The Man of the House

by Stephen McCauley

  “I’m sorry, but I think it’s sad, honey. I think it’s tragic.”

  “Oh, right, and Ginny’s dad cornering me against the refrigerator is just fine.”

  “Listen, Barbara,” I said, “why don’t you let your mother off the hook for one night. Give her a vacation.”

  Barbara looked up at me and then at Marcus. There was something ominous in her silence, and I began to wonder if intervening had been such a good idea.

  “So,” she said, popping another piece of chicken into her mouth, “are you two, like, boyfriends?”

  Agnes slammed down her fork. “That’s it,” she said. “I’ve had it. I’ve had it.”

  “What’d I say?”

  “Forget it,” I said.

  “I can’t forget it,” Agnes said. “How can I forget it when I can’t forget it? When I get reminded of it every minute of every day—how unhappy she is, how every word out of my mouth is wrong, wrong, wrong!” Her voice was going shrill, as if she was about to burst into tears.

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Barbara said. She rolled up her sleeves and put a slice of chicken on her plate and started to cut it with her knife and fork.

  “Please leave the table,” Agnes said.

  “What’d I say?”

  “Go to your room and heat something in that oven your father gave you.”

  Barbara stood up and knocked over her chair. It fell back against the floor with a thud. “It’s always me, isn’t it?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Agnes said, “it usually is.”

  There was a loud banging from the basement, my father pounding on the ceiling. “The devil is calling you down to hell,” Barbara shouted, and bounded up the stairs.

  I remembered his beer. “I’ll go see what he wants,” I said.

  “No, no, no,” Agnes said. She wiped at her eyes with her napkin and threw it on top of her uneaten food. “I’ll go.” She untied the white scarf from around her neck and stuffed it into the pocket of her shorts. “He can be so awful sometimes. What did you find out, Clyde? Is he all right? Did the doctor tell him something he isn’t telling me?”

  I cleared my throat. “Well, no, not really. I think he’s just going through a phase.”

  There was more angry rapping from below, louder this time. “He has a stick he pounds with,” Agnes explained. “It’s very convenient. What do you mean, a phase?”

  “I think he’s doing better.”

  Agnes looked at me sadly. Though I could tell she didn’t believe me, she had no alternative but to accept what I said, at least for the moment. She disappeared down the winding metal staircase. Marcus pushed his plate away from him. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “I hope Louise’s kid isn’t angry like that. You think it’s because the father walked out on them?” He paused, then looked at me defiantly. “You can’t say I walked out on anybody. You can’t accuse me of that.” He shook his head. “Poor Agnes. How much older is that girl than Benjamin?”

  “We’d better leave,” I said, and started to gather up the dishes. The condo was quiet in an eerie, insulated way. I began to experience some of Agnes’s panic, not at the thought that the outside world might start climbing in the windows, but at the realization that there was no obvious way to climb out.

  FOR SEVERAL DAYS AFTER THE VISIT TO NEW Hampshire, I stumbled around my cramped rooms in the apartment, trying to decide what to do about the situation with my father. Of course, the decisionmaking was complicated by the fact that I really didn’t know what the situation was. Was he actually planning to have this woman move in with him? Was he playing Agnes and me for fools by pleading illness and poverty while trying to set up his girlfriend’s son? Or was he the one being played for the fool? After all, who in her right mind would move into that dank basement voluntarily? Maybe the whole mess was a feverish delusion brought on by a combination of alcohol and fumes from the garage and the mildewed AstroTurf.

  I kept planning to tell Agnes, but I didn’t go ahead with my plans. Like my father, I didn’t want to have to deal with her hysteria. Mainly, however, I was enjoying sharing something with . . . Dad, even this absurd deception. My father and I had shared only one other secret that I could remember, and that dated back to around the time I was twelve. He and I were working on a lawn mower in the garage one rainy afternoon when he got up, walked to a corner, and pissed on the filthy, oil-stained floor. Looking over his shoulder, he said, “Don’t tell your mother I did this.”

