This is an excerpt comprising 1/6 of my otherwise unpublished novella I Don't Know, You Know? The same extract was published in the Georgetown University literary magazine in 1998, when I was a member of the Georgetown University community by virtue of visiting the Psychiatry Department on a weekly basis -- purely voluntarily, I assure you.

III.

John and Agnes live in one of those tract mansions for which scar-built Gulf Coast cities are unjustly famous, but theirs having been built only five years previous to the great real estate bust, the house was given a fin-de-siecle or at least apres-moi-le-deluge air that the building itself in no way merited, being composed of lofty rooms in which no one sang, and cunning staircases only children could love, which is in itself no bad recommendation, but which required at least one daily maid to follow the trail of devices, clothing, toys, and apparatuses scattered by the brood in their passage, Agnes herself being not above such tasks, but certainly uninspired by them, or at any rate, being any longer without that full, unquestioning enthusiasm, or at least duty, which permits the performance of caring and necessary food-clothing-room tending, which in some manifestations is called love, but is otherwise known as service, whether requited or paid or unpaid or aupaired.

However I am bent upon, not the bucolic village life implied in pristine corners, but a spot of pillage, or at least consensual misdemeanor, so that when I arrive at that house which contrives to disguise a wholly borrowed TV culture in the vestments of real life, I am immediately struck by how silent a house with only one person working in it can be, as Jacinta the wholly-legal Salvadorean housekeeper goes about making beds and kitchen-cleaning, while Agnes and I sip neutral iced tea on a glass porch with a view of a tame golf course, and in the interstices between our sentences note the passage of this or that dream or the other intended pursuit, which somehow never came to pass in the years since we were all young and desperate together, now not being either young or together, and having subsumed most of the desperation into normal everyday getting-by with the thought that, although we might feel as confused as ever, at least we didn't have to act it out so much any more, but could proceed as if confusion not only never had occurred but still never could, following whatever path we thought we could avoid so long ago, only to find out that family life has its own adhesive power which cannot be dissolved by mere intentions, nor by momentary, even if irrevocable, actions, nor yet by age-old patterns composed of small slices of choice layered within large blocks of unexamined reflex.

I remember the first time I dropped acid going to a Quacksalver Courier Service concert just before the 1972 Texas primary with John and Agnes and then returning home (I was then renting a room from John and Agnes in a house in a subdivision whose lots had been sold by our grandfather in the 1930's) to cool out with beer and weed, and finally, around 4 AM, being still wired but needing to crash, and somehow finding myself standing in Agnes and John's clothes closet, and emerging bewildered, past an even more bewildered Agnes, who looked at me like I'd just stepped off the 4:10 from Uranus, which was just about how I felt, since I was somehow -- simultaneously -- hearing a modern concerto for steam calliope, french horn and glockenspeil, and conducting what felt like fourteen vehement lines of argument, with a nameless multitude of adversaries, on subjects ranging from the recondite to the scatalogical, and employing a variety of voices, including the harsh monomania of a Lenny Bruce, without, of course, being funny, mingled with the elevated tones of a church lector, without benefit of Scripture.

So I stepped on past Agnes and out of the closet, and neither of us ever figured out what I was doing in their closet, except, of course, it seemed perfectly natural at the time, and I know I must have betrayed a gleam as I brushed past, which, with a shock of recognition, proclaimed that, had John not been there, I wouldn't have hesitated to lock eyes and then limbs with her; settling instead for the eyes for a moment, and setting aside the question of how, if it had not been for John, I would have known her, much less been in the same place, under conditions conducive to, if not invariably productive of, intimacy of at least mind and morale, if not bodies.

Which was a recurring problem over the intervening eighteen years, that was dodged in a multiplicity of manners, from sometimes she being available and me not, to sometimes me available and she not, and sometimes both of us being available but John being around, so that, in a series of summer and Christmas visits across two decades and a dozen addresses, every conceivable variation had been tried, and tried again just to make sure, but none having included both of us being available without John, to which pretty pass we had arrived on the glass-glanced sun porch, with the spreading moisture rings around our iced tea glasses trickling through the threads of our conversation about our spouses and kids and the continually amusing antics of our parents' generation in social situations dissembled.

