The Man of the House

by Stephen McCauley

  “Damn right it is. I thought he was, anyway. Until my old girlfriend took him with her.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it. He looks . . . cute.”

  The photo was a close-up of a cat with his mouth open wide and his fangs bared. It was a fierce-looking animal, like a wild beast you’d see ripping apart a zebra in National Geographic.

  “Best cat in the world.” He lifted up the bottle and glugged down almost half the soda.

  “You must miss him,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, what are you going to do?”

  “Were you and your girlfriend together long?”

  “Nah. Not long. About three, four years. Six, actually.” He looked me in the eyes, his features drooping slightly. His own eyes turned sad and watery, and for a moment I feared he was about to burst into tears. “I’ll tell you something, Clyde—I can be honest with you, right?”

  “Of course,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t be.

  “She left me for another woman. Can you believe it? I couldn’t believe it. All those years, and it turns out she was gay, whatever, lesbian. No offense.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “I mean, if I wasn’t secure, you know, the thing would have given me a complex. You know what I mean? Some guys would be like: ‘Hey, if she’s really into girls, what does it mean that she was with me for six, seven years?’”

  “I guess it doesn’t say anything about you at all. She was just confused about who she was. Or she changed.”

  He gave me another of his surveying looks. “That’s what the shrink said. She had me go to a shrink. I went six times.” He snapped his fingers. “Cleared the whole thing right up. Now listen, I haven’t told anyone else about this lesbian business, so don’t go spreading the word.” He lifted up the bottle, poured the rest of the soda down his throat, and threw the empty container into the sink. “And I sure haven’t told anyone about the shrink, either. Those losers at the party would drop dead, not that they don’t all belong there themselves.”

  “How long ago did you break up?”

  “Almost a year. I’m pretty much over it. Couldn’t care less, as a matter of fact. The way I look at it, we had seven or eight good years, so it was time for a change anyway. Even most marriages don’t last ten years. Not that I could ever get her to marry me. Things started getting better when I moved into this place.”

  I nodded, letting my eyes wander around the gloomy kitchen. He’d tacked a green plastic trash bag over the window above the sink and lined up a row of frozen orange juice containers he was obviously using as drinking glasses.

  “Hey, believe me, I know. The place is a dump, total house of horrors. But what can you do? I work, I come home, stuff a couple of pizzas in my mouth, and go to bed. I don’t have time to fix it up.”

  “I can understand that.” For a fleeting moment, I considered confiding in him about Gordon, out of solidarity. But I’d picked up two chicken salad sandwiches on my way home, and they were weighing down the pocket of my jacket. I was eager to get upstairs and devour them and forget about my conversation with. . . Dad. “By the way,” I said, “thanks for taking such good care of my sister the other day. She had a nice time. My father was telling me that just this afternoon.”

  He was contorting his face again, stretching his neck as if he was trying to elongate it. He covered his mouth, gasped out another burp, and smiled.

  “That’s what I wanted to talk with you about. I wanted to ask you about old Agnes. You know”—he rubbed his hand over his face—“you know, I guess there’s no shame in saying I found her a pretty interesting gal.”

  “Agnes is very interesting.”

  “Hey, look, I’ll come right to the point, okay? I want to ask her out to a movie, but. . . I can tell she’s shy, insecure, whatever. I don’t want to do the wrong thing, end up offending her or anything. Give her a complex or something.”

  A truck went by on the street, and one of the pans on the heap on the counter shifted position. We both turned to look at it. It crossed my mind that if I told him Agnes was dating someone, that would probably be the end of that.

  “Well,” I said, “as far as I know, Agnes isn’t a big movie fan.” Recently, Agnes had decided that it was unwise to sit in a darkened auditorium surrounded by a bunch of strangers, any of whom might be carrying a gun or an airborne viral infection.

  “What you’re trying to say is: Forget it. Right?”

