What Is All This

Dirk drove to Helen's house to pick up their son. It was his weekend with Roy--once every other, which he and Helen, without lawyer advice or court decree, had congenially agreed to a year ago, when they separated and she filed for divorce--but she had different plans for today.

"Donald's invited us to the city for the weekend. Roy can't wait, as Donald's been telling him what great wooden planes they'll make and how much fun Roy'll have sleeping in the balcony-bedroom setup Donald's built in his studio. But what happened to your phone? Because I called before, about the time I figured I wasn't going to hear from you. Called collect, but the operator, checking with her records office, because at first I refused to believe what she said, told (continued on page 233)What is All This?(continued from page 143) me that as of yesterday, your phone's been removed. Why? Because what puzzles me most is that you spend nine to ten dollars having a phone installed, and one week after it's in and when you really could've used it, you have it removed. Weird. I've definitely made up my mind, Dirk: Sometimes you're absolutely weird. Were all sorts of incoming wrong numbers getting you down, as they did in L.A. last year? Maybe I'm being unfair, but you at least had that phone for two months, which hints you're getting better, which means progressively worse. My point is that Roy could've reached you if you had a phone, and now he has to wait for you to call. Next time, I suppose you'll have your phone taken out the day after it's installed. And the time after that, if any phone company is mad enough to let you have a phone, you'll ask the telephone serviceman to remove the phone right after he's packed up his installation tools to go. But, admittedly, all that's your business now," and she yelled down the hall: "Roy? Is your knapsack packed? And your daddy's here."

Roy came out of his room, his unhitched overloaded knapsack hanging from a shoulder by one strap. He rushed up to Dirk, kissed him, said, "You coming to San Francisco with Mommy and me?"

Helen said no, "Your father has once more made the mistake of driving down without first calling."

Roy talked excitedly about his trip, how sleeping in a bedroll at Donald's was going to be like camping out in the woods. "And he says I can look out through windows there and see mountains and ocean and even look through a telescope to the stars. Do you want to sleep with me?"

"Dirk has his own flat in San Francisco, which you can probably stay at next weekend, if he doesn't mind." She looked at Dirk for confirmation as she sipped from her mug. "Want some tea? You've that old desiring expression again. I didn't make enough for two, but if you think you need some for the drive up, I'll put some water on." She went to the kitchen--Roy to his room to find his cowboy boots--and returned with two smoking mugs of tea. His was very sweet, just as she liked it, with two to three tablespoonfuls of honey in it, the liquid well stirred. "Is something wrong with the tea?" she said. She sipped her own tea as a test, winced, seemed about to spit it back, swallowed, said it was too tart, too lemony, "Uch, it's just awful," and they exchanged mugs.

"You like it tart, I like it sweet--our respective predilections, if you like; natures, so to speak. You like the shade, New York snow, barely endurable Eastern winters, depressing poetry, music, films and decomposing flowers to paint. While I like the sun, warmth, California spring, summer and everything happy and silly that goes with it, including getting a tan. You always put down that silliness in me. No, not always. We got married and everything was nice for a couple of days and then you suddenly became so stern and critical--you very definitely changed then--and started doing your unlevelheaded best to kill off my own silliness. What do you say about all that now? Donald's very much like me, in a way: Opposites now detract. Sometimes he's terribly silly, does cart wheels in the street, more than that, just dumb foolish indescribable things--he gets along with just about everyone. He's able to cut off his equally serious work almost immediately and simply have a gassy time. And so far, he and Roy get along great. He's teaching him about camping and carpentry and all kinds of ocean-creature things and even how to write out their names on your old electric typewriter--all three of their names apiece, including the Mister and Master--Roy wouldn't settle for less. Roy," she yelled, "will you move it along? It's past noon."

Roy hobbled into the room in one boot, said he was still searching for the other.

"You don't wear cowboy boots on Saturdays. Just Tuesdays and Fridays--you know that."

"There it is," Roy said, and he crawled under the couch, came out with the missing boot and sat on the floor to put it on.

"You don't wear those boots on Saturdays. Find your moccasins, jack boots, even your mukluks, but I want no more diddling around."

"Please?" Roy said, and he stood up, walked a few steps and fell over; the boots were on the wrong feet. Most of his clothes, books, toys, tools and crayons fell out of the knapsack and Roy screamed, "Damn it!" He threw the knapsack at his dog, who had just entered the room, and was snapping his crayons in two when Helen picked him up by his ankles and tapped his head twice on the rug.

"Idiot," she said.

"I give up," he said.

"Idiot, idiot, idiot."

