Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll

by Paul Monette

  It was after the twentieth of July, and we were having lobsters for dinner. Before Aldo came, we had made do with the little market in town where Mrs. Carroll had ordered her food because they delivered. David would call in a grocery list, and the panel truck would pull up a few hours later. The grocery boy, who was as sexy as the gardener though not as sinister, handed over a carton of food to David or me and traded pleasantries about the ocean. He was a weekend sailor, and he spoke with a certain dumb and simple rapture about his boat. Like all slow-witted people with a passion, he spoke in a language that seemed half religious, half erotic. He drove David crazy. I had a wonderful time when I talked to him, philosophizing with him about the tides and storms and wrecks and runnings aground.

  But Aldo had insisted that we were eating like little old ladies, and he had gone off in his car and found a fish market on a crowded harbor to the north of us. So now we had blue-fish and scrod, steamed clams and fresh scallops and oyster stew. Late in the day, Aldo drove away to examine the day's catch while Madeleine and I were off walking. Today he had gone all out and bought lobsters, though they cost about as much a pound as Iranian caviar. He found, far back in the china closet, a set of crazy red plates in a shellfish motif. He fitted us out with giant bibs and nutcrackers. He even convinced Phidias to join us, so we were five at the kitchen table. We worked at our lobsters and made a nice mess.

  "We look like the elves in Santa's toyshop," Aldo said.

  "I don't really like difficult food," Madeleine said, handing a claw to David to crack for her. "I adore the lobster salad at the Hotel Pierre, but I've never felt the need to know the source."

  "There won't be lobsters on this coast in fifteen years," Phidias said. "All the beds are going empty."

  "It used to give me hives when I was a child," I said.

  "But it was all in your head, right?" David said, smiling at me lasciviously.

  "It itched all over."

  "Did you know that some people are allergic to other people?" Aldo asked. "They wheeze and get all stuffed up and itch and everything."

  "It's all in their heads," David said.

  "Pardon us, Doctor Freud," Aldo said in a vamp's voice. Then he turned to me. "Maybe you were allergic to yourself."

  "No, that's me," Madeleine said. "Write a book about yourself sometime and see how sick of you you get."

  "Books aren't expressive enough," Aldo said. "I think I would like to choreograph a dance about myself. A three-act ballet."

  "What you ought to be," Phidias told him, "is a TV show."

  Considering how we loved, we should have been wildly jealous of one another, and we weren't. Somehow we had skipped that phase. Potshots and flesh wounds, yes. Aldo and Phidias still hadn't done time together alone in the same room, and they tended to express a kind of disbelief in each other. David and I did a thirties number sometimes, wisecracking and fast-talking much as Madeleine and Phidias had on the day they met again. Madeleine railed at us all for what we lacked in experience. "Is it because you're men or because you're younger than I that you don't know the difference between getting what you want and wanting what you get?" was a typical speech, and Aldo would beg her, "Stop with the Ethel Barrymore, Madeleine. You are not in church." But there was no discernible heavy artillery on the field. We managed at dinner to keep in motion the guts of the boardinghouse supper and the cachet of the captain's table. For once, perhaps, we were not worried about love. We were so different from one another that none of us posed a threat.

  "What about the book?" Phidias asked.

  "I've done twelve pages about my first year in LA."

  "That should work out to about a libel suit per page," I said, swirling a forkful of meat around in a bowl of drawn butter and feeling fine.

  "Don't worry, dear," Aldo said. "We'll put the advance in escrow in case any aging stars want to sue her."

  "No no, Aldo," Madeleine protested, "it's just the opposite. I'm so upbeat I could scream. I make Hollywood sound positively rosy. That can't be how it was."

  "Wasn't it supposed to be the fall of the Roman Empire?" asked David, his eyes agleam. You could tell he would have had a lovely time in Rome. "Bathtub gin and heroin and wanton chorus girls and strip poker and riding crops—"

  "No David, that was Berlin," Madeleine said. "But I never went out. All those dry hills got on my nerves for a long time. And nobody invited me to parties because I couldn't speak English. Or because I was queer," she added in a sleepy voice.

  "Chapter one, Madeleine in exile," I said.

  "People had faces then, didn't they?" Phidias asked, and it surprised me, as if it never occurred to me that he went to the movies. Later, I thought it surprised me because it was such a gay line.

  "Who said that?" Madeleine demanded.

  "Gloria Swanson," said David, ever the earnest archivist.

  "Oh, her. Sunset Boulevard. I turned down that picture, you know."

  "That's what they all say, Madeleine," Aldo said.

  And then the doorbell rang. It had only rung once before, when Farley came, and so we all knew what it was except Aldo. "What's that?" he asked, and we answered in a lopsided chorus, "The doorbell." I looked around the table. We all wore expressions that, to differing degrees, seemed to say, "Who can that be?" We looked for a moment like the strangers gathered in a waiting room. The pause was only a second or two, but the talk stopped, and so did the clinking of lobster shells. Phidias broke the silence and said it was one of his sons, which made sense since none of them would have had the temerity to walk right in. He stood up and took off his lobster bib and stopped at the sink to wash before going off to the front door. Hurry, I thought, because what if something's wrong. David and Aldo began to eat again, all unconcerned. Madeleine caught my eye across the table and silently questioned me. What did I think it was? she seemed to ask, but almost playfully, as if we needed a good surprise about now.

