Some Books Aren’t for Reading

by Howard Marc Chesley

  The next morning I managed to get out of bed without the floor as an intermediary. I made it to the kitchen and scarfed ibuprofen while ruminating about the Aeron poised in front of the glass-topped desk in the upstairs office of the Mar Vista house. True never liked the chair. She said it looked like some kind of insect. She preferred to sit Quaker-style in a straight ladder-back chair. I hadn’t been upstairs in that house for four months, but my presumption was that True had moved the Aeron from the desk, preferring to sit bolt upright in the ladder-back as she filled out more scurrilous court petitions against me.

  I poured some cereal and milk into a bowl and tried to sit at the table, but my back screamed in protest and I ate standing up. My mind was fixating on the Aeron and its accommodating curves.

  Perhaps True would be pleased to be rid of the piece of furniture she always claimed to detest. It would be of no real cost to her to ease my misery. My back and my entire well-being used to be a matter of concern for her. There was a time when she took pleasure in straddling me in the bed and giving me deep-muscle back massages after I played tennis. Sometimes they would end with both of us naked and breathless on the bed.

  Not from anger, but out of naive optimism I reached for the phone. It was early and I would probably find her in. I dialed my former number with small bravado.

  “Hello?” True answered without inflection. Was it a good day or a bad day for her? I couldn’t tell.

  Her silence seemed acrimonious. “It’s Mitchell. I’m having a back problem and I was…uh…. wondering if you were using the Aeron.”

  I heard a click and then a dial tone. This could have been predicted.

  All right. I would move on. What was on the agenda for the day? There were about ten boxes of books sitting in the garage waiting to be sorted and listed. That would take most of the morning and I could do a tour of thrift stores in the afternoon. But I couldn’t sit in the Ivar doing computer work. That was out. Most of the thrift stores don’t open until ten.

  It wasn’t as if True used the Aeron. And it’s not that I don’t understand her anger. But we had a child to raise together, and doing that as enemies was not only impractical but unlikely to produce a healthy environment for Caleb. Surely True could understand that. Perhaps she would come around to seeing that sharing the Aeron was the logical first step in a détente that was in Caleb’s best interest.

  Caleb had preschool from 8:30 to 12:00. True would have left to teach her ten o’clock class. She had informed me shortly after our breakup that she had changed the locks on the doors. But there were at least three or four defective window latches. Legally there had been no final disposition that said that I couldn’t enter and leave the house as freely as True. Legally I would be entering my house to get my chair.

  I felt my pulse rise as I turned the corner onto Colonial Avenue. I flashed on six years ago, sitting next to roundly pregnant True at the kitchen table with Amy Greenberg, the realtor from Coldwell Banker. What a wonderful name for a company with fiduciary responsibility—Coldwell Banker. Better even than Ivar or Ingo. Were there really a Coldwell and a Banker, or was it a made-up name that reeked of substance in order to inspire confidence? The names added waspy Wall Street heft even to diminutive, Brooklyn-accented, frizzy-haired Amy Greenberg. She looked at our loan worksheet with my $130,000 salary and True’s $54,000, and our $300,000 bank account and she said that we were a cinch to qualify at a very good interest rate. We could almost buy it and pay cash. She could pretty much assure us that the owners would accept an offer of $440,000, ten thousand under asking. This house could be ours with a nod.

  I know I should have requested a moment for us to confer. Instead I looked at True and she looked at me. “Let’s do it,” I said. Let’s jump out of the plane and look to see if we have a parachute on the way down. Let’s run across the freeway and think about those sixteen-wheelers when we get to the other side. Let’s take a handful of these funny little yellow pills and see if they make us feel good.

  “Let me write up an offer, then,” said Amy, barely allowing a breath of pause between my words and her putting pen to paper.

