The Man of the House

by Stephen McCauley

  Eileen Ash cleared her throat and said that she had a question. “And this brings us back to the topic of our course on the Victorian era. Do you think it was so very different then—for the writers, I mean?”

  But before Louise had a chance to answer, Mallory White stuck her head into the room. “If you could just hold that thought,” she said.

  In the past month or so, Mallory’s attendance had been sporadic, and I assumed that she’d either worked things out with her husband or found a reliable, energetic lover in his twenties. She’d attended class the week before, so I was especially surprised to see her now. She had on black tights and an alpaca sweater that came down to the middle of her thighs, and as she crossed in front of me, she left behind the fresh-air smell of the cool autumn night.

  “For once,” she announced, “I have a legitimate excuse for being late. I was reading Louise’s first novel, and I was so completely engrossed, I lost track of time until I finished it.”

  There was a murmur of enthusiasm in the room, and I found myself getting caught up in the excitement.

  “As you probably know,” Mallory went on, “I’ve been quite distressed this semester about my husband, so as you can imagine, I was very interested in the part of the book in which you discuss your affair with the married doctor in France. What I’m wondering—and you don’t really touch on this aspect—is whether or not you and the doctor spent much time talking about his wife when you were together. Intimate things, I mean.”

  I knew that much of Louise’s first novel was indeed based on her own experience. She’d gone to Paris after graduation to be an au pair and had landed in the middle of a domestic cold war. The mother of the child she’d been hired to care for was having an affair with a family friend, and it quickly became apparent to her that an unspoken part of Louise’s job involved covering for the wife. Gillian, the narrator of the novel, finds herself in an identical situation. She becomes involved with the husband, a sweet, portly doctor, partly to assuage her guilt over her complicity in his wife’s affair. But in real life, it was more complicated than that. It was true that Louise felt sorry for the cuckolded physician, but her feelings didn’t prevent her from taking advantage of him. She didn’t start sleeping with him, she’d told me, until after she discovered she was carrying Marcus’s baby and was trying to figure out what to do about it. This, Louise had explained to me, had been left out of the novel, not because she wanted to disguise Marcus’s role, but because she wanted to make Gillian a sympathetic character.

  Louise looked up at the ceiling and then glanced in my direction, a fairly blatant appeal for help. I suspected she looked as distressed as she did not because she couldn’t answer but because she could.

  “Let’s not forget,” I said, “that this is a novel. And because it’s a novel, we should stick with what’s given rather than speculate on Louise’s life. The whole world of these characters exists between the covers of the book.”

  Mallory considered my comment for a moment. “I see what you mean,” she said, “and I retract my questions. But my point is this, Louise: did Clyde tell you how I learned about my husband’s affair?”

  “Not that I remember,” Louise said.

  Mallory recounted the story that she’d told at least two other times since September, a story that had already been acted out in a role-play session involving the entire class. If this particular telling of the tale was about to evolve into a relevant question, I certainly saw no signs of it. It was with mild satisfaction that I noted the other students shifting in their seats and sighing as they were forced to listen to the recitation of events once more, this time with new details that bore the stamp of exaggeration.

  I looked at my watch; over an hour had passed already, and if I took a little control now, it might be possible to get things back on track. I suggested we wait on questions and asked Louise if she’d give a short reading from one of her books.

  She went to her overcoat and took out the dog-eared paperback of her first novel and a pair of round, rimless eyeglasses, which I’d never before seen her wear. She hooked them behind her ears, opened the book in what looked to be a random fashion, and started to read a chapter near the end.

  In the last third of the book, Gillian’s doctor lover sends her to Nice and sets her up in a yellow room with an obstructed view of the Baie des Anges. He’s offered to help pay for everything up to the baby’s birth, but their agreement is that Gillian will accept responsibility for everything thereafter. And never contact him.

  After the emotional tumult of the first sections of the novel, the intentionally farcical comings and goings and the layers of irony, the last third is refreshingly uncomplicated. For all the panache of the beginning, I suspect it’s the simple portrayal of contentment at the end that accounted for what success the book enjoyed.

