The Man of the House

by Stephen McCauley

  “No, you wouldn’t understand. Not that I expect you to. You’re as bad as Richie.” He popped three sticks of gum into his mouth and started to chew. “What do you think of this lamp?” he muttered through the gum. “I bought it yesterday at an auction.” He pointed to a Victorian parlor lamp dripping with broken crystal prisms. The glass shade was shattered, and the whole thing was tossed into a corner carelessly. “A hundred bucks. Too much, but who gives a ffffuck. I mean, you only go this way once, right? If Richie’s going to leave town for five days, I might as well go out and spend some money. Serves him right.”

  He sighed and looked around the apartment, jiggling his crossed legs anxiously. Today he was poured into a pair of tight blue jeans so spotless and carefully faded, it was obvious they were part of yesterday’s shopping spree, and a puce collarless shirt with a zipper instead of buttons. He wore his hair in a jaunty, military-academy crew cut that, since the last time I’d seen him, he’d bleached a highly unnatural and unflattering platinum blond. Like Gordon, Bernie considered Madonna “a genius,” although the only thing either ever praised her for was her ability to lure anyone she chose into bed.

  I listened to his chattering, nodding from time to time and throwing in the occasional noncommittal murmur. For all his self-centered banter, Bernie was, at heart, extremely generous, and every now and then he let slip into his rant a complaint about a sick friend he was caring for or some unappreciative elderly neighbor to whom he regularly brought whole meals from the restaurant. After what seemed a reasonable amount of time, I cut him off. “So, Bernie, Richie’s out of town?”

  He looked up at me and stopped chewing, suddenly timid. “Right,” he said. He took the gum and dropped it into one of the many nearby ashtrays and cast a sidelong glance down my body.

  “It’s awfully bright in here,” I said, even though the sky was a steely, late-October shade of gray.

  “You think so?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Maybe you should lower the shade.”

  He got up and strolled to the window slowly, showing off his firm little behind in those new blue jeans. There was something irresistibly fleshy and languid about Bernie. His telephone obsession, his constant complaining, his unconvincing tone of moral superiority, all added to his charm. He struck me as being more completely comfortable with himself than anyone I’d met, reveling in his flaws and indulging his appetites.

  I hoped that he and Richie never parted company. Bernie wasn’t the type who’d do well on his own. Probably half the reason he invited men over to the apartment when Richie left town was that he was lonely without his lover. I’ve always found something heroic in people who desperately need the company of others and aren’t afraid to seek it out.

  He leaned over a table by the window and reached up to pull down the shade, his movements deliberate.

  “Come over here,” I said, and sat upright in the chair.

  As he was crossing the room, the phone rang. His eyes shifted to the receiver he’d placed on top of a stack of yellowed Hollywood Confidentials, and he stopped. “Oh, to hell with it,” he said, and let it ring. Which, all things considered, was about the highest compliment he could pay.

  Out on the street, I buttoned my sports jacket against the wind, wrapped a scarf around my neck, and dodged my way through the five-thirty crowds of shoppers and office workers. I loved being in that part of town at that hour, especially when I was feeling satiated and still pumped up after an hour or so with Bernie, when I hadn’t yet let my self-image drag my ego back to reality.

  The streetlights had all come on and the cafés and pastry shops were lit up and the doors of the churches were open; the whole bustling neighborhood seemed filled with romance and sex, incense and cannoli. I wandered into one of the cafés and ordered an espresso and a block of some dense nutty pastry and ate leaning against the counter. Within minutes, I was buzzing with a combination of dizziness and nausea that was easy to mistake for euphoria.

  I stumbled out of the café and into the bustle of Hanover Street. A brisk wind was blowing, lifting whole sheets of newspaper up into the air and sending them soaring. There was a traffic jam on the corner, one of those festering brews of angry shouts and blaring horns and fists reaching out of windows. As soon as a chill pierced my overcoat, I felt a kind of unfocused loneliness begin to lap at me, a wave of nasty disappointment and longing that felt as if it was going to pull me under. The horns sounded especially loud and threatening on the corner. Although I’d made a point of telling Bernie, before I’d even pulled off the condom, that I had to leave, he certainly hadn’t objected. In fact, I was barely dressed before he’d picked up the phone and started to dial a coworker. That was the usual routine, but it had never before struck me as quite so abrupt and, if I let myself think about it, insulting.

