Scott Spencer

by Man in the Woods (v5)

  For a few moments they are all gathered at the base of the circular drive. The confluence of chrome bumpers reflects the hot summer sun, sending out bursts of blinding light. Sonny, perhaps wondering if his appearance and manner are going to be sufficient to convince Kate of the gravity of his situation, is holding a nearly empty vodka bottle in one hand and in the other hand a bottle on which the seal has not been broken yet. Choosing at the last moment to try to act charming, Sonny addresses his initial remarks to Ruby, who is peering at him over Evangeline’s shoulder. “Well look at you up there,” he says. “You’ve got a chauffeur just like your mom!”

  “Come on in, Sonny,” Kate says. “You can help me make some coffee.” She cups her hand on his elbow to guide him in and with her free hand she relieves him of one of the vodka bottles.

  Paul catches Kate’s glance and relieves Sonny of bottle number two, giving him a pat of greeting and acceptance with his other hand and saying hello to his sister and brother-in-law.

  Annabelle, dressed in pale orange pajamas and a white cotton robe, moves with difficulty over the pea stone driveway and watches her slippered feet, as if they might suddenly do something rash. Bernard keeps his hands just beyond the outlines of her body, hovering and practically vibrating, as if creating a force field of support for her.

  “Oh, Annabelle,” Evangeline says, “it’s so great you’re already out.”

  “Yeah, thanks. I’m not so sure this was the best idea in the world.”

  As she leads Sonny into the kitchen, Kate hears Evangeline saying, “No, no, it’s always better to move around if you can,” and Kate wonders on what medical authority a carpenter’s apprentice makes this statement.

  Paul turns to watch Kate bringing Sonny into the house, and seeing her helping someone is compelling, almost erotic. This is the woman who loves him. This is the woman who has opened her home to him, given her body to him, shared her child, her money, her mind. She is the person whom Sonny seeks in his desperation, the woman whom people wait in line to see, buying her books and listening to her show on the radio—how could this creature, through whom people find their way to goodness and God, look at him and say: let’s eat, let’s talk, let’s make love, let’s make a life together?

  That this would happen to him is not a miracle like the parting of the waters or the raising of Lazarus, it is a sort of slow-motion miracle, an incremental, daily wonder, full of sleeping and silence and not even realizing your own good fortune. From November on Paul experienced Kate’s love with amazement and gratitude—had he ever given anyone a better reason to turn away from him? Yet just as there are moments when he forgets he has taken a life, there are moments when he is no more grateful for Kate than he is for his own breathing. But she has seen the darkness and she not only decided not to turn away but she has followed him into it, and now the darkness belongs to both of them, and they belong to it.

  Kate opens the door to the kitchen, dislodging the sun’s reflection, and then she is gone, the door is shut, the sun returns in its bluish pool of old glass, and with a lurch Paul realizes they were not able to really talk about First Thing Sunday Morning. What had happened? What had he said? The day and all that needed to be said is being hijacked by all these people.

  “I don’t want any coffee,” Sonny is saying to Kate.

  “You have to have coffee,” she says. “It’ll make you feel better.”

  “I don’t want to feel better.”

  Kate is at the sink. She lets the water pound into the teakettle, in whose silvery curvature her face swells. She puts the kettle on the burner grate, turns on the gas, and the flame blooms yellow and blue.

  “Listen, Sonny. I didn’t invite you here for a pity party. I got you off the road because you blew it and you were a danger to others out there.”

  “I was being careful.”

  “Not really. You’re lucky nothing happened. You could have killed someone.”

  “I want to kill myself.”

  “Really? Maybe that’s what you should do. Not putting other people’s lives in jeopardy. Do you have any idea what it would be like to take a life, to actually kill another human being? You guys…” Her voice trails off as she takes a seat at the table, directly across from Sonny.

  “I’m not like other guys,” he says.

  “Really? Are you sure?” She hears Paul’s voice in the other room, but she can’t make out what he’s saying. We can’t always protect you? We can always connect you? Detect you? Inspect you? And then there comes Annabelle’s voice, nearly as slurred as Sonny’s—Vicodin, surely, but who knows what else is going on? the brain is such a hothouse flower and hers has been bounced around—making grateful-sounding murmurs.

