Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll

by Paul Monette

  I knew where he would be. If he had been dressed, of course, he would have been sitting in the summerhouse by now, having swum and explored the boathouse already, climbing up to the airy perch to take the long view. The naked sprinter in him was a different matter. After the run from the house, he would dive into the surf to cool down, then stand for a bit like the Sea Island statue, lost to the sea lights, dispossessed. I have seen him stand like that at my living-room window after a shower, looking down at the traffic on Commonwealth Avenue. If you had only watched him take the stance in a cramped apartment, still you would have known that he learned to do it while standing in the ocean. But I knew he would be out of the water now and lying on a flat rock that had split off the near ridge and slumped into the sand, the smooth side tilted to the afternoon sun.

  I orchestrate these things down to the specific rock, until the image in my head is watertight. I leave no room for chance. I wonder if I do it to prove that things don't go my way. If sex was the farthest thing from my mind, why did I walk around the water end of the cliff face convinced I would discover him dozing face up on my own favorite rock? I said I wanted only to find him. But I plotted it out in such detail that it seems to me I refused to look for him at all. Or I looked for him to be me, to take over my place for himself and in doing so make it truly mine. I was engineering it in such a way that I would hardly recognize him if I stumbled on him. I hardly did.

  I came around onto the beach suddenly. It flashed through my mind that he had abandoned the rock I had given him because the wrestlers were tumbling over it. I even registered that the wrestlers were David and the gardener before I saw they were making love. David straddled one end of the rock, hunched over onto his arms, his head down so I couldn't see his face. The gardener stood behind him and fucked him. He moved slowly in and out, and the muscles in his arms and chest stood out as he gripped David by the hips. His head was tilted, his eyes closed. Except for the genital connection, they both seemed detached, each centered wholly in himself. I had nothing to do with the slowing down of time here. But I felt it too, as if I were moving underwater now. I stared at them without a thought in my head, and nothing in their rhythm changed during a moment so long that I knew the world on the other side of the ridge went on for years while we stayed still. David was swaying his hips, and he rested his forehead on the rock. The gardener did thrusts and releases. They moved together like a single creature breathing in its sleep.

  They were no more than twenty feet away from me, but I would have had to shout for them to hear me because the further rhythm of the waves bathed the afternoon in white noise. I suppose I could have jumped back out of sight, since I had only come a step or two onto the beach, but it didn't occur to me that I didn't belong. I believed so firmly that I was expected here that I assumed this was what I was expected to see. The gardener became aware of me first. He opened his eyes and then opened them wide, and he stopped moving. His face was streaked with sweat, and his stomach muscles relaxed as he began to catch his breath. David continued to rock his ass back and forth, almost lazily, but the movement seemed idiotic all of a sudden. Someone ought to tell him, I thought, because it is no longer the appropriate response to the situation for him to be lost in passion. Now that we are all here, I thought, what are we supposed to do? It seemed that David should come back out of his head and tell us.

  But the gardener had an idea. His mouth opened as he breathed faster, and his whole face went slack as he pumped hard into David. I heard David gasp at the first thrust, and his head snapped up from the rock as if he were surfacing for air. The shock in his eyes as he looked at me happened in response to the gardener's shudder, but it deepened when he recognized me. He held my eyes, and I wondered, watching the sorrow pass through him, if I looked as sad as he. Since there were no rules, I knew I had no right to get in the way with my pain and tears, no matter how his making love might touch me. I had no say in the matter. I had given it up for ten days now with every refusal to take him in my arms. So I tried to look as unconcerned as possible, but of course I couldn't stop looking at them. The gardener was riding close to the crest, and David could no longer steady his eyes on me. He had to give over his whole body to the storm he had helped to start.

  "Bring me off," the gardener called to him roughly, ''bring me off." He leaned over now and took hold of David around the chest. David seemed to dance underneath him, swinging the two of them this way and that. Though he was pinned to the rock by the weight of the other, David moved as if he were swimming. The gardener, who had seemed throughout to control them both, had now become a mere rider. He raised his head and leered at me, but the final spasm overtook him. He grunted and gritted his teeth and buried his face in David's neck. David froze, and the gardener quivered again and again until he appeared to faint. Then they lay there quietly for a moment. It was only a moment, but I was not measuring it by the clock. I felt I was getting older with every breath I took.

  As the gardener lifted himself from David's body, he gave me the defiant look I had seen on his face when he chewed the dirt. I had the eerie sense that he was thinking he was one step closer to fucking me. David rolled over onto his back and said something to him, and the gardener looked at David and laughed dryly, then turned to the litter of his work clothes. David, his hands behind his head, watched him dress with what was no doubt the same appraising eye with which he considered him on the evening Mrs. Carroll died. I sat against a boulder and watched David watch him. I found myself blistering with rage at the gardener, but I was feeling as mild and blurred about David as if the intervening scene had not intruded between my dream of him sprawled on the rock and the way he lay now. I was hurting, of course. But the pain of distance and jealousy was so immediate, so much like the ache of simple longing for him that had so far eluded me, that I welcomed it.

