Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale (2 page)

Ralph and his pals lurched
along the park’s gravel paths among plants and trees strangely
tropical for the Northwest and totally unknown to Ralph. Ralph
picked leaves shaped like birds or bats in flight, and he sniffed
them and held them up in the evening light. Ralph and his pals
climbed great blue backs, swung from blue necks, took leaks on legs
like blue tree trunks. Playing monster movie, Ralph and his pals
split up, stumbling among the narrow paths grunting like goofy
Godzillas.

Deep into the park, Ralph
rounded a bend in a gravel path to discover the most beautiful
blond girl he had seen in his life. She stood in a small clearing,
hosing down a dinosaur, the dusk a haze of light about her as she
sprayed prismatic mists of water over the beast’s blue back. She
wore red short-shorts and a white halter top, and the ends of her
long blond hair were darkened with water. Her tanned shoulders and
long legs were wet and shining. The leaves of the trees and bushes
about the clearing dripped, and water dripped from beneath the blue
dinosaur, and the air smelled as rich as any rain in Ralph’s
memory. Ralph could hear the soft hiss of the hose and from
somewhere in the tropical trees around him muffled laughter, as
though from another life. Small, bright rainbows glistened over the
blue beast, and through the glowing bell of mist and light the
girl’s long, lovely, tan face floated before Ralph, and the air
captured in his chest was like an ancient caged breath. Ralph could
imagine this beast the girl watered moving off in the next moments
under the dripping trees to disappear.

When Alice Ann was ten her
mother died after a stroke, and Alice Ann hated her for doing it,
for leaving her like that, leaving Alice Ann and her half sister,
Erin, to live with Alice Ann’s crummy stepdaddy in his hot, cramped
trailer at the edge of her step- daddy’s dinosaur park.

Alice Ann would grow more
and more to look like her mother, tall and slender, with small,
delicate breasts, boyish hips, that cascade of blond hair, even the
voice, deep without resonance, a voice screaming would destroy for
hours.

One afternoon soon after the
memorial service, Alice Ann’s crummy stepdaddy picked Alice Ann and
Erin up after school. Lookit in the backseat, he told them. Your
momma’s riding in the backseat, he said, and snickered. Alice Ann
looked in the backseat, where she saw a silvery canister with her
mother’s name and dates of birth and death etched on its shiny
side.

Alice Ann thought Ralph
looked like a young Abraham Lincoln. Ralph was the smartest boy
she had ever met. Ralph wrote poems and he had big plans in which
that sawmill played no part. Ralph had dark brown eyes that widened
and flashed when he talked about a future to be fished like
shining, deep water. The first time Ralph kissed her, Alice Ann
thought about how fateful it felt, the way their bodies, both tall
and lean, seemed to fit like pieces of a puzzle, bone against soft
place, convex against concave, the perfection of dark hairs on the
back of Ralph’s huge, gende hands as they caressed Alice Ann’s
small blond breasts. Alice Ann’s stepdaddy hated the sight of
Ralph.

Late one summer night, a
month after they met, Alice Ann and Ralph made love for the first
time in the darkness beneath the blue brontosaurus. When Ralph
opened his eyes finally, he said, Holy moly, I’m in love. Alice Ann
did not move. A faint breath in her throat told Ralph that she knew
what he meant. Ralph had been a virgin. When Alice Ann skipped her
period, Ralph bought her a tiny diamond ring. Years later, when
Alice Ann finally broke down and told Ralph who had done it to her
before him, Ralph told Alice Ann it no longer really ate his heart
out that she hadn’t been a virgin, too. Besides, her rotten,
lowlife stepdaddy was by that time dead as a doornail.

When they were first
married, Ralph and Alice Ann did not have the proverbial pot to pee
in, so they could not set sail like some lucky honeymooners to
exotic spots to launch their life together. Forget any thoughts of
Hawaii, Niagara Falls, any Caribbean cruise under a yellow,
tropical moon and countless stars to romantic ports of call, forget
Disneyland. No, Ralph and Alice Ann had to launch their life
together at the Dixie Court Cabins and Trailer Park at the southern
edge of town. Their cabin had a tiny black-and-white TV set which
worked well enough, though, and there was a tiny swimming pool out
front, and down the road there was a discount liquor store with an
adjoining lounge, and they had enough money for two nights alone
before they would move into the small back bedroom of Ralph’s mom’s
trailer.

