The Man of the House

by Stephen McCauley

  “I see what you mean about the metaphor,” Marcus said. “I think you’re right. It’s all about food, isn’t it?”

  “Most cookbooks are.”

  “Let’s go to New Hampshire and cheer Agnes up. It might make me feel better to be around someone as unhappy as she is.”

  Marcus got up and went to the stove, dragging his feet in his beat-up sneakers, drowning in sweet self-pity over the departure of Nancy. For mysterious reasons, Marcus took comfort in thinking of himself as the victim of a cruel and chaotic universe. He was amazingly passive. It was a quality that attracted intellectual women, although it added to his air of unemployability.

  “I’m off to the library,” he said. “Christ, I hope this thing with Nancy doesn’t set me back. I really think I was on the verge of a breakthrough.”

  Marcus was thirty-nine. He’d completed his course work for his Ph.D. in experimental psychology ten years earlier and had been trying to write his dissertation ever since. As far as I could tell, however, he was no further along than on the day he started. He was filled with maudlin regret when he talked about what his life might have been like if he had finished his dissertation, and with vague hopefulness when he dared to mention what it might still be like if he finished it now. His research and his thesis had something to do with the significance of the frown in human relations, but what, exactly, I can’t report. No one in the history of the human race has ever been as boring as Marcus Gladstone was on the subject of his dissertation. The mention of it seemed to send him into a stupor, as if he’d been injected with some powerful narcotic. He started to drawl and drone, and his eyes drooped. Listening to him, I sometimes felt as if I was literally going to lose my mind.

  Marcus had been a gifted child, raised by gifted parents in a variety of academic settings. His parents were both professors, and he’d been brought up being assured by them that he would achieve great things in life, that his future was filled with bright promise. Now, he sometimes confessed, he was beginning to think they’d been wrong all along.

  I had a different but related problem. I’d never been told by anyone that I would achieve great things, and I was beginning to think everyone had been right.

  Marcus bolted down another cup of coffee. “Who’s that other letter from?”

  “Louise Morris,” I said. “She got a grant. Radcliffe, from the sound of it.”

  “Ah, well, women have these grant networks all sewn up. Don’t ever bother applying for a grant unless you’re a woman.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “I suppose I should write a novel. Is she going to look us up?”

  “It sounds like it.”

  He chewed this over for a moment. “I never should have told her I loved her on our first date. That’s why she hasn’t kept in touch with me. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I didn’t know you were in love with Louise.”

  “I wasn’t. But I misread her, thought she was one of those dreamy girls who’d like to hear gushy pronouncements. I’d better read one of those books she wrote before she gets here. One more distraction I don’t need. Maybe you could give me a plot summary.”

  Like most of the academics over thirty I knew, Marcus rarely read. One of the apparent advantages of being well educated at a young age is that you get all of that out of the way early on.

  “I’ll loan you one,” I said.

  “She was a blonde, wasn’t she?”

  “Redhead.”

  “That’s right. Redhead. And you’re sure she never based a character on me? I wonder if I should be insulted. Funny, isn’t it—I’ve never been attracted to redheads. Something too ghostly about them. Does she still have her kid with her?”

  “Of course she does. Why wouldn’t she?”

  He downed the rest of his coffee and clenched his lips around his handsome, horsey teeth. When he recovered from his caffeine spasm, he said, “I don’t know. All those years. . . Maybe the father came along to claim him. I guess it doesn’t usually work out that way, does it?”

  “No,” I said. “I guess not. Not usually.”

  “French, wasn’t he? Something like that?”

  “He was. If you believe her first novel.”

  “You can pretty much take all fiction as fact, Clyde. It’s the other stuff you have to wonder about.”

  I SPENT THE REST OF THAT WARM MORNING reading an enormously long biography of an Australian painter I’d never heard of and whose work, judging from the plates stuck between the endless pages of text, was cloying and uninspired. The paintings were mostly muddy landscapes—the kinds of things Cézanne might have painted if he’d been instructed by one of those TV art teachers who paint with knives, spatulas, meat cleavers, and other kitchen utensils. Which is not to say I didn’t find the book fascinating. In fact, I find most biographies fascinating and often read as many as two or three a week. It’s encouraging to be reminded that even the least eventful and interesting lives can count for something in the history of the human race. And it’s satisfying, in a greedy, vengeful way, to be reminded that the most eventful and interesting lives usually end tragically.

