walls were comfortably lined with books. Across the room, nestled between two ivory
bookends (bull elephants on their hind legs) was a round Sony TV. Dick was watching
Johnny Carson with the earplugs in while Monica read the new Michael Crichton that
had come from the book club that day.
‘Dick?’ She put a bookmark (THIS IS WHERE I FELL ASLEEP, it said) into the
Crichton and closed it.
On the TV, Buddy Hackett had just broken everyone up. Dick smiled.
‘Dick?’ she said more loudly.
He pulled the earplugs out. ‘What?’
‘Do you think Todd’s all right?’
He looked at her for a moment, frowning, then shook his head a little. lJe ne
comprends pas, cherie.’ His limping French was a joke between them; he had met her in
college when he was flunking his language requirement. His father had sent him an
extra two hundred dollars to hire a tutor. He had gotten Monica Darrow, picking her
name at random from the cards tacked up on the Union bulletin board. By Christmas she had been wearing his pin … and he had managed a C in French.
‘Well… he’s lost weight.’
‘He looks a little scrawny, sure,’ Dick said. He put the TV earplugs in his lap, where
they emitted tiny squawking sounds. ‘He’s growing up, Monica.’
‘So soon?’ she asked uneasily.
He laughed. ‘So soon. I shot up seven inches as a teenager – from a five-foot-six shrimp
at twelve to the beautiful six-foot-one mass of muscle you see before you today. My
mother said that when I was fourteen you could hear me growing in the night’
‘Good thing not all of you grew that much.’
‘It’s all in how you use it.’
‘Want to use it tonight?’
‘The wench grows bold,’ Dick Bowden said, and threw the earplugs across the room.
After, as he was drifting off to sleep:
‘Dick, he’s having bad dreams, too.’
‘Nightmares?’ he muttered.
‘Nightmares. I’ve heard him moaning in his sleep two or three times when I’ve gone
down to use the bathroom in the night. I didn’t want to wake him up. It’s silly, but my
grandmother used to say you could drive a person insane if you woke them up in the
middle of a bad dream.’
‘She was the Polack, wasn’t she?’
‘The Polack, yeah, the Polack. The mockie, why don’t you say? Nice talk!’
‘You know what I mean. Why don’t you just use the upstairs John?’ He had put it in
himself two years ago.
‘You know the flush always wakes you up,’ she said.
‘So don’t flush it.’
‘Dick, that’s nasty.’
He sighed.
‘Sometimes when I go in, he’s sweating. And the sheets are damp.’
He grinned in the dark. ‘I bet.’
‘What’s that… oh.’ She slapped him lightly. “That’s nasty, too. Besides, he’s only thirteen.’
‘Fourteen next month. He’s not too young. A little precocious, maybe, but not too
young.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Fourteen or fifteen. I don’t remember exactly. But I remember I woke up thinking I’d
died and gone to heaven.’
‘But you were older than Todd is now.’
‘All that stuffs happening younger. It must be the milk … or the fluoride. Do you know
they have sanitary napkin dispensers in all the girls’ rooms of the school we built in
Jackson Park last year? And that’s a grammar school. Now your average sixth-grader is
only ten. How old were you when you started?’
‘I don’t remember,’ she said. ‘All I know is Todd’s dreams don’t sound like… like he died and went to heaven.’
‘Have you asked him about them?’
‘Once. About six weeks ago. You were off playing golf with that horrible Ernie
Jacobs.’
‘That horrible Ernie Jacobs is going to make me a full partner by 1977, if he doesn’t
screw himself to death with that high yellow secretary of his before then. Besides, he
always pays the greens’ fees. What did Todd say?’
‘That he didn’t remember. But a sort of… shadow crossed his face. I think he did
remember.’
‘Monica, I don’t remember everything from my dear dead youth, but one thing I do
remember is that wet dreams are not always pleasant In fact, they can be downright
unpleasant.’
‘How can that be?’
‘Guilt All kinds of guilt Some of it maybe all the way from babyhood, when it was
made very clear to him that wetting the bed was wrong. Then there’s the sex thing. Who
knows what brings a wet dream on? Copping a feel on the bus? Looking up a girl’s skirt
in study hall? I don’t know. The only one I can really remember was going off the high
board at the YMCA pool on co-ed day and losing my trunks when I hit the water.’
‘You got off on that?’ she asked, giggling a little.
‘Yeah. So if the kid doesn’t want to talk to you about his John Thomas problems, don’t
force him.’
‘We did our damn best to raise him without all those needless guilts.’
‘You can’t escape them. He brings them home from school like the colds he used to
pick up in the first grade. From his friends, or the way his teachers mince around certain
subjects. He probably got it from my dad, too. “Don’t touch it in the night, Todd, or your
hands’!! grow hair and you’ll go blind and you’ll start to lose your memory, and after a
while your thing will turn black and rot off. So be careful, Todd.”‘
‘Dick Bowden! Your dad would never -‘
‘He wouldn’t? Hell, he did. Just like your Jewish-Polack grandmother told you that
waking somebody up in the middle of a nightmare might drive them nuts. He also told me
to always wipe off the ring of a public toilet before I sat on it so I wouldn’t get “other
people’s germs”. I guess that was his way of saying syphilis. I bet your grandmother laid
that one on you, too.’
‘No, my mother,’ she said absently. ‘And she told me to always flush. Which is why I
go downstairs.’
‘It still wakes me up,’ Dick mumbled.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
This time he had actually drifted halfway over the threshold of sleep when she spoke
his name again.
‘ What? he asked, a little impatiently.
‘You don’t suppose … oh, never mind. Go back to sleep.’
‘No, go on, finish. I’m awake again. I don’t suppose what?’
That old man. Mr Denker. You don’t think Todd’s seeing too much of him, do you?
Maybe he’s … oh, I don’t know … filling Todd up with a lot of stories.’
‘The real heavy horrors,’ Dick said. ‘The day the Essen Motor Works dropped below quota.’ He snickered.
‘It was just an idea,’ she said, a little stiffly. The covers rustled as she turned over on
her side. ‘Sorry I bothered you.’
He put a hand on her bare shoulder. ‘Ill tell you something, babe,’ he said, and stopped
for a moment, thinking carefully, choosing his words. ‘I’ve been worried about Todd too,
sometimes. Not the same things you’ve been worried about, but worried is worried,
right?’
She turned back to him. ‘About what?’
‘Well, I grew up a lot different than he’s growing up. My dad had the store. Vic the
Grocer, everyone called him. He had a book where he kept the names of the people who
owed him, and how much they owed. You know what he called it?’
‘No.’ Dick rarely talked about his boyhood; she had always thought it was because he
hadn’t enjoyed it She listened carefully now.
‘He called it the Left Hand Book. He said the right hand was business, but the right
hand should never know what the left hand was doing. He said if the right hand did
know, it would probably grab a meat-cleaver and chop the left hand right off.’
‘You never told me that.’
‘Well, I didn’t like the old man very much when we first got married, and the truth is I
still spend a lot of time not liking him. I couldn’t understand why I had to wear pants from
the Goodwill box while Mrs Mazursky could get a ham on credit with that same old story
about how her husband was going back to work next week. The only work that fucking
wino Bill Mazursky ever had was holding onto a twelve-cent bottle of musky so it
wouldn’t fly away.
‘All I ever wanted in those days was to get out of the neighbourhood and away from
my old man’s life. So I made grades and played sports I didn’t really like and got a
scholarship at UCLA. And I made damn sure I stayed in the top ten per cent of my classes
because the only Left Hand Book the colleges kept in those days was for the GIs that
fought in the war. My dad sent me money for my textbooks, but the only other money I
ever took from him was the time I wrote home in a panic because I was flunking