  That was what I was trying to say. But in the brief pause opened up by his question, I realized it wasn’t any of my business and, if nothing else, Agnes needed a night out. She’d found him cheerful. “I just mean, dinner might be a better idea.”

  “Hey, I like that,” he said. He smiled broadly, his tiny mouth pushing aside his fleshy cheeks. “Dinner. To tell you the truth, I don’t much care about movies myself. Listen, you want to stay and order out a pizza?”

  “I’d better not. I picked up something on the way home.”

  “Sure. Look, you don’t think the age difference is a problem, do you? I’m probably younger than she is. Thirty-four.”

  “Agnes is only thirty-seven,” I said, lopping two years off her age.

  “No kidding? Man, she must be using some good emollients, I’ll tell you that. I had her pegged for thirty-five, tops. Here . . .” He jumped up from the table excitedly and began rummaging through the drawers under the counter. “I’m glad I got up the nerve to talk to you. You don’t have a pen on you, do you? I’m mighty glad, Clyde, ’cause I’ll tell you, I’ve been thinking a lot about that sister of yours for the past few days. I’ve been missing meals over old Agnes. Here you go.” He handed me a scrap of paper and a red crayon. “Just write down the number. New Hampshire, right? Boy, I haven’t been out in the country for ages.”

  “I’m not sure you’d call it the country. . . .”

  “I can get into that rural scene. Gift shops, motels, the whole thing. It’ll be good, for a change.”

  He was looking over my shoulder as I scrawled Agnes’s number.

  “Long distance,” he mumbled. “Well, what the hell, the worst she can do is tell me to drop dead.”

  “I don’t think she’ll do that.”

  “Nah. Too much class, right?”

  ALTHOUGH I HADN’T BEEN ABLE TO discharge Gordon from my heart and mind as effectively as I knew I should, I wasn’t so thoroughly deluded that I was keeping myself for him physically. I did have a sex life, even if it was sporadic and pretty strictly limited to satisfying the basic biological demands. Strangely, though, I was reasonably content with it, a lot more content than I had been dating, a charade that promised more than orgasm and invariably delivered less.

  The first months after Gordon moved out, I spent the majority of my time wandering around the house with a hangover. It wasn’t that I started drinking, or even, truthfully, that I missed Gordon all that much. It was just that the sense of having been rejected weighed on me so heavily that I sometimes had trouble getting out of bed in the morning and sometimes didn’t bother trying.

  His departure and the emotions around it were confused with and sharpened by my mother’s death. In addition to missing her, I’d had some guilty hopes that perhaps her death would bring my father and me closer. My big move in that direction had been taking him out to dinner one night a month after the funeral. We sat through most of the meal in glum silence, which I managed to convince myself was related to our shared mourning. Toward the end of the meal, he looked across the table at me with genuine kindness in his eyes. “I know I don’t say this often, but I want to thank you,” he choked out.

  “For what?” I made the mistake of asking. This was exactly the kind of sentimental, lower-your-guard moment I’d been hoping for all evening, and all the years preceding it. My only regret was that I’d been too intimidated to initiate the outpouring of feelings myself. I was already figuring out polite, insincere refusals of the gratitude I expected him to heap on me for helping with the funeral arrangements and finding a do
ctor to write a prescription for tranquilizers to hold Agnes together through the interminable, morbid ceremonies associated with a Catholic death and burial.

  “Well,” he said, fingering the empty glass in front of him thoughtfully, “for not showing up at the wake with that friend of yours in tow.”

  “Gordon?”

  “Whatever his name is. You didn’t get a haircut like I asked you to, but I’m willing to overlook that because the other was more important to me.”

  Two days before my mother died, Gordon had left with a couple of friends for a week-long vacation in Saint Croix, a trip that marked the beginning of the end of our relationship.

  “He was out of the country,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, a couple weeks from now, when I drop dead, I hope to God he’s still out of the country. And don’t wear that ring to my funeral, either.”