  But it was strange and unsettling to hear the words of this youthful, optimistic narrator read in Louise’s cracked, hoarse voice. Her glasses pinched the sides of her face, making her look as old as she sounded. She read for close to half an hour, and the class listened in polite silence. Tim was sitting with his elbows resting on his knees, as if he were hanging on her words—or trying to stay awake. When she came to the end of the chapter, Louise took off her glasses and put them into the pocket of her shirt and closed the book. “And that’s the end of that,” she said quietly.

  There was a round of applause, more muted and sincere than the applause that had greeted our arrival, and Eileen wiped at her eyes and indicated to Tim that she wanted a refill. Throughout the reading, Brian had been shifting in his seat, crossing and uncrossing his legs with what I assumed was boredom. But now he pulled himself up in his chair and announced that he’d been impressed with the reading. “Fascinating stuff,” he said. “But I’ve got a question for you,” he added, in a tone that sounded harsh and lawyerly. “And I hope you don’t take this too personally.”

  “Go right ahead,” Louise said. “I wrote the book so long ago, I’m not the least bit sensitive about it. My own son told me he didn’t think much of it.”

  “I know this is a novel,” Brian said, “and all made up and none of it ever happened, total fabrication, but will you please tell me why it is that no one ever thinks about the father? I mean, the father of this kid in the book is just a disposable wallet and not much more. At least, that’s what I get from what you read—haven’t quite finished the book myself. Forget for a minute about the kid and whether or not he deserves to have a father or even know who his father is. What about the man? It seems to me the whole attitude is that as long as the alimony checks don’t bounce, who cares? Dad? To hell with the sperm donor, as long as the tuition gets paid. And just for the record, Princeton is not an inexpensive school. I tried to get him to consider one of the state schools, but that ex-wife of mine talked him out of it.”

  Louise was sitting on the edge of the table at the front of the room, looking at the floor and nodding as she listened to Brian. A few coppery strands of hair had come loose from her ponytail and swung down in front of her face. She tucked them into the rawhide lace and looked up. She smiled at Brian, rather feebly, but she didn’t say a word.

  It was then that I noticed there were tears rolling down her cheeks.

  I stood up. “I think we should take a break.”

  “Absolutely,” Mallory said. “I was about to suggest it myself.”

  “I suppose some people are brutes by nature,” Eileen Ash said.

  Tim quietly asked Louise if she’d like a drink, and she nodded. “Scotch on the rocks, if you’ve got it,” she said.

  Brian stayed seated, obviously confused as to why no one was answering his questions. Edwina had retreated to the turn of the century.

  We walked most of the way back to Louise’s house in silence, listening to the Mass Ave traffic in the distance and the braying of the electric trams circling the Cambridge Common.

  “I don’t want you to think I’m having a major slip,” Louise finally said,
“just because I had one drink.”

  “Two.”

  “I only had a few sips from the second one. Which just goes to prove my point, so let’s not count it.”

  “Maybe the reading wasn’t such a great idea.”

  Louise sighed and pulled her coat around her neck more tightly. “I hope the class wasn’t too mortified.”

  “My God! The only thing you could have done to please them more would have been to lie on the floor and reenact your baby’s birth. Three people told me they thought it was the best class we’ve had, and Eileen Ash is going to invite you to her end-of-semester party.”

  When we got to her house, Louise hesitated at the gate.

  “Once more around the block?” I asked.

  She took my arm as we walked. “It wasn’t only that man’s question that set me off,” she said, “although that settled it, I suppose. It was the book. It was so light and optimistic. So calm. I can’t write that way anymore, Clyde. I’d even forgotten I once felt that way. What a foolish girl! Stupid! I was selfish, not telling Marcus. It’s true. I could have written him, called, sent a photo. I was wrong, what I did with the doctor. I admit it. I admit it, all right? But my intentions weren’t bad.”

  “I know, I know,” I said, and reached over to wipe her eyes.