  Four days after the visit, I got a call from him. It was early morning, and I was lying in bed reading the biography of a movie star who was dead or nearly dead (I was two hundred pages from finishing it and didn’t want to skip ahead and spoil the surprise ending). I always felt a slight surge in my chest when the phone rang unexpectedly, probably because I was hoping it was Gordon, calling to arrange a get-together or something even more improbable and longed for: a reconciliation. The biography was basically a list of sexual conquests, with a few references to idiotic, forgotten films thrown in for bulk, so my romantic fantasies were running especially wild that morning.

  I picked up the phone and gave a few quizzical hellos without getting a response. It wasn’t until I heard wheezy breathing on the other end that I suspected my father.

  “Dad?” I said. “Is that you?”

  “That’s right, it is,” he said, as if I’d challenged him.

  Since the only other time he’d called me was to announce my mother’s death, I immediately assumed disaster and asked him what was wrong.

  “Nothing’s wrong. Why would it be?”

  “I don’t know, I just thought. . .”

  “Are you trying to tell me you told Agnes about Diane?”

  “Agnes?”

  “You mean you did!”

  “No, no. I didn’t say a word to her.”

  “Good. Don’t,” he barked, and hung up.

  I replaced the receiver gently. It had never occurred to me before that he might have my phone number written down somewhere, and I was delighted to think he did. Perhaps it was alphabetized in some book. Was I listed as Clyde, or was our last name in there, too? Perhaps he’d put “son” in parentheses, as a reminder. For a full ten minutes after the call, I felt so warm and connected, in a welcome-home, chestnuts-roasting kind of way, I couldn’t even read. I suppose I should have felt more loyalty to my poor dead mother, at least a few moments of outrage on her behalf, but after all, she was dead, poor thing. Eventually, I put the book aside and went downstairs to make myself a huge breakfast.

  I was still feeling elated early the next morning, when my father phoned again. I suspected it was him this time, so I decided to try his own telephone technique and, instead of saying hello, remained silent. I considered it a triumph that he was the first one to give in and say, “Is that you?”

  “Who wants to know?” I asked, curious to see if the question would corner him into an admission of paternity.

  “Don’t give me that bullshit,” he said. “You know who it is. I’m calling to ask you about your rent. Diane’s son is thinking about moving to Cambridge, and we’re trying to figure out what it’s going to cost him.”

  When I told him what I paid, he blew out his breath and said, “For that dump?”

  “But you’ve never been here,” I reminded him. “I’ve never described it to you.”

  “Believe me,” he said, “I can imagine.”

  That was pretty much the extent of the conversation, but it left me with the same combination of hope and despair and the altogether pathetic feeling that there was something flattering about the fact that Diane’s son—Roger, I learned in the course of the brief volley—was thinking of moving to the same town I lived in.

  I should have directed some of my anxiety toward reading the rest of the books for my ailing class and preparing a few lectures in advance, but I wasn’t up to it. The week after Mallory’s big announcement about her husband’s affair, she’d come to class carrying a picnic basket of food
she’d purchased at a nearby gourmet shop. She’d arrived twenty minutes late, projecting the flushed enthusiasm of a minor celebrity making an appearance at a charity auction. “Just pretend I’m not here,” she’d said, interrupting my introduction to Elizabeth Gaskell. She unloaded the picnic basket on the marble top of the French commode. One by one, heads turned in the direction of the food as the sweet, buttery smell of pastry drifted across the room.

  Aside from a few dismissive comments about the book’s title (“Sounds more like a chocolate bar”) and a consensus that it was of unimpressive length, Cranford was scarcely mentioned, no matter how many times I tried to intervene.

  Tim, the would-be actor, brought up a television movie starring Marlo Thomas that had aired the night before, which, it turned out, everyone else in the class had watched. Split personalities were debated for almost an hour. I was incapable of contributing much to the discussion, since I’d called a phone sex line and had missed the last half of the movie.