  I trudged on, wallowing in dejection, for about half a block, when I spotted Vance near the traffic jam on the corner, round and oblivious, crossing the street. His big raincoat was catching the wind and billowing out around his legs like a hoop skirt. He was leaning forward into the wind, in an apparent attempt to keep his tweed cap firmly on his head. He had the distracted, vague look of a man who wanted, above all else in the world, to be left alone, but I was suddenly so anxious and eager to talk with someone, I called out his name.

  He looked up with a hurt expression, as if he’d just been insulted. When he recognized me, his big, pink face lit up with relief. “Clyde!” he said. “What are you doing on this side of the river?”

  “Visiting a friend,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, yes. The trick with the boyfriend who goes out of town?”

  “I guess you could put it that way.” The depressing truth was that there really wasn’t any other accurate way you could put it. To Vance, I’d bragged about and defended the efficiency of my nonrelationship with Bernie, but at this moment, the whole arrangement seemed only dreary. The cold wind and all that miserable traffic weren’t helping matters any.

  Vance had his briefcase in one hand and, in the other, a white shopping bag with a name scrolled across the front in an elaborate and illegible script. I asked him what he had in the bag.

  “Bag?” He looked down at his hand. “Oh, nothing,” he said. “I’m just walking home.”

  “Let me take you out for a drink,” I said. “I owe you hundreds.”

  “To tell you the truth, dear, I’m a little uncomfortable in these clothes.” The wind opened up his raincoat, and he yanked at his tight belt. “Cutting off my circulation,” he said, and smiled wanly. A skinny teenager in a tight denim jacket knocked into him as he walked past, and Vance stumbled backward a few steps before catching his balance.

  The idea that Vance might walk off and leave me alone on the street filled me with dread. I couldn’t face my shabby apartment and Otis’s pleading little eyes and the telephone staring at me and Marcus padding around the kitchen with Sheila glued to his arm. I felt suddenly as if I were sliding—somewhere—and literally couldn’t get a grip. “I’ll come to your place while you change,” I said. “Then we can go out. It’ll be good for you, a little rest and relaxation.”

  “Well.” Looking up the street and then down, he seemed to be searching for an excuse. “All right,” he said, none too brightly. He swung around and dumped the bag into a nearby trash barrel. “Nippy afternoon, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” I said, and we headed off.

  I resisted the temptation to look back at the trash barrel. The bag must have been full of take-out food Vance was planning to gorge on, and I felt guilty for having come upon him and deprived him of whatever goodies he’d been carrying home. Still, it was better than getting on the subway to Cambridge or traipsing around Filene’s Basement in a daze.

  “I suppose you must be starving,” Vance said.

  “Not especially. I ate right before I bumped into you.”

  “Ah. I figured after an afternoon of mindless passion you’d be depleted. Of course, it’s been so long for me, I can’t remem
ber how that sequence goes.”

  Vance often drew attention to what he claimed was his celibacy, perhaps to underline his devotion to Carl. More than one mutual friend had said that Vance regularly spent at least as much money on his sex life as he did on restaurants. It was pure rumor and speculation, but personally, I hoped it was true. It seemed a much better investment than all those trips out to the suburbs. But he was right, I did feel depleted, even if it wasn’t for the reasons he thought.