  I suppose I read so many biographies because I was trying to understand how people stumbled through their days and their failures and spun their miseries and despair into great art or pathbreaking science or profound enlightenment. There were lessons to be learned, I hoped, principles I could apply to my own plodding existence. I likened the process to studying the training schedule of Olympic swimmers. But I was always tripping over the most lush, lurid details—Edith Wharton’s furniture, Nureyev’s dick, Freud’s cocaine, Garbo’s diet—and coasting through the rest.

  By afternoon, I figured it was time to attack my sister’s letter, and I put aside the Australian painter and prepared myself. I had a complicated system of fans in my attic rooms, which I moved from window to window and from floor to bureau to bookshelf, depending on the time of day and the angle of the sun. They didn’t really keep me cool, but they blew around enough dust and stale air to create the illusion of a breeze. Besides, all that plugging and unplugging and opening and closing of windows distracted my attention from any discomfort caused by the heat. I sprawled out on the daybed in my study, set a heavy cast-iron fan on the floor in front of me, and took Agnes’s letter out of the envelope.

  There it was, right at the top of the page, her sad, infuriating letterhead:

  FROM THE DESK OF AGNES CARMICHAEL, CO-PRESIDENT E AND A RESOURCES, INC.

  In the mid-eighties, shortly after Agnes’s divorce had been finalized and she’d moved into a town house development in southern New Hampshire, her friend Elizabeth (E) had persuaded her to give up her successful nursing career to start E and A Resources, Inc. For a substantial fee, E and A would line up baby-sitters, keep fresh-cut flowers in your bedroom, buy a Christmas present for anyone on your list, make arrangements for your five-year-old’s birthday party, and so on. They’d done reasonably well for a while, but as the economy started to slide, their business had suffered huge losses. With half the state of New Hampshire unemployed, who was going to pay E and A to hire a clown? E.A.R. had gotten into the more mundane housecleaning and laundry end of things, and a few months earlier, E had convinced A to go in on some weight-loss-supplement pitch. I was worried that it was only a matter of time before my sister joined a neo-Fascist direct-sales company and was out peddling cosmetics door to door. As it was, she had to take occasional retail jobs at department stores and a few shifts at one of the many nursing homes near her condo just to afford the business. And to keep up with the financial demands of caring for our father in his supposedly numbered days.

  No doctor had been able to explain our father’s mysterious, selectively debilitating illness. William, always a stocky, robust, unyielding man, had worked in the insurance industry for twenty-five years. He’d sold off his business early and bought two sporting goods stores, both of which had eventually burned down under highly suspicious circumstances. It was after
the second fire that he began to have amorphous health complaints and refused to leave the house—unless he wanted to. Our mother ended up waiting on him day and night, right up to her death. My father’s doctor, a peculiarly hostile man in his seventies, was never more specific about my father’s illness than to say that he was incapable of taking care of himself. Agnes had insisted he move into the basement of her town house rather than face the horrors of a state-run nursing home, which, according to his doctor, was the only alternative. The facts of my father’s financial situation were as difficult to untangle as the plot of Bleak House; he alternated between claims of poverty and hints that he’d made out like a bandit on the fires.

  He was mercilessly demanding of Agnes, and although she got no thanks for anything she did, she refused him nothing, from running errands to cooking meals to paying him a small monthly allowance. Part of me was sorry for all Agnes had to endure, but part of me was fiercely jealous; my father never asked me for anything and never accepted anything I offered him. My contributions to his allowance were made under the table to avoid an ugly scene. I’d come to the distressing conclusion that I didn’t have anything he wanted, or worse still, that he didn’t want anything I had. He was unabashedly homophobic, but I had to remind myself that being heterosexual hadn’t done Agnes all that much good.