"Mom, I said I give up, so let me down."

She set him up on his feet, they looked crossly at each other, Roy serious, Helen mocking, then started laughing, hugged each other; the dog, Sabine, got between their legs; Helen said, "Ummm, just ummm."

They all left the house. Dirk got on one knee to pick some weeds out of the parking as Helen, Roy and Sabine got into her car. "Call next time," she said. "And if you're going to Ken's thing Sunday night, maybe Don and I will see you there," and they drove away.

Dirk weeded the parking clean, drove to the supermarket, liquor store and bakery, which were all in the same local shopping center, and was in the freeway's speed lane doing 75, miles from their house, when he saw them in the rearview mirror, Roy and Sabine standing on the back seat, staring out the window, Helen wanting to pass. He flicked on the directional signal. Helen flashed a begrudging thanks as she drove her car alongside his. Roy spotted him on his own and beamed, waved. Dirk waved back. Roy waved with both hands and shook the dog's paw at him and pushed Helen's shoulder to point out Dirk driving behind them in the adjoining lane. Dirk floored the gas pedal, but their more powerful Saab was still increasing its speed and distance over him. Roy displayed his tool kit, extracted a hammer from it and made hammering motions in the air. Dirk smiled, nodded. Soon there were several cars separating hers from his laboring Volks, and Roy blew him a kiss.

Dirk turned on the portable radio strapped to the front seat by the safety belt. The Warsaw Concerto by Richard Addinsell, the announcer said, and the name of the orchestra, conductor, pianist, record company and number and time of day. Dirk hadn't heard the piece for years; when he was 13 or 14, it had been his favorite music--this same pianist on both sides of a 12-inch breakable record that, at 15, he jokingly broke over his brother's head. He tuned the radio in, listened to the loud dramatic opening, switched to AM and the telephone voice of a woman who said certainly, Dr. King's death is sad, as every assassination and sudden making of a widow and four fatherless children is sad, but who's to say he wasn't asking for it a little, you know what I mean? and the commentator's enraged denouncement of the woman's bigotry and proclamation of her stupidity and the loud click of his hanging up, and shut the radio off. A car honked behind him; he was straddling the broken white lines separating the two lanes; and while he edged into the slow lane, an elderly woman cut into the speed lane, narrowly missing his rear fender. From across the middle lane, they looked at each other. The woman frowned, glared, Dirk opened his mouth and crossed his eyes, as if he were being strangled; the woman accelerated her huge Mercedes to 80, 90; in seconds, he was left far behind. He took the San Mateo exit to his favorite restaurant in America, at the outskirts of town.

They had had their wedding reception there, rare Japanese and Okinawan dishes made special for the feast in the cushioned room upstairs. Half the guests got drunk on sake and Japanese champagne flown in that day from Tokyo through the owner's secret contacts at JAL; half the guests remained stoned on Israeli hashish smoked in the spray-deodorized johns. Irises, cherry blossoms, rose incense, paper slippers, friends' children sitting on the foot-high tables and guzzling from sake carafes filled with pop, handfuls of cold cooked rice thrown at the couple as they left. Later, he picked rice out of her hair; together, they painted Peace in fluorescent acrylics on the bedroom window overlooking the beach at Santa Cruz; in bed, she said how life was best when she had the sun, health, loving man and a backward and upside-down view of Peace from a comfy new mattress all at the same time; but where, she wanted to know, will we go from here?

A card was hooked over the doorknob reading he hadn't been home to receive a telegram; and penciled on the other side was the deliverer's personal message: "The gram's been slid under your door."

"If you have no objections," Chrisie wired from San Luis Obispo, "I'll be driving up for weekend with two girls."

Chrisie's younger daughter, Sophie, was genetically his. He'd met Chrisie at a New York party three summers ago, he in the city to be with his dying sister and grieving folks, she on a week's vacation from the man who was still her adoring hot-tempered husband; and minutes after their orgasm, when he was squirming out from under her to breathe, she said she was convinced she conceived. "Preposterous, granted, but I felt it, just as I felt it with Caroline three years ago, their infinitesimal gametic coupling before, as explosive as our own."

