The Man of the House

by Stephen McCauley

  “Pretty pathetic,” Barbara said. “Why does everyone have such weird hair?”

  The men did have amazingly similar, disfiguring haircuts: bowl-shaped around the top, with a curtain of stiff hair hanging down in back, like the shag cut Jane Fonda wore in Klute. The women had big, heaped-up hairdos, like headdresses from a Vegas nightclub act.

  “I’m going to get a beer,” Barbara said, and lumbered off to one of the two kegs in opposite corners. Donald had already pumped a glass of beer for Agnes, and he had her backed against the chain-link fence, nodding intently as he listened to her talk. I couldn’t imagine what it was they’d found to discuss already, at such length. I’d never figured out what to say to Donald once we got past hello, and Agnes usually lapsed into self-loathing silence in social situations. To be truthful, I felt a little jealous that each had found something in the other that I apparently hadn’t been able to find in either. Agnes made a fluttering gesture with the fingers of one hand and then started to stir at the air as if she were beating an imaginary egg with a wire whisk.

  Marcus sauntered into the yard and glanced around at the party. He’d put on a pair of shorts that came down below his knees, and there was something undeniably sexy, in a boring, pale sort of way, about his long, shapeless calves.

  “Where’s Sheila?” I asked.

  “She’s poking around in my drawers,” he said, “looking for something summery to put on.” Marcus had a way of unconsciously uttering god-awful double entendres, and even when I pointed them out to him, he’d shrug as if he didn’t get my point.

  “I wish you’d told me you invited my sister. I wasn’t psychologically prepared.”

  “She called for you the other day and we got jawing and I guess I said something about it.”

  “Jawing?” You didn’t “jaw” with Agnes. You tried to reassure and soothe her while she edged ever closer to a massive attack of hysteria. “You were flirting with her and then you forgot about her and showed up with this Sheila.”

  “Aw, stop talking like her brother. Anyway, it looks like she’s got an admirer.” His lifted his chin toward Donald.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  The sun was blazing down on us, making the top of my head uncomfortably hot. Like Agnes, I was overdressed for the weather. I had on long pants and a bulky sweater and a pair of black shoes. After the middle of September, I start to feel inexplicably naked in shorts, no matter what the temperature is. Perhaps it was the heat, but the still air was heavy with the smell of cheap powdery cologne, rose and vanilla and spicy citrus, as if everyone’s perfume and aftershave were mingling and merging and having a party of their own in a cloud above the yard.

  “I’ll tell you something, Clyde, I really think Sheila might be the one.”

  “The one what?”

  “You can’t believe how supportive she is of my work.”

  “Supportive” usually translated into reassuring Marcus that the brilliance of his dissertation was not dependent upon its ever being written.

  “Maybe she’ll help you get things rolling, and then you can sit down and talk with Ben.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping, Clyde. It really is. That’s the goal I’m working toward. It’s helping me settle in. Is this the Rolling Stones? Why are they playing this old stuff? I hate that narcissist Mick Jagger, strutting around with a microphone.”

  I felt a tap on my shoulder. A man was standing behind me, clutching a plastic cup filled with beer. He had one of those bizarre shag haircuts, and a faint smudge of a mustache that looked as if someone had drawn it on with an eyebrow pencil and then done a bad job of erasing it. “How you doing?” he said.

  I shrugged. I really wasn’t in the mood for socializing just then, not that I ever was.

  “Mark Greeley,” he said, and held out his hand. “You’re the guy from upstairs, right?”

  “Well. . .”

  “Donny said you teach at Harvard.”

  “No, no,” I said. I pointed at Marcus. “He’s doing a Ph.D. there, but I’m unaffiliated.”

  “If I was teaching at Harvard, I’d be bragging about it.” He looked at Marcus and laughed. “Right?”

  Marcus nodded, shrugged, and looked away.

  Mark Greeley’s harem pants were neon green with hot-pink stripes, and his T-shirt advertised a resort in Jamaica with the slogan “Rev Your Engines and Cool Your Jets.” He had on a pair of black sneakers that made his feet look like mittened fists.

