The Water-Method Man

'Don't tell me. You're ten for ten?'

'Ten out of ten!' he hollered. 'And always about three days after the examination. You're right on time!'

I was quiet on my end of the phone. In my hand her breast felt like plastic. But only for this quiet moment; she came to life when Vigneron boomed at me.

'It's not a matter of another opinion. Don't kid yourself. The geography of your urinary tract is a fact. I could draw you a map, to scale ...'

I hung up. 'I've never liked the French,' I told her. 'Your gynecologist must have it in for me, recommending that sadist. He hates Americans, you know. I'm sure that's why he came here, with his goddamn glass rods ...'

'Paranoia,' she said, her eyes already closed. She's not a big talker, this one. 'Words,' she says, in her harumphing way. She has a gesture for what she thinks of words: she lifts one breast with the back of her hand. She has good, full breasts, but they need a bra. I'm very fond of her breasts; they make me wonder how that fake boob of Vigneron's had any effect on me. If I had it to do again, I wouldn't take the tit. Well, yes I would. She wouldn't ever need a device like that, though. She's a practical, no-nonsense, gut-level, secure person. Offer her those four alternatives and she'd take the operation. I know; I asked her.

'Surgery,' she said. 'If something can be fixed, then fix it.'

'The water's not so bad,' I said. 'I like water. It's good for me too, in lots of ways. And I have bigger erections. Did you know that?'

She lifts the back of her hand and one breast stands up. I really like her very much.

Her name is Tulpen. That means tulips in German, but her parents didn't know it was German, or what it meant, when they named her. Her parents were Polish. They died peacefully in New York, but Tulpen was born in an RAF hospital outside London during the blitz. There was a nice nurse whose name was Tulpen. They liked the nurse, they wanted to forget everything Polish, and they thought that the nurse was a Swede. Nobody found out what Tulpen meant until Tulpen took German in high school, in Brooklyn. She came home and told her parents, who were very surprised; it wasn't the cause of their death, or anything like that; it was just a fact. None of this is important; these are just facts. But that's when Tulpen talks; when there's a fact. And there aren't many.

Following her example, I began with a fact: my urinary tract is a narrow, winding road.

Facts are true. Tulpen is a very honest person. I am not so honest. I'm a pretty good liar, in fact. People who've really known me tend to believe me less and less. They tend to think I lie all the time. But I'm telling the truth now! Just remember: you don't know me.

When I talk like this, Tulpen lifts a breast with the back of her hand.

What in hell do we have in common? I'll stick to the facts. Names are facts. Tulpen and I have the carelessness of our names in common. Hers was a mistake, which doesn't matter to her. I have several; like hers, they're all pretty accidental. My father and mother named me Fred, and it never seemed to bother them that almost no one else ever called me that. Biggie called me Bogus. That was the invention of my oldest and dearest friend, Couth, who coined the name when he first caught me lying. The name stuck. Most of my friends called me that, and Biggie knew me then. Merrill Overturf, who is still lost, called me Boggle. Like any name, there were vague reasons. Ralph Packer named me Thump-Thump, a name I despise. And Tulpen calls me by my surname, Trumper. I know why: it's the closest to a fact that you can come to in a name. Male surnames don't often change. So most of the time I'm Fred 'Bogus' Trumper. That's a fact.

Facts fall out of me slowly. So I don't get lost, I'll repeat them. Now there are two. One: My urinary tract is a narrow, winding road. Two: Tulpen and I have the carelessness of our names in common. And possibly not much else.

But wait! I am reaching for a third fact. Three: I believe in Rituals! I mean, there have always been things like the water method in my life; there have always been rituals. No particular ritual has ever lasted very long (I told Vigneron I have a new life, that I want to change, and this is true), but always I have moved from one ritual to another. Right now it's the water method. Some historical perspective on my rituals will take a little time, but the water method is clear. Also, Tulpen and I share an early morning ritual, of sorts. Although the water method has me getting up a little earlier - and a few times in the night - Tulpen and I have persisted in this routine. I get