  “I’ve never worn a ring in my life,” I said, not strictly true, but true enough, since I was pretty certain I’d never worn one in front of him.

  “Oh, well, I thought you had. My mistake. Don’t get bent out of shape.”

  When the check came, he insisted on paying for his meal instead of letting me treat, as we’d agreed. “I’d just owe you one, and we’d be going back and forth forever. Now that your mother’s dead, we’ll have even fewer reasons to see each other, so let’s each pay our own way.”

  In any case, about six months after Gordon had left and I managed to finally drag myself off the bed, I began a long stint of going out with the friends of friends. These evenings involved sitting around an overpriced restaurant trading censored and exaggerated life stories with someone in therapy and the computer field. The rambling monologues talked any mutual attraction out of existence and passed along so much detailed information, it was virtually impossible to project fantasies upon the other person. Because the whole chore of dating was tied up with safe sex and getting to know the other person and being responsible about AIDS in some broad, metaphoric sense that had little to do with the realities of viral transmission, the evening usually ended with a chaste kiss and plans to meet again for a movie or a second dinner, just to make doubly sure that all spontaneity and lust were pummeled into crumbs before we got naked. I found these dates so frustrating on every level that I frequently went straight from dinner to some venue where I could engage in responsible, anonymous sex without the clutter of college degrees, family trees, and amusing tales of coworkers. It took me months to realize that I’d be better off skipping the dates and cutting right to the sex. It was a more efficient use of time.

  I also discovered that while ugly black glasses and a slightly bedraggled appearance were a drawback in overpriced restaurants, they were an asset in the bulrushes, where they added a note of glowering menace that was highly prized.

  Out of these groping encounters, I’d managed to acquire a couple of casual friends with whom I didn’t have sex and a few semiregular sex partners with whom I wasn’t especially friendly.

  The star of this latter group was an amusing, infuriating man named Bernie. We’d met a couple of years earlier under the usual furtive circumstances, and although we probably hadn’t seen each other more than a dozen times since, he’d become an important minor character in my life. Bernie, like most of my semiregular sex partners, had a lover. Richie, the lover, was a scrawny, neurotic housepainter to whom, I’d been told, I bore a striking resemblance, although, for obvious reasons, I’d never met him. Bernie and Richie had been together for ten years, and while Bernie claimed they fought constantly, it was apparent they’d stay together for life. It didn’t take much insight to recognize that Bernie had initially been attracted to me solely because I looked like Richie. And certainly the fact that Bernie bore an almost uncanny resemblance to Gordon—Gordon before he’d become a gym enthusiast and chiseled his body into a more sharply defined but less interesting shape—was one of the main things that made him attractive to me.

  Because Bernie was living with a lover, I had to wait for his calls rather than call him, lest I compromise the sanctity of his relationship. I heard from him once every few months, depending on Richie’s out-of-town work schedule and Bernie’s moods. In between meetings, I thought of him infrequently and always with the same slightly annoyed fondness: “The little creep,” and so on, accompanied by a jarring erotic memory.

  I hadn’t heard from him since before Louise’s arrival, when, a week or more after my encounter with Donald, he called.

  “Hi, Clyde,” he said in the bored, vaguely mocking tone that was typical of his telephone personality.

  “Bernie,” I said. I was always happy to hear from him, although it didn’t seem right to express too much enthusiasm. Receiving one of his calls was like finding a small, unexpected check in the mail.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  As always, I answered truthfully. “Nothing.”

  I felt at a slight disadvantage talking with Bernie on the phone, because he was so completely at ease with the medium, like one of those people who seem to be natural-born swimmers or beautiful untrained singers. Even the way he held the telephone, balanced gracefully between chin and shoulder, made it seem as if the receiver were part of him. The majority of Bernie’s life revolved around long phone conversations that bled into one another; he was like a chain-smoker lighting a new cigarette off the last one.

  “If you’re in the neighborhood this afternoon,” he said, “drop by and we can have coffee.”

