Donald turned suddenly and caught me peering. “Oh, hey,” he said, squinting through the gloom of the hallway, “I’m having my cookout next Saturday. The one I told you about. Finally got the fricking thing together.”
“That’s great!” I said.
“Yeah, well, I don’t know about great, but come down anyway.”
Because I felt so foolish peering into his apartment, I said, “I’ll be there,” as excitedly as if he’d just offered me two tickets to watch James Dean rise from the dead.
“Bring that kid, if you want.”
“Ben,” I said. “His mother’s a friend of mine. I’m just taking care of his dog.” I’d begun to wonder if the neighbors were talking.
“Bring the dog. Bring the mother—we need some more females. Some of us anyway. Me, I mean.” He went into his apartment, humming to himself, turned, and said, “Listen, when you’re trying to get that dog to obey you? Make eye contact and give him a few rewards—bones, hunk of cheese, crap like that. And let it out in the yard by itself every once in a while. Builds confidence.” Then he slammed his door shut.
I stood in the hall, undone and defeated by the encounter, as I usually was when I bumped into Donald. How was it that he knew more about the care and training of dogs than I did?
Marcus was hunched over his coffee, leafing through one of the many academic journals he brought into the house. As far as I could tell, he had no interest in the articles they contained. He read them so he could dismiss the colleagues who’d written them and explain away the unjust circumstances under which they’d been published. For someone who’d chosen to enter the field of experimental psychology, Marcus was oddly disinterested in the workings of anyone else’s mind or the circumstances of anyone else’s life. He hadn’t accepted the fact that being interested in someone else is generally a lot more interesting than hauling out a half-dozen fascinating experiences, vacations, and love affairs for the perusal of the gathered multitude. The advantage of having low self-esteem is that certain social graces come naturally. Marcus would listen to me yak, all right, just as he’d listen to his youthful girlfriends. But it was always with a slightly distracted, bored attitude, as if no one’s problems but his own could be of any real significance in the world. This, like most delusions of grandeur and inflated-ego disorders, came from the misfortune of having had loving and nurturing parents. Marcus’s attitude, if articulated, would have been: Gee, I’m really sorry to hear that, Clyde, but I have a one-in-fifty-million chance of being elected President, while you, like all homosexuals, most women, and Ted Kennedy, have none. So let me get back to my coffee.
“Donald’s having his cookout after all,” I said.
“Should be fun.”
“Fun? You must be joking. It’s going to be a bunch of losers sitting around getting drunk—remember?”
“You could use a better attitude about social events, Clyde, you really could. You never know who you’re going to meet. Even in the most unlikely places.”
Because Marcus was virtually incapable of expressing any of his emotions directly, I always had to read between the lines of what he was saying. And because, no matter what he talked about, he never really talked about anything other than himself, I found this minilecture on optimism suspicious. I sat down on the nubby sofa. He was still leafing through the dull journal, shaking his head in apparent dismay at what he was reading. But he didn’t look quite as mangy as he had recently. A certain glamorous pallor had replaced the distressed flush of the last few weeks, and unless I was mistaken, he’d had his lovely yellow hair trimmed.
“How’s the work going?” I asked.
“Better, I think. I’ve almost got the whole thing done. Chapter by chapter. It’s just a matter of getting it down on paper.”
Sometimes when I was walking to The Learning Place or wandering through the streets of Cambridge after midnight, I’d sing. In my head, I mean. There, my voice and phrasing were a synthesis of Mel Tormé and Carlos Gardel. Innovative, emotionally compelling, flawless. The only time I stumbled was when I actually opened my mouth to utter a note. So it was, I imagined, with Marcus’s dissertation. The more perfect it became in his imagination, the less likely it was the thing would ever get written, even a single paragraph.
“You should bring someone along to the cookout,” I said, testing my suspicions.
“I might. On the other hand, I might just let her take the lead, see what happens.”
“Probably a good idea. With someone her age.”
He looked up from the article he was skimming. “Did I tell you about Sheila already?”
“No, no. I was just taking a guess.”
“I’d never noticed her before. She started coming around my carrel.” He shrugged at the inevitability of the whole thing. “You know, I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he said, gathering up his papers. “I think I might be allergic to that dog. We should probably keep her out of my room.”
Otis was sitting on the sofa, his absurd, tufted head moving back and forth from me to Marcus, following the conversation. I’d noticed that Marcus had increasing difficulty in remembering Otis’s name and sex.
“I’ll see what I can do about it,” I told him. “But I’m taking him for assertiveness training, so I can’t promise anything.”
Later that day, I went to Louise’s office. It was a small room on the second floor of a Colonial-style house in a cluster of houses owned by Harvard. The university owned mind-boggling amounts of real estate and was slowly but surely turning the city into Harvard World, a beautifully tended theme park designed around an academic motif. You couldn’t walk across any corner of the sprawling campus without getting swept up in a throng of tourists listening to amusing anecdotes about the school’s founder and snapping pictures of libraries and lecture halls. It was only a matter of time before they installed a monorail and a water slide.
