Scott Spencer

by Man in the Woods (v5)

  Soon, Paul and the dog are heading down the long driveway leading to Kate’s house. It is late morning. Kate is in her writing cabin, preparing her next broadcast. Evangeline’s girlfriend’s green Subaru is in front of the workshop, and Evangeline is inside sanding down an expensive ten-foot length of black walnut. The double doors to the workshop are open and as Paul approaches he can hear the hoarse whine of the sander.

  The sun has been radiating down on the tin roof and even with the doors open it’s fiercely hot inside the workshop. It’s too early in the season to run the air conditioner, and the sound of the exhaust fans unnerves Evangeline. She is bent over the walnut plank, working the sander around in small circles. Her hair is plastered to her forehead and the sides of her face, and her white T-shirt is dark at the armpits. She is wearing long, baggy shorts and work boots, the tops of which are covered in sawdust. She turns off the handheld sander, holds it shoulder-high as if it were a pistol, and, after licking the palm of her free hand, strokes the section of board she’s been working on.

  “Should I wait outside?” Paul says.

  “Oh hi,” she says. “You caught me coming on to the wood.”

  Paul finds another sander. He squeezes the trigger and the tool comes to life with a pugnacious roar. It’s weirdly startling: there seems something violent about striding toward another human being while revving up a power tool. Buried beneath all the things he used to think of as his true and essential nature, his nonconfrontational personality, his live-and-let-live character, beneath the steadily accrued rules of self-government, the limits of what he will do and what he will not do, beneath everything familiar and everything assumed, beneath his style and beneath his ideals, beneath it all he may be a beast.

  He notices Evangeline is talking and he turns off the sander, letting it dangle from two fingers.

  “Thank you for hiring me, Paul. I just want to tell you that to me you’re as much an artist as half the guys in galleries.”

  “I’m just a carpenter.”

  “That’s like calling Yves Saint Laurent a tailor.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with being a tailor. I’m a carpenter. Anyhow,” he says, jerking the reins of the conversation, “how come you drove Cheryl’s car to work? Is something wrong with your Honda?”

  “Oh the Honda,” Evangeline says, in the tone you use to discuss some dear but hopeless friend, some ceaselessly backsliding old comrade whom you love despite the many frustrations. “All these old Hondas need new timing belts when they pass a hundred thousand miles, and it needs a water pump.”

  “Well that’s not going to work,” Paul says. “You have to have a car.”

  “I know,” says Evangeline. “But Cheryl’s got two cars right now because her brother moved to Brooklyn and he keeps his Rabbit up here.”

  Evangeline is swaying back and forth as she says this and Paul realizes that her motion mirrors his own, that she is merely following him with her eyes and letting the rest of her come along for the ride.

  “Are you all right?” she asks.

  “I’m fine.”

  He used to say I’m good, until Kate pointed out that saying I’m fine is more correct, and to say that you are good refers to moral rather than physical variables. Now, not only is he not good but he doesn’t feel fine, either. He’s light-headed and though it is hot in the workshop he feels cold.

  “You’re sort of alabaster,” Evangeline says.

  “It was a long winter,” he says.

  “Well,” Evangeline says, “at least I got to use the word alabaster in a sentence.”

  Paul drags a chair from the drafting table, turns it around, and sits. It alarms him to feel the relief of it. Once, he saw his father heaving himself exhaustedly into a chair, taking off his shoes, and rubbing his feet, making little murmurs of pleasure, and the gesture seemed so foul and defeated that it has remained something Paul would never do: he sits with his back straight, his feet firmly on the floor.

  “I’m worried about this car situation,” he says to Evangeline.

  “I actually have a plan,” Evangeline says. Her voice is scratchy and dry; she sounds like a little girl who has stayed up far past her bedtime. “There’s these two dykes up in Lemon Bridge who run an auto repair shop right out of their house? Cheryl is friends with them and I think I can get them to do all the work on my car if I carve them one of those big salad bowls.”

