The Hazards of Good Breeding

by Jessica Shattuck

  This place he is looking at actually exists at this moment on this planet. A sign of his deteriorating karma, that this thought should strike him as novel. A sign maybe even that he should go there. What does he have to lose? Wheatgrass-addled e-mails from the animal rights activist he had a free-form relationship with last summer in Mendocino, a free subscription to The New Yorker, five guest passes to 24 Hour Nautilus, courtesy of his father.

  And Caroline. But maybe—the idea washes over him in a burst of hazy, joyful enthusiasm—just possibly, she would want to come with him? He will have to bone up on the particulars, make a case for it, convince her Eliot will be just fine without her. It is a ridiculous idea—he and Caroline climbing around the Himalayas in long robes herding cattle. And she’d have to give up smoking. But, after all, didn’t she say the other night that she wanted to get out of here and go capital S Somewhere?

  15

  BY THE TIME JACK LEAVES George Burt’s office, it is already late afternoon. The whole process has taken longer than he expected, and given him a hassled, slightly dirty feeling. Watching George Burt’s placid, gray face taking in his questions, registering the effort not to look surprised or appalled or whatever must have been his natural instinct to look, has given Jack a greater sense of disgust with himself than any outward gesture of dismay or rebuke the man could possibly have made. Jack walks back through the Common to his car, which is a detour, but he needs the air—he still can’t take a deep breath—and has lost something of his sense of urgency. He has an official letter from George, laying out what Rosita must do if, once the baby is born and it proves to be Jack’s, she would like support from him. The letter makes him feel oddly conspicuous, which makes no sense. There is certainly no one here who looks even remotely interested in his presence—a homeless man stretched out on a bench, a group of frisky young Spanish tourists, a very thin formal-looking young man reading under a tree, and lots of babysitters, black, brown, white, and Asian, pushing strollers and carriages, unwrapping bottles, speaking in low voices.

  An otherworldly calm has come over Jack like that which used to fall on him when he was a young man before important lacrosse games. He feels highly focused in a concentrated, but strangely vacant, way—aware of the muscles moving in his legs, the small tendons in his joints—ankle and knee, the breath entering his lungs and leaving, the swinging of his arms. He walks through the shiny marble lobby of his building, rides the gold-walled elevator to the garage, gets into his car, and navigates his way out to the southeast expressway in this odd, suspended state.

  Without full awareness of how he has arrived here, he is soon enough in Roxbury, on Blue Hill Avenue, this time with the Hancock Building behind him. Past the CHECKS CASHED signs and Caribbean Cultural Center, past the dingy murals and fluttering strings of grubby plastic pennants, and then here is Center Street again. The corner deli is open, neon coursing through its Budweiser sign despite the strong late afternoon sunlight. In front of it there is an old woman talking to two little black girls with great cones of hair sticking up off their heads at impossible angles. At the far end of the street, a group of boys are playing a violent-looking game with a red rubber ball—something that could almost be Bombardment, but not quite, it seems quicker and more complex. All of them are wearing ridiculous baggy trousers and baseball caps backward, shouting in a language Jack can’t be sure is English. It is oddly jarring; their movements, the trajectory of the ball between them, the cadence of their speech and laughter are so familiar, but then at the same time so utterly foreign. This is the world into which the baby—his baby—The pronoun stops his thought completely.

  Jack parks the car and feels for the envelope in his breast pocket. Now that he is here, though, he doesn’t know what he had in mind in terms of how to deliver it. To slip it under the door seems best, but is of course completely implausible. Why didn’t he send George Burt to deliver the letter? He has been imagining dealing with the brother-in-law, but of course it is equally possible he will ring the doorbell and in fact be greeted by Rosita.

  Unlike the other houses on the street, number 37 is absolutely quiet. Despite the freshness of the day, the front windows are closed and behind the shiny picture windowpane on the second floor there is only an opaque rectangle of darkness framed by green- and mustard-colored curtains. He tries to take a deep breath to fill his lungs, but can’t quite. Again this tight asthmatic feeling. And in addition, he feels suddenly—what? Dizzy? Ridiculous. A grown man, dizzy. He has not eaten lunch. So he will sit for a moment. Recover himself. He stares at the space between the curtains in the picture window, which remains as blank and unreadable as a closed eye.

