There are certain pluses now, though, as the years lurch past. The Reagan Era, I think, is doing wonders for Tod’s morale.
Physically I’m in great shape. My ankles and knees and spine and neck no longer hurt all the time—or not all at once, anyway. I get to places much quicker than I used to: places like the far end of the room. I’m there before you know it. My bearing is almost princely. I sold that stick of mine long ago.
Tod and I are feeling so terrific that we’ve joined a club and taken up tennis. Perhaps prematurely. Because—to begin with, at least—it made our back ache like a son of a bitch. Tennis is a pretty dumb game, I’m finding: the fuzzy ball jumps out of the net, or out of the chicken wire at the back of the court, and the four of us bat it around until it is pocketed—quite arbitrarily, it seems to me—by the server. Yet we leap and snort away, happily enough. We josh and kid: our trusses, our elbow supports. Pap say the rackets. Tod is popular; the guys appear to like him fine. I don’t know what Tod makes of them, except that his glands tell me he could do without any special attention, or any attention at all.
Most of the time we sit around the clubroom playing cards. The clubroom is where I see the President, on the mounted TV. Yes, the old guys, the elderly parties with their freckles and fruit juices, they all get a big kick out of the President: his frowns, his bloopers, his world-class hair. Tod likes it in the clubroom, but there is a man here whom he hates and fears. The man’s name is Art—another gorilla of a granddad, with a murderous backslap and a voice of millennial penetration and power. Even I was terrified the first time it happened, when Art rolled over to our table, gave Tod a kind of rabbit punch that almost broke his neck, and said, incredibly loudly, “You eat them alive”
“Yes. What?” said Tod.
He leaned closer. “Others in here might buy that shit, Friendly, but I know what you’re after.”
“Oh, that’s been much exaggerated.”
“Still chasing them?” Art shouted, and rolled away again.
Every time we try to slip past Art’s table, there’ll be a pause, and then a thick whisper that beats its way right across the room: “Tod Friendly: had more ass than a toilet seat.” Tod doesn’t like that. He doesn’t like that one bit.
Nevertheless, in the Superette, these days, it’s true, the eyes of Tod Friendly linger on the bodies of the local frauleins as they tug their carts. The ankles, the join of the hips, the inlet of the clavicle, the hair. It turns out, too, that Tod has a black chest with photographs of women in it. Gay old broads in party dresses and tan pants suits. Ribboned letters, lockets, the knickknacks of love. Deeper down in the chest, where Tod doesn’t often burrow, the women get appreciably younger and are to be seen in things like shorts and swim-wear. If this all means what I think it means, then I’m impatient. I really can’t wait. I don’t know how much sense it makes to say that I am tiring of Tod’s company. We are in this together, absolutely. But it isn’t good for him to be so alone. His isolation is complete. Because he doesn’t know I’m here.
We’re picking up new habits all the time. Bad habits, I’m assuming: solitary, anyway. Tod sins singly. . . . He has acquired a taste for alcohol and tobacco. He starts the day with these vices—the quiet glass of red wine, the thoughtful cigar—and isn’t that meant to be especially bad? The other thing is this. Not very enthusiastically, and not at all sucessfully either, so far as I can ascertain, we have begun doing a sexual thing with ourself. That happens, when it happens, the minute we wake up. Then we stagger to our feet and pick our clothes off the floor, and sit and drool into our glass, puffing on a pensive perfecto, and staring at the tabloid and all its gruesome crap.