The Man of the House

by Stephen McCauley

  Louise had been an illegitimate child, a category her son, Ben, would have fit into if it still existed, which, for all practical purposes, it no longer did. She’d been raised by an aunt and uncle, and although her childhood had been happy enough, it was obvious she considered herself an orphan. She had a mania for self-sufficiency, which sometimes amounted to finding someone to take care of her.

  She always had admirers, mostly men in their late twenties, men with jobs and cars who were drawn to her resourcefulness and probably all that trembling loneliness that was peeking out from behind her front of bold independence. Usually, though, her admirers had a wife or girlfriend in the picture, someone who wasn’t quite an ex, and most of her relationships evolved into one-sided friendships. Louise got calls at I A.M. from former boyfriends who were a little drunk and wanted to tell her how wonderful she was and how they wished things had worked out differently. She often seemed dismayed by her relationships, but it was clear she would have been terrified by a man who didn’t have other irons in the fire, other lives to live, and other women to marry.

  She smoked too much, drank too heavily, could be frustratingly stubborn, and sometimes, in a room full of people, she seemed to drift away, as if she were attending to a secret sadness. Once, when I asked her if she was happy, she said, “I’m not destined for a big hilarious life. You can tell that, can’t you?”

  It was true. She wasn’t morose or self-pitying, but she had the demeanor of someone who was resigned to making the best of a bad situation.

  One hot afternoon at the end of that first summer we shared an apartment, I went into Louise’s room and lay down on the bed beside her. She was reading and smoking, and I watched her for a while as her eyes moved across the pages. She’d cut her hair off that summer, making her look even more careless about her appearance and more dashing as a result. There was an exhaust fan in the window, spinning the smoke into a thread and sucking it out of the room. The summer was nearly over. Our van was up on blocks in the driveway beside the house, and the tenants we’d sublet from were due back in a week. I was moving to a small room in a boardinghouse, and Louise was moving into an apartment with a girlfriend.

  After a while, Louise put down her book and rested her head on my shoulder. “I don’t think I’ll ever be a pharmacist, Clyde.”

  “The amazing part,” I said, “is that you ever thought you would.”

  “Look, man, it’s a living. I have to worry about making a living. I guess I thought it was a practical career I could tap into. Counting out pills. I thought I’d like it. Now I think I’ll end up doing something very impractical.”

  “I think that’s a good idea, Louise.” I’d never really understood people with practical goals. The premed students with their chemistry books and the eerie economics majors with their statistics and bar graphs seemed to exist in a parallel universe, one I wouldn’t have known how to enter even if I’d wanted to. “Did you have a particular impractical field in mind?”

  “I might write, for instance,” she said.

  “A good choice. You can string that one along for decades.”

  Like everyone else who’s read a novel, I’d considered this option myself, but I’d concluded it required too much stamina. Despite her exhausted appearance, Louise had stamina. I was waiting for some unsuspected talent or ambition—an aptitude for physics, let’s say, or the ability to play the piano by ear, or a desire to speed skate competitively—to rear its head and lead me on. If none of it worked out, I figured I could always go to law school.

  For me and Louise and for everyone we knew, the world seemed filled with unlimited possibilities. But when we said, as we often did, that anything could happen, even the most cynical of us said it with the vain optimism that’s one of youth’s most dangerous blind spots. Certainly in those days, and for a few promiscuous years after, there didn’t seem to be such things as mistakes that couldn’t be corrected or diseases that couldn’t be cured.

  The summer after graduation, Louise and I shared another apartment, a bigger one than the first, but without a view. In September she was going to France, where she’d lined up an au pair position, and I was heading off to Chicago to enroll in the first of many graduate programs I’d never finish. For three months, I felt caught in a no-man’s-land between the home I’d grown up in and couldn’t go back to and the one I wanted to inhabit but didn’t yet know how to create for myself. If a picture fell off the wall, Louise and I left it on the floor. I didn’t bother to shelve books as I finished reading them; I’d just heave them into a corner, where they’d be easier to pack.

  Some nights, I’d come home from work late and Louise would sit me down in the kitchen and tell me, lucidly and in extraordinary detail, about a story she was writing or was planning to write. It took me a while to realize that this outpouring of detail, her most enthusiastic talk, usually meant she’d been drinking. She was one of those unusual people who seem to be more clearheaded when slightly drunk, even though her pale eyes got red and her lids heavy. I didn’t think anything of it at first—careless inebriation is another privilege of youth—and besides, nothing seemed to matter very much that summer. We were both in limbo. But after a while, it began to dawn on me that I often saw her drunk but never saw her drinking. It was the loneliness of the whole enterprise that worried me.

  Marcus lived in a basement apartment in our building. He’d graduated from Amherst when Louise and I were freshmen at our school. He was already practicing the hanger-on skills he’d perfected by the time I caught up with him again, years later, in Cambridge. We’d watch him coming and going through a little screened porch on the front of the house. He was blond and deeply tanned, and in those days, he walked with a healthy dose of self-assurance. Late in the summer he started coming by the apartment for coffee and asking Louise out to the movies.

