Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll

by Paul Monette

  I can't. There is more than one way, I see, of being forty-five. The usual fear of starting to die has long begun. The fear at forty that nothing would change between there and the grave has given place to the darker, insomniac fear that change is all there is and you can't stop it. You have found a new way of being alone, and the trick is that you can't talk about it, even with those who have crossed the line with you. Everyone wants to forget it, so leave them alone. It is one of the things that sells stiff drinks in a gay bar. But you see that you are forty-five in this way too, when the young outsex you. I come from a time when you fucked or you got fucked, you didn't do both. But the boys I meet go back and forth. A bullet of amyl nitrate swings from a chain around their necks, and nothing the flesh is weak enough to want appalls them. I envy them, I know, but it doesn't seem fair. Being gay, you are unmanned to begin with as you shy away from the brute straight world and the one thing men are. You finally succeed in believing that a man can be this and not just that. And see, you come to find out that you haven't gotten it quite right. Some people's houses are all doors.

  "I can't."

  "You'll see. Come on up to the tower. From my bed you can see everything." He sprang up and stood above me smiling, humming with energy. "Don't worry. You're going to like it here."

  "In a day or two I hope to have forgotten that it ever existed."

  "No, you don't. Come on."

  "David," I said, "what do you want from me?" It's my own fault. I lay there and let him caper around me, and my voice came out full of melancholy humor. I should have shouted and shaken him and pushed him off the dune. I was mad enough. He had decided I was feeling what he wanted me to feel, and he steamrollered right over me. And yet he was so unencumbered by time that I held it in, just so that I could watch him. He was electric, and now he was laughing at me.

  "Nothing," he said, grinning and playful. "I don't know what this means. Why don't we figure that out later? You can give a sermon on it. Up there," he said, pointing again to the roof terrace. Instinctively I followed the thrust of his arm again and saw that Phidias was alone there now. He leaned on his elbows on the balustrade, looking out to sea. "You can tell it to the tide and the wind. But right now why don't we go for a swim? And then go up to my room and take a shower."

  "No. You go. I'll watch you."

  He has always loved to be watched. He pulled the T-shirt over his head and shook his head loose from it. He dropped his cutoffs and kicked them off. As he put his fingertips into the waistband of his briefs, he looked down at me and smiled a smile I might have mistaken for Madeleine's—knowing and disbelieving at once—if I had come upon it by surprise while turning a corner. He slipped them off and stood free, and there I was again, back at square one. Leaping twice like a deer, he reached the flat sand and began to run toward the water. He is not a runner, but there is something more physical, more beautiful even, in the heavier step with which he moves, the breaks in his rhythm. He splashed in. He threw himself forward in a marvelous surface dive, slapping the water and taking off.

  As soon as he began to swim, I stood up and started to jog along the boards to the house. I don't know what I expected. I didn't really think that Madeleine and I could make a clean getaway. But I wanted the rest of the afternoon to be played out with Madeleine beside me, and then he would not be able to get me alone again. Can I possibly still have thought we were talking about nothing more than a Sunday afternoon? I ran the other way, away from the sea, and was panting after a moment and holding the stitch in my side. If he catches up with me, I thought as I slowed to a wheezing uphill walk, I will start crying again, and then he will lead me back to the beach to comfort me, and the sex will start all over. I can't. And I hate him because he doesn't believe me.

  When I reached the line of bushes that separated the sea's land from the clipped front lawn, I heard him call my name from far away. I turned, and he waved and began to swim in. He had a long way to go. Good. I stepped through the bushes, and there was Madeleine, standing on the porch at the top of the steps, leaning against a pillar. I could not for the moment recall what scene this reminded me of. We were about fifty feet apart. It is a tribute to the control she has over her instrument that when she called out to me, the words reached my ear just above a whisper.

  "Let's do it," she said.

  So I was the only one not asked to commit a crime. I was being invited along, I thought, to keep them company. And I had the getaway car if they needed to make a fast break. But I can only guess, since they had all gone crazy, what they wanted me for. I knew differently. I had been running away from it all afternoon, and the stabbing in my side bore witness to the shape I was in, but someone had to take care of them. Look where they had gotten to since lunch, one in the sea and one on the roof. Someone had to put this thing together.