  I could see the next two months of classes taking shape in front of me. Dorothea, the retired schoolteacher, had passed around a sign-up sheet for bringing in snacks and beverages for the rest of the semester, and Eileen Ash had taken her poll of vegetarians (one hypoglycemic who wanted to be counted as a maybe, and one lacto-ovo macrobiotic). The competitive spirit was building; the food would get more and more elaborate, culminating in Eileen’s catered extravaganza. Brian, the divorced lawyer, announced that he was going to talk to the administration about setting up a grill in the garden when it was his turn. “Let it be known, ladies,” he crowed, “I can cook.”

  When I described this to Marcus, he offered his standard metaphor theory: “It’s all about food, Clyde.”

  I spent my mornings reading more and more movie star biographies, while Otis looked on sheepishly from a pile of blankets I put out for him in the corner. I was beginning to get used to his presence in the house, although we hadn’t established much of a relationship. Sometimes when I looked at him, all timid and doe-eyed, I felt saddened by his evident insecurity about where in the world and to whom he belonged. I could easily drift off into a lurid, tear-jerking fantasy of his abandonment under a picnic table beside the highway, station wagon of screaming children pulling away and so on.

  Of course, I hadn’t completely ruled out the possibility that his depression was primarily the result of lying about in the apartment, observing me.

  Mostly, however, I’d begun to organize my days around Benjamin’s eerily prompt afternoon arrivals. He came by the house to collect his dog at two-fifteen every afternoon, give or take no more than a few minutes. The world is divided into people who tell time in minutes and those who tell time in blocks of half an hour or so. Ben was obviously in the former group. But even so, I wondered if he didn’t have a friend or two with whom he might occasionally fight after school or sneak off somewhere for a cigarette.

  Otis had a preternatural ability to distinguish Ben’s tread, for he always perked up as soon as Ben’s foot hit the bottom step. The dog had long strings of fur that hung off the tips of his ears. When he stuck out his ears to capture sounds, the strings hung straight down and made him look even more like a frayed piece of clothing. But he seemed confused about what he should do when Ben showed up: bound out of my rooms and fling himself down to the second floor to greet his master, or crawl under the bed. Usually he looked at me, whimpered, and licked his chops, as if waiting for instruction. There was no question that the dog had been traumatized, but all I had were odd clues that didn’t add up to much. What could it possibly mean that every time Marcus started to make coffee, the dog ran to the third floor and crawled onto his blankets? And what was his apparent water fetish all about? Each time I turned on the shower, Otis dashed into the bathroom and sat in front of the tub panting expectantly, ears straight up to the ceiling.

  As soon as Ben came into the house, he’d call Louise and recount some bit of news about school in a grudging tone. As part of her grant, Louise had been given an office in a building outside Harvard Square and had been told in an amazingly subtle but unambiguous bureaucratic way that she was expected to spend the bulk of her time there. After the call, Ben would take Otis out for a walk, sometimes not returning until after five. I had no idea where they went, but since Louise seemed satisfied that he could take care of himself, I didn’t think it was my place to be concerned. Still, the sight of Ben loping up the street, baggy clothes swimming around his body and Walkman clamped to his head, Otis dragging along beside him, brought back all the aimlessness of my own childhood and all the lonely disappointment. I had to keep reminding myself that it couldn’t mean anything to Ben that Marcus was spending increasingly long hours at the library, despite his resolution to get to know his son.

  A couple of weeks after his initial talk with Louise, Marcus still hadn’t shown any signs of sitting down with Ben. Most alarming of all, his golden hair was getting noticeably more unkempt, as if he hadn’t been combing or shampooing it with any regularity. Ordinarily, delight in casually maintaining his appearance was one of the things that held Marcus together. As he was wandering out of the house one morning in a bleary-eyed, caffeine daze, I stopped him to ask how things were going.

  “Which things?” he asked.

  “Well. . . academic things,” I said, figuring it was best to start with the predictable.