He rolled up the canvas he'd been painting on the floor, put away his income-tax statements and forms--Federal, state, New York City, six jobs in one year and once three part-timers per day, and he was going to be penalized for filing late--shampooed his rug with laundry detergent, washed down the baseboards with diluted ammonia, dusted every object in the flat a two- and a five-year-old girl could touch or step on a chair and reach, on his knees, scoured the bathroom tub and tiles and soaped the linoleum floors with the now ammonia-maimed sponge. He left the door unlocked and hauled two bags of linens and clothes to the laundromat down the hill. A girl was in front, her smock cut from the same inexpensive Indian bedspread he used to cover the mattress on his floor. "Spare change?" she said. He never gave, but today handed her a quarter. "Thanks loads," and "Spare change?" to a man approaching the laundromat with a box filled with laundry, detergent, starch and magazines. He said, "I work for my money." She said, "I work for my money also, by asking for spare change." He said, "Dumb begging kid," and she said, "Dear beautiful man," and he, "You ought to be thrown in Santa Rita with the rest of your crazy friends," and she, "You ought to drop some acid"; he, "And you ought to poison yourself also"; she, "I wasn't referring to poison"; "Well, I was"; "Spare change? Spare a dime, nickel, penny, a smile?" "Out of my way, pig"; and he shoved her aside with the box and went into the laundromat.

Dirk read while his laundry was being washed. His were the most colorful clothes in the machines. A few minutes before the cycles were finished, he got up to stick a dime in the one free drier, but a woman beat him to it by a second. "You've got to be fast, not slow," she said, as she stuck three dimes into the coin slot.

"Spare change?" the girl said outside.

A man set down four shopping bags of laundry and opened his change purse. "Oh no," and he snapped the purse shut, "I forgot, I'll need all my change for the machines. The coin changers have been vandalized so often this month the owner's had to seal them up, and now she's got to take them out, as they're still being forced open. People are violent and nuts."

One of the driers stopped. A woman sitting under a hair drier and another unwrapping a candy bar signaled with their hands and eyes and candy bar that the machine wasn't theirs. Dirk touched the shoulder of a man on a bench with a hat over his face, who was the only other person in the room the drier might belong to, but the man still slept. Dirk removed the strange warm clothes from the drier, folded them neatly and piled them in a basket cart, was throwing his wet clothes into the drier when someone poked his ribs; the man who'd been sleeping squeezed Dirk's wrist and said, "Don't any of you people have the decency to wait?"

The telegram read: "I and the girls won't arrive till tomorrow. Husband, Parents, complications. Love." Dirk drank a few vodka and tonics and fell asleep, awoke in the dark with his radio on and went outside. He had a Moroccan tea at a Haight Street coffeehouse, where many young people were drawing, writing, playing checkers and chess, talking about police harassment, pot planting, Hippie Hill freedom, the Bach cantata being played, democracy now but total revolution, if that's what it's going to have to come to, tonight's rock concerts at the Fillmore, Avalon, Winter-land, Straight. A man sat beside him, pulled on the long hairs of his unbrushed beard and braided matted head hair and said, "Hey, there, place's getting real artsy, very beautiful old North Beach days, culture with a Das Kapital K, crazies just doing their dovey ding, am I tight?" Dirk shrugged, the man laughed and patted Dirk's shoulder consolingly, a girl at the next table shrugged and the man said, "Yeah, North Beach si and now the Haight, you're all going to burn out famous," he announced to the house, "like Ginsberg, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, me boys, me best, me fine old friendlies who bade it ballsy and big, so try and refute me in five years, friends, that all of you who pluck to it haven't made buns of bread," and he finished his coffee, chugged down all the milk in the table's cream pitcher and left.

Dirk was on his way home when a girl stopped him on the street and asked if she could crash his pad. "I'm alone, in real trouble, it's just me and I won't be any bother, I swear. The pad I was supposed to flop at won't let me in. These four guys I was living with there suddenly split for Los Angeles--ran off with all my records and clothes while I was sitting it out in jail. Look at this. The creepy keeper gave it to me today as sort of a graduation diploma and safe-conduct visa out of Nevada." She showed him a paper that stated she'd been arrested and released after five days for vagrancy, loitering, wayward minor, accessory to crime, resisting arrest. "Resisting arrest bullshit. They just clamped on the cuffs, felt my tits and dumped me in a smelly van. We were selling speed, made our contact, two cats and myself in Carson City, which is America's worst dump. You ever been there? Don't ever go there. The creepy keeper said, 'Now, I'm warning you, sis, don't be turning back.' And when we left the restaurant with our contact, twenty Feds jumped out of the shadows with guns cocked like puny movie gangsters and threw us against our truck, arrested us all."

