Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll

by Paul Monette

  The problem was this: Mrs. Carroll, who persisted all year in predicting that this was to be her final summer, had been working on a will with Mr. Farley for several weeks. She had never revealed a southern passion for testaments before. She had lived for years following Mr. Carroll's lead, dividing her assets equally between John and Cicely and little Tony. She was an indifferent mother who developed a working disdain for the children only in the last years. But there were no King Lear scenes to speak of, no threats of disinheritance and no petulant bequests. They were all rich already, and Mrs. Carroll had come to understand they would bulldoze her land and make subdivisions of it before she was quite cold. So she took the land away. The new will turned the estate over to the public, subject to a hundred controls. And a group of trustees that the will created was empowered to tenant the house with high-minded sorts, the Audubon Society, say, or the Sierra Club. One catch. She hadn't signed it yet.

  Mr. Farley was appointed to arrive before the middle of July, just as the sun was beginning to warm the waters off Block Island, where he would soon undergo his summer vacation—taking a second sweet sherry before dinner and frying his fish in a pan. Mr. Farley, a conservationist in all things, had to applaud Mrs. Carroll's impulse to keep the land wild. But he was troubled by her contention that her children were neither as faithful nor as pure of heart as a single tree seen from her bedroom window, though she thought them a good deal more witless. Family conservation was Mr. Farley's business. Between the two, he was more concerned about the waste of Tony Carroll than he was about the elm and chestnut groves a buyer might uproot. Mrs. Carroll had expected a fight from Mr. Farley, a plea to reconsider. But she planned to wield her pen like a sword and have done with it. Mr. Farley, she knew, was a man who lived by saying he had done what he could.

  Apparently, Phidias thought it would be simple. He and David finished burying Mrs. Carroll in the late afternoon, and he didn't even pause at the grave when it was done. They trekked back up into the woods. Phidias let David lead the donkey on ahead, and for a while he followed a few paces behind, his head bent. But he caught up with David before they came in sight of the house again. When they were home, sitting over a drink in the library, David was made to understand that the issue of the will had become a crisis. They had very little time to see what they could do. How ingenuously he said it I don't know, but Phidias said that Madeleine would have to do nothing more than impersonate Mrs. Carroll for an hour or two. Mrs. Carroll had been notoriously moody with Mr. Farley, so Phidias figured that the tone could be sullen and the script limited. What they needed was a convincingly alive Beth Carroll, propped up with pillows and of impeccably sound mind, and a round of signatures for all of Mr. Farley's dotted lines.

  David had to think about it. That was all right, Phidias said. They would talk about it again on Friday. Madeleine would not even be in Boston until then, and Phidias had work to do meanwhile in the milk business. Tactically, that is the most clever thing Phidias did, to leave David alone for three days. When David said he had to think about something, he meant that he needed some psychic space in which he could stop thinking altogether. As soon as Phidias left, David repaired to the tower, rolled half a dozen joints, and spent the next several hours watching the sun go down, mooning like a princess in a fairy tale. He dragged out of bed at noon on Wednesday and took two aspirins and a Valium on his way to the shower, washing them down with an Alka Seltzer. He ate standing in front of the open refrigerator. In the library, he curled up and read National Geographic, cover to cover. When he went out in the afternoon, he found the gardener sleeping under the pear tree in the field behind the house. They had sex there. Not one word passed between them.

  "When I came here," David said to me, "I stopped being anxious for the first time since I left Miami. This house was all I needed. It was as if I was getting the house ready to be really lived in again. Mrs. Carroll had pulled back into her bedroom. The rest of the place didn't exist anymore until I came. Then it became my project. But all this week, I don't know, I couldn't seem to make contact with the house. I dropped things. I broke the table next to my bed. You know?"

