“Not too obedient, is she?”
“He. Usually he is.” Otis had planted himself in the middle of the garage floor. His head was slightly lowered, ears pulled back, and he was staring at me defiantly. “Come on,” I told him, “don’t make me look bad.”
“Give her a kick.”
My father opened the door to the basement and walked in. I realized as I watched him go inside that I hadn’t seen him up and out of his chair in close to a year. He looked solid, almost robust, in his work clothes and his heavy shoes, as if he’d just completed a day of labor, though he was slightly hunched and walked with a barely perceptible limp. I gave Otis another tug, but he stayed put, staring at me with maddening willfulness. I scooped him up under my arm and carried him inside.
“Aren’t you going to close the garage door?” I asked.
“Leave it open, in case I might possibly be expecting someone. Maybe.” He turned around and looked at Otis draped over my arm and shook his head. Never before had Otis seemed so much like an oversize lapdog, exactly the kind of insubstantial creature my father would expect me to be carrying around, like a surrogate infant.
“You’re expecting Diane?” I asked.
“I didn’t say that, did I? Who said anything about Diane?”
There was a big vinyl suitcase in one corner of the bedroom floor—Diane’s, no doubt, although I wasn’t about to ask at that moment. The basement was damper than the last time I’d been there, the air oddly hot and cold at the same time, as if there were a few weather systems battling one another in the small room. My father went to his chair by the window and lowered himself into it. “There’s a bottle on the floor of that closet,” he said. “Get it out and fill up the glass on the bureau.”
I opened the closet and pushed aside an armload of suit coats and dresses. The floor was littered with my father’s big, clunky shoes and slippers and an assortment of dainty pumps and sneakers, and there was a faint smell of stale, slightly rancid perfume. For as long as I could remember, my parents had maintained separate closets, bureaus, bathrooms, and bedrooms. There was something about the jumbled intimacy of the clothes on the rack and the shoes scattered around the floor that made me feel wretchedly sad for my mother and, at the same moment, happy for my infuriating father.
“And don’t let that goddamned dog in there with you,” my father called out.
“He’s not in here.”
“I’m not talking to you while you’ve got your head in the closet, Clyde. What kind of dog is she?”
I turned and stood up. “He. He’s a mutt. Are you sure you didn’t hide that booze somewhere else?”
“It’s in there. Don’t make me go look for it myself. I’m worn out.”
I got back down on my knees and crawled deeper into the dark reaches of the closet.
“Who’d want a dog this size, anyway?” he called out.
“He isn’t mine,” I shouted. “I already told you that.”
“I’m not talking to you while you’re buried in there. Since when have you been a dog lover?”
Finally, I spotted the dark-brown bottle, hidden behind some dirty shirts. I stood up, and all the blood rushed out of my head. I grabbed onto the doorjamb. When I’d regained my balance, I filled his glass and set the bottle on the night table.
“Is she housebroken?” he asked.
“It’s a he.”
“A what?”
“A he; the dog’s a male.”
“What do I care about that? I just don’t want her messing up the floor. You can’t clean these carpets, goddamned AstroTurf, whatever it is.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed, and Otis leapt to my lap. He stared up into my face with a pleading look that seemed to say, Let’s go, let’s go.
“Why do you do that, Dad? Why do you hide those bottles everywhere? What’s the point of it?”
He looked at me, dog in my lap, and shook his head. He gulped down a healthy dose of his drink. “Just to keep things interesting,” he said. “To keep people guessing. I don’t like everyone knowing my business.”
He switched on the television, and a picture flared to life, the gaudy halftime proceedings of a football game. He switched the channels until he landed on a home shopping network, shut off the sound, and glared at the screen with no interest whatsoever.
“I thought you were spending Thanksgiving with Diane.”
“We spent some of it together. Then we had a fight. But she’ll be back, you watch.”
“So you came home and left that message about the stroke?”
