The Man of the House

by Stephen McCauley

  Ben looked at me doubtfully. “I didn’t know it meant anything at all.”

  “Sure it does. Everything they do has some meaning. Rolling over on his back is submitting to your will, his way of saying, ‘You win, I’ll do what you say.’”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’ve been reading up on dog communication,” I said.

  Standing in line at the photocopier in the library, I’d thumbed through one dreary, cheaply bound book on canine behavior, all in an attempt to pick up a few fun dog facts I could impress Ben with. I’d found it far more interesting than I’d expected. I kept hunting through it, looking for explanations for Otis’s behavior or tips on training, and ended up checking it out. I didn’t want to show the book to Ben, because I was afraid it would make my knowledge seem less impressive, like revealing the mechanics behind a magic trick. I let the information sink in and then went back to the subject of my niece.

  “So what did you two do?”

  “Me and Barbara?” He shrugged. “We went to The Pit.”

  The Pit was a depression in a pedestrian walkway near the entrance to the subway in Harvard Square. It was usually jammed with a group of sickly teenagers with oddly colored hair and leather jackets and pierced eyebrows. I was so far removed from the current youth culture, it was impossible for me to read meaning into the hairstyles and costumes of the kids who congregated there, but the whole crowd exuded an air of lethargy that screamed elephant tranquilizers. I couldn’t imagine Ben or even Barbara fitting into that scene. “What did you do there?” I asked.

  “We didn’t stay long. One of Barbara’s friends was there, and she started spitting on us, so we had to leave.”

  “Spitting! Why?”

  “I’m not sure. Some grudge about an old boyfriend. I don’t think it helped that she was with me.” He snapped the hair out of his eyes. “I guess they thought I was too much like a kid.”

  In fact, he was a kid, but he didn’t really seem to me “like” a kid at all. Kids, for one thing, will never admit to being kids or even being like kids. He released Otis, and the dog leapt into the chair I was sitting on and curled up beside me, his head on my thigh.

  I had a heavy, hardbound copy of Great Expectations open on my lap. We’d started to discuss it in class the week before, and there was a flurry of interest and excitement. At first I thought it was because students were actually reading the book, but it soon became apparent that because everyone had heard of Miss Havisham and knew about the dress and the cake and all the rest, they assumed they’d as good as read it. The discussion quickly melted into speculation about her character’s emotional disintegration and slipping faculties, which had absolutely nothing to do with the facts presented in the novel and everything to do with current theories of agoraphobia, menopause, and even nutrition. Of course, one student suggested that Miss Havisham was suffering from allergies, a topic that fueled near-hysterical enthusiasm. I personally found Miss Havisham unsympathetic, possibly because I was jealous of her reclusive life.

  When the phone rang, I asked Ben to answer it so I wouldn’t disturb the dog. He picked up and said hello a few times. “There’s no one there,” he said, and passed me the receiver. “It must be your father.”

  “How did he know who it was?” my father asked.

  “He’s psychic.” I was delighted Dad had called once again, especially since Ben was there to observe our chummy relationship. “How was your weekend on the Cape?” I asked with forced cheer, settling into a big chair.

  “It was unbelievable. Great motel, beach over here, shopping mall over there, convenient to everything. Roger went swimming three times.”

  Roger again. So far, my father had managed to slip mention of him into nearly every conversation we’d had, and I was beginning to develop an intense aversion to the name. “Isn’t it late in the season for swimming?”

  “He’s a rugged little guy.”

  “How little?”

  “Don’t be a wise guy,” he said. “Roger’s been through the mill, and he needed a break.”

  “I thought it was a romantic weekend for you and Diane.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” he whispered harshly. “Is that kid listening?”

  Ben was at the stereo, leafing through a stack of records. “He’s got his own problems,” I said. “I wouldn’t worry about him. How old is this Roger, anyway?”

  “Early thirties, but he’s in great shape.”