  He is not sure how much time has elapsed when he is startled by a movement at the door to number 37—a tall, unkempt-looking figure comes out onto the front stoop. It feels as if Jack has just woken from a deep sleep, but his eyes are open already. It has been, he realizes, checking his watch, nearly an hour that he has been sitting here in his car.

  The figure jogs down the stoop and looks first toward the boys playing ball and then in Jack’s direction. It is, Jack realizes with a powerful jolt, Rock Coughlin, Jr. Jack stares at him, feeling the blood restore itself to his appendages. He is almost, for a moment, convinced he is dreaming. The boy jogs out into the street and, to Jack’s increasing amazement, directly toward him. Has he been sent out by someone to inquire what Jack is doing? But by whom? And why is he even here in the first place? Jack considers ducking to avoid notice, but then this impulse is quashed by his need to know what the hell the kid is doing. He raises his hand and raps sharply on the car window with the back of his knuckles. It is the first sound he has made since he arrived.

  Rock, who is now at the driver’s-side door of the car parked in front of Jack’s, stops and looks back toward number 37. Jack raps again, more urgently this time, and Rock’s eyes turn and land on him, pause there, wide and astonished, his face paling considerably. He does not look as though he is expecting to see Jack. Come in, Jack beckons without unrolling the window. He leans across to unlock the passenger-side door with an aggressive single-minded grace. This is the flip side of his calm—it makes Jack feel springy and controlled, predatory as a great cat.

  “Mr. Dunlap,” Rock says, sticking his head in the door. He smells of greasy hair and something else, woodsy and vaguely familiar—it hits Jack—marijuana. He registers this as if from a great distance. It is not what is important.

  “Get in,” Jack orders. The open door makes him uneasy.

  Rock complies, sliding into the passenger seat and bringing a puff of warmer, moister air in with him. The temperature of the car, Jack realizes, has gotten very dry and cold since he arrived here.

  “How’s it going?” Rock asks, hazarding a quick, uneasy glance at Jack, who ignores the question.

  “What are you doing here?” Jack asks.

  “Me?” Rock blanches. “Visiting a friend.”

  “In number 37?”

  Rock sends another questioning look over at Jack. “The top floor,” he ventures.

  “Oh,” Jack says. It had not occurred to him the boy could be coming out of one of the other apartments and he is not even sure which one is Rosita’s. And now he has invited him into the car, raised questions about what he himself is doing here. A surge of irritation runs over Jack like a chill. What is he doing here? He should have dropped off the letter and moved on long ago—the street seems to have some slowing, quicksand- like effect on him. He has the sudden urge to hurl something at the impenetrable facade of the house—to break the opaque, reflective window on the second floor and hear the satisfying crackle of smashed glass. Instead, he places his hands before him on the steering wheel—equidistant from one another.

  “Why? Do you—?” the boy ventures after a pause. “Are you looking for Don?”

  Jack stares at the boy. “Don?”

  “Oh, all right—no. I didn’t know, I just thought you were here, you know, and—”

  “Is this�
�—Jack narrows his eyes—“Don Rodriguez?”

  The boy stops fidgeting with the frayed edge of his shorts and looks at Jack with an astonished wide-open expression, which clouds of thought pass over in rapid, transparent succession. “No,” he says finally.

  “Mmm.” Jack ducks his head, looks down at his hands, now on his knees. He has the odd feeling the boy has just come to some conclusion—some awful misunderstanding about him here, in this place, at this time of day.

  “Well,” the boy says. He looks embarrassed. His eyes shift around the car, avoiding Jack’s. And Jack can suddenly see himself clearly in them, sitting here in his Explorer with the engine running, unshaven, loosened tie hanging around his neck, and stubble glinting in the late afternoon sunlight. And he looks all wrong—sleazy, suspicious, like a man who has left his office in the middle of the day to run some desperate, corrupt mission.