  David lay stretched out on his back, his arms crossed over his face as he rambled on. His shirt had ridden up out of his shorts, and some of his bare stomach was exposed, the navel and the line of hair reaching from it down into his groin. I had let go of my knees and sat next to him more loosely. He and Phidias were defrauding everyone but me, I thought. That left me to take care of them, I suppose. No, I said to myself, you leave it alone. People have to take care of themselves. Anywhere else, I could have made that injunction stick. But I knew that belly better than my own, so all my cautions about people and what they ought to do rolled off me like water. People don't have to do anything, I thought. That they do do anything instead of following rules is why we are here, David and I. There weren't going to be any rules, I knew, as long as we stayed within the borders of Mrs. Carroll's curious country, protected as it was from the world by a line of cows and the lull of pasture. It would all depend on how long we stayed.

  "I guess so," I said. "The house was practically yours for over a month. Then suddenly Phidias asks you to make decisions, as if it really were yours, and you fall apart. You feel like you've run up a bill in a fancy hotel, and you can't pay it."

  He uncovered his eyes and looked at me.

  "It's the way I used to fall in love."

  "Oh? Tell me how." I knew already, but he needed the chance to show me what he could do with the past.

  "After I left you, I used to fall in love every couple of weeks. I'd meet someone in a bar, and they'd be the love of my life the next morning. No one liked it. And whenever anyone stuck around and tried to love me back, I ran away."

  "It's called being gay," I said.

  "Is it what you do?"

  "No. I fall in love every couple of decades. And I don't run away."

  "Like I did from you," he said, a little more impatient than before. "Is everything we say going to end up punishing me for leaving you?"

  "Not everything. But if I were you and I wanted to avoid talking about what happened to us, I wouldn't bring up loving and running away at all. I'd talk about the goddam weather first."

  "But Rick, I'm trying to tell you that I know some things about myself now."

  "Okay." Very, very neutral. Hostile, really.

  "Please don't treat me like the enemy," he said. He leaned up on one elbow and put his other hand on my forearm and squeezed it. I had had my share of that kind of squeezing that afternoon and was beginning to find it patronizing.

  "All right," I said. A wind had come up, and a bank of clouds. The blue of the sea was a shade harder. It would be gray before long.

  "Tell me about Madeleine Cosquer," he said.

  "You talked at lunch as if you were writing the biography. We'll change the subject if you want, but you know more about her than I do."

  "I mean how do you know her?"

  "I met her in France. When I was twenty-eight."

  During this moment we changed positions. I mean that I was lying with my hands behind my head, and David was sitting cross-legged next to me, his elbow propped on his knee. "Tell me about it," he was going to say. Then, for the first time, I would be able to do my one number that didn't have anything to do with him or any other man. I thought so well of my meeting with Madeleine and had gone over it so often in my mind that I'm sure I could have recited it in my sleep. Ever since, in fact, the details have clustered this way and that and then floated up in my dreams. But I had never told it as a story, and now I had the ideal audience. Madeleine, who reminisced with me now and then about the beginning of our friendship, thought my version of it unusually valentined and soft-headed, at least for me. David was going to love it.

  "Tell me about it."

  "I spent that summer in the south of France. I was living on a boat with a thin little man who didn't want anything from me except to make his thin little friends jealous. I used t
o lie around naked on the deck and read books on self-improvement. Yoga and vitamins and foot massage. Everyone sighed a lot at me."

  "You sound like me."

  "Do I? But you keep doing it, David. I'd rather work the toilets in the Boston Public Library than lie in the sun anymore. I'm all cured."

  "I know. You're a mystic now. Get to the part about Madeleine."

  We were being a little whorish with each other now. It was the way we had always played when we had a good time, and it had its roots at the very beginning, on the Georgia-to-Boston run in the Chevy. We would talk like hookers and tease each other. It made us feel very much alike.

  "Well," I said, "you get to a day at the end of August when the sun is just too damned low in the sky. You're as tan as you're going to get anyway. So they took me ashore in the launch, and I headed inland. I took a train as far as Burgundy, and then I hitched rides through the wine country. A trucker picked me up one morning in Beaune, and since he didn't have to get to Dijon until the afternoon, we stopped at the vineyards along the way and drank their samples. When he let me off on the road north of Dijon, I was cross-eyed. Wine gives me a headache."

