Where Are You? I Can't Find You

University of Northern Iowa

Where Are You? I Can't Find YouAuthor(s): John HerrmannSource: The North American Review, Vol. 253, No. 4 (Jul. - Aug., 1968), pp. 22-26Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25116823 .

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I Where

| Are

| You?

by John Herrmann

/ Can't

Find

You

Our marriage wasn't going very well and Teddy, my second wife, had me going to Stephen J. Farmer, "the

very best domestic psychiatrist in California," she mentioned to me one morning after a particularly late

evening of go-arounds. "Just think about it, Billy," she asked.

"Please don't call me Billy." "But just think about going. I'm not asking you to

tell him everything. "Look," she continued, "isn't it worth it to you?"

Stephen J. Farmer had a suite of offices in a building on California street in the financial district of downtown San Francisco, and I not only went there often once I

started, I actually began to enjoy the sessions, even those painful ones, even the sad ones. I grew to depend

upon Thursdays at 1:00 p.m. It was like a long shower after an involved day's work and meeting Teddy going in when I walked out each time gave me spirit. Thurs

days were for the most part days of roses.

After four months Stephen J. suggested we try new

identities, that we weren't longing for divorce or change of mates as much as we longed for new sides to each other. He suggested new clothes, new cars, new knives, forks, spoons, new driver's license photo, and new

apartment. And Teddy and I dove to it. I bought everything: suits, mod ties, green shorts, striped boat neck tee-shirts and white duck bell-bottom trousers;

Teddy bought nylon dresses that clung, trench coat

dresses, black felt hats with wide and drooping brims, four inch alligator belts, and she went to parties in long football shaped wire earrings, shorty nightgowns and

rope thongs. We bought an XKE and sold off the Ford and stationwagon, and to celebrate Teddy drank a bot tle of Southern Comfort and went skipping out onto

our front lawn wearing only her alligator belt and car

rying my old black Charlie Chaplin wood handle urn

brella, singing "I'm going to wash that man right out of

A morning or so later I awoke to find her already up and gone, a note told me she'd see me this evening at our new apartment across the bridge in Sausalito. She left an odd looking key in one of her old personal ized stationary envelopes, the new address was written

on a strip of corrasable typing paper and it had smeared and was difficult to decipher.

Well, there it was, the chance of either slipping away from her now?after all, she left me, even though there were directions to follow?or the new me joining the new her in the new pad. But leaving Teddy was

something to consider. Besides our intellectual differ

ences, she was certainly a well appointed young woman, or in her case we might say thoroughly developed. And after all, we'd just spent eight-hundred dollars for Stephen J. Farmer's services and you can't throw

something like that out of a window. I therefore went over the Gate in the XKE and drove that nice little

winding road down into Sausalito, passed the rock

sculpture of the barking seal, found our street and

apartment and used the triangle key she had left for me.

The building was mostly aluminum, it seemed to

me, with yellow and red and white panels that made it seem very boxy. I went up in the outside glass ele vator and stopped at the fifth floor, our floor, our

apartment was nine rooms on the fifth floor; five ten

ants, five floors, and we were placed above them all. When I used the key and walked in I was shocked

at the space and the bareness. Not one piece of our new furniture had arrived, not one of my new shirts

hung in the echoing closet. I decided that Teddy had

arranged for everything and there was no cause for

worry. I didn't really want to spend a night in a hotel

waiting for the apartment to shape up. I heard the shower and walked into the bedroom intending to

sneak up on her and tear her from the bath and com mit some ugly, brutal husband's crime right there on

the bare mosaic floors.

But I could not find her or the bathroom. I could

plainly hear water running. I could hear my own wife's delicate soprano voice humming the theme from "The

Wild Ones," but I could not, absolutely could not lo cate the bathroom.

There were three doors in the master bedroom from which the shower sounds emitted. One door I had come through into the room, and both of the other doors opened into walk-in closets.

22 The North American Review



I called to her.

"Billy?" she said. "Where are you," I said. "I'm showering. How do you like the apartment? "Teddy, where the hell are you?" "Wait a minute, I can't hear you. I'll be out in a

minute."

I went into the next bedroom down the hall but couldn't hear water running from there and started back toward the master bedroom where Teddy came out drying herself with an oversized brilliant blue bath towel. She looked so magnificent standing white against the blue, standing first on one leg then the other, framed by the picture window behind which sail boats

moved on the still north bay, that I forgot about not

being able to locate her before and pursued the initial

plan. But changes of identity happen more slowly than changes of clothing, and finally Teddy was her old self, lying with her head off to the side, complaining about the coldness of mosaic flooring in bedrooms.