  One night when Louise and I were having dinner, she asked, apropos of nothing, “Do you think I should?”

  I knew exactly what she meant. The question of whether or not she’d sleep with Marcus had been hovering since we first noticed him. “Go ahead,” I told her. “I would. You’re leaving, he’s leaving. What could be more romantic than that?”

  For nearly a month, I’d been having a torrid love affair with a man I couldn’t stand the sight of. It seemed entirely possible to be passionate about anyone, as long as you were fairly certain you wouldn’t have to look at him after a set date.

  I don’t think Louise’s affair with Marcus lasted more than a couple of weeks. By early September, Marcus had packed off to Harvard. Louise and I put our belongings on the sidewalk and sold them. I drove Louise to the airport in Montreal and waved to her as she boarded the plane. She had two suitcases, both small, and was wearing a pair of overalls. She was proud of the fact that she was traveling light—undeserved pride, as I was soon to find out.

  I heard from her only once when she was in France, a cryptic postcard that was all weather and paintings. When she returned, she sent a letter from California. “I’m a bilingual mother, Clyde. I’ve moved out here for a while. Probably forever.”

  I never thought all that much about Ben’s paternity. Louise had told me his father was an Australian she’d met in Paris and had lost touch with by the time she discovered she was pregnant. Reading between the lines of her first novel, you had to assume the husband of the family she worked for in France, a chubby doctor, had fathered her baby. I suppose I accepted the truth as some hazy confusion of the two stories; Ben was enough like Louise in appearance and demeanor to make the question seem irrelevant somehow. Besides, the idea of simply not having a father had always struck me as enviably uncomplicated.

  That afternoon as I lay in my cramped attic rooms with the black cast-iron fan clattering on the floor in front of me, and all that waltzing accordion music playing in the background, I entertained myself by guessing what complications she might be alluding to. But finally I put the letter aside, reminding myself that Louise had a streak of drama she loved to pl
ay on.

  I WOULD GLADLY HAVE SPENT THE NEXT several days or weeks—or however long it took Louise to drive across the country—thinking about my old friend and her life, largely because the whole business demanded so little of me and provided a distraction from those things that demanded more. For example, Agnes and the bundle of family misery she was carrying on her shoulders. Several days after her letter arrived, I finally got around to reading it. It was typical of my sister’s notes and her style of communication in general: reproaches disguised as apologies, cries for help disguised as gentle reproaches, and an overriding tone of despair that was barely disguised at all. She’d begun one sentence: As for Barbara, but then had drawn three lines through the words, as if she couldn’t bring herself to discuss her teenage daughter. The only point she made clearly was that our father seemed to be getting “worse” and she needed to talk about the situation with me. But even this wasn’t as unequivocal as it seemed. When dealing with matters paternal, Agnes spoke in coded language. It was possible that “worse” meant sicker, but she usually used the word when she meant to say that he was becoming more demanding and critical of her than ever.

  I phoned Agnes several times over the course of the next few days. She always picked up after half a ring, a sign that she’d been waiting by her office phone, ready to pounce on a potential client.

  “E and A Resources, Inc. Can I help you?”

  The flutey forced cheerfulness in her voice and that bright uprise on “help” got to me every time. I wanted to start all over again—not with the phone call, but with my whole life. As soon as I heard her greeting, I hung up.

  What finally compelled me to go through with contacting Agnes was a dinner I had with my friend Vance Merkin.

  Vance was one of several people I’d met through my former lover Gordon and the only one I continued to see on a regular basis. Gordon himself had been a twenty-four-year-old law student when I met him. He was standing behind me in line at a cash register in the Harvard Coop, delivering a nonstop monologue to a friend, a rant that swooped dizzyingly from environmental law to Latin American politics to infamous celebrity fashion faux pas. He had a rumbling voice that was excessively deep in an unconvincing sort of way, as if he was pulling in his chin to strangle his larynx and collapse down into a lower register. The voice was completely at odds with his outrage over what some minor movie actress had had the audacity to wear to the Oscars four years earlier and made him sound like a truckdriver with a Liz Smith complex. When I finally turned around, I saw a short, chunky guy in a loose summer shirt, a pair of saggy seersucker shorts that made his legs look about as long as his forearms, and cheap plastic flip-flops. He had a sloppy, slatternly demeanor—shirt half tucked in, hair rumpled—that immediately fired my interest. There can be something mesmerizingly sexy about laziness, particularly if it’s combined with intellectual curiosity and manic, gossipy talk. His shirt revealed a gentle roll of stomach, another plus. I’m not especially partial to fat, but owing to my general insecurity, I prefer going to bed with men who have convex guts, since they’re more likely to mistake my emaciation for a washboard stomach.

  Gordon and I went from the cash register to a coffee shop to cohabitation just like that, one two three.

