The Fool's Progress, Page 2

  I get out bowls, wooden spoons, measuring cups, yeast, milk, butter, salt, sugar, flour. Real flour: Hungarian stone-ground whole wheat. Old Will, naturally, that proud pompous sonofabitch, grinds his flour in his own little hand mill, mounted to a five-hundred-pound butcher’s block. Sometime tonight I’ll write the letter:

  Will. Dear Will. Listen, farmer, I’m in trouble again. Need some help. Would you mind if I dropped in for a month or two or three or four?…

  I mix the yeast in water, stir, set aside for a moment. Mix warm milk and melted butter, add the foamy yeast, add salt, sugar, stir again. Sift and sprinkle in the good nut-brown flour, the crunchy wheat berries, and mix with a wooden spoon in the big wooden bowl. Thinking of the green green grass of home. Of Brother Will. Of our tough sweet beautiful mother in her seventies, quietly but indomitably vigorous, walking the hills, doing her work, leading that geriatric choir at church every Sunday morning.

  Home is where when you have to go there you probably shouldn’t.

  Knead your dough. Sprinkle flour on the board, fold the fat warm living dough into its own center and mash it down firmly but gently—don’t bruise the living yeast cells—over and over, working the outside through the inside until everything is satiny smooth as a baby’s bottom.

  I grease another bowl with butter, flop my glob of pale brown breathing dough into it, cover with damp dish towel and set on top of fridge, over the hot-air vent, under the ceiling. Now let it rise, double in volume, a genuine resurrection, an authentic miracle. Which was the worthier technological achievement, the moon landing or the invention of bread? The bake oven or the nuclear reactor? Only a fool would hesitate to answer.

  My Frigidaire is strangely quiet and generating no hot air. Stone dead—for a moment I’d forgotten. I contemplate its fatal wounds with pleasure. Nothing more satisfying than a gut-shot refrigerator. Down with General Motors. If Will can do it I can do it. Cut the lines. Break loose. Blast free.

  Mahler winds down, fading into reverie. Time to invert those disks. Refilling my drink—long night ahead—I advance to the stereo, turn the records and retreat quickly to the kitchen before the twin speakers catch me in their convergent blast. But this is the fourth movement (out of five), not a great baying of horns but a gentle female wave of choral voices pianissimo….

  In music lies the ideal world, the closest we’ll ever get to immortality. Whether it’s Mahler or Louis Armstrong, Gregorian chants or Japanese bamboo flutes or some grog-rotten Celt on yonder bonnie ridge braying like a jackass through his bagpipes loud enough to raise the dead—it’s resurrection. Temporary but true, like life itself. Weeping in my whiskey, I plug in the phone and dial Andrew Harrington, M.D. My friend, always on call.

  “Andy, I need a recipe. An antidote for pain.”

  “Try agony.”

  “I tried that. This is worse. Can’t sleep, Andy.”

  “Well, read a book. Read some—Balzac. Or George Eliot or Anthony Trollope or Thomas Hardy. One of those analgesic Victorian novels.”

  “I’m baking bread.”

  “Ah-hah! So she’s left you again.”

  “Again? Andy, I hear the wings of death flapping over the roof.”

  “I see. Keep talking.”

  “She’s moved in with Whatshisname. That computer science professor.”

  “Sounds indicative.” A pause. “Well, Henry, you had fair notice.”

  “A computer science professor!”

  “Yes, I know.” Another pause. “But she tried to tell you. Anyone could see it.” No answer. “Come on over, Henry, I’ll sit up with you. I can’t sleep either as a matter of fact.”

  “Can’t, Andy, my dough is rising.” I looked; indeed it was. Doubled in size.

  “Well,” he says, “don’t do anything weird. Get rid of those damn guns. Call one of your old girlfriends. Bake your bread, take some aspirins and go to bed. That’ll be thirty-five dollars please.”

  “Listen, Harrington, I don’t need good advice, I need some pills. Real potent pills. I feel lower than whale shit.”

  “What’re you drinking?”

  “The same old stuff.”

  “No pills tonight. Dangerous. Turn your tube on, they’re showing Treasure of Sierra Madre on channel nine, best movie ever made. Turn your tube on, keep drinking, take three aspirins, fall on the floor and get some sleep. Have lunch with me tomorrow.”

  “Sure, Andy.”