So, yeah, on her side, John's running around again on a longer leash than ever, while on my side, Tessa's climbing the corporate promotion ladder so assiduously that, if only I had steady work, we might actually be able to fix everything around the house that doesn't work, or at least that portion of things extant in the phsyical world of appliance repairmen and plumbers and other highpriced talent, then we could maybe relax together a little bit, only Tessa has this sense of what ought to be normal which I don't hardly ever live up to, since I have this political jones or electoral lottery fixation that keeps me in patronage jobs between primaries, and makes me blow off my senority every time there's some halfway decent candidate with a remote chance of winning that I can work for at the usual pittance wages and exhaustive time demands which are the hallmark of all campaigns, and of which Eugene McCarthy's assistant, Mr. Eller, in the back seat of a sprung-springed station wagon, going from meeting to meeting, once said -- quite accurately -- "No two campaigns are different"; while Agnes's addiction, as she confessed on a previous visit, was to the notion that life with John could somehow be as rewarding as if he actually loved her exclusively, whereas John's, of course, is solely to the next excitement, wheresoever it may be found or with whom.

The forenoon golfers in their plaid bags wandered across the cropped grass like martian treasure-hunters whose obscure apparatus was waved in arcane patterns, while Agnes and I conspired, in the silences between sentences, to test whether, at last, the moment had not come for us unspontaneously to share what, with affection aforethought, had oft been thought but n'er yet well expressed; and the sun painted the drapes' pattern on the far wall, and the ice in our glasses melted, faster than sighing does, on the starchy placemats of polite hospitality, which only balances over, but does not close, the crack in existence through which volcanoes of need are always slumbering, with habitual park rangers mustered alongside to remove anyone who might venture too close, to take the perfect photograph, or savor the perfect vision of time-stilled explosion in the jungle-thick air.

Agnes is tall and languid at all times, though given to explosive laughter upon anarchic provocations, and to the occasionally icy stabbings of scorn -- not so much for other peoples' stupidity, (which is a frequently misdiagnosed condition always reducible to "they must have been thinking about something else at the time"), as for their refusal to seize the glory, or insight, or wonder, or meaning of a moment that has providentially been laid out in front of them, or us, to be fingered and fondled and ultimately worn, but that, among the impaired, instead become rips in the fabric, or pauses, or awkwardnesses to be left behind, or dismissed, or forgotten -- in which adamant refusal Agnes leaves them, abandoned and bereft of any further loan of her personality or attention, though, being beset by the normal number of insecurities (and possibly a couple extra ones), she has been known to tolerate, out of pity or doubt, several such relatively useless relatives and friends, either with the hope of their eventual recovery to the land of the truly living, or else with the doubt that she must endure them, regardless of any sanity of preference, so that they may teach her some unspeakable mystery; not trusting fully enough in the mystery she already understands, but thinking there might be some others out there she ought to know about, which might come in unpleasant guise, like medicine, but be all the more invigorating for having overcome the initial distaste: and besides, there's always regular old fear to make us malleable.

So, being the forthrightly devious kind of guy I am, I know all these things about Agnes, and a few more she doesn't know I know, and, furthermore, being smart enough to know she knows a few things about me that I don't even know about myself, I proceed, with that combination of ready abandon and instinctual caution which distinguishes the truly twisted from our more normal -- that is to say, more predictable -- compatriots, so that, on the surface, this is the kind of leisurely conversation we have had in the midst of so many flying visits and overlying crises, at various dark nights and foggy days of previous elections, and previous affairs, and previous girlfriends, and previous family uproars (or celebrations, not always distinguishable one from another); meanwhile, the very famous undercurrents of passion, and calculation, and openness to the moment, and fixed intention, swirl about the well-lit, well-proportioned, well-filled by only-two-of-us porch, while I relate the latest outrages from the campaign trail, and bulletins from my home front -- and Agnes relates the latest light humiliations of the children's school lives and of John's irreducible egotism, and the morning has grown so long that it is now about to tip over into the afternoon, and neither of us has been even mildly flirtatious yet, just as you don't light even the tiniest match to see into the gas tank.

