G.H.
It was on this certain Sunday, some six days after the raccoon appeared, that Sarah and Matthew first spoke of me. As she later explained to Matthew, she and Beryl had spent most of the day on what they code-named “Project M.”—carting a protesting Mrs. Morel to a hair salon, then on to Westfarms Mall to shop for clothes. Matthew had arrived at Timothy’s place with the intention of reviewing work with his partner: while Timothy was in the kitchen making coffee, however, Matthew sank into the newly arrived sofa and instantly into a black sleep in which Timothy—knowing little, suspecting much, surveying his friend’s chalky skin and circled eyes—let him lie until it was time for them to drive back to Matthew’s house for dinner.
For the first time since the raccoon’s advent, there had been much laughing. Mrs. Morel had perched on a kitchen chair as the four friends cooked or pretended to help, regaling them with commentary on her day, and being teased in turn. (Timothy: “Whoa, devastating, Mrs. M. Bangs. You goin’ out to do a little man-killing?”) The laughter continued in the dining room as Mrs. Morel opined about the upcoming elections, but ended when she announced she was contemplating buying a television or radio.
“I could listen to the news that way, dears, and the house, why then, you know, the house would seem positively full of people, if I left that sort of thing turned on.”
That Mrs. Morel (she of the dead kitchen, she who considered any electrical device beyond the light bulb or thermostat hopelessly complicated, unnecessary, distasteful, and probably dangerous)—that she felt, though of course would not admit to, a loneliness so great that she would consider the companionship of radio or television to ease it: this was a revelation to astonish them all. After their guests were gone, Matthew entered the kitchen with wine glasses bouqueted in each hand to find Sarah standing at the sink, apparently too full of thought to use the soapy sponge in her hand, and so empty of any sensation of movement around her that when he came up behind her and kissed her near the ear she was startled. And quite involuntarily squeezed the sponge into the air and squirted them both with soapy water. She gasped, but then he laughed, and so did she, and she threw the sponge at him, hitting him squarely, soppingly, in the chest. He threatened to get her for this, and she ran, and he chased her through the house until they reached their bed. Where she allowed herself to be gotten.
And it was later, at half-past ten, in a still, fine moment, that Sarah said into the quiet of the house, “I wish we could find a nice man for Mrs. Morel.”
“One way to get her off our hands.” He received a light slap to the chest. “Okay, okay. Actually, I was thinking that too, tonight–maybe it was her talking about getting a TV, or you and Berry getting her all fixed up. It’d be great for her to have somebody, but I’m betting there’s a serious shortage of antique Prince Charmings right now—let alone that special guy who could get downwind of her and not gallop right back across hismoat.”
She refused to be deterred. “It would have to be someone courtly,” she said dreamily, amid strokings and ticklings, “somebody kind and patient and, and distinguished, you know—dignified.”
“Right. Also with enough sense to get her into some serious psychiatry–can you move your arm? That’s better—and a lot of patience.”
“Of course. But she needs more than that. Somebody, oh– impressive, someone she can tool around in society with, the way she did before she married Gardiner.”
“That kind of society vanished fifty years ago, Sar. I mean, have you noticed that even with old Gardiner dead, she’s practically a hermit? She’s really got nobody but the two of us.” An inspiration seized him, jerked him up. “Yes! I got it! I see who you mean.” He lifted a black lock of her hair and carefully formed of it an extravagantly drooping moustache on his face. “Rally, Mrs. Morel–your collection of local felines is too, too astonishing,” he drawled, using a most pathetic imitation of cultivated British speech.
“That’s it!” Sarah, too, sat up in bed. “That’s exactly who she needs, love. An Englishman. Maybe with a title, even!”
He cleared an odd tickle from his throat and refashioned the moustache. “Allow me to introduce myself, my dear Mrs. Morel. I am,” he cleared his throat again, “am—Lord Harold—no.. Too grand.”
“Maybe just a captain, Matty, a nice little Captain Somebody-or-Other. Lifelong bachelor and noted—”
“Noted authority on the carrier pigeon,” Matthew interrupted. Words not his own were beginning to come to him, faintly, so that he had to listen hard, over the strange sudden clamor of his heart. “No, that’s not right. This guy’s too elegant for pigeons. Something classier. Whooping cranes. I think it’s whooping cranes. Okay, Max, there you go. Sir Harold Whooper, noted authority on cranes of the same name.”
“Matthew. Don’t be ridiculous. Harold isn’t bad, but it doesn’t have enough—it doesn’t have the right ring. I ‘d rather have a more substantial name, like, like, I don’t know, like maybe Henry. And not Whooper. Too silly”
“Not Henry,” he muttered, listening and tryi ng not to listen to the words that were simply coming despite his own panicked volition. “No, not Henry. Not John. Somebody Whooper. What’s wrong with Whooper?”
“Are you falling asleep? You sound like you’re half-asleep.” She tickled him. “Not Whooper. It’s goofy-sounding. No dignity.”
The words came out slowly and tranquilly, as if of their own accord. “Okay, then. Make it George and drop the W. He’s Sir George Hooper.” He laughed abruptly, as if whatever inspiration had held him had now let him free. He sat up and cheered: “Sir George Hooper, he’s our man, if he can’t do it, nobody can.”
