The Man of the House

by Stephen McCauley

  Praise for Stephen McCauley’s THE MAN OF THE HOUSE

  “Charming . . . A wry, bittersweet look at the importance and impossibility of father-son relationships . . . The writing is seamless, the story never lags, and it is filled with eccentric characters and observations that you’ll find yourself reading aloud.”

  —Susan Kelly, USA Today

  “A comic novel about human predicaments . . . McCauley has mastered the small yet perfect comic gesture. . . . Readers will welcome back the rueful and rumpled comic vision that is unmistakably his own.”

  —Meg Wolitzer, The New York Times Book Review

  “A wry and melancholy comedy of modern manners . . . A lovely, funny book that represents an impressive strengthening of McCauley’s themes and talent.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Fine, funny and appealing . . . THE MAN OF THE HOUSE is consistently compelling in its depiction of the intertwining relationships between Clyde’s friends, neighbors and relatives. . . . A talented and winning writer.”

  —James Ireland Baker, Time Out New York

  “A painful, humorous look at life as a grown-up, where great expectations give over to silent resignation . . . Clyde’s observations are witty and right on target.”

  —Helen A. S. Popkin, St. Petersburg Times

  “Irresistible . . . McCauley’s latest and most emotionally complex probe into family dysfunction.”

  —James Patrick Herman, Elle

  “A hilarious new tale of wit and woe . . .”

  —Genre

  “[A] wry vision of the way we live now . . . funny, bright, fast-paced and populated by attractive characters . . .”

  —Francine Prose, Newsday

  “McCauley has a gift for creating characters who are wry, amusing, compassionate and genuinely smart.”

  —Mademoiselle

  “McCauley has a great eye for nuance and a great ear for dialogue. . . . [And] a real talent for searching out the flaws in people that make them truly interesting . . .”

  —Fred Goss, The Advocate

  “THE MAN OF THE HOUSE sparkles. . . . Clyde is as charming a narrator as we could wish for. . . .”

  —Margaret Quamme, Columbus (OH) Dispatch

  “A touching yet delightfully funny story about relationships in the ’90s . . . We’re compelled to like self-deprecating Clyde from almost the first page.”

  —Mary Scott Dye, The State (Columbia, SC)

  “THE MAN OF THE HOUSE is very funny. . . . Clyde Carmichael is likable, comical and sympathetic.”

  —Nora Lockwood Tooher, Providence Sunday Journal

  “Reading McCauley is like listening all evening to the funniest person at the party.”

  —James Kaufmann, Des Moines Register

  “THE MAN OF THE HOUSE is both hilarious and bittersweet, a perceptive picture of contemporary life in all its complications.”

  —The Anniston Star

  “A sharp, convincing rendering of the mishaps and uncertainties of contemporary not-quite-youth . . .”

  —Jordan Ellenberg, The Boston Phoenix

  Books by Stephen McCauley

  The Object of My Affection

  The Easy Way Out

  The Man of the House

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  Simon & Schuster

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1996 by Stephen McCauley

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Inc., 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  First Simon & Schuster ebook ebook July 2012

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Cover design by Brigid Pearson

  Cover art by Terry Widener

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-2237-2 (eBook)

  In memory of my real father and for Sebastian

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  THE MORNING LOUISE MORRIS’S LETTER arrived announcing that she was coming to town, I was sitting up in bed, rereading Wuthering Heights, trying to think of something meaningful to say about it to my adult education class that week. It was a little after ten, and already it was warm and comfortingly humid. It had been a steamy, wet summer, with one day more insufferably torpid than the next, but it was just past the middle of August and I’d grown used to the weather. I liked to think that putting up with it stoically would build character, a quality I couldn’t afford to pass up, whatever the price. I’d turned thirty-five that spring, so I figured it was now or never on the question of character.

  My quarters in the two-story apartment I shared with Marcus Gladstone, an old friend of mine and a onetime lover of Louise Morris, were the three converted attic rooms under the eaves of a busted-up, vinyl-sided house outside Harvard Square. Throughout the summer, they were stifling and smelled of tar and cedar, as if the roof were cooking right above my head and about to burst into flames. But there was something about the almost suffocating closeness of the rooms that appealed to me. I could sit up in bed and, with a few careful adjustments, touch all the walls around me. Marcus, who had a bedroom and study on the floor below, was too tall, considerate, and lazy to climb the steep staircase to my lair, so in addition to everything else, I had almost complete privacy. I’d moved in with Marcus two years earlier, after the breakup of a relationship, desperately longing for and dreading privacy. There’s a fine line between the gorgeous luxury of not having to account for your time and the loneliness of knowing that no one cares what the hell you do with it, and some days—most days, I suppose—I wasn’t sure which side of it I was on.

