The Man of the House

by Stephen McCauley

  “How do you mean worse?”

  “I mean sicker. More cranky, snapping at me all the time, complaining about meals. And he says his allowance isn’t enough. I might have to ask you to pitch in a few more dollars.”

  “Agnes,” I said, “has he . . . has he been going out more?”

  “Why would you ask that?” There was an edge of hysteria in her voice. Agnes lived in fear of conspiracies and inexplicable coincidences. I blamed our Catholic upbringing.

  “No reason. I was just wondering.”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, he has been going out more. I think he’s going for some kind of treatments he doesn’t want to tell me about. It fits with his whole mood.”

  “There are some other possibilities, you know.”

  “Such as what?”

  “Well, maybe we should sit down and go over this situation again.”

  “Situation?”

  “He’s been living with you since Mom died. Maybe it’s time to review the options.”

  “If you’re talking about a nursing home, Clyde, I won’t. I just won’t. I couldn’t live with myself, and neither could you.”

  Agnes’s voice was getting chirpy, as if she was about to burst into tears. She had a way of bursting into tears or fits of inappropriate laughter, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. She’d inherited this trait, along with her insecurities and her bad digestion, from our mother. I tried to change the subject, but the options weren’t promising: her business, the cookbook, her daughter. One topic seemed as perilous as the next.

  “I was thinking about coming up for a visit,” I said. “I could try and see what’s going on with him.”

  “Please. When?”

  Faced with the prospect of actually setting a date, I felt my stomach start to tighten and the first knot of a headache take shape behind my eyes. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe sometime before Thanksgiving?”

  “Thanksgiving? It’s not even September. What about tomorrow night?”

  “I have plans,” I said.

  “Oh. Are you seeing Gordon?”

  “Gordon? Gordon and I haven’t been living together for two years, Agnes! I wish you wouldn’t keep mentioning Gordon!”

  “Don’t jump down my throat, Clyde! I’m under a lot of stress. If it weren’t for the yoga, I don’t know where I’d be.”

  Because Agnes, although accepting of me in a broad, sentimental way, had never quite been able to grasp the concept of a relationship between two men, she’d never been able to understand that Gordon and I had broken up. Because I had never been able to understand that we’d broken up, either, I found her constant mentions of him especially annoying and gratifying. “I hope you’re being careful, whoever you’re going out with.”

  Agnes’s safe-sex lecture. She was always cautioning me to be careful, and I was always advising her to take risks.

  “Maybe in a couple of weeks,” I said, worn down by the pleading in her tone. “I’ll talk it over with Marcus. He mentioned he’d like to come.”

  “Oh, Clyde, I’m sure you must have misunderstood. Marcus is probably too busy with Harvard and girlfriends to visit me.”

  “Well, maybe he won’t.”

  “Why are you so discouraging? I’d love to see him. He’s always so cheerful and Southern.”

  “Cheerful” was Agnes’s highest compliment. As far as I could tell, it meant someone who made her forget for a moment how unhappy she was. I still hadn’t broken the code on “Southern.”

  We set a date. I said goodbye and started to hang up.

  “Oh my,” Agnes sighed.

  That remorseful, crushed sigh put my older sister right there in my bedroom: low ceiling, sloping walls, scattered socks, Agnes, and me. Agnes wore a fragrance she referred to as a “splash” called Summer Meadow, and I could practically smell its sweet scent, and I wanted to hold her hand and let her have a good cry and try to make everything all right for her. “What’s the matter, sweetheart?” I asked.

  “Oh, nothing. Just. . . everything.”

  “Agnes,” I said, “it’s going to be fine. One of these days, everything is going to turn around.”

  “I just wish I had a nice beefsteak tomato to have for lunch tomorrow,” she said.

  On that note, I decided to hang up and did.

  IT RAINED STEADILY ALL MORNING THE DAY Louise arrived in Cambridge, one of those drumming, insistent rains that signal the hesitant approach of a new season. It wasn’t quite two weeks since my dinner with Vance, but already summer seemed to be losing its sweaty grip.

