Ever After - William Wharton

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It was a new house, sitting in a bare space surrounded by other houses just like it, without even a lawn. I couldn’t get accustomed to living in an oasis surrounded by desert. I’d never lived like that. I couldn’t believe it was me living in this house, with Danny off to work most of the time.

      I did everything I could to make it a real home but I hated to look out the windows. Everything was so barren. I’d been spoiled by Idylwild, and even by Venice, but especially by living with my parents in Europe most of my childhood. At least there was always something interesting to see. Here there was nothing. It was so hot. Practically no one walked in the streets.

      Wills started school, and I announced to Danny I wanted a divorce. There were no other men in my life but I knew there would be soon and I just wanted out. Danny was broken up about the whole thing and we were up night after night, talking it all over. God, it was hell. Looking back, I can see I must have seemed a real bitch to him. Maybe I was.

      Dad and Mom couldn’t understand at all. Dad sat down with me for a quiet talk the way he did when things seemed to be getting out of hand. Most of the time he kept out of my private life, wanting me to work things out for myself, but once in a while he couldn’t hold himself back. It was the same when I started smoking. Then, again, when I first started having sex. It was the same with drugs. He’d explain his ideas and it was hard to argue with him.

      On the smoking thing, he talked very quietly to me in my bedroom, first asking if I smoked. There was no lying about it. I smelled of cigarettes all the time, I was getting up to a pack a day, and the teachers had told Mom I was spending time between classes in the smoking area. He was quiet.

      ‘Listen, Kate. I know it’s your life, but in a certain way your life is ours, too. We’ve spent a hell of a lot of time and effort getting you this far along, clearing up diaper rashes, pumping your stomach out when you drank Chlorodane, getting you through fevers when the doctor thought you had polio, keeping you from being run over, nursing you through chicken-pox, measles, mumps; the whole thing. We fed you vitamins, made sure you had all the shots to keep you from getting the worst diseases. You know you never had any other milk to drink except your mother’s milk or goat’s milk until you were four years old. I pulled milk from the teats of our goats every morning and evening.

      ‘It really makes us unhappy seeing you do this to yourself. Do you know why you smoke?’

      God, he could be so hard and mean in his quiet, tension-filled voice. I promised I’d stop but I didn’t. He knew I wouldn’t but he’d done what he felt he had to do. That’s the way Dad is.

      Then, with sex, he told me to be careful for health reasons, make sure the guy wears a condom. But he had to go on.

      ‘More than anything else, Kate, sex is one of the greatest joys on earth, like Christmas. But it can be the same as having Christmas every day in the year if one becomes promiscuous. There won’t be any thrill left.’ He tried to talk to me about the difference between romance and sex, that when sex came in the door, too often romance went out the window, cornball things like that.

      I didn’t know what the word promiscuous meant. When I told some of my friends what he’d said, they thought it was cute, and awfully funny.

      With the drug thing, they were having a big crackdown at school: even the president of the Board of Trustees’ and the Headmaster’s kids got busted. Sometimes I think there was more pot than cigarettes in the smoking area. This was the early seventies and we were all trying to catch up to the sixties. Dad cornered me in my room again. He pulled out a small bottle with about three ounces in it.

      ‘Look, Kate, do you know what this is?’

      He didn’t wait for me to answer.

      ‘It’s Mexican golden, some of the best pot you’ll find. A friend of mine sold it to me. He was going back to America and was afraid of customs.

      ‘This bottle will always be on the top shelf in my closet in the bedroom. Any time you want to smoke, take some, but only smoke it in the apartment here, and with none of your friends around.

      ‘The French are very tough on this stuff. If you get caught, since I’m not with a big company, we’ll all have to leave France in forty-eight hours. I really don’t want to do that. We like it here. You have to think about our lives, too.’

      He considered pot, and all other drugs, a cheap shot at what can be earned the hard, real way by personal creative activity. He was convinced it stopped people, chemically, from making the tremendous effort to get a personal ‘high’ based on their own capacities.

      ‘You see, Kate, when I was an art student at UCLA, I read Huxley’s Doors of Perception and was deeply impressed. I volunteered to participate in some experiments on LSD 25. That’s what they called acid back then. They wanted artists, and paid us thirty-five dollars a day to be guinea-pigs. I did it twice. They injected the stuff into my arm. After about five minutes, I became aware of the clothes on my body. It was really erotic. I could hear the clinking of neon lights, and was fascinated by the shadow of a typewriter being used by a secretary across the room.

      ‘They took me to the LA County Museum where they asked me to describe the paintings. The colors seemed phosphorescent and in different layers. On the way back to the university in the car, driven by the experimenters, I was suddenly on the edge of a bad trip and curled up on the seat.

      ‘The cars out the window seemed to be getting bigger and smaller. It was only normal perspective changes but my mind wasn’t up to that kind of rational realization.

      ‘I went back one more time when they wanted me to try painting after the injection. I thought I was painting the most beautiful painting in the world and was so happy I cried.

      ‘But after they’d cooled me off in a dim room for a few hours, I came out to look at the painting I’d done and it was just paints smeared together into a uniform brown, the kind of thing an untalented kindergartener might do.

      ‘I think I learned something, Kate. What happens with those drugs is the thinking part of the brain is repressed so feelings are very strong. The ability to discriminate, to make decisions, to understand the nature of the physical world is distorted.

      ‘Now, that’s fine if you have an ordinary brain and don’t have any plans for it. But you have a fine brain, Kate, and I’d hate to see you screw up the wiring, short-circuit yourself.

      ‘You know, after that experience, it was almost two months before I could work up the enthusiasm necessary to do any valid painting. Remember the word “enthusiasm” comes from the Greek for “with the gods.” It takes real discipline and involvement to paint well and I’d almost lost that.

      ‘I wouldn’t touch any of that stuff again for love or money. It’s only a way of saying you don’t have any confidence in your own identity. In a certain way, I think people who become dependent on drugs are like alcoholics. They have so little self-respect, they want to escape from themselves. It’s a form of psychic suicide.’

      He stared at me with those marbled blue eyes of his sunken under his chimpanzee brows. But he convinced me, and I stayed away from it all. I might be one of the only ones of my generation who got through the test-by-fire without getting burned.

      That’s the way Dad is. He’ll be so laid back most of the time, sometimes you think he just doesn’t care. But he respected us. He wanted us to make our own world but he didn’t want us to get hurt.

      When I told him I wanted to divorce Danny, I knew I was probably in for a bad time. He came to visit, and I spent about half an hour trying to explain. He sat on a little stool with his legs spread apart, his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands. He watched every movement in my face or else he just looked down between his legs. He didn’t say a word until I was finished.

      ‘Do you think Danny loves you?’

      ‘Yes, I think so, but …’

      He held out his hand lightly.

      ‘Does he love Wills?’

      ‘You

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