Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll

by Paul Monette

  As it happened, Madeleine and I were able to flee at once that first afternoon. There was packing to do in Boston before we settled in at Mrs. Carroll's. She did not press me about David on the ride back, and she said nothing more about Phidias's plan than to make sure that David had explained it well enough. "Well enough," I said. When we had reached the highway again and found ourselves caught in the crawl of Sunday traffic coming back from Cape Cod, she asked me to pull over and put up the top. No, I said. Why not? I don't want to. And then she lit into me, and we had the proper argument about the turn things had taken as we crawled back into the neat and gridded city.

  It appealed to her sense of risk. It was like singing "Now Is All We Need" at the front lines, the shells popping in the distance. In the car, at least, she had not been full of the high-flown purpose she had since developed. I don't think for a minute that she saw herself as playing a part in the destiny of Phidias and Beth Carroll. She wanted to do it, she said, for the fun of it. She had been turning down movie offers for so long, letting half-finished screenplays pile up beside her bed, that people had ceased to ask. She didn't feel finished or, worse, passed by; but she did miss the work. "I want to get my hands dirty again," she said. The old Dijon mustard-maker, doing up a small batch of the old recipe. I might have asked, "What fun is it going to be for me?" except I knew. I hadn't risked a nickel in years. For the wrong reason. I had convinced myself that it gave me no pleasure, and I had once known better. For fifteen years, I had cruised the bars and had risked falling in love, daring to go so far and no further, getting out alive. Whatever the specter of David and me might have in store for us, I could feel that first day the lilt in my head that hazardous living induces. There is no outer manifestation of this feeling, unless it is Madeleine's half-smile. I was half smiling myself.

  But perhaps it is best not to attach my shifting and parroty motives to her. I was scared to my bones about David, and at the same time I was thrilled and merry about the caper. I didn't want to explore that paradox too closely, for fear that the answer was Madeleine's own, that I wanted the pain back. But now that I thought of it, I just wanted to do something, to do something. I don't work, and I don't see people much, and I don't have the patience to sit down with a book. I don't even go to the movies anymore. I just run a lot of little errands. I sat in the car, going home, a thousand years after Madeleine had warned me about the pain, and yelled at her about fraud and shallow graves. She hit the dashboard with her fist and told me I talked like a skinny Anglican spinster. She had said from the porch, "Let's do it." Okay, I must have thought, as long as there is something for me to do. And not just taking care of them. I would do that anyway. But as I shouted about the law and made prophecies, I realized I was going to ride shotgun in this caper. The devil's advocate or, since I had been living clean, the angels'. "Wait a minute," someone ought to say, "while we think this over." And they wait because he forces them to, and he does use the time to think, and at last he can tell them what it all means.

  Madeleine put in a call first to Aldo, her money manager in Beverly Hills. She had found a quiet place for the summer, she told him, and asked him to pack her a couple of suitcases and air-freight them east. "You hate quiet places," he said, but she ignored him and started her list. She rattled it off like a pilot talking to mission control. Madeleine admits that her mind is a memory bank of the clothes she has worn, both those she has owned and those she has only worn in passing, in films. They say that Isadora Duncan, writing her memoirs, wrote in a large hand on scraps of paper that were thrown about the room as she reached for a fresh sheet. Every few days, a secretary picked them all up and put them in order. If Madeleine were to write hers, the pages would be stacked and pinned like sales slips, all method and no madness. These memoirs of hers would read like the paragraphs about the bride's clothes in wedding announcements. She paced about my living room, the phone in one hand and the receiver cradled between her shoulder and her tilted head. They would have given her a job buying and selling on the commodities market.

  "Now listen, Aldo," she said, "for the Geoffrey Beene I have to have the gold chain with the sapphire clasp. That's in the safe. And my gray sunglasses. In the top left drawer of the vanity. Then a scarf. Send a lot of scarves in the coral range. No reds. I don't have any shoes that are right. Go to Gucci and charge me some boots. Ask for Helene, and tell her they're for the Geoffrey Beene. She'll know."

