Why Men Are Afraid of Women

A Special Case

A Special Case H arry Caudill studied his naked self in the mirror. He had imperceptiblyturned into a fat man. A fat man in a strange place, he thought; he felt Ohio all about him, surrounding the cottage he rented from Marvella, pressing on the walls. A wooden clacking from the weather vane on the roof signaled a shift in the Ohio wind. Being away from home made him feel out of sorts; even after nearly six months at Goshen College as poet-in-residence he was still having trouble reconciling himself to this place. It was the winding roads, the trees and grass everywhere, the dark fertility of the manured soil that made him uneasy; he missed the string-straight highways,the arid fields of Kansas. But this morning's quirky depression came from somewhere else in his head. Did it have to do with love? He looked at himself in the mirror. Who could love me? He didn't care. Three wives had left him, and each time after an initial keen sense of loss he had been more relieved than depressed. The last one had fled his house in Wichita nearly eight years before, and since then Harry had reconciled himself to going it alone. He finished drying himself with one of the deep pink towels that Marvella provided, and dropped it on 68 Why Men Are Afraid of Women the bathroom floor. Marvella loved poets and professors and did her best to make them happy; so far he had been able to avoid her. He patted his stomach and decided that the extra bulk suited his years. It made him stand out among the thin students, gave him dignity. Nonetheless a vague dissatisfaction with himself had settled over him this morning as congruently as a second skin. "Harry Caudill ," he said out loud. He repeated his name, an incantation , a spell against nameless devils. Harry Caudill is disappointed in life. But that wasn't it. While he brushed his teeth he tried to fit a word to the feeling and failed. Anomie? No. He opened his mouth wide to the mirror and leaned closer to see more clearly. Forty-nine years old in three days and still with his own teeth; yellow and tough, they were probably good for another fortynine years. On the way to school he walked under trees that grew too close together to seem completely natural; they closed him off from the sky. A distant rumble of thunder, felt more than heard, disturbed the air. A random gust of wind shook the new leaves and Harry looked up at the sound, thinking the rain had already begun. If it isn't love that's making me feel bad, he thought, then it must be work. Between those two poles lie ninetenths of the man. But poems came when they wanted to come. He'd stopped worrying about it a long time ago. Sometimes he went six months without writing one worth keeping; other times three or four came in the same week. And he knew he wasn't going to be Dylan Thomas. He was used to that too. No cause there for that itchy dissatisfaction that clung to him closer than cobwebs. He stopped to let a girl in a long blue coat cross the path. "Hi, Dr. Caudill." She had a model's narrow face, A Special Case 69 with hollow cheeks and prominent bones. "Have a nice day," she said. "Melancholia?" Harry said. The girl looked puzzled, but he was already gone. During his classes Harry often found himselftalking to one student only, somebody who singled himself out by chance at the start of the period. This morning it was a girl with gray eyes who sat all the way at the back of the room. "We're all alone," Harry told her. "We're all going to die. It's a testimonial to the human spirit that we're not all down on that carpet writhing around and moaning at the idea." The rain began to fall just before the final bell and he stepped outside as soon as he could shake off his students. He wanted to stand under the water; he hoped it would wash off his ill humor. But it turned out to be a drizzly and feckless Ohio rain, a mockery of the flailing storms that lashed the ground back home and...