  When I heard the mailman pounding up the front steps of the house that morning, I got out of bed, slipped on a pair of jeans, and headed for the door. I always raced for the door as soon as I heard the mail arrive. Like a lot of basically unfulfilled people with too much time on their hands, I’d fooled myself into believing that A Perfect Life and I were separated by nothing more substantial than a postage stamp. Maybe there was money in today’s mail, or an offer of a job in. . . Rome, let’s say—a teaching position at some undemanding American school that provided its staff with rooms in a crumbling villa with views of the Forum. Or, equally likely, maybe Gordon, my ex, had come to his senses and written to tell me he’d made a mistake in leaving, the very words I’d been waiting to hear from him so I could finally forget about him and move on.

  As I walked past the bureau I had wedged into one corner under the eaves, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror
and stopped short. The problem with having a housemate as handsome as Marcus was that I sometimes took his face as standard issue. Then I’d walk past a mirror and have to suffer through the comparison. It wasn’t that I had any desire to carry around the burden of Marcus’s languid blond beauty; it was just that lately, the few things I’d once considered assets in my appearance were beginning to work against me. The lean and hungry, unkempt, and addled look I’d cultivated throughout my twenties was beginning to read like desperation and indigence as I stepped into my mid-thirties. At a certain age, the unkempt and hungry look is attractive only if you’re neither, and the truth is, I was at least a little of both. Even my eyeglasses were turning against me. Almost daily, the black, clunky things I’d been wearing for years appeared less and less East Village and more and more Steve Allen. I’d chosen them years earlier as a fashion statement, but I’d made a mistake and now it looked as if they’d chosen me. The depressing part was, I was stuck with what I’d made myself into and I couldn’t pretend that it was only a matter of minutes before I turned everything around and started getting expensive haircuts and flattering eyeglasses. Some things have to be hammered out in youth. Past the age of thirty-three, no one ever becomes stylish or takes up smoking or develops a passion for John Steinbeck. Besides, considering the astonishing number of people I knew who’d been plowed under before making it out of their twenties, aging felt like a privilege, the kind of privilege you should complain about only in private.

  I tripped down the two flights of stairs and pushed open the door to the tiny entryway of the house. Donald Gern, our downstairs neighbor, was standing there leafing through a stack of mail.

  “Can’t see a thing in here,” he said. “Like trying to read in a freaking cave.”

  He held an envelope at arm’s length and squinted until his gray eyes disappeared. Cracked stained-glass panels in the front door of the house blocked out a good deal of light, but even on the bleakest winter mornings I’d had no trouble reading the mail. Donald always went through this showy routine in my presence out of what I assumed was a combination of self-consciousness, lack of social skills, and discomfort at being trapped in a confined space with a known homosexual.

  Donald had moved into the first floor about six months earlier. The apartment was one of those badly painted, peculiarly laid out places that attract oddball transient renters. In the time I’d been living in the house, over half a dozen people had moved in and out of the apartment—mostly, as far as I could tell, math geniuses with greasy hair, the type who graduate from college with honors and high expectations, have a nervous collapse of some kind, and end up collecting comic books and working at copy shops. Donald Gern didn’t exactly fit the mold, but he didn’t exactly break it. He was a big man, over six feet tall, with a blocky body that could have been fat or muscular but didn’t seem to be either. I’d once seen him barechested in the backyard; he had a massive, undefined torso, the kind of pale, hairless body you expect to see on an extra in a black-and-white biblical epic.

  This morning, he had on a pair of dark pants, a white shirt, and a knee-length white lab coat. He worked in Boston at what he described as a “clinic” that treated baldness, thinning hair, and other untreatable maladies. In the short time I’d been acquainted with him, I’d become obsessed with his profession. I assumed it was pure quackery and was amazed at how unabashed he was about the whole thing. Whenever I mentioned his job to him, he grew serious and grim, in a pompous, self-righteous way, as if we were discussing oncology. On the other hand, I was beginning to grow concerned about the possibility of someday going bald myself, and I was always looking for signs that there was a shred of validity to what he did, in case I needed his professional help. In daylight, his own hair looked to be the color of a Band-Aid, but in this dim light it looked pink. It lay across his head in one limp flap, like a leaf of lettuce flung on top of a grapefruit. Was it real? A toupee? The result of some unsuccessful surgical procedure? These were questions that, I’m ashamed to admit, I pondered when I could have been pondering the meaning of life.

  “Off to work?” I asked him.

  “Double shift,” he said. He shook his head grimly, like someone recounting last night’s body count in the emergency room. “Eight patients back-to-back. We’re understaffed, but I’ll tell you, it’s tough to find qualified trichologists.” He glanced at me without lifting his head. “You know anyone looking for a job?”

  He asked in such a deadly serious tone, the offer seemed ominous. “Not offhand,” I said.

  “Everyone’s unemployed, but when you come up with a job offer, you can’t find a warm body.” He examined an envelope intently. “Looks like one of you boys is popular. Handwriting’s a lady’s, too, unless I’m mistaken.”

