers!” Hal screams.
“Hal,” Simon calls.
“Kissass mother!”
“Hal,” Simon calls again. “Take this five bucks. Go eat something.”
Hal approaches. He’s taller than Simon, about forty, and wearing a zippered jump suit under the field jacket.
“Up your giggy fuckface,” he screams, but a quieter scream.
“Time for breakfast, Hal.”
“Thank you,” Hal says in a normal conversational tone, and takes the bill.
He wheels and marches off down the street, screaming “Cunts cunts cunts cunts cunts!”
Simon goes back upstairs.
Veronica comes into his room looking very gloomy,
“We have to talk,” she says. She’s wearing a rather sedate dark-blue nightgown, one he hasn’t seen before.
“What’s the matter?”
“Dore. She’s falling apart.”
“In what way?”
“She’s lost her joy of life.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“She tries to hide it from you.”
“Maybe it’s just temporary.”
“I’ve never seen her like this. She’s been reading terrible books. Books about how terrible men are and how they’ve kept us down.”
“That should make her feel better, not worse. I mean, knowing the causes.”
“Don’t need your cheapo irony, Simon. She’s very upset.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Talk to her.”
“What can I say? I agree with half that stuff and think the other half is garbage.”
“Well it’s not for you to decide, is it? Whenever we say something you don’t like you say we’re hysterical or crazy.”
“Me?”
“Men in general.”
“Have I ever said you were hysterical or crazy?”
“Probably you didn’t want to stir us up. Probably you were thinking it and were just too tactful to say it.”
“Are you sure it’s Dore who’s got this problem?”
“She’s been lending us the books. What else do we have to do with our time?”
“So you’re all upset.”
“The truth shall make you free.”
“What makes you think this stuff is the truth?”
“Thirty-five percent of all American women aren’t allowed to talk at dinner parties. Think about that.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s in a book.”
In hog heaven the hogs wait in line for more heaven. No, not right, no waiting in line, it’s unheavenly, unhogly. The celestial sty is quilted in kale, beloved of hogs. A male hog walks up to a female hog, says “Want to get something going?” She is repulsed by his language, says “Bro, unless you can phrase that better, you’re chilly forever.” No, that’s not right, this is hog heaven, they fall into each other’s trotters, nothing can be done wrong here, nothing wrong can be done…