up and pee and brush my teeth and drink a lot of water. She starts coffee and puts on a stack of records. We meet back in bed for yogurt. Always yogurt. She has a red bowl, I have a blue one, but if we have different flavors we often trade the bowls back and forth. A flexible ritual is the best kind, and yogurt is a sensible, healthy food which is very kind to your mouth in the morning. We don't talk. This is nothing new for Tulpen, but even I don't talk. We listen to records and eat our yogurt. I don't know Tulpen very well, but apparently she's always done this. An addition to her ritual was introduced by me: when the yogurt is all gone, we make love for a long time. After that, the coffee's ready and we have it. We don't talk as long as the records play. The only variation caused by the water method is minor, and falls somewhere after love and during coffee. I get up to pee and drink a lot of water.

I haven't lived with Tulpen for very long, but I've a feeling that if I'd lived with her for years and years, I wouldn't know her any better.

Tulpen and I are both twenty-eight, but she's really older than I am; she has outgrown having to talk about herself.

It's Tulpen's apartment and all the things in it are hers. I left my things, and my child, with my first and only wife.

I said to Dr Jean Claude Vigneron that I have a new life, etc.; I said that some historical perspective on my rituals will take a little time; I also said that I'm not so honest. But Tulpen is. She helps me keep things straight by raising one breast with the back of her hand. In no time at all, I learned not to talk as long as the records play. I learned to say only what's essential (though people who've known me would tend to say that I am lying even now. Fuck them! I say, for such pessimism).

My urinary tract is a narrow, winding road, and right now there's yogurt and lots of water. I'm going to stick to the facts. I want to change.

2

War-Built Things

AMONG HIS OTHER kicks, Fred Bogus Trumper likes to remember Merrill Overturf, the diabetic. In Trumper's Iowa phase, his memories of Overturf are especially sweet. It helps, for accuracy, that some of Overturf is tape-recorded.

Such escapism. Listening to Merrill, in Vienna - while Trumper looks out his Iowa window, through a rusty screen and a fat katydid's wing; he sees a slow-moving, beshitted truck, brimming with hogs. Over the complaining pigs, Bogus listens to the ditty Merrill composed at the Prater - later used, Merrill claimed, to seduce Wanga Holthausen, a singing coach for the Vienna Boys' Choir. The background music is from the Prater go-kart track, where Merrill Overturf once held the 20-lap record. Possibly, he still holds it.

There are faint distortions on the tape; then Merrill is telling his swimming story, the one about there being a tank at the bottom of the Danube. 'You can only see it in a full moon. You must block the moon with your back,' says Merrill, 'which cuts the reflection.' Then, somehow, you arch out of the water and hold your face 'approximately six inches above the surface - all the time keeping a landsight on the dock at the Gelhafts Keller.' Somehow you hold this position without stirring the water, 'and if the wind doesn't make a single ripple, the tank's barrel swings up to where you think you could almost touch it, or it's perfectly aimed to blast you. And in a straight line off the Gelhaft's dock, the tank's top hatch opens, or flutters in the water, or seems to open. But that's as long as I've ever been able to hold my face approximately six inches above the water surface ...' Then, thinking diabetically, Merrill announces that this exertion always influences his blood sugar.

Bogus Trumper flips the switch that says rewind. The hog truck is gone, but on the other side of the screen, the katydid still holds out its wings, more perfect and complicated than some Oriental silkscreen, and Trumper, squinting through this lovely mesh, sees Mr Fitch, a retired neighbor, scratching his dry and overraked lawn. Scritch-scritch goes Mr Fitch, urging the last ant out of his grass. Through a katydid's wing is the only way to make Fitch-watching bearable.

The car that now labors to the curb - the one that Mr Fitch waves his rake at - carries Trumper's wife, Biggie, his son, Colm, and three spare tires. Trumper regards the car, wonders if three spare tires are enough. His face mashed to the window screen, he startles the katydid, whose sudden wing-whir startles Trumper - who lurches off balance, his head pushing the rotting screen free of the frame. Catching himself, Bogus jars the frame loose too, and what his startled wife sees is her husband's precarious dangle - his waist, the axis for his unexplained teetering on the window sill.

'What are you doing?' Biggie screams to him.