  “All it takes is one second, Sonny,” Kate says. “Someone’s injured, killed. Lives are ruined.”

  “I drove here,” he says, jabbing his finger against the table. “This is where I wanted to be.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “Yeah, I sure do.” His voice trembles and to compensate for this he draws himself up, looks at her defiantly, almost glaring. “Because this is where you are. And I just fucking love you, Kate.”

  She reaches across the table and gently touches his wrist with her fingertip and then withdraws her hand. “Sonny, you are so in love with Chantal, there’s not really room in your heart for somebody else. Remember? How she massages your back when you come home from work? How she doesn’t let you drive when you go out together? Chantal! Anyhow that’s not why you came here. That may be what you’re telling yourself, but it’s really not the reason. You came here because you knew I was going to be really mad at you for drinking.”

  “You’re the most special person I’ve ever known,” Sonny says miserably. He forces himself to keep his eyes on her.

  “Oh please, will you stop this bullshit. You’re going to make up this entire saga about the things we do for love, but it’s really about the things we do for alcohol. It’s like a demon, Sonny, and it’s furious with you for turning your back on it. It will do anything and say anything to get you to put it inside of you. How many days do you have?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s figure it out. I remember it was winter when you came to your first meeting. Right?”

  “You had a cold,” Sonny says. “You were holding your coffee cup with both hands and the tip of your nose was red.”

  “Shut the fuck up. Okay? And help me figure this out. What month was it?”

  “February.”

  “That’s right. I remember. February what?”

  “February 15.”

  “So you remember. That’s interesting.” Kate pauses, thinks. “That’s the day after Valentine’s Day.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So let me ask you something. This is just a shot in the dark—but was deciding to get sober your Valentine’s present to Chantal?” She doesn’t wait for Sonny’s reply; there’s little doubt in her mind that she’s right. “And now you’ve decided to take it back? Is that what’s happening?”

  “I’m not taking anything back. I just had a drink.”

  “You’ve got about six months in, Sonny. That’s a tough time for all of us. I really struggled around this time, too. It’s like the first few months it’s such a novelty being sober and everything seems so bright and hopeful, and it’s just life, day after day, ups and downs, and then a little voice starts to tell you Well, we’ve accomplished that, we’ve proven we’re not alcoholic, because you can’t be alcoholic and not drink for six months, so now that that’s been put to rest let’s celebrate with a drink. Right?”

  Sonny shrugs.

  “I know I’m right. Look, Sonny, we all struggle, day by day.” The teakettle begins to whistle, first a low note and as the water’s turmoil increases the whistle winds toward a shriek. “See?” Kate says, getting up. “Even the teakettle agrees with me.”

  “I drank because I wanted to see you,” Sonny says, rather loudly, even though Kate has only walked to
the stove. She extinguishes the flame and the kettle swallows its cry.

  “No, Sonny. It’s just not true. You wanted to see me because you drank.” She pulls a couple of cups out of the cupboard and puts a plastic cone over the coffeepot, and, advancing on all fronts, she puts enough coffee in the paper filter to make the coffee very, very strong: what reason cannot do, caffeine may well accomplish.

  “I feel sick,” he says.

  “Good, the less pleasure the better.”

  “Yeah, I guess. It’s my higher power making me nauseous.”

  “Maybe. Or it could be the vodka.”

  He looks at her quizzically.

  “Look, Sonny, what the fuck do I know? I’m out there beating the drum for Jesus but I don’t know anything you don’t know. Higher power.” She says the words as if they were pixie dust. “Maybe we’re really just here on our own, like all the other animals, and maybe there’s no one looking down and no one ordering events in any way, and the universe isn’t keeping score, and there’s no karma and no balance and good deeds aren’t rewarded and the wicked aren’t punished—it doesn’t matter. We still can’t drink.”

  The coffee is made. Kate remembers that Sonny likes his with no sugar but a lot of milk and as she goes to the refrigerator this knowledge of what this man likes and doesn’t like gives her a strange, peaceful feeling of happiness.

  “I can’t believe you remembered all that stuff about Chantal,” Sonny says, taking the cup from her.

  “It’s my job. I was going to ask you if I could use it sometime.”

  “I think she’s got Lyme disease. She’s achy and tired. You know she’s always in the garden and at night the deer come to feed there, too. There’s a lot of Lyme around.”