“That’s right. And Agnes wouldn’t even come up here, wouldn’t even leave her boyfriend to take me to the hospital. After all I’ve done for her, it’s a pretty sad state of affairs.”
I looked out the glass door to the little patio in back. It was raining now, big heavy drops pinging against the rusted grill. “I thought you might be happy for her,” I said, “happy she met someone. He’s not perfect, but. . .”
“That relationship isn’t going to work out. Just like her marriage to that other loser didn’t work out. I’m concerned about her, that’s all. Going around with a big goon like that. And here’s how she shows her appreciation. You have a stroke and you get left alone in a cold basement.”
His bottom lip rolled down with a miserable life of its own. He flipped through more channels until he came to The Weather Channel, then turned up the sound and listened intently to a report of a storm somewhere on the other side of the planet. Otis looked over at the television, jumped off my lap, and lay down on the carpeting by the sliding glass door. As I watched those maps with puffy, computer-generated clouds swirling over them, I felt naked and alone without the dog protecting me. And then something occurred to me.
“You didn’t get left alone,” I said.
My father turned, gulped down a quarter of his drink. “What?”
“You didn’t get left alone,” I said. “I came, didn’t I?”
“You what? I can’t hear what you’re saying, Clyde. You’re going to have to speak up.”
“Why don’t you just turn down the volume?” But apparently he didn’t hear that, either. I tried to make a case for myself in a louder voice, but I could feel something tightening up at the back of my throat and became panicked that I might start to cry. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d shown any strong emotion around him. Even when my mother was being lowered into the ground I hadn’t risked revealing the sorrow and regret I felt for all the things I hadn’t had a chance to tell her before she died. A stony, distant demeanor was safest.
At least there was something I could offer. I reached into the pocket of my vest and took out the lease for Roger’s apartment. But as I was about to turn it over to him, he pulled a pitcher out from under the bed and passed it to me. “Do me a favor, Clyde? Go upstairs and put some ice in this, will you? This booze is killing my throat. Not even a refrigerator down here. I’ve got to get the hell out of this dump.”
I took the pitcher from him and put back the envelope. “Come on, Otis,” I said. “We’re going upstairs.”
He’d fallen asleep on the carpet and was breathing deeply.
“Not too bright, is she?”
“He,” I said. “Otis.”
The dog looked up at me and then stretched his legs out in front of him and lay back down.
“Come on,” I said. But once again, he ignored me.
“Look at that,” my father said. “That’s a useless dog. You haven’t broken her spirit. She doesn’t know who the boss is. You have to break their spirits or they never do a thing for you, and then they turn around and bite your hand when you’re trying to toss them a bone. A dog like that, with a mind and will of her own, is useless.”
But Otis looked so content lying there on the green carpeting, the rain streaking down the door behind him, I didn’t have the heart to drag him upstairs with me. And if I called him again and he still didn’t come, I’d look all the more ineffectual. So I told my father to wat
ch him for a few minutes, and I climbed up the narrow spiral staircase.
That grim powder-blue condo with all the spindly white furniture had never looked more depressing. I stumbled into the kitchen and filled the pitcher with ice. The freezer was crammed with boxes of prepared dinners, frozen vegetables, cans of juice concentrate. I took out a package of frozen broccoli and lay down on the sofa in the living room with it pressed against my throbbing head.
I fell into some kind of stupor, and then I fell asleep. I don’t know how long I lay there, but when I came to, half the ice in the pitcher had melted and the waxy cardboard of the broccoli box had turned soggy.
My father was seated in his chair by the window, and the television was still pumping out a loud, irrelevant weather forecast for some corner of the globe. He was snoring, his head thrown back.
I looked over by the door, but Otis had moved from his spot on the rug. I opened the closet, but he wasn’t there, either. I shook my father’s shoulder, and he opened his eyes wide, as if he’d been roused in the middle of a nightmare.
“Where’s Otis?” I asked.
“Who?”
“The dog. Where’s the dog?”
“I let her out.”
“What do you mean, you let him out?”
