Precocious

Jack Steele                                                                                             3880 words

240 Regency Drive

Marstons Mills, MA 02648

(508) 280-8645

jacksteele1@comcast.net

Precocious

by

Jack Steele

     My wife was precocious.  She’s thirty-five years old now, and I haven’t seen her for

three years, but I have no doubt that she’s still precocious.  Still, that is, playing the role

of an exceptionally bright and talented young woman, still naïve and aggressive, still sensitive and tenacious.  The sort of person who never quite gets over being special.

     Kristine’s family was wealthy.  My first impression, a youthful one, was that her father raised quarterhorses and her mother raised “Oriental” orphans.  As time passed, however, I discovered a handful of other family enterprises that ranged from an industrial equipment business to a chain of hamburger stands, and I got the impression that they were all parlayed from a couple of exceptional oil wells.

     I remember her father as a man whose handshake could bring an unsuspecting suitor to his knees.  During our visits, he would always make an appearance an hour or so after we arrived, offer the bone crunching handshake, and then ask a couple of predictable questions about how we were doing and not listen to the answers.  On the whole he said very little.  Most of his few remarks were tossed off with his head turned, in such a low raspy voice that I hardly ever understood them, and after a while I suspected that they weren’t really meant to be understood.  I began to appreciate how such an eccentricity could be useful, in an intimidating sort of way.  Kristine’s father was no doubt at his best when he was doing business, or, as I understood his second favorite passtime to be, playing poker with his old cronies.

     Still, the old man did his part in upholding the family image by forsaking Cadillacs for a perennial white Mercedes, and by largely ignoring his cattle in favor of his quarterhorses.  The driving force behind the image, however, was my mother-in-law, Robbie Nell.  While not occupied with winning rose garden contests and sending checks to orphans, she kept herself busy with nervous breakdowns and an annual trip, always with a “girlfriend,” to the Caribbean to “rest.”  Perhaps she noticed me wince every time she used the word “rest,” which was often, since I could never figure out how what she did all day resembled hard work, nor how the “work” had much to do with the high cultural standards she was always talking about.

     In all fairness, I should say that Kristine did a pretty good job of convincing me that to write her mother off as a selfish and self-absorbed hypocrite was unfair.  “She has a good heart and she does a lot of good work,” Kristine insisted, “and if she’s also a neurotic snob, I’m sure you can take it.”  She was right, as I’m sure a lot of orphans would agree, about the good heart and the good works, but as for the rest, the snob part, I wasn’t at all sure I could take it.

     During the last few years of our marriage, Kristine began to defend her mother quite a bit.  Not because I was attacking her any more than usual, but because she began to identify with her more.  She began to realize, I’m convinced, that like herself, her mother spent her whole life being precocious, and what’s more, as her mother neared old age, and as Kristine approached middle age, neither of them showed the slightest inclination to change.

     In the mid-sixties the most precocious thing an eighteen year old in East Texas could do was win a scholarship to a prestigious women’s college back East, and the worst thing that could happen a few month’s later was for her to come home pregnant.  A family of means in those days could handle that situation discreetly by making arrangements in Mexico, and it was not uncommon for the family to then insist that the eighteen year old continue her education closer to home.  The next spring Kristine showed up in Austin, which is where I came in.

     Kristine sang in the choir of a Methodist church near the campus, as did my roommate and his girlfriend, which is how we met.  She was an English major with a keen interest in the Middle Ages, and a music minor who could play flute, violin, and a few other things.  She also happened to be very attractive in a way that her fellow Methodist choir members, most of whom were also from small Texas towns, probably didn’t understand.  After all, Kristine had been back East to school, and her family was rich.

     She was pretty, I thought, but what attracted me to her was that long before anyone else thought about it, or knew how, she carried what was known then as a Harvard book bag, rode a ten-speed bike around campus, didn’t curl her hair or wear make-up, and didn’t mind saying “fuck you.”  She was also very direct about going after what she wanted, which included me.

     An early conversation, and one that strikes me as typical, was about the Beatles.  Patronizingly, as would be expected from someone intimate with Beethoven and Mozart, Kristine said that the Beatles were “surprisingly melodic.”  Although I had musical aspirations of my own, three chords had always been enough for me, and I had only the vaguest notion of what she was talking about.  Being a blues oriented folkie, music to me was mostly how you said words, and I couldn’t have cared less how melodic the Beatles were.  But I managed to act interested, because I was so taken with Kristine.

     I discovered quickly that Kristine, unlike myself, was ambitious about knowing things.  That was the point of the Beatles conversation, to know their importance, their place in the scheme of things.  “I want to know everything,” she told me once, and I tend to attribute that sort of ambition to what I think of as liberal Methodism.

