Who Do You Think You Are

“Never mind the old mythology. Clifford wants to leave me again.”
    They settled down to drinking and talking about what Clifford and Jocelyn should do. This was not an unfamiliar conversation. What does Clifford really want? Does he really want not to be married to Jocelyn or does he want something unattainable? Is he going through a middle-age crisis?
    “Don’t be so banal,” Clifford said to Rose. She was the one who said middle-age crisis. “I’ve been going through this ever since I was twenty-five. I’ve wanted out ever since I got in.”
    “That is new, for Clifford to say that,” said Jocelyn. She went out to the kitchen to get some cheese and grapes. “For him to actually come out and say that,” she yelled from the kitchen. Rose avoided looking at Clifford, not because they had any secrets but because it seemed a courtesy to Jocelyn not to look at each other while she was out of the room.
    “What is happening now,” said Jocelyn, coming back with a platter of cheese and grapes in one hand and a bottle of gin in the other, “is that Clifford is wide open. He used to bitch and stew and some other bilge would come out that had nothing to do with the real problem. Now he just comes out with it. The great blazing truth. It’s a total illumination.”
    Rose had a bit of difficulty catching the tone. She felt as if living in the country had made her slow. Was Jocelyn’s talk a parody, was she being sarcastic? No. She was not.
    “But then I go and deflate the truth for you,” said Clifford, grinning. He was drinking beer from the bottle. He thought beer was better for him than gin. “It’s absolutely true I’ve wanted out ever since I got in. And it’s also true that I wanted in, and I wanted to stay in. I wanted to be married to you and I want to be married to you and I couldn’t stand being married to you and I can’t stand being married to you. It’s a static contradiction.”
    “It sounds like hell,” Rose said.
    “I didn’t say that. I am just making the point that it is no middle-age crisis.”
    “Well, maybe that was oversimplifying,” said Rose. Nevertheless, she said firmly, in the sensible, down-to-earth, countrified style she was adopting for the moment, all they were hearing about was Clifford. What did Clifford really want, what did Clifford need? Did he need a studio, did he need a holiday, did he need to go to Europe by himself? What made him think, she said, that Jocelyn could be endlessly concerned about his welfare? Jocelyn was not his mother.
    “And it’s your fault,” she said to Jocelyn, “for not telling him to put up or shut up. Never mind what he really wants. Get out or shut up. That’s all you need to say to him. Shut up or get out,” she said to Clifford with mock gruffness. “Excuse me for being so unsubtle. Or frankly hostile.”
    She didn’t run any risk at all by sounding hostile, and she knew it. She would run a risk by being genteel and indifferent. The way she was talking now was a proof that she was their true friend and took them seriously. And so she did, up to a point.
    “She’s right, you fucking son-of-a-bitch,” said Jocelyn experimentally. “Shut up or get out.”
    When Jocelyn called Rose on the phone, years ago, to read her the poem Howl, she was not able, in spite of her usual boldness of speech, to say the word fuck . She tried to force herself, then she said, “Oh, it’s stupid, but I can’t say it. I’m going to have to say eff. You’ll know what I mean when I say eff?”
    “But she said it’s your fault,” said Clifford. “You want to be the mother. You want to be the grownup. You want to be long-suffering.”
    “Balls,” said Jocelyn. “Oh, maybe. Maybe, yes. Maybe I do.”
    “I bet at school you were always latching on to those kids with the problems,” said Clifford with his tender grin. “Those poor kids, the ones with acne or awful clothes or speech impediments. I bet you just persecuted those poor kids with friendliness.”
    Jocelyn picked up the cheese knife and waved it at him.
    “You be careful. You haven’t got acne or a speech impediment. You are sickeningly good-looking. And talented. And lucky.”
    “I have nearly insuperable problems coming to terms with the adult male role,” said Clifford priggishly. “The psych says so.”
    “I don’t believe you. Psychs never say anything like nearly insuperable. And they don’t use that jargon. And they don’t make those judgments. I don’t