  My eye started to itch, a problem I frequently have when I feel cornered. I reached up under my glasses to rub my eyeball and nearly knocked the frames off my face. This encounter was headed for disaster. I could smell it on his aftershave. “Is there any more beer in those kegs?” I asked.

  Mark Greeley took a gulp of his own beer and said, “Anyway, I wanted to ask you a—you know—a little favor, since you teach there and everything. I’m trying to get into that Harvard Business School, and I was wondering if maybe you could”—he tipped his hand from side to side—“you know, put in a good word for me.”

  “Put in a good word?”

  “Yeah, you know, pull a couple of strings.”

  “You’ve got the wrong idea,” I said. “I really can’t. I’ve got nothing to do with the school, and Marcus here is only a student—”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘only,’” Marcus piped up. “I’ve taught several courses over the years.”

  Mark Greeley was staring at me and nodding in an anxious, angry way, but I could tell he wasn’t listening to a word. He had a case of steroid acne spread across his cheeks, which looked uncomfortable in the bright sun. “Listen,” he cut in, “you guys have your thing, that’s your business. I’m not worried about that. I just said put in a good word, no big deal. If I still don’t get in, I’m not going to hold you responsible. I’ve got a lot going on in my life. So are you going to help me out or not?”

  “Well. . . no.”

  He tossed his cup of beer onto the ground and stormed off. There was a momentary hush. One of the women in the smoking circle turned around and started to laugh. Mark Greeley pounded his fist against the fence and stomped out of the yard, banging the gate behind him.

  “What the hell was all that?” I asked.

  Marcus shook his head. “Terrible.”

  “I’ll say.” I looked around the yard, trying to calm down. Agnes, laughing at something Donald had said, seemed oblivious. Really, it was all her fault. If she hadn’t shown up, I’d still be upstairs reading about Lauren Bacall. Or better yet, sleeping.

  “It’s just another example of how you get involved in everyone’s tragic story, Clyde, instead of paying attention to your own.”

  “Involved? Don’t tell me that was my fault!”

  Marcus hooked his hair behind his ears and squinted up at the sun. He pulled a pair of aviator sunglasses out of his shirt pocket and slipped them on. “You have to start examining your own life a little more instead of getting involved with every person who wanders over looking for a kind word. Things have a way of working out if you give them time.” He looked at me for a moment, letting this profound statement sink in, and then went to open the gate for Sheila.

  Half an hour later, the food still hadn’t turned up. Barbara, who’d remained stationed by the keg, refilling her glass frequently, was looking less restless than before but, amazingly, still sober. From what I’d seen, no one had dared speak to her. The entire time she’d been standing there, she’d been casting threatening glances to ward off any possible approach and proudly, challengingly, showing off her severe haircut, her piercings, and a frown that Marcus could have used as the basis for his entire dissertation.

  Shortly after the incident with Mark Greeley, the teenage girl who lived in the house next door walked into the neighboring yard, set up a lawn chair, and stripped down to a Day-Glo—green bikini. She lay there in the sun, separated from the party by only a few feet and a chain-link fence. She’d even brought her own radio, a small boom box, which had mu
ch better sound quality than Donald’s massive speaker system. A week earlier, I’d heard her father shouting at her in the middle of the night, threatening to have her arrested, for what I had no idea, although I’d stayed up for over an hour trying to find out. She seemed perfectly composed now. Once the guests had ogled her, they turned their backs, as if they were ashamed to be caught at this low-prestige event.

  Donald had spilled Agnes’s cookies onto one of the empty plastic plates. They looked more like brown Bakelite poker chips than food, but they’d been devoured enthusiastically. At least half a dozen people had made their way over to Agnes to compliment her on her cooking, and she’d thanked them with cringing gratitude. To my amazement, she seemed to have completely forgotten about Marcus and my father. With any luck at all, Dad would call the following week to tell me about his trip and to thank me again. At least it gave me something to look forward to.

