Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale Page 2

  Both the men were bareback, and they were sitting there in the metal lawn chairs sipping from cans of beer and staring at Alice Ann, and Ralph wondered suddenly if Alice Ann knew this. Although Alice Ann was but a few feet from Ralph, he had the weird feeling that he was observing an image of Alice Ann that had been in some way magnified from far away, as though he were watching her from the wrong end of a telescope. As though it was not the real Alice Ann standing there but some sort of aura of her. The more intently Ralph stared, the more rarefied with clarity and sharpness her features became, yet always with that sense of magnified distance. Who is she? Ralph wondered. Who is she? Ralph had stood there, frozen to the spot, as he wondered if Alice Ann was posing for those perfect strangers, and the intense, peculiar desire he felt for her gripped his groin and made him both giddy and sick to his stomach. It was as though some beautiful but terrifying image of great portent were being projected before his eyes, the sort of image a story might turn upon.

  The one thing Ralph knew for certain was that, in the story he planned to write, this dramatic, frozen moment would set the narrative off in a direction full of utterly unexpected danger and possibly disaster. Yes, Ralph had thought, the wife in that story would have made juicy abandoned love the night before with her new husband. And they would have held one another tenderly while they pledged to preserve forever the excitement and mystery of their love and marriage. And then that wife would turn right around and betray that husband in the story. She might not want to do it, but she would have no choice. Ralph would bend that wife in the story to his will. He might even make the wife in the story sleep with both those bareback strangers, if that would make things more interesting. And maybe the husband in the story would betray the wife, too, in order to stir even more trouble into the plot. Even if the husband, too, didn’t want to do it. He might have to, for the sake of the story.

  Sperm Count

  In college Jim Stark’s first wife, Judy, a very pretty, perfectly nice, sensible young woman who everybody declared was a dead ringer for that American television sweetheart Mary Tyler Moore, had been a cheerleader, vice president of her sorority, and, in her senior year, Homecoming Queen. Judy had made good grades as a math major and planned on teaching high school four years before starting her family of two boys and two girls, about what her own mother had accomplished, in the baby department anyway. When her old boyfriend, a handsome, hell-raising halfback, lost his athletic scholarship due to academic difficulties and dropped out of college his senior year to drive a beer truck for his father’s beer-distributing company and drink beer a lot, Judy studied the Dean’s List late into the night. Jim Stark was no football star, and he was supposedly something of a moody James Dean loner type, but she had seen him around campus, and he was a pretty big guy and dark, her type, and pretty cute in a hoody, sideburned kind of way; also, he wrote a column for the college newspaper, and most important, he was on the Dean’s List in pre-law. There were rumors about Jim Stark, true: that he worked nights as a bartender-bouncer at that forbidden Big Al’s place across the river and that as a teenager he had been in some serious trouble with the law. Somebody even told Judy that this Jim Stark guy wrote poems, but he sure didn’t look like any fairy to Judy. And who believes every rumor, anyway?

  Judy’s new husband’s law school idea was a joke, of course, and by default, for lack of something better to do, besides enter adult life, Jim eventually earned an M.A. in English literature at West Virginia University, his thesis a Jungian analysis of the poetry of Matthew Arnold (another joke). Which was not necessarily a bad turn of events, however, since Jim was lucky enough to secure a teaching position at a small private college in southern Pennsylvania. College instructors certainly didn’t pull in the loot like lawyers, but there was adequate prestige in it back home with family and former boyfriends. Things could have been worse was the way Judy looked at it. She could have ended up married to the driver of a beer truck, which was a job Jim, frankly, would have traded up for.

  After a couple of years teaching at the small college, Jim applied to and was accepted by a prestigious Ph.D. program in Victorian Studies, where he rather jokingly planned to explore and catalogue every dark sexual archetype that informed the Victorian imagination. Jim requested a leave of absence from his teaching job to begin his studies, and that June he and Judy traveled to the university town, where they put a deposit down on a lovely first-floor flat with a working fireplace. Judy had already secured a teaching position at a good local high school, and she enrolled to attend evening classes to continue her work toward an M.A. in Guidance and Counseling. Judy began sewing curtains for the new apartment, and they splurged from their meager savings to buy two pole lamps, a wood-tone cuckoo clock for the mantel, and several framed Keene prints of children with enormous, concentration-camp eyes, which Judy had always considered decorative.