  I blamed the eagerness with which I leapt into love with Gordon on a lack of attentiveness. Less than a year before we met, I’d managed to extricate myself from a devoted lover and believed that I wasn’t looking for another relationship and wasn’t due to find one, a relaxed state of mind that made me especially vulnerable to bumping into one headfirst.

  We lived together for two years, and then Gordon graduated from law school and from me at roughly the same time. He left me after delivering a speech that sounded suspiciously like one I’d heard at his commencement exercises. New Beginnings, Looking Ahead—god-awful greeting-card sentiments he’d obviously taken too much to heart. I was considerably more shattered by his departure than I ever would have guessed. I’d have guessed that our relationship was almost at the point of dying peacefully in its sleep anyway. We’d traveled the predictable route from passionate groping at the movies to eating dinner watching TV. I’d begun to clench my teeth when I heard a sentence that started, “If you don’t mind me saying so” or “Don’t take this the wrong way.” I found it more and more difficult to say “Drive carefully” when Gordon left for a trip.

  But the sense of rejection I felt at his departure was so complete and overwhelming, I was still reeling from it two years later and trying to figure out a way to patch my wounds. It was obvious, even to me, that my reaction to his leaving was so out of line with what I’d been feeling for him that he must have tapped into a deep reservoir of hurt that had been waiting to drown me for years. Still, the only way I could think to make things right was to keep my love for him alive in some locked chamber of my heart and pretend that he’d made a gross mistake and was bound to come back to correct it. When he did, well, then we could get down to the business of going our separate ways.

  I knew better than to talk with friends about my lingering feelings of affection for Gordon; it’s considered chivalrous to maintain feelings for a former lover only if you’re the one who ended the relationship in the first place or if, as is so often the case these days, you’ve been widowed.

  I broke the rule of discretion only with Vance Merkin. He and Gordon had been friends in law school and still saw each other at lawyerly functions. And Vance was in no position to pass judgment on me. For the four years I’d known him, he’d been obsessing over a young man with whom he’d had an unconsummated seven-month relationship. If my attitude toward my ex was pathetic, at least it wasn’t as pathetic as his. He’d arranged his whole life around his obsession with Carl in a way that I probably would have found frightening if it hadn’t suited my purposes so well.

  Vance and I met from time to time at a restaurant in Boston’s grimy financial district, a neighborhood tucked between the fashionable shopping streets and the waterfront. The restaurant was close to where Vance lived, but he insisted upon going there not for convenience but because Carl had worked in the kitchen for three months more than a decade earlier and one of the ancient waitresses claimed to remember him.

  I had a genuine fondness for Vance that went beyond the connection with Gordon. He’d graduated from Yale at twenty and Harvard Law at twenty-four. He was still under thirty (although he looked a good fifty) and was making well over a hundred grand a year. Most of his income was spent on dinners, clothing, and the expensive gifts he lavished on Carl’s mother, a widow who lived in a suburb north of Boston. (Carl himself had departed for a commune in San Francisco long before I’d met Vance. According to Vance, he’d discovered he had bone cancer and had moved to the West Coast to spare his mother the pain of watching his illness progress. According to Gordon’s rumor mill, Carl was perfectly healthy and was simply fleeing from Vance.) Vance had boundless neurotic energy and great intelligence, both of which he squandered on trivial concerns. Above all else, he was a kind man and, like all kind people, pleasant to be with and mildly depressed.

  I met him on a balmy August night, after nearly a week of aborted calls to Agnes. I’d taken the subway into Boston and, an hour past the agreed-upon time, was still waiting on a corner near the restaurant. The streets in that part of town were always empty in the evening, and the whole city took on a pleasant deserted atmosphere I love—as if a bomb had wiped out the crowds but the subway was still conveniently running. The swath of sky visible between the granite buildings had turned bright purple as the sun set, a fleeting few minutes of magenta beauty.

  I’d taken a seat on the sidewalk with my back pressed against one of the crumbling gray buildings and immersed myself in the last chapter of Wuthering Heights, trying mentally to compose a lecture on it for class. Not that I needed to worry. I’d been teaching a series of unrelated courses at the adult ed center for several years, and experience had taught me that it didn’t matter all that much what I said. Few of the
students who enrolled in the classes actually read the assigned books, and a small percentage of those who did had any interest in discussing them. Whether I talked about Cathy and Heathcliff or Ishmael and Ahab or Batman and Robin, the class would listen in polite silence for about ten minutes. Then someone would ask an irrelevant question and the group would debate an amorphous topic unrelated to the book in question. The week before, in the middle of my halting lecture on narrative structure, someone had initiated a discussion of sex education in elementary schools that had gone on for the better part of an hour.

  But I was determined to do justice to the ending. A teacher can get away with any number of fumbled inanities and inaccurate statements about a book as long as he’s brilliant about the ending. Or at least coherent.

  My stab at having a life of the mind was cut short by a taxi making the corner at the far end of the street. It came to a halt in front of me, and Vance burst from it as if he’d been shoved from behind. He bounced across the street and embraced me, rattling off a long, incomprehensible list of apologies.