Jacinta now being busy at the endless washing and folding and putting away of laundry, and thus having retreated to the rooms nearest the garage, and therefore furthest away from the parental bedroom (for it is a useful convention not to disturb the equanimity of those who are paid to assist you in your home, nor to inflict any such disturbance on somebody else's territory), Agnes and I got up at last from the highly impressed table, and went in search of some tell-tale photograph, or other mediated aide memoire of other times and places or "states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm," and I in my suit, and she in her dress, appear the parfait gentil knicht and ladie -- as indeed we are, suitable for song or story in celebration of any mild but achievable variation from usual worries or long-held habits -- moving down the halls together, having evidently acquiesced but still not capitulated.

Although I have always been nervous around the women I love, including Tessa to whom I've been married for ten years, so that certain unabashed sensations -- of quivering anticipation and lung-thumping heartbeat, coupled with unaccountable hearing loss (from trying so hard to catch every nuance of breath that the simplest words stretch out into their constituent sounds, and fail to make that modicum of sense of which even the falsest utterance is capable) -- have never been driven from my life, whether by marriage, familiarity, or intense spiritual communication; not that the feelings have ever been made much worse by time spent, lives overlapped, or auras exchanged: but neither have they ever been made much better by such unconstraint or dilapidations or emanations.

It therefore requires an almost direct invitation before I can comprehend that any uprush of feeling I might have is not just some isolated internal phenomenon, wholly self-generated, but might have some companion state to explain, or at any rate confirm its propriety of existence, which requirement led to my having a not-completely-unwarranted reputation as a gentleman among ladies, which is to say, I can not only take no for an answer, I can, in many cases, anticipate it prior to its utterance, and, in some cases, can even hear it when it not only isn't being said, but isn't being intended -- and all this tentativeness has, of course, in the messy way of life itself, been compounded by those occasions when I so wished to hear "yes" that I couldn't hear "if only," or "not yet," or "maybe," or "later," or, on a few disastrous occasions, "never," from which memories grew the sense of the probability of failure, but despite which sense, hope itself -- all scarred -- continues to emerge, blinking, stunned in the sunlight by the unlikelihood of its survival.

So I stood, apoise in the new-minted afternoon hush of a hallway, suddenly halted on the brink of a doorway, with the silent encouragement of thick-fickle carpets, hooded-coded paintings, and draped sun, while my left-hand fingers rested on the door-jamb's pristine white paint at about head height, as I turned to Agnes beside me, her head at my ear, almost not-nestled in the not-shadow of my flexed arm.

I finally asked, banally, all scratchy-throated: and Agnes with a half-smile flicker led me over to the bureau, to show me the pictures of her girls at the last family picnic, while I attemted to arrange my sickened face in a pleasant mask to cover my burning ears and cheeks which signalled my consciousness of a grave and irretrievable error, where a piece of badinage only half-un-seriously meant had unaccountably blown up on me, like so many loves -- or, for that matter, jobs -- just when it seemed that everything was going all right, and some outreach toward a piece of inevitable-seeming rightness (that would make my days whole again) proved to be only another false step into an ankle-wrenching pothole -- while I tried to look as if I hadn't been pole-axed -- and I couldn't even hear what she was saying about grandfather and grandgirls, because of bewilderment buzzing in my head -- but I hadn't even had time for the black pity fully to descend and intensify the pain before I surfaced, when Agnes put her hand on my arm, narrowed her eyes at me in a look of concern, and then bent over to slip off her shoes.

And while my eyes were still widening -- before I had time to be even surprised, much less relieved, much less thankful -- Agnes had turned and sighed against my chest, while I kissed her hair in disbelief, and one arm went around her waist, for balance, while the other dropped in astonishment to grasp, to cup, to elevate her from below, and she nuzzled my neck on her way to my lips, so that while I, at last, dipped my tongue in her breath with tentative licks, I would have fallen, weak-kneed, had she not pressed against me; and I opened my eyes (that I had forgotten I had closed) to float above the fountain we were sharing, amid what could only be the mountains of the moon in broad daylight, with the clothesdryer snuffling in another room afar, and, for once, I didn't care what else was going on in the world, nor compare what was happening to some ideal, but -- contented and awe-stricken -- began to shift my balance to one leg, so as to further reach the other arm all the way around Agnes toward that portion of the future which protrudes, so breathlessly and eagerly, into now.