  But then, in early August, Jim suddenly withdrew half their remaining savings and boarded a bus for San Francisco. In San Francisco Jim moved into a commune of expatriate, doper West Virginians, and in a letter of explanation to Judy announced that the sick, dark sexual longings of the Victorians meant little to him really, and that he had been a closet flower child all along and he could no longer live a lie. Judy suspected that her husband was deranged from drugs, which was more or less true. Clearly, in the selection of one’s lifemate department, Judy had really dropped the ball. Divorce was the only answer, Judy decided, especially after she had secured the word of her loverboy, a junior high school football coach named Doc, that he would forsake his wife and retarded baby daughter for a new life with Judy, after all.

  It astonished Judy when Jim wrote her that he had won a writing fellowship to Stanford University (she hadn’t even known Jim had applied). At the end of the two-year-fellowship period he would have an M.A. in creative writing under his belt, which was a terminal degree and in some ways more marketable than a Ph.D. in something goofy like Victorian Studies. Maybe there was something to this writing goofiness, after all, Judy speculated. What if her goofy husband actually wrote some old book and sold the thing to the movies?

  Because her loverboy coach was balking about abandoning his retarded baby daughter, Judy told him to just forget it, and somewhat relieved, she joined her husband in California to launch a new life.

  At the end of his fellowship period, Jim was offered a three- year appointment as a Jones Lecturer, which did not pay beans, true, he acknowledged to Judy, but the prestige of teaching at Stanford would enable him to secure very promising teaching positions in the future, he assured Judy. Jim’s first novel, a sort of revenge upon his childhood, had been published by then to generally good reviews, but had sold less than a thousand copies. For months after the novel was published, the first thing Judy would ask Jim when she arrived home each evening from work at the end of her rope was were there any calls about the book? Nope, Jim would inform Judy, nope, no phone calls, no big paperback sales, no calls from tinsel town.

  Then one evening at dinner Judy informed Jim that it was time they started planning their family. She hated her job as a sportswear buyer, hated traveling, hated flying in airplanes. She wanted to be at home with babies, like most of her college girl friends were. She wanted a brick house. She wanted furniture of her own. Their rented life had run its course with her. Jim’s doggone dream of becoming a famous writer was dragging her down. Jim had been a Stanford lecturer two years and had published a novel, so if he got off his butt he could surely secure some promising teaching position for the following fall and begin supporting his family like the husbands of her college girl friends did. Meanwhile, they should take advantage of their insurance benefits and the facilities at Stanford. Stanford had an advanced medical program in artificial insemination techniques, Judy informed Jim, and she announced that she had talked with a doctor at the clinic on campus that very day.

  They were sitting at the kitchen table talking after a dinner of squabs stuffed with liver, bacon, and wild rice, a side di
sh of French stringbeans, Belgian endive salad, and ambrosia served in scooped and scalloped lemon halves. From earlier phone-call comments, Jim had suspected some relationship shit was going to hit the fan that evening, and Jim, a henpecked former tough guy, had slaved over dinner in a tizzy. Now Judy took several pamphlets from her purse and pushed them across the table in front of Jim. Then she handed Jim a small plastic jar.

  Well, how was dinner, honeybunch? Jim asked Judy. —Do you think that stuffing was too dry? What about that currant jelly, did that hit the spot? Judy told Jim dinner was dandy and she was stuffed to the gills, and then she told him to read this literature on artificial insemination before the doctor’s appointment she had scheduled for him the following Tuesday. He’s a real nice doctor, Judy had told Jim. —You’ll like him. He makes you feel real relaxed, she said. The little plastic jar had Jim’s name typed on a label taped to its side. It was for a sample of Jim’s sperm, which would be analyzed to determine his sperm count, Judy explained. Jim would have to time things right, because he had to get his sperm sample to the clinic by a certain deadline after he did it. It? Jim had asked Judy. It, Judy said, and wiggled her eyebrows suggestively. Judy told Jim she would accompany him herself, except she would be out of town next Tuesday. You’ll like this doctor, she repeated. —I told him, she said, that we had sex about twice a week. I read in Cosmopolitan that sex twice a week is about average for a normal couple our age. In case he asks you, too, so we’ll have our stories straight.