  The gardener dressed with his back to us. When he had pulled on his T-shirt, he turned before he took a leap to the cliff and clambered up and away. I didn't expect him to say good-bye to David because I knew the manners of the event were not in that direction. I thought they might exchange a ritual smirk. But he didn't look at David at all. Instead he glanced at me again, and he seemed to be both cocky about what he had just completed and daring me to do something I didn't understand. He looked willing to go further than I knew, as if he had just swallowed the dirt he rolled around in his mouth. Then he was off.

  David did not immediately turn to me, because he first took note of the gardener's scramble up the steep slope of the ridge. When he was entirely gone, David flopped over on his stomach again and propped his chin on one hand. I could tell that his mood was playful, and that the shock of my arrival seemed more crazy to him than dark. I knew he was going to wait until I spoke first, in case I should be arch or censuring. If I had been, I think he would have laughed in my face, and then I might have run for good. But that is easy enough to say now. I had never run away before until I ran here to Mrs. Carroll's. As I said, between us two David was the runner. What I felt was that I had to know what he thought about all this. For the first time, I was not afraid that he would be wrong.

  "Did I interrupt something?" I said, coming forward.

  "Not really. Did you know I'd be here?"

  "Yes. Did you know I was coming?"

  "No," he said a little more sharply, as if to warn me not to play rough. "I've thought about it ever since you told me, and I wanted to see it without you first. Would you believe I met John here by accident?"

  "No," I said, "but you don't have to come up with a good story."

  "All right. He and I agreed to meet here at four-thirty. I knew I'd need it after this afternoon."

  "David," I said gently, "you don't have to tell me the truth either."

  "I know I don't have to, Rick," he said, more gently still. "It isn't even the truth. It's just the facts. They're not the same until I understand them better."

  "Does he put you in a philosophical mood?"

  "No. I do it all by myse
lf."

  "Have you seen the boathouse?"

  "Yes," he said. "I have something to show you now. I'd like to take a swim first and wash him off me, but I'm afraid you'll run off."

  "You don't have anything to worry about, David. I never do the same thing twice anymore. Shall I go with you?"

  He shook his head yes, and his eyes shone. I sat on the end of my flat rock, where he had just been lounging, and took off my boots. David shivered in front of me, bursting to get in the water. "Let's go, let's go," he said to urge me on. Then, as I unbuckled my belt, he broke into a run to the sea. "I can't wait," he shouted back at me. But I was right behind him, and I plowed through the surf and jumped over the first low waves until I couldn't clear them and fell with a heavy slap. I swam straight out and didn't look to see where I was until my arms hurt. David had not come in very far. He bobbed and floated and then slipped beneath the surface and swam a little underwater. I always tore through the water as if I were in a race. David, because the sea was his natural element, let himself go with the drift.

  But now he was standing up in the shallows and beckoning me in. "I have something to show you," he called. I headed back to him with a slower, broader stroke, and I moved to the rhythm of David's remark as it played against Madeleine's remark. There's something I have to tell you. I have something to show you. The one and then the other, they flashed in my head like the two sides of a spinning coin.

  Though I had muffled and hidden the pain I felt about David and the gardener and talked lightly about it instead, I thought I had gained something in the bargain. David always said that his whorish sex, the little pornographic scenes like the one just aborted, didn't mean anything. He called it his private life, and he swore he wasn't out to anger me or hurt me. Swimming in, I began to feel what it would mean not to care if it was directed at me or not. Or not to care if David got hurt unless he got hurt. Luckily for him, it would mean I could no longer accuse him of leaving me. More to the point, I might have to accept that all my moralities might only apply to me. I was free whether I liked it or not.

  But I am way ahead of myself. In the water, I was not so analytic—and if nothing else, the experience goes to show that I ought to spend more time in the water. It was just this: for the first time I saw David as a separate man from me and wasn't sad that it was so. There had never been anything I could do about it, but that hadn't prevented me from raging and getting seared with despair in the past. I saw what David meant, that days like today were crazy instead of dark. I didn't agree, of course. And yet I knew he was not wrong. For some reason, the contradiction seemed like a marvelous turn of events. My hand struck bottom, and suddenly I was whirling in the shallows myself. It did not occur to me to say, "Wait a minute, we have to talk about this." I couldn't wait.

  I stood up, and the water streamed down my body. My cock had shrunk in the cold to the size of a peanut. My eyes cleared of salt, and I could see that David was loping on up the beach toward the sandy cliff. "Wait," I shouted, and he was near enough to hear me because he cried, "I can't." I laughed at the thought of a chase and knew, as I ran out of the water, that I could catch him easily. He was only fifty or sixty feet away, gliding along on the balls of his feet. But I took his pace without thinking, or thinking only that I would like it to be something of a chase. The sun was in my eyes, but it didn't seem hot because it was drying me off.