     Being a Methodist in Texas is a heady experience for many people.  It means you can be respectable without having to be a Baptist.  Put another way, you can be very Protestant and still have a buffer between yourself and someone who might, say, put leaflets about Jesus in public restrooms.  I was a Baptist.  An ex-Baptist, to be sure, but whereas Kristine reeked of cultured Christianity, from her involvement in classical music and the Middle Ages to espousals of liberal causes, I had no such impulses.  Relatively speaking, my ex-Baptist agnosticism qualified me as a working class anarchist.

     About a month before she ran off to Switzerland with a German brain surgeon who was into chamber music, thus ending our ten year marriage, we had what proved to be our last long conversation.  It began, routinely enough, with a disagreement over whether Jimmy should spend the whole summer at Kristine’s parents.  He’d done this the summer before, and Kristine’s position was that she’d miss him too much and it made him “weird.”  My position was that I wanted to spend the whole summer in Los Angeles, and since my goal there would be to renew some old contacts in the music business, I didn’t think it was any place for a seven year old.

     During the past decade I’ve developed enough of a reputation around Austin to work more or less steadily, if not too lucratively.  Pop music people don’t use words like “maudlin,” so my compositions are generally referred to as “suicide songs,” and I’m often compared, sometimes not too unfavorably, with Leonard Cohen.  But I don’t have much of a voice and hardly any knack at all with an audience, so my career, if you can call it that, is based mostly on being a songwriter.  The trouble, though, with writing my kind of songs if you can’t sing or perform, is that most people who would want to sing them write their own.  Still, my songs show up on albums now and again, and the money trickles in.

     We managed to pay the rent, often just by the skin of our teeth, and Kristine’s salary from a local Episcopalian prep school, where she taught music, helped.  We learned how to be comfortable cheaply, and now and then we accepted subsidies from my in-laws.  My father-in-law’s attitude, which I always considered reasonable, was that if I wasn’t willing to work in the equipment business or the hamburger stands, he certainly wasn’t going to support me just because I married his daughter.  At the same time, he and Robbie Nell didn’t want their daughter and grandson deprived of the finer things in life, so they helped out whenever they could find an excuse.  Kristine, over the years, became very good at helping them find excuses, and that improved our standard of living considerably.  At various times we were provided with such necessities as a trip to Europe, a dishwasher, and new school clothes for Jimmy.

     “There’s nothing to discuss,” she said.  “You do whatever you want to do, and I’ll stay here with Jimmy.”

     It was May and two o’clock in the morning and still hot enough to sweat.  We were sitting on the front porch of a rent house we’d lived in for the past two years.  It was on Grandview Street, which in the sixties was a thriving student ghetto.  By the late seventies it was no longer thriving and most of the “students” who were left were in their thirties.  At the end of the block, in the front yard of a house in which two Hispanic families lived, there were always two pickups parked, each with a plastic yellow termite on the roof.  Across the street from us an old folkie buddy of mine lived in the same house he’d rented since 1963, only then he was single and sold drugs for a living, and now he was married and worked in a bank, and his wife didn’t approve of drugs.  Now and then he’d sneak over to the house for a joint, but he was always looking out the window, as if he expected to see his wife coming across the street with a rolling pin.

     Our other neighbors included a couple of shirtless Ted Nugent look-a-likes, each of whom owned a German Shepherd, and across the street from them, as if for cosmic balance, a pair of clean cut graduate students who raced bicycles in the summer.  There was also a chubby, balding Englishman who raised African violets, and in his basement lived a wisp of a young woman who, though she never wore a lot of clothes, was partial to cutoffs.  She jumped every time anyone said hello to her, and on the rare occasions when she ventured away from her basement, she seemed to walk on tiptoe.

     “You’ll stay here for three months while I’m in LA?” I asked.

     “Why not?”

     I was sitting on a concrete wall that ran along the front of our porch.  Kristine sat in a cloth director’s chair, her feet propped up on the wall.  She was barefoot and wore yellow shorts.  Her legs, even in the summer, never seemed to tan, and in the position she was in it was hard not to notice that her thighs weren’t quite as taut as they’d once been.

     “Because the point of waiting until the summer was that you could go with me.”

     “I’m sick to death of music people, Jim.  On the whole, they’re very stupid.”

     I knew she meant “pop” music people and didn’t bother to make an issue of it.  She was drinking iced tea, and she ran her finger down the condensation on the glass.  First one careful line and then another, as if she were cleaning a window.

     “So it’s not Jimmy at all.”

     “Not completely.”

     “You used to get off on the glamour,” I said, regretting my word choice as soon as I said it.

     “Glamour?”