  I had never met Aldo, and I was not clear about how busy a millionaire in the computer software business was. I had always assumed that he did a little work on Madeleine's taxes and spent some time on the phone every now and then, ironing out the terms of a concert contract. It was a very different thing entirely to think that she could order him about like the upstairs maid. In the past, when I had asked her for details about her financial wiz, she dismissed the question with "Aldo? Aldo's just an old queen who's been looking all his life for a pet movie star. It's considered a very respectable relationship in LA. I couldn't go on without him." Now, as I listened to her pack a suitcase over the telephone, I thought: Madeleine, don't you dare take advantage of him. Or me, I added, glowering to myself. Fortunately for us all, I thought grandly, I am coming down to Mrs. Carroll's to raise these questions of ethics. I pictured us walking in pairs like the monks in an abbey, the air heady with ripening as the scent wafted in out of the orchards. And we would idle the afternoon away in a field above the sea while we did a Plato dialogue.

  I didn't hear the end of Madeleine's call. As I looked around at the disarray of my apartment, I found myself saying goodbye. I'm not coming back, I thought, half in panic, half shooting the moon. I don't know where I'm going after Mrs. Carroll's, but it won't be here. I didn't breathe a word of this to Madeleine, hoping it would go away. We packed our bags and went to sleep. Madeleine slept in my room, and I lay awake on the swaybacked blue-velvet sofa and tried to guess what was wrong with me. I felt like Huck Finn, rough-and-tumble, and I knew as sure as I was lying there that it would pass in a day or two. I would be sliding down the banister or chasing David on the shore when, pow!, I would have the existential equivalent of a cardiac arrest. So turn back. That is what the prudent, big-eyed animals say in fairy tales, and the hero pats their heads and passes on. The last thing I thought before I went to sleep was: What am I going to do with my plants?

  I took them. And my tank of tarnished fish, who tenaciously lived on, despite my indifference. There were three of them, and they were seven years old, which probably adds up to untold decades on the fish scale. David had brought them home one winsome afternoon and called them Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The fourth one died shortly after he left, perhaps out of grief. I didn't know which one it was when I flushed him down the toilet, though David always averred he could tell them apart. I called the three survivors Blind, Deaf, and Dumb.

  There wasn't much else I needed that I couldn't fit into a duffel bag and a wicker picnic hamper. I had never owned a suitcase since I had left my father's house. I think I always expected to flee Boston, and I always wanted to be free to take with me nothing more than the clothes I wore. A suitcase, by tying me down to changes of underwear and a coat and tie, disturbed my sexy picture of Rick on the road, out to make his fortune. Well, it is an academic question, since I never did go until now, and now I was taking a earful of goldfish and asparagus fern. But it goes to show you that you might as well scrap all the resolutions you make in your twenties. "I refuse to own a suitcase because it will order me around" is a dumb idea. Once, on an evening train to New York, I jerked off a bodybuilder I met when we tried to pass each other in the aisle. We sat in the back of the coach with a raincoat draped over our laps. Later he told me he was a nurse in a geriatrics ward. He was really rather delicate, like other muscle queens I've known, and he told me he was going no further than his sixtieth birthday. That, he figured, was his body's limit. He had gotten a doctor friend to agree to put a bubble of air into his blood and "needle him out," as he put it. But I know h
e won't do it. Things sound so noble when you're young and morbid.

  I stayed in an antic mood, my pulses racing, as we made our second trip out of Boston. When Madeleine told me that Aldo had decided to bring the suitcases himself and take a vacation too, I was too far gone to be able to stop him.

  "Why didn't you tell me as soon as you hung up the phone?"

  "Because you seemed to be having a vision," she said. "I didn't want to spoil it."

  "But Madeleine, where is this going to stop? You know, you can't invite the Variety critic to watch this performance."

  "I have to have Aldo around. I'm glad he suggested it. Besides, you ought to meet him. He's so gay he'll make you blush. It's very bracing."

