The Man of the House

by Stephen McCauley

  One of my father’s chief concerns when he discovered I was gay was that Lon would find out and have something else to hold over his head.

  “You know, that might not be a bad idea after all,” my father was saying. “It’s not like Agnes would dare call Lon to check up on it. Thanks.”

  Later in the afternoon, when Ben stopped in to drop Otis off for the night, he hung around the kitchen, rearranging the dog food on the shelves. He seemed to be waiting for something. Finally, when he was at the door and about to leave, he said, “Do you like your father, Clyde?”

  “Like him?” I asked.

  He nodded, his lank red hair falling over his left eye.

  It had never occurred to me to think about whether or not I liked my father, possibly because it was so clear I didn’t and possibly because it seemed an entirely irrelevant question. One thing was certain: I’d never been able to talk myself out of wanting to be liked by him, even if he wasn’t terribly likable himself. “You wouldn’t call us friends,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I was just wondering.”

  After a couple of weeks of watching Benjamin wander out in the afternoons, I took to going for long walks myself, hoping to bump into him, or at least to catch sight of him in some corner of the city.

  It was, by this time, getting toward late September, and although the days were still warm, the afternoons frequently turned windy and damp. A faint trace of the spicy rot of autumn—dying leaves and decayed flowers and the heavy sweetness of pine needles—had begun to scent the air, giving the whole pursuit an especially melancholy tone. But for more than a week, Ben and I had no chance encounters, and since I wasn’t ready to contemplate the humiliating absurdity of trailing boy and dog, I was about to give up.

  And then one afternoon as I was wending my way back toward the shabby neighborhood where Marcus and I lived, I cut through the yard of Radcliffe College. The yard was a quiet, soothing oval of pampered lawn ringed by impressive Gothic Revival buildings, which, unlike their immense Harvard counterparts, were small enough to exude an unintimidating charm. When, years earlier, I’d worked at a bookstore in the Square, I often took breaks there and napped in one of the several gardens tucked into shady alcoves behind the brick walls surrounding the school. The sounds of traffic and pedestrians filtered into the yard, but muted and serene so that it was like being in a grassy clearing listening to the sounds of a football game from a distant stadium. (Another advantage to living in a college town is easy access to a lot of nicely tended grass, secret gardens, and public toilets.)

  The library at Radcliffe was reputed to have the world’s largest collection of cookbooks, a fact I’d once made the mistake of relaying to Agnes. She’d lit up at the prospect of our mother’s recipes being housed in such a renowned institution. “Mom would be so proud,” she’d said, and had gone back to her insane project with new determination. Actually, the idea of “Oh-So-Simple Spaghetti Sauce” (“Mix one bottle of ‘catsup’ with two cups of ‘water,’ one cup of sugar, pinch of ‘herbs’ and stir”) being housed at Radcliffe excited me, too, but I wasn’t about to admit it to anyone. A few days after my abortive visit in New Hampshire, Agnes had sent me a note saying that she was disappointed I’d left so abruptly. “We were having such a fun time,” she wrote, without any apparent irony. She’d enclosed a couple of new recipes she’d come across and wanted to know if I thought she should include them. One in particular caught my fancy:

  Cutting through a side yard, I started to imagine this recipe among the volumes of world cuisine, and within seconds I was leaning against the wall, gasping for air, thinking about Agnes and my mother and those ridiculous balls of Jell-O floating in milk, forlornly waiting for Barbara or anyone to come along and admire them or appreciate them or at the very least eat them.

  It was then that I spotted Ben. He was stretched out on his stomach on the grass, propped up on his elbows, reading. Otis was keeping watch beside him, and when the dog saw me, he started to wag his tail, the first sign of pleased recognition he’d ever shown. I immediately felt revived.

  It was after four, and the wind had shifted east and begun to blow in from the ocean, salty and damp. The remaining sunlight in the garden had narrowed to one bright corridor on the grass, and Ben was lying in it, facing away from me, a bed of dead daylilies near his head. Something in the sight of him, stretched out and reading like that, made me feel I’d snuck up on him unfairly, and I turned away and hurried across the yard and out one of the wrought-iron gates.