The inside of Louise’s building was a warren of tiny rooms and narrow hallways, noisy with the clicking of computers and the whir of copying machines. I climbed the steep staircase to the second floor and knocked on her door. She was sitting at her desk, staring at the opposite wall. “Take a seat,” she said hoarsely, indicating a daybed littered with books and papers.
The whole room had the feel of massive confusion and chaos. Magazines and newspapers were stacked everywhere, cords and computer parts were scattered about, a toaster oven and a hot plate took up the floor in one corner. The drawers of a filing cabinet were open, revealing a coffeemaker and bags of English muffins. She had a few road maps stuck to the yellow walls, which somehow added to the atmosphere of confusion—all those crisscrossing black and red lines.
I cleared off a space on the daybed and sat down. “Cozy,” I said. “The whole house is buzzing with creativity.”
She looked over at me with undisguised dismay, her pale-blue eyes bloodshot and exhausted. “That’s not creativity, it’s neurotic energy. They’re all nuts, the women in this building. Obviously, I can’t smoke in here, which is fine, but the poet over there”—she pointed to the wall behind me—“told me I couldn’t smoke in the yard behind the house because the smell was drifting in through her windows. And the one on this side is allergic to everything and breaks out in hives when I make toast.”
“Too bad. I was hankering for one of those English muffins.”
“Oh, good.” She sprang up from her desk and ripped open a bag. “Let’s make lots.”
“Do you get any work done here?”
She pushed up the sleeves of her sweatshirt. “Of course not. No one does. Every bit of creative energy gets sucked up in the rivalries and complaints and endless rounds of gossip and breast-beating. Who got a bigger advance, a better teaching job, a roomier office. Thank God I’m basically a failure and have the least desirable room. And let’s not forget the round-table discussions of Prozac dosages. It’s a sham.”
“So the novel. . .”
She slammed shut the door on the toaster oven and pushed a butto
n, and all the lights in the room dimmed. Someone in the room behind me pounded on the wall. “All right, if you want to hear the truth, here it is: I got the grant because I told them I was writing a memoir about being a single mother. No one cares about novels anymore, Clyde. No one wants to wade through the obfuscations of fiction. Just pump out all the filthy facts, toss in a chapter on rehab, and wrap it up.”
I nodded guiltily, thinking about my own reading list of late. Of course, I didn’t entirely agree with her estimation. It struck me that as literature, movie star biographies, for example, are vastly underrated. Given a fitting course title, I could teach a superb class on the subject. With their tales of astonishingly abrupt physical transformations and meteoric shifts from poverty to wealth to poverty and so on, they rival the magic realism of any Latin American novel I’ve ever read. And trying to sift through the exaggerations, dodges, and outright lies of the subjects, the sources, and the hack biographers themselves requires as much intellectual engagement as it takes to read Kafka.
“So, you’re not working on a memoir?”
She opened up a drawer of her desk, lifted out a stack of papers, and dropped it on the desk. “I don’t know what it is. A big mess. Unpublishable hybrid.”
“Why don’t you just write a novel and pretend it’s a memoir? People have been writing memoirs and pretending they’re novels for decades.”
“Too confusing. I might try my hand at a mystery. I’m in the mood to kill someone off.” She tossed her manuscript back into the drawer. Fine wisps of smoke were starting to rise from the toaster, but when I went to the corner to unplug it, she told me to leave it alone. “Let her suffer,” she said, pointing to the wall behind her. “Actually, she’s out of town anyway.”
When the toast was sufficiently burned, she yanked it out and spread it with something yellow and slick from a tub she kept in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. She sprawled out on the floor and picked at the bread. “At least the grant got you to Cambridge,” I said.
“It did indeed. But is that a good thing? Marcus stopped by here a few days ago to tell me he needed a little more time before talking with Ben. He’s on the threshold,” she said, doing a fair imitation of his accent. “Right on the threshold.”
“I think he might be starting up with a new girlfriend.”
“Ah well, that makes sense, I suppose. Nothing like staving off impotence in one area by disproving it in another. But I can’t be too critical of him. I’m the one who made the mistakes. He was an innocent bystander.”
That was at least partly true. Marcus, with his wondrous passivity, had made himself a professional innocent bystander.
“The other day,” Louise said, “Ben asked me if Marcus was gay.”
“What was that all about?”
“Probably because you two share the house.”
“One of these days, Marcus is going to have to reevaluate having me as a roommate.”
Louise rolled over on her back and sucked at an unlit cigarette. “Don’t you think you should reevaluate it one of these days? What keeps you in that place?”
“If I knew, I’d move out.” Although I did have suspicions. There was something appealing about Marcus, beyond his looks and that irritating charm of his. I loved the way Marcus blathered and stumbled through life, like some fool tripping through a minefield and coming out unscathed. I suppose what it really was was that since Gordon had departed, and probably before that, too, I’d felt an especially compelling need to live my life as if I was waiting for it to begin. Like Marcus, I was in that odd state of suspended animation—waiting to graduate to the next stage of life. If I went out and got my own place and started to buy furniture that hadn’t been cast off by some junkie who’d gotten his life together, it would be an admission that my own life had begun, and I suppose I’d have to take some responsibility for it.