  We had expected him for days. I had a horror, as I sat today on the porch steps looking out to sea, that he was going to breeze in on the heels of Mr. Farley. And he would barge in and storm her bedroom just as Madeleine's hand had taken up the pen and started to sign. But otherwise, I was afflicted with considerably fewer horrors than gripped me on a regular cloudy day in Boston. Madeleine and I had had an edgy talk here and there, as we had on Tuesday in the hall, but they always ended in sunlight. Phidias and I were still sizing each other up and spoke in shorthand. Mostly, I was on my own and free to wander. Since the house was not open territory yet, I roamed outside, on the beach and in the dunes and fields, and came back to rest on the porch. At meals, I was more and more quiet and felt like I was floating.

  "He's become a yogi," Madeleine said one night at dinner. "His body temperature has dropped to forty, and his blood doesn't move at all."

  "I don't think so," David said playfully. "I think he's becoming a creature of the wildwood. He used to want to fill in the sea with cement, and now he looks as if he might go off and be a sailor. I bet he could live on roots and berries if he had to. He has burrs in his hair."

  David. Somehow, David had pulled in his horns. He came down to my room from the tower in the middle of the first night and sat on the edge of my bed in the dark. "What do you want?" I asked, and he said "Nothing." He stayed there, I think, until I fell asleep and made no move to touch me. It was a major change in tactics from the old days, when he would try to counter my bad moods with his hands in my pants, not seeming to realize that the sex would be bad and the afterimage snarling and gloom. With David, loving never lost its aura as a cure, however much I might finish up staring at the ceiling. Besides, he was blessed with a capacity not to see sex as good or bad. Its primary feature for him was its way of turning everything else erotic. We both were always wanton, but the difference was this when we came together to live: I did it every day for fifteen years in order to put it behind me every day, and he thought about it the whole day through and didn't need to do it much at all. He loved to jerk himself off and would lie in bed for an hour bringing himself up to it. He once compared it to a man rowing in a single shell on a river clear as glass. When I did it, I felt stunned and alone and knew I had made a mess. So it probably turned him on just to sit on the edge of the bed. He knew he had made a mistake to smother and attack me on Sunday afternoon. He also could see that I had arrived back at Mrs. Carroll's in a euphoric state—"wide open to the cosmos," he called it in himself—and he wanted to keep in touch, however marginally. If he kept his hands to himself, I was willing to let him.

  On the morning after the second night, I awoke to find that he had fallen asleep next to me, still in his clothes. On the fifth morning, I saw he had taken his clothes off and crept in under the covers. I was brushing my teeth on the seventh night, Sunday, a week to the day we fell into this, when his face appeared in the shaving mirror above the sink. He leaned there in the bathroom doorway.

  "Why don't you come on up to the tower tonight?"

  I ducked and spit a mouthful of foam into the sink. When I stood up, I didn't turn around but held his eyes in the mirror instead.

  "I thought I turned down that offer."

  "I thought I'd make it again. Now that you're such a beachcomber, I think you'll fall in love with the view. It's like living in a lighthouse."

  "Does it warn the ships at sea that there is danger here?"

  "They already know," he said. "They avoid us like the plague. I'm glad, though, because if a ship docked here, you might ship out on it."

  And he turned and left. Wait, I nearly said, I haven't answered your question. Yes, I'll come up to the tower, but please tell me when you started to sound so world-weary and stripped of illusion. You sound too old. I saw that he was not going to twist my arm now either, but neither was he going to pretend it was a good idea to go on this way. He accused me in the neutral tone of his voice. Still, he was trying to show me that I could hate the boy who left me five years ago without losing the time I had with the man who had just appeared and disappeared in my mirror. More than he wanted us making love again, he wanted to have it out about the past. A week ago, he wanted to make love first. So I had won, if you could call it that.

