Five Tuesdays in Winter, page 6
He pulled her close, but Paula came around the corner then, and they jumped back. His daughter, however, was grinning. She took them each by the arm and led them to dinner. She’d lit a candle and poured apple juice into wineglasses. She’d put the heart of chocolates by his place. Lasagna sizzled in the center of the small table and Kate was smiling and Mitchell felt, if only for this moment in his kitchen, if only for this one winter evening, that he might not need a never-ending spell after all.
WHEN IN THE DORDOGNE
The summer of 1986, the summer before I entered high school, my parents went to the Dordogne for eight weeks. My father had been sick, and it was thought that France, where he had studied as a young man, would enable his recovery. Through the university’s employment office, my mother hired two sophomores to house-sit for the time they would be out of the country. As I came with the house, these two college boys were obliged to take care of me, too.
We lived at the end of a short street in a quiet neighborhood. Our house was big and gray, exceptionally large for three people, though I didn’t realize that until Ed and Grant arrived in a maroon Pontiac that first afternoon. The two boys stood responsibly beside me as we waved my parents off. Grant might have murmured something consoling as they disappeared around the corner, about how they’d be back before I knew it. And then, after a respectful pause, they let loose.
Ed ran into the house and circled the rooms like a dog just let off its leash, climbed up the front staircase and came down the tight back stairs and then went back up the front set again, whooping and whooping again, all the way to the third-floor balcony where he called down to Grant and me still standing in the front hall. Just as we looked up, he released a pale-green globule that landed right on Grant’s cheek. Grant barely flinched, wiped it off with the bottom of his T-shirt, and tore up the stairs. I could hear them on one floor and then another, down across the back hallway to my father’s study—I didn’t tell them not to go in, though I was screaming it in my head—and around to my sisters’ old rooms, my brother’s old room, all of them having left before I could remember them ever having lived there, their rooms still stuck in the seventies: the girls’ closet doors covered with McGovern-Muskie bumper stickers, my brother’s with Nixon-Agnew and Ford-Rockefeller. I stood there frozen in the downstairs hallway, not with fear but with amazement, with revelation. I had only seen people behave one way in this house, prudently, laconically, in codes I could not understand but had learned to imitate. And now here was another way.
I was the martini baby, conceived, I’m sure, after one too many in late July of 1971. My parents already had their family: two girls in boarding school, a boy about to enter the seventh grade. My father was fifty-one, my mother forty-seven. It must have seemed slightly obscene back then, a woman of her age getting pregnant. I was such a deep inconvenience to them. That much was clear already, although not something I could have put in words. It was purely visceral, a confused shame lodged inside my gut, a sense that I had been terribly, terribly bad but not being able to recall what I’d done wrong.
My mother had walked Ed and Grant through the house during their interview, showing them the circuit breakers and the hot-water heater and the fire extinguishers. She took them out to the pool house and explained about the toilet latch, told them a man named Chuck would come by every Wednesday to clean and chlorinate the pool. She brought them back in the house and gave them each a glass of iced tea with a sprig of fresh mint, which grew beside the back door stoop, and asked them if they had any questions.
It was Grant who asked about me. “Could you give us the rundown on your son?” I don’t think he knew my name yet. “When he should be in bed, what he likes to eat, where he’s allowed to go on his bike.”
“Oh, he takes care of himself quite well, really.” She gave me a small smile. “The club’s schedule is right there on the fridge if there’s any question of where he should be.”
They were just two boys, young men, I suppose. Nothing particularly special about either of them. Ed came from New England, a small town in northern Maine, and Grant from Pennsylvania. Ed spoke little about his family except in tight, funny vignettes, like his father buying his mother-in-law a cow for Christmas because whenever she came over to the house she complained the milk was off. But Grant told me long stories about his sisters’ love affairs, his mother’s battle with polio, his father’s ashes scattered in their garden and how scared he’d been as a boy to touch the flowers that grew there.