  “The cherry?” Paul asks.

  “Definitely the cherry,” says Evangeline.

  “You could sell one of those in the city for a thousand dollars,” Paul says.

  “I don’t think so,” Evangeline says. “There’s a store on Madison called Maison Extraordinaire and they bought one off me for three hundred and fifty bucks and sold it for thirteen hundred.”

  “That doesn’t seem very fair,” Paul says.

  Evangeline shrugs. “Cheryl and I were going to drive down there and burn the place down, or just fucking stab the guy in the forehead, or something. But what the fuck. It’s how the world works.”

  “You know what,” Paul says, placing his hands on his kneecaps, taking a deep breath. It takes a bit of effort for him to stand. It feels for a moment as if an implacable, invisible hand is holding him down. The workshop, the machines, the tools, the boards, the shelves lined up with various types of stains, the new computer still not out of the box in which it was delivered, the stools, the chairs, the drawings of future projects, the snapshots of past work, the rafters, the windows, the sawdust drifting in the sunlight, it all dims, almost to the point of disappearing. But, to his relief, it all comes back and it’s as if it never happened, this sudden shrinking of consciousness, this rush to the edge of his own demise.

  In its wake, he feels a glowing disorder, as if his sense of the world has for a moment been turned into pure luminescence. And at the shimmering core of this sudden radiance trembles an idea. He walks to the drafting table, dragging the chair behind him, sits, finds paper and pen.

  “I’m writing up an agreement,” Paul tells Evangeline. “I’m going to make you a partner in this company.” He looks over his shoulder so he can see her. “Is that all right with you, Evangeline?”

  She opens her mouth to speak, not really sure what she wants to say. At last, her face reddening, her eyes swimming, she says, “You’re either a saint or you’re crazy.”

  Kate is pointing out the items on the table one by one.

  “The lasagna comes from that new Italian deli—I got it especially for Ruby, but there’s enough for everyone. The stuffed peppers come from Streamside Catering, they’ve got a little take-out counter now. The broccoli and almonds, also from Streamside. The chicken is from the rotisserie place where they have a name that is impossible for me to remember. And the salad, such as it is, I made myself.”

  She points to a bottle of salad dressing. “Except for that, which Paul Newman takes credit for.” Kate hears the defensiveness in her own voice and thinks about adding something to her next broadcast about her need to apologize for serving ready-made food.

  Ruby, slouched in her chair, with her chin on her sternum, stares at a manila folder on her lap, while reaching for the bread plate and taking five slices of baguette, each the shape of a small kidney.

  “What do you have in your lap?” Paul asks Ruby.

  She doesn’t reply, except to point to her mouth, into which she has already placed a piece of bread.

  “Plate please,” says Kate, reaching toward Paul.

  “Not too much,” he says.

  “I know,” says Kate, as neutrally as possible. She gives him a small amount of everything. She has chosen it all with him in mind, as though this is the meal that is going to restore his appetite. “Sweetie?” she says, reaching toward Ruby.

  “There’s a birdy fairy angel on the wall,” Ruby says, pointing to a spot directly behind Kate.

  “There is?” Kate says, turning around to look. But all that is visible is an eleven-by-fourteen pencil drawing of a bow
l filled with eggs, made by a woman in Kate’s AA meeting. “Is it pretend?”

  Ruby shakes her head no, not emphatically but more as if she were keeping matters straight in her own mind. She looks down at the folder in her lap, for a moment, and then looks up at Kate, her little face full of defiance and fear, like a child looking back at her poor mother as the train pulls away from the station and the mother is thinking, Why did you leave me? and the daughter is thinking, Why did you let me go?

  When all the plates are full, Kate bows her head. “Thank you Lord for this time together.” She stops, thinks. There is a vast internal silence. Something she thought was there does not seem to be present after all; it’s like thinking you have heard the voices of loved ones coming from another room, but when you open the door and look around all is emptiness. Maybe Jesus does not want to be talked to right now, and that is fine with Kate.