  I grunted. Younger than me and better-looking. It was impossible for me to mention anything about the appearance of anyone, male or female, in front of my father without inciting a hostile reaction. If I said a woman was attractive, he acted as if I was suddenly trying to claim heterosexuality to win his approval. And if I dared to mention that a man was fit, handsome, or even homely, he’d glare, shocked and furious, as if I’d just described a blow job in minute detail. “Anyway,” I said, “I’m glad you had a good time. What’s up?”

  “I heard Agnes went down there last weekend. You didn’t. . .”

  “She doesn’t know anything about it.” I said it too loudly, for Otis jumped off my lap and ran over to Ben, the foolish tuft of fur bouncing on his head.

  “Let’s keep it that way. I don’t like the idea of her running down there every five minutes. Who’s this neighbor of yours?”

  “Donald?”

  “She’s mentioned him three times in the last twenty-four hours. What’s that all about?”

  “He was nice to her, that’s all.”

  “I don’t like the idea of her hanging out with a gay crowd.”

  “I have to go,” I said. My head was beginning to feel as if someone had slipped it into a vise.

  “Listen,” he said, “keep your ears open for a nice, cheap apartment in Cambridge. Roger can’t afford much, but he’s not going to move into some dump.”

  After I’d hung up, Ben continued to flip through the records, and neither one of us said anything. He had his back to me, a great relief, really, since it would have been too humiliating to face him right at that moment. I tried to reconstruct the portion of the conversation he’d heard, to see if he could possibly have made sense of it, but the whole thing was blurring in my mind, sloshing around with the dull throb of my headache. I dated my problem with headaches back to the disaster of coming out to my family, although the underlying neurotic response of developing a physical pain to mask something deeper probably went back to birth.

  Coming out was, for me, the round of insults, anger, tears, recriminations, apologies, and regret that’s pretty much standard fare for that particular rite of passage, assuming things don’t go badly. Most of it doesn’t bear repeating, which is a good thing, since I’ve buried most of it in an extraordinarily shallow grave. It might well be true that the unexamined life isn’t worth living, but let’s face it, cable TV makes it a lot easier to put up with.

  What stands out most clearly in my mind is what happened a month after I made my big announcement. I was living in Minneapolis at the time, having just dropped out of another graduate program in some subject I can’t even remember. I’d found a job as a desk clerk at a hotel, a semipathetic profession at which I’d become an expert and which I later blamed, along with heredity, for the premature failure of my eyesight. One day at work, I received a package, a good-size carton with no return address. The box, which I made the mistake of opening in front of my coworkers, contained an assortment of shirts, underwear, ties, scarves, woolen hats, socks, and gloves. Although a few of the items appeared to have been worn, most looked new—the underwear was still in its cellophane packaging, the shirts were still pinned and the socks still bound together. It was a fairly dreary collection of goods, most obviously sale items, seconds or factory rejects that looked faintly, disconcertingly familiar.

  “Man! Look at this rag,” a coworker said, and held up a checkered shirt.

  It was at that moment that I recognized the contents of the box. These were all the gifts I’d given to my
father for birthdays, Christmases, and anniversaries over the course of the preceding eight or ten years. A look of shame must have crossed my face, for even though I said nothing, everyone stopped laughing. I put the stuff back in the carton and returned to work.

  What continued to haunt me for years and what, I suppose, I still hadn’t gotten over was knowing that my father had been keeping all of those ugly, bargain-basement gifts aside, in some drawer or closet or in the back of some cabinet somewhere, just waiting for the right opportunity to ship it all back to me. As if he’d been planning for the day I’d do the truly unforgivable and he’d be free to unload it with a clear conscience. I’d felt so humiliated by what I came to think of as the Surprise Package, I borrowed a friend’s car, drove for miles one night, and stuffed it into the Dumpster of a supermarket in a neighborhood I never visited.

  Ben turned on the stereo. Bordello piano, scratchy violins, and the throbbing vibrato of an overwrought soprano filled the silence. It was a recording of Libertad Lamarque, a tango singer who’d made her name in Buenos Aires in the thirties, a perfect choice for my overwrought mood.

  “I think Otis is starting to respond to you more,” Ben said without turning around.