  “Call me in the morning. Or I’ll call you. Don’t disconnect on me.” Pause. “You hear me?” Pause. “Henry? You still there?”

  “Still here.”

  “All right. Be careful.”

  I hang up. At once the phone begins to ring. I unplug it and take down the bread, the warm sweet dough, and lay it on the board. I punch the air out, rolling it over and over, shaping it into a nice fat oblate blob, and place it in my greased baking pan. Back to the refrigerator top, warmest spot in the kitchen. Let her breathe and swell for another thirty minutes, O staff of life.

  The whiskey and ice percolate through my kidneys; time to relieve some pressure. I stumble to the bathroom, flicking switches as I go. Conserve power. Keep the utilities in trouble. Unzipping, I piss into the washbasin. Perfectly sanitary, much tidier than pissing into the toilet bowl from the male position, splashing hot piss over the rim and floor and rug and shower curtains. Could’ve pissed in the kitchen sink but the sink is full of dirty dishes again. What a slob that woman is. Was. Well now, with her gone, we’ll have some Ordnung around here, some “ordered liberty,” as our neofascists like to say. What’s worse than a knee-jerk liberal? A kneepad conservative, that’s what, forever groveling before the rich and powerful. Anyhow, we’ll have stability now, control, discipline, centralized administration.

  The face in the mirror grins at me. Little squinty eyes with veins of gaudy red, like Christmas tree baubles. Jaw bristling with whisker—needs a shave. Hair greasy as a groundhog. Need a shit, shave, shower, shampoo—probably a shoeshine. But still don’t look as bad as I feel. Nor feel as bad as I look.

  I shake and squeeze it, trying to expel that final drop. Fail, as always. The last jewel trickles down my thigh when I pack the thing back in its nest. Sign of middle age, perhaps. The dotage of the dong. The Grim Raper falters. What of it. For forty years, ever since boyhood, I’ve been bound in servitude to this cursed thing with a mind of its own—but no conscience—leading me about like a dog straining on a leash. Nothing but trouble. Down with romance.

  Check the bread. Almost ready for the oven. A few more minutes. Now what? Shall I call Ingrid in Denver? Lynell in Santa Barbara? Becky in Seattle? Nancy in Phoenix? One o’clock by the clock—better not. The bitching hour. They wouldn’t understand. What would Brother Will do? What would Tolstoy do? Montaigne? J. Prometheus Birdsong, all my other heroes dead and gone?

  Alas, there is no remedy. No shampoo by Kathleen, no gluteus-maximus vibrato by sweet Melanie, what’s a man to do?

  Nothing but bourbon. And on solo flute, the dark secret bird of night. And my loaf of bread. Shall I call the boys—Lacey? Ferrigan? Arriaga? No, leave them in peace.

  Even the bars will be closing soon. Too late now for a heart-to-heart chat with Cindy and her swelling bosoms. (They’re big, she says, but they’re not very practical.) Or with golden-haired Sunshine and the tattooed butterfly on her thigh. Or Laura with the wicked and perjuring smile, and Whatshername and so on, they’ll all be bolting off soon on the buddy seats of Harley choppers, each with one hand hooked in the waistband of the greasy blue jeans of her dope-dealing gun-smuggling child-molesting black-bearded beer-swilling pool-shooting ugly dirty evil old man. Bores and whores, all of them, but—fascinating. The smell of sin. That cockeyed coke-sniffing glister in the eyes. The smell of lust and money. The smell of salt, sweat, Listerine and sweet papaya juice….

  My bread has risen. Check the oven: 375°F. I pop in the loaf and close the oven door, refill my glass and retreat to the easy chair in the living room, followed soon by the f
ragrance of baking bread. Even the smell makes me feel better.

  Mahler explodes into his grand finale, vast heavenly choruses arching across the sky. An outburst of joy, clouds of exaltation piled on exaltation and then—a fierce short coda followed by silence. That golden stillness. “Silence always sounds good,” said Arnold Schönberg, explaining the odd pauses in Pierrot Lunaire. How true. Especially in the tortured agonized manacled music of Arnold Schönberg.

  But my wife—?

  Plainly, she is not coming back. I can tell by the pattern of the cracks in the plaster. There’s a code there, a message. Like the secret message in the final bars of Shostakovich’s fifteenth and last symphony. Faint cryptic signals, like the clicking of a telegraph key, against the remote and sustained monotone of the violins—a song from outer space. What was he trying to tell us?

