The Man of the House

by Stephen McCauley

  Without looking up from the paper, he said, “What’s with the dog?”

  “I’m taking care of it for a while,” I said. I knelt down on the floor and unhooked the leash. He’d seemed surprisingly inept at being walked, stopping one moment and racing ahead the next, then abruptly sitting on the sidewalk as if waiting to be bludgeoned. Now he stood in the middle of the room for a moment, perplexed. The tuft of sandy fur on top of his head made him look especially pathetic, and I patted it down gently to try and grant him some shred of dignity. He darted his eyes from corner to corner and whimpered, then started to shake and wheeze.

  “Whose is it?” Marcus asked.

  “He belongs to Louise’s son.”

  “Small,” Marcus said, even though, as far as I could tell, he still hadn’t seen him.

  Otis began circling the perimeter of the room, anxiously peering into the corners and sniffing. He stood on his hind legs to try and see over the top of the trash can and ended up tipping it over, a catastrophe that induced more wheezing.

  “Is he housebroken?” Marcus asked.

  “Supposedly,” I said.

  “I guess it doesn’t matter much at that size whether he’s house-broken or not. Seems pretty skittish, though.” Marcus looked up for half a second as the dog crawled out to the center of the floor. “Cute,” he said, and immediately went back to the paper. “How’s Louise?”

  “She seems to be doing pretty well. She’s going to call you tomorrow to see about getting together for lunch.”

  Finally, something had captured his interest. He folded up the newspaper and began making faces at Otis.

  “Freaky, aren’t they?” Marcus said, pointing his chin at Otis. “Little hairy emotional creatures. Had one when I was a kid. It got struck by lightning when it was swimming in the river. Big tragedy. I wonder if that has something to do with my procrastination.” Marcus was always bringing up some occurrence of this nature. None sounded very likely, but because I was a Yankee, I felt I had no right to doubt the truth of any eccentric, folksy thing a Southerner told me. “Well, I’m no good with dogs,” he said, “so don’t count on me.” He opened up the newspaper again, wrapped his hair around his big ears, and started to read. “What’s the kid look like?”

  “A little like Louise.” I paused. “A little like you, as a matter of fact.”

  He laughed, obviously flattered in some way. “Don’t pin that on me. I’ve never even been to France.”

  It was nearly midnight when I finally decided I couldn’t wait until the next day to confront Louise. I walked back to her house, along the shadowy, leafy streets—no moving vans or giddy students now—and quietly pushed open the gate leading into the yard. The second floor of the carriage house was dark, but a thin yellow light was spilling out of the study. I peered in; the room was empty. I walked around to the corner of the garden off Louise’s bedroom. She was there, sitting on a lawn chair, her feet up on a round wrought-iron table with a candle burning in the middle. There was a trellis overhead, dripping with grapevines and clematis, and the air smelled sweet, from the white flowers and the pot she was smoking.

  She didn’t seem especially surprised to see me. She waved toward an empty chair across from her and handed me the joint.

  I sat down and shook my head disapprovingly, then took a hit, and, holding the harsh smoke in my lungs, said, “You could have told me about Ben, you know. I can’t believe you didn’t.”

  Louise’s hair was still damp from a shower, and when she reached out to take back the joint, I could smell the scent of lemony soap rising off her skin. “It’s not fair to burden people with your secrets, Clyde.”

  “But it would have been worth the burden, sweetheart. All these years, I could have known more about Marcus than he knows about himself.”

  “Everyone knows more about Marcus than he knows about himself. Or they did, in the days I knew him. I’ll bet somewhere deep down you suspected anyway.”

  She was wearing a shapeless black jersey dress, with a big gray sweater on top. Her skin was pale, almost luminous against the black dress and the dark. After a few more hits of the pot, I felt something inside me let go, and I sank back against the cushions of the chair and drank in the still night air. A phone rang in one of the houses behind us, but no one picked it up.

