When we left the bar, Chase announced that he was ravenous for something with local flavor, insisting we find some Boston baked beans. When I told him that I had no idea how to find these other than in a supermarket and that I wasn’t sure that this version of baked beans even came from Boston, he decided instead that he wanted tea. I assumed this was a reference to the Boston Tea Party and didn’t bother to ask for an explanation. I tried to convince him that he might want to try other Boston specialties, suggesting a trip over to Little Italy, but he’d decided that he wouldn’t be able to get to bed that night without some real Boston tea. I took him to the nearest diner.
I let Chase and Iris sleep in my bed while I spent the night on the couch. I was nearly asleep when the sounds of their lovemaking came through the door. This was not the first time I had been in the next room while someone else was having sex, but this was markedly different. My roommate the previous year had taken several women back to his room, filling the air with rhythmic pounding and exclamation and the concussion of bodies flipping athletically. But the sounds that Chase and Iris made were more serene and exponentially more erotic. Iris’ subtle hum of satisfaction, the whisper of a hand moving softly underneath the sheets, a warm chuckle, an intake of breath, the quiet reverence in Chase’s voice the few times he spoke. I found it a little disturbing to be listening to my brother this way (and I truly had little choice) but I also found it somewhat satisfying. I was glad that the two of them had this sexual connection together and I appreciated anew the effect that Iris had on Chase. I think they were still making love when I fell asleep.
The next morning, Chase walked into the living room in his boxer shorts, waking me up as he continued into the kitchen. He rummaged around for a minute and then came back to tell me that I had nothing to eat for breakfast. He walked back into my bedroom and came out fully dressed, telling me that he was going out to “forage.”
As soon as he closed the door to the apartment, I heard the shower go on. A few minutes later, Iris came into the living room with a towel wrapped around her head and wearing the Emerson sweatshirt I’d bought Chase for his last birthday.
“It was really nice of you to let us sleep in your bed last night,” she said, sitting down in a chair.
“I don’t think the two of you would have been very comfortable on the couch. I guess I never thought much about having guests over.”
“Well it was really nice of you anyway.” She smiled and looked around the room.
I’d gotten out from under the sheets, had put my pants on, and had been folding a blanket when she walked in. Now I sat back on the couch and watched her glancing around. I couldn’t help but think about the sounds she had made while she was making love to my brother the night before. That soft hum was a slightly lower register than her speaking voice and it spoke of feeling something on a deep level. I’d never heard a woman make that sound before and I wondered if it was something distinctive to Iris or if it was something my brother regularly generated from his partners.
Iris’ eyes continued to scan the room and I continued to look at her. I had of course realized that she was beautiful the very first time I saw her (even though at that point I thought she was beautiful and insane), but this was the first time that I realized how sexy she was. Almost certainly, it had much to do with what I had heard the night before, but it also had to do with how she looked just out of a shower. The towel didn’t capture all of the strands of her hair and a few tickled her neck. The sweatshirt was considerably too large for her and led me to think about the lithe body that it covered. I stopped myself from continuing this line of thought. In the past, it had been fine for me to appraise my brother’s girlfriends in this way because I had known they wouldn’t be his girlfriends for very long. But things were different with Iris and I had to consider her in a different way.
Iris rose and picked up the book I’d been reading the night before.
“I don’t get Camus,” she said.
“I didn’t get him in high school, either. I tried reading The Fall in my sophomore year and it gave me a headache.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“But my philosophy professor this year has really helped me to connect with him. I’m kinda becoming a closet existentialist.”
She smiled. “Your secret’s safe with me. I don’t think I could ever be an existentialist, though. I prefer to have a little more meaning with my world-views.”
I promise you that a sentence like that had never come from the mouth of any of my brother’s other girlfriends.
“Well the last great philosopher I embraced was Bullwinkle, so I’m likely to move on again.”
She laughed and said, “When Chase and I first started dating he tried to convince me that he was a Marxist. I tried to explain to him that he really didn’t sound like a Marxist at all. Then he told me he was talking about Harpo Marx.”
“And he is a strict Harpo Marxist.”
“Yeah, I guess he is.”
A few minutes later, Chase returned with a bag of doughnuts and took over the room again. I left for my class around 10:00, but they stayed until after dinner. We talked about many things, mostly inconsequential. At various times during the day, though, completely unbidden, I would remember hearing them together the night before. And for at least a moment, I would have to look away.
I went into the store the next day feeling good. Iris had confirmed her interest in my staying in touch before we parted, the Phish double-CD bootleg had propelled my drive home from Lenox, and I even found Tyler’s greeting of “Morning, Captain” when I arrived cheering.
The idyll didn’t last very long.