  “So I hear,” Kate says.

  Sonny takes a long drink of coffee, and then with exaggerated caution sets the cup down. “I better go,” he says.

  “You’re still pretty hammered, Sonny.”

  “I’m mostly just tired.”

  “Why not call home? Tell Chantal where you are and take a little nap. When was your last drink?”

  “Top of your driveway.”

  Kate laughs, surprising them both. “Okay. Well maybe a big nap.”

  “I thought maybe we could pray together.”

  His eyes, once drowning in vodka-infused anguish, take on a sudden keenness, and it seems to Kate that he has an instinct that something has changed in her.

  “Sonny, I’m sorry. I can’t help you there. Let’s just find you a place to crash for a couple of hours. You want me to call Chantal for you?”

  “I better do it. She’s not going to want to hear your voice.”

  “Oh no.”

  “I had to tell her.”

  “Oh Sonny. That was really not nice.”

  Sonny lifts his chin, purses his lips, like a captain deciding to go down with his ship, though in his case the ship is someone else’s heartbreak and actually he is not really on board.

  In the front of the house, Paul sits with his sister and Bernard, listening, with his hands folded between his knees and his head down. Bernard is telling him about what the INS seems to be focusing on in their investigation.

  “They are now saying Cessez-Feu was a meeting place for Phalangists,” Bernard says, his normally careful, tranquil voice now curdled with contempt.

  “What is Cessez-Feu again?” Paul asks.

  “My club in Beirut.”

  “It means cease-fire,” Annabelle says, as if that alone should exonerate her husband.

  “And what’s a Phalangist?” Paul asks. “I’m sorry, but I’m just a simple carpenter.”

  “They’re a Christian party in Lebanon, with its share of bad elements,” Bernard says. “I had nothing to do with them. They call themselves Social Democrats, they call themselves Kataeb, in the end they stay true to their origins, which is with the fascists of Spain and Italy. The man who brought these ideas to Lebanon was Pierre Gemayel, who was a family friend, though not a close one, and now that’s being used against me.”

  “They were all Maronites,” says Annabelle. “So of course they knew each other. All the well-off Christian families knew each other. It’s so ridiculous. Listen, Paul. I don’t know what to tell you. They’re talking about kicking Bernard out of the country.”

  “I don’t excuse the behavior of the Phalangists,” Bernard says. The sun pours through the windows behind him and the thick old glass bends the light so that it touches the back of Bernard’s head pinkishly and pale greenishly. He sits next to Annabelle and he pats her hand with the steadiness of a metronome as he speaks. “They committed unforgivable atrocities in the name of the Blessed Virgin. During the Civil War they were very bad.”

  “Wow, religious fanatics doing bad things,” Annabelle says. “Stop the presses.”

  “But why is the government bothering you right now?”

  “We don’t know,” says Bernard. “It seems to be coming out of nowhere.”

  “Bernard,” Annabelle says, giving his name a cautionary curl.

  “Well perhaps you would prefer to make the explanations,” Bernard says.

  “His wife,” Annabelle says. “We think she contacted someone at State or some other agency. The Beauty Queen’s in and out of the U.S. all the time.”

  “You must not call her that,” Bernard says.

  “Wait a second,” Paul says. “You’re Bernard’s wife.”

  Annabelle waggles her hand back and forth. “It seems Bernard forgot to get divorced from his first wife, the well-named Reem. But, yes, I am his wife and yes we did get married—but now there’s a question of its validity. So we’re fucked.”

  “I have not seen Reem for thirteen years,” Bernard says. “That we are still married is a fantasia.”

  Paul has not noticed before how delicate Bernard is—or perhaps fear has shrunk him in some way. His bright yellow short-sleeved shirt is three sizes too big; when he shrugs his shoulders they seem no larger than tennis balls. He wears white linen slacks and gray slippers without socks, revealing slender ankles.

  “The point is what are we going to do about it?” Annabelle says. “We need a lawyer.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” says Paul.

  “Bernard has been given the name of a very good immigration attorney,” Annabelle says. “Most of the people practicing immigration law are just a bunch of kids or old lefties. But this guy—his name is Hodding Wainwright—has had years of State Department experience and he’s supposed to know everyone you need to know to get this horrible mess straightened out.”

