“What a wonderful thought. I have to tell you something unpleasant. Your friend Ralph in town died this afternoon. I waited because I didn’t want to tell you while you were enjoying your favorite lasagna dinner. His daughter is there on a visit. You should call her now.”
He broke down weeping. He sobbed, in fact, thinking that his friend might have died of a heart attack while trying to pull the cork from a recalcitrant bottle of wine. He wasn’t very strong. The two of them had recently been corresponding about Chinese poetry and he had begun to think of Ralph as his only true friend.
His wife held him and they sat there an hour vomiting up their souls, saying everything that was possible to say about their multiple faults that had kept them apart. Finally they made love to the obnoxious music of mosquitoes on the wooden floor of the porch.
Chapter 8
Long months of writing can pop your skull with strain. It’s the tediousness of exhaustion he went through, the ache of a period wherein he wrote a novel quickly followed by a novella. It was a life of compulsion. He missed the variety of pigs and wandering around France. He still had Marjorie but Mary had a bad paw and couldn’t walk. Marjorie had developed the illusion that she must look after Mary on walks rather than the natural vice versa. He figured that it was because she was conscious of her great size, probably about three hundred pounds he guessed.
One day he was walking Marjorie alone when the neighbor girl came past with her young German shepherd. The dog had likely never seen a pig before and scrambled under the fence in curiosity. The girl called out that her dog was “mean” and he yelled back, “So is my pig.” Marjorie attacked the dog which snarled and barked. Marjorie pinned the dog in a corner with three fence posts. The dog was being strangled and crushed at the same time while its jaws were ripping at the pig’s ears which she ignored. He tugged at Marjorie’s neck but couldn’t budge her. The girl tried to help but her skirt was caught in the barbed wire. He cautioned himself not to look up her lovely legs but to help her save her dog’s life. He managed to wriggle and wedge a hand down between the dog and Marjorie and rip up whereupon he was able to toss the dog over the fence getting nipped badly in the shoulder in the process. The girl cringed in horror because his shoulder was bleeding though not as badly as the pig’s ear. Meanwhile the dog headed home down the road at top speed. She embraced him. “Don’t tell my father.”
“Don’t worry. I’m fine.” He errantly let a hand slide down brushing her firm butt in the summer skirt. She trembled and so did his hand. She backed away, flushed.
“Why are we kissing?” she asked.
“Because we wanted to.” He kissed her again even more passionately and clutching her rump. She wriggled and his fingers inched into the cloth-covered crevices. Marjorie made an alarming noise and they turned to her. She was clearly glaring at the girl. “Marjorie sit.” Marjorie sat like a bird dog looking off as if embarrassed.
“I didn’t know you could train a pig like a dog.”
“It’s one of my specialties,” he said smugly.
“Maybe you could help me train my dog?”
“I’d be glad to.”
“I better get home. They’ll worry if I don’t come back with the dog.”
“One more kiss?” he said, pushing her a bit into the thicket that surrounded the big rocks down in the corner of the pasture. He began to lift her skirt.
She was frantic. “I don’t take the pill yet.” She squirmed loose and ran down the fence line.
He sighed and wondered how unlikely the whole thing was. She reminded him of a ripe peach.
His exhaustion made him feel inert. The one doctor was testing him for sleep apnea saying he wasn’t getting enough oxygen when he slept. He didn’t care what it was, he just wanted to be over it. He was inert with self-absorption, a detestable emotion where you only sat there thinking about your meaningless fatigue. He had been sleeping pleasantly with his wife since the death of his neighbor and the evening on the porch. She didn’t feel up to making love but neither did he. He slept most of the day on his studio sofa, meaning a short nap that always elongated itself. The incident with the girl, her dog, and the pig was the only true lust he had felt for months.
Earlier in his career he had easily presumed that many of his problems were clinical and could best be handled by a battery of psychiatrists. Of late the exhaustion problem seemed insuperable. He read widely, as always, in the area of his problem which brought on the usual frustration of knowing what precisely was wrong and still being unable to do anything about it. After the doctors he slept most of a month. Quite suddenly he couldn’t write a sentence but then he didn’t want to. It was all he could do to sign a credit card receipt. When up he drifted as if sleepwalking mostly watching the multiple species of birds coming north from Mexico.
Fifteen years before, bored with northern winters, they had rented a house on a creek on the Mexican border. He hadn’t realized that it was one of the prime bird areas of the United States but he happily assumed the childhood delight of identifying birds. He saw the rare Mexican blue mockingbird the first time it arrived there. The word got around and promptly there were literally hundreds of bird-watchers lining the fence crossing the creek on the property line. He was furious about the privacy invasion and told some of them that he was going to shoot the bird. A few women wept. He hung a sign saying, “Beware American Champ Pit Bull Black Savage.” That definitely helped but not all that much. He drove to Nogales and went to Walmart and bought a boom box stereo and some CDs of the Mexican border featuring the music of love, violence, and death. That helped the most and seemed to frighten everyone. People would quickly come and go. He was amused that the Mexican blue mockingbird would prance up and down dancing on the boom box.
The whole area was gorgeous, mostly forested mountains and some desert all with both flora and fauna. A mother and daughter mountain lion had killed and eaten a deer in their brushy front yard. A jaguar was seen within a few miles of their house. Rattlesnakes were a bit of a worry. He had to shoot one in their bedroom one day. His wife had left the French doors open and the snake had come in to cool off. This was nothing compared with their warm weather place in Montana where a professional snake catcher had to remove a thousand rattlers in a cliffside den after he had lost his favorite English setter Rose. She had been bitten in the face with a fang protruding from her eye.
Earlier in his career when his writing had him well up a scrawny tree he was bright enough to take a break. He had been forced to admit that you can become stupider as you get older. During his Guggenheim year in his thirties he fished a hundred times but still managed to write a novel and a book of poems as the weather was bad frequently in northern Michigan.
Now, when his talent had etiolated, he often sat there suppurating, or worse yet simply dozed. He had always been a championship sleeper. Once he had taken two friends fishing and had fallen asleep in the act of rowing. When he had landed at de Gaulle in Paris a stewardess had to shake him awake. He was scarcely raring to go into a new life. Five cups of coffee and he could sleep immediately. He prided himself on being a good thinker whatever that meant. Not much most of the time. Luckily his memory had held out against attrition. He could see clearly backward into his waxing and waning. To wane was easy. Just come to a dead stop and you’ll fall off the rails asleep.