Rounding it off with a cocktail, we finish our meal and sit there doggedly describing it to the waiter, with the menus there to jog our memory. Silence in the car on the way back to his place and the act of love in the hour of dusk. Preceded, as I said, by the moment of horror. And it isn’t without its pathetic aspects anyway, this evening scene with the two mature parties, their spectacles, their hair, their heavy old shoes, and the extra trust that she in particular will be needing to feel, and may not feel. Here it comes, like a chime. A naked female stare. Her body is probably naked by now but there is nothing as naked as human eyes: they haven’t even got skin over them. Like a chime, the moment of intense focus. That same look—full understanding, unwelcome wonder—as if they have just seen everything, even the figure in the dream with his white coat and his black boots and, in his wake, a night sky full of souls. Well, whatever they’ve seen, it can’t bother them all that much. Who knows, it may even work as a kind of sick turn-on. Seconds later they will attest with a sigh to his incredible invasion. And they soon get over it. Thereafter it’s no more than a recurrent talking point, or a way of talking down, with all this I don’t feel I really know you and What’s really going on in there? and Show me the real you. The real Tod. Of course, I’m curious too. The real Tod: show me it. But am I sure I really want to watch?
Perhaps Irene puts it best—she certainly puts it most often—when she tells Tod that he has no soul. I used to take it personally, and I was wretched at first. Yet she sticks around. Can Tod be so bad, if she sticks around? She doesn’t have to. She’s not our mother. . . . Needless to say, Tod has neglected to regale Irene with accounts of his new relationships, his invasions, his conquests, his quiet annexations. But she knows what he’s like. She’s observant. It was Irene, for instance, who pointed out something I’d never been able to put my finger on: that Tod can’t talk and smile at the same time. But maybe he never wants or needs to. … He copes okay. With all his ladies and their different bodies, their different odds and ends. Meanwhile, I suffer. I find I am very vulnerable to confusion and regret. If I were given my head, which I never am or will be (for I am impotent. I can make no waves), I would remain faithful to Irene. At least until my wife shows up. It happens to be a matter of principle. One man, one woman: I think we owe this to the human body. I feel like an ardent ghost, like a mute shedding tears of eagerness, as Irene lies in our arms. “Tod may be two-timing,” I want to whisper, “but I’m true to you. I am constant. I am true.”
In the dream there’s always this room, something like a gardener’s hut or a potting shed. The implements are wrong. The atmosphere is badly wrong. People are gathered there. It is a room in which something mortal will be monotonously decided.
Tod’s hidden mind insists, in dream form, that Tod feels pain. The dreams tell us this in their miserable iteration. And fear. Tod is a big depositor in the bank where fear is kept.
Around midnight, sometimes, Tod Friendly will create things. Wildly he will mend and heal. Taking hold of the woodwork and the webbing, with a single blow to the floor, with a single impact, he will create a kitchen chair. With one fierce and skillful kick of his aching foot he will mend a deep concavity in the refrigerator’s flank. With a butt of his head he will heal the fissured bathroom mirror, heal also the worsening welt in his own tarnished brow, and then stand there staring at himself with his eyes flickering.
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I have spoken of the three triggers, those stimuli on which Tod’s body gives judgment. That coppery twang on the emergency cord that hangs tight in his gut. There is a fourth trigger. Like the scorched fingernails, it emanates from fire. Is fire itself a trigger? Fire, which painfully heals and floridly creates out of the slimiest reek and chaos . . .