He thought of Margaret Brant's sweet taste of revenge; her mature forgiveness surprised and encouraged him. And Harlan Booth's giving in? Whether he was converted -- or just trapped, and evil to the core -- was quite unknowable at the moment. Whether anyone was ... Ronkers wondered.
Danfors's season with the heart machine now stood at four-and-six. What sort of odds were those in favor of human reproduction -- Ronkers's and Kit's, especially?... And even if all the high school principals and parents in the world were as liberal and humorous and completely approachable concerning venereal disease as they might be sympathetic toward a football injury, there would still be rampant clap in the world -- and syphilis, and worse.
Kit slept.
The brittle tree clacked against the house like the bill of a parrot he remembered hearing in a zoo. Where was that? What zoo?
In an impulse, which felt to Ronkers like resignation, he moved to the window and looked over the moonlit roofs of the suburbs -- many of which he could see for the first time, now that the leaves were all gone and a winter view was possible. And to all the people under those roofs, and more, he whispered, wickedly, "Have fun!" To Ronkers, this was a kind of benediction with a hidden hook.
"Why not have children?" he said aloud. Kit stirred, but she had not actually heard him.
Interior Space (1980)
AUTHOR'S NOTES
"Interior Space" was first published in Fiction (vol. 6, no. 2, 1980). It is my second-favorite among the very few short stories I have written; I have written more novels (eight) than short stories -- I believe that will always be the case. I remember that I wrote the first draft of this story sometime in 1974, probably before I began The World According to Garp (1978); for forgotten reasons, the story languished in a bottommost drawer for five or six years before I took it out and finished it.
I admit that a certain confusion regarding the subject of this story may lie at the heart of why the story "languished" for so long, and why I was quite surprised when it won an O. Henry Award. "Interior Space" began as a story about a false case of gonorrhea, but Mr. Kesler's cancer stole the stage. All along, it was the death of the tree that most interested me. In the end, it is a story about marriage, and -- more important -- about the necessary optimism that is required of thoughtful, observant people who decide (despite what they know) to have children.
I see now, too, that in "Interior Space" I was testing a line that would (with revision) become the last line of The World According to Garp: "In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases." Here it is the tree that is a "terminal patient."
BRENNBAR'S RANT
My husband, Ernst Brennbar, worked steadily on his second cigar and his third cognac. A slow, rising heat flushed his cheeks. His tongue felt lazy and overweight. He knew that if he didn't try to speak soon, his mouth would loll open and he'd belch -- or worse. A bear of guilt shifted in his stomach and he remembered the bottle of '64 Brauneberger Juffer Spatlese that had accompanied his ample portion of trutte Metternich. His red ears throbbed a total recall of the '61 Pommard Rugiens that had drowned his boeuf Crespi.
Brennbar looked across the wasted dinner table at me, but I was lost in a conversation about minority groups. The man speaking to me appeared to be a member of one. For some reason, the waiter was included -- perhaps as a gesture meant to abolish class distinctions. Possibly the man who spoke with me and the waiter were from the same minority group.
"You wouldn't know anything about it," the man told me, but I'd been watching my blotching husband; I hadn't been paying attention.
"Well," I said defensively, "I can certainly imagine what it must have been like."
"Imagine!" the man shouted. He tugged the waiter's sleeve for support. "This was the real thing. No amount of imagining could ever make you feel it like we did. We had to live with it every day!" The waiter guessed he should agree.
Another woman, sitting next to Brennbar, suddenly said, "That's no different from what women have always had to face -- what we still have to face today."
"Yes," I said quickly, turning on the man. "For example, you're bullying me right now."
"Look, there's no persecution like religious persecution," the man said, yanking the waiter's arm for emphasis.
"You might ask a black," I said.
"Or any woman," said the woman next to Brennbar. "You talk as if you had a monopoly on discrimination."
"You're all full of shit," said Brennbar, slowly uncoiling his lounging tongue. The others stopped talking and looked at my husband as if he were a burn hole developing in a costly rug.
"Darling," I said, "we're talking about minority groups."
"As if that counts me out?" Brennbar asked. He made me disappear in a roil of cigar smoke. But the woman next to him seemed to feel provoked by this; she responded recklessly.
"I don't see that you're black," she said, "or a woman or a Jew. You're not even Irish or Italian or something like that, are you? I mean -- Brennbar -- what's that? German?"
"Out," said the waiter. "That's German, I know it."
And the man whose pleasure had been to abuse me said, "Oh, that's a fine minority group." The others -- but not I -- laughed. I was familiar with my husband's signals for the control he gradually lost on polite conversation; blowing cigar smoke in my face was a fairly advanced phase.
"My husband is from the Midwest," I said cautiously.
Oh, you poor man," said the woman next to Brennbar. Her hand lay with facetious sympathy on Brennbar's shoulder.