Best,

Fred

9

Mice, Turtles & Fish First!

TULPEN TAKES CARE of the bills now. I don't even see the checkbook. I contribute, of course, and every week or so I ask her how our money is.

'Are you hungry?' she says. 'Do you have enough to drink?'

'Well, sure, I have enough ...'

'Well, is there something you need?'

'Well, no ...'

'Well, the money's just fine, then,' she says. 'I don't need any more.'

'I'm fine,' I tell her.

'Was there something you wanted to buy?' Tulpen asks.

'No, no, Tulpen - really, everything's fine with me.'

'Well, everything's fine with me,' she insists, and I try to force myself never to bring it up again.

But I just can't believe it! 'How much do we have?' I ask her. 'I mean, just to get an idea of some rough figure ...'

'Does Biggie need money?'

'No, Biggie doesn't need a thing, Tulpen.'

'You want to send something to Colm - a truck, a boat or something?'

'A truck or a boat?'

'Well, some special toy, is that it?'

'Jesus, never mind,' I say. 'I was just wondering, that's all ...'

'Well, honestly, Trumper, you should say what you mean.'

Indeed, I should stick to the facts. That's what she means.

But I honestly think my avoidance of the facts has as much to do with my distrusting the relevance of them as it has to do with my lying a lot. I don't think the statistics in my life have ever meant very much.

When my mother used to write me, she'd ask about the stuff we had. She was concerned about whether we had a toidy pot for Colm. If we had one, we were all right. My father also suggested snow tires: with snow tires we'd be happy all winter. I imagined their friends asking them how we were; my father would mention our winter driving, and my mother would bring up the toidy pot. How else could they have answered.

Most recently in a terse phone conversation with my father, I was asked how I paid my bills. 'With checks,' I told him. (I guess that's how Tulpen does it.) 'You shouldn't send cash through the mails.' But he asked me as if that was all he needed to know - and knowing that, he would know about me.

Rituals are more revealing than facts!

For example, I once kept a tape recorder who was my friend. Also, I wrote letters to my wife; I mean, I wrote to Biggie while I was still living with her. Of course I never gave these letters to her; they weren't really letters, then; it was the ritual of writing them that mattered.

I showed one to Tulpen.

Iowa City

Tags: John Irving Fiction
Source: readsnovelonline.net