While they walked to his apartment, she told him she thought she was pregnant again. She'd had a kid in Hartford last year, gave it away, her rich German Jewish father told her the baby was very ugly after he had told her how much he was forking over for her bills. "Best of hospital service, never had it so good, and he was kind of sweet and kind of like an overconcerned expectant father expecting his first child and then, with my society-minded momma, had me committed. But the state released me after four months, though my folks wanted me in for at least a year but were too cheap to pay for a private crazyhouse, when they found I was still getting pills and grass and was caught balling with one of Connecticut's prize mental deficients behind a bandstand during a Saturday-afternoon dance. You ever been to Hartford? Well, don't ever go there, either. That's what they told me in Carson City. Said, don't come back for six months' minimum, and I said, six months my ass, I'm never coming back, none of my friends will ever come back, you lost a good tourist trade when you locked me up, and this giant Swedish matron, she was very congenial when she wasn't forcing my box open every ten minutes to see if I was stashing anything inside, she just laughed, laughed and laughed."

Dirk gave her one of two tuna sandwiches he made. She said it looked pretty and sweet, sourdough was her favorite of all nonmacrobiotic breads, but no, thanks, with the last kid she gained 46 pounds, she was ten pounds overweight as it was, she was going to start eating again when and if she found she wasn't pregnant. "Look at that view. Golden Gate from your own flat. Do you ever really look outside--I mean, really? Too much. You ought to raise your mattress to window level, make it with some groovy chick while you're both stoned on hash and eye-popping the moon and sun. You do all these paintings? Do them on pills? Well, don't ever get on them, don't even hold them, they're worse than anything besides junkie's junk, which is really a good trip the first time but the shits when you have to start paying forty dollars a high. You're a real housekeeper. Just look how clean this place is. You ought to wear an apron--a clean flowery one. I'll make you one, if you get me some thread things and paints and an old clean sheet. Floor recently washed, books in place, not even a curly body hair on the rug, and pardon me for all my luggage," she lifted her average-sized pocketbook with her pinkie and reset it on the floor, "but I feel utterly helpless if I have to travel light."

They drank tea, she showered and said she was sorry, but she had thoroughly soaked his bathroom floor; when she was living in Hartford, she wasn't such a slob and, in fact, was a real housekeeper then, also: cooked, cleaned, deveined the shrimps and cracked the crabs, just obsessed with ridding the flat of flecks and specks, as her mother is and he must be, but now she hasn't made a bed for eight months, no, nine, except for the five days in Carson City's most depressing jail, which is just another reason for never going back. "You have kids? You look like you have half a dozen. That you and your boy in the sailboat? Is your wife as blonde as he? I never want kids, never want to get married. Marriage is for con men who give charm for money and that Mongoloid I balled who'll always need some help and love. But for everyone else, it's me me me me. My childhood was the worst. My mother's a hysterical bitch and shrew. My dad's got a gripe against me because he always wanted to screw me and now because he bought me a thousand dollars' worth of clothes to keep me in Hartford just two days before I split for the Coast. Two cats came by the place I was staying at and said, let's take you away from all this, meaning my apron and housekeeping chores, and I said sure, anything; there wasn't anything happening in Hartford since I gave that ugly baby away. So I packed those clothes in two valises I stole from the cats I was living with--they did much worse to me in the past, so don't even begin to twinge and twist--and we made it across country without a bit of flak, never for a moment being anything but high. I've now been in every state but Alaska, Carson City, Nevada, my forty-ninth. And I have no clothes, maybe two dimes in my wallet, my father would just piss if he knew and my mother's aching to put me away for life, and most everybody who knows me says I'm wasting my time, that I've something more than a one-forty I.Q. and ought to use that natural intelligence in writing about all I've seen and done, though with a humorous aspect to it, as there's far too much sad seriousness in literature and the world as it is. And one day I will. Just as soon as I land a pad of my own."

He offered her a sleeping bag on the floor and she said that was exactly what she needed for her rotten back. They went to bed. "Hey, look," she screamed, "I can see the moon. It's getting a little past the half stage. My God, it's being eclipsed by the earth--our earth. What do astrologers say about eclipses of the moon? Are they special nights, do any of the signs undergo any change? And I bet you're a Gemini. Geminis are the worst. Yes, I'm sure you're a Gemini. Well, I'm a Taurus, we'd never get along, and my name's Cynthia Devine."

