“Old Hegel.”
“Don’t be so snotty. We have Hegel in Denver.”
“Hegel is quite sexy. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.”
“You think that’s where he got the idea?”
“Could be.”
Simon positions the white plaster egg eight feet tall in the sitting room. The women are watching. He smashes it with an iron-headed maul. Inside are three naked young men. Their names are Harry.
Q: I sometimes imagine that I am in Pest Control. I have a small white truck with a red diamond-shaped emblem on the door and a white jump suit with the same emblem on the breast pocket. I park the truck in front of a subscriber’s neat three-hundred-thousand-dollar home, extract the silver canister of deadly pest-killer from the back of the truck, and walk up the brick sidewalk to the house’s front door. Chimes ring, the door swings open, a young wife in jeans and a pink flannel shirt worn outside the jeans is standing there. “Pest Control,” I say. She smiles at me, I smile back and move past her into the house, into the handsomely appointed kitchen. The canister is suspended by a sling from my right shoulder, and, pumping the mechanism occasionally with my right hand, I point the nozzle of the hose at the baseboards and begin to spray. I spray alongside the refrigerator, alongside the gas range, under the sink, and behind the kitchen table. Next, I move to the bathrooms, pumping and spraying. The young wife is in another room, waiting for me to finish. I walk into the main sitting room and spray discreetly behind the largest pieces of furniture, an oak sideboard, a red plush Victorian couch, and along the inside of the fireplace. I do the study, spraying behind the master’s heavy desk on which there is an open copy of the Columbia Encyclopedia, he’s been looking up the Seven Years War, 1756-63, yellow highlighting there, and behind the forty-five-inch RCA television. The master bedroom requires just touches, like perfume behind the ear, short bursts in her closet which must avoid the two dozen pairs of shoes there and in his closet which contains six to eight long guns in canvas cases. Finally I spray the laundry room with its big white washer and dryer, and behind the folding table stacked with sheets and towels already folded. Who folds? I surmise that she folds. Unless one of the older children, pressed into service, folds. In my experience they are unlikely to fold. Maybe the au pair. Finished, I tear a properly-made-out receipt from my receipt book and present it to the young wife. She scribbles her name in the appropriate space and hands it back to me. The house now stinks quite palpably but I know and she knows that the stench will dissipate in two to four hours. The young wife escorts me to the door, and, in parting, pins a silver medal on my chest and kisses me on both cheeks. Pest Control!
Four o’clock in the morning. Simon listening to one of his radios, sipping white wine. Two horn players are talking about Coltrane.
“The thing is,” one says, and the other bursts in to say, “Yeah, but wait a minute.”
A Woody Shaw record is played. Simon’s using earphones so he can play the music as loud as he pleases without disturbing the women. At low volume you lose half of it, a thing his wife had never understood. Now one of the guests is praising D flat. “This is on ITC,” the host says. “ITC is a new label that’s just getting started in LA. They’re getting new guys and doing new things.” The drummer on the Woody Shaw record is wonderfully skillful if a bit orotund.
“Great one,” says one of the guys on the radio, when the Wynton Marsalis track is over.
“A lot of humility,” says the other. “I mean he can do it all.”
Simon suddenly remembers putting on his daughter’s shoes, in the morning, before his wife took her to nursery school. His wife brought in the child and the shoes, and Sarah would sit on his lap as sneaker was fitted to foot. “Make your toes little,” he’d say, and she’d perversely spread them.
“New York is a bitch,” the radio says, “but there’s more community.”
Wheat-germ bubble gum was served
At the Maniacs’ Ball
He lays himself down in bed, sleeps fitfully for an hour and a half. At six he’s up again, in a t-shirt and jeans, moving around the apartment. The women are all still sleeping. He looks out of the windows. On the street a man in violet running shorts is carrying a woman on his shoulders, she’s in fact riding him, her legs around his neck. The man is heavy, muscular, carries his rider with spectacular ease. The woman is in her early forties, the man the same age or a little younger. The man runs in circles, the woman waves like a circus performer. It’s six-thirty.
When he goes out to get the Times there is a semi-corpse in the vestibule, a barely breathing Hispanic male. He’s vomited blood and blood is all over the red tile. Simon shakes the man’s shoulder. Whiskey smell and no visible wounds. He shakes the man again. No response.
There’s a hospital at the end of the block. Simon, on the sidewalk, stops a resident on the way to work. He’s Oriental, Korean or Japanese, white-clothed, a stethoscope stuck in his right-hand jacket pocket.
“There’s a man in here. Not in good shape.”
The doctor looks annoyed.
“Call nine one one.”
“I think you’d better look at him. He looks pretty far gone.”
With clear reluctance the doctor, a small man with a mustache, follows Simon into the vestibule. He bends over the fallen man, taking care not to touch him.
“Call the hospital. Something in the —”
He moves one hand up and down his chest.
“Drunk, too.”
Simon trudges back upstairs and telephones the hospital.
And what if we grow old together, just the four of us? The loving quartet? What if we raddle together? They of course raddling at a rate less precipitant than my own. I have a quarter-century advantage, in terms of raddling. He’s WAD, as the medical students say, Whirling Around the Drain. What kind of old ladies will these old ladies be? Veronica will be, as ever, moody. She’ll do something immensely foolish, like writing a book. The book will be an extended meditation on the word “or,” or the road not taken, or the road taken but not enjoyed, or the road taken and enjoyed to the fullest, a celebration of “or” not less fun-some than Kierkegaard’s. Twelve people will read the book. Four will write her letters. I will read the book but not write her a letter. “Good work,” I will say to Veronica, clapping her on the shoulder several times to signal hearty congratulation. “That type…” The book will have been set in Bulmer, a typeface most eloquent, anorexic Bodoni but speaking nevertheless. Veronica will bring me my toddy as I sit by the fire, two pints of tequila laced with capers and a little gunpowder. She’ll kiss my knee, which will probably, by this time, resemble a drill bit. I’ll place my claw in her hair, now red and a very convincing red thanks to improved Dupont manipulation of the Periodic Table. The old folks at home.
Dore will come in and demand to know where my penis has got to. I don’t know, I’ll say, it was there yesterday, more or less. You call that there, she’ll say, scornfully, and I’ll say, I am a poor relic, a poor husk, a leftover, a single yellow bean covered with Cling Wrap sailing on a flawed plate through the refrigerator of life. Yes, she’ll say, excuses, you promised us Eden, you did, I remember, not anything you said in so many words but by implication, you implied that we would be happy forever together… I didn’t! I’ll say, or scream, I always said that things would turn out badly, consult the records, look at the transcript, you have no right to —