  “I thought my kid and I would be enough of a family. I could write my books and scrape by, and I’d have a real purpose. It seemed so wonderful, the idea of having a purpose and a real family for once in my life. The rest of the world could go on its own way and to hell with it. That’s what I thought. I was on a bus coming back from the clinic with my test results, people around me talking a language I barely understood. I couldn’t have been more alone—the pregnant American girl with the ugly feet. But I didn’t care, Clyde. It was the first time in my life I wasn’t lonely. I felt protected from all that. I was going to do everything on my own. . . . Do you understand?”

  “Yes. I think I do.”

  “And I did. I did it on my own for years.”

  “But you decided to come east.”

  “Don’t you see?” She was sobbing now, angry at me but leaning against my shoulder for support. “I had to. I wish Ben’s father were some Australian or some Austrian I couldn’t find again if I wanted to. Or some fat French doctor. But he isn’t. Who was I to decide Ben couldn’t have a father? And I was a bigger idiot to think I could just come and fix it all, make it all right.”

  “They’ve been going out, haven’t they? Marcus is making some moves.”

  “Marcus called yesterday to tell me he wants to wait until after Thanksgiving to talk with Ben. He can’t help himself, he’s just too dug in. I wish I could leave tomorrow.” She pulled a paper napkin out of the pocket of her coat and blew her nose into it. “Ben knows about Marcus, doesn’t he?”

  “I haven’t talked with him about it, but yes, I’m pretty sure he does.”

  “You see, it’s exactly what I didn’t want to happen, to have Ben waiting on some ambivalent man. It’s what I worried about most. I wish I had had that second drink. And a third, too.”

  We’d circled the block and were almost back at the gate in front of the garden. With all of the trees and the vines stripped of their leaves, the yellow carriage house was plainly visible from the street. The lights were on in the loft, and as we walked down the path to the house, I could once again hear the phone ringing in a house beyond the fence. We entered, and Ben came bouncing down the stairs. “How was it?” he asked.

  “Another triumph,” Louise said, and put her arms around him.

  ONE OF THE DANGERS OF ENJOYING A THING too much is that you come to depend on it, almost as much as you depend on the things you loathe and dread. Much as I hated to admit it, I’d come to depend on Ben’s companionship. In theory, I was happy that Marcus—Ben’s . . . father, after all—was getting involved, but I was concerned that ultimately Marcus would let Ben down. Or, to put it another way, I was jealous of their relationship. I felt rejected by Ben, and hurt that he hadn’t confided in me, so I spent more and more time rejecting him: making sure I was out of the house when he showed up in the afternoon or, if I was in, making such showy, furious lecture notes as I read Daniel Deronda that he didn’t dare interrupt me. Pulling back from him had left me ample time to wander around my low-ceilinged rooms, wondering what I was going to say to Gordon when we finally had our drink, an activity that made reading a biography of Jayne Mansfield seem positively productive.

  But one afternoon, as I was studiously avoiding Ben, I ran into him.

  I’d made an appointment with Taff that afternoon so she could take me to look at an apartment which, she’d assured me, was a promising prospect for Roger, a special listing that she was hanging on to for me, as a favor. But because I didn’t want to show undue respect for either my real estate agent or my “brother” by being prompt, I stopped into a store on Mass Ave to peruse a rack of tabloids. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to chew on a few scandalous bits of celebrity gossip so I could regurgitate them when conversation ran dry with Gordon. “Did you see the picture of So-and-so?” was all I’d have to say to start him off on a ten-minute monologue on weight gain, plastic surgery, and rumors of homosexuality, drug abuse, and eating disorders among the famous and fabulous.