The room was very dark when he awoke a few hours later to Cynthia talking about her magnificent view of the totally eclipsed moon. He put his hand on her knee and she felt his chest. "You have a very interesting heartbeat," she said. "I've never slept with a man with such a rapping heart." Her hand moved down his body and she said, "Ooooh, now I know why it's rapping so fast. But stop, will you, because then I can say tomorrow that it was a lot better sleeping here than it was in jail. There I got a crummy mattress on a wooden board with no privacy. I wasn't even allowed to see daylight till they walked me across the yard for a health exam. The doctor there gave me these pretty blue antibiotic pills and these blood-red capsules for what he said was my venereal disease. I told him vaginal infection, not V.D., a vaginal infection I had had for a month and still have, till he finally apologized. Prison doctors are always trying to stick you with the worst. But he was fairly nice, all told. And Sheila, the matron, wasn't half bad, either, when she wasn't trying to get into my pants."

Someone knocked on the door. "You get your share of telegrams," the deliverer said. "When this one came this morning, I was sure it was my fault because you didn't get the two I slipped under the door and this one was trying to find out what was wrong."

"I started out this evening," Chrisie wired from San Luis Obispo, "and then returned home. Let me know if you think I should really come. Call. Love." And her phone number.

He walked Cynthia down the hill, to show her where the public phone booth was and to cash a check at the drugstore for himself. "Goodbye," she said, shaking his hand. "I think we--no, I'm glad we didn't--oh, maybe it would've been fun if we had, as it's always a crazy farce with somebody new, though it's also nice sleeping peacefully, for a change, without someone's hands tearing into me. I've got to call some guys I know. They were staying at a flat before I got busted, and if they've already split, then I'm really screwed. Maybe I should phone my dad for cash. I can get him at business now, just after he's returned from a three-martini lunch. He's really quite beautiful when he's smashed, and thanks."

The druggist smiled. "You made the year 1968 on your check instead of 1969."

His 86-year-old landlord was pulling out weeds from around one of the hundred or so signs he had painted and then erected in their front yard. The sign read: Stop being an accessory to the crime of fratricide--don't you know all wars are silly? "I've just come back from distributing my peace pamphlets downtown," Mamblin said, "and you wouldn't believe the wonderful reception I got from so many of our courageous lads. Peace first, I told them--love, learn and grow. Jewish and Christian wars must end, I said--gardens, not battlefields. A mental revolution, not a physical one. One young man from Santa Monica, of all places, said that after listening to me, he would think again about avoiding the draft. He said I was a man of God, which I disproved scientifically--a walking institution to peace, he tried to make me, which was nearer the truth. But I've unfortunate news also, Dirk. Mrs. Diboneck dropped by too early this morning and complained that you've been coming in at all hours of the day--playing the radio too loud, waking her, having wild parties, orgies, she said, and that you're also running a hippie haven in your apartment downstairs. She's old, a good woman, knew my wife, been here close to twenty years, and you know how I had trouble with the previous tenant of your flat, him being a bit queer with men in a sexual manner and shooting out all my lovely leaded-glass windows and causing a mild attack for poor Mrs. D. But what do you think of my latest sign?" He pointed past a few dozen older signs to the new one with gold-painted letters bordered by red, which read, I have arisen from the dead. "Did it yesterday, after this long stimulating conversation with a young Welsh lady who happened by while I was weeding. It has no Christian significance, of course, other than its possible mockery of mythological Christian belief--but the symbolism's what I like. I have arisen from ignorance, mediocrity, mindlessness, myths, lies, half-truths, superstitions--I have arisen from the deaf, dumb, blind and spiritually dead. And, being you're one of the truly good people in this area and a disciple of mine, I think--I don't exactly know what to make of you yet, though you're being carefully studied. Dirk, phrenologically and every other way, so be on your guard--why don't you work matters out with Mrs. D. yourself? I only don't want her waking me up again before nine."

Mrs. Diboneck's typewritten note in his mailbox read, "I would appretiate if you would not slam the door so vigorous. It shakes everything and scares me to death. I accomodatet your wish last week ago by using my T.V. and Radio allmost never. So be a Gentleman and hand an to the doors!! Thank You."

Using Magic Markers, he made a quick small sketch of the view from his room. Red towers of Golden Gate bridge, gold towers of St. Ignatius Church, green park, blue bay, yellow ocean, purple sky, brown, black, orange and pink hills and mountains of Marin County, and he was about to stick the drawing in Mrs. Diboneck's mailbox when he saw her watching him through one of her lower door panes. She stepped onto the sidewalk, clutching her house dress together at the chest. "I'm sorry I complained to Mr. Mamblin before, Mr.--but what is your name? But the noise, dear God, one would think a children school down there directly below with what I hear and you make. Why? Why? I ask myself an old lady without any answers, and the radio, so loud I can't hear myself phone talking when it isn't waking me out of sleeps and naps I need and all such things, or is it your TV you own? But is it not possible, may I ask, that people live in this building, too? I don't want to speak about it more than now and never again to Mr. Mamblin if I must, so be reasonable, please, a nice young man and your blond boy so sweet, and we will remain kind friends. Otherwise, I must one day call the police if Mr. Mamblin does not, which to me even with my illness seems cruel but no other matter can I help taking this being forced by you," and she dropped a small bag of garbage into the can standing between them and returned to her apartment. He put the drawing into his billfold and went to the post office.

