Hokey Pokey

There I was, talking with this woman. She was neat and I wanted to say something that would make her say, "Hey." I didn't want her to say, "Wow." "Hey" would do. But what should I say? She talked about her ex-husband. I talked about my ex-wife. We had another drink.

I was getting bombed. I opened up. I really wanted her.

"My wife was a bitch," I said.

"My husband was a bastard," she said.

When I was a kid, I used to think bastard was the male of bitch, just as dog was the male of cat. I don't know what I was doing thinking about sex at that age, because I never did again until after I was 40.

But we weren't getting anywhere. "I've got to piss," I said.

"Thank you," she said. "The last guy who was here pissed off the porch. There were great arcs of piss in the morning." She said, "Upstairs, to the right."

"It was a funny thing," I said when I came downstairs again. "I had this professor at Alabama, who told me----"

"But what were you doing at Alabama?" she said.

So I had to tell her how cheap it was at Alabama, how you could go there for less than it took to stay at home. I remembered then that this was something I always had to explain to a new woman at a certain stage--not usually this stage, though, not after the first piss. "Seven dollars a month for room," I said. "Thirteen dollars a month for board."

"But how did you hear about Alabama?" she said.

"Rose Bowl," I said. I wanted to tell her about my map puzzle of the United States but was afraid I'd lose the thread. "Rose Bowl was worth a thousand tuitions a year, they figured."

"But how did you hear?" she said.

"My mother heard," I said. "She listened to the radio a lot--that old Atwater Kent. It ran on batteries, can you believe it? She listened to the game and offered me a choice of Mass Aggie--Mass Aggie, for Christ's sake--or Alabama. One of them was a hell of a lot farther away than the other.

"What was I saying?" I said.

"You were saying how you met her," she said, jumping all the way back to before the piss.

"Oh, yes," I said. "Her husband was in the class I had."

"She wasn't?" she said.

"Oh, no," I said. "It was the husband. The husband was in love with the one girl in the class. We were all in love with her, but she was in love with him."

"Were you in love with her?" she said. "I mean, really in love? I think I was in love once and I want to know."

"Of course I was in love with her," I said. "Why should I be different?"

"But that has nothing to do with you and her," she said.

"Everything has everything to do with everything," I said. We had had a hell of a lot to drink. "One night, when he was fucking this girl in the stacks of the library under the aegis of 821--Dewey decimal system--the wife came to me and asked what was going on."

"And what was going on?" she said, refilling my glass with the local store's own Scotch.

"How should I know?" I said. "They didn't hit it off. Incompatibility, as they say. Perhaps 813 would have been better."

"Don't fuck around," she said.

"That's what she said," I said. "But I had just met a girl I thought I could fuck on the next date--there never was a next date, for some reason or other--but, anyway, I had a pint of Seagram's Seven and a package of Trojans in my desk drawer. That's all I knew: Seagram's and Trojans."

"But where is your wife in all this?"

"I'm telling you," I said. "I said, 'Scratch my back.' Oh, but she was a great back-scratcher, the best since I used to sleep with my sister when we were very little. But she was something else when she really got down to it. A wildcat. Of course, I was proud of the marks on my back and never felt them at all at the time, except to cringe my crotch a little closer to hers."

"I'm all confused," she said. "Where is the girl you loved?"

"I'm trying to tell you about this professor at Alabama," I said. "He told me to take R.O.T.C. 'Me take R.O.T.C.?' I said. But I took it anyway, because he had it figured. He'd been there. Thought he was Tietjens. Had even been gassed around Belleau Wood."

"Who was Tietjens, for Christ's sake?" she said.

"He was Tietjens," I said. "Ford Mad-ox Ford's Tietjens. World War One and all that shit. A good man but fucked up. He had an awful wife. He fucked me up, too, because I signed the name Tietjens to a motel receipt and absent-mindedly put it in my pocket. Of course, my wife found it and had it in court and fucked up my divorce."

"That was pretty fucking dumb," she said. I made a note that I had got her talking dirty.

But there was still a coffee table between us, and I was getting nowhere, and that's about as dumb as you can get. Two people who might as well have been frothing at each other's crotches, and we were sitting there making nice-nice.

"But the funniest thing," I said, "was how we got married."

"It can't be funnier than how I got married," she said, but not at all as if it were really funny. "We went into this courthouse in the middle of goddamned Iowa with our license in our hands, and the J.P. told us to wait a minute. He was doing something at his desk. I was looking out the window and my husband was reading some lawbook from the bookcase when someone said, 'Well, do you or don't you?' And two locals in bib overalls said, 'Congratulations.'"

"At least you married the girl--boy--you loved," I said.

"No," she said.

"Why didn't we meet thirty years ago?" I said.

"Like when I was nine?" she said.

"I may be a shit," I said, "but I'm not that kind of shit."

