I can’t tell—and I need to know—whether Tod is kind. Or how unkind. He takes toys from children, on the street. He does. The kid will be standing there, with flustered mother, with big dad. Tod’ll come on up. The toy, the squeaky duck or whatever, will be offered to him by the smiling child. Tod takes it. And backs away, with what I believe is called a shit-eating grin. The child’s face turns blank, or closes. Both toy and smile are gone: he takes both toy and smile. Then he heads for the store, to cash it in. For what? A couple of bucks. Can you believe this guy? He’ll take candy from a baby, if there’s fifty cents in it for him. Tod goes to church and everything. He trudges along there on a Sunday, in hat, tie, dark suit. The forgiving look you get from everybody on the way in—Tod seems to need it, the social reassurance. We sit in lines and worship a corpse. But it’s clear what Tod’s after. Christ, he’s so shameless. He always takes a really big bill from the bowl.
It’s all strange to me. I know I live on a fierce and magical planet, which sheds or surrenders rain or even flings it off in whipstroke after whipstroke, which fires out bolts of electric gold into the firmament at 186,000 miles per second, which with a single shrug of its tectonic plates can erect a city in half an hour. Creation … is easy, is quick. There’s also a universe, apparently. But I cannot bear to see the stars, even though I know they’re there all right, and I do see them, because Tod looks upward at night, as everybody does, and coos and points. The Plough. Sirius, the dog. The stars, to me, are like pins and needles, are like the routemap of a nightmare. Don’t join the dots. . . . Of the stars, one alone can I contemplate without pain. And that’s a planet. The planet they call the evening star, the morning star. Intense Venus.
There are love letters—I know it—in that black chest of Tod’s. I tell myself to cultivate patience. Meanwhile, sometimes, I fold up and roughly seal and then dispatch letters I haven’t written. Tod makes them, with fire. Over in the grate there. Later, we stroll out and pop them in our mailbox, which says T. T. FRIENDLY. They are letters to me, to us. For now, there’s just this one correspondent. Some guy in New York. Always the same signature at the foot of the page. Always the same letter, come to that. It reads: “Dear Tod Friendly: I hope you are in good health. The weather here continues to be temperate! With best wishes. Yours sincerely …” These letters arrive annually, around the turn of the year. It wasn’t long before I started finding them both repetitive and bland. Tod feels differently. For nights on end, before the letters come, his physiology speaks of alerted fear, of ignoble relief.
The moon I actually like looking at. Its face, at this time of the month, is especially craven and chinless, like the earth’s exiled or demoted soul.
2
You have to be cruel to be kind
These developments all came one
after the other. A new home. A
career. The use of an automobile.
And a love life. What with all the activity and everything, I’ve hardly had a moment to myself.
The house move was a perfectly symmetrical operation: lucid, elegant. Big men came, and loaded all my stuff onto their pickup. I rode with them in the cab (we tossed the one-liners back and forth)—to our destination. Which was the city. Down Route 6, south of the river, over the tracks, beyond the stockyards and their rusty corsetry, their spinal supports, their arthritic suspenders. The new property is smaller than what we’re used to: terraced, two up two down, with a modest backyard. I’m delighted with the place, because what I’m after, I suppose, is human variety, and America’s pretty pluralism, and there’s even more of that here. But Tod is in two minds about it. He’s confused. I can tell. For instance, on the day we moved, while the men were still lurching around with their crates and cardboard boxes, Tod slipped out into the garden—the garden on which he had worked for so many years. He lowered himself to his knees, and, sniffing hungrily, richly … It was beautiful, in its way. Dewlike drops of moisture formed on the dry grass, and rose upward through the air as if powered by the jolts in our chest. The moisture bathed our cheeks, deliciously, until with our tickling eyes we drew it in. Such distress. Why? I assumed at the time that he was crying for the garden and what he’d done to it. The garden was heaven when we started out, but over the years, well, don’t blame me is all I’m saying. It wasn’t my decision. It never is. So Tod’s tears were tears of remorse, or propitiation. For what he’d done. Look at it. A nightmare of wilt and mildew, of fungus and black spot. All the tulips and roses he patiently drained and crushed, then sealed their exhumed corpses and took them in the paper bag to the store for money. All the weeds and nettles he screwed into the soil—and the earth took this ugliness, snatched at it with a sudden grip. Such, then, are the fruits of Tod’s meticulous vandalism. Greenfly, whitefly, sawfly are his familiars. And horsefly. He seems to summon them to his face with a slow flick of the wrist. The muscle-bound horseflies retreat and return; they rest, rubbing their hands together in anticipation and spite. Destruction—is difficult. Destruction is slow.