  When Ben showed up with Otis late that afternoon, I was sitting at the table in the kitchen, eating a bowl of cereal. He had on several shirts—a black T-shirt and a long-sleeved flannel shirt and, over that, a short-sleeved white dress shirt—and his face was pink from the breeze.

  “It’s getting cool out there,” I said. “You’ll have to cut your walks short, won’t you?”

  “This weather won’t last. There’ll probably be another long stretch of warmth. New England is famous for that.”

  Ben had told me that he researched all the places he and Louise moved to. He knew more about the climate and topography of New England than I’d learned from a lifetime of living there. We were, he explained, in a period of deceptive cool that usually occurred this time of year and seldom lasted more than a few days, a week at most.

  He went to one of the cabinets and pulled down a box of dog food, filled Otis’s dish with it, and made him sit for a moment before putting it on the floor. We’d agreed that he would feed the dog in the afternoon, although I’d started to sneak him treats from my plate just because I couldn’t resist the look of hungry pleading in his eyes. “I think Otis likes the cold,” he said. “He’s more lively in this weather.”

  “He’s lively around you,” I said. “Around me, he sleeps. Why don’t you sit down and have some cereal?”

  He looked at me through his bangs and then snapped his hair off his face. “That’s what I had for breakfast.”

  “That’s what I had for breakfast,” I said. “That’s what I had for lunch. It’s probably what I’ll have for dinner. Take one of those bowls from the dish rack.”

  “I don’t think so, Clyde. I already ate.”

  I shoveled in more of the cereal. It had been sitting in the bowl so long it had taken on the consistency of wet newspaper. “Where did you eat?”

  “At a friend’s house.” He said it quickly and then turned to put away the dog food.

  I’d felt such a pang of sadness at seeing him alone, hiding out in the garden, I’d stopped at a used-record store on the way home, one of a good half dozen in town that I frequented, and picked up an album for him. I’d bought it solely for the title—Music for a Chinese Dinner at Home—and the faded but still garish cover, a posed photograph so racially insensitive it defied description. Louise had told me Ben collected odd record jackets from the fifties, and I figured you couldn’t get much odder than this. I had it in a bag on the table, and I handed it to him now as unceremoniously as I could, slightly embarrassed by the offering, by having any offering at all, and went back to my cereal.

  “For Louise?” he asked.

  “For you.”

  He fingered the bag for a moment. “Accordion music?”

  “As a matter of fact, it isn’t. I’ve temporarily given up on that. This is an unselfish gift, appealing to your interests, not mine.”

  He pulled the record out of the bag and smiled, briefly and hesitantly, when he saw the cover. I hadn’t seen him smile very often, and for a few seconds he looked untroubled and happy, like a little boy. The skin around his eyes was so light and thin, it looked blue. As he smiled, some facial muscles tugged his ears forward, making them more protuberant and uncannily Marcus-like than usual.

  He put the record back in the bag and mumbled a thank-you that sounded more embarrassed than pleased. “Where’d you find this?” he asked.

  “I can show you, if you like,” I told him.

 
We fell into a routine of going out together some afternoons and walking to one or more of the used-record stores in Cambridge or across the river and into Boston. On the whole, the record stores were dusty places with a damp-basement smell, most of them heaped to the ceiling with stacks of discarded LPs. The floors themselves were sagging under the weight of all that perfectly good vinyl, cast off by the lemmings who’ve been hoodwinked into believing that compact discs have superior sound.

  The stores were always crowded with brooding shoppers who fit into one of three broad categories: young music student with, assuming he was white, dreadlocks; tweedy academic with bad eyesight; nervous, obsessive-compulsive opera fan with body odor and shoes worn down at the heels. Apparently, women don’t buy used records, so the stores had the atmosphere of a faintly unwholesome men’s club. I mixed right into the crowd because my glasses created an all-purpose weirdo look that was right for every occasion. Despite his sheepishness, Ben never seemed uncomfortable in these stores. He had the same self-contained quality Louise had had when I knew her in college: a way of carrying himself and moving through a crowd of people that made it clear he didn’t really fit in but wasn’t exactly out of place, either. He was fending for himself, an attitude most people seem to respect.

