The Whore's Child

the deck, and Gene has pulled on a ratty, moth-eaten sweater from the navy-issue duffel bag we’d hauled from the Volvo into my study, where there’s a foldout couch. Clare and I are leaving tomorrow for Europe where we will rendezvous with our son, who’s pretending to study there. Once we’re gone, Gene and Portia can move into our bedroom, though I’m not sure they will. Gene, a writer of subtle, knowing short stories, will be sensitive about climbing into our bed with his new young wife. On Clare’s pillow he will sniff something unwelcoming, perhaps even disapproving, and I’m not sure what fragrance he’ll find on my own.
    â€œGene has sweaters without holes in them,” Portia says languidly, taking a sip of beer and tilting her head over the back of her deck chair, her long hair hanging free. She shakes it, then straightens up and studies Gene from beneath heavy, hooded eyelids. My own presence on the deck, I suspect, is not strictly necessary to their ongoing drama. Portia already seems perfectly at home, and to her the pillows in our bedroom will smell of bleach and fabric softener, nothing more. “He thinks of this as his Thoreau sweater. The badge of welcome poverty.”
    Gene is drinking white wine and munching sunflower seeds from a baggie he got from the car. “Thoreau was a fucking tourist,” he remarks. “Poverty was a game to him.”
    Portia turns her languid gaze on me. “Nothing is a game to Gene,” she says. “He’s
very
serious.”
    I decide that the best way to befriend my friend is to pretend I like this woman, so I force a smile and nod. “Gene and I go way back,” I tell her. What I mean to say is that I know all too well that for Gene nothing is a game, but it comes out sounding like I understand her husband a hell of a lot better than she does.
    â€œThen you know,” she says, reaching for his big paw and giving it a squeeze. “It means he’s a proletarian writer laboring in the sweatshop of tough, honest prose. It means he comes from an ugly mill town and that’s who he is and always will be.”
    Gene grins good-naturedly, and I suppose even he would have to admit that this is precisely what the sweater connotes. If he doesn’t like her tone, he offers no sign. She gives him an unpleasant, birdlike peck on his hairy knuckles and says, in a baby-talk voice, “Isn’t that right, sweetie pie?”
    What I’m wondering is whether she’s aware of having been chosen for pretty much the same reasons as the sweater. At fifty, Gene’s still a good-looking man, and women have always been attracted to him. They seem to like his lumbering gait, even like his huge mastiff’s head. He’s always been pursued by graduate students although he has not, until now, allowed himself to be cornered. Of course until recently he’s been married. Even so, it’s revealing, if not particularly surprising, that it’s
this
woman who has snared him. It’s as if he’s chosen her to reflect his sense of worth. This will also be Clare’s take, I’m sure. And now that I think about it, I realize I’m a little annoyed with her for not having returned.
    I go inside to fetch some cheese and crackers, and when I return, Gene looks up at me expectantly. “You should read Portia’s work,” he says when I set the plate down on the table.
    â€œI’d like to,” I say, and it’s true, I would, if only to find out whether she’s as unpleasant on the page as she is in the flesh. Writers are often surprising in this respect, and it’s possible that Portia possesses a more generous self that emerges when she’s in the company of people who live in her head.
    â€œShe was the only one in the workshop not looking away,” he explains, a classic Gene comment if ever there was one. A great believer in “staring down the truth,” he admonishes his students not to blink, not ever. Such advice appeals to them, and he has a huge following at the midwestern university where he teaches. He often sees more in his young writers than they see in themselves, and that’s either flattery or faith, depending. In this case he’s explaining why he’s chosen this young woman to be his mate. His twenty-year marriage went south, according to Gene, because Maryanne had never come to terms with who he was and where he was from. The