Tuesdays in the store were always quiet. Even during the height of the summer and fall, when the inns were full most of the time and it took ten minutes to find a parking space anywhere near Russet Avenue, Tuesdays and Wednesdays remained relatively still. During the first hour I was in the store, as Tyler took notes for his accounting final and Carl put up a new shipment of Father’s Day mugs, it came to mind that I could easily take these two days off for as long as it took to sell the store.
It was about this time when Carl came running up from the stockroom.
“We have a problem,” he said, looking at Tyler.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“The back room is getting flooded.”
The three of us moved quickly to the stockroom, where water was gushing out of a burst pipe at an absurd rate. There was already an inch of water on the floor and the wall that butted up against the back display of the store was getting soaked.
“How the hell did this happen?” I said.
Carl shook his head. “I’m not sure how it started. I came back here to get a box and there was water all over the place. I tried to close the valve over there with a wrench and the valve broke.”
I threw my head back and cursed. The vision of an enormous flood in the back of the store doing untold damage – damage that would take months to repair, thereby extending my stay in Amber – loomed in front of me as the water continued to stream out. My cursing seemed to intimidate Carl, who started muttering apologies. I wasn’t interested in an apology. What I wanted was for the flood never to have happened in the first place.
While I was seething, Tyler was actually doing something. He went first to a valve that he thought controlled the water in the store, but nothing happened. As he continued to search, I continued to rant. Several minutes went by while Tyler tried to figure out how to turn off the water. During this time, the flood got worse. Nearly the entire back wall of the store was soaked now.
“Of course, it’s outside,” Tyler said and headed out the back door. Shortly thereafter, the water stopped streaming and Tyler returned.
“I’ve probably seen that valve five hundred times coming into the store,” he said. “I just never paid any attention to it.”
“This is a disaster,” I said, looking around the room. Most of our backup stock had been drenched. Since this was e
ssentially cards and stationery items, that meant that all of it was ruined. I walked out of the stockroom to look at the back of the store. As I suspected, the plasterboard was soaked. What I stupidly hadn’t anticipated was that the carpet was spongy. Rivulets of water formed around my shoes.
“Can someone help me up here?” came a voice from the front of the store. I turned to see a man holding a magazine, looking exasperated. I turned my back to him and cursed again.
“I’ll get him,” Tyler said, walking to the cash register. I went back to examining the display and Tyler returned after making the transaction.
“This whole wall is going to have to be replaced,” I said. “Is this a load-bearing wall? Is the entire back of the store going to collapse?”
“What do you want me to do with these boxes,” Carl said from the stockroom. I stood up, opened the back door, and pointed outside.
“See that dumpster?” I said. “That’s the only thing you can do with those boxes now.”
Tyler put his arm around my shoulder. “You might want to wait until we talk to the insurance company.”
“I don’t even know who the insurance company is.”
Tyler took a deep breath. I think he was doing it to try to convince me to do the same. I didn’t take his suggestion.
“I’ll find out,” he said. He led me toward the door of the stockroom. “Listen, why don’t you take the register for a while? I’ll call the landlord and cordon off the back of the store and then I’ll get the number of the insurance company from the files.”
“This is a total disaster,” I said.
“It’s actually only a partial disaster. Let me take care of some stuff back here. You handle the front.”
While Tyler worked, I stood behind the counter, helping the occasional customer and stealing regular glances toward the back. I knew I’d been overreacting, but this complication was one of the few distressing scenarios I hadn’t considered before. We weren’t likely to find a buyer for the store while it was under repair. I castigated myself for having cavalierly offered to stay until my father sold the store. If I’d thought about it at all ahead of time, I would have put an outside date on my commitment. A date that would be rapidly approaching instead of receding increasingly into the distance.
I allowed myself to be furious about this for a while longer. Eventually, the simple act of needing to be pleasant to customers calmed me down. By the time Tyler returned to the front, I’d begun to feel somewhat chastened by the way he had taken charge while I ranted. Certainly if Tyler hadn’t been there, I would have eventually done all of the things that he did instead, but I wouldn’t have done them with his composure.
“Thanks,” I said to him when he got behind the counter.
“It’s fine. It’s a mess back there, but at least the customers won’t get wet. The landlord’s going to be here in a half hour or so. The insurance agent is Philip Watson. I’ll call him if you want.”
“No, I’ll call him.” He handed me a piece of paper that listed the broker’s contact information and the policy number. “You’ve done way more than your share already.”
By the time the afternoon came along, the landlord and Watson himself (an old friend of my father’s) had been by to examine the damage and I’d spoken to a contractor about getting to work on the repairs as quickly as possible. The activity made me feel like something was happening, even though it was really only conversation about something happening. Feeling guilty, I even sent Tyler home early once I was sure that things were under control. I kept Carl around, though there was very little for him to do.
