The Man of the House

by Stephen McCauley

  I waited for Louise to arrive—through cocktails, through dinner, through an elaborate bûche de Noël that looked like an extraordinarily well-bred cousin of my mother’s holiday roll. I wandered off into the library and called her, let the phone ring a good dozen times or more. Somewhere around the tenth ring, I realized, with uncharacteristic certainty, that the phone was ringing in an empty house. That sometime since I’d last spoken to her, she and Ben had packed up their belongings and driven away, as unceremoniously as they’d arrived.

  When I got home that night, Marcus was sitting up at the kitchen table, poring through one of his academic journals in the yellow light of a single, dim lamp. “How was the party?” he asked.

  “Oh, pretty much what you’d expect: string quartet, lobster bisque, chorus girls jumping out of a cake.” He nodded appreciatively, not hearing a word, eager to get on to the serious matter of updating me on his current state of mind. But I didn’t much care if he was listening or not, and I went on anyway: “I think I’ve reached my limit with The Learning Place. Vance has a connection at a private school, and I’ve finally decided to follow up on it.”

  “Sure, sure,” he said, as soon as I stopped talking. He put away the academic journal and folded his long, bony fingers on top of it. “I’ve made a decision, Clyde. I’m talking to Ben tomorrow. I’m walking over there first thing in the morning, bright and early, and I’m sitting down and talking to him. I was doing it all for Sheila before, but now that she’s out of the picture, I see I have to do it for me. Him, too, of course.”

  He did look old in that dim light; handsome, of course—he still had a decade of good looks, providing he didn’t lose much more weight or balloon up, grow a beard or start following fashion trends. But I pitied him for the first time ever as I heard his voice droning on somewhere on the other side of my thoughts. He’d misread his situation—in thinking he had forever to decide about his son, in thinking the rush of life would come to a standstill until he’d had time to catch up to it.

  I’d misunderstood my situation, too. For years, I’d been assuming that my relationship with my father was unfinished and unresolved and had let myself drift into the becalmed waters of waiting. It wasn’t until Otis vanished that I saw the cost of waiting and longing. Dad and I had finished all our business years earlier; we had nothing left to resolve. It was simply a matter of learning to live with the resolution.

  IT WAS A SNOWY WINTER, ALTHOUGH NOT an especially cold one. Beginning in January and continuing right into the middle of March, storms swept across the East, dropping wet snow that clung heavily to the trees and made walking and driving a misery. Sometime in the middle of February, I abandoned my car on a side street and didn’t return to it until I felt certain I wouldn’t have to worry about getting stuck in a bank of filthy slush. Anyway, I had nowhere to go.

  In February, my father and Diane—who, as it turned out, was a retired nurse—were married. Agnes and I didn’t find out about it until March, when they moved into an apartment in a planned and gated community about ten miles from Agnes. Birch Lane Brook was designed as a combination nursing home and cruise ship—twenty-four-hour health care available, along with nightly entertainment and two restaurants. Roger had arranged for the apartment. Whenever I felt aggrieved that Dad was a better father to Roger than he was to me, I only had to remind myself that Roger appeared to be a considerably better son than I’d ever been. Whether Roger moved to Cambridge or not, I never learned. My father and I didn’t talk to each other for a long time after Otis disappeared, and when we started to talk again, it was mostly about the weather.

  Agnes had wept profusely at the news of the secret marriage and declared that if she ever remarried, she wouldn’t invite our father and his new wife to the ceremony—or at least she’d wait until the last minute to invite them. But secretly, I think she was relieved to have him out of her house. In addition to having her food bills cut in half, she could now entertain Donald without fear of intrusion and recrimination. Shortly after word came out about the marriage, Agnes quietly put away my mother’s recipes, and she didn’t mention them again for months.

  I waited for news from Louise, a letter or a phone call or even a postcard, but none came. Eventually, I decided she’d slipped back into the anonymity of her drifting life. I assumed she’d gone back to California, someplace more familiar to Ben, warmer and more welcoming to her.

  In the spring, I taught three courses at The Learning Place. I had a monthlong vacation in front of me before the start of the fall semester. Vance’s connection with Mary Laird hadn’t proved quite as useful as he’d promised or as I’d hoped. She kept referring to the adult ed center as The Learning Porch. She did assure me that they’d put my name on a list of people they could call in at the last moment, in case of sickness, death, or suicide. “Something often comes up,” she said cheerfully.

  Originally, I’d planned to spend my vacation languishing in the hot, tidy rooms of my new apartment, lying in bed and reading with a fan blowing over my body, but right before the end of classes, I’d felt a surge of determination to make a stab at being in the right place at the right time for once. I called Taff and had her find me an apartment in Provincetown.