  Ruby has folded her hands and bowed her head, awaiting her mother’s prayer, but now, in the long silence, she unclasps her fingers and jams her hand past the waistband of her blue jeans. She leans far to one side, putting all her weight on her left buttock while hoisting up the right, which she proceeds to scratch with a single-mindedness that seems more animal than human.

  “Ruby?” Kate says. The child looks up at her with dark, opaque eyes. “Do you feel itchy?”

  “No,” says Ruby.

  “How about this—stop scratching and let’s eat,” says Kate.

  The meal begins. Moments pass and no one is talking, there is just the busy, arrhythmic clatter of silverware, until Kate speaks up. “So Ruby, school.” Ruby looks up from her plate, as if she has just heard the roar of a lion. “Anything interesting?” Kate prompts. “Anything exciting, strange. Delightful? Weird? Anything?”

  “I don’t know,” Ruby says. She puts her eating utensils down, looks pleadingly at her mother. The fingernails on her right hand, the hand with which she had been scratching at herself, are dark.

  “Nothing?” Kate asks. “Eight hours of your life and nothing to report?”

  Ruby clears her throat. “Maybe Jeremiah’s mother came to our class and told us…” She sees Paul looking at her fingernails and she quickly tucks her hands beneath her buttocks, and rocks back and forth on them.

  “Told you what?” Kate asks.

  “I don’t know,” says Ruby. “Everything.” She laughs. The laugh must be nervous, or false, but it sounds uproarious, unhinged. “Birdy Fairy Angel says I need to wash my hands,” Ruby declares, jumping up from her seat. The manila folder falls to the carpet, spilling its contents—a crayon profile of a pert young girl, with a button nose, long eyelashes, and a ponytail, another page with nothing but frantic scribbles, as if it was made by an automaton that had sprung a gear.

  “You can wash your hands in the downstairs bathroom,” Kate calls after her, but Ruby pounds up the stairs, and the next sound is the boom of a slammed door. “Something’s not right there,” Kate says.

  “It’s hard work, being a kid,” Paul says, pushing his food around his plate. Bad emotional weather is setting in. He has lost his appetite, which is particularly disheartening because this was one meal he thought he would actually eat and enjoy.

  “Not happening, huh,” Kate says, gesturing with her chin to the food on Paul’s plate.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s good though.”

  “Yes,” says Kate, “I’m glad the tines of your fork are enjoying it, but I was hoping for a little more.” The unintentional sharpness in her voice is an age-old error she doesn’t wish to remake, and she reaches across the table to touch Paul’s arm. “Do you want me to get your protein drink and vitamins?”

  “No, it’s okay, I already took them.”

  “You took them already? You knew you weren’t going to eat?”

  “No, I thought I was going to eat. I thought for sure.”

  “Then why did you take your protein drink and the vitamins?” Kate asks.

  “Because it was six o’clock, and at six o’clock that’s what I do.”

  Kate shakes her head. “Okay, I know that in the world according to Paul what you just said makes perfect sense, so we’ll leave it at that.” She reaches for his plate. “Before you give it to the dog,” she says.

  He hands his plate over, and it feels like turning in his membership card to the club of normal life.

  “By the way,” Kate says, “I noticed Evangeline leaving this afternoon. She looked quite upset. And I was thinking to myself how strange that is. Because the Evangeline I see, which is, of course, the Evangeline she chooses to show me, is always smiling.”

  Paul says, “I guess I’m so used to her, I don’t even think about things like that. But you know what we should do?” He gestures toward the glazed doors he put into the west wall of the dining room. They are nine feet tall, about sixty-five percent glass, the rest pine, painted white. The doors open up to a bluestone patio and they face in a southwesterly direction; sometimes so much sunlight comes through them that Kate needs to draw the curtains. “We should put transoms over the doors. Right in the space between the tops of the doors and the ceiling molding. That way, when the curtains are closed, light will still come in. And I love transoms. There’s something about a transom.”