  But Elaine, how can she do this to me?

  She has her reasons.

  II

  Are you listening to me?

  I looked up from this book: Jaynes or somebody on the origin of consciousness or something. What?

  Are you listening to me?

  Yes. Sure, Elaine. Of course.

  What did I say?

  What?

  What did I say? Glaring at me.

  Well…Trying to restore the unity of my broken-down bicameral mind, I stammered, Well, honey, you said—what you always say.

  You never listen. Off in a world of your own. What lousy company.

  I like it.

  It’s all you know. She shook her light brown hair from her eyes—those fine Liz Taylor eyes, smoldering with anger. Couldn’t blame her one bit. Turned her eyes away, giving me the model’s profile: the classic Nordic symmetry of vertical forehead, dark arched eyebrows, charcoal lashes emphasized with mascara, a short straight middle-class nose barely retroussé—but why go on with this tedious inventory? Everyone knows the formula. Who cares?

  Well now, we do care, don’t we. Men care and women care because the men care. We’re trapped in our biology, why not enjoy it? She was a trim little WASP—white-Anglo-sexy-Protestant—not a perfect beauty, a bit thick in the thigh and short in the leg, but more or less the type the whole world adores. Thanks to our planetary communications system, magazines, movies, TV, videocassettes. Blond hair, rosy skin, slender figure—why is it that men everywhere, from Fairbanks to Tierra del Fuego, from Oslo to Capetown, from Lisbon to Calcutta, yearn to clutch this creature in their arms? Two and a half billion men on the planet—and every one, apparently, prefers a blonde. Including me. Why?

  Who knows? Envy of the power and prestige of Europe and America? Some strange racial longing for the glow of the golden North, a hidden evolutionary drive toward this particular archetype? Are the angels, as we once imagined, really honey-colored honkies? The thought is too cruel to be borne. And very much taboo. But who can doubt it? Artificial female blondes swarm the streets of every nation—but where can you find girls naturally fair dying their tresses black, wearing brown contact lenses, trying to widen their hips or shorten their legs?

  It’s not fair. Life is unfair and it’s not fair that life is unfair. Is there no justice in the world? And no mercy neither? No wonder they hate us—and hate us so much—down there in the lower hemisphere.

  She turned away from me, my fair Elaine. Finally. Finally gave up. No more argument, no more debate. I heard her packing a bag in the bedroom. A small one—she’d already moved most of her personal things to her boyfriend’s place, Professor Schmuck, cybernetician. Seymour S. “Shithead” Schmuck. (Tomorrow I’ll kill that guy. Tonight I’m baking bread.) Minutes later she was gone, slamming the door.

  Was it all my fault?

  I love you, Henry, she’d say.

  You’ll get over it, Elaine, I’d say, always kidding. And she did.

  You say you love me, she’d say, but you don’t show it. She was young, too young, only eighteen when I first clapped eyes—and then my hands—upon her. You don’t show it.

  What do you mean? I said. I’m crazy about you and you know it. Look at this thing.

  I don’t mean that.

  Well what do you mean? I mean, Jesus Christ, I mean what do you want me to do? I mean what do you mean?

  I can’t tell you. If you don’t understand there’s no way I can tell you. I mean if I have to tell you you’ll never understand.

  I see. My heart sank like lead beneath the weight of her incomprehensible phrases. I’d turn away and she’d turn away and I’d pick up a book or put on an Anton Bruckner or Tom T. Hall record or go for a ten-mile walk in the moonlight or she would leave, slamming the door. Much to my immediate relief. I always loved the sound of my wife walking out the door, starting her Jap automobile, vanishing into the filthy city. To visit a friend? A relative? A relative friend? She was gone to visit her lover. And I never guessed or cared enough to guess. As long as she returned before morning I was content. I was a fool but happy.

  Longing for my Elaine, I plug in and telephone Melanie. Lovely Melanie. Lovely aroma of fresh bread in the kitchen. But who wants to break bread alone?

  Yeah? She sounds sleepy. Melanie, it’s me. It’s late, Henry. I know sweetheart, but I was thinking of you. I’ll bet. I miss you. You’re drunk again. I love you, Melanie, desperately. Yeah, when you’re desperate you love me. Melanie, I want to tell you something. It’s almost two, Henry; some of us have to go to work in the morning, you know. Tomorrow night? Maybe; maybe later. You still love me? I adore you. That’s not what I asked. Have to go now, Henry. Wait a minute. Good night, Henry….