"Five cents a card is still quite the bargain," the clerk said, "what with all the postal rates raised and the cards staying the same. A two-dollar bill? Where you been hiding it? And a John Kennedy for your change."

He made a drawing on one of the cards of a laughing man running through a forest followed by a five-horned four-eared three-tongued two-nosed one-eyed six-tailed horselike creature called the multimal and addressed it to his son in San Jose. Beneath the address he wrote, "Attention: Love to you and Mommy."

"I arrived at the precise instant this thing was being delivered," Chrisie said, holding out a telegram, as she and the children cautiously walked down the long steep rickety flight of outside wooden stairs.

"Decided not to come after all," Chrisie had wired from San Luis Obispo this morning, "Why not drive down here instead, love," her address and the number of the main connecting highway, 101.

"Remember Dirk, Caroline?" Chrisie said to her older daughter, and Caroline said, "No, when are we going home?" "Remember Dirk, Sophie?" and Sophie, two in a month, said, "Dow? Dow?" and painted her hand with his purple marking pen. "Remember Chrysalis, Dirk?" Chrisie said, and Dirk hugged her, made bacon and eggs for the girls on his two hot plates, gave them milk in clean paint glasses, set up Sophie's portable crib, unrolled a sleeping bag for Caroline, and later placed a triptych screen between the section of the room the girls were asleep in and his mattress on the floor.

He and Chrisie had tuna sandwiches, wine, salad, ice cream, grass, got under the covers, turned down the electric blanket, tuned in a Vivaldi piccolo concerto, watched the lights of a low-flying plane pass his window and cross the full moon. A dog from the house below his began to bay.

"Happy Easter," Chrisie said when he awoke, handed him a wicker egg basket filled with candy eggs, jelly beans, chocolate bunny and new electric razor. Caroline said, "Merry Easter, Dirk," and showed him a similar basket with a live white baby rabbit inside sniffing the green-paper grass. Sophie was standing in her crib, nibbling a blue candy egg.

Two conductors wouldn't let them on their cable cars because of Caroline's rabbit. The conductor of the third car patted the rabbit's head and asked if he could feed it part of his apple. The car rattled along Lombard Street, was very crowded; a woman said she thought the rabbit just now scratched her old family Bible and brand-new stole; a man hurrying to catch up with his wife, who had suddenly alighted to take movies of "the world's crookedest street," nearly knocked Caroline off the back platform. The rabbit jumped out of the basket, as Chrisie was picking up Caroline, and disappeared down a sewer grating. Dirk blew the highest note on his harmonica to the man, who snarled back, "Hippies," and resumed his smile and pose for his wife's camera. Caroline stopped crying when Dirk gave her his Kennedy half dollar and harmonica and said she had wanted a pink or blue rabbit, anyway. Dirk held Sophie as the car headed down to the Wharf. She was wet, smelled, her mouth bubbled, he kissed each of her sticky fingers, felt her firm back, rubbery legs, grazed his face across her thread-thin hair, which was getting blonder than Chrisie's lemon-colored top. They got off at the turntable, Chrisie said how touristy the whole area was, got on the same car for the return trip up the hill, went to Golden Gate Park, where a radical New Left political party was sponsoring a be-in, and rose to leave an hour later. The sound equipment was bad, not enough music was being played, Chrisie was getting paranoid at the number of people openly turning on around them, and the field was too crowded and the girls could get lost and there were too many political speeches being made. "The black man," the black woman candidate for the state's 18th assembly district said, "and the white man had all better start working together fast to end the repulsive criminal police power in this fascist town, or else the whole Bay Area's going to get burned down, a lot of noninnocent people going to get accidentally wiped out, the entire state and country might even get cooked, and I ain't just bull-jiving, brothers."