  "Madeleine," I shouted, "how long is this going to take?"

  "Just the summer," she whispered back.

  "FOR ONE THING," Madeleine said, "she couldn't stand to have an animal around."

  "Don't make things up about her, Madeleine. You're trying to make her more interesting, and she's interesting enough."

  Madeleine shook her head at Phidias, stood up from the table where they had been having coffee, and walked over to the stove. I was steaming clams for chowder, and next to me on the cutting board were mounds of potatoes and onions and mushrooms, sliced for the next step. Madeleine took up a handful of raw mushrooms and popped them into her mouth like grapes or peanuts. She turned back to him and gestured as she spoke, a fat white mushroom between her fingers as she waved her hand. She usually made me nervous in the kitchen, feigning interest badly, for the sake of the moment trying to convince you that she kept a file of recipe cards in her purse. Worse, she would try to help if the food seemed peasant enough to her. Some things evoked the rough and pungent kitchen of her youth, and it delighted her to have a hand in, touching the pulse of things as her mothers and aunts must have done. But in fact, she didn't cook because she didn't eat. She never wasted a wish on food. And I and my soup were safe today because she was taken up by her argument with Phidias, coloring in the portrait of Mrs. Carroll.

  "You can't expect to know everything, Phidias. I've seen her. We'd walk along the streets in Boston, and she would mutter and glare if we went by someone with a dog."

  "Dogs and cats," he said, nodding agreement, as if he had finally put the muddle in some order. "You said animals."

  "You know what I meant," she said, as if dogs and cats were all the animals there were. And though she was talking to a farmer.

  "Tell me about your daughter," Phidias said, inviting her to practice.

  "You can't say anything about Cicely anymore," Madeleine said, and I was hard put to say how the voice had aged. The spaces between the words were not as equal as they might have been. The breath was thinner. "I did not bring up my children to be boring. I've said to her, 'Why don't you have a nervous breakdown, like Tony.'"

  "That's not fair. Tony has never been in a hospital. Not for anything. He's never even had a cold." He could not quite add a name at the end of any sentence. He couldn't call her Madeleine, because she wasn't. With my back turned to the stove, I was ready to believe Madeleine wasn't in the room at all. But he could hardly call her Beth.

  "Well, he's not boring anyway. Except for sex. Cicely keeps a calendar, and she fills it up tight, to the last hour. If you threw that away, she'd have a nervous breakdown. She doesn't talk to me."

  "Why?"

  "Because I don't like children. She says. The point is, I don't like her children. They're about as lively as stuffed animals. I don't like animals either," she said, coming out of the voice as seamlessly as she had entered it. The insistence about the animals sounded deliciously witty in her own voice, and she had returned to us as if out of a time warp. To prove she was really she again, she laughed her one-syllable laugh.

  "Hey Rick," she said, and I turned around, "how was I?"

  "You'll have to ask Phidias
, Madeleine. I never heard the original."

  "Well?" she said to Phidias, throwing open her hands, smoking him out.

  "Better. Madeleine, I just realized you don't have any French accent when you do it. How do you hide it?"

  "Phidias, I haven't had a French accent for twenty-five years. I just slur a little, and people hear French. They hear it because they want to hear it."

  She does not speak cynically about what it is people want from her, but she is a realist who has studied the phenomenon of herself and come up with some answers. I have watched her annual Boston concert for thirteen years. I am convinced every time, in spite of knowing at first hand that even she has not been able to hold back all the changes, that I am seeing a woman arrested in full flower. You could say, and it would be true, that the myth has taken over; but at the same time you can't deny the craft and the rigorously studied effects. Madeleine pooh-poohs it. She once said to me that it works because her fans are looking at her through the blur of their own teary eyes. But I have seen her spend a whole afternoon on the stage directing the lighting men, getting the spots right for the love songs. She wants it to work, and the worker in her is as tireless and unpressured as the women who bake the bread and hang out white washing in the hill town north of Dijon. So the French accent is another trick she plays, and at the same time it isn't. If you told people that Madeleine Cosquer didn't have a French accent, it would make as much sense as to say de Gaulle had a button nose.