The furniture arrived by late afternoon, and by then I had still not found the bathroom off the master bed room. I used the half-bath between the second and third bedrooms, offering Teddy the only excuse nec

essary now: it was my new self?complete privacy, my own bathroom where my own mirror saw only me.

That next weekend we had a bang-up party around our elegant surroundings. Our massive orange leather sofa was as great a success as the four foot by four foot

enlargment of Teddy topless and fishing off pier 42 while storm clouds gather over her. By midnight more than one-hundred persons were standing on those same

mosaic tiles. I was actually finding my new self now, walking here and there between them with my adopted air of intellectual skepticism, spotting chances for my practiced crude or nasty remark that would eventually gain me the label of eccentric. (Stephen J. said that for a new personality to "take" one must see it in the reactions of others, and the quickest of all reactions

was disgust.) But the party did not help me locate the master

bath. I followed men and women into the bedroom, watched them go into the closet door, waited while I heard water running and rattling around, saw them reopen the door and walk past me, and when I went over and opened the door I walked into my closet. The same door, I was certain of that.

I therefore continued to use the back bath and was never visited by my wife there, never.

Still, the marriage was not going well, and if I am

going to be able to tell the rest of this incredible story, it will have to be altered considerably. Some of the incidents are dream-like and some are unassailable like

seeing a very dear friend on the street as you drive by in traffic, unable to slow or stop, and you lose sight of him in the crowd on the street and cannot decide whether to go round the block or not because you're

JOHN HERRMANN teaches at State University College, Oswego, N.J. 'He was formerly Director of Creative "Writing at the "Uni

versity of Montana.

not certain if it could really be whom you think it was ?and so on.

Let's then talk of me as though I were that old and lost friend on the sidewalk, old William What's-his

name. It's all I can really give you anyway, after all. William stood near the kitchen door watching a dark

young woman who was handling herself very well while surrounded by from five to eight men, each seeming to wait for that instant of silence when they could lean in, gesture with their drink, catch her attention with a remark and perhaps take her away from the group into another room where the party was quieter, where there

was a chance for intimate conversation. William watched her shift her weight from one foot to the other

and back, and then back again. As she spoke, always softly so that her entourage had to be speechless to hear her (was that her psychiatrist's suggested technique for

personal awareness? he thought), she moved her head from one to the other, and always ended by staring,

William thought, at him. After a while it appeared as

though she were shooting glances directly at him to catch him staring at her. William was certain that his

wife had not noticed this play yet and he began to move around a bit so that she would not become suspicious of him standing in that one place all evening long. He never lost sight of the young dark girl and when he could not exactly see her deeply tanned face or even her head, he managed to move so that he could at least see her white linen mini skirt or her plaid blouse.

It was getting very late and this party, the third this

weekend, was beginning to break off. In fact there were just a few people now getting their coats out of the bedroom and two rather drunk husbands making last attempts at hustling the dark young woman William

had watched all evening. She sauntered away from the two men and passed

William and looked intensely at him. She stopped and he moved past her through the door, and as he did she stuck out her index finger and caught his shirt and

stopped him, then she ran her finger over his lips lightly, turned and walked into the bedroom, and

William followed scratching his lips. He saw her open the closet door and go inside. He waited. When she came out she smiled at him and walked out of the bedroom leaving the door open slightly. William

jumped to the door and went inside and it closed be

July-August, 1968 23



hind him, and he was at last in the master bathroom. At last.

Well, it had been here all the time. There was some

thing wrong, of course, but this bathroom had certainly always been here. He washed carefully and dried with a strange towel, one he had never seen before, a towel on which the initials "GP" were embroidered. He de cided he would ask Teddy about it, combed his thin

hair, looked in the mirror for food between his front

teeth, opened the door and walked out of the bedroom

feeling less anxious than he had felt in months. The bedroom was empty of people and he was very

glad of that. He had to be at work earlier than usual tomorrow and wanted at least a few hours sleep. He

went into the livingroom and found the dark girl in the white mini skirt lying on the sofa, her shoes off, her

stockings off, her blouse undone, her arms outstretched, her eyes closed, asleep, he thought. He walked to the

picture window and looked out at the few lights on the

bay and at the many lights across the bay, looking past his own reflection, but then in a moment he saw her reflection and felt instantly that he wanted her, but that changed immediately to revlusion as he thought disgustedly of himself as a voyeur. He saw her, he

thought, move just slightly, her leg perhaps, or perhaps she moved her hand and yawned.