"We simply don't work together, fit together, do anything well except sex together," Chrisie said in his apartment, "and even that we can't be too certain about, Dirk. I liked you better when I first met you--even liked you better during that last disastrous weekend in L. A. I like you better in your letters, prose paintings, painted postcards and grunts and silences for phone conversations. I think you only see me because of Sophie. You're so compulsively solitary, at the same time, so hungry for companionship and maybe, maybe even love. Most people we know agree to my theory about you, or have even volunteered a similar one on their own, that there are really three of you--and we can say this unhypocritically while realizing you probably represent, in some exaggerated form, the condition of us all. The pleasant helpful exterior, the bored angry man inside, who keeps distorting the fake amiable face, and the third you, who's inside the second you and who deeply wants a close enduring relationship with someone but can't find his way out. I've thought about it a lot, Dirk, so maybe you can think about it a little after I'm gone. Blaise didn't know I was driving up. Nobody knew except my father, who called as I was leaving the second-to-last time and asked why I couldn't spend Easter Sunday with them. I told him because I was celebrating it with a friend, and he said which friend, as he thinks he knows all my friends, and I said a friend, and he said male or female friend, and I said male, of course, though we're strictly platonic, but only because you're a brilliant young scientist fag. I finally had to divulge your name, John Addington Symonds--I love playing literary jokes on my dad, if only to let the snob know how really uninformed he is--and a phony address, which they're likely driving to right now. This place is like a monk's room except for the paintings. Though David Silverman became a monk and he still paints. I think Blaise is going to scissor through your painting when he discovers where I've gone. I'd hate for him to cut it up. You made it for me without my asking you to, and it's going to be worth a lot of money one day, which everyone agrees to except my father, who says it's too psychedelic and you ought to try another art form. That one looks like a sexed-up vagina close up. And that one there has always been my favorite--an immense forget-me-not, which was my pet flower as a girl. But Suicide--no, it makes me uneasy, tense. You should've sold it when that very suicidal man wanted to buy it from you, simply to get it out of the house. Show me all the new ones, Dirk. I like that one, that one's fantastic, that one's another great pulsing vagina, I don't like that one at all--another Suicide. This one should be reproduced in an underground newspaper, this one hung on a busy street corner, this one hung above the bed of a couple who want to but can't conceive, this one given to Blaise to cut up. Can I make you a liverwurst and cheddar on rye? Are we getting along better than we did last night? Do you have any more Miracle Whip for the girls' tuna fish?"

The telegram to Chrisie from her husband read: "Don't bother returning less you bring back two fresh loaves Larraburu extra-sour sourdough rye."

They drove to the party where Helen, Donald and Roy might be. Sophie in his arms, Caroline behind them, blowing into the harmonica, they mounted the stairs, were greeted at the top by the host, who was the twin brother of the man who had invited Dirk. He shook their hands, seemed disappointed. "Nice kids," he said, "the little one a girl? Coats over there, head's through there, drinks in there, nice to see you--Dick, is it? Julie? I never remember names and especially not children's," and he greeted the childless bottle-bringing couple behind them with a long noisy hug. "Wendy, Harris, glad you could come, glad you could come."

Ken, the host's twin, said he was happy to see them, picked up Caroline, kissed Sophie's head, Dirk's Cheek, Chrisie's lips, said, "Soft, soft like morning mush" and "Bar's over there, head's back there, I guess you know where you put your other duds and I'm the bartender, so vodka and tonic for everyone except the teeny kids. Orange pop on the rocks do you, Caroline, my dear?" and he put her into a soda carton and carried her to the bar.

Helen was in the living room, dressed and groomed meticulously in a floor-length harem suit, different from Chrisie, who had washed her face and brushed her hair in less than a minute and thrown a wrinkled paisley smock over her body, with nothing on underneath but sheer panties she could hide in her fist. "So this is Sophie," Helen said and took Sophie from his arms and kissed her nose. "She's a darling, a dream child," held her high, "she ought to be on television, promoting very pure white soap. She looks nothing like you, Dirk, except for her thin hair." Chrisie's uneasy smile failed, she looked weakly defensive, sullen, said nothing; they were all handed drinks by Ken.

"Special," he said. "Drink this and two more magically appear in its place."