“She wanted to go out, so I let her out. You didn’t expect me to let her crap on the floor, did you?”
I looked out through the glass door to the cramped cement patio.
“He’s not out there,” I said.
“I let her out through the garage. The door back into the cellar’s open. She’ll wander in. What the hell time is it?”
I ran out to the garage. The door was still open, and rainwater was flowing down the badly designed driveway and into the garage, pooling in the center of the floor. There was no sign of Otis. I ran up to the winding roadway around the town house and called him.
My father shuffled out into the garage. “For Christ’s sake, Clyde, stop that shouting. The neighbors will think you’re calling for help.”
OTIS SEEMED TO HAVE VANISHED INTO THE maze of houses and cars and parking lots. I searched for him for the rest of the evening and into the night, ringing bells and knocking on doors. The rain turned to slush and then wet snow. The later it got, the more desperate and bedraggled and deranged I knew I looked. Fewer and fewer people bothered to open their doors, fearing, I suppose, that I was one of the maniacal murderers rumored to be wandering the byways of WestWoods.
By the time my sister and niece returned to New Hampshire, it was late in the evening and I’d collapsed into one of the spindly wicker chairs, soaked and sneezing. Agnes rushed over to me. “Is it. . . Dad?” she cried. “Is he . . .”
“He’s fine,” I said. “Diane drove into the garage a while ago, and I think the two of them made up.”
“No stroke?” Barbara asked.
“Stroke? What stroke?”
“No stroke,” I told Barbara. “Indigestion.”
Then, as if she already knew, Barbara came and sat next to me. “Where’s Otis?” she asked quietly.
“He,” I said, “is not fine.”
I stayed the night in Agnes’s living room, and in the morning, Barbara and I continued the search. But it was the day after Thanksgiving, and the shopping malls were teeming with frenzied buyers and the parking lots were spilling out onto the roadways and the roadways themselves were clogged with cars—traffic backed up for miles, exhaust fumes and blaring horns and the sizzle of tires on wet pavement. Late in the day, Barbara offered to come back to Cambridge with me, so she could be there when I told Ben.
For the next two weeks, I drove to New Hampshire with Louise and Ben every day after school. We canvassed a broader and broader area, put up signs, contacted the animal shelters, talked to suspicious residents. But there were no leads. Through it all, Ben maintained an eerily composed demeanor, as if he was convinced the dog would suddenly appear around the next corner—pretty much what I was expecting, too.
Then, as we were driving north one cold afternoon, Louise said, “One of these days, we’re going to have to stop coming. One of these days, we’re going to have to stay at home.”
“I know that,” Ben said.
“It could be any day.” She pulled off the highway and onto the wet gravel of the shoulder and turned off the engine. The car shuddered as a truck roared past. “We’ll just have to decide arbitrarily, pull the date out of a hat. But I’ll leave it up to you to say when.”
We sat there in silence by the side of the highway with the traffic speeding by us and Louise’s cigarette filling the car with thin blue smoke. And then, as Louise was about to turn on the engine again, Ben began to cry. He curled up on the front seat, sobbing, his hands over his face as if something inside him had cracked open at last and all of his composure had fled. The front seat shook with his sobs. A police cruiser flew past with its siren on, and Louise reached out to put her hand on Ben’s back. In one move, he flung open his door, jumped out to the shoulder, and began to pound on my window. He was shouting something, loudly but incomprehensibly, and when he stepped back, I went outside. He pushed me against the trunk of the car with sudden, angry strength and kicked and kicked at my legs. I put my arms around him and buried my nose in his hair while he beat his fists into my chest. When I lifted my face, he knocked off my glasses and kicked them out onto the highway. And then we both stood there and watched as a truck sped past and flattened them under its tires.
“I’m not sorry,” he said, in a voice of dull amazement. “I’m not sorry. I’m not sorry.”
We got back into the car and Louise turned on the engine and pulled out into traffic. “Should we go home now?” she asked.