And with the second pronouncement of my name he felt a tingling, pleasant shock, as of running into cold waves, fast, on a hot summer’s day, and in the rippling of that water Matthew saw a glorious vision and stood up upon bed, waving his hand before him to seize what shimmered before his eyes. “I can see the society pages now, sweetheart. ‘Sir George Hooper was spotted last night escorting Mrs. Violet Morel to the opening of the symphony season at the Bushnell. Mrs. Morel, the darling of the uppity eyebrows, was tastefully decked out in black galoshes and a shocking pink muu muu. She swept down the Bushnell’s center aisle trailing her classic fragrance, ‘Cat Phew.’ By George, Max, I think we’ve got it’!”
“Don’t call me Max,” she said and pulled him back down, but already she was whispering, as if the musicians had finished tuning up and her eyes were adjusting their focus to the auditorium’s dim light. “They make such a handsome couple, don’t they, sweetheart?”
He called her Max because she’d appeared for their first date wearing an old, green felt man’s fedora, which she intended, perhaps, as an emblem of severe bohemianism. So we are stuck with our names, and whatever associations they give rise to in the minds of others.
If anyone other than myself were to read this, he or she might at this juncture become a trifle confused, and might very well desire some sort of explanation. Not that there really is anything so very extraordinary here; most people are conceived of during the same act to which I allude above. Indeed, if one were to make, for the moment, the absurd assumption that I was conceived during that passage of love, perhaps the most noteworthy aspects of such a conception would have been that the parents began in laughter, and that so fluid and opalescent an admixture of gentleness and passion eased their physical act as is rare even for such young lovers as Sarah and Matthew. Moreover, had I been conceived in that way, this evening, it would have been with such generosity of impulse as, in my humble opinion, the dark-suited Freudian faculty could trivialize, but not explain.
And the world, really, is full of stranger conceptions. What is one to make of the poor starfish sliced in half by a curious scientist, a being whose two halves then become two wholes? Isn’t the severing in that case a form of conception, and possibly even a birth as well? Then, too, the ancients believed life rose spontaneously from the fertile mud of the Nile; some modern thinkers believe life on earth sprang from the fortuitous mating of lightning with certain particular, if unexceptional, chemical compounds. Had I been conceived as described above, it would have been a conception far less monstrous than the Minotaur’s, say, and fully as reasonable as deriving one’s being from the successful assault of a fishtailed sperm on a round-bellied ovum in some dark Fallopian alley. Well then.
If such had been my conception—in the intricate convolutions of Sarah and Matthew’s brain cells, amid the confused, rapid, innocent flexing and heaving and joining of thei r two discrete imaginations—would it really have been any stranger than the ordinary business of heaving buttocks and flexing toes, the joining of two discrete bodies by the absurdly sweet means of their genitalia? However one might weigh the relative pleasures involved in each type of conception, who is to say which act would be stranger, more marvelous, more real? Are not passions and histories involved in both acts, and some thought, at least, in the one?
Again, and not to dwell too long on the obstetrical, would the heart be less nurturing than the womb, would the mouth be a less moist and mysterious passageway to the world, in the one case, than the usual birth canal in the other? Would such a carriage and delivery be any the less appropriate, less intimate, less real?
There are objections and protestations that could be raised against these arguments, of course, but they would be objections and protestations so bitterly literal and unimaginatively biased as cannot concern me here. No. For I am only concerned, after all, not with asserting my reality but my purpose—which, for the moment at least, is to record what seems to have occurred to Sarah and Matthew. Perhaps I am here for other purposes as well, purposes I do not understand—I certainly do not claim to be omniscient—but then few and fortunate indeed are the souls who know all the reasons for their being. I at least know enough about my purpose to know that I am blessed to have one.
I, at least as much as anyone else, know that I exist.
And if that existence had originated in the minds and on the bed of these two young people, it would still be as full, as potent, as enduring a reality as any more prosaically conceived being. Had I—let me propose for argument’s sake—in fact been generated in that act of love, by a sunny bolt of inspiration on those two fecund spirits, who is there can say—who is there dares say—that I would have been any less a being than he or she? And what would it matter if, under those circumstances, I came to be here? For here I certainly am, sitting in a perfectly solid chair, writing a perfectly ordinary English sentence that any literate person might read. Creature that I am, I lay my claim to an adequate mind, and a soul. I have lived long and wisely enough to conjure the scent of hyacinths while snuffling across the icy bleak of winter; I can make snap judgments, feel pain and anger and remember in my very bones the awful bewilderment of children; I have known hunger and doubt and great, oh, very great love—and these things would be enduringly real even had I had such a conception as this.
While the foregoing argument has been of course purely hypothetical, I felt it necessary to make, in light of certain circumstances that may arise in the course of this experiment.
In connection with which I must record that it was I, alas, who provided Matthew with my name. A whimsical interference with my subject (for lack of better term) that I will not attempt to justify now. It was a rash thing to do. Perhaps wrong. But in any case, it is done.
next, 4 October
previous, 27 September, cont’d.
The Nature of Things 