Now, I came to recognize this woman’s difference, her rarity, not simply because she had an affair with my father, no; also, shortly thereafter, I myself fell into a period I’ve come to call The Rampage.
More tabloids. That Bette’s father should have cheated was shock enough. The man had never made much of an impression, compared to the likes of Cousin Cal. On him, Bette’s long-boned paleness looked watery. The father had a Vice Presidency at First Boston and an avocation for Scottish genealogy. On one wall of his den hung a framed letter from some Edinborough regimental society. Yet the news about “Fudds”—a regular sex machine, that Fudds — wasn’t the real surprise in today’s printout. What shook Kit more was that his wife should bring up, for the second time in less than a week, The Rampage. The Rampage, an in-the-bedroom version of trashing the family garden, picking the men up and putting them down.
In the photos Kit had seen from that time, his wife-to-be had worn her hair like a helmet. She’d thrust out one cowgirl hip as if it were the edge of an axe. Battle-ready. Kit lowered the printout, thinking back to the letter she’d left him last Tuesday. She’d mentioned Ivan, then. One of the very few I’ve kept in touch with. Very few, to put it mildly. Bette had gone most of their marriage without bringing up Ivan or any of her other one- and two-nighters from that time. Kit would’ve thought she’d never wanted to hear about The Rampage again.
The Rampage, The Rampage! — oh, don’t the “Cut” and “Paste” keys make it easy — The Rampage, The Rampage! “Cut” and “Paste:” just the thing for lacerations, my baby. Indeed as I consider it now, as I consider my wounds, I think that perhaps you would’ve done better to discuss this, um, “difficult period” (The Rampage!) with your stepfather, if you’d ever known your stepfather. He could have handled the subject more objectively, your handsome prince of a stepfather; he might even go so far as to say there was a prince or two before him; whereas your mother, my baby, your mother can’t think of them as princes. She finds this far too packed and painful a corner of the world for princes, your mother.
Oh, who shall I mention? perhaps that violent French post-doc who’d studied with Roland Barthes? — absolutely chockfull of theories, he was, and gifted with an innate fucker’s rhythm besides, but you had to watch him once he’d cracked the absinthe, you had to make sure there was someone else in the apartment. My baby, when I think of my Rampage partners, it’s like the old song: No way my prince will come — no way, not even if he’s that sweet teenage drug fiend who later turned up in Aerosmith: a wild thing on stage but a cuddly stuffed teddy bear off it (because you see he was far too much of teddy bear, all soft and marble-eyed) … Yes, your mother believes she ran a shameful gamut: shameful, rather predictable really, and utterly devoid of princes. Your mother’s starting to think this entire section should be redone; I scroll back up the screen and I can’t help thinking of your stepfather. One marvels at the man. Before I came upon his muckraking, I’d never thought that mere newsprint could carry such fervor; my baby, you’d have done better to discuss this with him.
But your mother, well. I’m starting to think I should have confined my input to more subtle business: to my schoolgirl self and the others who crossed the quads with me — to the whole intricate process by which “one of us” came of age. Your mother should never have mentioned her wicked past, because the mystery that matters is nothing so sensational; the mystery that matters is this other girl, the one with the unsullen practicality etc., who fell in love with my father. You need to know, you and your stepfather both — you need to understand how one of us came of age, and how my father’s one turned out, in the end, different. Let’s see … there was that thing she said to Hildreth that time Peggy and Alison were talking about the Patty Hearst kidnapping, and then there was the way Hildreth reported what she’d said, the angle of her smile (I mean Hildreth’s smile) and the way she (Hildreth again) wagged her bottle of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine, and then there was that time while Megan and I were waiting for her boyfriend (Megan’s boyfriend) to call and I myself brought up the Patty Hearst affair, and the particular angle of the irony I gave to what I said by repeating what this woman (Our Woman Now In Providence) had said … let’s see.
A subtle business, isn’t it, my baby? O, subtle — o, silliness. There were a thousand thousand faint shadings and shifts in how one of us came of age, don’t you know; there’s a veritable War and Peace to be written about us, the New England Natashas; it would include even the palest prism in a sunstruck dorm window on that long afternoon when, say, the ’60s shaded into the ’70s…
Am I playing games, here at my Apple? playing giddy teen games after all? I came to this with something serious to say: I’d decided that you were born out of my father’s affair.
I think I’ll name the woman Dee, as in Dee-lete.
Now Dee was well into Med School the last she and I spoke — that is, not long after her fling with old Fudds — and she intended to work in obstetrics (small world), and so you see at the Providence Women’s Crisis Center (new world), all your mother needed to do was ask whether there were a Doctor Dee in town. A Doctor Dee, you see, because the at-home Dee clearly had an unlisted number — something your mother’s been thinking of getting herself, lately … At any event le Centre du Crise proved remarkably helpful, and I couldn’t help but think of your stepfather, again: forever helpful and sincere and, unlike your mother, perfectly direct. Yes direct: that’s Dee, Ayy, Arrgh.
By now Kit was out of his coat and into nightclothes. Dry clothes, even warm — the bureau stood beside the radiator. The pieces of the gun ended up on top of the bureau, beside the photo of his father. He left the Percodan up there too, still untouched. Through all this Kit never lost the thread of his wife’s thinking. Her previous letter had seemed to him written in another language, if not another medium, but now it seemed he could handle a more complex wave-pattern. But that was also precisely what hurt: how well he and Bette knew each.
The entire weekend’s been like that, don’t you know, I’ve been forever thinking of some third party even in the midst of trying to reach my second party … Indeed such distractions have been buzzing about my head for longer than that: there’s a certain Ms., yes Mzzzz, a real bee in my bonnet (your stepfather will know who I mean [if I am in fact doing this input for him]); and there’s been another ghost about, lately, another half-mad apparition out of mean times (and shall I nest one clue inside another again? [you really should read this, stepfather]).
Ivan, Kit figured. The “mean times” were the Rampage, and Ivan certainly qualified as half-mad. He was the one who’d told Bette about the psychic.
You know just last week I visited, well, a medium? A woman who speaks with ghosts? — looking for you, my baby, looking for my little lost loup-garou: that’s why I went. Mysteries have their solutions, God knows, and that goes for the mystery of my visiting a medium, too; I got the idea when that other ghost in my life started to groan over the phone (o, how he does groan, over the phone) … and last week I lacked the strength to search out my real Mrs. Dee, my real mystery (o, you input imp!) … and so I began to think of you, my baby. I began to look for you — though first, wouldn’t you know it, in-Dee-rectly. In unlikely places.