  “It’s strange how the law seems to be completely asleep,” Paul says, “and then suddenly one day it just opens its eyes and grabs you.”

  “It was not my intention to be here under false pretenses,” Bernard says. “Now they are going to be making a picture of me as a religious extremist, when all I am is a simple man who owned a bar in a troubled city. How was I to conduct myself? To refuse service to my Maronite clients? At Cessez-Feu when you walked in the door you were welcome.”

  “They’re going to come after me at the post office, too, I can guarantee you,” Annabelle says. “A federal employee implicated in a green card marriage? That will really be something.”

  “So this lawyer,” Paul says. He clears his throat and the sound of it rouses Shep, who has been relaxing on the cool, roast beef–colored bricks in front of the hearth. The dog picks himself up rather carefully and hobbles over to Paul and collapses onto the floor again with a long, low groan.

  “Yes,” Annabelle says. “He can help. At least we think he can.”

  “Is he expensive?” Paul asks, because in this instant he has realized that is why Annabelle and Bernard are here: they need to borrow money.

  “Very,” says Annabelle. “We might find a lawyer to do it out of the goodness of his heart, but it won’t be Hodding Wainwright.”

  “The dog is looking at me with unusual interest,” Bernard says.

  “I think he knows
your family ate someone from his family,” Annabelle says.

  “We did nothing of the kind. It was discussed and rejected.”

  “I can pony up,” Paul says. “I want you two to stay.”

  “Oh Paul,” Annabelle says. “I love you, I really do.” She stops, considers what she has said, and decides to amend it. “Not for the money, but I just do. I always have.”

  “How much do you need?” Paul asks.

  “We’re not sure,” Annabelle says. “Maybe ten thousand dollars. For the retainer. We have some of it, but frankly our savings are depleted. How much can you spare?”

  “I can spare whatever I have,” Paul says. He feels a rush of joy and it is so alive and so energizing that it is all he can do to remain seated and not rush upstairs and bring down the two shoe boxes in the back of his clothes closet, both of which are filled with fifty-and hundred-dollar bills. He remembers counting the cash before closing the boxes; there was three thousand dollars in each box, rubber-banded and then covered with pigeon-pink-and-gray slate roofing tiles rescued from a demolished Lutheran church, not to conceal the money but merely to keep it flat.

  Sunday continues to be a day of unexpected visitors. Cheryl arrives to have words with Evangeline, and ends up staying, playing with Ruby while Evangeline runs the lathe. The painter Hunter DeMille, whose lighthouse Paul has been working on, arrives in his Aston-Martin spontaneously stopping by after a visit to the Sunday farmer’s market in Leyden, though the later he stays the more clear it becomes he has not completely given up on the idea of buying Shep and presenting the dog to his seven-year-old son, Cooper. The last time DeMille attempted to buy Shep off of Paul he had begun by offering five hundred dollars and finally worked himself up to the incomprehensible sum of ten thousand, and the coincidence of that being what Bernard’s lawyer needs drones like a honey-drunk bee around and around Paul’s mind as DeMille wanders nonchalantly through Paul’s workshop.

  Hunter is unaware that Evangeline has not said one word to him, nor does the tall, brooding painter notice her scornful glances. After having spent years admiring his work and studying him in her art history classes at the college, she has not forgiven him for disillusioning her with his presumptuous behavior regarding Paul’s dog, though Cheryl seems not to have heard anything about this little skirmish of wills and, no stranger to art history herself, cannot take her eyes off of DeMille. Shep is hobbling along with them but barely lifting his head, not even when Ruby tempts him with little pieces of cookie, which she has brought out to the workshop despite the rule not to. Paul is showing DeMille some long curls of charcoal-gray bark stripped from a plum-cherry tree, bark which Paul plans to dry, lacquer, and cut into small squares to use as inlay, which he will work into the edge of a countertop, along with the greenish nubby bark of a possum wood. Suddenly, DeMille whirls on Evangeline and looks frankly at her, in an openly appraising way, up and down, his eyes resting on this feature or that. “I’d like to paint you,” he announces. “I’m doing a series called ‘Ten Triptychs in a Semiclassical Mode,’ and I want you in them.”