  "He says I'm better," she said to me. "He's a bastard to work with. All I have to do is perform for a half-hour for a lawyer who has the sense of humor of a tree, and he thinks," pointing over her shoulder with her thumb, "that I have to know when Beth Carroll got her first teeth and who took her first confession."

  "She wasn't a Roman," Phidias said. "Just the husband and the children. She wasn't anything."

  "He's like a museum, right?" she said to me, but there was in the remark a sense of admiration that he knew so much.

  I looked over at Phidias where he sat at the table. "Is it going to work?" I asked him. I had been asking him that for ten days, but I had become so used to the unreality of living there that the urgency had gone out of the question. Of course it was going to work. Madeleine did not get bad reviews.

  "Sure it will," he said, as if success had never been an issue. Then: "Like I told you, Rick. It has to work." And suddenly he had made it sound dicey again. I was never satisfied by his assurances. He trusted that some form of Providence would see us through, as it always had. He seemed to assume that if you stated the goal often enough and gave yourself to it, you landed bull's-eye on the target, your parachute billowing down around you. But wait, I wanted to say, what about Mrs. Carroll's goal? "I just want to get through this summer," she had said to David. "I'll cheat the bloody winter and go in September." What about that? Things don't have to work, I thought. It is my experience that they practically never do. But I didn't say anything because I didn't want to be caught talking down the dead.

  He drank the last of his pale, heavily doctored coffee. Half sweet cream and three sugars. It tasted like pudding. He stood up and walked to the swing door leading into the dining room.

  "I'm going up to look through another stack of her papers," he said to Madeleine. "Come when you want."

  "I'm going to run a cold bath and sit in it and do isometrics. I may act like I'm eighty-two, but I feel like a hundred."

  "You don't look it," he said, wryly but on cue.

  "So they tell me."

  He left, and she hung back to watch me fill the chowder in. But I wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of making a mess. I turned the flame down low and walked over to where she stood by the door, propelling her into the dining room and in the direction of her bath.

  "He's the least simple farmer I've ever met," I said as we walked across the wine-dark rug, the glint of polished wood shining in the still and curtained room. "And the least Greek Greek."

  "He's always been something of an overseer here. I don't think he's ever spent much time with the cows. That's what the sons are for. Isn't that Greek enough?"

  "I guess so. Was Mr. Carroll here when you were here before?"

  "In a way." She shrugged, as if all this were too petty to explain. "He was in Boston most of the time. Once the children were born, he and Beth stayed out of each other's way."

  "Was it sad?"

  "For whom?" she asked as we passed into the lighter air of the hall. We stopped at the foot of the main stairs.

  "I don't know." I wasn't certain what it was that jarred me. I didn't, for instance, care who slept with whom in 1945. "Was Phidias as free then as he is now? To come and go in the house, I mean."

  "Not so much," she said, looking away to think for a moment. The wide mahogany banister started at the ground floor as a kind of pedestal, and on it was a marble nude of a young girl on tiptoe, reaching into the air to capture some fuzzy Victorian abstraction. Madeleine touched the girl's heels with her fingertips and followed the arch of the foot and rested her hand there. As she turned back to me, she seemed to be holding the girl up on her toes. "You're really very proper, Rick, aren't you? You want the masters and the servants to know their places. That's a very bourgeois notion of aristocracy." When she said "bourgeois," her French seemed a thousand years old. "I met Phidias in Paris, when he and Beth had been traveling together for seven months. They had a chauffeur and a lady's maid with them. The servants rode in the front seat. Phidias rode in back."

  "And then they met you."

  "It was a big car. There was room in the backseat for the three of us. But it's the sex you want to know about, is it?"

  "Madeleine, don't browbeat me."