  I had not yet been in the tower. When I came up the stairs into David's darkened room, I saw him in the light of the midsummer moon. He was facing me on the bed, the sheet drawn up only as far as his hips, and he was honey-colored against the pearl white of his linen. I came up close to the bed and looked down at him as I undid the belt of my robe and let it fall to the floor behind me. I thought he was asleep because in the past he had always fallen asleep instantly, but as I pulled back the sheet, I caught a glint of moonlight in his eye.

  "Are you awake?" I said.

  "I was just waiting to see if you'd come. You know, you haven't even looked out the windows."

  And as if it had been a command, I stood up and went to the windows. It was the old story of the moon on the sea. It had never broken my heart and had never made it feel like a valentine either. But here there was something in the distance and the height together that caught at me. I walked from window to window around the room and was monarch of all I surveyed. I took the measure of the beach I combed in daylight, where I ran and swam and threw rocks in the water, and it seemed only inches long in the scheme of things—the bay in which the house lay harbored and the set of points and inlets that zigzagged to the south. Even when I am wide open to the cosmos, I don't seek it in the scheme of things. I make do with the heft of a rock or a dive into icy water from my own staked-out bit of shore. David thought I would like to be both king and beachcomber, since I could have it both ways just by feeling free with the tower stairs. I wondered if they wouldn't cancel each other out.

  "It does make me feel a little like Rapunzel," I said. "But you're right, it's ravishing. Tell me what everything is out there. As the crow flies, where is the world?"

  I walked over to the bed again, and he was fast asleep. It felt like a slap in the face. I sat down and reconstructed what we had been setting down as rules. If I had succeeded, it was in forcing him to be confounded by the distance that channeled between us. But he had agreed by agreeing that it could be seen that way, not that it was that way. Damn him. I believed that there was only one gospel interpretation of what had broken us before, and the crime and the punishment were rooted in David's illusions. He thought not. So he had turned the problem over to me, as if to say "You think of something." He knew I couldn't, of course. He slept like a baby and left me sentry over the whole luminous curve of the planet. I wish I could say that I stood watch until the sun bleached out the moon and brought on the sober blue of the sea. But I curled my body around him and buried my face in his salty hair. I stroked the flat of his stomach. I was not aware of the windows again until I woke to the full dazzle of the morning sun. I lay on my back, my cock as stiff as the needle on a sundial. The tower room was as hot as a furnace, and David had gotten up and left, I didn't know when.

  As things stood on July third, then (and they didn't stand still), I was sharing a bed with my long-lost lover in an eagle's nest, but we had left the loving out of it so far. I walked the beach and took the sun and ended up with my head in my hands at the iron ta
ble on the front porch. Phidias and Madeleine huddled from breakfast until dinner over the project. I had wondered aloud to Madeleine what went on among the cows and whether Phidias's farm wife complained, that he should spend so much time on the coast. "I don't know," she said, giving me a look. "Why don't you go ask them?" David had abandoned his polishing and stayed outside, but he must have found his own windless inlet because we never crossed paths. He was tanned so dark that it seemed a pity to clothe him. His skin sheathed him like an animal's coat, and he walked on the pads of his feet like a light-footed Indian.

  Curiously, it was the gardener and not David who was prodding me about sex. There was only so much gardening that needed to be done in the front yard, since the hedges fronting the sea were meant to grow wild, and David watered the window boxes on the porch rail. The lawn needed mowing no more than once a week. And yet he made an appearance every day. As I sat in a mild trance at the table or on the steps, I would hear the clippers or the chink of a hoe farther along the porch. Then he would come into view, looking as if he were studying the condition of the shrubbery that lined the porch. He would stand there intently and strike poses. He took his T-shirt out of his back pocket and rubbed the sweat away from his bare chest, or he put a hand to his groin and rubbed himself as if absentmindedly. He was a little too chunky and slow in his limbs for my taste. Still, when he held the rake upright in one hand and leaned his elbow to rest on the bar of it, it threw his steamy body into a pose full of lust and abandon. I was meant to make the first move. He would only give me a perfunctory nod as he passed the porch. My return nod was almost imperceptible. There had been no progress.