  Combined with the record, the comment was such an obvious attempt at consoling me, I cringed. “I think you’re right,” I told him.

  “Louise says we’re all strays—Otis, me, and her. Do you think that’s true?”

  “It depends how she meant it.”

  He turned around and looked out the window and away from me. “As a compliment, I think. I like Otis more because he was a stray. Barbara said the same thing. She loves dogs, but they can’t get one because Agnes is allergic to all animals. Do you think that’s possible?”

  “No, no. Of course not. It’s just. . .” I pointed to my head.

  “That’s what I figured. That’s what Barbara figures, too. She said it all started when her father walked out on them.”

  “Oh, Agnes’s troubles began before that.”

  Agnes had gone from worrying that she’d never find a husband to worrying that she’d lose the one she had, a worry she expressed by constant exaggerated concerns over Davis’s health. Barbara had been the source of multiple miseries because she’d been a sickly infant and because Davis had always seemed uncomfortable with her and with the very idea of himself as a father. He’d once told me, when Barbara was still an infant, that he was afraid that being a father would make him less attractive to women, a comment that shocked me because it had never crossed my mind that women might find him attractive in the first place. Personally, I’d always thought that Davis’s departure had been a slight relief to Agnes, at least in the sense that she no longer had to worry about him leaving her since he was already gone.

  “Her allergies got worse when Barbara’s father walked out,” Ben said. “It happens a lot when men walk out on their families. That’s a big advantage Louise and I have. Louise never gave my father the chance to leave us, because she left first.”

  I nodded in agreement. I was foolishly concerned with mentioning anything in front of him that might be taken as too loaded with intimacy. Even when I talked about Otis, I avoided words like bed, sleep, skin, and tongue. Father, I realized now, was another word I tried to steer clear of, unless I was talking about my own. But I decided to give it a try. “Do you think about your father much?”

  “No,” he said, too emphatically.

  “Not even a little curious?”

  “Not as much as everyone thinks. Besides, we probably wouldn’t like each other anyway. That’s the way it usually works out.”

  He was looking at the phone when he said this, a fact that made me think he must have heard more of my conversation with my father than I’d thought.

  An hour later, when the sky had cleared some, I walked Ben halfway home. But when I got back to my house, it began to rain again, a heavy downpour that was like a faucet being turned on. I stood out on the front porch under the shelter of the roof and watched the water wash down the street, carrying leaves and trash to the clogged drains on the corner. One of the frantically thin mothers who lived next door ran along the sidewalk with a laundry bag slung over her shoulder, her long black hair streaming. I waved as she ran past, and she looked up at me and gave me the finger. A car sped by and sprayed the steps with water and rotting leaves. At the far end of the street, Donald rounded the corner. He was walking at a leisurely pace, carrying a monstrous black umbrella, practically the size of a small tent. He stopped a few houses down, picked a plastic milk bottle off the sidewalk, and tossed it into a trash barrel. At the porch, he made an elaborate production of ducking out from under the umbrella and closing it cautiously so that not one drop of rain touched the top of his head. The back of his coat was soaked, as if he’d been sprayed with a fire hose, but his Band-Aid—colored hair was dry, every strand in place.

  I nodded to him and thanked him for inviting me to the cookout. “Aw, what the hell,” he said, shaking rain off the umbrella. “It turned out okay, didn’t it? It’s the first party I’ve had in a long time. I figured I had to break the ice sooner or later and face the world again.”

  He seemed to be referring to some personal crisis I thought it was probably best not to pursue. “How’s your friend who had the accident?” I asked.

  “Jerry? He’s doing all right. They’ve got him in detox, lucky bastard, thirty days with nothing to do but watch TV and bullshit with a bunch of drunks. I’d like to know what happened to all those hamburgers, though.”

  “It’s lucky Agnes brought the cookies,” I said.

  At the mention of my sister’s name, his face grew serious, and he stared at me for a moment, perhaps to analyze the real meaning behind what I’d said. He drew his light eyebrows together but said nothing. We went into the dark front hallway of the house. It smelled faintly of cat piss, as it always did on rainy or humid days. When I first moved in, I’d spent an afternoon scrubbing at the floor with assorted cleaners designed to remove “pet odors,” although the heavy chemical stench was remarkably similar to that of cat piss.