  Agnes’s letter fluttered in my hand every time the fan rotated in the direction of the daybed, but I couldn’t bring myself to read past the letterhead. I put the thing away, promising to read it before nightfall—or at least before dawn—of some day in the next week. I went over to my stereo and put on a scratchy recording of musette waltzes. Louise Morris, who knew of my fondness for the bright melancholy of accordion music, had turned me on to French dance hall tunes years earlier. As the afternoon wearied on, and I carted around the heavy fans, I played the record over a dozen times and thought more and more about my old friend and the period of my own life when we’d been close.

  Louise and I had been in English Lit together my freshman year of college. A thin girl with fine copper hair and pale skin, she was always rushing into the room late or leaving early, knocking over a chair and apologizing loudly. She tended to dress in very practical, androgynous clothes—chinos, thermal T-shirts, work boots, bulky sports jackets—that somehow looked provocative on her, drew attention to her lean, clumsy body instead of hiding it. She rarely spoke up in class, but when she did, she made the kind of pithy, mildly ironic comments that can easily be interpreted as condescending or brilliant and, either way, turned most of the other students against her. There was always a lot of eye-rolling after Louise Morris made one of her literary comments: “I don’t find Ophelia at all sympathetic. If she were alive today she’d be teaching aerobics.” When she took more than a few sentences to make a point, she tended to ramble and let her hoarse, raspy voice trail off into silence in the middle of a thought.

  The professor, a young man with the harried look of someone who’d fallen behind on his reading ten years earlier, had a fawning appreciation of her. He became rapt when she spoke and was visibly distressed when she left the class early. I don’t think that helped her popularity much, either.

  I was taken with Louise from the first time I saw her stumble into class, tousled and boyishly pretty and smelling of cigarettes. She had a pocket watch she was always pulling out to check the time, as if she had some important place to go, a real life outside of school she was eager to get back to. I had no life outside of school—or in it, for that matter—which heightened my fascination with her. I’d gone to college primarily as a way of distancing myself from my father, partially at his expense, and had forgotten that it involved studying and attending lectures and feigning an interest in the future. It was a state school in western Massachusetts, one of those bursting-at-the-seams places with the atmosphere of an overcrowded city in which no one has a job. Freshman year, I lived in a dormitory with thousands of teenage rowdies who spent most of their free time knocking down walls and throwing furniture out of windows. I suppose I could have found a niche into which I might have fit—a social group that catered to insecure, inarticulate, introverted homosexuals, let’s say—but for months I got lost whenever I walked outside the dorm. Then, too, I seemed to be constitutionally incapable of fitting into groups: I alternately feared being rejected by them or losing myself in their claustrophobic warmth. The first months I was in school, I felt most comfortable at football games; I didn’t care a thing about competitive sports, but I could sit in the middle of thousands of screaming fans and feel simultaneously surrounded and utterly alone.

  I used to see Louise in the library, in a back corner of the top floor, where I studied and napped. I’d glimpse her leafing through old botany texts, books about birds, and poetry anthologies she routinely picked off a table of discarded tomes. We nodded at each other for weeks—more than once, she’d tripped over my feet when she was rushing into class—but neither one of us spoke.

  Halfway into the semester, on an afternoon when I was trying to study, I was roused from my stupor by the sound of a man talking in a strained, choking whisper. “I have to go back to her,” he was saying. “Considering everything, it wouldn’t be fair not to. It wouldn’t be right.”

  I turned around and saw a dark, brooding man sitting on the edge of a low table. He was wearing a paisley shirt with a big white collar and an ugly gold chain around his neck, items that made him look ruggedly handsome. I was just beginning to learn that the simplest way for masculine men to project masculinity is by dressing in cheap, slightly effeminate clothes. Louise was curled into a corner of the sofa in front of him, a book open on her lap. There were tears rolling down the man’s face. I don’t think I’d ever seen a man crying before, and the sight of him shocked and excited me in some strange, erotic way. I wished I could make a dark, brooding man weep merely by sitting in front of him with nonchalant disregard. It’s relatively easy to make someone happy, but only the truly desirable can make loved ones miserable.

