Bedside Matters by Richard Alther

Author:Richard Alther
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2021-02-19T20:06:20+00:00

Chapter 11

When I hold out silver coins,

take them,

and give me a cup of liquid full of gold light.

No, Walter. These days I just give talks around the country, Polly said ages ago best he can recall.

You’re a motivational speaker! Nothing’s changed.

I sit on panels where women from around the region gather to discuss ways to bolster their fledgling or underfunded chapters of Planned Parenthood.

You’ve never let that one go, Polly, and good for you.

Well, it’s more than how to raise money, it’s PR. Imagine it has to keep being resold, this most basic of rights. Getting stories out about an abused mother right in their midst, on her own with five kids and trying to make ends meet, desperate to avoid another pregnancy. That kind of thing.

He shakes his head, still in awe of this woman who used to be his wife. And Jack’s okay with you hiking all over?

After thirty years he says he loves the chance for frozen dinners. A break from my kale salads and the like! He has his cigars, and can indulge at the club with his golf cronies. He’s so easy. Watches Gomer Pyle reruns, can you stand it?

I do, too! He lets that sink in. This woman with two men cut from the same cloth. He says: I admit I was not easy, Polly. Nor were you. We’d both be squirming at the symphony.

Oh, Walt, you always got headaches or an upset tummy the minute we began a vacation. Simply could not relax, those years.

You should see me now, he thinks presently, flat on his back. I guess you’ve been here a few times to visit, I’ve lost touch.

Paula will send him an email with a video attachment featuring a clip of Polly on some local TV interview, commenting upon the fight to block a state initiative banning abortion outright. Polly always appears so rational, articulate, never angry. Schoolmarmish in her matronly years, a worldly senior whose wisdom you don’t question. But isn’t that the role I happily helped her assume at a third our age now? You go your way, Polly, and I’ll go mine. What about the personhood of a zygote thing down south? it strikes Walter. Was that Polly or more recent? It’s all a mash-up the more he attempts to recollect. If I’m going to reminisce about the old girl, why not the few but marvelous times smooching when we each got carried away? Ray Charles in his raspy voice tripping out “Georgia On My Mind,” or was that farther back in high school with another girl, him too nervous to notice her name or the particulars? Whatever he remembers specifically with Polly, it was something slithery—Peggy Lee, Nat King Cole?—as he and she stroked and groped but ever so slowly, in sync to the mellow, sexy music. Johnny Mathis. Swoon. The two of them definitely on the same page for that business.

Suddenly Polly is saying: We were both absent parents for Gavin. It wasn’t just you, Walt, glued to your desk downtown.

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