On their second and last
evening there, Ralph had splurged on a bottle of high-class Scotch,
and as he walked back to the cabins from the liquor store, he had
felt enormously happy. He was looking forward to another long night
of abandoned love- making. Abandoned, a word he liked the sound and
taste of and said over and over to himself, rolling it over his
tongue like a cherry-flavored LifeSaver; abandoned, the only word
to describe what it had been like, throwing caution to the wind,
and good manners, making all the noise they wanted, making juicy
sounds during sex that were, well, so abandoned they were downright
animal. Alice Ann, Ralph had gasped at one point while they were
taking a breather, this business sure is, you know, abandoned.
Alice Ann, Ralph had said, let’s always be abandoned.

As the Dixie Court came into
view, Ralph saw that Alice Ann was standing beside the little pool
in front. She was wearing her new red bikini and she was wrapping
her wet hair into a white towel. The early-evening light seemed to
shine off her beautiful brown skin, and Ralph felt a flutter in his
stomach. There she was, he thought with pride and wonder and lust,
his new wife, his bride, the new Mrs. Crawford. Alice Ann was
motionless except for her lifted slender arms and her hands folding
her hair into that towel. It seemed to Ralph that even from this
distance he could catch the scent of her flesh. She was standing
slightly on tiptoe, so that the sleek muscles of her long, tanned
legs were flexed and lovely-looking. Ralph felt his weenie
wiggle.

Alice Ann seemed to be
staring at something in the distance, something in the line of pine
trees at the darkening edge of the woods maybe. Ralph looked past
her, in the direction of her intent gaze, but he couldn’t see a
thing of interest. When he looked back at her, he noticed for the
first time that the two men who were staying in the cabin next to
theirs were sitting out front in metal lawn chairs. These men were
on a fishing trip, and Ralph and Alice Ann had spoken with them
briefly the night before and then again this morning, when they had
run into each other at breakfast in the little diner down the road.
Ralph had given them a tip about a spot he knew on a nearby creek
good for brown trout, and then he and Alice Ann had chowed down on
a breakfast of a half-dozen pancakes and three over-easy eggs with
extra bacon each, before they had raced back to their cabin to make
lots more abandoned love, their fingers and mouths still sweet and
sticky with maple syrup.

Both the men were bareback,
and they were sitting there in the metal lawn chairs sipping from
cans of beer and staring at Alice Ann, and Ralph wondered suddenly
if Alice Ann knew this. Although Alice Ann was but a few feet from
Ralph, he had the weird feeling that he was observing an image of
Alice Ann that had been in some way magnified from far away, as
though he were watching her from the wrong end of a telescope. As
though it was not the real Alice Ann standing there but some sort
of aura of her. The more intently Ralph stared, the more rarefied
with clarity and sharpness her features became, yet always with
that sense of magnified distance. Who is she? Ralph wondered. Who
is she? Ralph had stood there, frozen to the spot, as he wondered
if Alice Ann was posing for those perfect strangers, and the
intense, peculiar desire he felt for her gripped his groin and made
him both giddy and sick to his stomach. It was as though some
beautiful but terrifying image of great portent were being
projected before his eyes, the sort of image a story might turn
upon.

The one thing Ralph knew for
certain was that, in the story he planned to write, this dramatic,
frozen moment would set the narrative off in a direction full of
utterly unexpected danger and possibly disaster. Yes, Ralph had
thought, the wife in that story would have made juicy abandoned
love the night before with her new husband. And they would have
held one another tenderly while they pledged to preserve forever
the excitement and mystery of their love and marriage. And then
that wife would turn right around and betray that husband in the
story. She might not want to do it, but she would have no choice.
Ralph would bend that wife in the story to his will. He might even
make the wife in the story sleep with both those bareback
strangers, if that would make things more interesting. And maybe
the husband in the story would betray the wife, too, in order to
stir even more trouble into the plot. Even if the husband, too,
didn’t want to do it. He might have to, for the sake of the
story.

