Last Bender

10.4

There were no messages on the machine so I put on the TV and lay down on the bed and faced the sky above the buildings across the street. It was a clear night and still warm. I lay there not thinking, listening to book TV, until I started to get hungry. Nothing sounded good.

When the phone finally rang I ran to it, I confess.

“So you’re back then,” she said. “How was work?”

My stomach growled. I looked at the clock on the cable box. Ten. No wonder I was hungry. “I’ve been home for two hours.”

“When do you usually close?”

“As soon as I give up hope. It’s a struggle from 1 o’clock on. I had my employee there to keep my nose to the grindstone. He guilted me and left, the callous bastard.”

“Bartleby!”

“He’s far more Iago let me tell you. He seduces me with lies about myself and twists me about my own professed ideals. I’m skewered like a fool and grateful for it.”

“Did I ever tell you that my mother’s first therapist in New York was named Iago? It explains a lot.”

“Franklin Roosevelt said to Ickes, I think it was, or one of those men, ‘You’re my right hand, and my left is under the table.’”

“Oh like Henry the 8th, ‘If I thought my hat knew my counsel, I should cast it in the fire and burn it.’”

“Yes. ‘Three may keep counsel, if two be out of the room.’”

“Did you get my book?”

“Not yet. I ordered it. And I Googled it. You.”

“Well, now you know all about me.”

“Your class webpage, and the reviews. No websites dedicated to you as of yet. Is there a sallycam?”

“I’m a voyeur, not an exhibitionist.”

“I suppose that’s something we have in common?”

“Are you married?’

“No.”

“So that’s the TV?”

I turned it down and then off. “There.”

“I didn’t mean that. I’m surprised you watch TV.”

“What else is there to do?”

“I don’t know. Go out. Don’t you ever go out?”

“No.”

“But you must do something.”

“I see Tammy and her family. They’re nice to me, I love her kids, her husband is OK. We do the major holidays I don’t do with my mother and the chiropractor.”

“Herb Cheese,” she said.

“Czischz.”

“Don’t you have a girlfriend, someone you go out with?”

“Nothing regular.”

There was silence. I could tell by the breathing that she was guessing at my meaning. “So you just like screw around.”

“Something like that.”

She took in her breath and said, “Me too.”

“Only in your case–”

 “Well, I do want to be in love again some day. I believe it could happen,” she said.

“I’m too old for that,” I said.

“Old!” she shrieked. “Are you even fifty yet?”

“This year. I already got my AARP card.”

“That’s not old at all Alex, don’t be pathetic. Go out and have a few drinks.”

“Strange advice from an alcoholic.”

“I said a few drinks. With me it was never a few drinks. My life was a mess. It was starting to affect my work. I’m lucky to have gotten this job. It’s a real break, a second chance.”

“Your book didn’t hurt.”

“You read the reviews. I was attacked from all sides. It’s funny, I never thought about it being read by more than a few hundred people. My first book was like anyone else’s. I hardly expected this one to even get published. I just wanted to write about the plays and the time and bring everything I knew to it and then push past that in some direction I’d never gone before, and I wouldn’t plan where it would be, I’d have to know when I got there. I think it was when I finally could think about my mother’s death, when I was sober enough to grieve.”

“I didn’t know. I’m sorry. I loved your mother. How?”

“They don’t know. It was strange circumstances. She had a seizure driving one night and hit a tree going thirty miles an hour. After that, over a few months, she became totally debilitated. Anyway, it was horrible. She was 70. She died of pneumonia. I had so many bad years after that, but when it was over and I could see I saw the mother material, and started thinking about female inheritance and all the rest of it. Lineages. Networks. Nodes. The last chapter, the one that got me in all the trouble for my romantic stance, I wrote for you.”

“You wrote for me?”

“Well sure, you’ll see when you read it. But it’s about replacing the word desire with the word love, when we speak of books, and not texts. I thought of the way you used to touch a book when you were searching its contents for a quote, or how you held it in your hand to make a point, thumping the side with your finger, and how you read to express yourself, read mad and read depressed and read defiantly. Your relationship with the book was one of love, your interpenetration with the book is a loving one. It becomes a part of the mysterium, how one thing stands for another and perception creates what it sees.”