  Click, followed by the electronic whine, as of cosmic mosquitoes or background radiation, of the dial tone coursing through the circuits. Transistor static. I detest that noise. Music is natural, static cultural. I unplug the phone, just as it starts ringing, and open the oven door. My bread is ready, waiting for me. I grope for hot pads, pull out the pan, empty the loaf from pan onto tabletop. Perfection. A hot firm shapely loaf, golden brown, sweet as a virgin’s haunch.

  Breaking off the heel of the loaf, the best part, holding the warm and crusty chunk in my hand, I reach for the bottle of Wild Turkey, now almost empty, and slide down the wall to the kitchen floor. A bite of bread, a swallow of bourbon—God’s on the job.

  Nothing really helps. I should go for a long walk into the desert, take my agave stick, my pistol, our doomed dog, my jug of Gallo’s Hearty Burgundy, fall in the gulch, finish the wine, shoot the dog, take a piss, vomit. That would help. Go to sleep on the cool sand while tarantulas creep on their eight dainty hairy feet across my face, pausing to stare with sixteen compound eyes into the cavity of my ear. Then moving on, twitching a leg, to pastures new.

  Courage. I crawl from the kitchen into darkened living room, feeling along the wall for light switches, remove Mahler from the phonograph and install my hero the great American Charles Ives. An insurance executive, like Wallace Stevens, and our best composer yet. Symphony no. 4. At top volume, certainly: let the walls rock, the cinder blocks cringe, every nostril in the neighborhood bleed. I crawl for safety back to the kitchen under the terrific crashing chords of the opening—dual pianos in a black rage, followed suddenly, quietly, by strange cloudy fantasies of mingled New England village bands, a fireman’s parade, a churchly hymn, the ghost effects and haunted cemeteries full of Union dead. Nearer my God to thee, the chorus sings, sort of. I think of Mother’s choir. I think of family, of clan.

  My great-great-uncle John Lightcap, half-starved POW, escaped from Richmond’s Libby Prison in 1863, spent two weeks sneaking homeward through Confederate territory living on goober peas, chanterelle mushrooms, dandelion greens, arrived in Stump Crick, West Virginia, in time to learn that his son Elroy was dead, killed only a week before by bayonet at the Battle of Gettysburg, 150 miles to the east. Pickett’s last charge. Roy Lightcap’s last stand. Uncle John’s last war. Hain’t fightin’ no more in Lincoln’s dirty war, he said, resigning the captain’s commission to which his men had elected him two years earlier. H
e’s so powerful strong on stompin’ down the South and keepin’ the Union big, let that cold-blooded murderous sonofabitch go down there and fight his rotten war his own self. And take his coward son with him….

  Maybe I should see a psychiatrist. Two I’ve noted in the phonebook: Doctors Glasscock and Evilsizer. Or some kind of analyst: a barium enema, a proctoscopic probe. All-Bran and psyllium powder. The enema within. Join a Kundalini therapy group and take part in mystic Oriental orgiastic rites. Write a book. Call it—Cluster-Fuck: A Presbyterian Looks at Group Sex. I may be the only redneck intellectual in America who’s not yet been analyzed, psychoanalyzed, rolfed, TMized, estered, sensory-deprived, reborn, spinologized and had my colon irrigated. Never did get to know those spiritual amphibia crawling in and out of Esalen hot tubs.

  Once as a matter of fact I did let Elaine bully me into attending a group encounter session. She believed in it (that season) and felt I needed the treatment. And why? What’s my problem? Well, I have this queer thing about pretty girls: I like them. And this weird thing about steady jobs: I don’t like them. I don’t believe in doing work I don’t want to do in order to live the way I don’t want to live.

  And so she paid twenty-five dollars to get me in a group. I snuck out after ten minutes of holistic gender blending, having enjoyed about as much as I could stand. All those warm fuzzies and fearless feelies massaging one another’s emotional pudenda:

  Who are you? says this man I never saw before, staring at me with the pale eyes of a codfish. We sat on the floor facing each other, paired off like the others, knotted up in the lotus posture. (No chairs in the room.) Okay for bandy-legged little Asiatics but hard on a native American. All but me, I saw at a glance, were veterans of these rituals, self-absorbed and comfortable. Another Lost Generation. We should’ve told them to stay lost.

  Who are you? he says again.