By the following Saturday, I’d forgotten about the cookout. It wasn’t the kind of event even I would live for.
The night before, I’d received a call from Drew and Sam, a couple of ferocious overachievers I knew, inviting me to a cocktail party at their South End condo. The invitation was such an obvious last-minute attempt at papering the house, I should have refused on principle. But I had so little respect for the hosts, I didn’t really care about humiliating myself by accepting.
“Who’s going to be there?” I asked.
“People you know” was the vague answer.
I wasn’t sure if I was talking to Drew or Sam, but they were so similar, it didn’t really matter. They were part of, and fairly representative of, Gordon and Michael’s social circle. I had high hopes that my ex and his accountant would be in attendance. I tended to avoid that kind of gathering, but I figured that since I was making such progress with my father, I might give it a whirl with Gordon.
Drew and Sam lived in one of those superbly renovated brownstone condos that give me severe claustrophobia. The walls were painted in dark colors, so dense they seemed to absorb all the light and most of the oxygen. The artwork consisted of soft-core porn photographs tucked into lovely metal frames they didn’t deserve. It would have been simpler and more artistically honest to tack up a few Polaroids of the neighbors exposing themselves.
Not only was Gordon not there, but after half an hour of forced, disjointed conversation, Drew and Sam brought out the VCR and showed a two-hour pictorial record of their recent trip to Brazil. The video was basically a modeling portfolio of the hosts wearing a variety of swimsuits, drawstring pants, and terry-cloth robes, a sort of home-movie version of the International Male catalog, with a few perfunctory shots of Poverty, Crime, and Nature thrown in for local color. The main, perhaps only, advantage of lousy eyesight is that it’s possible, in these situations, to remove eyeglasses, stare at the TV screen, see a lovely pale-blue blur, and go into a state of meditative repose. The sole mention of my ex all evening was when Drew/Sam said that Gordon and Michael were coming over to see the video the following week so that they could plan their own, identical vacation. I left late, hungry and with the same sense of having pointlessly amputated a portion of my life I had had the time I sat through all four torturous hours of Gone With the Wind.
I was barely awake when the doorbell rang at eleven the next morning. I glanced in my bureau mirror on my way to the stairs, amazed at how increasingly unkind sleep was as I got older, as if someone came in every night to practice origami on my face while I slept.
My sister was standing on the doorstep, clutching an enormous shopping bag, her jaw clenched with anxiety, as if she were expecting to be assaulted by a gang of roving crack addicts. She hadn’t been to Cambridge in nearly a year, claiming that visiting the city, along with flying, listening to the radio, and seeing the sunset, made her nervous. Since the New Hampshire visit, she’d had her hair cut still shorter, into one of those Peter Pan dos with a tiny sprig of cowlick sticking up in back. It made her neck look even longer, in a surprisingly flattering way.
I assumed disaster of some variety had brought her to town, so I tried to sound my most calm and upbeat.
“Agnes! What a surprise, sweetheart,” I croaked.
An ambulance screamed a block away, and Agnes closed her eyes until it had passed and the sound had faded. She glanced behind her. “Do you think my car is safe out there?”
I peered around her. The car, a newish four-door sedan of no discernible make, model, or color, was pulled up to the curb right in front of the house. “They never ticket on Saturdays. Come in.”
“I’m not worried about a ticket, Clyde. I mean safe. Is it safe?”
Sometimes I wondered if the kindest course to take with Agnes wouldn’t be to act out her fears right off and get them out of the way—in this case, take a sledgehammer and smash all the windows myself so my sister could relax for the rest of the day, secure in the knowledge that the worst had already happened.
“I’m sure it’s fine,” I said.
“Well, it’s important. Barbara’s in t
here.”
I looked around her again. There was no sign of my niece.
“She’s asleep on the back seat. It’s usually best not to wake her up. It tends to make her a little moody.”
“I’ll leave the door unlocked in case she wakes up and wants to come in.”
“Oh, good. Well, unless you think that isn’t safe.”
Agnes talked about safety as if it was synonymous with happiness.
“We’ll risk it this once.”
I was so stunned to see her, it wasn’t until we were upstairs and in the kitchen that I thought to ask her why she’d come. “The cookout,” she said. “Didn’t Marcus tell you he invited us?”
She asked this question in a characteristically incredulous tone, as if I’d just informed her that I’d never heard of Hiroshima or the Washington Monument. It wasn’t until that moment that I remembered the event myself. “He invited you? But it’s going to be unbearable.”
“Well, he didn’t think so. And he sounded as if it would mean so much to him to have us come, I didn’t want to disappoint him.”
Two nights earlier, Marcus had gone out on a date with Sheila, presumably at her suggestion, and he hadn’t been home since. It was a good bet he’d forgotten about the cookout himself. “How,” I asked, “did you talk Barbara into coming?”
“She insisted. There’s a store in Harvard Square that sells awful, awful leather things. She wants a black leather vest or something. I can’t worry about it, Clyde. I can’t take the whole world on my shoulders. I can’t be responsible for every mistake she makes.”
The Man of the House Page 14
