“My husband!” she explained.
Who cared? Instantly John invaded her. With zero fore-play. No hair-stroking or sighing or staring sorrowfully at the ceiling, not for her. No extra-loud snoring or anything, not for this baby. . . . Soon afterward she took up a position at the hospital. Nurse Davis. We still date. Her husband, Dennis, is a night watchman. She keeps saying she’s glad Dennis doesn’t know about us and she hopes he never finds out. What is it with them, the human beings? I suppose they remember what they want to remember. And I suppose, in our case, John and I should exchange high fives in squalid thanks to this human talent for forgetting: forgetting, not as a process of erosion and waste, but as an activity. John forgets. Nurse Davis forgets. The husband, Dennis, shuddering in the cold on his way to work, on his way to watch the night, forgets.
Largely out of a sense of duty I search for connections between the two interests, between the two kinds of female body. One body wallows on a barge of pillows, with warmly tousled gaze and smelling of fresh bread (you’ll get no argument from me there: women are great); the other body lies flat and cold on a table down whose eaves blood runs, like a sunset. John attends them both with his animal parts thickened. Here’s another one, he seems to think. Another face with its bridal train of hair. Another thigh of astonishing might. Another female belly.
With the children, at the hospital, in Pediatrics, where the light is never off, where the little victims whom we patiently deform lie drugged and lost and itching—with the children John is at his briskest. He surges through the wards snatching toy and lollipop, wearing a skull’s smile. No feeling tone. Only the men get to him. Funnily enough. He meets their eyes with a look that almost confesses. Confesses that they have a right which he hereby violates. And what is this right? It is the right to life and love.
With the men, the doctor’s cultural performance is at its most tenuous. It is abruptly open to question, this idea the doctors hold in secret, that they must wield the special power; because if the power remains unused, then it will become unmoored, and turn back against their own lives.
Carter was an exception, to this and to everything else, but I used to feel that I was roughly the same age as the reigning American president. People said I resembled Gerry Ford, though of course I’m a lot more handsome than that now. I was younger than LBJ, at least to start with, and I’m definitely older then JFK, who’s even handsomer than I am. JFK: flown down from Washington and flung together by the doctors’ knives and the sniper’s bullets and introduced onto the streets of Dallas and a hero’s welcome.
Now despite years of steady disarmament they’re all talking about nuclear war again, and more intensely than ever before. I wish I could put their minds at rest. It isn’t going to happen. Come on: imagine the preparations that would be needed. No one’s even started. No one’s ready.
Remember the punks? They were ready. The experiments in mortification they performed on their own faces— the piercings, the pallor. The punks had made a start. They were ready. But they vanished decades ago.
Here’s a little moment I’d like to share.
I’m in the waiting room of the Peter Pan Ward, shooting the breeze with Nurse Judge. There is another woman there, a Mrs. Goldman. Because she is a woman, John glances at her from time to time: because she is a woman. But she is also a mother: she has a baby at her feet, and a further child, a three-year-old girl, whose hips we have decided to destroy. The girl is lying in the Peter Pan Ward with her lower half in plaster. She’s been there for months—it’s a long-term project. . . . Mrs. Goldman is reading a magazine, with the baby at her feet. We’ve seen this pair before. The baby is shrinking fast, and can’t really crawl now though its struggles are something to see. But wait a minute. The baby is crawling, only one or two panting inches at a time—but crawling forward. And the mother with the magazine, the glossy pages ticking past her face: she’s reading, or skimming, forward. Hey! Christ, how long has it been since I . . . ? Anyhow, it’s soon over, this lucid interval. The mother is reading backward again, and the baby is merely weeping. It wants its diaper changed, or it’s hungry. It wants its diaper filled, with new shit from the trash. I’m being immature. I’ve got to get over it. I keep expecting the world to make sense. It doesn’t. It won’t. Ever.