     Lately, she had a way of looking sarcastic by opening her eyes wide and setting her jaw in a certain way.  The no makeup of the sixties had long since been replaced by a way of doing her eyes that made them look larger.  She used this look on me as she continued to wipe down the glass with her finger, and at the same time she gave a little half-hiccup type laugh that was supposed to sound incredulous.

     “Hanging out with speed freaks at the Tropicana Motor Hotel is not exactly my idea of glamour.  Nor is holding the hand of some middle-aged alcoholic who used to be a famous person’s daughter, but is now throwing up quaaludes in the street.  No thanks.”

     I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, partly from the toll that a long day of overindulging had taken, and partly in protest to her attitude.  I unbuttoned my pants to make myself more comfortable.  I was no longer quite so taut myself.

     “What do you want?” I asked.  “If life could be any way you wanted it to be?”

     She stared at me for a moment, to make sure I wasn’t putting her on, and then said, “You work for Daddy so we can build a house.  And speaking of what’s good for seven year olds, I can’t imagine this neighborhood rating very high.”

     We’d had the conversation about working for Daddy often enough to have it memorized, but I guess whoever said that about hope springing eternal knew a lot about being married.  And maybe we still believe a little bit in alchemy:  if you do something over and over again, sooner or later what you want to happen will happen.  Of course it works sometimes, if the people involved stay together long enough, because sooner or later one of them usually gives in.  But in ten years I’d never worked a lick for Daddy.

     “You’d quit your job and move to East Texas for a house?”

     “In half a minute.  Besides, they do have schools in East Texas, you know.”

     She slapped a mosquito that had been circling around her knee.  Mosquitos liked Kristine.

     I shook my head.

     I said, “I can just see you taking your violin to an old time fiddlers’ hoedown.”

     She ignored that and said, “So, are we going to be living here ten years from now?  What about when we’re fifty?  Aren’t you going to feel a little funny singing songs for college kids through your false teeth?”

     “Not as funny as I’d feel serving them hamburgers.  Besides, I talked to an old guy the other day who quit his day job and came down here with his bass fiddle from Wichita Falls.  And he’s making a living.”

     She was grinning.

     “What?” I asked.

     “I was trying to picture you in a paper hat and a bow tie.”

     I grinned too, but the way she enjoyed herself made me uncomfortable.  I lit a cigarette and looked across the street at my old friend’s house.  Even on weekends the lights were always out by midnight.  Down the street, the Ted Nugent clones were out on the town as usual, and I wondered whether their German Shepherds were asleep, or if they spent the night prowling around the dark house.  I pictured them prowling, their long claws clicking on the hardwood floors as they paced back and forth.

     “Anyway, I’m not going anywhere this summer,” she said, finally.  “You do as you please.”

     “Okay.”

     Indifference always pissed her off.  Slowly, as if exercising a great deal of self-control, she said, “You would like for things to stay exactly the same, wouldn’t you?”

     “No.”

     “Then what do you want?”

     I didn’t say anything.

     “It’s time we faced facts, Jim.”

     “Oh,” I said, “this is that conversation?  Do you mind if we skip the last part?”

     “You mean the part where you break something?”

     She took her legs off the wall and turned towards me.  She leaned forward, holding her glass with both hands, and said, “You always do this.  If it’s something you don’t want to talk about, then we don’t talk about it.  And that’s that, or else.”

     “Can we please not talk about facing facts tonight?”

     “Whatever you say.”

     She turned away and leaned back in her chair, but she didn’t put her feet back on the wall.  She continued to grip her glass tightly with both hands.

     “Look, Kris, I don’t think a new house is going to solve our problems.”

     “Not yours anyway.”

     “They run deeper.”

     “Oh, are we going to talk deep?” she asked, moving to the edge of her chair.  “In that case, I’d better get some more iced tea.”

     “Just forget it.”

     “No, no.  I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” she said, standing up.  “I’ll be right back.  Need anything?”

     I shook my head.  I slid off the wall and adjusted the zipper of my pants so that it nudged my belly without squeezing it.  Then I walked out into the front yard to stretch my legs and look around.

     Wisp in her cutoffs was coming down the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street.  She was walking on her toes, as usual, and singing to herself, moving her head from side to side as she mouthed the words to “Mickey,” a song that was high on the pop charts at the time.  When she passed under a street lamp, I could see that she’d complemented the cutoffs with a red shirt tied up under her breasts.  She was so thin that the cutoffs stuck out about an inch all the way around her waist.

     Without noticing me, she cut across the Englishman’s lawn and disappeared around the side of the house.  Perhaps, I thought, what I really wanted out of life was to spend it in bed with wispy young women who knew all the words to “Mickey.”  Lately, I’d thought that Kristine was starting to look a lot like her small town girl friends had looked back in college.  Probably not, but she was curling her hair and spending more time in front of the mirror.

