I sit in the sun drinking gin. It is ten in the morning. Sunday. Mrs. Uxbridge is off somewhere with the
children. Mrs. Uxbridge is the housekeeper. She does the cooking and takes care of Peter and Louise.
It is autumn. The leaves have turned. The morning is windless, but the leaves fall by the hundreds. In
order to see anything-a leaf or a blade of grass-you have, I think, to know the keenness of love. Mrs.
Uxbridge is sixty-three, my wife is away, and Mrs. Smithsonian (who live on the other side of town) is
seldom in the mood these days, so I seem to miss some part of the mornings as if the hour had a threshold
or a series of thresholds that I cannot cross. Passing a football might do it but Peter is too young and my
only football-playing neighbor goes to church.
My wife, Bertha, is expected on Monday. She comes out from the city on Monday and returns on
Tuesday. Bertha is a good-looking young woman with a splendid figure. Her eyes, I think, are a little
close together and she had a peevish way of disciplining them. "If you don't eat the nice breakfast
Mummy has cooked for you before I count three," she would say, "I will send you back to bed. One. Two.
Three.." I heard it again at dinner. "If you don't eat the nice dinner Mummy has cooked for you before
I count three I will send you to bed without any supper. One. Two. Three.." I heard it again. "If you
don't pick up your toys before Mummy counts three Mummy will throw them all away. One. Two.
Three.." So it went on through the bath and bedtime an one tow three was their lullaby. I sometimes
thought she must have learned to count when she was an infant and that when the end came she would
call a countdown for the Angel of Death. If you'll excuse me I'll get another glass of gin.
When the children were old enough to go to school, Bertha got a job teaching social studies in the sixth
grade. This kept her occupied and happy and she said she had always wanted to be a teacher. She had a
reputation for strictness. She wore dark clothes, dressed her hair simply, and expected contrition and
obedience from her pupils. To vary her life she joined an amateur theatrical group. She played the maid
in Angel Street and the old crone in Desmonds acres. The friends she made in the theatre were all
pleasant people and I enjoyed taking her to their parties. It is important to know that Bertha does not
drink. She will take a Dubonnet politely but she does not enjoy drinking.
Through her theatrical friends, she learned that a nude show called Ozamanides II was being cast. She
told me this and everything that followed. Her teaching contract gave her ten days' sick leave, and
claiming to be sick one day she went into New York. Ozamanides was being cast at a producer's office in
midtown, where she found a line of a hundred or more men and women waiting to be interviewed. She
took an unpaid bill out of her pocketbook, and waving this as if it were a letter she bucked the line saying,
"Excuse me please, excuse me, I have an appointment." No one protested and she got quickly to the
head of the line, where a secretary took her name, Social Security number, etc. She was told to go into a
cubicle and undress. She was then shown into an office where there were four men. The interview,
considering the circumstances, was very circumspect. She was told that she would be nude throughout the
performance. She would be expected to simulate or perform copulation twice during the performance and
participate in a love pile that involved the audience.
I remember the night when she told me all of this. It was in our living room. The children had been put
to bed. She was very happy. There was no question about that. "There I was naked," she said, "but I
wasn't in the least embarrassed. The only thing that worried me was that my feet might get dirty. It was
an old-fashioned kind of place with framed theatre programs on the wall and a big photograph of Ethel
Barrymore. There I sat naked in front of these strangers and I felt for the first time in my life that I'd
found myself. I found myself in nakedness. I felt like a new woman, a better woman. To be naked and
unashamed in front of strangers was one the most exciting experiences I've ever had.."
I didn't know what to do. I still don't know, on this Sunday morning, what I should have done. I guess I
should have hit her. I said she couldn't do it. She said I couldn't stop her. I mentioned the children and
she said this experience would make her a better mother. "When I took off my clothes,: she said "I felt as
if I had rid myself of everything mean and small." Then I said she'd never get the job because of her
appendicitis scar. A few minutes later the phone rang. It was the producer offering her a part. "Oh, I'm
so happy," she said. "Oh, how wonderful and rich and strange life can be when you stop playing out the
roles that your parents and their friends wrote out for you. I feel like an explorer."
The fitness of what I did then or rather left undone still confuses me. She broke her teaching contract,
joined Equity, and began rehearsals. As soon as Ozamanides opened she hired Mrs. Uxbridge and took a
hotel apartment near the theater. I asked for a divorce. She said she saw no reason for a divorce.
Adultery and cruelty have well-marked courses of action but what can a man do when his wife wants to
appear naked on the stage? When I was younger I had known some burlesque girls and some of them
were married and had children. However, they did what Bertha was going to do only on the midnight
Saturday show, and as I remember their husbands were third-string comedians and the kids always looked
hungry.
