I Am Curious (Thirty)

January 8

Last night was horrible.

Howard came home with what I think the lower orders would describe as a hair up his ass. Just a wee bit too much aggravation at the office and just a wee bit more booze than he positively needed in the club car. When I picked him up at the train he started bitching at me for not having had air put in the front left tire. It is not flat, but then neither is it round, and we had decided that I would have them put air in the tire, a service they perform willingly when they sell you gas. Had I failed to get gas? No. Then I meant to say that I had gone into the gas station without getting the tire filled? Right, guilty. Well, what the hell was the matter with me, anyway? A good question, and one which, although I said nothing, was not entirely original on his part; I had been asking myself much the same thing all day.

He had a couple more drinks with dinner. I don’t exactly blame him. Dinner, let’s be honest, stank. A noble experiment. One of those packaged things with equal parts of dried herbs and poisonous chemicals. Betty Crocker’s Rice Galitzianer, perhaps. Sometimes I have fantasies of buying stone ground flour and organic vegetables and making everything from scratch, and then I cruise down the aisles at the Pathmark and fill the cart with all of this processed shit. I think there’s something insidious about the pictures on the boxes. God knows nothing I make turns out looking like that. Even when they taste good they don’t look like that.

The point being that dinner was a loser. After dinner he took a drink in to watch television by, like mood music. I followed at a distance. After the eleven o’clock news he turned to me. He was, I guess, about half in the bag. Half in the bag for Howie means he can still wiggle his toes if you give him a few minutes to work it all out in his mind.

Why am I being so bitchy?

Because I’m hostile.

Next question?

No, let’s remember how this went. He said, “Jan, baby, this isn’t working out, is it?”

A moment of panic. What wasn’t working out? Our Vietnam policy? Our marriage? The new color television set? Rice Galitzianer?

“What I mean is that this is no way to start a family.”

“Oh.”

“You can’t get pregnant watching television.”

“Unless we do it doggie style.” (I didn’t say this. Like most good repartee, it occurred to me twelve hours after the moment when it would have been effective. What we all need is the opportunity to go over our lives with a blue pencil the next day.)

(And cross everything out? Maybe.)

“You know something, darling? I love you.”

“And I love you, Howie.”

“Baby, let’s go upstairs.”

“Sure, honey.”

We live in a ranch house. Everything’s on the same floor. One’s speech patterns seem to derive from the culture in which one lives to the point where one summons one’s bride unwittingly to the roof. I used to think, when Howie first invited me to an upstairs which wasn’t there, that he had spent his childhood in a two-story house. Not so. He had never lived in a two-story house, had in fact never lived in a house before we moved to Eastchester. It was always an apartment somewhere or other in Brooklyn or the Bronx. When he and I had the apartment on Seventy-seventh Street, there was none of this Let’s go upstairs cuteness. It came with the house, like the thirty-year mortgage and the leak in the basement and the army ants or whatever they are. Sometimes he catches himself, and sometimes I remind him, but it doesn’t matter, he does it again the next time. Movies and books and television taught the poor man that when you live in a house you have to climb stairs to go to bed.

So we went upstairs — why fight it? — and went to bed, and he kissed me boozily and felt my breast — felt one of them, anyway — and thus inspired he gave a great sigh and passed out. Went to sleep? No. Passed out sums it up fine.

Leaving me to feel guilty about feeling glad.

I don’t want a baby.

I guess I’ve never said that out loud. I guess most of the time I don’t really believe it myself, but I do now. God, yes. I mean God, no.

I don’t want a baby.

I wonder if he does, really. I don’t think so. Men are supposed to have these undeniable impulses. I have a feeling they’re as deniable as anything else. Mine certainly are.

You know what I think? I think it’s all part of the image. Being a few years married, and past the honeymoon (God in heaven, are we ever past the honeymoon!) and having moved out of the crowded evil city and into the fresh (?) air of sweet suburbia. The car we bought, for example, is a station wagon. We never owned a car in New York — that was one of the things I hated about New York, you had to go through a big production whenever you wanted to go somewhere — and here we finally have a car, one car for the two of us, and what kind of car is it? A cute little sportscar? A cunning and sensible compact? A big showy ostentatious ballsy sedan?

None of those things. A station wagon, a big klutzy station wagon with room for eighteen kids, none of which I want to have.

None of which I probably will have, having gone two years now without coming any closer to pregnancy than I don’t know what. (You have a way with words, Giddings.)

And if I were using this book as a way of keeping compulsive records, rather than a place to jot down the observations of the moments (I think I mean the observation of the moment, both singular, although how few moments are truly singular, Doctor?) I might in that case feel compelled to state here in blue-black and white that in this year, now eight days old, we have, if memory serves, fucked once, and then not very well.