GRUMPY CLUCK SAID, “Somebody should invent a detector that gives a readout on that, what you called the mood of the house. If you could invent a gadget like that, you’d make a lot more than you ever did on flying-saucer detectors.”
“Oh, Clark,” said Alice. “He didn’t sell flying-saucer detectors.”
“You didn’t?” he asked me.
“Not really,” I said. “I did build one detector, and I thought about trying to sell them, but part of my inherited mental illness is a tendency to get distracted by the next idea, and I moved on to sex.”
“Oh! I see!” he said. “Well, it would still be a useful gadget — not the flying-saucer detector, the mood detector.”
“I think it’s only men who would need a device like that,” said Albertine. “I think women come with mood detectors as part of the basic equipment package.”
Elaine and Alice agreed.
“Well I could use one,” said Clark. “Forty-two years of marriage and I still can’t tell when she’s happy. If I ask her, ‘Are you okay — are you happy?’ she says, ‘Stop asking me that.’”
“‘It makes me unhappy when you ask me if I’m happy,’” I said, quoting Albertine. As soon as I had said it, I wished I hadn’t. I glanced at her. She was laughing, but I suspected that my quoting her had made her unhappy.
“Exactly!” said Lou. He extended a hand toward Elaine and said, “I used to look at your mother and she wouldn’t seem happy to me, so I’d say, ‘I wish you were happy,’ and she would get angry about it. She’d ask me, ‘What have I done? What have I done to make you think I’m not happy?’ And she’d say, ‘Believe me — if I’m not happy, you’ll know it,’ and by then I was pretty sure I knew it.”
We all laughed at that, and we all knew what we were laughing about. Lou and Elaine exchanged a look, and there was a twinkle in his eye. He winked at her, and she grinned back at him, and then he said, “I bet you could make money on a gadget like that, Clark. You’d have to convince people that it worked, and at the same time you’d have to claim that it was meant for entertainment purposes only, but if you sold it through the shopping channels and the horoscope magazines I bet you’d do all right. I bet you would.”
THERE HAS BEEN only one goal for my life, only one thing that I have ever wanted to accomplish: to make Albertine happy. There have been side trips, short-term goals, and to-do lists (buy coffee, varnish tables, write memoirs), but if each item had been specified in full the list would have read: buy coffee to make Albertine happy, varnish tables to make Albertine happy, write memoirs to make Albertine happy.
I lay in bed facing the awful conviction that I had failed in the ultimate goal, that all I had done was buy coffee and varnish tables and write my memoirs, but failed to make Albertine happy, and that I was running out of time to accomplish it. That awful draining feeling of time slipping away began to make me panic, to sweat and twitch. Then Albertine stirred, just shifted her position, and my conviction — my belief — that she was unhappy made me interpret her movement as evidence of the anguished dreams of an unhappy woman trapped in a miserable life. My twitching grew worse. I had a need to move my feet. I had to get up, because I simply could not lie still, so I got up, dressed in workout wear for warmth, and went to the lounge, where I stretched out on one of the sofas. I heard a sound, nothing more than one of the thousand nightly sounds an old hotel emits as it slowly collapses, but for a moment it made me think that the other sofas might be occupied, that all the inmates might have been driven from their beds by the twitching ripple of panic across their backs. This struck me as simultaneously absurd and quite likely, and lying there with my feet pressing and releasing against the arm of the sofa, like a cat kneading, I almost laughed.
[to be continued]
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