That first night we had chicken noodle casserole and peas and crinkled french fries, all from the freezer in the basement.
“It’s better than a supermarket down there,” Grant said when he came up with an armful of boxes. They had carte blanche at the market—just had to sign their names—but Grant loved foraging down in the basement much more.
He made the dinner while Ed sat at the kitchen table drinking a Schlitz. But he didn’t sit there morbidly like my father sometimes did in the evenings, forcing himself—or perhaps forced by my mother—to be present. Ed set his chair at an angle and put his feet up on another one and chatted. He was a great chatterer. Chatting wasn’t something I was used to.
“How long you been out of school?” He had an accent I’d never heard before. “School” sounded like scoal. It sounded Scottish or something.
“Three weeks tomorrow.” They had been boring, lonely weeks. I hated tennis lessons and trying to hit the tin can for a Coke when you served and sailing classes with all the instruction about winches and halyards and the folding and unfolding of the sails and never enough time on the water.
“Three weeks? My little sister just got out yesterday.”
“Private school,” Grant said over his shoulder.
“That right? You pay for longer vacations?” he said to Grant. And then to me: “You like scoal?”
“Not really.”
“You like anything?”
I thought. I wanted to like something. I liked them, Ed and Grant, though I wasn’t about to say that.
“Guess not,” he said. “Trying to think what I liked when I was your age. How old are you? No, wait, let me guess.” He pretended to tie a kerchief to his head then pressed his fingers on his temples. “You are fourteen years, four months, and one day.”
I did the math. He was exactly right.
He started laughing as my eyes widened at him. “Your father keeps your passports in his top desk drawer.”
His words struck me like a slap.
“So, let’s see,” Ed said. “At fourteen years, three months, and a day, I loved Celia Washburn. I loved her so much my jaw ached and—”
“You can’t go in that study. Ever. You have to promise.”
I felt Grant turning around behind me. Saw Ed glance at him. They were trying not to laugh at the weird possessed voice that had come out of me.
“Okay. It’s a promise,” Ed said. He shifted his legs and took a swig of beer. “So my mother took me to the doctor because of this jaw ache, and he said I had to stop clenching it so much and when did I clench it, and I said whenever I think about a certain girl and he and the nurse laughed. My mother was out in the waiting room. Then we got to talking about other things and I told him my mother wouldn’t let me play baseball that year because my cousin had gotten clonked on the head in the outfield, the dolt. So when he called my mother in, he told her that I was a little stressed and that she should let me play baseball to unwind.”
Grant was chuckling.
“Oh, the shiny knees and long ponytail of Celia Washburn,” Ed said. “You enamored with anyone?”
I was, of course. Hopelessly. But I shook my head no.
Ed hooted. “Oh my God, you are a terrible liar! Le pire! Never mind. I’ll get it out of you in due time, my pretty.” He raised his beer to his lips, then put it down again. “So apart from her, who shall remain nameless for now, what do you think about? What, as Professor Marcus would say—remember this, Grant?—makes your heart sing?”
I felt so uneasy with all this interrogation, but I liked it, too. And yet I had no answer. Nothing made my heart sing. Even Becca Salinero didn’t make my heart sing. She made it hurt.
“Nothing? Nothing makes your heart sing?” Ed swung his head to Grant at the stove. “What makes your heart sing?”
“Chicken noodle casserole. The full moon and the really thin moon. Sunday mornings if the New York Times isn’t sold out. My nieces and nephews. My blue bicycle. Yeats. And Hermann Hesse sometimes.”
“Hermann Hesse. Le pire!”
“Narcissus and Goldmund,” Grant said.
“Oh, c’mon. If you have to read a German, read Mann, not that lightweight.”
“Four hundred pages about a guy wrapped in a camel hair blanket? No thanks.”
“What makes your heart sing, Ed?” I ventured.
“The venerable state of Maine.”
“So why aren’t you there now?”
“Oh, God,” said Grant.
“It’s Disneyland in the summer. Unrecognizable. Hollywood. Hate it.”