  “It was his ears,” I said. “He has Marcus’s ears. His mouth, too, but it was the ears that tipped me off.”

  “Oh, the ears, right. I’ll bet I found those attractive on Marcus. But Ben might outgrow them, don’t you think?”

  “Marcus didn’t.”

  “I’ve spent so many years thinking of him as mine alone, I hate the idea of sharing his genes with anyone.”

  “Does Ben know?”

  She shook her head and slipped a roach clip onto the end of the joint. “He pretends he doesn’t care. But he asks about his father sometimes, mostly in discreet non sequiturs he slips into conversation, trying to trip me up. ‘That Austrian guy who was my father,’ he’ll say, and then wait to see if I correct him and say ‘Australian.’”

  “Do you?”

  “Not as often as I used to,” she said quietly. “I didn’t know a twelve-year-old boy without a father would look so different from an eleven-year-old boy without a father. He’s sadder than he used to be. He hated Seattle, didn’t get along in school. The grant came through. It seemed fate was arranging a convergence.”

  She had a plan of action, and she related it to me as we sat there with the galaxy of waxy flowers drooping overhead. She wanted a commitment from Marcus, not to support Ben financially or to be a father in any traditional sense; she had no illusions about renewing a relationship with him, and no interest. She simply wanted Marcus to be a reliable presence in Ben’s life, no matter what was going on in his own.

  I found myself growing sad as I listened. Among other things, it was hard for me to imagine Marcus being a reliable presence in anyone’s life. I’d romanticized the idea of Louise as a single mother just as I’d romanticized her own orphaned childhood. But now all the relationships and connections struck me as dubious and up for grabs. One thing I’d learned from reading hundreds of biographies is that chaotic, ill-defined relationships, appealing at the start, don’t age well. I’d also learned that it’s almost always a mistake to bury part of the truth—not for any moral reasons, but because eventually someone feels compelled to dig it all up and expose the whole mess to sunlight.

  “But it might work out, don’t you think?” she asked. “Marcus will probably be relieved I didn’t tell him sooner. And Ben’s bound to understand, especially since I’m the one who pays his allowance.”

  “You might be right.” She smiled faintly when I said this, exposing her overbite and some ghost of the puckish girl she’d been so many years earlier. Her optimism—part dope and part desperation—was infectious, if not exactly convincing. “I’m sure you’re right.”

  She shrugged. “All I can do is try. It worked out with the dog, didn’t it?”

  “Magnificently.”

  “You’re a liar, Clyde. That’s why I knew I could count on you.”

  I had a key made for Benjamin and put it on a chain with a tag shaped like the head of a dog. When I presented it to him, he glanced at the tag, slipped it into his shirt pocket, and thanked me without looking at me, as if he was mortified by the sight of the Day-Glo plastic mutt. My niece had had a similar reaction to a dinosaur watch I’d given her for her eleventh birthday, some mix of being insulted at my estimation of her maturity and embarrassed on my behalf for my awful taste.

  “I know it’s hideous,” I said, trying to recoup, “but I wanted to make sure the key didn’t get lost, and it was the only one I could find. At the last minute. Before I gave it to you.” I’d spent half an hour poring over a rack of the tacky things in a pet shop and was pleased and proud when I found one that vaguely resembled Otis.

  “It’s okay, Clyde,” Ben said. He pulled a key chain out of his pocket, a stylish silver item tha
t looked as if it had been crafted from the handle of an antique spoon. There were at least a dozen keys attached. “I’ll just put it on with the rest of these. I collect the keys from the places Louise and I have lived.”

  I nodded and watched as he hooked Otis up to his leash and led him out.

  Ben came by every day after school, let himself in quietly, left with the dog, and returned a few hours later. He was so cagey about his comings and goings, I thought it best to leave him alone. I watched him from my top-floor window. The poor dog seemed thoroughly confused about where he belonged and whose orders he should obey. He often looked back at the house as they headed off, as if trying to determine the likelihood of returning. The one time I’d scolded him for knocking over a stack of books, he’d cowered so pathetically I hadn’t had the heart to do it again. Now, whenever he stumbled into a mishap, I found myself apologizing profusely, begging him to crawl out from under the bed and stop wheezing.

