The next morning, after driving down from the station at Indianapolis (we’d taken my car so as to leave the Buick and Cadillac free for Mac and Violet, respectively), I dropped off Prok at the Institute and Corcoran at his place, then drove out to the farmhouse. I’d thought of picking up a little gift for Iris — flowers, a box of candy, perfume — but hadn’t got round to it, so I stopped at the market and wandered the aisles till I found something I thought she might like, and it represented a bit of an extravagance for us: a two-pound sack of California pistachios, salted and roasted in the shell. I was all the way up to the counter before I remembered John Jr., and I had to go back and dig a pint of Neapolitan ice cream out of the freezer, and then I wondered if Iris might not have run out of coffee or bread or eggs while I was gone, so I wound up getting some basic supplies too.
I pulled in under the canopy of the weeping willow out front, its remnant of yellowed branches hanging in a skeletal curtain, and already felt my mood sour. It was always this way. As much as I looked forward to seeing Iris and my son, as much as I held their faces before me as a kind of talisman during the tedious hours of travel and history-taking, the minute I pulled into the drive I saw a host of things that had been neglected in my absence, the trashcan overflowing at the rear of the house, the door to the basement left gaping, the tarp blown clear of the fire-wood. And more: she’d left the porch light burning, no doubt for the whole ten days, and that kind of waste just infuriated me. I bundled the groceries in one arm and took the suitcase in the other, and the first thing I did on mounting the steps was kick the deliquescing remains of a jack-o’-lantern off the corner of the porch. Which made a mess of my shoe. And then I had to fumble with the door, almost dropping the groceries in the process.
Inside, it was worse. She must have had the thermostat set at a hundred — more waste — and the chemical reek of ammonia from the cat’s litter pan hit me like a fist in the face, and whose job was it to change that? There were toys and infant’s clothes scattered round the living room, newspapers, spine-sprung books, knitting — and food, a smear of it, in two shades of apricot, on the new-painted, or recently painted, wall. I didn’t say anything, didn’t call out her name, just dropped the suitcase at the door, trudged out to the kitchen and set the groceries on the counter. And, of course, the kitchen was a story in itself. I tried to stay calm. I was tired, that was all — irritable, maybe a bit hungry — and Iris had had her hands full, stuck out here all by herself, John Jr. in his roaming phase, getting into everything, needful, always needful. I tried, but even as I mounted the stairs to the bedroom, I could feel a dark knot of irascibility beating at my temples like something shoved under the skin, like a splinter and the hot needle to chase it down.
Iris was in bed, asleep, curled round the prow of her hip and the sharp terminus of her folded knees; John Jr. stood silently in the playpen at the foot of the bed, clutching the bars and staring at me as if I were a visitation out of the universal unconscious. He had Iris’s eyes exactly. “Hey, champ,” I said, and I squatted down to poke my face in his, “Daddy’s home.”
My son gave me a smile of sudden stunned recognition, followed by a gurgle of infantile transport, baby joy naked and unfeigned, and I took him under the arms and swung him out of the playpen even as the fecal odor swamped the room: he needed to be changed, had needed to be changed for some time. “Yes,” I cooed, “that’s the boy,” and set him back on his feet behind the wooden slats of his gaudy prison. At which point, he began to wail.
“What?” Iris pushed herself up, struggling to focus. There were two parallel indentations on her cheek where her face had creased the pillow, red stripes that might have been wounds. She was in her nightgown still, though it was nearly noon. “John? Oh, God, you scared me.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I scare myself sometimes too.” I made no move toward her. John Jr. began to outdo himself, each shriek building on its predecessor like waves crashing in a storm.
“Here,” she said, holding out her arms, “give him here.”
I lifted the squalling bundle of him from the playpen, careful to avoid the wet spot at the crotch of his playsuit. Playpen, playsuit, playmate, playtime: more euphemisms. “He needs to be changed,” I said.
I watched her fussing over him, the shrieks subsiding into disconnected wails that were like the sound of shingles falling off a roof. The walls closed in on me. Everything was a mess, everything stank. “What,” I said, “are you sick?”
No, she wasn’t sick, she wasn’t sick at all. She’d never felt better — physically, that is.
So what was the problem?
She was depressed.
“You’re depressed?” I loomed over the bed. Her face was small, a nugget, sidelong and averted. “What about me? I’m the one who had to sit in some rancid overheated room for ten days and watch a thousand men jerk off. You think that’s fun? You think I like it?”
A silence. The tragic underlip. “Yes, John,” she said finally, her eyes fixed on mine, “I think you do. You do it with Prok, don’t you? And Purvis? And half the tramps and male hustlers in, in — go ahead, hit me. Will that make you feel like a big man, huh, will it?”
I didn’t hit her. I’ve never hit her and never will. And when I spoke earlier in pugilistic terms, of bouts and rounds, you have to understand that it was meant metaphorically, strictly metaphorically. Certainly we had our disagreements, like anyone else, but violence had no place in them, at least not physical violence. I just turned my back on her and stalked out the door. I might have kicked something against the wall in the living room, a teddy bear or a toy dump truck, I don’t remember, and then I went out in the yard to have a smoke and let the dead gray November sky feed my mood.
Later, when we’d both cooled off, she got up and dressed and changed the baby. She made a real effort to tidy up the place — it just wasn’t in her nature to let the housekeeping go, at least not for long — and she went out of her way to make a nice meal that night. I’d gone in to the Institute to put in half a day, and when I got back I must have dozed off, because I remember waking to the smell of something in the oven, and then Iris padded into the room — the living room; I was on the couch — and deposited a bathed and talcum-scented toddler in my lap, along with a glass of beer.
I played with John Jr. a moment, and then he got down and staggered off across the room to rummage among his dump trucks and steam shovels. “Listen, Iris,” I said, lifting my eyes to hers, “I’m sorry about this morning. I didn’t mean — I was tired, that’s all.”
Iris had her own glass of beer. She was wearing a gingham house-dress, blue and white, and her hair was up. “You were in a pretty foul mood,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I was thinking of the calculus of a relationship, how sex equals love equals babies, mortgages and cellar doors left ajar, and how love itself is nothing more than a hormonal function, purely chemical, like rage and hate. But I had a beer in my hand and a roof over my head, and my son was there, and my wife, and what more could anyone want? Other wives, other sons, other roofs? I felt charitable. Felt content. “But, hey,” I suggested, “how about if I build a fire? Would you like that?”
“Sure, that would be nice.” She was propped on the arm of the chair, one leg dangling, her pretty leg, her ankle, her foot in its trim felt slipper. “But, John, there’s something I wanted to say to you — and don’t give me that look because it’s nothing like that. It’s — well, I want you to teach me how to drive. Violet and Hilda drive everywhere — Violet says she’d be lost without her car — and even Mac, Mac drives, and if you’re going to be gone all the time—”