  At the cliffs, David climbed easily up to the field, and I thought the route he took over the rocks was natural until I was on top of it. But I could see there was a set of stairs cut into the cliff here, though it was now fallen into ruins. The frost had wrecked the right angles of the steps, and the flagstones were tipped in all directions. But I made my way, once grabbing hold of the wall of earth beside me and coming away with a fistful of clay and pebbles. When I reached the top, the field spread out ahead of me for a hundred yards before it stopped short at the pines. The land was all scrub and hard grass, but I could see that I was on a path now as well. David continued toward the trees. He was moving toward the point, deep in the trees, where the two ridges converged. As I started after him, moving up the buckled path, I felt the symmetry of the place all around me. Down on the boathouse beach, the world was somewhere else because of the power of the two walls that set the beach apart from the world. As the ridges came together on the hill field, they made it seem as if there were no other world but the one toward which they were now converging.

  David reached the woods, for a moment hovered at the edge of the dark, and then was swallowed up. In the same moment, I ran into the long shadow thrown by the pines and felt myself slow down. Hot as the day was, there was a chill breeze blowing out of there. Or if there couldn't have been a breeze, then it was my being naked that made me go cautiously. "David," I shouted when I got to the trees.

  "I'm here," I heard him say matter-of-factly. And since his voice sounded close and the path went on into the trees, the light gravel half-buried in pine needles, I couldn't sustain the dread and so jogged on in. The air was a dense dark green. The sun appeared in patches and sometimes in pools, and I did not have my usual reaction to woods, which was to imagine them in a dreary rain, no matter what the weather was. I wondered how many other places on the estate were marked by these restless and curious sketches of order. Why gravel a path through the woods? People either make a path all by themselves, by the way they go, or they don't.

  And then it stopped. I was surrounded by a blur of underbrush, and again I called "David," convinced there was nothing to worry about.

  "Over here," he called back, more insistent than before. His voice came from the left, and I sidled that way and saw a splash of light and took two great steps through the bushes to reach it. "Here," he said again. I looked up and saw him on the spine of the ridge. It sloped up here at a sharp angle to the forest floor and was covered with moss. David stood in the sun and beckoned me to follow, but he meant that I should follow on the ground as he maneuvered his way along the ridge ten or twelve feet above me. I watched him lose and gain his balance a dozen times. He moved like a tightrope walker. I padded on the warm bed of pine needles under my feet, once again letting him strike the pace as he tested his footing and then darted ahead a few steps at a time.

  I had not seen him naked for so long and unbroken an interval in five years. As I was walking now at my ease, there was ample time for me to see him in a hundred different attitudes that brought to the surface the range of the past. In the tower room, in the bathroom, on the beach below the house, I caught mere glimpses of his body. At first I turned from them in sorrow at what was broken in me when I lost him. As the days passed, I should have admitted that the pain was gone, though I clung to it enough to say only that it had changed. I had begun to freeze like a deer when I came upon him in the nude, if he stepped out of the shower and shook his wet head like a dog or if he stretched at the closet door in the morning, deciding among his shirts, while I lay in bed behind him. I took in the simple beauty of him at those times. There was something abstract about it, like the running figure in the film that I saw from Madeleine’s window. I insisted, as if I might have to prove it in Farley's court, that my feelings were not sexual. This new pain had to do with brief and perfect beauty. I swore to myself that I was aching as I would ache about a rose poised in its midmost hour. This was a high-flown pain, and I was as faithful to it as Keats.

  Naked myself now, and on a fragrant carpet of pine, I didn't any longer know what I had to prove. The pain was not there, and with it had gone the double-crossed reasoning that said pain made me real. I would be so glad, I thought, if this wall went on forever. My neck throbbed from looking up at David, but it had the sweet simplicity of localized pain. A week earlier, I would have supposed we had earned this moment without rules or borders by living through the day we had just lived through. But I thought it took away from the newness and the merriment of a naked forest walk to see it as a reward. If we were survivors, it was not today we were surviving. You would have
had to come up with a myth or a fairy tale to compare David to as he led me along. He was not, in this brief journey, compelled to mirror any action from the other life we had left behind. Nothing in the tower and nothing in the past had any force here.

  He stopped and looked down at me, his legs wide apart as he stood on two stones. He was grinning, I thought, because he seemed to understand how lewd he must look from where I was standing. "Well," he said happily, "we're here."

  "Where?" I wanted to know, and said so, since it seemed to me there was no "here." We had been where we were from the moment we ran out of the sea. He shook his head at me gently. He could see now, I think, that it was he and not the landscape who had caught my eye and given it a lighted path out of the cave I lived in.

  "You know what you look like?" he asked ironically, and because I didn't, he told me. "From up here, you look like you've been struck dumb by a vision. If I put a rag around your loins, you could pass for a saint waiting for the sky to open."

  "You always said I was a mystic."

  "Mystics aren't hunky like you," he said, and he reached out and pulled in the branch of a maple tree that grew at his height. He snapped off a leaf and put the stem in his mouth. "Aren't they all skin and bones? They have big Adam's apples and red eyes."

  "I don't know. I think they look like you and me, except when they're being mystical."