  "Do you have a headache now?" he asked, brushing the back of his hand across my forehead.

  "I'm on the downhill side of it."

  "Good." With a little throb in his voice. It deepened when he made love, getting husky and close.

  "So I walked up into this hill town and took a room in the little hotel. I had a view of the Romanesque church and the clay-roofed houses, but I drew the draperies and slept all afternoon. When I came down to the terrace for dinner, Madeleine was the only other person eating. They sat me down as far away from her as they could, but I saw who she was. She was wearing a white linen suit and a man's straw hat."

  "What year?"

  "Nineteen fifty-eight. I told you, I was twenty-eight."

  "No Passport. MGM. She was fifty."

  "Fifty-six. She had finished that piece of shit in the spring. So she said to me, 'Come on over to my table. I have the view.' So I did."

  "What did you talk about?"

  "I don't remember. The town, I think. The hotel was supposed to close for the month of August, and they were keeping it open just for her. For the accidental tourist too, but it was the sort of hotel whose clientele would know it closed in August. There must have been six or eight people working there. The whole kitchen was kept open, just to cook for her."

  "I like that about her," he said, grinning. "She always does what she wants."

  What he was assuming about her was the myth of luxury. She was wildly rich, he was thinking, so rich she could keep a whole hotel open on a whim. He was missing the whole point of the story, though of course it is partly Madeleine's doing that there is a myth at all. Money, her clothes always say, is no object. But I remember falling in love with Madeleine that summer because she knew she was broke again and not getting any younger, and still she was hoping and making plans. She had settled down in this picture-book country inn to regather her forces and plot her next campaign. In the afternoon, she sat at the same table on the terrace drinking Perrier, writing letters to her agent. "I know more about the business than he does," she would say to me. "I have to give him ideas." You could have called it sad, like an old matinee idol fishing for a cameo. You could have almost called it a bit of Sunset Boulevard. But Madeleine was the beloved queen of a medieval town that summer, and she glided through it as fittingly, as much suspended in time, as the lady of the manor in a thousand-flowers tapestry. And in the course of those letters, she also came up with the idea of a nightclub act and thus began her second career. Within a year she was an international event again, the cabaret star in the sequined gowns. So it wasn't sad at all really. But it wasn't what David thought either, champagne and sturgeon roe and five-dollar tips. You can't confuse the thirties with the fifties.

  "You don't understand, David. This was her hometown. To these people she was like Joan of Arc or something. She came home to rest, and they took care of her."

  "I thought she came from Paris."

  "That's Piaf. Madeleine is the other one."

  "You're being snotty."

  "I know. I just want to make sure you like her for the right reasons. But I shouldn't do it. She can take care of herself."

  "Look," he said, pointing up at the house. I came up on one elbow to see, and for the first time saw the beauty of it. It fronted the sea in several moods, its porch open to the beach and its tower reaching up to look out the whole coast. It had been built a hundred years ago, when people took the sea air without much leaving the house, and it was as vast as the industry that ran a Victorian family. A music room and a sewing room, a central hall large enough to exhibit machinery, and a reception room as big as a parlor, just for callers. Rooms with no purpose were part of the given, like the battery of servants and the reasoning that reasoned that the family was to come here only from the Fourth of July until Labor Day. And yet, for all that, it looked like the opposite of a place to live; there was something poignant about it, something as quiet and washed clean as a ship in full sail. It was shingled with a million shingles, gray and beige and streaked, and was at last the color of the sand or the scorched, late-summer grass. Its trim was the dark green of the forest, a mile of it in strips and cornices, shutters and stairs. A doll's idea of a house.