  “Which brings us back to Evangeline,” Kate says. “What’s going on there? Is she a tiny bit falling in love with you?”

  “Are you being serious?” Paul asks.

  “I don’t care how gay she is,” Kate says. “Love is love and it tears down walls. You taught me that.”

  “She’s not in love with me. We work together. We like each other.”

  “So what was going on?” Kate asks. “Was she upset about something or was it just my imagination?”

  “I made her a partner in my business,” Paul says.

  “Seriously?” Kate says, more quickly than she would have liked.

  Boom, boom, boom, Ruby is coming down the stairs, as heavy as a conquistador in full armor.

  “Yes, she’s there every day,” Paul says. “And she can’t even afford to fix her car.”

  “Why not give her a raise?” Kate asks. She can feel the falseness of her own smile, the strain of it, its perilous proximity to a grimace.

  “I don’t know,” Paul says. “It didn’t feel like the way to go. And I’ll say this: it felt good. As soon as I said it, I thought you were right.”

  “That doesn’t even make any sense,” Kate says.

  “About God, I mean,” Paul all but whispers. “I felt it, the energy of…of something. It was amazing.”

  Ruby enters the dining room and makes her way to the table; the dishes and silverware tremble at her approach. “Ruby, please,” Kate says. “You just can’t walk like that. It’s abusive.”

  The girl’s face is piebald, flushed here, cadaver-white there, and her eyes twinkle like Christmas lights. The cuffs of her taupe long-sleeved T-shirt are wet, dark. She bumps the pointer finger of her left hand against the pointer finger of her right hand, over and over, and she sits heavily at her place. She sniffs her food and apparently it is all right because she begins to eat.

  “You okay there, Ruby?” Paul asks.

  “I don’t understand why you’d do that,” Kate is saying. “No wonder she looked like that when I saw her after work. She must have been out of her mind with happiness, or something.”

  “Happy is good,” Paul says. “We’re all for happy.”

  “Goddamn it to hell, Paul,” Kate says.

  “Goddamn it to hell, Paul,” adds Ruby, her voice an eerily accurate reproduction of her mother’s.

  “All right, enough,” Kate says to Ruby. “This is serious.”

  “Okay!” Ruby says brightly, “everybody stand in line and flappy fly.”

  Kate makes a gesture of small exasperation. “What does that mean?” she asks, but Ruby mumbles what sounds like sorry, and then concentrates on her food, which is just as well for Kate because she wants to pursue the matter of Evangeline with
Paul.

  “So now you two are partners?” Kate says.

  “She’s there every day,” Paul says. “She does the work, I mean it wouldn’t be happening without her. And she’s really learned a lot. She believes in what we’re doing. So I guess we were partners all along, except we never said it.”

  Kate feels wild with exasperation, and she struggles to keep herself in check. When it comes to verbal jousting, she knows that Paul is not a true match for her—they both know this. For the most part, Kate uses the knowledge of her prowess as a means of restraint, a way to argue with him less frequently and with less force, even though talking things through, even heatedly, even heedlessly, is ultimately soothing to her. The flow of words has a calming effect, just as boxers say that hitting someone leaves them feeling tranquil.

  “You know, Paul,” Kate says, her voice so calm she almost sounds drugged, “it is not the same. If she’s a partner that means you can’t fire her. I’m not saying you should fire her or that you would ever, but it’s a very different relationship. Before, you were the boss and she was the employee. Now you’re equal.”

  “I don’t want to fire anyone,” Paul says. “And I don’t want to be able to fire anyone. It’s inhuman.”

  “It’s inhuman?” Kate asks. Her voice has started to rise but she pulls it back down. “It’s not inhuman, it’s how people live. It’s how people have always lived. It’s how work gets done; it’s how the world works. Someone is the boss, someone is the worker, there’s a chain of command.”