"George?" she said almost whispering. "Everyone has left," he said. "Then let's go to bed."

He let it go, looked out at the lights again, then at

himself, then at her but looked away as he saw her turn toward him.

"Aren't you tired?" she said. He let that go too. She sat up and he saw that her blouse was opened all

the way. "Let's go to bed, George. I'm practically dead."

"I'm sure everyone has gone," he said.

"Then let's go to bed, George. I'm not going to stay here and wait all night. She stretched. Beautifully, he thought.

"It's tempting," he said, "but you've got the wrong man. I'm not George, I'm William."

She stopped in the middle of her stretch and looked at him then let her arms drop limply to her sides in

disgust (he was getting expert at recognizing it). Okay, William or George, it doesn't matter, as long as we get

in that bed right now." "You don't understand ..."

"I understand, and you'd better. Now before I count to ten you get out of your pants and into that marriage bed in there." Sternly, she was pointing.

He locked and bolted the door and went in and went to the dark girl who had slipped out of the mini skirt

and, because the room was warm, had slipped nude in between the sheets but was sleeping more soundly than the gentleman who now stood above her could imagine.

He too undressed and went in beside her to spend the most torturous night of his life.

He woke up two or three times and thought he heard his wife's voice from the next room but when he went in to see, his mind working furiously at seven major

and fifteen minor explanations; there was no one there. He might have been dreaming but had not remembered

being asleep. Each time he returned to the lovely dark nude he hoped the movement of getting in bed would waken her, and once he moved close and brushed

against the back of her legs and she moaned in her

sleep and turned over and he thought she said, please, no, so tired.

She was there beside him the next morning, still

nude, and so much thinner than Teddy, and so brown. He turned over and she touched him lightly on the

thigh. "Good God, must we get up now?" she said to him.

"It's seven thirty." He wanted to scream something at her that would make her suddenly turn into the

woman she had promised him she was. "I've got to find Teddy, get to work on time . . ."

She turned over and brushed his hair back. He

leaned toward her and, taking her down to the bed, kissed her while she slowly began to settle and move

under him. She was so much thinner than Teddy. Very nice, the difference, and Teddy was so nice too, but now this difference, hot it felt, then her thin different

legs, and her body hotter than he'd thought thinness could get, and her beneath him moving beneath to the

right place and hot and then it suddenly was right was

there and there was difference, and good he did not now think about with her moving and thin, coiled,

drifting, until she moved back suddenly strange, she

said, unlike you, she said, but then back and now not

strange but hot and then at the right moment she was

right, not strange, and together they both forgot strange ness and were deeply right not caring strange until

long after when, trying to understand, both lay back

looking at each other, looking and not understanding that they had been married to each other for nine

years and why all of a sudden, she asked, was it this

way? and he made no attempt to answer.

It was definitely not the apartment Teddy had rented. He'd been all over the place, had not gone to work, and everything or at least almost everything was the same. Yet it was not the apartment, the view was just enough different to make him wonder if it were a view from another floor or else he'd gone to another build

ing. But it was, it seemed, the same building, the same

apartment, and yet it was not. And then he saw it, the same four by four photo

enlargement on the wall, a picture of this dark woman,

topless, fishing off pier 42, the very same storm clouds

gathered. There was something wrong with the orange sofa,

too. It seemed to be the same but showed wear and w7as placed just a few inches closer to the picture window than Teddy would have arranged it. Yet it was

just right enough to make it impossible to understand. Nor did the dark woman understand what he was

saying.

"You're simply not my wife."

It had been hours now and she was visibly tired by his insistance that they'd never met until the party and




that he'd been having difficulties with his second wife and had decided firmly that he should divorce her and find someone else or else no one, but a change was

necessary.

"And then we got the apartment and I couldn't find the bathroom, and then I found it after you came

out . . ."

He continued living with her, Ruth, his third wife, as he thought of her. He became used to her, used to her thinness which he found odd still but oddly fem

inine, very delicate, simply a different kind of loving. But the problem of Teddy and the unthinkable incident of passing out of a mystery door into a completely different world in which you have a perfect place wait

ing for you, that problem came back into George's mind in waves like waves of radio broadcasting that fade and

build and fade away again but always you know they'll return.

He saw in Ruth a kind of woman that any man could

want, a kind who unconsciously held out a little of herself so that you could never know her all the way, she would remain endlessly feminine, a mystery, as he remembered hearing about all women and which he had learned was not the truth. He began, he thought, to love her, yet he did not forget Teddy nor had he any intentions of trying. Ruth was not all wife either. She dried the dishes only, did not cook Spanish or Chinese foods because she disagreed with those countries' poli tics, and she stood constantly at their picture window in either a mini skirt or bathing suit, and George de cided she could be seen from across the bay by tele

scope. He asked her several times not to do it but she acted as though he'd said nothing at all that he really

meant.

