The Man of the House

by Stephen McCauley

  “I ate already. I can’t rearrange my whole life just because you decide to drop in once every decade.”

  “You’re exaggerating,” I said. “I was here five years ago.”

  There was something morbidly institutional about the room, with its vertical blinds and its blank white walls. Down at the far end, a set of sliding glass doors led out to a miniature sunken patio surrounded by a cinder-block wall. It was an odd little well, with a concrete floor covered in mildewed AstroTurf. In winter and spring, it was freezing and flooded, and in summer, it trapped heat and formed a primitive convection oven. There was a plastic lawn chair flung into one corner and a rusting gas grill in the other. Agnes had brought the grill with her from the house she and Davis had lived in, but because she thought of outdoor cooking as a man’s job, the thing had never been used and sat there brutalized by the elements, a monument to Agnes’s failed marriage and general loneliness. I felt a sharp stab of pity for my cranky old man. No matter how you looked at it, he was not in an enviable position, even if it was one he’d made for himself.

  “I’d come more often,” I said, “but I’ve been busy teaching. I haven’t had much free time lately.”

  “Did you get tenure yet?”

  “It’s not that kind of teaching job.”

  “Ah.” He nodded and turned away in disgust. “So what you’re trying to say is, you didn’t get it.”

  “I guess that’s right.”

  He turned down his lower lip and shook his head, and I felt my shoulders slide under the weight of his disappointment in me.

  “I’m thinking about applying for a different kind of teaching job,” I said. “At a private high school. I’ve got a few connections.”

  “Are you crazy? You can’t change careers at your age, Clyde. You’re stuck. Live with it. Even if you don’t have tenure, there’s a chance they might not fire you for a while.”

  He was sipping at his drink, slowly but without evident pleasure. Vance must have been delusional. It wasn’t possible that anyone as disgruntled and perennially miserable as my father could be whooping it up under any circumstances. He drained his glass and held it up. “There’s a bottle on the floor behind the chest. Get it for me and fill this up.”

  For as long as I could remember, my father, an avid though not wildly excessive drinker, had kept his liquor bottles in odd, out-of-the-way places—the back of a cabinet under the kitchen sink, the far reaches of a closet in the front hall, with the detergents and bleach near the washing machine. It might have made some sense if he were a secretive drunk, but he made no attempts at hiding his drinking. In fact, Agnes and I had always been enlisted in digging out his stash. I pushed aside the chest of drawers, one of those blond, pressed-wood, cheap-motel creations, and rummaged around on the floor for the bottle. Even though a headache was beginning to trickle down the center of my forehead, I felt useful for the first time since entering the room and buoyed up by the boost in status I was getting from performing this humiliating chore.

  As I poured whiskey into his glass, he said, “So Agnes tells me you want to ‘talk’ with me.”

  “She asked me to,” I said, eager to shift the blame. I passed him his drink. “She’s worried you might be leaving the house for some secret late-night medical treatments.”

  “I’ll tell you what she’s worried about—she’s worried I’m going to die and leave my money to someone else.”

  He frequently made these scurrilous accusations of gold-digging, even while he pleaded poverty. The whole thing was so ridiculous, I suddenly craved a drink myself. But I screwed the cap on the bottle, set it on the floor, and pushed the chest back against the wall. Although my father viewed my lack of interest in booze as suspect, the few times I had taken a drink in his presence, he’d indicated that the lapse was another sign of my moral and physical weakness. I sat down in a chair near the door, the big bed a buffer between us. “She’s not worried about money. She pays you an allowance. We know you got wiped out in that last fire.”

  “The beautiful part is, Clyde, that neither one of you knows anything for sure. I could be sitting on a million-dollar insurance settlement.” He seemed absurdly pleased by this comment. He took a big ugly gulp from his drink and turned back to the muted TV. “Now that we settled that, is there anything else you wanted to ‘talk’ about?”

