Scott Spencer

by Man in the Woods (v5)

  “I thought I’d find you here,” Todd Lawson says from the workshop’s doorway. For a moment, Paul barely recognizes him, dressed as he is in a tuxedo, with a crimson cummerbund, matching bow tie, and patent leather evening slippers. The tux and its accoutrements have an inherited quality to them. The cut of the jacket, the worn-out shine of the fabric, and the approximate fit all suggest that someone has worn these clothes many years ago, someone other than Lawson, perhaps his father. Paul’s father’s closet held no formal wear. There were a couple of sports jackets, six or seven ties, and a pair of black wing-tips from England, inside of which the cedar shoe trees had resided for so long that they had fused with the leather and were impossible to remove during the hectic, tearful cleanup after Matthew’s death.

  “So you’ve come to commune with your dog?” Todd says. His hair falls into his eyes as he leans against the doorway’s frame and grins at Paul. He is holding a champagne glass. The champagne, in fact, is being held back and will be uncorked at midnight, but Todd has somehow gotten himself served.

  “Not really,” says Paul, “it’s more making sure he doesn’t make a run on the ham.”

  Todd drains his glass and places it carefully on the floor. He rakes both of his hands through his hair, takes a deep breath. “Hey, Paul, I made a decision this afternoon.”

  “Yeah?” Paul’s heart beats faster. Seeing Lawson now, he realizes he has told him too much during their walks—more than enough, really, for Todd to piece together if not the exact story then at least enough of it to surmise that Paul has stumbled into darkness. As soon as you tell one person it is no longer really a secret and Paul has told two. He thinks, Oh, I will have to kill both of them now, which he does not mean, but the thought is still somehow present, like the sharp, rank stink of a decomposing deer wafting up from some unseen spot in the woods.

  “I’m getting out of here,” Todd says.

  Paul searches his friend’s face, but all he can find is merriment and self-regard.

  “Mexico,” Todd says.

  “You go to Mexico every winter.”

  “This time I’m not coming back. This place is fucked. Too much development. Too many new people, too many idiots and cityiots. Everything about Windsor County that I loved is disappearing. I mean, come on, we walk in the woods and we hear the sound of bulldozers and then hedge-fund fuckers come jogging by. Jogging, man. Whatever happened to getting your exercise by actually working?”

  “I’ll miss you,” Paul says. His voice is thin, unconvincing, though he does mean it.

  “Too much civilization. They’re paving the dirt roads, every little lane has a street sign on it. People like us, Paul, we’re just not made for this kind of life. And—by the way—it’s not like Mexico is paradise. But you can still get off the grid there. You can still breathe. You can live by your own code.”

  “What exactly is that code?”

  “Do it yourself, baby. DIY. All the way.”

  “I better get back, Todd. I can’t leave Kate there with the party all by herself.”

  Todd looks at Paul for a moment with a bemused expression, as if Paul has just declared himself on the side of everything Todd has rejected. “Okay,” Todd says, “I’ll walk you.”

  Despite the cold, they take an indirect route back to the house, which shines and sings beneath the night sky. They walk left from the workshop and follow the curve of the driveway, passing the pair of hundred-year-old maple trees that now creak and twitter in the cold black wind, well past their prime. Paul expects that in the not-too-distant future, one of those trees is going to fall, and likely both of them together will go. He has already measured the distance from the crowns of the trees to the house and no matter which way they fall the house will be safe—ah, but what a tragedy it will be anyhow. He has pruned them, cabled them, scooped out rot and filled the gaps with cement, but his best hope is that when they go he will not be around to see it, not the mess of their demise nor the eyesore of their absence.

  “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to,” Todd says. Their shoes crunch along the gravel; the house and its burning lights seems to rock back and forth behind them. “But let me tell you about what I’ve been thinking.”

  Paul gestures, as if to say Go ahead.

  “I think you stepped over some line. I think you did something, I don’t know what, but it’s in your eyes. You did something that’s really making you wonder.” Lawson laughs, but Paul can’t tell what the laugh means—is Lawson making a joke or is he uneasy for having said the truth? Sometimes laughter is like sand in your face.