  As I turned the corner onto Colonial I was feeling an echo of that weak-in-the-knees feeling I had with Amy Greenberg. Substantial and conservative like the Mormon businessman who built it in 1933, the house had an expansive bottom story that spread itself over two small lots. This was the proud seigniorial dwelling on the street. Perched on top was a smaller second story that contained three little bedrooms and a single bath. It was our plan to add a second master bath later, when our yet-to-be born child might be an intrusion on our bathroom privacy. No doubt post-Depression Mormons would have looked on such thoughts as frivolous excess. There was a large picture window that looked out onto the street and through the window I could see hanging the large painting by an unknown Venice artist I was sure was a comer, but whose career never took off. The grass was browner than when I had left. The rosebushes were unkempt and the garden full of weeds. True never liked to work in the garden, and we had let the gardener go weeks before I left.

  True’s Camry wasn’t in the driveway. I parked on the street. There were no neighbors around. Emboldened, I got out of the car and walked around to the back of the house. I tried the back door. One of the house’s charms is that it has an old-fashioned service porch. There were shopping bags of recyclables sitting on the floor at the side of the back door. Along with the empty plastic milk and water bottles I noticed several Coca-Cola cans. When we were together, True and I had an agreement that we wouldn’t feed Caleb sodas. We didn’t want to be Nazis about it, just not buy them and have them in the house. This makes me uncomfortable.

  I tried the door. It was locked. I went outside. Another Mormon retort to the tawdry reductionism of California construction was a full cellar with an outside entry. In the basement door stairwell I tried the doorknob. The window next to the stairwell is held by a flimsy catch between two dry-rotted shutter frames. It bent and then yielded when I pushed. I scanned for curious neighbors, and then climbed through, head first, dropping on my hands on the cement cellar floor. The dark space smelled like cool, damp earth and wet newspaper.

  I climbed the cellar stairs and opened the interior door into the kitchen. The kitchen had old-fashioned, pale yellow tile countertops and dowdy, white-painted cabinets. Breakfast dishes were piled in the sink. Before the debacle that led to my departure, True and I had been shopping a kitchen remodel, and we were getting surprisingly comfortable with a price around eighty thousand dollars. We had convinced ourselves that granite counters and upscale appliances were an investment in the value of our house that would be more than paid back if we sold it to move to larger quarters. Now I can’t help but think of them from the point of view of the hopeful pickers in their aging pickups that frequent the Volunteer Veterans auction early every morning. What would they think of a couple of young people who drop ten thousand precious dollars on a shiny new Viking range?

  The living room was relatively kempt by True standards. I never loved her for her neatness. She made it no secret that she had to let the housekeeper go, and Sarah, the neighborhood teenager who helps take care of Caleb, makes more mess than she cleans up.

  My eyes moved to the long, scarred and distressed pine table against the wall, the one that we bought in the pricey store on Montana Avenue, knowing full well that we were overpaying for a table that was antiqued and not antique. It still served as a platform for desk-framed photographs—a small shrine to Caleb: Caleb at two months bathing in the kitchen sink. True with baby Caleb in his snuggly in front of the house (picture taken by me). Caleb in Pampers taking some unsteady first steps on the Tabriz. Caleb at five with his maternal grandmother poolside at the Beverly Summit Hotel. Caleb blowing out the candles on his fifth birthday cake in our old apartment living room in Brentwood. Here is something new—Caleb and True in front of the Mad Hatter Teacups at Disneyland. A month ago Caleb had told me that his mother took him to Disneyland and that his f
avorite attraction was Goofy’s Bounce House. Millions of dollars invested by Disney on the state-of-the-art House of Terror was wasted on my gentle, terror-averse six-year-old.

  The picture of me standing next to Caleb astride a pony at the Santa Monica Sunday farmer’s market had been expunged in a callous and heavy-handed program of deMitchellification. In her bitterness would she prefer Caleb to believe that our wonderful Sunday interlude with fresh croissants and a pony ride never happened?

  I climbed the narrow staircase to the second floor with its three small bedrooms. One that was for True and me (now for True alone), one for Caleb and then a tiny room that serves as an office and the area where my treasured chair should reside.