"I couldn't think how to say no," she said. "How to let him down easy."

"The whole medical examination," I said--I didn't need to hear it--"was this: 'Do you know any reason why she will be disappointed on her wedding night?' Of course I didn't. That's the kind of thing it takes fifteen or twenty years to figure out."

"Did you really do R.O.T.C.?" she said. "The whole bit?"

"The whole motherfucking bit," I said. "Second lieutenant U.S. Army Reserve--or whatever it was. He said, 'Be inefficient'--by which he meant fuck up. 'But only a little.' How was I to know the limits of my ability to fuck up? 'Just enough so they'll send you back to work at a training center.' So they kicked me out and I got married."

"The chronology is confusing," she said, and she polished her glasses while she glowered at me owlishly.

"It's as clear in my head," I said, "as God's view of eternity."

"Elucidate," she said.

"Her husband and I were living together in New Orleans," I said.

"!" she said.

"She was in Tuscaloosa, finishing her degree. Some weekends she came down to see him and some weekends she came down to see me, 'Go away!' I shouted when he rattled the door while she and I were in bed and he was supposed to be working. 'Goodbye,' she said and kissed him at the bus station before she got off at the edge of town--'Naughty, naughty,' the bus driver said--and came back to spend a few days with me. There was a balcony where we watched the moon rise. One night, when I turned to her, there was a skull on her pillow."

"A real skull?" she said. "I used to dream my husband was a loaf of bread."

"Bread is all very well," I said. I guess I thought I ought to acknowledge her in some way. She splashed cube after cube into my drink.

"Do you suppose if I married the other one..." she said.

"What other one?" I said. Now I was the one who was confused.

"The one I loved--or thought I did-- when I was seventeen," she said.

"Oh, that one," I said.

"Do you suppose sooner or later I would have dreamed he was a loaf of bread?"

"Marriage makes strange bedfellows," I said. As I said it, I realized it was funnier than I meant it to be--actually, I hadn't meant anything. But she laughed and I took all the credit. God knows, there's enough credit you deserve and never get.

"Or maybe a radish," she said. "Maybe he'd have been a radish."

"But the truth of the matter is," I said, "that I fucked up so well they wouldn't have me in the Army. They wouldn't even allow the draft board to have me. No one would have me and I wound up at the welding school."

"I didn't know that," she said.

"Neither did I," I said. We were exactly where we were before. One hell of a sexy lady on that side of the coffee table that was complete with ice bucket and tongs, and on this side of the table something or other in remarkably good shape for its age, considering, except that I hadn't been able to get it up since about 1956, though she had no way of knowing that. My teeth were in great shape, though. I gnashed them at her. Let her think about that a little.

"What big teeth you have, Grandma," she said.

"Right on," I said. I tended to forget, when I got interested, exactly what decade I was in.

"It was all over," I said. "I knew it was all over. She knew it was all over. Everything was over except the dancing in the streets. But she had to come down to New Orleans to stage one last scene. She was in theater. Did I mention that? She said, 'It's all over.' I said, 'What a pity. I was going to ask you to marry me.' She said, I accept.'"

"Jesus Christ," she said. "Just like that? But, then, I suppose I said, 'I accept' just like that, only I was the one who was appalled when I said it."

"Jesus Christ," I said.

"My husband--that shit," she said, "was a chaser. He chased boys and he chased girls."

"I never had that problem," I said.

"Lucky you," she said.

"She just chased me," I said. "You call that lucky?"

"Have an ice cube?" she said. And she put three into my glass. They now stood up above the rim. I'd have welcomed a splash of Scotch.

"I was actually drafted," I said, "and I was turned down. I volunteered and I was turned down. I was turned down for the Canadian army. I was plenty undesirable." I looked at her hopefully, but she didn't rise to it. Not even another ice cube. "So I went back to school and kind of got married."

"I didn't know she was married before," she said.

"It was no secret," I said. "We just didn't tell anybody."

"Who can have a secret," she said, "in a town like this?"

"To be sure," I said, "it's generally known that on December seventh, 1941, I was writing the great antiwar novel of the war. I worked all that day and finished it and threw two handfuls of oatmeal into two cups of water in the cookie tin on my gas heater and lay down to listen to the radio. The rest is history."

"'What I Was Doing on December Seventh': the story of your generation," she said.

"And what is the story of your generation?" I said.

"When I first heard the Beatles."

"It makes a difference," I said.

"It sure as hell does," she said. There were seven slick magazines, a bottle of Scotch, ice in a bucket and a flowering azalea on the coffee table between us, two glasses and an overflowing ashtray.

"That's why I was divorced at fifty," I said, "and you were divorced at thirty."

"She called me up and asked for the name of my lawyer, you know," she said.

"I didn't know that." I said.

"But yon already had him, clever you. And she was disappointed because she had heard he arranged handsome settlements--is she a Victorian? That's a curiously Victorian statement--handsome settlements."

