The Whore's Child

separate from me, her work from my work. She fears it’s my intention to revise her.”
    Clare and I nod seriously. This is the sort of talk that Clare will mimic to devastating effect once we’re alone. Gene makes such observations so seriously that in the moment of their expression they seem valid. When they’re repeated, in Clare’s voice, I will hear something fundamentally insincere. As we pull up the covers tonight, Gene will seem God’s own fool, stuffed full of psychobabble. The emotional stage he’s describing so plausibly, even generously, will remind us of nothing in our own experience. During the final year of Gene’s marriage, which had ended in an ugly, rancorous divorce, he’d called me several times to explain not only his own emotional stages but Maryanne’s. In fact, he was most eloquent about
her
pain and rage. “I’m not letting myself off the hook,” he assured me. “I’m a damaged man. I’ve damaged her.” When I hung up and tried to do justice to Gene’s view of things, Clare’s response had been immediate and eloquent. A lip fart.
    The three of us talk agreeably for a while, avoiding the land mines that often punctuate these conversations with Gene. A certain amount of mild criticism does come my way, starting with his fear that I intend to give up “real work” for writing screenplays. Worse, he can’t understand how I could have quit teaching. Still, these criticisms are couched in flattery. The way Gene sees it, our discipline is full of charlatans and well-intentioned incompetents who not only don’t help but can even do real harm to young writers, poisoning fertile ground. I am one of a handful, he claims, who can do apprentice writers some good. He seems almost to suggest that my defection means that he will now have to take on my students, increase his own burden. I tell him the truth: that when I quit last year, I wasn’t the teacher he remembered from the residencies we’d shared, that I’d grown tired of repeating myself, sick of the sound of my own voice. That’s only part of the truth, of course. I’d quit when I could afford to, something I know better than to say to Gene.
    When Clare finishes her wine, she gets up and announces that she has to get started on the sauce. I follow her inside to get another bottle of wine and a beer from the fridge, but what I’m really after is a moment alone with her. I have sensed an emotional sea change out there on the deck, and when I come up behind my wife and slip my arms around her waist, I can tell from the tenseness in her body that I’m right. I never mind Gene’s gentle reproaches, but Clare always does. She’s already warned me that she will brook no criticism of our house or the fact that we can afford to own it—certainly not from someone who’s getting to use it rent free for two weeks.
    â€œI’m glad to see you,” I say, kissing her neck and immediately feeling better.
    â€œI bet you are,” Clare says, peeling the thin skin off a clove of garlic.
    â€œYou’re a good-looking older broad,” I tell her. It’s one of my favorite lines and sometimes it loosens her up. I recall what Gene said about Portia refusing to have anything to do with him until he admitted she wasn’t beautiful. Clare’s needs are pretty much the reverse. She enjoys and always has enjoyed being told that I think she’s lovely. Her enjoyment seems natural to me, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
    â€œGood-looking or not,” she tells me, “this older broad is getting steamed. If he accuses you of selling out to Hollywood I’m going to put an ice pick through his lung and send him out with the tide.”
    â€œHe won’t,” I assure her, and, since I could be wrong, add, “and neither will you.”
    â€œYou let him get away with too much.”
    â€œMaybe he’s my conscience,” I suggest, trying the idea on for size.
    When she turns in my arms to face me, I can see she doesn’t think it’s a great fit. And I’m grateful when she says, “Oh, please.”
    I carry the beer and wine out onto the deck where Gene has turned in his chair to look out over the dunes toward the strip of deep blue ocean beyond. Since this is also the direction his wife took over an hour ago, I conclude that he’s gazing into an uncertain future. And I