Sperm Count

In college Jim Stark’s first
wife, Judy, a very pretty, perfectly nice, sensible young woman who
everybody declared was a dead ringer for that American television
sweetheart Mary Tyler Moore, had been a cheerleader, vice president
of her sorority, and, in her senior year, Homecoming Queen. Judy
had made good grades as a math major and planned on teaching high
school four years before starting her family of two boys and two
girls, about what her own mother had accomplished, in the baby
department anyway. When her old boyfriend, a handsome,
hell-raising halfback, lost his athletic scholarship due to
academic difficulties and dropped out of college his senior year to
drive a beer truck for his father’s beer-distributing company and
drink beer a lot, Judy studied the Dean’s List late into the night.
Jim Stark was no football star, and he was supposedly something of
a moody James Dean loner type, but she had seen him around campus,
and he was a pretty big guy and dark, her type, and pretty cute in
a hoody, sideburned kind of way; also, he wrote a column for the
college newspaper, and most important, he was on the Dean’s List in
pre-law. There were rumors about Jim Stark, true: that he worked
nights as a bartender-bouncer at that forbidden Big Al’s place
across the river and that as a teenager he had been in some serious
trouble with the law. Somebody even told Judy that this Jim Stark
guy wrote poems, but he sure didn’t look like any fairy to Judy.
And who believes every rumor, anyway?

Judy’s new husband’s law
school idea was a joke, of course, and by default, for lack of
something better to do, besides enter adult life, Jim eventually
earned an M.A. in English literature at West Virginia University,
his thesis a Jungian analysis of the poetry of Matthew Arnold
(another joke). Which was not necessarily a bad turn of events,
however, since Jim was lucky enough to secure a teaching position
at a small private college in southern Pennsylvania. College
instructors certainly didn’t pull in the loot like lawyers, but
there was adequate prestige in it back home with family and former
boyfriends. Things could have been worse was the way Judy looked at
it. She could have ended up married to the driver of a beer truck,
which was a job Jim, frankly, would have traded up for.

After a couple of years
teaching at the small college, Jim applied to and was accepted by a
prestigious Ph.D. program in Victorian Studies, where he rather
jokingly planned to explore and catalogue every dark sexual
archetype that informed the Victorian imagination. Jim requested a
leave of absence from his teaching job to begin his studies, and
that June he and Judy traveled to the university town, where they
put a deposit down on a lovely first-floor flat with a working
fireplace. Judy had already secured a teaching position at a good
local high school, and she enrolled to attend evening classes to
continue her work toward an M.A. in Guidance and Counseling. Judy
began sewing curtains for the new apartment, and they splurged
from their meager savings to buy two pole lamps, a wood-tone cuckoo
clock for the mantel, and several framed Keene prints of children
with enormous, concentration-camp eyes, which Judy had always
considered decorative.

But then, in early August,
Jim suddenly withdrew half their remaining savings and boarded a
bus for San Francisco. In San Francisco Jim moved into a commune of
expatriate, doper West Virginians, and in a letter of explanation
to Judy announced that the sick, dark sexual longings of the
Victorians meant little to him really, and that he had been a
closet flower child all along and he could no longer live a lie.
Judy suspected that her husband was deranged from drugs, which was
more or less true. Clearly, in the selection of one’s lifemate
department, Judy had really dropped the ball. Divorce was the only
answer, Judy decided, especially after she had secured the word of
her loverboy, a junior high school football coach named Doc, that
he would forsake his wife and retarded baby daughter for a new life
with Judy, after all.

It astonished Judy when Jim
wrote her that he had won a writing fellowship to Stanford
University (she hadn’t even known Jim had applied). At the end of
the two-year-fellowship period he would have an M.A. in creative
writing under his belt, which was a terminal degree and in some
ways more marketable than a Ph.D. in something goofy like Victorian
Studies. Maybe there was something to this writing goofiness, after
all, Judy speculated. What if her goofy husband actually wrote
some old book and sold the thing to the movies?