  We walked in silence for a while, assaulted by the sharp wind and the swirling papers and leaves, and crossed over Atlantic Avenue to the waterfront. All of the crumbling docks there had been converted into condos with guardhouses and gated parking lots. The few aged fishing boats that remained, tied up to the pilings and bobbing in the wind, looked more like window dressing than anything else. The clean lines and awful little balconies of the dockside condos seemed frighteningly similar to those of Agnes’s town house development. In a few years, the entire country would be thoroughly homogenized, with only a few sad little signposts left standing to distinguish one place from another. Nautical motif for the seashore, a pine tree theme for New Hampshire. I mentioned this to Vance, but he shrugged it off. “I find it comforting, especially since I don’t really like Boston. Makes it easier to pretend I’m elsewhere.” He adjusted the brim of his cap and looked out at the ocean. “I’m in a bit of a funk, Clyde. Carl’s wretched mother and I had a fight last week, and we haven’t talked since. I’m not sure I’ll be much use to you, if you’re looking for cheering up.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “What happened?”

  “Oh, she listens to too much talk radio. Poor thing doesn’t sleep. Anyway, she went into a vile right-wing rant. I’d mind it all less if I thought she really believed any of it, but she’s just trying to be trendy. I figured I’d punish her by not talking for a few days. Of course, I have to call her tonight because we’ve got tickets for some revolting dinner theater event this weekend. You pretend you’re at a wedding, as if being at a real wedding isn’t awful enough.”

  By this time, we were nearly at the aquarium, and Vance insisted we stop by the sea lions so he could get his nightly look at them. “Big, blubbery things,” he said. “I have total identification with them. Swimming, swimming, but never getting anywhere.”

  I watched the fat mammals corkscrewing through the water for a few minutes and then turned my back to the pool. Since Otis had moved in with me, I was incapable of looking at any animal without seeing his sad, confused eyes and wondering what he was up to at that moment, which led inevitably to wondering what Ben was up to at that moment, and so on, right down to wondering what the hell I was up to.

  The aquarium was closing, and noisy groups of children in parkas were rushing out the doors, with their parents chasing after them. I’d once taken Barbara and Agnes to the aquarium, but the outing had been a disaster; Agnes had been overcome by fumes five minutes after entering. “It smells so fishy in there,” she’d gasped, as if there were something surprising in that.

  As I was about to drag Vance away from the tank, I spotted Eileen Ash emerging from the aquarium on the arm of a tall, handsome man. She had on a knee-length Navajo-blanket poncho, and her light, gray-streaked hair was pulled off her face in a tight bun. She and the man, obviously her husband, were surrounded by laughing children pushing at them as they raced by, but they appeared to be floating along the windy concrete walkway in their own enchanted world. Eileen looked more beautiful than I’d ever seen her, her enormous green eyes flashing, even at a distance.

  Despite the relatively small size of Cambridge and Boston, I rarely ran into my students outside of class, and I was always mildly embarrassed when I did. Being seen anywhere but at the front of the classroom undercut my already minimal authority. Eileen’s husband leaned over and kissed her behind her ear. I turned away quickly as they walked past, although, from the looks of things, they wouldn’t have noticed me anyway.

  Vance came up behind me and put his arm around my shoulder. “Let’s go. I’ve had my daily dose.”

  Vance lived behind the aquarium in an enormous and fantastically ugly concrete tower right on the edge of the water. It had been built about twenty-five years earlier and had quickly become the primary residence in Boston for lawyers and business executives of both sexes who were in the middle of divorce proceedings and for people like Vance, who loved the ocean breezes and the dehumanizing anonymity of living in an ugly concrete tower. His apartment had a spectacular view of the boat traffic in the harbor and the tiny green islands out in the bay. The airport was right across the channel, and at times the monolithic 747s seemed to be lining up for a landing on his puny balcony.

  He’d had the apartment expensively decorated with a brick-red leather sofa and antique Turkish carpets and all manner of new furniture weathered to look old and old furniture refinished to look new. Everything in the apartment had been carefully chosen by someone paid to choose carefully, but the whole place reminded me of a suite in a luxury hotel—elegant, but with the air of rooms that have never really been lived in.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” Vance said as we entered. I sat down on the leather sofa and he handed me three remote controls. “I don’t know which controls what, but if you hit an On button you’re bound to end up with some kind of entertainment. I’ll be right back.”