  “As a matter of fact, there is. A friend of mine said he saw you out at dinner with a couple of people a few weeks ago. Some seafood joint. If that’s true, Agnes would be relieved to hear it. And I would, too.”

  “First of all, what friend of yours?” he asked, as if this were the relevant point.

  “My friend Vance. You don’t know him.”

  “Someone I don’t know is spotting me at restaurants? Wouldn’t hold up in a court of law, would it?”

  “I knew he was wrong, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to check.”

  “I don’t remember saying he was wrong.” He wrapped his lips around the rim of his glass and took another swallow.

  “You mean he was right?”

  “I don’t remember saying that, either.”

  I stood up and started toward the door. “I think you should reconsider and come up for dinner. It would mean a lot to Agnes.”

  As I was about to walk out, he said, “Where are you running off to?”

  There was such an unlikely, uncharacteristically plaintive tone in his voice, I stopped short and turned back to him. He seemed to be slumped in his chair now, his neck bent as if those heavy brows were pulling his whole head into his lap.

  “You act as if I didn’t love your mother. Well, I did. And no matter how I felt about her, I stuck by her.”

  I never had doubted or even given too much thought to his love for my mother, possibly because contemplating their relationship in any way struck me as too morbid.

  “My friendship with Diane has nothing to do with your mother.”

  Diane? “Diane?”

  “That’s right. And don’t go broadcasting the name around upstairs.”

  “So are you . . . dating her?”

  “I’m thinking of asking her to move in.”

  “Here?”

  “That’s what I said, isn’t it?”

  I looked around the tiny room. “Where?”

  “Look, I’m not asking for your advice, Clyde. I’m just telling you.”

  “But Dad . . .”

  “Don’t go pulling a guilt trip on me. We’re trying to help her kid out. He had everything under control, putting some money aside; next thing you know, they’ve got him on some rap about being a deadbeat dad. It’s none of the government’s goddamned business. Just don’t go telling Agnes about this!”

  “Don’t you think she’s going to find out if someone’s living here?”

  “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. In the meantime, I don’t feel like dealing with her hysteria. I’ll just tell her it’s a nurse.”

  The light in the room was beginning to grow gray, as if a fog were seeping in the sliding glass doors. I felt I was suffocating in the dank room, slipping away into the fog. I promised him I wouldn’t tell Agnes and tried to convince him one last time to come upstairs for dinner. “My friend Marcus is here,” I said, an unlikely inducement.

  “The loser with the phony Southern accent? No way. I’ve got to make a few phone calls. Tell Agnes to bring me down a beer. There’s not even room for a refrigerator in this dump.”

  When I got back upstairs, Marcus was setting the dinette table and Agnes was taking a roasted chicken out of the oven. She handed me a carving knife and said, “Here. Men seem to be able to carve better than women. How was he?”

  “Engrossed in Wheel of Fortune.”

  The chicken was so dry it was practically crumbling. I’m not sure why it is that some people seem to be incapable of cooking, but Agnes was one of them. Even if she followed the directions on a box of cake mix down to the last quarter teaspoon of oil and second of baking time, there was a problem.
The idea that cooking requires love is absurd. Cooking requires confidence.

  She looked at her watch and put her hand on her hip. “But Wheel of Fortune went off the air ten minutes ago.”

  “Well, he got engrossed in whatever came on next.”

  “Entertainment Tonight?” Agnes had a way of scouting out the most irrelevant side to every issue, something I was not in the mood for. The conversation with my father had left me jittery and confused, exactly as if I’d just had two cups of coffee too many. “I don’t think it makes much difference,” I said.

  “But he usually hates that show.”

  “Agnes . . .”

  “Agnes was showing me some of your mother’s recipes,” Marcus said. He was folding cloth napkins and carefully placing them beside the plates. “They’re unique.”

  “There’s a reason for that,” I said. I handed Agnes the plate of chicken, which looked a lot like a plate of heaped-up sawdust.

  “I showed him the No-Bake Cake Pie,” Agnes said, “and for your information, he thought it sounded delicious.”

