A God in Ruins - Leon Uris [48]
T3 Industries netted a billion dollars the day they were married. He purchased Nanatuck Island, built a twenty-thousand-square-foot home among the climbing rocks and flat level plateaus, and he helicoptered to and from Pawtucket.
The early years were palatable enough. Pucky gave birth to the required son and daughter a few years later.
His premarital introversion which she had found so charming did not hold up. The bloom fell off the rose. Clunk.
The ensuing twenty years was a catalogue of Thornton’s indifference to her and the good things she did.
Pucky Tomtree never did travel very far into her husband’s mind. He had a built-in walled city of a brain, connected mostly to speak the new language of the computer.
The fork in their road ran in opposite directions, and that was the way they evolved, away from one another. He showed up at a few baroque string quartets played at the Newport mansions for high-scaled charity events. Pucky was more at home with the jazz trumpets at the people’s festival.
Their children, CiCi and Thomas Carmichael Tomtree, grew up flatly within the required Grassley-Newport framework. They were flat in ambition, flat in achievement, great sailors and peacefully took their places in line on the inheritance ladder and went on to live flat wealthy lives with flat wealthy mates. But before taking that flat voyage as permanence in life, both drifted into the flower-child, hippie scene and had to be retrieved from Haight-Ashbury on two occasions.
Pucky simply had too much vitality. Unable to plumb her husband’s mind or excite him physically, she endured for a time as indentured chattel. For Thornton, sleep meant working out a problem in his dreams. Lovemaking meant working out a manufacturing glitch.
New York? Theater? A waste of time. Those puffycheeked clarinetists blowing out “Saints”? Good Lord, Pucky, what next? Conversation? To what avail if not to advance your business?
After two decades and out from under child rearing, Pucky threw in the towel. Her confidant was—who else but Darnell Jefferson?
“T3 is more a piece of technology than a human being,” she had told Darnell over and over again.
Even knowing the two were too far separated ever to have a fruitful and peaceful relationship, Darnell sideslipped the discussion until he saw a woman coming on fifty nearly totally melancholy.
“You knew what you were getting into, Pucky.”
“I knew and I never complained.”
“You went into the marriage with Thornton thinking you could change him, fuck him into compliance. Too many wives fling open the refrigerator on their wedding night and say, you don’t need those hot dogs, but you should have more yogurt. Nobody in the world can change Thornton Tomtree. He’s an original.”
“You can,” she challenged.
“Pucky, I can’t produce his testosterone for him.”
So, on she went with her good works in the arts, traveling to and from Washington on national committees, patronizing the theater in her region, supporting young artists. It was all very Grassley. And Pucky was to be congratulated for stabilizing her son and daughter so ultimately they were neither hippies nor druggies.
The master bedroom at Nanatuck faced the sea, complete with a hot tub and a play area. Thornton slept in the dark-dark because too much light hurt his eyes.
About five in the morning, most mornings, Pucky was awakened by the sound of Thornton in his bathroom, urinating and brushing his teeth. She quickly went to her own bathroom, and he knew exactly how long it took her to prepare and get back under the covers.
A very low-key ritual dance began with a peck of a kiss followed by certain wigglings and allahkazam, they were in the missionary posture. Give or take, the entire drill lasted around fifteen minutes. It was impossible for Pucky to confront him with his sexual inadequacy. He simply didn’t get it, require it, or see that there should be more to it.
The woman kept it to herself, had herself tied off after the daughter was born, and lived with