  He leaned against the doorjamb and ran his hand through his greasy hair. He had on a maroon V-neck sweater with moth holes around the waistband, a piece of clothing he usually wore only when he was housebound with the flu. Over his shoulder, he was carrying a gray canvas briefcase that Monica had given him when he began work on his dissertation. It was stained and tattered, the strap frayed and one of the zippers broken. There was a wad of unpromising-looking, dog-eared papers sticking out of the top. “I feel as if I’m on the threshold, Clyde. I really do. A few steps, and I’m in there. It’s all so clear in my head, I know I’ll be able to knock the thing off in a few months once I actually begin. It’s a surprisingly hot topic right now.”

  I nodded, afraid to say anything. I wasn’t even sure how the frown qualified as a “topic.”

  “I’m putting off talking with, you know, Benjamin,” he said. “Just until I get my foot in the door. Just until I feel secure about the beginning. Another week or so is all.”

  Then he hoisted his ratty briefcase up on his shoulder and left.

  One afternoon, after Ben had made his call to Louise but just before he left for his walk, the phone rang. We were in the attic room I did myself the favor of calling a study, and I was bent over the record player, attempting to move the needle beyond a scratch without making it worse. I was trying to interest Ben in accordion music through subliminal suggestion. Whenever he was around, I put on albums of musette waltzes and Argentinian tangos and even some insipid but virtuoso recordings of Lawrence Welk playing polkas and pop tunes. Thus far, he hadn’t commented on the music, and I couldn’t tell if he hadn’t yet noticed it or was simply trying to be polite. Either way, I was sure that eventually, unless I’d completely misjudged him, he’d fall for the combination of giddy circus wheezing and the heartbreaking chords that I found so haunting.

  “Do me a favor,” I said on the third ring, “and answer that.”

  He picked up the phone, said hello a few times, and then held the receiver out to me. “No one’s there.”

  “That’s my father,” I said over my shoulder. “Ask him what he wants.”

  He put the receiver to his ear and then said to me, “He says to pick up the goddamned phone yourself if you want to know what he wants.”

  “All right. Tell him to hold on a minute.”

  “He said to hold on a minute,” Ben repeated. Then, obviously answering questions, he said, “It’s Ben. My full name? Benjamin. Oh, well, Benjamin Morris. I’m twelve.” He put down the phone and shrugged. “He hung up.”

  A few minutes later, the phone rang again. “You’d better get it this time,” Ben s
aid, and left with Otis for one of his long, mysterious strolls.

  “I’m not going to ask who that is,” my father said, “but who is it?”

  “A friend’s son,” I told him. “He comes here after school to walk his dog.”

  “You’re running a day care center now?”

  I knew it was only a short step to accusations of child molestation. Still, I hadn’t heard from him in over a week, and I was happy he’d called. For some reason I couldn’t quite explain, I was proud of the fact that Ben knew my cantankerous old man was phoning me in the middle of the afternoon. “Was there something you wanted to tell me, Dad?”

  “Diane and I are going to the Cape for a night next month, and I want you to explain it to Agnes.”

  “Explain it? How?”

  “Well, obviously not by telling her the truth. I could do that myself.”

  “Forget it, Dad. There’s a limit.” I wasn’t sure there was, but it seemed to me it was in my best interest to say so. As soon as I’d said it, though, I could feel his disgust draining through the line and tried to make amends. “Why don’t you tell her you’re going to visit Uncle Lon?”

  “Ha! I wouldn’t even lie about visiting that rat.”

  Uncle Lon was my father’s younger brother, a gaunt, towering loudmouth who’d made money on a variety of real estate deals that were constantly under investigation. He had three bibulous daughters who, much to my father’s delight, were always in trouble—everything from drunk driving to “female problems,” aka abortions. Lon was steadfast in his devotion to his “girls,” and they doted on him, between drinking binges and court dates. My parents had lived a few miles from Uncle Lon and company for decades, but the brothers hadn’t seen each other in nearly ten years. Once, in the middle of an Easter dinner, Lon had accused my father of burning down one of his sporting goods stores—a generous accusation, since it was obvious to anyone who knew anything about the situation that he’d burned down both. My father had countered with a snide comment about Tina. Lon made a tearful defense of his beloved youngest daughter, dragged his wife out of the house, and the two hadn’t spoken since.