  A more honest way of phrasing it would have been, “Can you come by at two-thirty and fuck me?” But I suppose to reduce the sting of possible rejection—sometimes I had other plans, and underneath it all, he was an appealingly insecure guy—he always put it in less explicit terms.

  Actually, I did have plans for that afternoon. I’d agreed to drive Ben to a used-record warehouse in one of the suburbs and then take Otis for a hike. But since Ben had overheard my humiliating conversation with my father, I’d been less eager to spend time with him. I scrawled a note for Ben explaining an emergency meeting at The Learning Place and left it near Otis’s food. The dog sat up on one of the kitchen chairs, watching me, with his tiny head held high. It was an imperious pose, made only slightly less condescending by the foolish tuft of fur on top of his head. “I don’t know why you care,” I told him. “You’re still going to get your walk.”

  He gave a pathetic whimper, lay down, and hung his head over the seat of the chair. This look of abject misery and the please-don’t-abandon-me cry that went along with it had started to get to me every time I left the house. I went to him and stroked his head, and he immediately rolled over onto his back, legs splayed, soft belly exposed: Do with me what you will, but don’t leave me here alone.

  “I liked it better when you ignored me,” I told him, even though that wasn’t true. “I’m just going to get you some food, all right?”

  Against all odds, I found that this kind of lie usually made me feel better about walking out on him. As if he understood what I was saying or would have believed me if he could.

  Bernie and Richie lived in the North End of Boston, an Italian neighborhood of cramped streets, antique cemeteries, and sweeping views of the innermost reaches of Boston Harbor. Their apartment was on the top floor of an unimaginably narrow building that always smelled so strongly of coffee and heavy, roasting meat, I grew dizzy just walking into the front hallway. The other floors of the building were inhabited by an assortment of old couples and ancient widows, who appeared to accept the boys above with startling tolerance and eyed me disapprovingly whenever I rang the bell. I climbed up the creaking four flights of stairs that afternoon, and as usual, Bernie met me at the door with his cordless phone cuddled against his neck. He was a waiter at one of the many restaurants in the neighborhood, and I’d never once dropped in on him when he wasn’t arguing with some coworker about scheduling conflicts or a maître d’ who’d favored someone else’s station the night before. Bernie seemed to exist in a perpetual state of out
rage over minor insults and slights.

  He nodded at me and shooed me down the corridor to the living room.

  Bernie was a collector of anything made before the Second World War, provided it was overdone and gaudy. Ten years’ worth of kitsch was spilling from every shelf and tabletop and window ledge: ceramic figurines and squeeze toys, plates, cups, tourist ashtrays and old magazines, religious icons, grotesque lamps, hand-painted signs and children’s toys. I loved the cozy clutter of the apartment, all the useless junk and heavy furniture, which seemed to guarantee that he and Richie would be buried there forever in their troubled domestic arrangement. If only, I sometimes thought, Gordon hadn’t been such a minimalist. I sank into one of the overstuffed chairs and tried to arrange my legs and crotch as provocatively as possible.

  Bernie finally came into the room and nervously dropped down onto the sofa, talking as if he were still in the middle of his phone conversation and trying to get the wrapper off a pack of chewing gum. He was short, like Gordon, and with the same solid, chunky build—the build of a scrappy boxer who’s been out of training for half a dozen years.

  “I’ve been there for seven years, seven years, and I’m the best waiter they’ve got and they know it, and there’s no way I’m going to put up with that shit.” He had a way of drawling swear words, sloshing them around in his mouth and spitting them out, that made them sound like whole three-page monologues. “I mean, I won’t work under those conditions, and that’s all there is to it. Well, do you blame me? I mean, really, do you blame me?”

  I shrugged and held up my hands. I’d learned that if I expressed too much interest in Bernie or lent him too much sympathy, he’d turn cool, as if I wasn’t playing my part properly or was staking a claim on him that I had no right to.