  After talking with Agnes, I’d attempted a few calls to my father, but hadn’t succeeded in going through with them. My father’s telephone style was to pick up the receiver and, instead of saying hello, to wait in stony, indignant silence for the intrusive caller to announce himself first, a test of wills. I always felt as if I was being sucked into that silent void on the other end of the line and hung up, exactly the effect my father hoped his intimidation would have. But in addition to my being intimidated, there was a small part of me that feared he might hang up if he recognized my voice. Oddly, I always felt sure he knew it was me anyway, and after every attempted call, I came down with a crushing headache.

  There must have been a small leak in the roof above my attic rooms, because whenever it rained, a brown, oblong water stain in one corner of the ceiling deepened in color and spread. I loved to lie in bed and read, with the rain driving against the leaking roof. The morning Louise arrived, I looked up occasionally from a stultifying biography of an opera singer to watch the slow progress of the seepage. It was tremendously reassuring to me to know that no matter how bad the situation got, I would never have to fix it. I’d called the landlord two years earlier. I’d done my duty. If the roof fell in, it wasn’t my concern. It made me feel secure, lying there, watching someone else’s house deteriorate around me while I read about someone else’s deteriorating life.

  By early afternoon, the storm had passed and the sun had come out. The steam was rising off the soaked pavement when Louise called. I was shaken by the sound of her raspy voice, now only a mile or so away. Her voice had a way of pulling me back in time, since, despite my ongoing fondness for her and the distant way I kept up with her, our friendship existed in the past.

  “I can’t believe you’re so close,” I said. “I really can’t.”

  “Neither can I, Clyde. Tell me I haven’t made a hideous, irreparable mistake I’ll regret for the rest of my miserable life.”

  “Of course you haven’t,” I said. Louise was always looking for reassurance, although she never accepted any. “Why would you think that?”

  “We unloaded the car and the house is filled with boxes UPS dropped off weeks ago and I’ve got a stiff neck and the trip is over and now we have to start living. It’s daunting.”

  “But you’re an expert at this sort of thing,” I reminded her. “You’ve been relocating for years.”

  “I think that’s what makes it so difficult. The thrill is gone. I used to feel like an old hippie, but today I just feel old. Will you come over and tell me it’s fine? It really is a beautiful place, a total fluke I landed anything this nice from three thousand miles away.” She lowered her voice to a hoarse whisper. “Ben loves it, even though he won’t admit it. Come before we both lose our enthusiasm, shredded as it is already.”

  I copied down her address and told her I’d be over in a few hours. I could have left right then, but it was the middle of the day, and I didn’t want to make a bad first impression by having it look as if I didn’t have more important things to do. Or at least other things to do. Already I could feel the gaps in my résumé open wider beneath my feet. In the dozen years since graduation, Louise had racked up quite a list of accomplishments—books, offspring, foreign languages, and teaching credentials. The most I could point to was a series of failed attempts at advanced education, one relationship I hadn’t been able to stay in and a more recent one I hadn’t been able to leave, and
a few trial memberships at health clubs. I’d done some traveling, too, but travel on an otherwise unimpressive résumé looks like what it usually is: an attempt to give the appearance of forward momentum to a life that’s really at a standstill.

  I’d recently come to the conclusion that much of the stop-and-start quality of my experience thus far (with the emphasis on stop) could be traced back to my inability or unwillingness to really participate in anything, even my own life. I’m not a joiner. I have all the instincts of an outsider, but saying even that implies membership in an avant-garde, bohemian sort of society that I didn’t fit into, either. In my worst, most self-pitying moments, I felt as if I were doomed to live in the off-season, like a tourist on a round-the-world journey who arrives at every port a month after the shops have been boarded up, the restaurants closed, and the crowds dispersed for a more agreeable climate. My timing was off, my instincts were awry.

  I’d vowed that if I ever made enough money, I’d get into therapy and try to move past my neuroses, but I only made the vow because I was fairly certain my financial status wasn’t likely to change soon.

