The Man of the House

by Stephen McCauley

  “My son thinks you’re a horrible person,” Louise said. “Not me.”

  “I’m constitutionally incapable of giving in. Plus, I don’t like animals.” She slipped the earrings into the pocket of her skirt. “I’m just not interested in all that fur and panting. I might as well be honest about it.”

  She had a very practical haircut, a drip-dry bowl cut, and didn’t appear to be wearing makeup. Up and out of the house in half an hour, that type. Unless I was mistaken, the marriage was one of those teacher-student flirtations that had gone way too far.

  Louise was nervously shifting her weight on the sofa, as if she was trying to prevent herself from pouncing. Her face was considerably leaner than the last time I’d been with her, her flesh settled in closer to her bones, and despite her pale-blue eyes, and that appealing tomboy’s overbite, and the freckles scattered across her nose, she’d lost her carefree girlishness and, to my disappointment, had finally, visibly, become a full-fledged adult. She reached into a canvas bag at her feet and pulled out a pack of Marlboros. “We found the dog after I talked with you about the sublet. I wasn’t keeping anything from you intentionally.” She produced a large ceramic ashtray from her bag and set it on the coffee table. “You didn’t say anything about smoking.”

  “I’m not saying anything now.”

  “Well, good. Now, are you going to let me talk you into the dog or not? Because if you’re not, we can save ourselves a lot of time.”

  Camille shrugged. “I’m not.” She said it so casually, the dog was clearly a lost cause.

  “Fine,” Louise said. “Give us twenty-four hours and we’ll figure something out.”

  “Fine. Let us know if you need anything. You might as well come straight to me, since Thomas is useless.” She started to head out, then stopped in the doorway. “By the way,” she said, “we read one of your novels in my book group. The one about the baby. We all loved it. The group can’t wait to meet you.”

  Louise threw herself into the chair Camille had been sitting in. It was a big, overstuffed thing, its maroon slipcovers printed with ivory peonies, and although it had propped Camille up as if she were a queen on a throne, it seemed to swallow Louise whole.

  “Is this a big crisis?” I asked her.

  “It could be.” She arranged her legs under her, carefully hiding her feet. “Oh, Clyde,” she said hoarsely, “I’ve really fucked everything up, haven’t I? Tell me I haven’t, even if you don’t believe it.”

  “You haven’t,” I said.

  “Of course I have. And I wanted us to have one of those phony, huggy reunions.” She lit her cigarette and scattered the smoke with her hand. “Awful part is, I like that kind of woman: bossy, knows what she wants. Why shouldn’t she? Well, she isn’t going to step on my toes. No way, man. She picked the wrong person to wrestle with.” Louise looked around at the chaos of boxes and newspaper and heaps of clothing. “I wonder if I kept a copy of the lease.”

  A door slammed on the floor above, and Benjamin came pounding down the staircase. He had a defiant gait, but it was obvious from the smudges on his cheeks and the drained look in his eyes that he’d been crying. Although he still looked like a little boy, he was virtually unrecognizable from the last time I’d seen him. He was gangly now, and awkward, with the slumped, self-conscious posture I’d noticed on my niece, Barbara: an adolescent’s conviction that every move is being watched by an interested adult, which, at the moment, was absolutely true.

  He had Louise’s pale skin and lank red hair and a cluster of freckles on each side of his face, right along the cheekbones. His nose was broad and soft-looking, as if it hadn’t quite taken shape yet, and his ears stuck straight out from his head, like two little red wings. He was dressed in an absurd pair of dark-purple shorts that hung down below his knees, a big black T-shirt, and an enormous pair of green sneakers. He looked like a scarecrow someone had thrown together too hastily and hadn’t given an adequate portion of stuffing. Standing in front of Louise with his arms folded resolutely across his chest, he snapped his hair out of his eyes. “I just want you to know one thing,” he said. “It’s all of us or none of us. I’m not kidding. I’d rather have myself put to sleep than him.”

  “I doubt it will come to that, sweetheart. Can’t you even say hello to Clyde?”

  He nodded at me with his eyes averted. “Hi, Clyde,” he said shyly. He had a surprisingly raspy voice, as if he had inherited or was imitating his mother’s.