  “Is that the one with the cookies?” I asked. It was a preposterous recipe that involved smashing up a bag of chocolate-chip cookies with a hammer, mixing in a lot of peanut butter and junk food, and then pressing the glop into a big pan and smearing a can of frosting over the top. “Perfect for long holiday weekends,” my mother had written, “when the family raids the icebox for snacks after the touch football game.” I hated to think of my mother sitting around the kitchen table dreaming up these absurd fantasies, depicting the family as a less political version of the Kennedys.

  “Oh, Clyde,” Agnes said calmly, “would you mind going upstairs and getting Barbara? I called her on the phone, but her line’s busy.”

  I could tell by the forced nonchalance of her voice that Agnes was determined to stay out of the line of Barbara’s fire. Not that I blamed her.

  I walked upstairs with dread, hoping my niece was in a good mood. All the hallways of the condo were painted the most gratingly powdery shade of blue imaginable, the visual equivalent of air freshener, and I felt as if they were closing in around me, conspiring with my headache to crush my skull.

  As I was about to knock on Barbara’s bedroom door, I heard her talking and stopped to listen for a second. “Don’t buy it from him,” she said. “I can get you a much better deal.”

  I knocked.

  “Listen,” she said, “I gotta go. No. Uncle, I think. Yeah, tell me about it.” Then she opened her door and stood holding the knob. “Hi, Clyde.” She leaned in and kissed me on the cheek.

  The kiss was so disarmingly genuine and so shy, I felt like a horrible curmudgeon for having any doubts about her. The truth was, she could shift from impossible teenage delinquent to adorable little girl and then back again, all in the course of a single sentence. Much depended upon the company.

  She had on an enormous pair of denim overalls, a flannel work shirt with sleeves hanging down over her hands, and a pair of tattered blue sneakers. Her hair was unnaturally black and hacked off in an alarming fashion, the sides long, the back cut to the middle of her head, so that she appeared to be wearing a Halloween fright wig that didn’t fit. I couldn’t really tell through her clothing, but she seemed to have filled out some since the last time I’d seen her. In contrast to her hair and clothes, her plump face looked soft and angelic. But on closer inspection, I saw that what I’d assumed was a pimple on the side of her nose was a gold stud poking through her flesh.

  “How’s it going?” I asked. I often found myself trying to sound as casual and hip as possible when I talked to Barbara, even though I had very little idea of what casual and hip sounded like to a fourteen-year-old these days.

  Barbara shrugged. Behind her, the room was a tangle of electrical wires from a television, a boom box, a telephone, an answering machine, a computer, and the aforementioned microwave. The faint smell of popcorn wafted out into the hallway. The powdery blue walls were covered with spray-painted graffiti. “Did you do that?” I asked, nodding toward the black lines.

  “Yeah.” She stepped out into the hall and slammed the door behind her.

  “It looks great,” I said.

  “Whatever.”

  “I like your . . .” I pointed to my own nose, not sure what to call her piercing. “Did it hurt?”

  “I put ice on it first.”

  “You did it yourself?” I got the creeps cutting my own fingernails.

  “A friend helped,” she said, apparently assuming that I’d find this reassuring.

  Barbara started down the stairs ahead of me, clumsily bouncing from step to step. “How’s teaching?” she asked, without turning around.

  “It’s all right,” I said. But as soon as I’d uttered the words, I felt a sudden solidarity with her, a desire to confess all. “Actually,” I said, “the classes aren’t going too well. The school’s a bit of a joke.”

  “All schools are, Clyde. We’re having metal detectors put in next month.”

  “Metal detectors!”

  “I know—pathetic, isn’t it? All you have to do is have someone pass the gun through the bathroom window once you’re already in.”

  Marcus was standing behind a chair in the dining area. “Wow,” he said, “look who’s all grown up.”

  “I’m working on it,” Barbara said in a bored, suggestive tone. She sat down at the table and, without rolling up her sleeves, managed to grab a piece of chicken and pop it into her mouth.