  I’d always been pretty skeptical about the whole therapy industry anyway. It reminded me of a course I’d taught at The Learning Place, called “Telling the Truth: How to Keep a Journal.” It had attracted the most blatantly dishonest and self-dramatizing students I’d ever had, the only kind of people, when you came right down to it, who’d bother to keep a journal in the first place.

  In the late afternoon, I walked to the address Louise had given me. It was still quite warm, but the rain had indeed driven in a new weather system, and there was a suggestion of fall in the air, a ripple of cool I felt whenever I passed under the shade of a tree, something wistful in the angle of the sun. I saw several moving vans circling the streets, ruthlessly pulling up over curbstones and lopping off the branches of trees, a sure sign that summer was ending and another wearying influx of hopeful students was under way. It was demoralizing, the sight of all that intelligence, beauty, and human potential that washed into town every September, all that Harvard brilliance scrambling to find something significant to do with itself. I liked living in a college town—good movies, good bookstores, great trash on the sidewalks in May—but for my next life I’d make it a junior college with a bad reputation that attracted only slackers. It would be a relief to be surrounded by people whose lives I could more easily understand and who didn’t have quite as far to fall when they fell from grace.

  Louise’s sublet was in one of the many hidden pockets of Cambridge in which the air is usually cool and fragrant and the architecture grand and eccentric. Her house was located on the far end of a dead-end street halfway up a steep, shady hill. As directed, I looked for a towering yellow Victorian with a white picket fence. At the corner of the fence, nearly hidden under the sagging branches of an enormous hydrangea bush, was a gate with the number 171/2 artfully painted on it. I pushed this open and entered a sprawling garden lushly overgrown with end-of-summer flowers: white and magenta phlox and black-eyed Susans and tall spikes of purple loosestrife. The carriage house sat at the back of the garden, at the end of a narrow flagstone path. It was a tiny building, the same shade of yellow as the main house, with a steeply pitched roof and wide windows glinting in the sun. The front of it was covered with morning glory vines and ropes of autumn clematis. It was one of those overdone renovations with Investment emblazoned across every clapboard, but I was so charmed by the sight of it, I didn’t notice and almost stepped on a small brown dog that appeared to be doing somersaults in the middle of the path.

  “Sorry about that,” I said.

  The dog looked at me with a submissive, cowering glance, tail tucked under and head down, as if I’d threatened it with a club. It seemed to be part terrier, not much bigger than a good-size cat and so scruffy and bowlegged it must have been the product of a furtive, lustful coupling behind a breeder’s back. Its fur was dark brown except for two beige forelegs, light stripes above the eyes that looked exactly like eyebrows, and a tuft of beige fuzz that stood up on its head and gave the creature the look of something drawn by Dr. Seuss, or maybe by one of his less talented imitators.

  I crouched down to pat it, but the poor mutt whimpered, dived into one of the flower beds, and started to kick up the dirt around a cluster of snapdragons with a demented fury, as if it were digging its own grave.

  As I approached the house, I heard the voices of a man and a woman, arguing. I knocked hesitantly on the door. A woman shouted, “It’s open!” in a very unwelcoming tone, and I walked into a tiny, book-lined study, the floor of which was strewn with balled-up newspaper and overturned cartons.

  The woman who’d shouted me in was talking in an equally unfriendly tone to someone else: “I don’t understand why you didn’t solve this before I got home, Thomas. That’s what I don’t understand.”

  There was a sound of gurgling, like a baby spitting up, and then a man mumbled something.

  I followed the voices into an open, high-ceilinged room flooded with hazy late-afternoon sunlight. Louise was sitting on a long bamboo sofa with her feet thrust out in front of her and crossed at the ankles and her arms folded across her chest. She had on a pair of rumpled khakis and a big white T-shirt. She was barefoot. For reasons she’d never made clear, she’d always claimed to hate her ankles and her feet. It was one of the few complaints I ever heard her make about her appearance, but in the time we’d been friends, she’d made it frequently. The sun was striking one side of her face, and she was squinting into it. She looked exhausted. There’d always been something luminous about Louise’s pallor, but now the sunlight was being decidedly unkind to her, making her skin look as lifeless and rumpled as her khakis.