  The stairs creaked in a pleasantly familiar way. The ridges of the wrought iron banister under my palm tickled my sense memory. At the top landing a look into Caleb’s room revealed his small bed—unmade. When Caleb is in my house he and I have a ritual of making his fold-out bed together every morning before I drop him at preschool, neatly tucking in the corners, putting the bed pillows on the chair next to the sofa and then folding the bed frame back into the sofa. We perform the reverse each night after dinner. I like to think that the constancy of the ritual is stabilizing for him.

  Toys littered the floor—several I didn’t recognize—notably a large, expensive Tonka dump truck and a child-sized plastic easel. I was surprised that Caleb never mentioned them to me. On the easel was a watercolor picture of what appeared to be this house. There was no mommy or daddy, only a house and a tree and a sun. Make of it what you will. Thank God the sun seemed bright and optimistic.

  I looked from the hall into the office. I was right about the chair. It had been replaced at the desk by the ladder-back with the straw seat and the Aeron was tucked in a corner. Although the office and the Aeron were my destination, our old bedroom across the hall made a siren call I couldn’t resist.

  The bed is queen sized with a large antique mahogany headboard that was never properly mated to the steel frame. As a result, when True and I did our most seismic lovemaking, the frame would pound against the headboard that, in turn, would pound against the wall.

  The bed was unmade, with the bedcovers pushed down to the foot. I intended to have a quick look-around. Jog the senses and leave. A quick glance to the nightstand revealed the traditional pile of a half-dozen or so crisp and new review copies that are regularly doled out to academics. And an irresistible distraction to a book scout.

  Principles and Application (Evaluation in Education and Human Services) by Ronald K Hambleton. Small academic press. Hard-to-find. A lot of those books would sell “Like New” on Amazon for fifty or sixty dollars apiece. True, of course, would rather burn them all than see me get one.

  I move on, mindful that True, unlike me, doesn’t see this book as a sixty-dollar payday. She naively believes it to be a large arrangement of words offering information and opinion on the subject of education evaluation.

  On the floor by the bed where I would expect to see her flannel nightgown were crumpled blue jeans and panties. I picked up the panties—not in a sexual way because I never found used underwear with its fecal aura to be the faintest turn-on, but rather with forensic intent. They were not her usual cotton, up to the navel and over the butt cheeks variety that I had accepted for our conjugal norm. They were shiny, lacy, slender and red with a high arch on the thigh, designed to impress rather than give comfort. They certainly didn’t give comfort to me.

  I searched for condoms under the bed. There were none that I could see among the dust bunnies, even when I removed the lamp from the bed stand and shined it underneath the mattress. I sneezed from the dust and replaced the lamp, making sure that it was positioned as I had found it.

  I strained to shun the image of True under some energetic new lover in our conjugal bed. I didn’t need a memo from the ACLU to remind me that as a separated woman she had the right to thrust her middle parts where and when and with whom she pleased. It was, however, something on which I tried hard not to dwell, despite my inability to do anything but. And when my mind inevitably wandered in that direction, I found I couldn’t settle on a face to go with the dick.

  Someone from the college? Maybe Cesar Pimentel—a wavy gray-haired, tennis-playing, fiftyish Argentinean fop. He’s the always-on-the-make co-chair of the department with a pandering book about bilingual education. Cesar has made an alternate career of inveigling himself onto panels at education conferences, displaying his intellectual wares in a way that is the academic equivalent of stuffing a sock into the crotch of one’s Levi’s, with the primary intent of seducing lithesome female conference attendees. My hostility toward Cesar grew as I tried to banish from my mind the image of him brushing his veneered teeth in my bathroom.

  Wait a second. Who was the taker of that picture of True and Caleb at the Wild Teacups at Disneyland? Was it a threesome or did she hand the camera to a passer-by? This was more than I could bear to have ping-ponging against the walls of my brain. Let her have sex with the entire faculty and student body—just don’t have anyone surrogating fatherhood to Caleb. Please. For God’s sake. That’s all I ask. No other guy displacing me with an arm draped paternally over Caleb’s diminutive shoulder as they share a tram in the Indiana Jones Adventure. Nobody buying him overpriced Pluto-dogs and Goofy-fries and helping him tear open his little foil packets of mustard and ketchup.

