The Man of the House

by Stephen McCauley

  “There’s nothing especially depressing about Benjamin,” I said.

  “Little Benjamin is another one of those sad boys waiting for his father to acknowledge him. Like you and like me. Boy on the burning deck, all that. Waiting, waiting. Miserable waste of time.”

  He got up and slumped off to the kitchen. What Vance had told me about his past was that he’d grown up in a wealthy suburb of Chicago and been spectacularly unhappy for all but a few days of his childhood. His mother, whom he’d adored, had died when he was seven, and his father had promptly married a pious, self-righteous woman who resented Vance because, even at age eight, he looked exactly like his mother. Vance’s father was a dashing, sporty man who began to pursue an obsessive exercise regime as soon as he found out his son was gay. A civil rights lawyer, he’d sublimated his homophobia in revulsion of fat. He played football, coached rugby, ran marathons, and, the year before, at age sixty, started participating in triathlons. Vance had invited his father and stepmother to his law school graduation. He rented them a suite overlooking the Charles and made reservations at all the best restaurants in town. They’d left for Cape Cod after one night, complaining of the heat and indigestion and leaving Vance with a two-thousand-dollar bill for the unused rooms.

  He came back into the living room with a plastic bowl filled with steaming macaroni and cheese that he’d just heated in the microwave. He fell to eating it like a driven man, with no discernible pleasure. “I should offer you some, but I’m starving. Completely famished. I’d love to meet the kid, but children don’t like me. They treat me the condescending way they treat portly old-maid aunts. Speaking of which, I had a long conversation with Mary Laird the other day, and she told me they’re hiring at the school for next fall. I told her to keep an eye out for your résumé.”

  Mary Laird was the headmistress Vance had been urging me to talk with for years. “I’m not sure I’m ready for that yet,” I said.

  “You’d better get ready, dear. The school is about to force her retirement, and there goes your best chance at an interview. If she believes half of what I told her, she’s convinced The Learning Whatsis is giving Oxford a run for its money.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I told him. “I just feel I should wait a little.”

  He took out his wallet and handed me Mary Laird’s business card. “Don’t think too much, or you won’t do it. And I can’t imagine what it is you imagine you’re waiting for.”

  “I have an awful lot of unfinished business at the moment, between my father and my relationship with Gordon.”

  He picked up the bowl again and looked across the room at me with a glance that was so uncharacteristically hard and unforgiving, I recoiled slightly. “Unfinished business? You’re deluding yourself, Clyde,” he said harshly. But then, perhaps taken aback by the tone in his own voice, he smiled and fell back into his more familiar, self-mocking mode. “I’m ready to go now,” he said. “One drink, and then I can come home and pass out.”

  VANCE AND I NEVER DID GO FOR A DRINK that night. As we were about to leave, he decided he had to call Carl’s mother first to have things out with her, or at least to confirm plans for their date. I sat through the first few minutes of the discussion and then excused myself. Vance’s end of the conversation was an embarrassing mix of apology and restaurant review, all in such intimate terms I had the feeling I was listening at the wall of someone’s bedroom.

  It was probably just as well; he obviously wasn’t in the mood for spending time with me, and I was considerably less keen on the idea since he’d broken the sacred trust of our friendship by telling me what he really thought of my attitude toward Gordon. If he hadn’t recovered from his bout of honesty so quickly, I might have told him what I thought about Carl, Carl’s mother, and so on, and the whole house of cards would have come tumbling down.

  I walked out of Vance’s building and into the clear chill of the autumn night. Planes were stacked up, waiting to land, a line of lights in the sky stretching far out into the harbor. I still couldn’t face sitting around my attic rooms, sharing my solitude with an abandoned dog for the rest of the evening, so I decided to walk home. I followed a circuitous route through the concrete wasteland of Government Center and then up the steep, winding streets of Beacon Hill. I usually find the cold New England wealth perched up on the Hill soothing. But that night, it made me feel even more like a castaway. Looking down from the top of Pinckney Street past the town houses with their gaslights and wrought-iron gates and the rows of shedding trees lining the sidewalks, I could see the lights of Cambridge reflected in the river and the cars streaming along the roads surrounding the city.

