Don't Disappoint (Ch. 8)

by Martin van Cooper

Welcome back to a special Summer Edition of PILCROW. For the next eight-ish weeks, we’ll be serializing Martin van Cooper’s unpublished novel Don’t Disappoint (runner-up in our last contest, back by popular demand). Stay tuned for submission deadlines for our next quarterly contest (in which each of two runners-up receive $500, and the ultimate winner - voted on by you, dear subscribers - receives $1,000).

As ever, if you believe in what we’re doing at PILCROW, subscribe, share, and consider offering a paid subscription.

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In Don’t Disappoint, amidst a flailing career, a displaced midwesterner in Los Angeles goes home to confront the complications of a mother with advancing dementia, only for a marital sucker punch to leave him questioning what’s left of his family to salvage.

Martin Van Cooper writes the Substack Don’t Read the Dust Jacket

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Jessica and Randy met during medical school and somehow both ended up specializing in interventional cardiology and landing in LA, with Jessica at the University and Randy in private practice. This was the year when children eating Tide pods—the candy shaped and candy colored soluble packets of laundry detergent—was some kind of national emergency according to the internet, prompting detergent companies to release a battery of absurd commercials focused on how safe the packaging of their product was. You know, in case you accidentally popped one in your mouth. There was a once-a-month girls’ dinner for the female interventionists—they were 1:10 outnumbered by men and thus all knew each other, there were about 15 in the entire county of 15 million—sometimes including civilian friends. Randy was hosting, there were four of them that night, and had turned her kitchen over to a chef hired for the evening.

Prithi’s fiancé says to me while she’s changing out of her scrubs that he wants to be a writer, to which my ears perk up, Randy is saying.

Get in line.

And get this.

He wants to be the next John Grisham.

Man shit. He wants to write about man shit, he says.

A dearth of such, for sure.

Real man shit, for real men.

My old man farted like a foghorn when he pissed. He should put that in there.

Ok, TMI.

How did she find this one?

She’s a magnet.

Was she the ball stretcher guy?

Ok. Details. Hold on. Details.

Hang on, I need a refill for this.

That was the last one.

The last one, ok: she made the guy wear a ball stretcher.

And that does what, exactly?

Doesn’t get me riled up I can tell you.

I’ve yet to be with someone where I said to myself, I wish he had longer balls.

Low hanging fruit.

Is it a control thing, like binding woman’s waists or feet?

She said her boyfriend’s balls were hung a bit too high and tucked up close to his body. I think it’s all about cosmetics. She was a bit off because she was letting this man live with her half the time for the past few months. She broke up with him for his unwillingness to commit.

To the balls thing?

I don’t blame him.

Then she hired a private investigator just to find out he was using a fake identity with her.

The plot thickens.

So, he had a different name, lived in a different city and was married. He was letting her use all his fake credit cards.

Why, ok, why is she using his credit cards?

Judgement!

Should have been a red flag…boyfriend lets you use all his credit cards.

And is living with you.

I know.

She created a fake email address and emailed the wife about what he was up to for the past few months including screenshots, etc. I found this to be quite insane.

Oh boy.

But did she ask the wife about the ball height?

Shit, I didn’t think to ask. She also told me how her 14-year-old son who is on meds for ADHD decided to take acid which catapulted him into serotonin syndrome. He was covered in vomit and violently attacked her.

As opposed to what kind of attack exactly?

He punched her in the face, knocked her to the floor so her head ended up in his bathroom closet. She struggled to overtake him and had to choke him to the point of nearly passing out when he finally calmed down.

Jesus.

These I may be a sex addict or alcoholic but at least I’m not in this person’s league stories always make you temporarily feel better about yourself.

So, he ended up in the hospital and they ended up talking to the cops.

I don’t understand how people can maintain functional careers.

You’d be surprised.

Apparently.

It’s the back and forth. I don’t know how she does it.

There’s momentum. People get going and then you are on that track.

My parents were like that toward the end.

