Good Sense

Hate me. I do. Since my son’s conception I have shrunk into yet another white dad with a secure-enough income who writes about white dads with secure-enough incomes. You are reading this dispatch and I have written it even though neither of us has read enough work by or about women, minorities, and LGBTQ writers. That is probably true even if you are not a white cis male. We say that we cannot go on, yet, from our distinct positions of leisure, we go on. So together we extend the patriarchy farther and longer, though we would rather the old system torn down yesterday. So hate me. I have known how stale and redundant I am since before I became what I am. I knew it even before I saw John Updike’s prosthesis at the last century’s end.

Then I was unsuccessfully drying out at the University of North Florida after several bad turns had left me jaundiced in both skin and heart. The director of the writing program there, a woman to whom I owe my current secure-enough income, invited me and nine other student writers to meet the old man for a private Q&A session before a public reading that night. My grainy recollection of the room’s crown molding, stretched ovular table, swallowing leather chairs, great casement windows, and legal office scent lead me to report happily that five years later paid men took a wrecking ball to the building entire. Soda and powdered cookies held my fellows until Updike arrived.

I was not yet familiar with the political meaning of the term “privilege,” but my heart knew that Updike was it made flesh. He was tall as his dumb, forlorn Rabbit, looked as if he’d been tall and adult forever in a suit that was the first monogrammed suit I’d ever seen in person. I could not tell if his middle initial was “L” or “H” or “I.” He had thick, natural hair the color of moonlight. His head might have been drawn with the aid of a protractor, his wrinkles with a careful knife. Every line of him, along with his dark, rounded eyeglass frames, suggested the contemporary patrician.

I asked him a question about writing habits. He gave his answer to the door. He gave all his answers to all our questions to the door. He did not appear in need of a drink and a quiet, shadowed room.

At the meeting’s end, he splayed his long steady fingers on the table and declared his solemn responsibility to translate the modern domestic scene into words that could be seen, smelled, heard, and touched. A husband and father, he said, is a terrible, clunking machine, built poorly for his work.

That afternoon I drank hard at the campus bar. I told an uninterested co-ed that I would die in the grass outside if she did not help me. I lived and went to Updike’s reading in the basketball gym. The goals had been raised. Both the stands and the court were crowded with vibrating twins and triplets of people. They knew when and when not to clap. Updike was a droning smudge at the far baseline. I felt more certain than ever that I would die soon and that co-ed would be sorry, though if I survived I would have the good sense never to write about the modern domestic scene.

But I would have to write about what happened before I reached the campus bar, when I followed Updike into a bathroom. We used neighboring urinals. I finished first and was soaping my hands when he showed me his prosthesis. It was a tube made of what looked like plastic Tinker-Toys. A thin red cord ran through it for the transport of fluids. Its dome was ringed with pulsing lights. The dimensions of that device hurt me enough, but then I imagined it fitted with a flesh-like cover to make sex possible. My unenhanced counterpart had failed in recent love situations.

“Hello,” John Updike said.

Sixteen years on I wear sober glasses and pressed clothes to teach on campus. Among students I sometimes descend into lectures on commitment, responsibility. My abandoned, jaundiced self would say that I have bent into a readerless Updike. Worse, I am on most days a cheerful Updike. Worse still, I am writing something of what I goddam know. That self would rather be dead.

My current, treasonous self—my “I”—whispers from his cell that despite the truth of these charges, he cannot quit. The truth, he says, is a small though essential thing. And it is at least two things, and they are not always small. His math confuses you almost as much as it confuses him. His work is often an attempt at sorting out his confusion and, at the same time, a deepening of it, not making sense of the picture but making a picture of the smudge.

Marcus Pactor wrote the collection, Vs. Death Noises. His work has recently appeared in Literary Orphans, TheEEEL, Menacing Hedge, The Collagist, and Green Mountains Review. He lives and works in Jacksonville, Florida.