  Ben had been coming to the house for about a week when I ventured downstairs to talk with him. I’d seen him returning from his walk with Otis and timed my arrival in the kitchen to look like a chance meeting. But when I got there, he was sitting on the nubby orange sofa, undoing Otis’s leash and listening to Marcus. He smiled at me and looked away.

  Marcus didn’t hear me come in. He was standing at the stove, going through his ritual afternoon coffee production and relating some variation on the implausible tale of the dog who’d been killed by lightning.

  “It nearly killed me, I don’t mind telling you that. Of course, I always had a way with animals. Don’t know what it is, but they all seem to gravitate to me. I guess I should be flattered, right? What’s the name of that dog of yours again?”

  “Otis,” Ben said.

  “My brother’s name is Otto,” Marcus said. “Same kind of idea, wouldn’t you say?”

  Otto was Marcus’s older brother, an equally handsome but more motivated academic, whom Marcus usually preferred not to mention except in some faintly disparaging context like this.

  When he finally finished with the coffee, he took a cup of it to the maple table and nodded at me as he sat down.

  “You’re home early today,” I said.

  He hooked his hair behind his ears and sipped. “Everyone deserves an afternoon off now and then. I was just talking about my dog.”

  “I heard.”

  “He’s got his mother’s hair, doesn’t he, Clyde?”

  “He does.”

  “I always loved Louise’s red hair. We used to be great friends, your mother and I.” He picked up a newspaper that had been sitting on the table for at least a week and started to read. “She’s probably told you all about that. We’re having lunch next Thursday. Can’t wait to see her, actually. Rehash the good old days. I think they were good, anyway.”

  He started talking about his career at Amherst, a self-aggrandizing, revisionist version of history if ever I’d heard one. I couldn’t tell if Ben was listening or not; he appeared to be preoccupied with Otis, but every once in a while he’d nod his head and look over at Marcus. Studying him? Weighing the credibility of what he was saying? I couldn’t tell. I myself was too preoccupied with comparing their features and contemplating the strange, immutable bonds wrought by something as cold and mathematical as genetics.

  When Marcus had finished leafing through the paper, he folded it and wrapped up his life story. He put his hands behind his head and looked across the room—a confused, vague glance. The few weeks in any given year when Marcus wasn’t involved in a relationship, he wandered around the house like a man suffering from memory loss, lifting up the cushions on the sofa and staring into empty cabinets, trying to remember where he’d left his. . . well, something. He was usually saved from this fruitless search by the appearance of an eager, impressionable young woman.

  He recovered from his identity crisis and shook his head. As he was walking out, he turned to Ben and said, “You ought to teach that pup a few tricks. Make him earn his keep. Right, Clyde? Now, tell me your name again?”

  Ben sat in silence for a few moments after he’d gone. “Is he a Southerner?” he finally asked.

  “He is,” I said. “But sometimes he’s more Southern than other times. You’ll like him once you know him better.”

  “He doesn’t seem like Louise’s type.”

  As I remembered it, Louise had fairly eclectic tastes. But it didn’t seem like an appropriate comment, so I changed the subject.

  I THOUGHT IT WAS AN ESPECIALLY WONDERFUL class tonight,” Eileen Ash said.

  I was standing behind the table at the front of the classroom, stuffing my books and papers into my backpack. I looked up at Eileen and bared my teeth, hoping the expression would pass for a smile. Eileen Ash had stayed behind after every class to offer some congratulatory comments on my performance. Because no class ever seemed any better than another (although some, like tonight’s, were clearly more disastrous), I felt mildly insulted by the praise. Either my skills were so minimal that Eileen felt bad for me, or she was so desperate to make the most of a bad situation that she’d actually managed to convince herself.