I didn’t know what to say so I said, “I see.”

“Ha!”

“So you were a wreck at meetings too? I’m trying to picture you as a drunk.”

“Well, your memory was always quite good, you must remember.”

“You sometimes drank too much. Everyone did.”

“I was always shooting my mouth off at school, smartest person in the room stuff, and the youngest. But that wasn’t such a big deal. Everybody is an egotist and it becomes a matter of habit and survival. But then I stopped producing, no more papers, a lot of sick days, no departmental duties. I wouldn’t show up places and then I ran into some ethical problems. They were doing me in.”

“Ethical? Were you stealing? Or having an affair–”

“Neither. I was watching porn. Downloading it. My work computer, home. They found it all. It started when I got into queer theory, which I had to include with gender, class and race. And it was sexy. It was that or post colonial. You could combine them. Whatever. You know how it is. I watched a few documentaries about avant-garde queer cinema in Germany, and I started to read about the politics of gay porn, and I watched queer movies, and those naked hairless men fucking really got me off.”

“Ew, hairless? I always like a little turf with my surf.”

“It was disturbing. I lost all desire for real men and just watched them fuck for hours and hours. They had the biggest fucking dicks you ever saw. That’s all I could think about. It was like being insane. I pretended it was research but I would go home after classes, open a bottle of scotch, take a few Xanax and watch all night long till I passed out. Then a few of my grad students started to come over, young, wild gay kids mostly who wanted to take my classes and whom I had no business hanging out with. I’d show them porno movies and we’d snort cocaine. I got caught when one of the grad students brought an undergrad and we were all really high and I started to make out with her. I hardly knew what I was doing. She told her parents. She thought it was funny. The kid also put it on her MySpace page. I’m surprised you didn’t get that when you did your search.”

“I didn’t go onto LexisNexis.”

“I squeaked through the investigation, but I was on a short leash, probation, and I had to go into therapy and treatment, of course. I’m surprised they didn’t make me pee in a cup. I negotiated a sabbatical, and Lydia drove me to Tully Hill in upstate New York. I went back twice but here I am.” She laughed. “More kicks than pricks I guess.”

“When did you manage to write the book?”

“I had all the research, it just wasn’t adding up to anything. I was stuck, but I kept reading of course, and taking notes. A lot of my hangovers were really lazy excuses to stay home and write. So when I got sobered up enough I got to work and it came out quickly. For the first time in my life I had a narrative I felt in control of, I didn’t panic about the details, they would be there to fall into place. I just knew that. And I’ve always been good at the scholarship. I have detailed notes going back to college. And bibliographies are a cinch. So I could fly and I did.”

“I’m going to switch phones. I’m hungry.”

“Don’t you have a cordless phone?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t work in the kitchen.”

“What are you eating.”

“I don’t know. I fell into a swoon and now I have a headache and I think I need to eat.” The kitchen phone is a pain in the ass. I cradled it against my ear and opened the fridge to see what there was to eat. “It looks like cold pasta with tomato sauce.”

“What kind of pasta?”

“Linguini, with mussels and clams.”

“No sausage.”

“Not in mine. I don’t eat much meat any more. As usual, I’m against the trend.”

“Well, I’m glad I caught you at home. I think I have to go now. You can eat.”

“When will you call again?”

“When I get to town, We’re going to have dinner, right? I don’t know that many people here anymore.”

I shut the refrigerator door and held the phone with my hand. “What does that mean for us then?”

She paused and said, “I don’t know.”

“Neither do I.” We said goodnight. I had not said what I felt, but there didn’t seem to be a way. I heated the pasta in a saucepan with a little water to steam it. Then I ate in the bedroom on the bed, facing the chair and the window. The lights were quiet and reassuring. I felt the presence of others watching. Was I the man in the window now?