own. Dwellers in the Andaman Islands keep a calendar based on the odors of seasonal plants as they bloom and die.
Each morning, I observe, the day displays a few more dead leaves on the driveway, a few more yellow patches in the stand of young maples reflected in the pond. Shaving in my bathroom mirror, I glance down and perceive a slightly more reddish tinge than yesterday’s to the top of the burning bush, Euonymus atropurpureus, which grows in the terraced area visible from this window.
Gloria points out that I shave badly, for all the times I have done it. I skip bristles beneath my jaw and just under my nose; I don’t go far enough down my neck, so unsightly long white hairs protrude above my shirt collar. She also claims, observing me through the rivulets in the steamed-up glass door, that I don’t know how to shower—I don’t use enough soap, and I don’t pull back my foreskin and scrub. The wives of uncircumcised men get cancer of the cervix seven times more than women with circumcised husbands, she claims. So, go marry a Jew or be a nun, I think. It wasn’t my decision; it was taken by old Dr. Hardwick and my mother, back at Pittsfield General on a September afternoon in 1953. Maybe they plotted to give my wives cervica cancer. There was some kind of collusion between dark browed, young-old Doc Hardwick and my petite, sandy haired mother; I could feel it in the way they paired up at my bedside when I had the chicken pox or mumps. I could hear it in their chatting over coffee downstairs, my father off at work and house calls already all but a thing of the past. In the more than three score years that I have had to ponder it, I think being uncircumcised perhaps the most valuable thing about me. My sheathed glans imparts a responsive sensitivity to the entire stumpy stalk that embarrassed me now and then in youth but served me well into advanced maturity; I am Homo naturalis, man unscathed, Adam before the covenant; and I am deeply hurt that Gloria levels these criticisms. Perdita never complained of my poor cumbersome body, though her silences, her increasing reserve, her way of grimacing and keeping her own sweet counsel in the end were more devastating than any utterance.
To Gloria I am a kind of garden, where she must weed, clip, tie, deadhead, and poison aphids. She can’t believe that, after all these years, I sometimes set the fork on the right and the knife and spoon on the left; it would affront her no less if I came to the table without trousers on. At the weddings we now and then attend, to see time feed the younger generation into its procreative mill, when she and I dance she tells me to take big steps and to stop jiggling my shoulders. Slurping my soup, picking my nose even in the dark of the movie theatre, putting on a striped tie with a checked jacket—all these harmless self-indulgences excite her to flurries of admonition, and perhaps I am wrong to take offense. She merely wants to train me, like a rose up a trellis. As I age and weaken, I more and more succumb to her tireless instruction. She finds my driving doddery and dangerous, so it seems simplest to let her drive when the two of us are in the car. Docilely, before putting them on, I hand her my pajamas to verify that they are clean enough to wear for one more night; she sniffs the collar, makes a face, hands them back to me, and says, “The hamper.”
Yet I do not fail every sniff test. Sometimes, usually just before dinner, when her biorhythm enters an amorous patch, she presses her nose into my neck and says, “You smell right. You smell mine. It’s like a mother—she knows her baby by the smell. And the baby knows the mother.” These elemental animal facts never lose their charm for her; she is so conversant with the language of scent that I fear she may catch on my face a whiff of Doreen’s crotch, which I have won the right to nuzzle, down in the shack, and, her glossy thighs propped on my shoulders, to stir with my tongue—the scarcely musky, gingerly furred pink folds of it—as the closest approach to penetration that I will allow myself, or that my unstated compact with