  “You look like a whole new person,” I said. “Since the last time I saw you. Do you remember? I came to visit when you lived in San Francisco.”

  “Benjamin remembers everything, so watch what you say around him,” said Louise. “He’s grown, Clyde. It happens at his age. Fortunately, he’ll never outgrow those clothes he’s wearing, unless some sort of glandular disturbance kicks in.”

  Ben had those weirdly shapeless legs all kids his age seem to have as they start to shoot up: protruding hipbones, knees, and ankles, with a couple of slim, undercooked baguettes in between to separate them. But it was more than his height; the proportions of his face had changed, and despite his coloring, he didn’t look all that much like Louise anymore. There was a grave, handsome set to his features that was all his own.

  “I’m five seven almost,” he said. “But let’s not change the subject, all right?”

  “All right, sweetheart.” Louise was holding her cigarette between her middle and ring fingers, and the smoke was drifting up into her eyes, causing her to squint. Her hair was stringy, as if she hadn’t washed it in a couple of days. Once, slightly greasy hair had made her look nonchalantly glamorous, but it wasn’t a look she could really pull off anymore, just as I could no longer skip shaving for a weekend without looking like an unwashed speed freak by Sunday night. “I just need to figure something out.”

  Benjamin went to one of the wide, sunny windows and looked out for a moment, checking on the dog, I suppose. Then he came and slumped down on the sofa at the opposite end from me, his arms across his chest once again. “We can’t dump him after we rescued him. He’s our responsibility.”

  “He’s awfully melodramatic, isn’t he? I don’t remember saying anything about dumping anyone. We have to develop a plan.”

  “You and your plans, Mom. She’s always developing plans. That stupid motel cabin in Indiana. That was some plan. Wow.”

  She stubbed her cigarette out in the big ceramic ashtray. “You can’t blame me for that, kiddo. You have to be fair about the way you spread around blame.”

  “Well, it wasn’t my idea. She has bad judgment sometimes. She almost burned the place down.”

  I nodded, even though I didn’t know what they were talking about and neither of them really seemed to be talking to me. Their conversation was taking on some of the coded intimacy of their landlords’.

  “How did I know the oven wasn’t working?” Louise asked. Then she and Benjamin exchanged glances and broke into laughter. Benjamin rocked forward and crumpled up on the cushions, and his hair fell all over his face. He sat up again and pushed it behind his big ears, a gesture that struck me as terribly familiar, for some reason.

  When he’d gone outside to play with the dog, Louise curled up into a tighter ball on her chair and stretched her T-shirt over her knees. I’d forgotten how small she was, possibly because I’d always thought of her as so self-sufficient and accomplished. Folded up on the chair like this, she didn’t appear to be much bigger than her son. “Do I look like an old woman to you?” she asked abruptly.

  “You look wonderful.” I wasn’t sure if that was true, but since her day was turning out to be such a bust, I figured the least I could do was offer a facile compliment.

  “But older?” She was holding her chin at a slight angle, and I couldn’t tell what she wanted me to say.

  “Maybe a bit.”

  “I’m glad.” She let her chin drop. “I hated being young. I hated everything about it. Almost everything.” She lit another cigarette, inhaled
deeply, and swallowed the smoke as if she were downing one of Agnes’s monster vitamin pills. “Days like today, I wish I was still drinking. I didn’t say that. Well, I said it, but I didn’t mean it.”

  “How about this,” I suggested. “You meant it, but you’re not going to act on it?”

  “That’s even better.” She eyed me through the smoke of her cigarette in a friendly, critical way. “You need sprucing up, Clyde; not that I’m one to talk. You look like you’ve been working too hard.”

  “It’s probably allergies,” I said. I’d picked up on this latest cultural trend—the allergy problem—as a way to publicly explain away every sleepless night, stomach upset, and other disorder that was obviously and embarrassingly psychosomatic in nature. It was doubtful anyone believed it, Louise least of all, but it was an effective conversation-stopper. “What’s the dog’s name?” I asked.

