charts. When the alarm would sound, I would stumble to the bureau, shake down the thermometer and offer it to Story’s sleeping face. She slept on her stomach with no pillow and for eighty days at least, that thermometer was the first thing she saw every day. She’d lie there while I said, “Okay, now, don’t move. Two minutes and forty seconds to go. I’m watching you. You’re moving. Please. Can you please lie still for two and a half minutes! Okay. I’m telling Doctor Binderwitz that your chart is a fabrication. Two minutes. Fine, fine, squirm around; do your calisthenics; see if I care.” It would get down to 10–9–8–7–6–5 and I’d move around and find the glass tube snug in her sleeping mouth. I’d sit on her and announce: “Ninety-eight point nine. We’re talking impending ovulation. We’re moving into a period of massive fertility!”
She’d groan and say, “Get off me.”
“You don’t mean that.”
Then, every other day, as part of our program, I’d throw my feet up in her side of the bed and she would pull me to her, moving from a warm sleep to the warm, insistent dreamarama lovemaking. She was always a morning person as far as sex was concerned, and it was a smooth, slow swimming which left us both wet eyed, awash, and stunned.
BIGVILLE IS a small college really, and they are glad to have me because they consider me not just an art teacher, but a real painter, that is, one who has two paintings in national collections and one who from time to time has a show on some second floor in New York and a carload of deans gets to go down and drink wine for an afternoon. No one knows I’m not painting, except Story, and as always, she treats me as if I’ve simply taken some well-earned time off for coffee.
I threw myself into my teaching with an organized enthusiasm that cautioned me. I made progress charts for each of my students, making notes on approaches, even encouraging the oppressive Mary Ann Buxton, who tried too hard to make Bigville into the finishing school she never attended. Her approach to painting was simple: it was something you owned, the way rich people own France during those cocktail parties on campus in the fall. They bought the experience, as if it were a stereo system or a fine meal. I noted happily that Mary Ann was doing less copying and more “emulation” of her neighboring easels. What I am saying is that I did what I could to make the spring into a positive sojourn for myself, despite the fact that my eyes were on fire, seeing things, and I knew that meant something would come of it. But as of March, I was not painting.
The ice on Mugacook began to rot, and sometime mid-month Fudgie Miller fell entirely through a section by the town wharf, ending the skating season for good. Fudgie, twelve, was one of the eight Miller kids who lived right across the road from us, and when Constable Manwaring drove Fudgie home wrapped in a blanket and shivering, he was received with the general joy and jumping up and down usually reserved for only children. I witnessed the crowd scene from my front porch, and I thought: that’s it. That’s what we’re after right there. All right. Now all I need is eight kids.
Because of the headaches, we abandoned Clomid, that wonderdrug, and we drove back down to New Haven on a windy, tree-tearing day in late March for the histogram. The air was thick with rushing grit as we crossed the clinic parking lot, and a copy of the Yale News blew against my leg, the headline, as always: STRIKE !
Again I scanned the covers of Sports Afield in the waiting room, while the dye was injected through Story’s uterus and up into her fallopian tubes. Each of the magazines I had selected bore covers of large fish (two trout and one bass) standing on their tails in a raw white splash. The bass was trying to spit out a salamander plug and each of the trout had an oversized Royal Coachman hooked in the corner of his mouth. I was surprised by how vital,
She’d groan and say, “Get off me.”
“You don’t mean that.”
Then, every other day, as part of our program, I’d throw my feet up in her side of the bed and she would pull me to her, moving from a warm sleep to the warm, insistent dreamarama lovemaking. She was always a morning person as far as sex was concerned, and it was a smooth, slow swimming which left us both wet eyed, awash, and stunned.
BIGVILLE IS a small college really, and they are glad to have me because they consider me not just an art teacher, but a real painter, that is, one who has two paintings in national collections and one who from time to time has a show on some second floor in New York and a carload of deans gets to go down and drink wine for an afternoon. No one knows I’m not painting, except Story, and as always, she treats me as if I’ve simply taken some well-earned time off for coffee.
I threw myself into my teaching with an organized enthusiasm that cautioned me. I made progress charts for each of my students, making notes on approaches, even encouraging the oppressive Mary Ann Buxton, who tried too hard to make Bigville into the finishing school she never attended. Her approach to painting was simple: it was something you owned, the way rich people own France during those cocktail parties on campus in the fall. They bought the experience, as if it were a stereo system or a fine meal. I noted happily that Mary Ann was doing less copying and more “emulation” of her neighboring easels. What I am saying is that I did what I could to make the spring into a positive sojourn for myself, despite the fact that my eyes were on fire, seeing things, and I knew that meant something would come of it. But as of March, I was not painting.
The ice on Mugacook began to rot, and sometime mid-month Fudgie Miller fell entirely through a section by the town wharf, ending the skating season for good. Fudgie, twelve, was one of the eight Miller kids who lived right across the road from us, and when Constable Manwaring drove Fudgie home wrapped in a blanket and shivering, he was received with the general joy and jumping up and down usually reserved for only children. I witnessed the crowd scene from my front porch, and I thought: that’s it. That’s what we’re after right there. All right. Now all I need is eight kids.
Because of the headaches, we abandoned Clomid, that wonderdrug, and we drove back down to New Haven on a windy, tree-tearing day in late March for the histogram. The air was thick with rushing grit as we crossed the clinic parking lot, and a copy of the Yale News blew against my leg, the headline, as always: STRIKE !
Again I scanned the covers of Sports Afield in the waiting room, while the dye was injected through Story’s uterus and up into her fallopian tubes. Each of the magazines I had selected bore covers of large fish (two trout and one bass) standing on their tails in a raw white splash. The bass was trying to spit out a salamander plug and each of the trout had an oversized Royal Coachman hooked in the corner of his mouth. I was surprised by how vital,
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