  “I hope this isn’t why you’re moving to Mexico, because you’re really really wrong,” says Paul. He says it with ease.

  “You’re one of the good guys, Paul. God loves you. Whatever you did.”

  Paul shakes his head, as if the matter were too absurd to discuss. But he feels a wave of relief going through him. “My friend,” he says, as if amused, putting his arm around Todd’s shoulders. “You are truly insane. Or really, really drunk.” And after a moment, he adds, “And what if there is no God? Then what?”

  “Then everything is meaningless and everyone just takes whatever they can get.”

  “I think we better get back,” Paul says.

  “I hope I’m not too out of line,” Todd says.

  “I just don’t know where all this is coming from. It’s pretty weird, is all.”

  “Just remember,” Todd says, “getting away with it might be easier than letting yourself get away with it. Whatever you did.”

  “I don’t think you’re drunk,” Paul says. “Maybe high? Some of that ’shroom tea you sometimes sip?” Or have you killed someone, too?

  “And by the way, my old friend,” Todd says, “let’s not forget that if this Y2K stuff turns out to be true, every slate in the world gets wiped clean. The chaos, man, the chaos. There will be so much shit hitting so many fans, no one’s going to know what the hell to do.”

  Inside, from a temporary perch halfway up the stairs, where she sits with a glass of seltzer and a few seedless red grapes, Kate surveys the party and thinks to herself: How can this be happening? As she watches the great human wheel of the party turning slowly in her downstairs rooms, Kate feels her anxiety rising. This is now and will forever be a haunted house. This is a house with a ghost in the attic, or maybe it hovers right this moment above the party, counting down the minutes of the old millennium.

  Kate drinks from her glass of seltzer; the fizz of it vibrates against her lips. There are others here sipping carbonated water; the fifteen or so of them are a party within a party—no matter what happens tonight, they will have their sobriety to keep them warm. Yet everyone else here, too, seems to be on their best behavior and whatever grief they carry in their daily lives has been checked at the door, and now, temporarily freed from lugging about their sacks of woe, they are standing up straight, paragons of posture, and moving with a lightness of step, borne by the helium of New Year’s Eve. If they believe that the world is about to be plunged into chaos at the stroke of midnight, the hundred unexpected guests have done a sterling job of putting a brave face on it. There, for example, is Sam Holland, who has been working for nearly a decade on a history of anti-Semitism, talking with his son Michael, who Kate guesses is pushing thirty and who drifts about the county doing odd jobs, and Michael’s fiancée, Melissa, who is the most elaborately dressed woman here tonight, a second-grade teacher in the public school who has chosen to usher out the millennium in a full-length teal silk and crinoline dress that looks as if it had once belonged to the Countess Anastasia. Melissa feeds a Swedish meatball to her future father-in-law, after which Michael puts his arm possessively around her shoulders. There is Kurt Nelson, the widower playwright, in his maroon felt slippers and paisley smoking jacket, holding court among several attentive young people, and there is the prodigiously versatile young president of Marlowe College with his large head and tiny bow tie, and there is Evangeline with her girlf
riend, both dressed in modified tuxedos, and there is Ruby’s favorite babysitter, pregnant herself now, here with her baby’s father, a jumpy-looking kid with white eyelashes, and here come Annabelle and Bernard, who know few people here and whose expressions are at once removed and inquisitive.

  Kate drops a red grape into her seltzer. It displaces a chevron of bubbles, and she marvels at the world, our little wounded, fragile world with its thousands of physical laws, where even our glasses of carbonated water tremble with life. In this, her religious forties, she has sometimes agonized over why people of advanced intelligence often do not believe there is a supreme being, why it is they, and not the high-school dropouts, who are the ones to insist that logic and all the available proof show that religion is a compendium of rumors and fables and outright bullshit strung together by committees of ancient sun-baked men deprived of all scientific knowledge. Kate has sometimes despaired that the average intelligence in the nation of unbelievers is drastically higher than the intelligence in the devout community; surely a convention of atheists would be able to run intellectual circles around the membership of most churches. Yet if Christ and his message are real, then the dumbbells win and the chrome domes lose. Those in the IQ aristocracy have fallen in love with their own minds, which is a dangerous, and foolish, and possibly insane thing to do, and their vanity over their extra IQ points fills them with hubris, and they believe themselves to have no superiors. Not the geniuses, really, it’s the valedictorians of the second-rate schools, those are the ones who find the idea of a supreme being so ludicrous, the ones who beat their fists against their empty chests and say, Prove it. Prove it. And here is the secret truth about them—it is not God whom they have overcome, not God whom they somehow see through. It’s the people who do believe in God that are the real target of their atheism…