  Eileen was one of an even dozen students who’d signed up for “Love and Marriage, Horse and Carriage: Relationship Issues in Some Nineteenth-Century Novels,” and the only student who’d bothered to attend all three meetings thus far. She was a tall, angular woman with graying hair she wore parted down the middle and turned under at the chin. Tonight she had on a loose Indian print dress made of light cotton and cinched at the waist with a multicolor belt that looked like it had been woven by a peasant living at a high altitude in some impoverished nation. Despite a degree of frailty suggesting a few too many liquid lunches, there was something energetic and almost athletic about Eileen; she had enormous green eyes that gave her narrow face an equine beauty, and I could picture her a decade or so earlier downing cocktails at some horsey gathering in Greenwich or the Berk-shires. In class, she often remarked that she loved the books we were reading, although she never said anything specific enough about them to indicate that she’d read them. Still, her enthusiasm was genuine, and she was always eager to help me out by leaping in during embarrassing silences, usually with the all-purpose comment, “I keep wondering if things are so very different today.”

  Eileen and her husband, a Harvard professor so famous even I had heard of him, lived off Brattle Street in a rambling mansion hidden behind a softly rounded privacy hedge. During the first five minutes of the very first class, Eileen had offered to hold a party at her house at the end of the term. “To give us something to look forward to,” she’d said. She’d intended no offense, but I’d felt defeated by the comment. As a result, I harbored a slight resentment toward her, which I hadn’t been able to shake.

  “I thought it was a particularly relevant class tonight,” she said. “Especially for poor Mallory. It’s awfully sad, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” I said. “But we don’t know, things might work out for her.”

  “I hope so.” Eileen clasped her book to her chest, and I noticed that the volume she’d brought to class was Jane Eyre. At least she was in the right ballpark. “But the chances are slim, aren’t they? Look at this class alone. How many divorced?”

  “Quite a few.” I should have known the exact number, since every member of the class had announced his or her marital status on the first day and many continued to slip barbed comments about “my first wife” or “that ex-husband of mine” into virtually every statement they made.

  “Nine,” Eileen said. “Imagine that. Nine out of twelve. Not very encouraging.”

  Indeed not, but you’d hardly call the class a random sampling of the population at large. The title of the course, which had been manufactured and handed to me by the admissions board of The Learning Place, almost guaranteed a disproportionate number of students from broken marriages.

  I attempted a casual glance at my watch by pushing my glasses up on my nose with the back of my wrist. I’d
let the class out early, but it was now a little after seven, and Marcus was probably out front, waiting to depart for New Hampshire.

  “I shouldn’t be keeping you,” Eileen said.

  “No, no,” I said. “You’re not.”

  “You don’t need to be polite with me. We’re old friends, Clyde. I don’t have anything urgent to discuss, I just wanted to tell you how much I’m getting out of the class and maybe go over a couple of details for the party. It’s only a few months away, so I really should be lining things up with the caterer. Don’t you think?”

  “Maybe we should plan a simple potluck event,” I said. Personally, I had no interest in planning anything, but since the party had become the centerpiece of the entire class, I felt some responsibility to get involved.

  “Oh, no, I don’t think so. Those can be so depressing, all those blocks of cheese. I’m just not sure if there are any vegetarians in the bunch. With your permission, I’ll take a head count next week.”

  “That would be fine,” I said, We were supposed to begin discussing Cranford the following week, but I could tell that a good portion of the class would be spent on menu planning, if I played my hand right.

  She tilted her head to one side, smiled graciously, and walked out, leaving behind a faint smell of hyacinth.

  Maybe it didn’t matter what she was getting out of the class, as long as she was getting something out of it. Anyway, I had my own concerns that night, specifically trying to figure out how best to confront my father about his mysterious social life. I was so nervous about the visit, I’d barely been able to see straight for the last half hour of class. I hitched my backpack up to my shoulders and walked around the room, closing windows and turning off lamps.