  We stood silently fumbling with our keys, so close we were practically bumping into each other. When he had his door open, he turned toward me as if he was trying to prompt me to ask him something, but what, I couldn’t guess. “Listen, Clyde,” he finally said, “come in for a second, will you?”

  I leaned my umbrella against my door and followed him into his apartment.

  The living room was as unfurnished as I’d suspected. The speakers that had been in the backyard were disconnected and stacked up in one corner, and there was a lonely, spindly philodendron in a white plastic pot by the window. The brown sofa had a tangled, graying bedsheet and a pillow on it. Show me a man who sleeps on his sofa, and I’ll show you a man willing to keep an open mind about the possibility of life on other planets. I followed Donald down a narrow, dark hallway that wound around under the staircase to our apartment. Instead of ducking forward or stooping to pass, he leaned back awkwardly, like a dancer going under a limbo stick. He lifted up one of the kitchen chairs and dumped a pile of clothes onto the floor. “Sit down,” he said, gesturing with his hand. “Let me get you a beer or something.”

  “I’d better not,” I said.

  “Teaching tonight?”

  “I have some reading I should catch up on.”

  He nodded and then shook his head in dismay. “Freaking work, man. It rots, doesn’t it?”

  “Well . . .”

  “I know, don’t tell me—I’m lucky to have a job. Hey, believe me, I know. The point is, I figured out a while ago that you have to specialize in something. I trained for this job for eight months. Eight months at minimum wage, but look how it’s paying off. Even if the stress feels like it’s going to kill me sometimes.”

  I nodded. Attempting to convince people you can grow their hair back when it’s a medical impossibility must be trying.

  The kitchen was a good deal smaller than ours, the wal
ls covered with milk-chocolate—brown paneling. There were a couple of calendars thumbtacked to the walls, both of them with pictures of food that were so glossy and sensual, they looked vaguely pornographic. I felt certain they must have been put up by the former tenant. The stove was heaped with pots and cast-iron pans that looked too old and rusty to have been used in the recent past, and most of the cabinets were open and empty.

  Donald took off his topcoat and his lab coat, stood in the doorway of a room off the kitchen, and tossed them in. He went to the refrigerator and pulled out a plastic jug of diet Dr Pepper. As he twisted off the cap, the stuff sprayed all over him, but he seemed only remotely aware of it. He shoved the bottle into his mouth and drained off the foam.

  “I meant to tell you, Clyde . . .” He paused. He contorted his face as if he’d swallowed a fish bone. Then he burped. “I meant to tell you I’m sorry about my friend Mark Greeley. Don’t pay any attention to him.”

  “I’m not even sure what happened. He seemed a little hostile.”

  “Forget about it.” He swept the clothes off the other chair in the room and sat opposite me at the little Formica-topped table. “He’s just one of those white guys angry at the world because he can’t get laid. Now he’s got some idea about Harvard Business School. A total fantasy. He got kicked out of an air-conditioning-repair training program last year for threatening one of the teachers. He’ll probably end up opening fire in a McDonald’s, something like that.”

  “How do you know him?”

  He held up his hands. “Can’t tell you, man. We’ve got a rule about confidentiality for patients at the clinic. Guys get into a very weird thing about losing their hair. I see guys walking down the street, and I can tell from the way they carry themselves which ones are going bald. You see guys cowering when they walk into a room with overhead lights? There’s a lot of hair on their pillowcases, I’ll tell you that. It’s all about. . .” He grabbed his crotch and shrugged.

  His doughy face grew grim again, and he stared at me as if he was pleading with me to drag out of him whatever it was he wanted to say. His dark eyes darted from my eyes to my mouth to my eyes to my nose, as if trying to piece together a whole face. I looked around the room for something to comment on and settled on a blurry photograph of a yellow cat taped to the refrigerator door. “So . . . is that your cat?” I asked.