  “If it’s all right, I guess I’ll be going,” Rock says uncomfortably. “I’ve got to be—” But Jack isn’t listening. There is a movement in the picture window. At first he thinks he has imagined it, just a flicker in the darkness of the pane, but then it is a figure—he can make out shoulders, a body, crossing, disappearing, and then coming back, much closer to the glass this time. Rosita. He can see her face, full on, for the first time since she lived with him. And she is so lovely, in a red shirt without sleeves, her yellowish-brown skin pale against the darkness, one arm lifted, tugging back the ugly curtain, and then coming to rest protectively under her breasts, across the swell of her stomach. Jack can feel the familiar stirring in his gut. Here is a woman who has lived in his home, cared for his son, and cooked his dinners. A woman who once put out a fire that had sprung up in his kitchen curtains and who helped him uproot the mock orange trees behind the garage with nothing more than a shovel and her bare hands. A woman he has slept with, not once, but four times. A woman he dismissed without so much as an explanation.

  Seeing her upends Jack, like a yank on a stage wire. In a moment she is gone.

  Slowly, gingerly, Jack navigates his way back down onto solid ground. Next to him, this unkempt boy is staring at him expectantly. Jack is aware the car has gone silent, there is nothing but the gentle, rocking wake of words. “All right,” he says. His mouth is completely devoid of saliva.

  “Is everything—Are you okay to drive, Mr. Dunlap? I can give you a lift if you want.”

  “No.” Jack frowns.

  The boy shifts uncomfortably in his seat and another waft of unwashed hair, dust, and the pungent smell of marijuana smoke floats through the car. “Sure?” he asks.

  Jack turns to look at him. He does not have a stupid face. It is possible he is in love with Caroline and she will never love him back. Jack feels suddenly sorry. He would like to explain, to find some way to exonerate himself in the boy’s eyes. “I’m fine,” he says instead, after a pause, enunciating clearly.

  “All right. Take care, Mr. Dunlap.” The boy opens the door and gives Jack something between a wave and a salute.

  Jack watches him climb into the parked car ahead of him, turn the key in the ignition, glance back in the rearview mirror, and for his sake Jack pretends to be fumbling for something in the glove compartment, preparing to drive away. But once the brown Toyota has disappeared around the corner, he turns off the ignition, unrolls the windows. He has a disoriented feeling—as though the orderly drawers and boxes of his mind have been rifled through, their contents dug up and strewn about like the refuse of a robbery.

  He is in front of the house of the woman who came back with him after the snowmobile accident to change her clothes, which were, like his own, completely bloody. They drove back to the house in silence, in a kind of shocked awe, seeing still the boy’s bloody parka and the stake in the stained snow. Eliot had left the night before, for his first visit to his mother’s new home, and the house was empty, ticking with dry heat in the pipes and the occasional groan and shudder of wind against the old boards. And sitting in his car on Center Street, looking up at the dark window, Jack can remember, suddenly—physically, even—coming out of his room with his clean pants still cool against his legs and finding Rosita standing in the hallway, closing her own door behind her. She had turned with a startled expression on her face at his simultaneous appearance there in the dim passage, and there was a moment of awkward, silent proximity. But then she had smiled into this—a small, tenuous, kind smile that seemed more a display of bravery than charm or pleasantry. And Jack was suddenly aware of the smell of lotiony sweetness—and beneath this, the smell of another warm body there in the dim hallway. Her skin was so springy and alive-looking, as if its color made it fitter, less sensitive to the ravages of time or weather than a white person’s. He had taken two steps toward her, almost without thinking, and touched the smooth line of her neck above the collar of her sweater.

  And he can remember, suddenly, the shock of pressing his lips against hers—the strangeness, after so many years, of another mouth—teeth, tongue, and taste, and the feel of her hair pulled back smooth and tight against her skull. And there was the small but amazing feeling of her hand creeping up around his neck, finding the soft skin at the base of his hairline. He had walked the few steps back into her room, one foot after another, one hand lightly steering the base of her spine. He was not drunk, or confused, or irrationally carried away—just precisely, urgently sure. The moment had nothing to do with the sort of hazy delirium in which he has wrapped it up in retrospect. He knew exactly, wanted exactly, what he was doing.

  And because of this, and the other times like it, Rosita is now having his baby. Jack sits forward and the stiff, suddenly irrelevent envelope sticks into his skin through his breast pocket. At the end of the street a fat black woman has emerged on a stoop and is yelling at one of the boys. There is the shriek of a window opening, sticking in its tracks, and from behind him, the bang and shudder of a bus on Blue Hill. Approaching.