  She smiled at me vaguely and waved without unclasping her arms. It was a mercifully anticlimactic greeting. I hate big hellos and all goodbyes.

  Standing on the other side of the room was a tall woman, in a gray skirt and a silk blouse, and an addled man, balding on top, ponytailed in back. He was bouncing a baby, whose face was so pink and contorted it looked as if it was about to explode.

  “Who’s this?” the woman asked. She looked at me with a fixed, blank expression, but the question didn’t seem to be addressed to anyone in particular. She was one of those no-nonsense types who make the world go round and resent having to drag the dead weight of the rest of us behind them.

  “This is Clyde,” Louise said. “A friend of mine.” Her voice was raspier and even more hoarse than it had sounded on the phone, as if she were thoroughly worn down. I realized I’d made a big mistake in waiting so long to show up. Clearly, her frayed enthusiasm was all gone. “You don’t mind if I have visitors, do you?”

  “Oh boy, another victim,” the woman said. “I only wish Thomas had settled this before I got home. That isn’t unfair, is it?”

  She looked at me when she said this, but it wasn’t a question so much as a reproach to her husband. I had no idea what to say or do with myself, so I sat on the sofa next to my old friend.

  “Oh, Clyde,” Louise said quietly, “those glasses.”

  “Awful?” I asked.

  “Terrible. They make you look asthmatic.”

  All my concerns about seeing her again vanished. There’s really nothing more intimate than the right kind of insult. I leaned over and kissed her. She put her arm through mine and nestled against me. Her hair, her clothes, and even her skin smelled heavily, though not unpleasantly, of cigarettes.

  “We have a rule about pets,” the man explained to me, shifting the baby from one arm to the other. “It’s the garden. The gardener, actually. I’m Thomas. My wife, Camille.” He walked toward the sofa and extended his hand but, remembering the baby, retreated back to his corner. He had on short pants, white athletic socks, and a pair of those ghastly New Age sandals with nubby rubber soles that look like a bed of nipples.

  “Are you also a writer?” Camille asked me. Her tone was intimidatingly impatient, as if either a yes or a no
answer would be equally predictable and boring.

  If you could look past her sedate outfit and sensible jewelry, you could see that she was quite young, probably not thirty. Somehow, I’d gone directly from feeling at a disadvantage because I was younger than those in authority to feeling at a disadvantage because I was older than those in authority.

  “I teach at The Learning Place.”

  Husband and wife exchanged glances. It was the first indication of compatibility I’d seen, and I found it reassuring, despite the fact that I was the butt of their mutual disapproval. I should have said, “I teach in Cambridge,” and let them think I was a tenured Harvard professor trying to be modest.

  The baby’s face was getting redder and more bloated, like an overinflated balloon. Suddenly, she popped: her eyes and mouth flew open, and she flung herself against Thomas’s shoulder and let out a tremendous wail.

  Camille and Thomas returned to recriminations in what was, apparently, their private shorthand: “Yes, at three. . .” “At three!” “But she didn’t even . . .” “Oh, I’m tired of that excuse. . .” “All right, but where does it get me?”

  I felt Louise relaxing against my shoulder, as if she was sighing with relief that the couple was distracted or possibly that she wasn’t one of a dueling couple herself, a favorite theme with her.

  “Just take her outside,” Camille said. “It’s obvious I’m going to have to deal with this anyway.”

  “I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of you, Clyde.” Thomas was shouting over the baby’s cries. “That. . . school’s in the neighborhood, isn’t it?”

  But before I could answer, Camille nodded significantly at her husband, and he walked out. Camille’s shoulders dropped and she flopped into a chair near the sofa. “The baby takes after her father,” she said. “And that’s not meant as an insult.” She removed a pair of tiny pearl studs from her ears. “I suppose you think I’m a horrible person, Louise, making a scene about a little dog.”