  Sex! Jim hooted and hopped up from the kitchen table. —Twice a week! Who says that’s any of that bastard’s business in the first place? Jim inquired as he snapped open a beer he had grabbed from the refrigerator; it foamed over his hand onto the floor and he tossed it into the kitchen sink. —Our stories straight! Christ, we’re not applying for a fucken loan. That sumbitch better not ask me nothing like that if he knows what’s good for him! Jim informed Judy as with shaky hands he filled his Mickey Mouse Club collectible glass to the brim with vodka. Normal couple! Jim said. —What’s that supposed to mean? And how can you spring something like this on me, anyway?

  You’re the so-called writer around here, Judy reminded Jim. —You know what normal is supposed to mean, all right. And if you don’t, well, buddy, go look it up in your hundred-dollar Webster’s Dictionary. And you’re a fine one to talk about somebody springing something on somebody. You owe me, buster, Judy reminded Jim. You better do this, she said.

  So that next Tuesday found Jim flopped naked as the day he was born in his darkened bedroom with his sorry member in his hand, watching the soundless television’s blue light flicker on the ceiling. Jim thought of light escaping from our world off into cold space, reaching someplace new forever. Jim wagged his limp, sore penis like a little fishing pole. He looked over at the clock’s glowing face on the table beside the bed: 10:32. His doctor’s appointment wasn’t until one o’clock. Jim still had plenty of time. He pulled halfheartedly on his poor penis. He took a sip of his third screwdriver of the morning. He still had some hope.

  Don’t give up the jackoff! Jim admonished himself. Never say die! I have not yet begun to jack off, Jim told himself resolutely.

  After dropping Judy off at the airport the day before, Jim had made trial runs all afternoon. The first trial run, he had parked in the lot of the campus clinic and for a half hour or so simply stared at the building’s front doors, again and again imagining himself walking up to them. He then drove to the Oasis on El Camino for a pitcher of beer. The second trial run, Jim had walked up to the doors and almost entered. The third trial run, after spending an hour at the Red Lion downtown drinking among buddies, mostly outpatients from the Veterans Hospital, one of whom sucked his vodka-tonic through a straw he inserted in a hole in his neck, Jim had entered the doors and sat in the vast lobby on a couch between potted plants and watched people walk by with what appeared to be purpose, and he envied them bitterly. Whenever somebody glanced in his direction, Jim looked at his watch impatiently, as though he were waiting for his wife, say, who could be at that very moment entertaining a test for pregnancy, or having a biopsy, and he would sigh audibly and gaze up at the high ceiling of relentless fluorescent lights, affecting the attitude of a fellow bracing to accept any news.

  Jim did owe Judy. Who had to tell him that? And he was the last person in the world to complain about somebody springing things. Judy had been a technical virgin when she and Jim were married, hence her experience was not immense in the male- equipment department, so what could she really know about normal scrotums? Not until nearly a year after they were married did Jim’s mother, a nurse and well-meaning woman, let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, when she mentioned to Judy that there were astounding advances being made in medical science every single day, especially in areas such as artificial insemination, so couples like them always had hope. Hope? Judy had asked Jim. Medical science? What in the dickens does that all mean, anyhow?