  Louise often called me late at night, after Ben had gone to sleep. She’d drag the phone to a chair on the patio off her bedroom and wrap herself in a blanket. Her hoarse voice sounded even smaller and more distant as, in vague, reproachful terms, she talked about the book she was working on and lit one cigarette after another. Occasionally she’d comment on what she could see in the lit-up window of a neighbor’s house.

  Some nights I’d wander over to her neighborhood. Because my days lacked much in the way of formal definition, I’d long been a nocturnal walker, tromping around the streets of Cambridge after most of the city was dark. Somewhere in the city, there was always a fusty-looking person sitting in a window, bent over a book. I’d sneak through the garden alongside the main house like a thief, and if I saw lights on in Louise’s study, I’d knock on the glass doors and lure her out.

  One balmy midnight as we sat under the dying grape arbor, she said, “I hope Ben isn’t taking too much of your time.”

  “Not at all. He’s giving my life some shape.”

  I’d said it to be polite, because he was taking up an increasing amount of time, but as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized they were true. Perhaps that was why some people need children and pets and spouses, to bring order to the chaos of their lives. In a pinch, the pursuit of anonymous sex can function as a reasonable alternative, although it’s complicated these days and it does require a fair amount of self-motivation.

  “Shape?” Louise said. “Don’t tell me that. I’ve spent the past twelve years trying to make sure my life is shapeless.”

  “Turning down marriage proposals?”

  “Not many,” she said. “None that would have lasted. Let’s face it, I’ll never marry.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked as if I were shocked by the comment, but I’d thought the same thing for a long time.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe I just like men too much. Every job I’ve ever had, I sit around and listen to women complaining about the men in their lives—how they don’t like the way they smell or the way they think or how they slop down their food. They just categorically dislike the whole breed, give or take a few parts and pieces. And we all know that most men hate women.”

  It was true that most women I knew had little good to say about men in a general way and seemed to take rapacious pleasure in running down the entire sex. One of the chief drawbacks to a decidedly macho gym I’d joined had been having to listen to a lot of discontented straight men voice their bottomless rage and resentment toward the women in their lives as a way of veiling their fears of being rejected by them. Heterosexual relations are in such an appalling state in the country, it’s a wonder anyone bothers to marry. If it weren’t for the consumer frenzy for big dresses and creamy roses whipped up by those immense bridal magazines, I doubt anyone would. Of course, I have to admit I’ve heard gay men talking about women in disparaging terms, too, but it never seems quite as bluntly misogynist, since they’re usually talking about their mothers.

  “But somehow,” Louise said, “all these people who can’t stand each other end up having relationships. Rancorous relationships, it’s true, but ones that endure. There’s some element of passion missing in me, I think. I’m too calculating, especially since I stopped drinking.”

  I, too, had a theory about why it would be hard for Louise to form a relationship, but it lacked the irony of hers. My theory was that she was too independent, in a determined way, to really give herself over to anyone. She hadn’t changed all that much from her college years, when she dated only men who were unavailable or otherwise engaged.

  More important—most important—she already had a man in her life, or a male anyway, and I don’t think she was ready to nudge Ben aside to make room for another.

  On our walks to the record stores, Ben and I spent a fair amount of time talking about Louise. He spoke of her with what sounded to me like calculated annoyance. According to Ben, Louise had terrible problems disciplining herself to sit down and write; she was a sloppy housekeeper; she never dressed properly for the weather; she was an impractical shopper. But the real point of his comments wasn’t to criticize his mother so much as to imply that he was the one who held her together. He listened to the weather reports in the morning to tell her if she should leave the house with an umbrella or a sweater. He curtailed her tendency to overspend. He was forcing her to cut down on her smoking.

  “But what about you?” Louise asked. “You shouldn’t be mooning over someone who left years ago. It’s not healthy, Clyde.”