Ball stretchers?

No. But maintaining careers amidst a maelstrom. When I was 10 or 12 and we were still getting together with our neighborhood friends one, sometimes two nights on the weekend and going to my grandparents’ house at least once a month, my mother started bringing up a man she dated before my father. This was when she was drinking heavily and the subject would always be broached by her after she had put away 2 sometimes 3 bottles of fairly cheap red wine…

Hey, this is not cheap wine.

Amen.

No doubt, no doubt. Some things change. The subject was brought up apropos of nothing and for the year or so that it went on, she became increasingly brazen with her lead ins to the point where many of my parents’ friends would start to throw furtive uncomfortable glances at each other and raise eyebrows and scoot out to the bathroom each time she would find some segue between say, the Israelis in Lebanon or Saddam’s going into Kuwait or Perot and whatever.

Ross Perot?

Yeah, Ross Perot, I don’t know, I always remember them talking politics. But she, my mother would say something apropos of nothing like this reminds me of this guy I used to date before Henry. Before my father. Oh, don’t worry she would say, Henry knows all about it. Apparently this previous relationship had been one of considerable contention with my mothers’ parents because my grandfather would turn stone faced when my mother brought it up, invariably with him and her mother and siblings in the room. On several occasions my grandmother left the room and she always went ashen when Robert was recalled. I think she got intestinally ill, my grandmother, when this came up.

Understandable.

Your father was in the room?

In the room. Invariably.

And he knew about this?

Ok. My mother was in college at the time so this was way before my dad and she was still on a fairly tight leash held by my grandfather and since she went to school across the country he expected her to call on a daily basis to divulge on her classes, well-being and, he mistakenly anticipated, her personal life, such that when my grandparents found out, via an allegedly accidental disclosure from my aunt, she had been dating Robert for a year and not told them they were shocked and hurt enough by this ostensible betrayal so as to commence with 3 days of calling my mother’s roommate and then cousin in Pittsburgh, only to finally convince her, my aunt, they were distraught enough to be contacting the police and getting on a plane to fly out that she, my aunt, chose to divulge that maybe that wouldn’t be the best course of action since my mother had dropped her classes that quarter, the first of her senior year, and decamped with Robert to Paris.

Romantic.

Ahh. They went to Paris.

I’m guessing this ends well.

It sounded like the sort of rebellious thing you were supposed to do, right? A straight A senior at Princeton with an MCAT score in the 95^th percentile and an unblemished undergraduate resume of homeless clinics in the summer, an honors research thesis on nitrogen fixation by symbiotic arbuscular micorrhiza bacteria in soybeans and the effects of elevated carbon dioxide and atmospheric temperature, and a double major in art history. This is my mother.

Wait wait. Who’s this Robert.

He’s the ex.

An ex ex. Several before my Dad.

But what’s his story.

He had finished art school in New York the previous year and felt he needed to get away from the city and all its brash Americanness.

Yes! I love this guy.

What a hipster doofus.

To experience the Old World and to escape the hyper capitalist nightmare while he still could. I know how this all sounds, my mother said, so daft, but at the time it was romantic and crazy and I needed to break something. They spent a week in a shared flat near Montmartre…

Oh my God.

I know, I know. I don’t think it was much more than a week before my grandfather finally tracked her down over the phone and demanded she come home. After he asked her if she had had an HIV test, she hung up and for around 24 hours refused to answer the phone and when she finally did her mother snatched the receiver from her father long enough to pronounce her a harlot.

Very Old World.

Very romantic.

Montmartre. In springtime.

It was years later after my parents had split up and I was in med school that my aunt intimated to me, after several G&Ts something about a previous pregnancy scare with Robert and my mother, although she, my aunt, was speaking in such tongues at that point of a late Thanksgiving eve at Vail that I didn’t have the skill to pin her down and am not even sure that she wasn’t making the whole thing up, re-dredging her sister’s one big fuck up to silence her own voices.

And this was discussed. By your mother.

