Why Richard Can't

WHY RICHARD CAN'T / Nanci Kincaid THERE WERE ENDLESS GOOD reasons. For months now, Richard had lain in bed running over the Ust in his head, adding to it as though the reasons were doUars and he was wisely depositing them in a savings account. First of all, Mona was twelve years younger than he was. This is where he began each night. He lay on his back, legs spread, hands folded behind his head, staring at the ceiling fan. The woman is thirty-six years old he thought. In the dark she looks younger. When Richard was sixty-one Mona would stall be in her forties. He shuddered. Granted, there was something to be said for younger women, the way coeds bolted across campus with a mix of hurriedness and forever in their gait. Something to be said for firm breasts and shiny hair and mouths that had not said everything already or been kissed enough for the thriU to be gone from it. Richard noticed these things. He wasn't dead. He was sensible. He didn't want to attach himself to some younger woman who would remind him constantly that he was aging. "Good lord, Richard," Mona said, "I'm thirty-six years old. Nobody can accuse you of robbing the cradle." Sometimes Mona wasn't sensitive to the point he was making. Number two: Mona had chUdren. Richard had never had chUdren of his own and the truth was they scared him. He didn't know how to talk to them. He couldn't teU what they were thinking. And Mona's chUdren were girls. Two teenage girls. My God, he must be crazy. What would it be Uke to Uve in a house fuU of Tampax and telephone caUs, and barelegged females walking around in toenaU poUsh and T-shirts? He supposed there must be a great deal of crying in a house fuU of women, and giggUng too. He feared he might become the source of their private jokes and not know it, that laughter would gush from Mona and her daughters Uke a kind of sympathy. Oh, the reasons were endless. It made no sense to dweU on it night after night. WHY I CAN'T MARRY MONA. She is not my type, really. She expects things from me that I almost certainly cannot deliver. She thinks I am a better man than I am. Her divorce has made a mess of her—she doesn't know her own head yet. She couldn't possibly 56 · The Missouri Review marry me until she finds herself. That sounded right, didn't it? Did women stiU 'find themselves' in the nineties? Did they stiU lose themselves in the men they married? Richard didn't know. He knew Mona looked at him with more sting than any woman ever had. Mona had been in his graduate American Literature class for almost six weeks when it occurred to Richard, much to his horror, that he loved her. She sat in the back, listening, amused. He measured the success of his lectures against her response to them. He couldn't seem to make her understand the magnificence of artistic suffering. A great artist must suffer, he told her, but he couldn't make her feel it. She said Moby Dick was boring. Boring. She said it was a man's story and didn't particularly interest her. Chasing a whale is a smaU thing, she said, compared with raising chUdren. Chasing a whale is a luxury. Richard had never heard anything so ignorant in his whole Ufe. She had gone on to say that Thoreau was self-reverent, not self-reUant. She said a Ufe separate from other Uves, untangled, unanchored, uncommitted is the Ufe of a coward. "Who couldn't have a lofty thought or two with aU that leisure tame on his hands?" she asked. "Who did Thoreau ever look out for other than himseU? If he'd raised chUdren on Waiden Pond, fed them, clothed them, educated them, whUe thinking his thoughts, then that would be something. Of course, if he'd had chUdren to raise he wouldn't have had time to think so...