  Agnes came in from the kitchen with a plate of vegetables, carrots and broccoli in such fantastically uniform pieces it was hard to imagine they weren’t plastic. “Oh, honey, that shirt,” she said. “You’re dressed for midwinter.”

  “What am I supposed to be? Naked?”

  “Isn’t there something in between?”

  “Like what? A lame scarf around my neck?”

  Agnes took a seat, and Marcus and I followed her lead.

  “Did you show Clyde your paintings?” Agnes asked.

  “They’re not paintings,” Barbara’s evil twin growled.

  “They’re wonderful,” I said.

  Barbara reached across the table and grabbed another piece of chicken with her invisible hand.

  “I didn’t know you were an artist,” Marcus said.

  “She’s a very good one,” Agnes said, and passed me a plate of sawdust.

  Barbara rolled her eyes. “She’s pissed off because I painted on the walls. You ought to be happy, Mom. At least I didn’t do it on the outside walls.”

  “I don’t think the neighbors would have appreciated that.”

  “Like we know the neighbors.”

  “I thought you were friends with that girl on the A side of the complex. Ginny Monte, isn’t it?”

  “Right. Like I’d ever be seen with her. You just want to meet her father.”

  “How’s the chicken, Marcus?” Agnes asked, carefully avoiding eye contact with her daughter. “I hope I didn’t overcook it too much. Someone told me that two people in the complex died of salmonella last month, so I kept it in an extra hour.”

  “It’s superb,” Marcus said. “I had a grandmaw used to make it just like this.” The last I’d heard, the only grandmaw he’d ever known had been a physicist.

  Agnes sloshed more wine into her glass. “Marcus was telling me about your writer friend,” she said. “Louise Morehouse, is it?”

  “Morris. How much did he tell you?”

  “I mentioned that she’d come to town. That’s all.”

  “I wish you’d invited her, Clyde. I’d love to meet her. You gave me her books. I adored them. Of course, I don’t remember a thing about any of them.”

  “I don’t know why you bother reading, Mom, since you forget everything about the books two days later. I mean, I wouldn’t even bother.”

  “It passes the time,” Agnes said.

  “That’s why you do yoga. That’s why you do everything. I mean, why not just take sleeping pills and go into a c
oma for a few weeks? That’d pass the time.”

  “I hope I get to meet Louise. And that dog sounds adorable!”

  I began describing one of Louise’s novels, while Marcus picked nervously at his food.

  A light went on in Agnes’s head: “I remember the wonderful little baby that poor girl has. It was so sad. Or was it funny?”

  Marcus looked across the table at me. He put his hands to his temples and applied pressure, as if he were trying to squeeze a pimple.

  Barbara, who seemed lost once attention had drifted away from her, pushed back the long flaps of hair covering her ears, revealing a fleeting glimpse of the shaven sides of her head. “I mean, the one time I made the mistake of going over to see Ginny Monte, her father practically raped me. Good luck with him, Mom.”

  “We were talking about something else, dear.”

  “I think me almost getting raped is more important.”

  “I think you’re exaggerating just a bit, honey.”

  “No, I don’t think so, Mom. I think I’d know when someone’s practically trying to rape me.”

  “Marcus,” Agnes said, “would you pass the chicken to Barbara so she can put some on her plate.”

  “Oh, right,” Barbara said. “Like we sit down with napkins every night and have dinners all the time.”

  “Sometimes we do,” Agnes said. “Sometimes we even eat with forks.”

  “I mean, why do we have to be so civilized all of a sudden, just because Clyde and Marcus are here?” She said Marcus’s name in a provocative singsong, and a flush crept up Agnes’s chest, past the scarf on her neck, right to her jawline.

  “So tell us about these metal detectors,” I said.

  “It’s so sad. You move up to the country to get away from all that,” Agnes said, “and you just can’t escape it. It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Right, Mom. Teenagers are committing suicide all over the world every minute of the day, and a metal detector is the saddest thing you’ve heard.”