Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [28]
Dave and his buddy fetched a bazooka. When they got back, the tank was still there. A radio was still playing music inside. They shot the tank with the bazooka. Germans didn’t pop out of the turret. The radio stopped playing. That was all. That was it.
Dave and his buddy skedaddled away from there.
Trout said it sounded to him as though my boyhood friend’s Bronze Star was well deserved. “He almost certainly killed people as well as a radio,” he said, “thus sparing them years of disappointments and tedium in civilian life. He made it possible for them, to quote the English poet A. E. Housman, to ‘die in their glory and never be old.’ ”
Trout paused, secured his upper plate with his left thumb, and then went on: “I could have written a best-seller, if I’d had the patience to create three-dimensional characters. The Bible may be the Greatest Story Ever Told, but the most popular story you can ever tell is about a good-looking couple having a really swell time copulating outside wedlock, and having to quit for one reason or another while doing it is still a novelty.”
I was reminded of Steve Adams, one of my sister Allie’s three sons my first wife Jane and I adopted after Allie’s unlucky husband Jim died in a railroad train that went off an open drawbridge in New Jersey, and then, two days later, Allie died of cancer of the everything.
When Steve came home to Cape Cod for Christmas vacation from his freshman year at Dartmouth, he was close to tears because he had just read, having been forced to do so by a professor, A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway.
Steve, now a middle-aged comedy writer for movies and TV, was so gorgeously wrecked back then that I was moved to reread what it was that had done this to him. A Farewell to Arms turned out to be an attack on the institution of marriage. Hemingway’s hero is wounded in war. He and his nurse fall in love. They honeymoon far away from the battlefields, consuming the best food and wine, without having been married first. She gets pregnant, proving, as if it could be doubted, that he is indeed all man.
She and the baby die, so he doesn’t have to get a regular job and a house and life insurance and all that crap, and he has such beautiful memories.
I said to Steve, “The tears Hemingway has made you want to shed are tears of relief! It looked like the guy was going to have to get married and settle down. But then he didn’t have to. Whew! What a close shave!”
Trout said he could think of only one other book that despised matrimony as much as A Farewell to Arms.
“Name it,” I said.
He said it was a book by Henry David Thoreau, called Walden.
“Loved it,” I said.
24
I say in lectures in 1996 that fifty percent or more of American marriages go bust because most of us no longer have extended families. When you marry somebody now, all you get is one person.
I say that when couples fight, it isn’t about money or sex or power. What they’re really saying is, “You’re not enough people!”
Sigmund Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to.
I thank Trout for the concept of the man-woman hour as a unit of measurement of marital intimacy. This is an hour during which a husband and wife are close enough to be aware of each other, and for one to say something to the other without yelling, if he or she feels like it. Trout says in his story “Golden Wedding” that they needn’t feel like saying anything in order to credit themselves with a man-woman hour.
“Golden Wedding” is another story Dudley Prince rescued from the trash receptacle before the timequake. It is about a florist who tries to increase his business by convincing people who both work at home, or who spend long hours together