“Well, that was impressively concise.” Grant handed me the peas and said sotto voce and yet for Ed’s benefit, “Sometimes that topic can go on into the night.”
“Well, I didn’t want to scare our boy here right out of the gate.”
We ate. The food, though familiar, tasted better than when my mother made it. I listened to them talk about the part-time jobs they had just started. Grant worked the lunch shift at a diner out on the highway, and Ed paved people’s driveways. Grant said he dreaded going to sleep because he was always dreaming about gravy, pouring it into people’s coffee cups, serving it in shoes. Ed said his lungs would be paved by the end of the summer.
Grant had heated up a Sara Lee pie, blueberry. We gathered round it when he pulled it out. He started to cut into it and Ed said, “I know how you’re going to do this, a miserly wedge at a time when you know for a fact we’re going to eat the whole thing. Gimme that.”
Ed took the knife from him and cut the pie into thirds and put a mound of ice cream on each of the enormous pieces. We ate on the porch. It was a warm, humid night and the hot pie and the cold ice cream were perfect together. Our lawn looked blue in the near dark. We could hear the sounds of a cocktail party down the street, the rumble of male conversation and a woman’s laughing voice cutting through, saying, “No, no, don’t tell them!”
“No, no, don’t tell them,” Ed said in falsetto. “Don’t tell them, Harold, about our large animal fetish!”
Everything he said felt like the funniest thing I’d ever heard.
Ed finished his pie way before Grant or me. He set his plate on the porch boards next to him and put the fork carefully at four o’clock. “It’s very civilized, being rich,” he said. “Very mellow.”
I’d always been told we were middle class. Rich was something else. Yachts and private jets. I remembered my parents and their plane flight. They would be over the ocean by now. I didn’t know what a nervous breakdown was, though I knew that’s what kept happening to my father.
From far off there was a splash. Then Ed started to laugh. “I heard that person dive into a pool and I thought, lucky bastard, and then I remembered we have a fucking pool.” He lifted off his T-shirt. “Fancy a swim?”
I never swam in the pool at night. It was too scary to be the only one in there, my limbs white as an octopus. Even with Grant and Ed that first night I was a little scared, and embarrassed. They took off all their clothes but I couldn’t. I changed into the suit that was hanging in the pool house. I thought they’d make fun of me for this but they didn’t. They didn’t say a word. I had never been naked in front of anyone since I was a baby and even then I wasn’t sure. All my life my mother had been handing me things through a closed door, just her arm reaching in with a towel or soap or whatever I needed. One time when I was eight or nine I slipped getting out of the tub and she had to call my father to come get me. I remember how rough his wool jacket felt against my wet skin.
With the big underwater bulb on in the deep end, everything was lime green. Our splashes looked phosphorescent. I was aware of their bodies, fascinated by their bodies. Ed was smaller and more compact than Grant, with taut bulbs at the backs of his calves and a stomach with small bands of muscle. He had a thick head of hair but his chest was hairless, smooth as rubber. Grant was tall and lean but loose, strangely fleshy for a person who in clothes appeared so thin. Two small pools of skin hung at his narrow hips, as if used to drooping there above an elastic band. He had thin brown hair on his head, a sparse coating of it on his chest, and yet around his penis the hair was quite red.
Ed found me in the shallow end, staring at Grant hanging from the diving board. “Do you think he dyes it?”
“I heard that,” Grant called to us.
“Well, do you?” Ed called back.
Grant dropped down into the water and skimmed the bottom toward us, his long legs doing all the work, his ass tight then loose, tight then loose, square and soft.