  Then who was the unknown picture-taker? This thinking was clearly counterproductive, getting in the way of my mission.

  I strained to create a more pleasing, alternate vision. True, alone with Caleb, hands her little Olympus camera to one of a pair of bubbly young girls visiting from Osaka, Japan. The girl, sporting a fresh-off-the-kiosk Buzz Lightyear T-shirt, takes the camera with a shy giggle. As True and Caleb pose in front of the teacups ride, she asks them to “smirel.” Having driven out my demons for the moment I left the bedroom.

  The Aeron was my sole mission. Anything else was a trap. I entered the office. Except for the reversal of the natural hierarchy of chairs, everything seemed much as it had been. On the desk was another stack of books. I resisted the temptation to look up their selling price, leaving my smartphone holstered. Also there were some opened envelopes and a few manila file folders, what should be a resistible diversion. I am, however, only a human variety of a spurned spouse with all of the attendant foibles. There was a letter already open on the desk. The letterhead was from True’s college—California State University, Northridge.

  Dear True:

  I just wanted to let you know personally that after looking into all of the possibilities for teaching evening extension classes there weren’t any available openings for the upcoming quarter. Dean Ames spoke very well of you and normally we would be honored to have someone from the education department with your credentials and experience teach in the extension school. You are at the top of the list if anything should turn up.

  Sincerely,

  Richard Shelton

  Dean of the Extension School

  True was looking to bring in some extra money. Not a surprise under the circumstances. My reaction was uneasy and mixed. It somehow seemed fair to me that she was now getting a taste of the job market’s hard knocks. I remembered well how, when I had trouble finding work after our separation, she ran out of sympathy quickly. On the other hand, if she got the job she would no doubt be bitter about having to teach evening hours in the extension school to make ends meet. Moreover, those who still held me in any esteem at all (if there were any of those left) would see True’s working of two jobs as further evidence of my callous abandonment.

  I pulled the Aeron away from the wall and delicately eased myself into it. We fit together like space modules docking—the perfection of the mating of two finely machined and polished surfaces. All of my painstaking adjustments to lumbar height and lumbar depth seemed to remain untouched. The arm height was exactly where I had left it, low enough not to be a hindrance while I worked at the desk, yet high
enough to fall pleasingly under my forearm when I was in the contemplative, relaxed mode.

  I luxuriated briefly in the embrace of my old friend. The Aeron, despite its use of the latest composite materials, is a bulky fifty pounds. My back was in a delicate state. One step at a time. It rolled nicely over the rug and onto the hardwood floor of the upstairs hall. Rather than carry it I decided to precede it on the stairs using the casters to ease it down. Like a cowhand’s trusty horse, it seemed to sense my hobbled state and cooperated nicely as we eased our way to the bottom landing. All I had to do was roll it out the front door, down a few steps and then lift it into the Volvo. Of course I wouldn’t be telling this story if that was all there was to it.

  Apparently Elizabeth Selgrath who lives in the house diagonally across the street and who knows me and my Volvo, saw me in front of the house while she was closing an upstairs window. I should say that I had no reason in particular to expect any hostility from Elizabeth. She and her husband, Ronnie, were nodding neighbors and outside of our social circle. While I never suspected that the circumstances of my departure from our family would be a secret from the neighborhood, I didn’t consider myself the same sort of pariah with the neighbors that I was among our friends. On the other hand, it stands to reason that those who know me less are apt to demonize me more. In Elizabeth’s case the fact that I could never warm to her silly-looking Shih Tzu when she walked the dwarf-dog in front of our house no doubt contributed to her enmity. In any case, Elizabeth apparently considered herself duty-bound to call True’s cell phone and report that I was sneaking around the house. True found my presence at the house that we legally, technically still own together such a cause for concern that she turned around on the Burbank Boulevard off ramp of the northbound 405 and raced south to Mar Vista, leaving her class to fend for itself. I was loading the Aeron into the back of the Volvo when True’s Camry bounded across Colonial Avenue and into the driveway. She leapt out of the car and stomped toward me and the open tailgate of the Volvo.