  Louise’s letter arrived the day I was leaving, a dry, hot Friday in July. There was no return address, but it was postmarked Florida.

  I dropped all my bags and started to open the envelope, but the lobby of the building was hot and still, and I longed to get on the road and out of town.

  It was close to four by the time I got to the tip of Cape Cod, though the sun was still high. Driving through the miles of dunes with a hot wind blowing sand across the road and the ocean a trembling mirage at the edge of my line of vision, I felt overwhelmed by a calm optimism and a desire to stretch out in the sun. All that empty sand and water seemed to be spread in front of me as I approached, and then the crescent of the town, a lunatic hodgepodge of wooden houses and piers pasted onto the thin strip of land.

  Provincetown was hot and teeming, the streets a gaudy carnival of tourists and bicyclists, six-foot drag queens sweating through their makeup, fishermen in heavy boots, men in string bikinis, and bewildered families trying to buy T-shirts, all baking together on that tiny spit of land thrust out into the ocean. The boat for Boston was boarding, and day-trippers, sun-scorched and drunk, were dashing down the sidewalks to make the pier before they were trapped for the night.

  I rented a bicycle and pedaled through the crowds and out to the beach. It was after six o’clock, and the parking lot was nearly empty. The tide had started to come in, and a breeze was blowing across the water and up onto the sand. There were a few pockets of people, topless women and silent men in sunglasses, all too content and weary to leave. I found a place to spread my towel up on the beach, protected from the breeze. Finally, I took out Louise’s letter and read.

  Dear Clyde, Greetings from Florida. I know—Florida in July, but not nearly as bad as you might think. I found a town on the northwest coast Ben and I could agree upon. Not quite the surrealist landscape Ben had hoped for and I had feared. A quiet, bleached-out town that’s been here for a surprisingly long time. (20 years.) Not a bad place to have spent the winter and not an expensive place to spend the summer. Come fall, well, we haven’t decided. San Francisco probably. But I haven’t ruled out staying put.

  In April, when the winter people moved on, we moved into a place right on the beach. Condo with a balcony, but not so terrible. We’re house-sitting, a job I wasn’t in a position to turn down. I lost a few precious grand on that flight from the vine-covered cottage in Cambridge. Worth it, I think. It wasn’t the dog. Or, it wasn’t only the dog. It wasn’t only anything, just all of it together. It was Ben’s idea to leave. All that time I spent waiting for Marcus to make up his mind, and it never occurred to me I might be better off letting Ben do the deciding himself.

  We have another dog. Forty pounds, snatched from the jaws of death at the pound. We decided we’d never find out
what really happened to Otis, so we could make up an end to his story. What we settled on was this: He wandered out of Agnes’s condo and through the back of those malls and out onto the highway. He was headed back to Cambridge. When he got tired, he took shelter under a picnic table in a rest area, and a boy and his mother driving to their farm in Maine found him. His tags had fallen off by then, and they decided to take him home with them. There are five other dogs at the farm, and they watch over him, but he’s the only one who gets to sleep inside.

  Yr frnd, Louise

  I folded the letter and put it back in its envelope. A town on the northwest coast of Florida, a dog, a balcony on a beach that perhaps looked something like this.

  I was drugged from the heat, drowsy and melting into the blanket. Hot wind was blowing up over the sand and through my hair, and across the wide expanse of water stretched out in front of me, a smudge of smog on the horizon. There was a small group of men nearby, sitting on tiny, legless chairs, umbrellas over their heads fluttering in the wind. They had a cooler filled with ice and beer, and they were passing around a joint. One, a round, pink man in a straw hat, was singing a slow, maudlin version of “Ten Cents a Dance” in a raspy, ruined tenor, and from the opposite direction, a man was walking at the edge of the water, dragging his feet through the foam. There was a boy with him, eight or nine, thin and sunburned, in an enormous pair of swim trunks. The boy ran ahead of his father, up into the dunes, then reappeared farther ahead. “I’m right here, Dad,” he called. “I’m over here.” The father waved, and the boy disappeared again.

  They passed by me, and I watched them wander down the beach like that until they were two dark shapes in the distance. Eventually, they disappeared, and all I could hear was the pink man singing the same slow verses over and over in his soothing, ruined voice.

  © 1996 Sigrid Estrada

  STEPHEN McCAULEY’s first two novels, The Object of My Affection and The Easy Way Out, were both published by Washington Square Press. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is at work on his fourth novel.

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  THE OBJECT OF MY AFFECTION

  “Superb. . . .a joyously comic novel. . . . shimmers with hope, humor, and compassion.”

  —People

  THE EASY WAY OUT

  “An exhilarating, entertaining, smart novel. . . .Stephen McCauley is a writer of insight, surprise and finesse.”

  —Michael Dorris, San Francisco Chronicle

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