Grant crashed through the surface and took Ed in a half nelson and they struggled and threw each other down into the water and I swear I could hear my mother at the side of the pool saying, No roughhousing in the pool you could drown each other. Though when she ever said that I didn’t know. Perhaps when my brother was a young boy and I was watching from her lap. I had a hard time thinking of my brother—Frank was his name—as my brother. He was thirteen years older than I was, more like a friend of my parents’ who stopped in occasionally for a drink. It seemed to me he was always wearing a tie, even on Saturdays. He lived in the city and my mother lamented how little he came to visit, how much he worked. He likes it, my father often said. Worse things than working too hard. Frank rarely spoke to me directly, though I think he spoke a lot about me, for I was aware of a hum of talk, like crickets at night, that when I came closer receded and when I left the room resumed. I thought it was about me, though perhaps it was about something else.
At one point, Grant held Ed underwater for a long time, too long, I thought, and just as I opened my mouth to tell him so, Ed elbowed him hard in his soft stomach. Grant released him with a long whimper and Ed’s head pushed up through the water screaming, “What the fuck?” and Grant seemed to be crying, though it was hard to tell with the weird green shadows and all the water already on his face.
Grant got out, wrapped a towel around his waist, and went inside to do the dishes. Ed swam laps back and forth. I was afraid their argument would be like the ones my parents had, a few sharp words followed by days of silence. But after Grant finished up in the kitchen, he came back outside with a beer and placed it at the edge of the pool. Ed glided toward it and drank it standing in the shallow end. He made a joke in French and Grant laughed and things were tranquil between them again.
Later we sat on the porch. Their clothes were back on and that was more comfortable for me, though still I was not entirely at ease around them and found myself shaking with nerves despite the heat. They drank beers and Ed suggested I have one but Grant said no.
“I cannot believe it’s not Friday yet,” Ed said.
“It’s not even Tuesday yet.”
“The smell of that stuff.” He meant the liquid asphalt. “Le pire.”
“Why do you always say ‘le pire’?” I asked.
He gave a very French frown, a thinking, eyebrows-raised frown of consideration. He lifted his palms up to me. “When in the Dordogne.”
* * *
I woke up in the middle of the night. Someone was coughing below my window. I looked down and saw Ed on the back porch rattling cookies out of a package. He ate five in a row then lit a cigarette. “Fuck,” I heard him say. “Fuck that.”
I went into my father’s study. It was a big room, meant to be a bedroom. Bookcases lined the walls. They were crammed with books and papers and journals in no particular order. The cleaning lady had done that in the spring, taken everything that had been scattered around for years and shoved it on the shelves. His desk was in the far corner, a chair on either side, its surface clean and empty now. It was an old desk, with green leather inlaid on the top and fat brass handles on the drawers. I sat down and opened each one, checking for the gun that was no longer there. Then I turned around to the wall, stuck my finger in the hole between his diploma from the Sorbonne and an old painting of the sea.
I heard a cough in the hallway and then a tap at the door.
I spun around in the swivel chair, wiping the plaster off my finger.
“Can I come in?” Ed said, already in and coming toward me.
He sat in the chair on the other side of the desk. I tried to block his view, but he saw it anyway, the hole and the fissures in the plaster around it.
“Wasn’t exactly a crack shot, was he?”
“I think maybe he took a bit of skin off his cheek. He wore a Band-Aid for a few days.”
Ed smirked. He was wearing boxer shorts. It was a hot night and we were both stuck to the leather chairs.
“It’s not here anymore,” he said.
“What?”
“What happened.”
“Then where is it?”
“It’s gone. It’s over. You can’t find it, stroke it, coo over it. Time has stolen it away like it fucking steals everything. In rare instances, like yours, that can be a good thing.”
* * *
During the interview my mother had asked Ed and Grant if they played either tennis or golf and they had lied and said they did, thinking that that was the kind of person she was looking for. In fact she had wanted to know solely for practical reasons, because if they did she would put their names down in the guest book at the club and they could come and go as they liked. That first weekend I took them to play tennis. On weekends you had to wear all whites and so they put on my father’s clothes. It was only as we were walking there that I noticed Ed had forgotten to put on my father’s white socks. I didn’t say anything but Grant did, and Ed said he was going to move so fast on the court that no one would arrest him for his black socks.