  “Otis. We found him in a rest area off the highway, tied to a picnic table and shaking. A case of abandonment, which is probably why I let Ben take him in. I agree completely with Camille on the subject of dogs, but this wretch got to me. Believe it or not, he’s in better shape emotionally than when we found him.” She uncurled herself and smashed out her cigarette, jostling the big ashtray and spilling ashes onto the top of the coffee table. “Let me show you the rest of the place, in case we get chucked out tomorrow.”

  She took me by the arm and led me through the square, bright rooms of the carriage house. The whole place was furnished in a style that made it look like a sun room in a 1930s summerhouse, with faded floral cushions and toss pillows, wrought-iron tables with tile tops, and cabinets and bureaus covered in weathered, chipped paint. In addition to the living room and the study through which I’d entered, the first floor housed a spotless kitchen and, in the back, Louise’s bedroom. There was a door beside her bed, which led out to the rear of the garden. She opened it, and the room was flooded with the smell of damp earth.

  Battered as some of the furniture was, the house itself appeared brand-new, the walls freshly painted in various shades of white and the floors desperately clean and polished. It felt solid and secure, and when Louise shut the door again, there was a little sucking sound, as if the house were sealing itself off from any assaults by man or nature. The place made me feel momentarily ashamed of the dilapidated wreck I shared with Marcus. Ben’s bedroom, the only room in the loft, looked out on the garden. Unlike the rest of the place, his room was neatly arranged. The bed was made, the pillows were plumped, and the doors of the two closets tightly closed.

  “Obsessively tidy,” Louise said, when she saw me looking over the neat stacks of records in the corner. “He’s compensating for all our moving by keeping strict control over his own stuff. That’s my analysis.” She sat down on the edge of the bed and started to pick at the fuzz on a red plaid blanket. “Poor little Ben,” she said, with some combination of pity and sarcasm.

  I went to the window and looked down at the garden. “You’ll never find any place nicer than this, you know.”

  “Thanks for reminding me. Maybe Camille will move to Colorado tomorrow.”

  “It’s more likely you will, with your track record.”

  “I suppose you’re right. But not tomorrow. The grant keeps us here until the end of December. After that, I haven’t decided. I have the option of hanging on to this place for a while. The tenant’s on a research grant in North Africa.”

  Ben was sitting on a rusted metal chair on the lawn below, holding a red rubber ball in his hand. His baggy clothes had settled around him, as if they were melting into a puddle on the chair. The scruffy mutt was eyeing him warily with his head down, trying to figure out what new kind of torture was being planned for him. When Ben threw the ball, the dog cowered and snuck off into the bushes. I felt a horrible pang of sadness, not for Louise or Ben, but for the pathetically insecure animal. Like a lot of people who know something is missing from their lives but can’t figure out what, I frequently contemplated checking out death row at the Animal Rescue League to find myself a grateful canine companion. It seemed a lot more straightforward and manageable than trying to find a lover or spiritual fulfillment.

  “I could take Otis for a while,” I said. “We have a yard behind the house. The whole neighborhood’s basically a pound.” Most of the troubled families on either side of us had at least one dog, usually a fierce pit bull or German shepherd with a threatening two-syllable name: Rambo, Uzi, Killer, Bullet.

  “No garden?”

  “Marcus tried to grow a patch of marigolds back in May, but it was taken over by weeds before Memorial Day.”

  She smiled at this and looked away. She propped herself up on the bed, with her hands out behind her. For a minute, she looked very much as she did in one of her book-jacket photographs, pretty and bemused and a little too posed to look entirely sincere. “She knows how to take a picture,” Vance had said after looking at the jacket of her last novel, but I wasn’t sure he’d meant it as a compliment. “So how is Marcus, anyway?” she asked.

  “In the middle of a few crises, as usual.”

  “Women?”

  “Women, dissertation, poverty. Are you looking forward to seeing him again?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way.” She started to rap her fingers against the blanket and let her head drop back. “You might say I’m dreading it.”

  “There’s not much to dread, is there?”

  “More than you think,” she said, and snapped her head up. “Listen, you don’t have to take the dog. I’ll figure out something else. I really will.”

  “I want to. Will Ben go for the idea?”

