Book Review : They Should Have Grabbed Chances When They Could

Terrible Kisses by Robley Wilson Jr. (Simon & Shuster: $17.95; 219 pages.)

These are stories about men, and anger, and aging. In an era--and a society--where the rights of women, children, minorities and the diseased are continually trumpeted, and we are continually reminded of the injustices dealt out to these groups, we tend to forget that precisely because white males have the highest hopes and the most “chances,” they are apt to end up the saddest, the most jerked-around by life, the most heartbroken, the most disappointed.

Chance is the operative word here. There is some “chance” for a man to be rich, successful, happy and given all the love he needs and wants. About the same chance a man has to win the lottery. The protagonists in Robley Wilson Jr.’s stories are--most of them--in the process of finding this out, and their pain expresses itself in every kind of way: murderous rage, sullen withdrawal, bewilderment. Most often they are caught wearing their desires on their sleeves, and become targets for their wives’ compassion and sometimes contempt.

In “Africa,” the first story here, Seth Sharp, a 60-year-old crank, has sequestered himself far away in the woods with his wife, Agatha, in a house so isolated and cut off from the rest of the world that it doesn’t even have a porch. When, after decades, Seth does build a porch--a bridge, as it were, to the rest of the world--he discovers that the “rest of the world” is experiencing a lust, happiness, and an intensity of feeling that he’s been denied all his life. He’s furious, more than furious.

Lives Leaking Away

The metaphors and figures in “Africa” seem extreme, so extreme that the average reader may be able to distance himself or herself from the events therein. Few of us, after all, live sequestered in deep, deep woods. But many of us have lived on shady streets in post-World War II housing developments and watched our children grow up, and our lives leak imperceptibly away.

In “Guilty Occasions” an aging father of a family returns to watch the wedding of the last daughter of their close family friends on this street. As he lives with his wife now in a “smaller place,” their own children gone, his life has quietly evolved into a hollow toothache-agony, unacknowledged mourning for a life he never had. He doesn’t want to go to the wedding, he tells his wife, but he will anyway. “How can you do something you don’t believe in?” she asks him, and he answers, devastatingly, matter-of-factly, “Aren’t I married to you? . . . 30-whatever years, day-in, day-out?”

The reason he hates to see his neighbor’s daughter married, is because for years he’s loved her “like a father,” and then one day, during a chance visit to the house he has encountered the girl alone. “I went dizzy from that unexpected vision of her. Desire, pure desire is what I felt. I don’t know how else to describe it, except that it was like not having any bones, so that instead of a skeleton holding me upright, it was only the blood pounding through veins and arteries that kept me from falling over.”

Feelings Not Acted Upon

The sadness here is that none of this feeling can be acted upon. The brain, and the demands of society, conspire to deny the body that which it most craves.

In another story, a grandfather traveling with his wife and granddaughter in an uneventful American vacation, can’t keep his eyes away from his granddaughter’s girlish body. His wife isn’t condemning, only watchful. And in all these cases, the aging men are unmanned by the last youthful twitches from their own rebellious bodies.

In “Praises,” a well-known artist and writer who were once lovers re-encounter each other in Denmark. The woman, who once, years ago, Xeroxed an image of her breast and sent it to her beloved, has been through breast cancer, her body snipped and trimmed away, just as so many chances, so many opportunities for pleasure, for love, for life, have been cut away from them both.

These are stories of loss and sorrow, beautifully told. The effect on the reader is to put the book down, kiss the nearest person, run through the streets, breathe, live, before it’s too late.