"Antediluvian," I said. "She goes straight for the jugular."

"I thought it was my mother when she called. 'Hello, Momma,' I said. I was really embarrassed. She wasn't."

"She thought she was my mother, too," I said.

"What did you think?" she said.

"I didn't know what to think," I said. "I checked it all out: mother, sister, daughter, and decided she was my best friend's wife that he palmed off on me, the fucker."

I began to make my move around the coffee table and, what with one thing and another, trips to the John, refilling the ice bucket, stuff like that, before I knew what was going on, she was on the couch and I was in her chair. She looked even better now that I was looking down (continued on page 220) hokey pokey (continued from page 170) on her. Great dark eyes I never really noticed.

"I even found out about my mother," she said.

"Your mother?" I said, groping for a clue.

"You can't keep a secret in a town like this," she said.

That sounded vaguely familiar to me, but it wasn't much of a clue. "Christ, no," I said. I was about to tell her the story of the motel receipt signed Xtopher Tietjens, but that began to sound familiar even before I began to tell it.

"My own mother," she said. She was really hurting.

"You don't have to, you know," I said. "I probably don't even know the guy."

"If it were only that," she said. She stopped then. I had the impression she thought she had said it all.

I said, "I said she looked like a cheap tart, but my friend said she looked like a tough broad who had lived all her life in a trailer."

"Where the Christ did that come from?" she said.

"I mean, why can't I think of things like that?" I said. "What I mean is, here we are, talking about this picture of a transsexual, and I can't come up with anything better than 'cheap tart.' It depresses the hell out of me."

"So?" she said.

"So it's damned hard coming up with the right word." Her foot eluded mine under the table. "A tough broad who had lived all her life in a trailer. In a trailer, for Christ's sake. That has panache."

"You're doing OK," she said.

"Thanks," I said. "I needed that." By now I was bombed out of my mind.

"But what really happened?" she said. "I'm getting curious."

"Oh, I got a phone call," I said. "I told my wife I was going out to meet a student in a bar and talk about movies--it was only later I brought myself to call them films or even flicks. Now I'm back to movies. I never went home again. She didn't know it, but I wasn't really there. The student wasn't really a student and she didn't give a damn about films. In fact, she didn't give a damn about me after the first time we went to bed. But it was a beginning. Aha, I said to myself."

"And then what?" she said.

"Do you want to go to bed with me?" I said.

"No," she said.

"And then," I said--I didn't know whether I ought to be relieved or not, but I was; 1956 was far behind me.

"And then--" I said, "where the fuck was I?"

"That's for you to say," she said. We moved automatically around the coffee table again and again wound up on opposite sides.

"I don't suppose," I said, "that your husband would be interested in marrying my wife?"

"For God's sake," she said, "you don't make her out to be any bargain."

"It would save me alimony," I said.

"I still have compassion for him," she said, "if nothing else."

"It's just a thought," I said. "I've pretty well given up the dream of a rich retired farmer for her or an Indian graduate student carrying her off to India."

"She must have thought I was crazy when I said. 'Hello, Momma.' 'Hello, Momma,' I said without thinking. But it was crazier than she could have known. My mother and I sound alike on the phone. What do you think of that?"

"I never had the pleasure," I said.

"No one ever knows which one of us is talking," she said. "That's what caused all the trouble."

"What trouble?" I said. I was beginning to think I had drunk too much.

"That's what I'm trying to tell you," she said. "The trouble with the boy I loved when I was seventeen." She looked annoyed for a moment, but it passed at once. She wasn't with me anymore.

"I have a lump on my breast," she said.

"Oh," I said.

"I see the doctor on Friday."

I didn't say anything. I knew what I wanted to say, but it sounded foolish even to me at that point. I'm 59 years old, I would have said. I could have said it then. Sometimes I wanted to shout it--scream, more like. But 59 just then was a small quiet clot somewhere around my heart. I could have told her about the man in the book I read two years ago who said hopefully, "But I'm only fifty-seven." And who was still 57 last week, when I saw him again. I think she would have heard me.

"But how did you get there?" she said. Clearly, there was something she wanted to know, just as there was something I wanted to tell her. But neither of us knew what it was, and if she wasn't going to let us try to fuck our way to it, there wasn't much we could do about it.

"How did we get there?" I said. "We got there by train and we got there by car. Once I wrecked a U-Haul and lost my license and my allowance and three friends. Once we got there by Model A and hit a car on a narrow bridge in Paoli, P.A. But mostly we got there. When she got there with three suitcases and six cardboard boxes and seven plants--one, two, three, four, five, six, seven--the porter put them down on the platform in the New Orleans station. And I knew then I had made a mistake."

"Three suitcases, six boxes and seven plants," she said. "On the train?"