  "You'd recognize her a mile away, wouldn't you?" David said. As he said it, I finally saw what I was meant to see. Madeleine and Phidias came into focus. They were talking together on the high terrace that was set into the roof at the opposite end of the house from the tower. It seemed like an architectural afterthought, this airy perch, the nineteenth-century version of the spare and bony widow's walks that topped the captains' houses in the old harbors. It was out of place here because no one would have gone to sea out of this balloon-waisted banker's house. And no one would have gone up for a Gothic hour of scanning the sea's far edge for a sail. But David was right. Though the figure was tiny from where we sat above the beach, it was clearly Madeleine Cosquer. You knew it from the hands on the hips and the throwing back of the head as she paced on the battlements. Phidias sat on the railing, his back to us, in much the same way as he had sat on the porch railing three floors below when he joined us after lunch. Madeleine was doing the talking, and she looked mad.

  I turned back to David. "I don't think your plan is going over very big," I said.

  "It isn't my plan."

  "What is your plan?"

  He bent down to kiss me. I turned my head away into the grass, but he kissed me anyway, patting his lips on my temple, moving down my face until he nuzzled the tight cords in my neck and stroked them with his tongue. Very close to my ear, I heard him say in a voice so low I couldn't catch the tone, "I don't have one, Rick." And as my face came away from the grass and I began to hold him, I believed that this was as much of the truth as he knew. I held his head close with one hand and gripped his shoulders with the other. We held still while I gave up. Those who have no plans are so unlike those who plot. I am a plotter, and I know. A plan is wrong-headed to them because it seems untrue to the life of the present, which for them just unfolds and unfolds. For me, a plan is at least something for nothing to go according to. What are we going to do now? I thought. Of course I knew that what we were going to do right now was make love, one way or another, but I couldn't imagine what we were going to do about it. How do you get out of it alive? I wanted to know, because I hadn't the last time.

  We were on our sides, facing each other. I felt his body all along me, but I couldn't answer it or move against it yet. I just clung there. We kissed deeply, though, drinking each other in. The taste of his mouth was so familiar and so undiminished by the years that I kissed him with a gasp and a sob fighting in my throat. I know I think too much. I always have. But it hovered in my head that we were very, very old right now, and we held each other lovingly, but the passion and sex were something we had left behind in the past. We seemed to
be recalling something sweet and very distant. It did not make me unhappy that it had come to this.

  "Rick," he said, breathing the words into my mouth, "why don't we go up to the tower?"

  What did I know about the tower?

  "Is that where you keep your lovers captive?" I said lightly. "Your life is like a folktale, David."

  "Don't say that," he said, his face going grave, an ache in his eyes. "I want us to go to bed, and I want it to be real. I don't have any fantasies anymore. I promise. Just make love to me."

  Perhaps because I had lived the last minute in my head, I wasn't aware until then that his cock had stiffened against me and rode between us, pulsing against my belly. I pulled away a bit, far enough so that I couldn't feel it any longer.

  "David, I can't. I don't go to bed with the people I meet. That's not what I do now."

  "I don't understand." And he didn't, of course. Beds are David's life raft. They are his ballast. He can sleep until noon if he wants, and he props himself up on pillows to read in the late afternoon. If there is a telephone on the bedside table as well, he is fixed for the day.

  "I've gotten sex down to a science," I said, lamely trying to be light again. "I suck people off in the baths, and I jerk them off at dirty movies. When I go to the library, I don't bother to take my library card. You don't need it in the john."

  "If you don't want to go to bed with me, why am I in your arms again?"

  "Because I love you. And I wanted to make love a little. But this is far enough." He stared at me as if he didn't believe a word. "That's the plan anyway," I said, reaching for the joke.

  "I know what it is," he said. "You're afraid you can't get it up." I took in a breath to tell him no, and he put his hand across my mouth. "No, darling, listen. I'm not trying to test you. You don't have to fuck me." Oh stop, I thought, stop with the "darling." Don't call me things. "I told you, I know some things about myself now. Either way is all right with me. Let me fuck you."