  “I realize. But I feel as if I can’t go ahead with this unresolved relationship hanging over my head.”

  She looked at me warily in the dim light spilling out from her bedroom. I wasn’t sure I believed it, either. I had a sense I’d fallen into a crack in the sidewalk somewhere a few years back and couldn’t pull myself out.

  “Marcus called to tell me he’s putting off talking to Ben for a little while,” she said. “Something about stepping into a room. I couldn’t follow the metaphor.”

  “It has to do with beginning his dissertation.”

  “I figured. He should just write it.”

  “He should,” I said. “But then it would be written, and where would he be?”

  She pulled at her lip. “I think it’s a momentary case of cold feet about Ben. Don’t you?”

  “Definitely momentary,” I said.

  “But definitely cold.”

  Every night when I visited her and we sat in her garden, a phone started to ring in one of the houses behind us. It rang ten or fifteen times, and no one ever picked it up. It started to ring now in the silence between us, a distant bell tolling out the time: fifteen o’clock. I hated the sound of that phone, ringing and ringing and no one answering it, all that wasted potential. When the phone stopped, Louise and I sighed together, and without saying anything more, I kissed her good night and left.

  DONALD GERN, MY DOWNSTAIRS NEIGHBOR, struck me as one of those affable, basically kind-hearted, but socially inept people besieged by bad luck. The only sounds I ever heard coming from his first-floor apartment were those of falling pans and breaking dishes, followed by loud thumps, as if he’d slammed his fist into the wall in rage or frustration.

  When, late in the summer, he’d mentioned his intention of having a cookout, I’d assumed that if he ever did get around to planning it, the event would be canceled at the last minute by a sudden, unseasonable weather disaster—tornado, massive electric storm, flooding—or possibly by some personal tragedy. It was hard to imagine that anything ever went well for Donald. The problem was that hair. One calamitously ill-advised affectation, like a ridiculous hairstyle, a propensity for cheap jewelry, or overdeveloped calves, can act as
a magnet, drawing bad luck and misery. If Donald didn’t have that idiotic flap of pink hair sitting on his head, he wouldn’t be living in that grim apartment on the first floor. He wouldn’t have his quack job, and he wouldn’t dress in clothes that made him look like a cartoon baby.

  Unfortunately, it’s not possible to spot your own ill-advised affectations. If it were, I probably wouldn’t have been living in the grim apartment above Donald or have my quack job or be scurrying around town awaiting the affection of a lover who’d dumped me, so I could turn around and dump him and get on with my life.

  One morning early in October, Donald stopped me in the hallway and handed me a couple of bills that had come in the mail that day. He had on his lab coat with a baby-blanket-blue sweater underneath, stretched tight across his chest. He was studying a catalog of mail-order food, one of many that came for the previous first-floor tenant. “The guy that lived here gets four of these a day. Must have been a real pig, huh?”

  “I didn’t know him, to tell you the truth,” I said. “But he was awfully skinny.” Most of the tenants in the building were physical extremes of one sort or another. Donald’s predecessor had had the gaunt form and furtive demeanor of a male anorexic. I often saw him on the front steps of the house huddled over his food magazines, his legs tightly wound around each other like pipe cleaners. Along with most of the other residents, he’d had an inexplicable fondness for sheeny blue windbreakers. In many ways, Donald was the best of the bunch.

  He looked at me, wide-eyed and sincere. “No kidding. Skinny! Maybe he read these instead of eating. Kind of like jerking off, but with food. You know what I mean?”

  I nodded and reached behind me for the door to our apartment. I was never too keen on turning my back on Donald. It wasn’t possible that anyone that ineffectual could be dangerous, but I hadn’t completely ruled out the possibility that he had body parts stashed in his freezer. When he opened his own door, I was overcome by a wave of morbid curiosity. I craned my neck to get a better view inside. All I could see was a scrap of living room. From my vantage point, it appeared to be empty except for an ugly brown sofa that looked disconcertingly like a log and a big black box, probably the back of a TV console or a massive stereo speaker. A perfect suicide parlor.