I don’t see eye to eye with Tod on all issues. Far from it. For instance, Tod’s very down on the pimps. The pimps—these outstanding individuals, who, moreover, lend such color to the city scene, with their zootily customized clothes and cars. Where would the poor girls be without their pimps, who shower money on them and ask for nothing in return? Not like Tod and his tender mercies. He just goes around there to rub dirt in their wounds. And backs off quick, before the longsuffering pimp shows up, and knocks the girl into shape with his jeweled fists. As he works, the baby in the cot beside the bed will hush its weeping, and sleep angelically, secure in the knowledge that the pimp is come.
—————
Irene still telephones regularly but I mustn’t get my hopes up. I thought she was slowly coming round to us. She isn’t. She’s turned against us again, with a vengeance. Why, I don’t know. Is it something we’ve said?
It’s mildly encouraging now, though, when Tod looks at a woman in the street. For once his eyes point where I want them to point. Our imperatives or priorities are by no means entirely congruent, but at least they overlap. We like the same kind of woman—the womanly kind. Tod looks first at the face; then the breasts; then the lower abdomen. If it’s a back view, he goes: hair; waist; rump. Neither of us, it would seem, is much of a leg man, but I suppose I could do with a bit more than I get. I’m also annoyed by the timespots Tod allows for each section. He is done with the face way too soon. A single downward swipe of the eyes. Whereas I’d like to linger. Maybe the etiquette forbids this. Still, I’m mildly encouraged. There’s hardly any of the usual vertigo effect, when I’m trying to see things he’s not looking at, when I’m trying to look at things he’s not seeing.
Vivified, perhaps, by all this fieldwork we’re doing, our lone sex sessions have, of late, become unrecognizably livelier. The missing component, the extra essence, is to be found, of course, in the toilet. Or in the trash.
Where would Tod and I be without the toilet? Where would we be without all the trash?
Mothers bring Tod their babies in the night. Tod discourages this—but he’s usually pretty sympathetic. The mothers pay him in antibiotics, which often seem to be the cause of the babies’ pain. You have to be cruel to be kind. The babies are no better when they leave, patiently raising hell all the way to the door. And the moms crack up completely: they go out of here wailing. It’s understandable. I understand. I know how people disappear. Where do they disappear to? Don’t ask that question. Never ask it. It’s none of your business. The little children on the street, they get littler and littler. At some point it is thought necessary to confine them to strollers, later to backpacks. Or they are held in the arms and quietly soothed—of course they’re sad to be going. In the very last months they cry more than ever. And no longer smile. The mothers then proceed to the hospital. Where else? Two people go into that room, that room with the forceps, the soiled bib. Two go in. But only one comes out. Oh, the poor mothers, you can see how they feel during the long goodbye, the long goodbye to babies.
And about time too.
Now that it’s eventually started happening, I find that my attitude is one of high indignation. Why has Tod been frittering my life away like this? Overnight the world has opened up and revealed its depth and color. And the self has opened up, also. We’re not just surface anymore but voluminous and deep-sea, with our wiggling flora, our warped fish. Everybody’s like this, I realize: touchingly— no, grippingly—vulnerable. We have nowhere to hide.
Love didn’t catch me entirely unawares—I had fair warning. Love was heralded by a whole new bunch of love letters. But these weren’t love letters from Irene. They were love letters to Irene. Written by Tod. In his squat and unvarying hand. They came from the trash, of course, from the innards of a ten-gallon Hefty. Tod went and sat in the living room with this red-ribboned bundle on his lap. He had his black chest out too. Then after a pause he took a letter at random from the middle of the stack; he stared at it with an unfocused, an uncommitted eye. I made out what I could: