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To Dawn, who’d been trying for decades to be as tolerant of the Swede’s imperfect parents as he was of her imperfect mother, this was their most inexplicable preoccupation–their most enraging as well (particularly as Dawn knew that, for her adolescent daughter, Sheila had something Dawn didn’t have, that somehow Merry had come to trust the speech therapist in a way she no longer trusted her mother)”Are there no Jewish blonds in the world other than you?” Dawn asked him”It hasn’t anything to do with her appearance,” the Swede explained, “it has to do with Merry
“What does her being Jewish have to do with Merry?”
“I don’t knowShe was the speech therapistThey’re in awe of her,” the Swede said, “because of all she did for Merry
“She wasn’t the child’s mother by any chance–or was she?”
“They know that, darling,” calmly answered the Swede, “but because of the speech therapy, they’ve made her into some kind of magician
And so had he, not so much while she was Merry’s therapist–when he had merely found her composure a curious stimulus to sexual imaginings–but after Merry disappeared and grief absconded with his wife
Thrown violently off his own narrow perch, he felt an intangible need open hugely within him, a need with no bottom to it, and he yielded to a solution so foreign to him that he did not even recognize how improbable it wasIn the quiet, thoughtful woman, who had once made Merry less strange to herself by teaching her how to overcome her word twiggy balenciaga phobias and to control the elaborate circumlo-cutionary devices that, paradoxically, only increased her child’s sense of being out of control, was someone he found himself wanting to incorporate into himselfThe man who had lived correctly within marriage for almost twenty years was determined to be senselessly, worshipfully in loveIt was three months before he could begin to understand that this was no way around anything, and it was Sheila who had to tell himHe hadn’t gotten a romantic mistress–he’d gotten a candid mistressShe sensibly told him what all his adoration of her meant, told him that he was no more himself with her than Dawn was Dawn at the psychiatric clinic, explained to him that he was out to sabotage everything–but he was in such a state that he went on anyway telling her how, when they ran away together to Ponce, she could learn Spanish and teach techniques of speech therapy at the university there, and he could operate the business from his Ponce plant and they could live in a modern hacienda up in the hills, among the palms, above the Caribbean
What she did not tell him about was Merry in her house–after the bombing, Merry hiding in her houseShe told him everything except thatThe candor stopped just where it should have begun
Was everyone’s brain as unreliable as his? Was he the only one unable to see what people were up to? Did everyone slip around the way he did, in and out, in and out, a hundred different times a day go from being smart to omega planet ocean watches being smart enough, to being as dumb as the next guy, to being the dumbest bastard who ever lived? Was it stupidity deforming him, the simpleton son of a simpleton father, or was life just one big deception that everyone was on to except him?
This sense of inadequacy he might once have described to her; he could talk to Sheila, talk about his doubts, his bewilderment–all the serenity in her allowed for that, this magician of a woman who had given Merry the great opportunity that Merry had thrown away, who had supplanted with “a wonderful floating feeling,” according to Merry, half at least of her stutterer’s frustration, the lucid woman whose profession was to give sufferers a second chance, the mistress who knew everything, including how to harbor a murderer
Sheila had been with Merry and she had told him nothing
All the trust between them, like all the happiness he’d ever known (like the killing of Fred Conlon–like everything), had been an accident
She’d been with Merry and said nothing
And said nothing nowThe eagerness with which others spoke seemed, under the peculiar intensity of her gaze, to strike her as a branch of pathologyWhy would anyone say that? She herself was to say nothing all evening, nothing about Linda Lovelace or Richard Nixon or HHaldeman and John Ehrlichman, her advantage over other people being that her head was not filled by what filled everybody else’s headThis way of hers, of lying in wait behind herself, the Swede had once taken to paolo gucci women’s watches be a mark of her superiorityNow he thought, “Icy bitchWhy?” Once she had said to him, “The influence you allow others to have on you, it’s absoluteNothing so captivates you as another person’s needs And he had said, “I think you are describing Sheila Salzman,” and, as always, he was wrong
He thought she was omniscient and all she was was cold
Whirling about inside him now was a frenzied distrust of everyoneThe excision of certain assurances, the last assurances, made him feel as though he had gone in one day from being five to being one hundredIt would give him comfort, he thought, it would help him right then if, of all things, he knew that resting out in the pasture beyond their dinner table was Dawn’s herd, with Count, the big bull, protecting themIf Dawn still had Count, if only CountA relief-filled, realityless moment passed before he realized that of course it would be a comfort to have Count roaming the dark pasture among the cows, because then Merry would be roaming among the guests, here, Merry, in her circus pajamas, leaning up against the back of her father’s chair, whispering into her father’s earOrcutt drinks whiskeyA mischievous intelligence that was utterly harmless–back then unanarchic and childish and well within bounds
Meanwhile he heard himself saying, “Dad, take some more steak,” in what he knew was a hopeless effort–a good son’s ef-357 fort–to get his self-abandoned father to be, if not tranquil, less insistently chagrined over the mens gucci watches inadequacies of the non-Jewish human race
“I’ll tell you who I’ll take some steak for–for this young lady Spearing a slice from the platter that one of the serving girls was holding beside him, he dumped it onto Jessie’s plate; he had taken Jessie on as a full-scale project”Now pick up your knife and fork and eat,” he told her, “you could use some red meatSit up straight,” and, as though she believed he could well resort to violence if she did otherwise, Jessie Orcutt drunkenly mumbled, “I was going to,” but began to fiddle with the meat in such a clumsy way that the Swede feared his father was going to start cutting her food for herAll that crude energy that, try as it might, could not remake the troubled world
“But this is serious business, this children business Having gotten Jessie taking nourishment, he was in a state again about Deep Throat”If that isn’t serious, what is anymore?”
“Dad,” said the Swede, “what Shelly is saying is not that it’s not seriousHe agrees it’s seriousHe’s saying that once you’ve made your case to an adolescent child, you’ve made your case and you can’t then take these kids and lock them up in their rooms and throw away the key
His daughter was an insane murderer hiding on the floor of a room in Newark, his wife had a lover who dry-humped her over the sink in their family kitchen, his ex-mistress had knowingly brought disaster upon his house, and he was trying to propitiate his father with on-the-one-hand-this and louis vuitton jewelry on-the-other-hand-tha