  As I was studying a picture of Jamie Lee Curtis and her mother—an entire evening’s worth of material—I looked up and saw Benjamin strolling down the sidewalk. It was a cold afternoon, and he was wrapped in a bulky woolen jacket and a green plaid hunting cap. Stopping at nearly every tree, parking meter, and hydrant along the street to let Otis sniff and leave his scent, he looked ahead with a vague, ponderous gaze as he waited. Traitor, I thought, and went back to the tabloid. But when I looked up again, I saw two boys on Rollerblades speed past and nearly knock into him. They stopped with remarkable speed and grace and, skating backward with the pretty athleticism of dancers, circled around him as they apologized and exchanged a few friendly words. They had on light sweaters and fingerless gloves, all very bright and synthetic, and propped up on their big skates, they towered over Ben. He looked small and weary, a dead-end kid by comparison. Classmates, no doubt, but they looked as if they’d dropped in from some happier, more carefree planet. After a moment, they waved and pushed off. Ben yanked at the leash and continued on to the next meter.

  What Vance had said about the odd sadness of children, with their curious mixture of sophistication and innocence, was true, but in some, the sadness was more apparent than in others, closer to the surface. How foolish of me to buy used tango records and musette waltzes for a twelve-year-old when he didn’t even own a pair of Rollerblades! I tossed down the magazine and hurried out to the street.

  Ben smiled as I approached, a look I chose to interpret as forgiveness for my recent detachment, and Otis stood up on his hind legs and pawed at the air.

  I knelt down and popped a biscuit into Otis’s mouth. “Where are you headed?” I asked.

  Ben shrugged and pointed. “This way,” he said, indicating a chilly row of stores, as if that answered the question.

  “Me, too. I’m going to talk with a real estate agent about an apartment. You should come along. The agent’s fun to listen to, talks a lot, has a lot of opinions. Her name’s Taff. Imagine that.”

  “Taff?” He pulled his mouth off to one side of his face. “Is that short for something?”

  “No,” I said proudly, “that’s it, just Taff, isn’t short for anything.”

  We walked down a long block of dress shops and toy stores and banks and stopped at the corner to wait for the light. Sometime in the past month or so, Ben had grown, and the top of his head was above my shoulder now. I could see his cap bobbing in my peripheral vision. “You’re moving?” he asked.

  A bus rumbled past, the side plastered with an enormous advertisement for an over-the-counter allergy medicine. “Moving?”

  “The apartment you’re going to look at. Is it for you?”

  He was peering up at me from
under the brim of his cap, waiting for me to explain, the tips of his big, inherited ears pushed out by the band of the cap. It was one thing for me to go through with the whole convoluted procedure of trying to get in my father’s good graces by hunting down an apartment for his surrogate son, but quite another to discuss it openly with a twelve-year-old whose paternal relations were even more unresolved than my own. “Is it for me?” I asked, as if there had been something ambiguous in his question. “Yes,” I said, “it is.”

  I explained to Ben that they didn’t allow dogs in the office, and told him to wait outside. Taff was sitting at her desk, chatting on the phone with a customer in the tone of malicious good humor that seems to be required of real estate agents. But she had on a blue cashmere muffler, just to show me, I suppose, that my tardiness hadn’t gone unnoticed, that she’d been sitting around waiting for me, dressed and ready to go. She indicated a seat by her desk and had me sit there for at least five minutes while she finished the call, rifled through the drawers of several filing cabinets, and then disappeared into a curiously empty-looking room at the back of the office. She had a dozen or so photos lined up on her desk, smiling, gap-toothed children floating in the azure ether of the professional photographer’s studio, and friends or relatives unfairly preserved for eternity in a moment of bloated inebriation at some seaside picnic. The human spirit, in all its wonder, seems to insist upon personalizing a work space, which only makes it sadder that everyone’s family photos are interchangeable with everyone else’s.

  On the far corner of the desk was a hardbound copy of the most recent translation of Crime and Punishment, with a bookmark stuck somewhere near the middle. I’d been meaning to read this new edition for some time but had been distracted by my craving for true-life stories, unburdened by what Louise called the obfuscations of art. I picked it up and started to scan the inside flap. “I’m reading it for my book group,” Taff said, coming up behind me. “This translation’s much more lucid than the old Constance Garnett. Well, I suppose no one reads that anymore.”