Not the pregnancy part or the HIV test part but Robert in the abstract, yes. It was a terrible experience my mother would say, with a performer’s mirth, sucking down more wine while my grandparents after first admonishing her not to speak that way in front of her husband, my Dad, acquiesced into silence. That a child was in the room never seemed to occur to anyone.

You have to learn somehow.

Sooner the better.

Passing on some serious wisdom there.

She was doing this to show my father that she existed and to show her family and their friends that she was a separate person from him. I think she was also doing it to try to somehow win my father’s attention back by reminding him that even though maybe he didn’t think about it very often anymore, there were plenty of other people interested in screwing his wife and running around the world with her, even if it was in the past.

What was his reaction?

He would mostly just stay quiet. Sometimes he would add a sardonic, self-effacing comment like back in your mother’s hippie days or before she met someone with less personality and no artistic talent to settle down with. The story wasn’t new to him, but it was my mother’s intent to add new details in every retelling to bring out some new, usually salacious component of the relationship and her dalliance away from her education and the completeness with which she ignored my grandparents’ opprobrium.

What a saint.

He was no saint. But he was not to be provoked, at least never in front of me or our guests or family. I think he had already emotionally moved on from whatever flash in the pan him and my mother had. At that particular point in time, she was all that there was and that was enough.

Yikes.

Ok, but at least she had her spring trip to Paris.

But here’s the kicker. That Robert was black came first in response to a barbed accusation from one of my aunts, after which my mother dove into a story of Robert’s mom being a waitress that had him when she was 13, delivered, these stories were by my mother, with some conspiratorial flair as though all fiction and fact were scuttlebutt she heard around the water cooler that afternoon. This fact came up a second time in front of our neighbors. My father’s sudden wistful countenance told me this was in fact a new tidbit.

After all those years.

After all those years. Something new. He tried to hide it, but I could tell he didn’t know.

Wow.

What bothered him, if I try to imagine what he was thinking, is not that the man my mother ran off with during her senior year—years before she met him—was black. He couldn’t have cared less. What would have bothered him was that she felt necessary to remark that he was black to use this fact to somehow injure my father and elevate herself and what did this mean about her and what she thought about what mattered to him.

And your aunt? What did she have to say about this.

The women in that family all sought husbands on bad streaks that they could nurse back to health and then demean for the rest of their lives. Only my father broke the mold, since once rescued from his own skid he steadfastly remained genteel and kind, notwithstanding 30 years of conditioning to belittle him.

Jesus.

I suspect my father already knew at that point that his marriage was unsalvageable and that he was just pursuing a least bad option by staying in it until I was myself in college. I don’t think he had any illusions about the divergence my mother and he had taken since my birth and yet I can’t help but wonder how he must have felt, what impact it had at the time on his relationship to me and my grandparents, who were scandalized, even at 12 I could see that, or our friends who per the social contract took my parents as one unit at least until the divorce was final, my father wasn’t one to lobby people to his side on that issue, before or since, and so the friends from those two decades fell away, for him. I’m also pretty sure, given the transactional way his mind worked, that on some level he was relieved to be emasculated by my mother in front of her family and their friends because it meant he was one up and could come back to even with a clear conscience by leaving her. My father filed shit like that away for future use. I could also see that it freed him to know, like Rabbit said, that having someone sleep with your wife adds some value back to her, even if it was in the past, although he couldn’t care less about the past and never talked about his. I think it did also make him feel hollow, because this woman he was married to was using this thing that would most hurt if he used it on her. The other lover, real or imagined, past present or future. She’s the one that would have been hurt by his past. And yet it didn’t hurt him like it would her, it only made him realize that he only existed for her as she related to him. He only existed to her in the capacity to which she increased her sense of herself and maybe it was a fallacy to believe this was not the rule but the exception. But my father had long since lost interest in playacting such things.

Who’s rabbit? What rabbit?

Nothing. No one. No ball stretchers. Just a fucking man.