As I stayed in the store, my sense of frustration returned. I walked to the back to examine everything again. I wondered if I had missed some sign that would have told me that this was coming, and I wondered if I could have done something to prevent it. I wondered what my father would have done differently. And then I wondered what Chase would have done differently. That I knew that both of them would have acted more efficiently and might have even minimized the damage did nothing to salve my mood.
That weekend, my mother went out of town with her sister for a couple of days. They’d been planning the trip for quite some time, some kind of annual spring retreat, and my mother intended to cancel it to tend to my father until I told her that I would do that job instead. It seemed that she could use the break and, sadly, taking care of my father didn’t require much.
On my mother’s recommendation, I hadn’t told him about the water damage in the store because I didn’t want to depress him more than he already was. This had the effect of making the weekend feel even more stilted than it was already going to be. Not only was he largely uncommunicative, but I couldn’t even come up with a conversation starter without thinking about the mess in the store. On Friday night, he sat staring at the television, picking at the roasted chicken I’d brought home, and only talking to me when I asked him a question. Between my stint at the store and the duty I was pulling here, I felt like a full-time babysitter.
I knew I couldn’t leave my father alone (a neighbor was staying with him while I was in the store), but I certainly didn’t need to be in the same room with him. Still, for some reason, I felt obligated to sit with him, even though he was at best tangentially aware of my presence. And so I lay on the couch, gazing at the trophies and photographs and shop projects, while he sat in his chair watching a sitcom (two kids frolicking and causing their parents to roll their eyes a lot), a mawkish drama (a dysfunctional family that still manages to love one another), and then a cop show (some kind of mystery emerging from deep in the past). At some point, I fell asleep. The first time in my adult life that I did that in front of a television. When I awoke, it was a little after eleven and Dad was giving the news the same hypnotic attention he’d given the other shows.
“Dad, it’s late,” I said. “Let’s go to bed.”
“I just want to finish watching this.”
“All right, but we’re going to bed after the news is over. I’m getting tired and I want to help you upstairs before I go to sleep.”
He didn’t say anything until a segment on a parade in Hartford finished.
“I’m not going upstairs tonight. I’ll sleep here.”
For the past three nights, he’d slept on the sofa bed in the den, unwilling to climb the steps to his bedroom. The doctors had told us that there was no reason to believe that the stress of going up a flight of stairs would do any damage to his heart, but he didn’t want to hear this. If he was going to sleep downstairs a fourth night in a row, there was a good chance he was simply going to continue to do it. In his mid-fifties, my father was acting like an elderly man.
“The bed upstairs is much more comfortable, Dad. We always put the guests we didn’t like very much on the sofa bed.”
“This is fine. I’m not up for climbing the stairs. If you could just pull the bed out for me, I’ll be okay.”
I wondered what would happen if I refused to pull the bed out for him. Would this force him to come upstairs with me? I guessed that he would probably just sleep in the chair. I set things up and then tried one more time to convince him to go up to his room.
“I’m fine here, Hugh. Go to bed if you’re tired.”
“Do you want me to help you to the bathroom?”
He scowled at me. “I can make it to the bathroom myself,” he said. At least I had some sense of the parameters now.
When I came back from the store on Saturday, we repeated the ritual. By 8:45, I was burning up with cabin fever. He was watching a rerun of a Super Bowl game on ESPN Classic. He didn’t even like football. He’d always said that the only games he could watch were the games Chase participated in when he was in middle school. I tried to pass the time reading The Witches of Eastwick, but the play-by-play on the television was too distracting. Finally, I decided to leave the den. I’m not even sure Dad noticed I was gone.
As I approached the stairs to my room, I passed the study and noticed the computer’s screen saver,
a time-lapse video image of a lily blossoming. My mother was a dedicated e-mail correspondent with dozens of friends and relatives. In fact, this was the primary way I had communicated with her over the past several years.
Rather than reading, I decided to spend a little time online. I went to Google and typed “New Mexico.” Of course, there were nearly three million items returned, but I managed to find some truly informative sites on the first several screens. One site even allowed me to match my temperament with my ideal New Mexico location. While I would have expected to be directed to Albuquerque or Santa Fe (admittedly among the only places I knew in New Mexico), the program directed me toward Tucumcari, a tiny frontier town out on the old Route 66. The only previous reference I’d had to Tucumcari was in Lowell George’s song, “Willin’” and George had hardly provided much information. I followed a link to the town’s Chamber of Commerce site and spent a good half hour surfing the place’s history, attractions, and community development plans. I even found a restaurant that I would surely visit once I got out there. Before leaving the site, I requested a booklet about the town and several brochures.
Crossing the Bridge Page 8