A day or so later I went to a divorce lawyer. He said a consent decree was my only hope. There are no
precedents for simulated carnality in public as grounds for divorce in New York State and no lawyer will
take a divorce case without a precedent. Most of my friends were tactful about Bertha's new life. I
suppose most of them went to see her, but I put it off for a month or more. Tickets were expensive and
hard to get. It was snowing the night I went to the theatre, or what had been a theatre. The proscenium
arch had been demolished, the set was a collection of used tires, and the only familiar features were the
seats and the aisles. Theatre audiences have always confused me. I suppose this is because you find an
incomprehensible variety of types thrust into what was an essentially domestic and terribly ornate interior.
There were all kinds there that night. Rock music was playing when I came in. It was that deafening old-
fashioned kind of rock they used to play in places like Arthur. At eight thirty the house lights dimmed,
and the cast-there were fourteen-came down the aisles. Sure enough, they were all naked excepting
Ozamanides, who wore a crown.
I can't describe the performance. Ozamanides had two sons, and I think he murdered them, but I'm not
sure. The sex was general. Men and women embraced one another and Ozamanides embraced several
men. At one point a stranger, sitting in the seat on my right, put his hand on my knee. I didn't want to
reproach him for a human condition, nor did I want to encourage him. I remove his hand and
experienced a deep nostalgia for the innocent movie theatres of my youth. In the little town where I was
raised there was one-the Alhambra. My favorite movie was called The Fourth Alarm. I saw it first one
Tuesday after school and stayed on for the evening show. My parents worried when I didn't come home
for supper and I was scolded. On Wednesday I played hooky and was able to see the show twice and get
home in time for supper. I went to school on Thursday but I went to the theatre as soon as school closed
and sat partway through the evening show. My parents must have called the police, because a patrolman
came into the theatre and made me go home. I was forbidden to go the theatre on Friday, but I spent all
Saturday there, and on Saturday the picture ended its run. The picture was about the substitution of
automobiles for horse-drawn fire engines. Four fire companies were involved. Three of the teams had
been replaced by engines and the miserable horses had been sold to brutes. One team remained, but its
days were numbered. The men and the horses were sad. Then suddenly there was a great fire. One saw
the first engine, the second, and the third race off to the conflagration. Back at the horse-drawn company,
things were very gloomy. Then the fourth alarm rang-it was their summons-and they sprang into
action, harnessed the team, and galloped across the city. They put out the fire, saved the city, and were
given an amnesty by the Mayor. Now on the stage Ozamanides was writing something obscene on my
wife's buttocks.
Had nakedness-its thrill-annihilated her sense of nostalgia? Nostalgia-in spite of her close-set eyes-
was one of her principal charms. It was her gift gracefully to carry the memory of some experience into
another tense. Did she, mounted in public by a naked stranger, remember any of the places where we had
made love-the rented houses close to the sea, where one heard in the sounds of a summer rain the
prehistoric promised of love, peacefulness, and beauty? Should I stand up in the theatre and shout for her
to return, return in the name of love, humor, and serenity? It was nice driving home after parties in the
snow, I thought. The snow flew into the headlights and made it seem as if we were going a hundred miles
an hour. It was nice driving home in the snow after parties. Then the cast lined up and urged us-
commanded us in fact-to undress and join them.
This seemed to be my duty. How else could I approach understanding Bertha? I've always been very
quick to get out of my clothes. I did. However, there was a problem. What should I do with my wallet,
wristwatch, and car keys? I couldn't safely leave them in my clothes. So, naked, I started down the aisle
with my valuables in my right hand. As I came up to the action a naked young man stopped me and
shouted-sang-"Put down your lendings. Lendings are impure."
"But it's my wallet and my watch and the car keys," I said.
"Put down your lendings," he sang.
But I have to drive home from the station," I said, "and I have sixty or seventy dollars in cash."
"Put down your lendings."
"I can't, I really can't. I have to eat and drink and get home."
"Put down your lendings."
Then one by one they all, including Bertha picked up the incantation. The whole cast began to chant:
"Put down your lendings, put down your lendings."
The sense of being unwanted has always been for me acutely painful. I suppose some clinician would
have an explanation. The sensation is reverberative and seems to attach itself as the last link in a chain
made up of all similar experience. The voices of the cast were loud and scornful, and there I was, buck
naked, somewhere in the middle of the city and unwanted, remembering missed football tackles, lost
fights, the contempt of strangers, the sound of laughter from behind shut doors. I held my valuable in my
right hand, my literal identification. None of it was irreplaceable, but to cast it off would seem to threaten
my essence, the shadow of myself that I could see on the floor, my name.
I went back to my seat and got dressed. This was difficult in such a cramped space. The cast was still
shouting. Walking up the sloping aisle of the ruined theatre was powerfully reminiscent. I had made the
same gentle ascent after King Lear and The Cherry Orchard. I went outside.
It was still snowing. It looked like a blizzard. A cab was stuck in front of the theatre and I remembered
then that I had snow tires. This gave me a sense of security and accomplishment that would have
disgusted Ozamanides and his naked court; but I seemed not to have exposed my inhibitions but to have
hit on some marvelously practical and obdurate part of myself. The wind flung the snow into my face and
so, singing and jingling the car keys, I walked to the train.
B&L Associates, Renton, Washington, U.S.A.