"Why'd you come, Dirk?" He had gone to the bedroom to get their coats. The party was dull and the children's presence was annoying the host and the guests. "Why'd you come, Dirk, or does it matter? But you knew this'd be an adult party. If you came with Chrisie alone, I'd say fine, big deal, you're fully out of my life now and I think it'd be wonderful for you if you ended up marrying her and possibly even hilarious. She seems nice, quiet, down to earth, attractive and good to the girls, though expressionless. She has no expression. I could never understand that in a woman. Ken says she looks like a wasted hippie. But why'd you come?" She put the headset back on to listen to the music being piped in from the living-room stereo. "Too much, The Chambers Brothers doing Time Has Come Today, like having the speakers built right into your brains--four big beautiful spades coming on like Gang Busters in your skull; want to hear?" She gave him the phones, he sat beside her on the bed, she got up, shut the door, stretched out on her stomach, he felt her thigh, she laughed and turned over and stroked his neck, said Roy was being baby-sat at Donald's by this wild old Russian countess, if he was interested, Donald was in this super cutting room downtown, editing his totally insane flick, if he was interested, drank from her drink, his drink, said his tasted better, sweeter, would he mind if they exchanged or just shared, touched his waist, said she thinks he's lost weight, it looks good, he'd been getting much too heavy, signaled she'd like the headset back; when he put up his hand for her to wait awhile more, she said she thinks the host has another pair. She left the room, returned with the second set, plugged it into the jack, lay beside him, both on their backs, listening to Time; Helen asked if he could do it quickly. She could; Donald's way above par, and all that, but he'll be editing films all night and she wants to fuck, does he? "And then, you're still my quasi-legal husband till June and such, but no rationales or threats, can you do it quickly? I can." He helped her kick off her panties, she helped him unbuckle his belt, both moved to the howls and beat of time ... time ... time ... their headsets got in the way when they kissed, he tried throwing off his pair and got one phone off and was prying out the other phone cord still wedged behind his ear when the doorknob turned, the door was being pushed, Helen's wrist was pressed to his mouth and her teeth clenched tight, when someone screamed, "Dirk," as they exploded together, "I'm tired, Dirk, and Mommy wants for us to go home."

"We don't often accompany each other that far," Helen said, as she removed her headset. "Did they make your ears hot also?" She blew him a kiss, slipped into the room's toilet; he opened the door, gave Caroline her coat, helped Chrisie on with her sweater, took a sleeping Sophie in his arms, shook Ken's hand and waved to the host, who seemed delighted they were going, said from across the room, "Nice to see you, Dick, nice to see you, Chris, come back again real soon."

"Did you two make love?" Chrisie said during the drive home. "I thought you were and didn't want to bother you in the room. It was Caroline who insisted we go. And when Helen unlocked the door and came over to the bar asking for a second set of earphones, I had some crazy idea you were going to do it with those things on. What was it like? You smell like a marriage bed now. I wish we could do it with sound ourselves."

In the apartment, the children asleep, he and Chrisie began to make love, stopped, she said it was usually better when he was hard, she'd understand if he couldn't or didn't want to right now but felt it was something more. "Feel like it, Dirk, that's an order, or almost an order; no, no order at all, it was nothing, maybe a confession, forget I said anything; but even if talking about the act usually kills it, I still feel I've got to do it at least once before I leave, my femininity's at stake, my whole well-being's in peril, the children's futures are in jeopardy; besides, we haven't done it in half a year and you were usually so good at it before; do you mind? Strange how things change."

Chrisie and the girls were in the car, Dirk on the sidewalk. "Will you be coming to Obispo?" she said. "Though I suppose I should continue coming here, what with Blaise and an insanely jealous father and a mother who's always spying by for butter and mommy-sissy chats and demanding to know who painted those erotic water colors. No, I'll come here, or maybe we should just start living together. Blaise would adore that. He honestly would. He wants to be alone also, so you two could sort of switch. And you cook better than Blaise. I like to cook also, but you cook so well I'd let you run the kitchen. And your sandwiches. I think I'll fly up and get us all killed next time, just for your sandwiches. You ought to open a sandwich restaurant. Just make sandwiches any old way you like and I'll be your only waitress. We could retire in a few years and live for as long as we liked on the Costa del Sol or any one of those other Costas or Sols. But you do make delectable sandwiches, Dirk, and thanks for buying me two front tires. I didn't know they were bald. I didn't know that people got blowouts from bald tires. I thought that even new tires could get blowouts. Goodbye, Dirk." He stuck his head inside the car and they kissed. "Goodbye, Dirk," Caroline said. He opened the rear door and he and Caroline kissed. "Goodbye, Dirk," Chrisie said. He extended his head over the front seat and they hugged, cried, kissed. "Goodbye, Dirk," Caroline said, and he laughed, kissed her forehead and cheek, closed the door, keeping his thumb pressed to the handle button, to make sure the door stayed locked. "Goodbye, Dirk," Chrisie said, and he stuck his head through the window and they kissed. Caroline was still flapping her toy bunny at him as their car entered the freeway on ramp. During all these words, embraces and gestures of departure, Sophie had remained asleep in her car chair hooked over the back seat. What, he thought, staring at the busy freeway, What, he wanted to say, what is all this?