  What I hadn’t told Vance was that a few days earlier, on my walk to The Learning Place, I’d gone into a real estate office to get information on available apartments for Roger. The agent, a garishly good-natured woman with extraordinarily tiny feet and blue eye shadow, dragged out a notebook of listings and went through it with me, page after page, until we finally got into a range that seemed affordable. As far as I could remember, I’d never dealt with a real estate agent before, but even so, I could tell she was tossing out every cliché in the profession concerning the location, charm, and amenities of the apartments. “Now, this would be perfect for you,” she kept repeating, as if we were old friends.

  Finally, I had to confess that the apartment wasn’t for me.

  “For a ‘friend’?” she asked, putting the word in quotes to let me know she was onto me.

  “Actually,” I said, “it’s for my brother.”

  “What a nice thing to do,” she said, transfixed by my generosity in the same glazed, inattentive way she’d been transfixed by everything else I’d told her.

  I settled on a couple of listings for studio apartments and took down the information. But when I called my father the next day to tell him, he interrupted me before I had a chance to get out more than a few words. “Studio means one room, doesn’t it?”

  “One big room. With an alcove.”

  “You expect Roger to live in an alcove? He’s going to want to entertain, start a new life. You’d better try a different agency.”

  “Listen, Dad, maybe I should give you a few numbers and Roger can call himself.”

  “No way. Diane and I want to surprise him by having the whole thing lined up. Try a different agency.”

  I didn’t do that, but I did call the agent and make an appointment to look at new listings. For some reason, I felt I owed it to my father.

  By the time I’d walked along the Esplanade and crossed the long, flat bridge over the river and entered Cambridge, I’d worked myself into a state of confusion about my loyalties. It didn’t help that I’d entered the city near MIT and found myself surrounded by the school’s curious mix of computer whizzes and frat boys, most of whom looked to be high-IQ social outcasts driven to the brink of insanity by impossible parental expectations and a diet of tortilla chips and compulsive masturbation. I decided to stop at the Hyatt Regency and phone Bernie, just to say hello and make a few lewd remarks that might bring on a trace of the amnesia I’d felt in his presence earlier that afternoon.

  Architecturally, the lobby of the Hyatt was an amalgam of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and Las Vegas: a brick atrium lush with exotic plants and flowering trees and coruscating with fountains, glass elevators, lasers, and, for good measure, a rotating cocktail lounge pasted on the top floor. I loved stepping into the bustle of the place with its extravagantly costumed employees and grotesquely overdone floral arrangements and that peculiarly flattering lighting that made everyone from the chambermaids to the alcohol-flushed guests look like extras in a credit card commercial.

  I went to a bank of pay phones discreetly tucked into one corner of the lobby and took my place in a row of business-suited men and women, the men all mumbling into the mouthpieces and the women talking loudly. In hotel lobbies, women are usually calling home to check on their kids and the husbands they’re about to betray with their business par
tners, and men are phoning their mistresses to make tortured, whispered promises that it’s only a matter of time before they leave their wives. If the religious fruitcakes in this country are really as concerned with saving the American Family as they claim, they’d be well advised to get off their Kill Faggots platform and start lobbying against pay phones.

  A call to Bernie would have been right in the spirit of things, but as soon as my quarter dropped, I found myself phoning Gordon.

  It had been a couple of months since we’d spoken, so it was perfectly appropriate for me to call him—which was what I found so depressing about our current relationship. He’d even invited me to his and Michael’s pad a couple of times for dinner. The whole easygoing tone seemed designed to remind me that there was nothing unresolved between us, nothing that needed to be avoided or allowed to cool off.