He started back to work the third day. After the

explanations of a couple of day's leave were over one of the salesmen under him asked how Ruth was and called him George, and he immediately got sick and left for home. That evening he told Ruth he couldn't take it any longer, he had to have answers, and besides that he confessed that in this world his job wasn't as

good as in the other life. He took her into his study and sat at his desk and pointed out books sitting on the shelf above him that he recognized yet did not recog nize. The Mathematics of Moving Men, Hiring and Firing: The Personnel Arts, Sexual Satisfaction and How To Attain It, Vol. 9 of Personnel Management, The Creative Tester, and so on.

"I don't like personnel work," he told her. "I want to go back where I belong."

Ruth was beginning to agree with him. She seemed tired, he thought, and told her so, and she laughed at him in an ugly way and her hair shook forward and looked twisted, as though she had not combed it for several days. She had not dressed, was wearing a white

terry cloth robe, and she made it clear she would not dress today and would not go out with him to do the

shopping. When George walked very slowly toward the master

bedroom he must have looked strange or given himself away because she rose and started after him. He ran

then, and she ran after. He grabbed the door and

THE BLUES SINGER

Songs were At best

Costly.

He pieced them From bone chips, Bits of tissue.

Further he Could not go.

Without her.

She had a fine

Body About which he Had composed Fine lyrics.

Further he could Not go without

Looking.

Some w7omen are

Too beautiful.

The queers Off 42nd St.

Thought she was And hissed And circled him.

The limb, The clear skin Torn He fell, Apart.

Various pieces Tossed To the East River Floated out to The sound.

C. G. Hanzlicek

C. G. HANZLICEK is a member of a gang of poets holed-up in fresno, California.

opened it as she grabbed at his arm and held him. It was a silent, hard breathing scuffle as he beat on her arm with his fist. "You," he said, "you let me go back.

Let me. Let me go back." But she held him, her eyes red, shining now, her knuckles white. Finally George hit her and knocked her backward. He reached for the knob and pulled the door closed and fell back

against the tub breathing heavily with his eyes closed. After his breathing became normal he washed his

face and neck and dried on a plain white towel, then he opened the door slowly and walked out into the

master bedroom where several persons were gathering their coats and talking.

July-August, 1968 25



"About time, old man," one of them said and walked into the bathroom and closed the door.

He walked into the empty livingroom and was startled breathless as he saw Ruth lying on the sofa in the mini skirt, obviously asleep. He started toward her but was stopped by Teddy who took his hand and

put a bottle of beer in it. "You look thirsty," she said. "Where the hell have

you been, the Sahara Desert?" He looked at her and took the beer then walked over

to the picture window with her and together they looked at the lights on the bay. "I liked the view from our other apartment better," he told her. Although he could not begin to understand what had happened, he felt good about seeing Teddy, he felt right about it.

"Do you think Sandra will come back?" Teddy said. She kissed him on the cheek and he leaned toward her and felt her breast against his arm.

"Who cares?"

"Well, you're sure the brave one. She might just care," she whispered, kissing him and touching his cheek.

"Let's go to bed," he said. "Not here," she said.

"What?"

"Let's go to my place."

He looked at her and slowly, very slowly put the beer down on the window sill and turned and faced her

directly.

"What's my name?"

"What do you mean?" she asked. "I mean, what's my name? Say my name." He

shook her arm.

"Say your name? Say your name? Charles. Charles is your name. But let my arm alone or I'll say another

name."

He left her and walked past the people in the bed room and opened the door but walked into the closet.

He stepped back and looked at it as though it might have been the wrong one. It wasn't. He went to the other door and opened it. There was a person lying drunk, or dead, on the closet floor. He slammed it and ran to the other door and opened it again as the people in the room watched. Then he turned and walked slowly back into the livingroom where both Teddy and Ruth now stood waiting for him, smiling.

So that is how it is. Perhaps an incredible story, perhaps not. But think of me not as a victim of Steph en J. Farmer's domestic psychiatrics but as that old lost friend you have missed seeing or just have not seen for so long you're not sure of yourself. Occasionally you try to catch up to see if you were right, but somehow you either can't catch up or else you find you were mis taken, that your friend and you will never see each other again.




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Where Are You? I Can't Find You