  No one seems to notice Kate. She may as well be a ghost. A memory: somewhere near her eighth birthday, seated just like this on the staircase in gray, fragrant Wilmington, gazing sleepily down as her parents and a few of their friends passed around what they said was a peace pipe. They were all trying to remember the words to a Perry Como song—Catch a falling star/And put it in your pocket/Save it for a rainy day. They were finding their mistakes and memory lapses to be matters of the highest hilarity; Kate experienced it all with a mixture of longing and disdain, the laughter, the coughing, the shouts and corrections, and the staggering about. There was her father, with his crisp white shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal dark, virile forearms, who even several hours and several drinks and now several tokes from the office continued to wear his stethoscope around his neck, the chilly silver circle tucked into a pocket. And there was Mother, who would not permit the words Mommy, or Mummy, or Mumsie, or even Mom, pinching closed the nostrils of her brief, pointed nose and pursing shut her lips, in Jackie Kennedy pink lipstick, trying to keep from expelling the magical smoke. Who else was there that night? There was Mr. Cunningham, with his military buzz cut and clamshell ears, and his wife, Jan, with her heavy calves and harlequin eyeglasses, and Mr. Stevenson, who made you call him Chip, who wore bell-bottoms and T-shirts with sayings on them, and never worked a day in his life, and his wife, Lulu, who had divorced him and was sick with some bone thing and Chip had remarried her out of kindness, according to Kate’s father—or, if Kate’s mother was to be believed, it was insanity, Chip’s way of telling everyone he was a man capable of throwing his life away as if it were a used Kleenex. Kate will never forget the look her father gave her mother when she said those words, the sour, rueful glance of a man taking pleasure from having his worst suspicions confirmed.

  How could she ever have known the sorrows of those six adults? Those six adults capering around and getting stoned on hash; each of them had their own little entry in the encyclopedia of pain. And now her mother, Lulu, and Mr. Cunningham are buried, Chip lives in Thailand and has become a Buddhist, and her father, deaf in one ear, blind in one eye, arthritic, loose-jowled, and cane fat, is on his third wife. How he gets anyone in his bed is a mystery to Kate that even his money cannot quite explain. He has turned into the crybaby of the Western world, sentimental and nostalgic. That caustic walking hard-on of a man is gone; his only existence is in the hell to which Kate has consigned him in her own mind, and it occurs to her tonight that those fires are burning only within her, and she is the only one to feel their vicious heat.

  She sees Paul coming in from the outdoors, his hair askew from the wind, his cheeks flushed with cold. His eyes find her immediately; it is as if he is the only person in the house who knows she is sitting on the steps, looking down at all of them. He gives her a little mock salute and points toward the food table, asking her if she would like him to prepare a plate for her. The little gesture of domestic ease fills her with sadness—one day she will lose him, the thing that has happened, the thing he has done, they will never be free of it, they will never outrun it, it will catch up to him, to them, it will destroy everything, and their life will be as dead as that unnamed, indelible man in the woods.