  "He's a very lovely man, Rick. I think it upsets you that he bosses me around. I like it. It reminds me of making a picture, and he knows it. Beth and I were very temporary. He and Beth were together the way people are in storybooks. It never crossed their minds to be sorry they were married to other people. They liked stealing time to be together. Do you understand?"

  "A little. I'm just being jealous."

  "Of him and me," she said, exasperated. "Be jealous of him and Beth, like I am. They had a destiny."

  "What does that mean? You're talking movie talk."

  She lowered her eyelids and shrugged her shoulders. She brought her hand away from the feet of the statue, and the girl stayed on tiptoe, all by herself.

  "They understood the time they had," Madeleine said. "There was something inevitable about them. In the war, you could see how daily life—just getting up again in the morning—killed people. Not them. The day-to-day run of things didn't make them crazy. It made them laugh."

  She didn't expect an answer, perhaps didn't even care after a certain point whether or not I was listening. She didn't address the remark about movie talk, and she hadn't stopped talking it either. But the past may be a place where you have to talk that way. In any case, she had made me see that it was not my place to censor it. One talks as best one can, her shrug seemed to indicate. You take a risk. You say things that words are not about, things that are the opposite of words. She had looked away from me while she spoke, as if to bring them into better focus for herself. Now she looked me in the eye again.

  "You know, she and I were lovers during all that time, from the day we met. But it was the two of them I needed to be with."

  "Okay, Madeleine, I'll take a closer look at him," I said. "The green-eyed monster's dead."

  "We'll be done with it day after tomorrow," she said, referring to Mr. Farley by the time he took. "Then it will be a vacation." She turned and began to climb the stairs. "I'm glad I have more confidence in my work than you do," she said without looking back, teasing me with it.

  "You haven't made a picture in ten years," I called after her.

  "It's like riding a bicycle."

  She went on up, and I stood there next to the girl on tiptoe. At the top of the stairs, Madeleine turned and smiled.

  "You k
now," she said, "that's a very funny way to make chowder. You're doing it all backwards. If you wait until I'm done, I'll come down and help you." And she walked away toward her room, savoring the joke. The last thing I heard was the laugh, "Ha!" like the toot of a boat. It hung in the air of the hall for a moment and then disappeared. But not before it got to me, and it was me laughing back that finished it off.

  We're going to make it, I thought. I can't believe it, but we are. We have to.

  We had not eaten on the front porch since the afternoon we had arrived. But the rusting, wrought iron table and chairs were there still, and they seemed so solid to me that I had taken them over. I agree with Goethe that every view pales after fifteen minutes, though I am inclined to be restive even sooner than that. Five minutes is about my limit. It is true too that I have stared at a beautiful man in a park or on an airplane for an hour at a time without flinching, but that is not the same thing as a view that is just a landscape. The beauty in nature seems willful to me. So it wasn't the dunes and the cold summer ocean that drew me there at different times of day. I think it was this: that I was not convinced that the house was ours until we had passed the inquisition of Mr. Farley. It may be, I thought, that I will not be able to take care of them after all, but someone has got to remain uninvolved. I did not permit myself in those first days to be anything more than a caller, and it is significant to me now that I spent so much time at the table where I had first paid the call, not yet caught up in anything. The house belonged to nobody yet, and I responded to the limbo it was in by sitting outside.

  It was Thursday morning, the third of July, and Mr. Farley had an appointment with Mrs. Carroll at two o'clock. She had made a point of not inviting him to lunch, it seemed. Madeleine was upstairs by herself, making up. At breakfast in the kitchen, she had told Phidias and David and me to meet at noon in the courtyard next to the library. Her plan, I guessed, was to appear on the balcony outside the bedroom doors, when it would be in full sun. We would catch our first glimpse of her from below and at a distance. I could hardly blame Madeleine for counting on the advantage of an operatic entrance, but she was not going to be given so much latitude with Farley. He was coming to see Beth Carroll up close and in bed, the same as always. However, we all agreed on high noon and synchronized our watches. Then we went off in all directions, and I came out on the porch.