“Wherever that is,” Ben said.
When I walked into the apartment later in the day, Sheila was in the kitchen, stuffing her papers and books into a big string bag. She was moving with a kind of ferocity and purpose I wasn’t used to seeing in her, and I had the distinct impression she was preparing to make an exit. I sat down at the table and watched her for a few minutes.
“Where’s Marcus?” I asked.
“Don’t know,” she said. She turned quickly, flinging all her curls at once. “Don’t know, don’t care. Doesn’t matter. He’s stalled. And you know what happens to a helicopter when the engine stalls? Drops like a stone. Well, there you have it. Stalled. All this going on with Ben, just when he needs a father most, and he still can’t bring himself to sit down and talk with him. So what chance has he got with anything else in his whole stalled life? What chance is there that he’s ever likely to make a commitment to me? I’m not interested in losers, Clyde, and I never have been. Anyway,” she said, “he’s too old for me.”
This was a complaint I’d never heard from one of Marcus’s girlfriends before, and as I watched her dash around the house, putting her things in her bag, I realized it was true. He was too old for her, too old for his dissertation, too old to become a father. He’d waited too long for his life to begin, and he’d passed the point at which he could jump-start it. That he’d wasted his brains, all the promise of his supposed intelligence, wasn’t news; the real shock was realizing he’d squandered his beauty as well.
Eileen Ash’s party was held two weeks before Christmas, on a clear, icy Thursday night. I’d talked to Louise a couple of days before, and although she’d agreed to come, she told me not to bother picking her up. “I’ll meet you there,” she said, in a curiously unconvincing voice.
In fact, I was a little hesitant to go myself, since I’d barely been functional for weeks on end, but I tried to make the best of it by reminding myself I’d barely been functional for most of my teaching career. And so far, it had been a backhanded asset.
Eileen’s house was an immense Italianate monstrosity, tucked in behind a tall cedar hedge on Brattle Street. There were candles in every window, flickering prettily and hinting at the tasteful splendor of the Christmas decorations inside.
“You’re not getting enough sleep,” E
ileen said, as she showed me into the living room. “I think you should go on sabbatical.”
“I’m afraid they don’t offer sabbaticals at The Learning Place.”
“Well, of course they don’t offer them, dear. You have to demand.”
The living room was vast. So vast, the small gathering of students might have looked lost if it weren’t for the string quartet Eileen had hired and the uniformed army of caterers rushing around, passing out drinks and filling the room with activity and the impression of holiday cheer.
“I’ve been dying for you to meet my husband,” Eileen said. “He feels as if he practically knows you.”
She took me by the arm and led me to a high-backed chair at one side of a roaring fireplace. In it was an aged, hunched man who scowled up at me from behind a thick pair of lenses. Unless he’d been struck by a stray, out-of-season bolt of lightning in the past two months, there was no chance he was the same man I’d seen Eileen cozying up to outside the aquarium.
“I loved your class,” he said, as I shook his hand.
“You did?” I said. Senile, to boot, probably a tremendous convenience.
“No, no.” Eileen laughed. “Ei.” She sat on the arm of her husband’s chair and kissed his cheek. “That’s what he calls me. Ei.”
“She loved it,” he said. “She’s going to sign up for another class next fall.”
“Unless he takes a sabbatical,” Eileen said.
“Oh, well,” her husband said. “They’ll pull in somebody, won’t they?”
Off the street, he clearly meant. “They usually do,” I said.
“There are two people I want you to meet,” Eileen told me, as she led me away. “They claim they’re enrolled, but I’ve never met them before, and as far as I know, I’ve made nearly every class.”
“That always happens,” I told her. “A few people sign up and then don’t show until the final party. I’ve never been able to understand it.”
“I see what you mean. Probably using the class as a cover for some more nefarious activities. With each other, for all we know.” This thought seemed to cheer her tremendously. “I’ll say one thing for them, they’re hungry.”
The Man of the House Page 28