  “You’d better present it as the best thing for the dog. Make it sound as if it’s all for the dog’s sake. Whatever you do, keep me out of it.”

  I’ve always found it unnerving to be around children, especially intelligent ones who can’t be fooled and haven’t yet learned the social usefulness of lying. They have a way of looking directly at you and then quickly away, as if they’ve spotted something hideous, better left unacknowledged.

  So when Louise had gone out to buy food and Ben and I were left sitting opposite each other in the living room, I found myself squirming on the sofa. I’d brought up the idea of taking Otis temporarily, and Ben had immediately retreated into brooding silence. To fill space, I’d asked him what he thought of the house. He’d given me a suspicious glance through his bangs, as if to say: You already know, so why ask? Now he was settled into the overstuffed maroon chair, silently patting the cringing dog.

  “Did Louise write dog food on that shopping list?” he asked abruptly.

  “I’m sure she did,” I said. “It was a pretty complete list.”

  “She never gets the right kind. She always buys the most expensive one, which he doesn’t even like. I should have gone with her.”

  I assumed this meant he was as uncomfortable with me as I was with him. At least he had the dog to pet. I resorted to tying and untying my sneakers in order to keep my hands occupied, and each time I retied them, they got a little tighter. A few more minutes, and my feet would start to swell. Otis was peering across the room at me, his big watery brown eyes suspicious, his ears flattened back.

  “Is he a fussy eater?” I asked.

  Ben obviously considered the answer to this question one more thing that was none of my business, since he didn’t respond to it. “I almost flunked out of school in Seattle. That’s one of the reasons we left. Did Louise tell you?”

  “She didn’t.”

  He nodded—proudly, it seemed to me. “She had a horrible boyfriend, too.”

  “She didn’t mention him, either,” I said. “What was his name?”

  Ben set Otis on the floor, lifted his rear end off the chair, and pulled a piece of paper out of his back pocket. He unfolded it carefully and smoothed it out on his lap. “His name was Dale. He wanted to marry her. Louise wasn’t interested. I made a list of all the breeds Otis might be. I’ll give you the top ten.”


  He read through the list of breeds, giving me a detailed explanation of how Otis fit into the characteristics of each. I listened with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, which, frankly, wasn’t all that much. As far as I could tell, the dog was mostly a mix of assorted toy terriers, with some long-haired dachshund tossed in around the ears. Personality traits were irrelevant, as the creature had clearly been traumatized out of anything but the most rudimentary self-preservation reflexes. But as I listened with drifting attention, I realized that Ben had lapsed into a list of dos and don’ts related to care and feeding. Apparently, I’d missed some connecting link in the conversation in which he’d given his approval to my taking the dog.

  “Don’t hit him,” Ben said. “If he starts to bother you, just shout at him and he’ll crawl off under a bed or something. I’ll take him out for walks in the afternoon.” He folded up the paper and slipped it back into his pocket. “Do you think you could maybe give me a key to the apartment?”

  “I’ll have an extra one made,” I said.

  “You should let me know which rooms are off-limits.” he said.

  “None, I think. But I’ll check with Marcus.”

  “Doesn’t he go out to work during the day?”

  “Well, he goes out,” I said. “Look, Ben, I hope you don’t think I’m taking your dog away from you.”

  “You’re just trying to help. I think it’s the only solution at the moment, don’t you?” He’d inherited his mother’s matter-of-fact attitude toward solving problems. He hooked his hair behind his ears and gave me a very thoughtful and unnerving glance. “To tell you the truth, I’d rather you take him than someone he was going to get really attached to.”

  I nodded distractedly. I was so preoccupied by those oddly familiar ears that I didn’t get around to feeling insulted until later.

  MARCUS WAS SITTING AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, folded over a cup of coffee with his legs wound together, studying a newspaper. Marcus read the newspaper irregularly. Often, he’d pick up an old copy in the hallway or from the top of the trash and read it from cover to cover, completely oblivious of the fact that it was days or even weeks old. “Did you hear?” he’d ask, and then recite some piece of news that had been debated by two-thirds of the population for weeks. I always try to keep up with the news, especially the local news, so that if I’m called for jury duty I can legitimately claim a bias.