  Gordon answered with a burst of the pep-rally enthusiasm that had recently infected his personality. “Clyde! Hi there.” To Michael, he shouted out something about the volume on the stereo. “Oh, never mind, he can’t hear me. You’ll have to yell. We just got the CD of that incredible new singer. Have you heard her?”

  I said I hadn’t, even though he hadn’t identified her. Gordon and Michael had the world’s most extensive collection of newly issued CDs, all carefully stacked in specially designed shelves in their living room. Every time I called, they’d just purchased a recording by a chanteuse who, through packaging and a good press agent alone, had manufactured a reputation as “the new Piaf” or “the new Dinah Washington.” All had similarly bland voices that gave way to an ear-shattering belt on the last bar, as if lung capacity were equivalent to talent. It always struck me as odd that Gordon and Michael would be so eager to hear “the new Dietrich,” let’s say, since, as far as I could tell, neither of them had ever had the least bit of interest in listening to the original.

  “She’s incredible,” he said, “has a six-octave range. She’s supposed to be the new Yma Sumac.”

  Someone was bound to be, sooner or later.

  Gordon again shouted for Michael to turn down the volume, and this time he did. “So how are you, Clyde?”

  This inquiry was made just loudly enough for Michael to hear. Gordon took pleasure in having Michael know that I was still pursuing him, in my own maudlin fashion. You’re always more attractive to a lover if you have someone chasing after you, especially someone who’ll likely never catch up.

  “I’m doing fine,” I said. “I was thinking about you because I was over at Vance’s—”

  “Oh, God. That must have been uplifting. How is he? Big as a house, I suppose.”

  “He’s about to start a diet.”

  “I’m tired of hearing that. It’s all about that boy in San Francisco he’s so obsessed with. That’s what Michael thinks. I heard some interesting gossip about that boy the other day. I’ll have to tell you sometime.”

  I didn’t say anything. Now that Gordon was convinced his life was on track, he’d lost all patience with Vance and anyone else who hadn’t heaved his excess baggage into the nearest incinerator. He tended to explain away friends’ problems with extreme explanations, which, however unlikely, at least relieved him of any obligation to lend a sympathetic hand. I was sure he talked about me in equally disparaging terms, but perhaps I was flattering myself.

  I could hear him tapping a pen against a glass impatiently. “So what’s up?” he asked.

  A reasonable question. “Not much. Marcus says hello, by the way.”

  “Oh, yum.”

  Gordon, like everyone else who didn’t really know Marcus, was fascinated by him and seemed to derive some mild sexual thrill from the mere mention of his name. I encouraged the infatuation because I knew I earned a few glamour points by association.

  Figuring it best to strike with my own agenda while his mind was still on Marcus, I said, “I was wondering if you’d maybe like to have dinner sometime?”

  “Not out of the question. Let me check with Michael and see what his schedule looks like.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I was hoping you and I could have dinner alone.”

  “Why, is something up?”

  “Not really,” I said. “It’s just been a while since we’ve had much of a chance to talk.” In fact, he and I hadn’t been alone together since he’d taken up with Michael. It was a risky suggestion. I knew from my own experience that such get-togethers often slide into uncomfortable silences in which the person with the new lover contemplates his good fortune at being free from the old. But I felt such a strong, sudden conviction about seeing him, I couldn’t resist bringing it up.

  “I suppose we could do it that way,” he said laconically.

  And then—something I’d completely forgotten about—the coin dropped, making its unmistakable series of clangs and clicks.

  “Are you at a pay phone?” Gordon asked incredulously.

  “My line’s been on the blink lately. . . .”

  “Why don’t we make it drinks, Clyde, if it’s going to be just the two of us? That would probably be easier to arrange.”

  I’d crossed into the realm of irritant, right up there with someone making calls from a telemarketing company. The pay phone had obviously given my call a note of desperation that reminded him of every reason he’d left. I could see the way his mind was working: If Michael wasn’t going to be around to see how desirable even a loser like me found him, it was probably better to plan something less time-consuming than a meal. We set a date, and then a mechanized voice came on, threatening to cut off the call.