     “Where were we?”

     She was back in her chair, her feet propped up again on the wall.  I walked across the lawn and stood facing her across the wall.

     “Deep.”

     “Right.  Okay, I’m ready.  Fire away.”

     “I’ve got an idea.”

     She gave me the patient look she probably used on her preppies when they became tongue-tied.  I’d been thinking about my theory of married conversations and alchemy, and I’d decided I might be wrong.  Perhaps the conversations do change, but so slowly from day to day that no one notices.

     “Let’s play trade sexual fantasies.”

     “What happened to deep?”

     “Deep never gets us anywhere.”

     “And sexual fantasies will?”

     She began to fidget.  She put her glass down on the concrete porch and took her pack of cigarettes off of her lap.

     “Actually,” I told her, “I’m thinking deep sexual fantasies.”

     “Actually, we’ve done that.”

     “Not really.  I mean seriously deep.  The deepest.”

     “What makes you think my deepest fantasies would have anything to do with sex?”

     When I didn’t answer immediately, she said, “Besides, I don’t see the point.”

     “There’s something I’ve never told you before.  Do you want to hear it or not?”

     She stared at me thoughtfully for a moment, and then said, “Sure.  I don’t see what your sexual fantasies have to do with where Jimmy spends the summer, but I’ll listen.”

     “I’ve always wanted to look like Roy Orbison.”

     “Should I laugh or shudder?”

     “And be a pimp.”

     “You’ve told me that before.”

     “This is different.  The setting is an old Italian villa with cold stone floors and crumbling staircases.  All the women, about a dozen of them, have short hair, like a boy’s, and they wear black smocks that come down to just about their hips.  They’re recruited from the richest families all over the world.  The daughters of royalty, industrial tycoons and world rulers.  And they’re all between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, and bone thin.”

     I paused to light a cigarette and Kristine continued to look skeptical.

     “Their fathers have threatened to disown them, or in some cases even murder them, if they don’t submit to this regimen for at least a year.  Or however long it takes.  You see, they are all willful, headstrong women, and their parents are convinced that such subjugation is the only way of making them useful members of society.”

     “And you heartily agree.”

     “I’m the one who convinces them.”

     “Looking like Roy Orbison?”

     “Right.  I also carry a pencil thin black whip and the girls have to crawl on their hands and knees everywhere they go.”

     “I don’t think I want to hear anymore.”

     “I’m just getting to the good part.”

     “Tell you what,” she said, looking past me as if trying to remember something.  “Spare me the details and I’ll tell you a deep one.”

     A bottle of whisky sat on the wall directly in front of me.  I took a swig, frowned, and wiped the corners of my mouth with my fingers.

     I said, “It’s a deal.”

     She took her feet off the wall, leaned forward again in her chair, and rolled her glass back and forth across the palms of her hands.

     “Okay, this started as a dream, but I’ve caught myself thinking about it during the day.  I’m obsessed, you see, with becoming a master violinist.  The problem is that I can think fantastic music, but I can’t play it.  I hire the best teachers and buy the finest violins in the world, but without success.  Then one day I notice that I’m irresistably beautiful to a certain type of man.  Brutish men.  Hairy apes.  Stupid men.  The more apish and stupid they are, the more irresistable they find me.  They start drooling at the sight of me, and at first, I think they want to humiliate me, but after a while I realize that it’s just the opposite.  They want me to humiliate them.”

     “I see.”

     “And the idea appeals to me.”

     She paused with a smug grin on her face.  The gleam in her eye challenged me to say something, but I didn’t.

     “Also,” she continued, “I knew intuitively that this was my ticket to greatness.  It made perfect sense in the dream.  I humiliate those men and I become an excellent violinist.  A predictable, causal relationship in the logic of the dream, or maybe it was more like a balanced equation, but either way, all it cost me was time.  The more hours I put into humiliation, the better I played, so I started doing it more and more.  I indulged in an orgy of humiliation, and I became the best violinist in the world.  The best ever.”

     “And then?”

     “Then nothing.  That’s it.”

     “I don’t see the connection.”

     “Why it works?  Is that what you mean?  Or to this summer?”

     “Why it works.”

    “There’s tons of explanations.  Selling my soul to the devil for one, but I prefer a more cosmic view.  Negative and positive energy, the balancing of.  The more negative I exercised, the more positive I had at my disposal.”

     “You’re not the best violinist in the world are you?”

     “No.  I’m not even very good, by professional standards.”

     “I wouldn’t have raped those girls, by the way.”

     “I know.”

     “But looking at their bottoms and smacking them now and then would have given me great pleasure.  Not to mention their general girlishness.”

     “I’m not a girl anymore, Jim.  Or rather, not the same girl.”

     “I know.”