  Only then had Jim tearfully informed Judy, his bride, who had not even seen an ocean until their weekend honeymoon at Virginia Beach, that having her family of two boys and two girls might need a little help in the miracle department from medical science, due to this litde disability he had been born with, through no fault of his own. Disability? Judy had said. What dag- gone disability? You never told me anything about any daggone disability. I have testicles, Jim assured Judy. It’s just that those litde rascals aren’t all the way down where they should be is all, undescended, so to speak. You can say that again, buster, Judy had agreed wholeheartedly. Listen, Jim said, I’ve fought in the Golden Gloves, I’ve battled with switchblades, I’ve driven a stolen car crazily toward a cliff’s deadly edge for no better reason than romance, I’ve pulled seven armed robberies, lived on the lam, and survived to write about it all.

  What in the world does any of that bullstool have to do with my two boys and two girls? Judy had been real curious to know.

  Eleven thirty-eight, the clock by the bed read, the faint sweep of its second hand luminous as it spun around insanely in the darkened bedroom. Jim had held his limp, sore, sad member in his hand befuddledly. What sexy thing between him and his wife had Jim not tried to conjure? He should be thinking about his wife while he jacked off, shouldn’t he? This whole ordeal was for them, wasn’t it? For their litde baby-to-be, their son, for their future. But Jim found there was nothing, no memory, no imagined thing between them that would do the trick.

  At high noon Jim had let himself imagine his wife cavorting with her loverboy coach back home. He permitted himself to imagine his wife and Doc at that motel where they met nights when his wife was supposedly chaperoning sock hops. Jim imagined them in the shower, his wife’s hair wet, her slick skin smelling sweetly of soap. When his wife soaped Doc’s enormous dick, it hardened in her tiny hand. Then his wife soaped the fingertips of her free hand, and she commenced to run them slowly up and down the tight crack of Doc’s muscular coachy ass. At some point Jim’s wife inserted her middle finger in Doc’s anus and rotated it resolutely. Then Jim’s wife joyfully soaped Doc’s enormous balls. She knelt down on the slick tile floor then, Jim’s wife, the shower water like a warm summer rain over her fresh, pretty petal of a face, and she took her loverboy’s coachy coconuts, one at a time, into her mouth. Still upon her knees, Jim’s wife moved around Doc, kissing and licking and nibbling the wet skin of his hard thighs as she went. When Jim’s wife had finally arrived at her boyfriend’s rump, and they were cheek to cheek, so to speak, she had spread Doc’s muscular coachy buttocks with her slender fingers, at which point Jim’s wife had buried her sweet, moist, pink little tongue into that hairy abyss.

  The Seven Warning Signs of Love

  When Ralph Crawford and Jim Stark first met and became fast friends as young writers, they were both sappy with expectation. The future seemed to loom before them like a stupendous dream. Soon they were congratulating themselves mightily for living like bold outlaw authors on the lam from that gloomy tedium called ordinary life. T
hey were both daring, larger-than-life characters living legendary as they engaged in high drama and hilarity, the stuff of great stories, they were convinced, and not simply drunken, stoned stumblebums and barroom yahoos.

  The stupendous dream Ralph and Jim shared was for fame. They were hungry for it (and who could have guessed how famous old Ralph would become!). And nobody is above taking shortcuts to the rewards of fame, such as enjoying sexual congress with comely strangers. That time, for instance, when Ralph, in the heat of a roadhouse romance, tried to impress a beautiful barmaid by telling her he was none other than Philip Roth, the professor of passion, the doctor of desire. The barmaid had never heard of this Philip Roth. And Jim Stark had once told a beer-joint beauty at a crucial moment that he was Norman

  Mailer, that lionized lover and mayor of American letters. Norman who?

  Jim found Ralph’s front door wide open as usual. Ralph’s house was a rambling, one-story, ranch-style in a cul-de-sac of solid middle-class homes in Menlo Park. He and Alice Ann had purchased it a few years earlier after a surprise inheritance from Alice Ann’s natural father. It had fallen on hard times since then. But nothing a dozen good coats of paint couldn’t cure, and maybe a few months of professional yard work, plus an army of good roofers, and it would have been beneficial in the beautification department to have had Ralph’s criminal son haul away the heap he had balanced on cinder blocks in the driveway, a vehicle he worked on at all hours with stolen parts.