  It was hard to know what Sheila made of the event. Although Marcus had opened the gate for her, it was she who led him into the little yard with some of the vain pride I occasionally felt when I was out walking Otis: Look at me! Aren’t I adorable because I’ve got an adorable dog at the end of this leash?

  What she’d dug out of Marcus’s drawers was a white sleeveless T-shirt that clung to her flat stomach and her breasts and a pair of long dark pants that looked so heavy and wintry, they made the T-shirt all the more provocative.

  We engaged in a few minutes of strained conversation on her studies—landscape paintings of the Sung dynasty from a contemporary Western feminist perspective—before it became apparent to her that despite my broadly phrased questions, I hadn’t even a remote idea what century we were discussing. “Marcus told me you teach at The Learning Place,” she said, trying to rescue me.

  “He would.”

  “I think that’s great! Adult education is wonderful.”

  It was bad enough having people know what I did for a living, but having them praise me for it, the way you might praise a ten-year-old for his paper route, was truly humiliating.

  When she and Marcus went to sit on the back steps of the house, Agnes squeezed her way through a group of men and leaned against my shoulder awkwardly. “They’re in love, aren’t they?”

  “They are,” I said. “But they’re both in love with the same man, so it’s bound to fail.”

  “Oh, Clyde, don’t be a cynic. I’m so glad I came. I’m having a lovely time.”

  “You really are?”

  “I really am.”

  “Well, I’m awfully happy to hear that, sweetheart.”

  “You have such nice friends. Even Barbara seems to be enjoying herself.”

  At the very least, Barbara was enjoying her bottomless cup of beer. She had her arms spread out along the fence behind her as if she were claiming that whole corner of the yard as her territory.

  “I know I shouldn’t let her drink, but I can’t take the weight of the world on my shoulders, can I? Donald said everyone drinks at that age, so I shouldn’t worry. I suppose he’s right. He’s cheerful.”

  “Donald?”

  “Mmm.” She put an arm around my waist, an affectionate gesture so badly executed she twisted her shoulder and had to retract it.

  A few minutes later, I started inching my way toward the gate, hoping to slip out of the yard unnoticed. But when I turned to leave, Ben was standing there, half hidden by an immense hydrangea bush. He had on a big jersey with a pair of sunglasses sticking out of the pocket and absurdly oversize sneakers. I couldn’t tell if he was spying on the pathetic spectacle or simply trying to get up the nerve to enter.

  “I forgot my key,” he said.

  “You did? That’s unlike you.”

  “I wasn’t sure you were here.”

  “With a little luck, I won’t be for long. Have you been standing there awhile?”

  He shrugged.

  I started to open the gate, intending to leave, but thought better of it. “Come in for a minute,” I said. “There’s no food and there’s nothing for you to drink, but. . . I want you to meet my sister.”

  “Agnes?” he said.

  “Very good. Half the time, I can’t remember her name.”

  I unhooked the rusted gate and directed Ben to the corner of the yard where my sister was once again yucking it up with Donald.

  “I bet I know who this is,” she said. Her tone was uncharacteristically confident and buoyant, even a little teasing. “I bet this is Louise Morris’s son.”

  “Benjamin,” I said.

  She stuck out her hand. “Well, I am very pleased to meet you. Did Clyde tell you I’m your mother’s biggest fan?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  “Well, I am. You must be very proud of her.”

  “Hey, kid,” Donald said, “tell Agnes here how I trained your dog to fetch a ball. I’m trying to impress her with my talents.”

  Ben nodded and then looked at me without saying anything. I’d claimed responsibility for teaching Otis his latest trick, a lie I’d felt justified in telling since I was the one who’d bought the ball. “It was a group effort,” I explained.

  Sheila and Marcus walked arm in arm through the cluster of chain-smoking women, as if deigning to mingle with mere mortals. When they reached us, Marcus put a hand on Benjamin’s shoulder, a gesture of intimacy and ownership that shocked me. Perhaps it shocked Ben, too, for he turned around and stared up at Marcus with a sad, worried expression. “Sheila was just telling me she has a brother right about your age,” Marcus said. “They’re best friends.”