  He reached out and took Louise’s hand. “But who’s going to take care of you?” he asked.

  “Oh, I’ll be fine,” she said. “Really.” She took back her hand and closed her book. “You just should have told me you were married, that’s all. What are you going to name the baby?”

  When he left, she looked at her pocket watch and went back to her reading.

  I moved over to the opposite end of the sofa where she was sitting and rested my feet on the table, next to hers. She had on a pair of engineer’s boots that made her feet look absurdly big and her legs spindly. “You recovered from that quickly,” I said.

  She had very pale blue eyes and a spray of freckles across her nose. When she smiled, I noticed that she had a slight overbite. I’ve never understood why people go to such great lengths to perfect their features when it’s the imperfections that make a face memorable and appealing—the bumpy nose, the crooked mouth, the uneven eyes. Louise wasn’t exactly beautiful, but something in her face drew you in. She had long eyelashes that made her look attentive and innocent and contrasted sharply to a pallor that made her look prematurely world-weary. “Poor Larry,” she said hoarsely. “He’s left with a bigger mess than I am.”

  “His wife?”

  “His pregnant wife. You see, he had bad skin as an adolescent. It’s made him unbelievably insecure.”

  I’ve always had a fondness for acne scars, except on the shoulders, which is where I have them. “Even so,” I said, “he should have told you he was married.”

  I thought of marriage then as an exotic drunken brawl in which a man in ugly shoes and a woman in a girdle hurl insults at each other and make hollow threats. Not pretty, but glamorous somehow, like Joan Crawford in her horror-movie incarnation. In any case, not something to be taken or betrayed lightly.

  “I told him that,” she said. “Did you hear me tell him that?”

  “I did.”

  “I wouldn’t have gotten involved with him if I’d known.” She started to
loosen the lacings on her enormous boots. “On the other hand. . . maybe I would have.” When she bit down on her lower lip, her overbite became more apparent and appealing. “You never say anything in class.”

  I was pleased that she’d noticed. “I usually don’t get to the reading on time.”

  “Oh, that doesn’t matter. You just listen for a while and then take a position that contradicts everything everyone else has said. You have to make it completely insupportable if you want professors to think you’re a genius. You’re gay, right?” she asked, without any hint of judgment, and then started to tell me about an ex-boyfriend of hers she thought I might like to meet. I was happy she accepted it so calmly, but I was a little disappointed that she’d stolen the fanfare and drama of revealing to her the central secret Fact of My Life, the only Fact of My Life that I was aware of at the time. Before I even had time to comment, she changed the subject again. “It’s for the best it’s over with Larry.”

  She had on a long-sleeved T-shirt, and she pushed the sleeves up to her elbows. I was surprised by the frailty of her arms; the bones of her wrists stuck out and her skin had a skim-milk cast. Her pale eyes began to wander around the room and settled on a shelf of books behind us. It was obvious she was about to cry. It was one thing to watch a stranger cry from a safe distance, but to sit beside a weeping acquaintance was a different story. “You’ll have a lot less trouble without him,” I said quickly. “No relationship, no demands. You’ll probably get better grades.”

  “No, no,” she said. “I get good grades anyway. It’s because I don’t really care about them. If I cared about them, I’d be flunking out. As long as you don’t want something too passionately, it’s bound to come your way sooner or later.”

  We studied together for the rest of the semester, and by Christmas we were fast friends. We shared a sublet that summer, a dilapidated apartment with a view of the Berkshires, and we split the cost of a used Volkswagen van. Louise had taken a job in a drugstore. She had a half-baked idea that she might like to go into pharmacology. It was a hot summer, the air still most days and the mountains shrouded in thick haze. I found a job working on the grounds of a vast resort hotel. I didn’t have any half-baked ideas of going into the hotel business, but there was an atmosphere of sexual possibility on the wide, shady porches and in the steamy, fragrant gardens which excited me, even though the furtive glances suggested more than they ever delivered. In the evenings, Louise and I would drive our van into the mountains to cool off and watch the sunset. She was usually on her third beer by the time I got home from work, and eager to talk as we watched the valley turn red and then purple and then fade away altogether.