  “Hold on,” I said, “I think I have another quarter.”

  “Look, Clyde, I have to get going anyway. Dinner’s almost ready.”

  “Dinner?” I checked my watch; it was nine forty-five. “But you always have dinner before six o’clock, sweetheart.”

  “That was years ago, Clyde. Call me and remind me about our drink closer to the day, will you?”

  Then he hung up, a frequent ending to our phone conversations when I’d attempted to get too intimate with him.

  I felt someone tap me on the shoulder. The man standing at the phone next to me had his hand over the mouthpiece and was looking at me, bug-eyed. “I hate to bother you,” he said, “but my call’s about to be disconnected. You wouldn’t happen to have an extra quarter on you, would you?”

  I looked at the coin in my hand and then back at the man’s distressed face and decided to hand it over. He thanked me with such exaggerated gratitude, I almost demanded it back.

  I went out into the lobby, where the guests were parading around in their uncomfortable clothes, water was shooting up from pools sunk into the floor, and glass elevators were descending from the rooftop lounge. It was such a dizzying display, I sank into a soft leather seat to get my bearings and ponder the whole numbing circus. The more I thought about it, the clearer Gordon’s life with Michael became: late nights at the office, long workouts, ten-o’clock dinners. Someone on one of the upper floors let out a tremendous shout of laughter, and one of the glass elevators dropped into view and deposited a load of merrymakers in the lobby.

  As I ogled this crowd, I felt someone tap me on the shoulder again, and I looked up to see the man who’d asked for the quarter standing above me, grinning.

  “Hey, listen,” he said, reaching out to shake my hand, “thanks. It really saved my life. I had this business deal going, and I think that call settled it. I just needed the final three minutes to really seal it. I should have phoned from the room, but they charge an extra seventy-five cents for local calls.”

  He was a tall man with an angular face that had the tragic pallor that comes from trying too hard for too long to accomplish an impossible task. His dark, deep-set eyes immediately made me think about poor abandoned Otis.

  “I should offer to buy you a drink,” he said.

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “It was just twenty-five cents.”

  Later, though, when he invited me up to his room, I had the feeling
that it had been a pretty good investment after all.

  When Ben came to walk Otis the next day, I immediately launched into an elaborate description of the emergency meeting at school that had forced me to cancel my plans with him, a description so detailed it could only have been invented.

  “It’s fine, Clyde, it really is,” he said several times. “It was too windy anyway.”

  “Too windy to go to a record warehouse?” I didn’t want him to let me off the hook quite so easily; wallowing in guilt usually helps to assuage it.

  He shrugged. “We were going for a hike after. I guess you forgot about that.”

  I guess I had, so I didn’t say anything for a few minutes. He was crouching on the floor, crumbling a heartworm pill into Otis’s dish of food while the dog looked on with intense curiosity, head cocked, ears at attention. “We can schedule the whole thing for tomorrow,” I said. “I’ve been checking the weather reports, and it’s going to be perfect for hiking around the suburbs. And buying records.”

  “I can’t tomorrow.”

  “Oh?”

  “I have plans.”

  So far as I knew, he’d never had plans before. Instantly, my desire to go out hiking and shopping with him became violent. “I know you’re just trying to punish me, all right? So I’ll admit I feel guilty about screwing up our excursion. I apologized, didn’t I? If you really want to know, there was no meeting—”

  “But I am doing something else,” he said, cutting me off.

  “Like what?”

  “Marcus and his girlfriend are taking me to a museum at Harvard. To see meteorites.” He looked up at me and snapped his lank red hair out of his eyes. “Sorry, Clyde. We can go next week.”

  “Does your mother know about this?”

  “They just asked me yesterday. I can’t remember if I told her or not.”

  “Well.” Certainly it was a good thing that Marcus was coming around some. “You can’t bring a dog to the museum, you know.”