  He tucked the letter under his arm and continued to go through the stack. He had one of those ageless baby faces. His eyebrows were so light they were almost nonexistent, and his mouth was as puckered and tiny as a Kewpie doll’s. At first I assumed he had a thyroid condition—the thinning eyebrows, the awkward bulk, the sluggish Bride of Frankenstein walk suggested as much. More recently, however, I’d noticed a look of unmistakable sadness on his face when he thought he wasn’t being observed, and I suspected he might simply be lonely. Still, he had an irritating way of treating both Marcus and me like children, even though he was probably younger than both of us. I wanted to demand that he hand over the letter immediately, but I couldn’t think of a way of doing so without acting like a peevish child and justifying his condescension.

  When he came to the bottom of the stack, he looked up. “Shucks, I guess no one keeled over and left me a million bucks.” He surrendered the letter. “Maybe you got lucky.”

  “I’m not sure you’d call it luck,” I said. “It’s from my sister.” There was no return address, but Agnes always wrote our surname, Carmichael, in huge block letters, a reminder that I had familial obligations.

  “I always wished I had a sister,” Donald said, shaking his head sadly. “Other than the one I have, I mean.”

  As I started to back toward the door, another letter fell out of the pile of catalogs and magazines Donald was holding and fluttered to the floor. He uttered one of his genteel curses, picked it up, and handed it to me. “I guess I missed one in this fricking light.” He opened his door. “See you ’round, buddy,” he said.

  He slipped into the apartment and slammed the door, leaving behind the citrus-and-sawdust scent of his aftershave and the powerful adhesive smell of hair fixative.

  In the past month or so, it had begun to worry me that I had such a strong interest in and identification with Donald. I suppose he was the person others fear they will become if they don’t hurry up and get their professional life together or inherit some money or, at the very least, dig up a spouse of some kind. The week before, he’d told me that he was planning to have a cookout in the backyard and would keep me posted on the date. “No big deal,” he’d said, “just a bunch of losers sitting around getting drunk. You guys should drop down.”

  Unfortunately, it was the best offer I’d had in weeks.

  The second letter Donald had turned over was addressed to me in Louise Morris’s scratchy handwriting. I hadn’t heard from Louise in a while, not since she’d written more than a year earlier, to tell me she was moving to Seattle. I stuck it in my back pocket as I walked upstairs, intending to save it as a reward for reading the missive from my sister. Agnes had left a couple of messages on my answering machine in the past week, but I hadn’t returned them, largely because she’d said: “It’s about. . . Dad.” Both Agnes and I tended to hesitate before calling our father “Dad”: the term didn’t quite fit somehow, but “Father” was too formal and we were too intimidated by him to call him by his first name. Discussing our father was low on my list of ways to brighten up the day. I could already feel myself starting to resent Agnes for reminding me of his existence.

  The house Marcus and I lived in had been built sometime in the late forties, a s
tandard, uninspired two-story dwelling with an attic, a little front porch, and a mattress-size backyard, just right for the optimistic postwar family moments before the flight to suburbia shifted into high gear. There were four houses identical to ours on the street, but we had the distinction of having in the tiny front yard an immense pine tree that was gradually chewing up the foundation. The tree, so out of proportion to the yard, added a look of neglected beauty to the bland exterior of the house and the romance of pine needles clogging the gutters and littering the front steps. Over the years, the interior of the place had been reconfigured, renovated, and neglected by a series of owners, and as a result, many of the rooms were oddly shaped, with staircases and doors that led nowhere, windows sliced in half by a cabinet or makeshift closet, and moldings and wainscoting that disappeared unexpectedly into a wall. We were only a few blocks from a neighborhood where professors and lawyers lived in leafy quiet, but our street was crowded with noisy, pessimistic post-Reagan families in constant financial turmoil and personal crisis, who, inexplicably, drove cars plastered with bumper stickers for Republican candidates and assorted right-wing extremist causes certain to make their lives even more unbearable than their constant public brawling indicated they already were. All the fathers had the bloated look of heavy drinkers or steroid abusers, and the teenagers walked around day and night as if they were trying to decide whether to shave their heads or commit suicide. The mothers were either morbidly obese or amphetamine-thin. The former made rare public appearances, and the latter tended to spend eight or nine hours a day washing clothes at the laundromat on the corner, hooked up to Walkmans.

  Our house backed up to a fancy grocery where Julia Child, who lived part time on the other side of the tracks, was rumored to do her shopping. She’d been my favorite TV star as a child, long before I learned, with some dismay, that she was a real person and not an invented character. The breakup that precipitated the move in with Marcus had been a fairly traumatic one, and I’d initially spent hours wandering the cramped aisles of the store, picking up tins of snails and caviar and other expensive, fishy items, all in hopes of catching a glimpse of the French Chef. For some reason, I thought it would be reassuring: Gordon may have left me, but goddamn it, Julia Child and I shop together. Finally, I gave up the pursuit and started shopping at a chain supermarket, where no one famous was rumored to shop but where they did give double value for coupons.