  “He’s the main reason I hated to leave California,” Sheila said. “And you, you remind me of him exactly. We send E-mail back and forth almost every day.”

  “Don’t talk to me about computers,” Donald said. “Gives me a headache just thinking about them.”

  “Isn’t it lovely you’re so close,” Agnes said. She glanced across the yard at her daughter and sighed. “I wonder how things would have turned out if Barbara had had a brother.”

  “Where in California is he?” Ben asked.

  “San Diego. Have you ever been there?”

  “Me and my mom lived there for a year. But I don’t remember it much.”

  “You were four,” I said. It was a guess, but I figured it was closer than anything his father could come up with.

  Sheila rested her head on Marcus’s shoulder and squeezed her lips into a pout. “I’m sorry you can’t keep your dog with you, honey. He’s such a sweet little guy. Marcus is helping you take care of him, isn’t he?”

  Ben shrugged.

  “We’re working on it,” Marcus said. He said it with so much conviction, I could tell he believed he really was.

  Agnes introduced Ben to Barbara, who dismissed her mother and started talking with him animatedly, making discouraging faces at the adults. She finished off the beer in her cup and clomped over to our little group, with Ben trailing behind her. They hadn’t been together more than a few minutes, but already she’d established dominance over him.

  “We’re walking up to the Square,” she announced. “Does anyone object too much?”

  “Oh, my purse is upstairs,” Agnes said. “Barbara and I made a little deal—”

  “Forget it, Mom.”

  “—that if she’d come down to Cambridge—”

  “Mom, quit while you’re ahead, okay? Anyway, I changed my mind. We’re going to walk the dog and try to score some drugs. Just kidding.” She snapped her head. “C’mon, Morris, let’s go. We need your key, Clyde.”

  “I was about to leave myself.”

  “We should go, too,” Sheila said.

  “Got a feeling the ship’s sinking, sis?” Donald asked.

  “Not at all,” Agnes said. “I’m having a wonderful time.”

  THE ROOM I GENEROUSLY CALLED A STUDY was small, low-ceilinged, and looked out to the side of the house and right over the rooftop of the gourmet grocery. There was a duct from the store’s ventilation system below the win
dow, and at odd hours of the day and night, mouth watering smells of baking bread and roasting coffee and chocolate belched out and seeped into the house. I used the room primarily for napping and other slothful midday activities, for while I found it depressing to fall asleep in my bed in the middle of the afternoon, I found it reviving to fall asleep in the study. I assume the only thing that kept Marcus from crashing into a suicidal slump about having accomplished nothing for a decade was the fact that he’d had the good sense to accomplish nothing in the library rather than at home. I’d furnished the room with a thin twin-bed mattress propped up on bricks and boards I called a daybed and a pair of overstuffed chairs with serious structural problems. I’d draped the chairs with Indian-print bedspreads—a decorative touch that’s practical at age twenty but an admission of defeat at thirty-five. The chairs were so bloated and lumpy and lopsided, they sometimes looked to me like two fat, sloppily dressed drunks complaining to each other about the state of the world while slugging down another drink.

  But the room had an undeniable charm, especially when something delicious was in the oven next door or when there was a power outage and it was too dark to see much.

  A few days after Donald’s cookout, Ben and I were sitting in the study. It was pouring, sheets of rain slamming against the window and drumming loudly on the roof. Otis’s reluctance to go outside had convinced Ben to stay in for once, and he was sitting on the floor pulling knots out of the dog’s wiry coat. I was eager to find out what Ben thought of my niece or at least what they’d done for the nearly two hours they’d spent together the afternoon of the cookout, but whenever I asked a question, he practiced the same kind of maddening evasiveness that Barbara herself practiced routinely.

  “Do you know what it means when Otis rolls over on his back like that?” I tried.