  I sat fumbling with the controls and finally threw them all aside. I don’t own any appliances that come equipped with remotes, and I’ve always been chagrined by people who do. One more modern convenience to separate me from that portion of the world that’s too busy with careers and lovers and happy families to waste time crossing a room to change a channel or shut off a stereo. The living room and kitchen were antiseptically clean and smelled faintly of ammonia and furniture polish. Twice a week, Sergio, a young Brazilian, came to clean. Vance had a deep sentimental attachment to Sergio, even though he’d never met him face-to-face; his name and his accent on the phone had won him over. For the most part, Vance lived in his bedroom—eating, reading, watching TV, working on his computer—but he kept the door to that room locked, so Sergio wouldn’t have to deal with the mess. “It’s not his fault I’m a slob,” Vance had said when I suggested he let Sergio into the bedroom. “The poor kid works hard enough as it is.”

  I settled back against the cool, soft leather and watched the planes trembling past the window with their cabins dimly lit, one flying cocktail lounge after the next coming in for a landing. I could see it all: the landing gear coming down, the slow, smooth descent, the puff of smoke when the wheels hit the runway. There’s nothing more melancholy than watching airplanes finally give in to the pull of gravity, and I felt certain that if I sat there watching too much longer, I’d burst into tears.

  Vance’s telephone was another high-tech piece of equipment and looked almost exactly like the remote controls. After two attempts, I finally figured out how to use it and called Bernie. Busy signal. Since Bernie had call waiting, he must have been on two lines at once, one of his specialties.

  Vance came out to the living room and I tossed down the phone, as if I’d been caught going through his mail. He’d put on a pair of black jeans and an immense green shirt that came down to the middle of his thighs. It was one of those artful outfits that smoothed out his bulges but, in doing so, made him appear as big and square as a major appliance. He’d replaced his tweed cap with a baseball cap that looked uncomfortably tight with his thick, curly hair sticking out around the edges.

  “So where shall we go for our drink?” he asked. He went into the kitchen, opened a cabinet, and pulled out a bag of pretzels, which he began to devour by the fistful. “I know, dear, I know, I shouldn’t be shoving these in my fat face, but I can’t help myself. Shall we go to some trendy gay place where I’ll feel ostracized because I’m a fat queen, or to some trendy straight place where I’ll feel ostracized because I’m a fat queen?”

  “We don’t have to go anywhere,” I said. “I j
ust thought . . .”

  “Oh, no, I insist.” He sat down on the opposite end of the sofa, right on top of the remote controls. “Just give me a few minutes to recover. It’s been a terrible week. Hectic at work and then all this trauma with poor Carl’s awful mother. And if you don’t mind me saying so, you look a little shopworn yourself.”

  “Shopworn?”

  “Pale. And black circles even those ugly glasses can’t hide. Too much excitement this afternoon, I suppose.”

  It was tempting to go along with him and leave it at that. I’d settled comfortably into thinking of Vance as the more troubled of the two of us: he had a better education and nicer apartment than me, a serious career, a pension fund and health insurance, but he also had a minimum of two chins. I have no doubt he took considerable comfort in the fact that I was six years older than him. I was open with him about most of my feelings for Gordon, but I tried not to wear any of my other miseries on my sleeve for fear I’d lose my imagined advantage. Still, I couldn’t resist at least hinting at some of the strange loneliness that had made me thrust myself on him tonight.

  “To tell you the truth,” I said, “I got a little down looking at the planes landing.”

  He finished off the pretzels, crumpled up the bag, and turned to the window. “I know what you mean.” He sighed. “It’s a lovely view. That’s why I spend most of my time in the bedroom, where I can’t see anything but an overpass on the Central Artery. But you were a little down to begin with tonight, weren’t you, dear?”

  “Maybe a little lonely.”

  “You’re spending too much time with that child. Children are depressing by nature because they’re still so close to the birth trauma and getting off the tit and all that.” He removed his cap and plucked at his mop of curls. For a moment, I was distracted by his unsettling resemblance to my dentist’s grandmotherly receptionist.