  Ruby comes to Paul’s side and says something to him with apparent urgency. He points to Kate, and Ruby’s eyes widen with relief. And in the brief interval of time between when Ruby has seen her and Ruby is at her side, Kate feels something that she can only describe as a painless stab of light, neither hot nor cold but bright as the summer sun. Everyone here, all these faces, this roomful of secrets, they are here because they cannot suffer being alone. We need each other. Sam Holland; Richard and Sonya Martinez; the dreadful Drazens; Jeannie Malkiel, monochromatic in beige; her blind thirty-year-old son, Jonathan; the Colliers; the Trehans; Goldie Evans; the effervescent Kufners; Sonny Reed, who is the world’s oldest drunk; arrogant, lonely Kurt Nelson; Evangeline and her partner, Cheryl; the DeMilles; Dodie Pierce; Annabelle; Bernard; Joseph; and, of all people, Ray Pickert (who the hell invited him?). They are huddled together with the darkness surrounding them, because it is New Year’s Eve. The clock ticks with a peculiar force and fury; the passage of time is suddenly bereft of all gaiety.

  “Why are you up here?” Ruby asks, plopping down next to Kate and immediately sticking her finger into Kate’s seltzer, trying to capture an elusive floating grape.

  “Just looking,” Kate says. “Making sure everyone’s having a good time.”

  “It’s the best party of all recorded human history,” Ruby says, and the diction of this is so inflated and unexpected and so theatrical that it startles a groan out of Kate. “It is, I’m not kidding,” Ruby says, and struggles for a moment as Kate puts her arm around her shoulders and pulls her closer. Ruby submits to her mother’s embrace, gratefully: she likes being touched.

  A sudden and inexplicable silence descends upon the party. It is as if everyone who has been talking has come to the end of their thought at exactly the same instant, and everyone who was about to reply has taken an extra moment to breathe.

  “My mother used to say when the room went suddenly quiet, ‘An angel just passed over,’” Kate whispers to Ruby, and the girl lifts her eyes, as if she might really see an emissary moving across the rooms. In the two seconds of quiet, Jackson Browne can be heard. Doctor, my eyes have seen the years…

  And in an instant of ice-clear certainty Kate knows that when midnight strikes and all the computers that are responsible for keeping everyone sane and alive fail or don’t fail, the end result will be basically nothing. We are not being kept alive by algorithms of 1s and 0s, we are not creatures of some cosmic mainframe. Y2K is going to be a bust, a big letdown posing as a huge relief, a sore disappointment that we will agree to be pleased about. All the precautions, the hard drives copied, the larders filled, the flights postponed, the water stored, the personal information photocopied, the bank accounts emptied into floor safes, wall safes, mattresses, the candles and the kerosene, and the firewood, all those apocalyptic speeches from our leaders—it was all a desperate attempt to find some meaning, a predictable narrative. The hour will come and it will pass, and the only
horror of it will be just that—another hour will have passed, and after that another one will, and then another. Y2K will be soon forgotten. The things for which we feverishly prepare aren’t generally the things that actually happen. Our undoing comes waltzing in through another door altogether…

  Kate takes her daughter’s hand; it feels warm and sticky, and Kate has a surge of love go through her as powerful as a wave at high tide. “Come on, baby, let’s join the others.” As they make their way down the steps, her eyes meet Bernard’s. He offers a brief, courteous bow in her direction, and lifts his glass of red wine in a silent toast. To her, to the party, to all of them, to the new year, to life.

  The dirty dishes and empty glasses and the scuffed floors and the flattened pillows and the tilted picture frames and the cherry-scented pipe tobacco smoke and the finger-smudged windowpanes and the crushed cashews and the slight stink from a piece of punk wood in the fireplace, which will not burn and will not go out, and the listing Christmas tree with its shimmering ganglia of tinsel—the entire archaeology of the late twentieth century still occupies the downstairs of the house, while Paul, Kate, and Ruby and Shep sleep upstairs in the twenty-first.

  It is four a.m. on the first day of the new millennium and the computers of the world are working every bit as well as they were the day before. Kate shakes Paul’s shoulder and he reaches for her, unconscious but warm, so warm.

  “You have to get up,” she whispers to him soothingly, and then with considerable urgency when he fails to move. Paul pushes the covers back, stumbles out of bed, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. Unlike the coddled men she has known, Paul knows that sometimes you just do what you are told and there’s no time to ask why. He knows that the little creaking sound may well be telling you the ceiling is about to collapse and the snuffing, huffing noise is not your tent-mate’s heavy breathing but the sound of a brown bear’s hungry approach.