  ROCK HAS SMOKED too much weed since he left Don’s and even now, hours later, his nerves feel like the frail white roots that wrap around the edges of a flower pot. Running into Jack Dunlap has startled him—more than startled him, disturbed him, really. What the hell was he doing there? Back at the duplex, Rock has taken a shower, made four cups of slippery elm relaxation tea, and tried to complete the task he left Don’s apartment with the intention of completing: preparing for Tibet.

  But he is too worked up to get anywhere. He has sorted his clothes into piles labeled, in his own mind, “To Tibet,” “To Goodwill,” and “To be decided on,” which is the biggest, because he has no idea if, for instance, he will need flip-flops or polypropylene underwear in the monastery. The urgent excited feeling he had upon leaving Don’s is drifting off like some bright, elusive hot-air balloon. And in its place the image of Jack Dunlap staring out his car window has been burned like a camera flash into the delicate lenses of his eyeballs.

  The man is in trouble. Rock can see that much. Sitting there, on that street, at that time of day can only be a bad sign. It seems, somehow, to lend credence to the idea that he has knocked up the babysitter—that his life has entered a real downward spiral. Sitting in his car with that blank look on his face looking for someone named Rodriguez. A coke dealer, maybe. But this seems so bizarre. Jack Dunlap on coke. He is too old for such antics. Or heroin? The idea paralyzes Rock. Absolutely outlandish, but somehow possible. He had that hollow-eyed, desperate look of a user.

  Rock rolls another joint to calm down. But this only makes matters worse. His brain feels like a light bulb with shaky wiring; his thoughts come in a series of bright flashes and leave him groping for the contours of meaning. He imagines Jack, in the strange spaced-out state he left him in, being stabbed and left on the sidewalk by some thug who wants his Explorer, or having a heart attack in a crack den. For a moment it seems as if, in fact, this is how Rock left him. Which gives him an uncomfortable, responsible feeling.

  Twenty minutes later Rock is on Route 2, making steady forty-mile-an-hour prog
ress toward the Dunlap residence. He has the feeling if he speeds up he will somehow attract too much attention. The objective is to be discreet here. Not alarming. This is the same approach he will take to telling Caroline; he will be discreet, not alarming. Beyond this he has no distinct plan of action.

  By the time he arrives at 23 Memorial Road, the sun has sunk behind the gentle rise of the Ponkatawset Golf Course and the evening is full of an eerie purple twilight that looks like it has risen from the ground itself, pushed up through concrete, packed earth, linoleum, bodies of water. It hovers on the lawn, on the white stones of the driveway, on the roof of the garage. The house itself is the only thing that seems impenetrable to it—a solid black hump, no lights on, set against the glowing lavender sky. Rock slams his car door and walks toward it.

  He mounts the stairs and rings the doorbell. No one is home and even the dogs are eerily quiet. Rock sits down on the steps for a moment to determine his course—should he leave a note, or wait? But mainly he just feels overwhelmingly tired. Behind him, he can feel the presence of the house like another body—warm and alert and somehow hostile. A strip of skin along Rock’s back flinches as if he has just caught sight of it wielding a meat cleaver above his shoulder. He will leave a note, he decides. Just letting Caroline know her father may be involved in something sordid—no, “bad” or “iffy”—this is how he will put it. And—and that he feels in some way he, Rock, can be helpful. This part is less clear to him, but not less true. There is something—he doesn’t know what, but he is sure of it; there is something he can do.

  As usual, the door to the house is open.

  “Hello?” he calls as he steps in, just in case, and gets no answer. The dogs bark wildly from behind the gate in the mudroom. “Shhhhh,” Rock says. “It’s just me, Rock Coughlin,” but this has no effect on them—if anything, it renews their vigor. The trash can is standing in the middle of the room and there is a trail of water on the floor from the refrigerator to the sink. Dishes are strewn across the counter and the tabletop, and in the twilight they glow a vivid, almost animate violet, like debris from another planet. The kitchen looks as if it is on the edge of some metamorphosis—from the center of up-to-date household appliances and domestic industry to the nexus of a significant, all-encompassing chaos.