"When I saw all that coming out of the train, I said, 'Who the fuck?' And when I saw her, I said, 'What the fuck?' But I was very young at the time and full of idealism and semen. It was only when somebody actually said--sometime after 1956--'Fucking's what it's all about,' that I realized that whatever it was all about, it wasn't all about that. I was a slow learner and had to have it spelled out for me, if only in reverse."

"Welcome to the club," she said and poured me another drink.

"Jesus Christ," I said. "This is the kind of story you only tell in the dark in bed after the first fuck, when you want to spill your guts to the person you think is going to understand at last."

"You're right," she said. "I've never heard anything like this except when somebody's limp cock was slipping out of me no matter what I did to keep it in."

"It must mean something," I said.

She threw up her hands and her eyes and her voice and said, "Rape."

She was joking, of course, but she knocked me into the middle of 1978.

"Jesus Christ," she said, "don't you see? We don't need to fuck after what we've already said."

"OK," I said, "OK." I knew she was right, even though it seemed to me that she had just been lying there.

And, besides, Tietjens always said that the only reason to go to bed with a woman was to finish your conversation with her, and we were already way past the end of a conversation.

"I saw him a few years ago," she said.

I knew at once who she meant. I'm simply not the kind of person who knows things like that, but I did then. The boy she loved when she was 17. I even noticed that we both had stopped saying "thought she loved."

"I thought he had died of love for you way back then," I said.

"That's only in books," she said. "Do you know what he said to me?"

I had been doing very well up to that point, but, no, I didn't know what he said to her.

"He asked me why I told him I never wanted to see him again."

"Why did you?" I said.

"I never," she said.

"You never?" I said. Now I was more like myself.

"I'm sure I never," she said. "It was my mother--it was a long time ago--in my voice, our voice. She hated him."

"My wife's voice," I said, though that didn't mean anything even to me.

"I'm sure," she said. "I think."

"And you still say, 'Yes, Momma,'" I said. She just looked at me.

"Do you still see her?" she said.

"See her?" I said. "You've got to be crazy."

"So you just tried it once and left it alone?" she said.

"What the hell are you talking about?" I said. "We may have tried it just once, but it went on for twenty-five years."

"Not her," she said. "The Hokey Pokey lady."

"Hokey Pokey?" I said.

"You know," she said.

She was on her feet just then, getting another bottle of Scotch out of the cabinet. She turned with the bottle in her hand and began a little dance. "'You put your right hand in,'" she said and reached the bottle toward me. "'You put your right hand out.'" She put it behind her. "'You put your right hand in and shake it all about.'" She did it all, shaking the bottle like a magical gourd in my face--feathers and stones and bones and shells--but it was holy water I felt falling on me. "'You do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself about. And that's what it's all about. Hey.'" At the "Hey," she did a dancer's shuffle and ended on one foot, one arm out, bent as if flying toward me.

"I took tap when I was four," she said. "My mother still hates me for not being Shirley Temple." She did her shuffle again and balanced precariously, her arm stretching, her smile reaching, toward an audience that had never been there at all.

"Her," she said, "the what-it's-all-about lady." She poured us both drinks. The ice was gone, but we were getting down to basics.

"Oh," I said. "Yes, I still see her. She turned out to be wrong. It was something else."

She drew in her breath sharply. "What?" she said.

"We don't know," I said.

"Oh," she said. "Well, here's to." We raised our glasses, but they didn't clink, because the backs of our fingers touched. I felt it hot all over me, like a boy touching a finger accidentally on purpose for the first time--the bloody fucking hem of her garment. I forgot all about 1956.

"Come on," she said, "let's do it." She was snapping her fingers and putting her hips in and putting her hips out. The shake was cataclysmic. I was ready to do it on the bearskin rug. I stood up. I had my hand on my belt.

"Here's how it goes," she said. "First you put in your right hand. Then you put in your left hand. Right foot. Left foot. And finally your whole self."

"God knows how," I said. "But I'm for it."

"It's kind of like hopping in a sack race," she said, "forward and back, with a dash of St. Vitus at the end, and then you fall in a heap on the floor and giggle a lot."

"OK," I said. I could see myself really getting into that.

We put in our right hands, just managing to touch the tips of our fingers, and the neighbors complained. We put in our left hands. Now we were up to our elbows in the private air around each other. And the police came. The house was rocking. The police took off their hats and they took off their gun belts and all their hardware. They took off their big shit-kicking shoes. And they put in their very pink right feet. Such pink feet. They must always be driving-back to the station for another shower. Pictures were falling off the wall. The neighbors had to join us--they had no choice. The street was filling up with abandoned cars. We put in our left feet. Bricks fell out of the chimney. The lights burned out. The front wall blew out with a crash. The lawn was full of people. They put their right hands in. They pulled their left hands out. It was bedlam. And we weren't even there yet. But very close. We were getting closer.