  "Is it hard to write?" David asked.

  "No," she said, "but it's hard to care."

  "Bullshit, Madeleine," Aldo said. "What you don't like about it is that you can't pay yourself compliments."

  And the three of them were off again while I strained to hear what was going on at the front door. But in vain. There would have had to be screaming for me to hear it so far away. Something like "Fire!" or "Help!" would have carried, but apparently it was none of those. I couldn't at the moment think of a crisis in the milk business that it might be. And of course it was hard to take it seriously that it might be a disaster, because it was Friday night, we were all together, and the enemy was variously on Block Island and in Chesapeake Bay and North Africa.

  "Shh," I said. I could hear Phidias coming through the dining room, and then the door swung open. From the look on his face, it was bad but not catastrophic.

  "It's Tony," he said.

  I knew that's what he was going to say.

  "He's in North Africa," I said.

  OH NO HE WASN'T. He had come home. And in the ensuing confusion, there really wasn't time to get into the fine points of why his plans had changed. Phidias told Madeleine to go up the kitchen stairs and lock herself in Mrs. Carroll's room, and she made him promise to stall off a visit until the following morning. Tony was going to expect to stay in his old room, Phidias said, and that, David and I knew, meant we had to vacate the tower. Aldo cleared off Madeleine's place at the table, but there really wasn't time for us to disappear or negotiate a story that explained who we all were. Phidias said that, as soon as he got his things out of his car, Tony would be on his way in here for a drink. So he drinks, I thought. There was nothing for us to do but sit there and pick through the remains of our lobsters and try to look properly sheepish and brazen by turns. As if we had been caught by the master with our servants' boots on top of his desk while we tried a pipeful of his tweedy tobacco.

  As Madeleine opened the maid's door to go up the back stairs, she turned around to give an exit line. As it happened, only I was watching her because Phidias was
giving orders, and David and Aldo were bustling to get them done. She spoke in that whisper she could aim like a laser, and no one else heard her as she spoke across the kitchen to me.

  "The plot thickens, eh?"

  She closed the door behind her, and her footsteps sounded on the steep stairs. She had gotten her way after all, and she loved it. As to the plot thickening, I grinned at the thought that some movie lines were so surreal they had probably never made it into movies. When I think back on it, I see it was the first time all summer that I didn't take my psychic pulse and note what I was feeling. The first time in years, really. As I considered quickly the range of things that could happen in the next day or so, I found myself full of scenes and not full of me. I gauged the other three men in the room as I would have measured my infield in the ninth inning. Or no: as I would have squinted from one to another of the men in my gang before a holdup in broad daylight.

  We still had enough lobster to keep us busy, but no one seemed to know what to say. I did. To make us seem casual and self-possessed, I began to spin a yarn about lobsters, something out of my youth I didn't know I remembered. About a lobsterman who wouldn't eat them, who said they were full of slow poison and caused cancer. I talked to him gravely at the town dock when I was a child. "He must be dead now," I said, but it didn't depress me much. When Tony Carroll walked into the room, a half-gallon of Dewar's under his arm, I was talking too much and the others were unnervingly silent, heads bowed to their dinner. We looked like any four dumb workingmen, but I at least looked like their leader.

  "Are you mother's nurse?" he asked me.

  "You mean David," I said, fingering him as I pointed across the table.

  "We don't say nurse," David said neutrally. "She says she doesn't need a nurse."

  "That's where mother gets all her power, isn't it, Phidias?" Tony said. "She defines all the words."

  Phidias shrugged his shoulders and continued eating, apparently having heard it all before. I saw that Tony Carroll was almost as old as I am, and it disoriented me differently than had the similar recognition about Aldo a few weeks before. I had wrongly assumed Aldo was an Older Gentleman, and I always thought Tony would turn out to be a Boy. Because he was the baby of the family, I suppose. But also, Phidias and Madeleine seemed to talk about him as if he suffered from a very young man's loss of self. The only self that kind has to lose so far is a child's, and they lose it badly and clumsily. If they are gay as well, they lose it again and again until they come out or until they are thirty, whichever happens first. Tony Carroll was an aging baby, and he wasn't aging well. He had a drunk's baggy eyes. His face was curious because in some places it seemed drawn and tight and in others puffy and numb. He wore the sort of nondescript sport jacket and tie that told you he was about to go into a classroom smelling of boys and teach a class in lower mathematics or Latin verbs. And he was gay all right, but you could tell he hated it and kept it to himself. I felt a little leap of rage.

  "How was North Africa?" David asked. David, I saw, was the one who was going to be polite. I certainly wasn't.

  "Grotesque," he said, putting ice in a glass. He talked as he undid the wrappings on the bottle. Of course, we already had scotch. But people who bring their own liquor do not want to be restrained by other people's fifths and jiggers. "I had the shits in Algiers for four days, and the guide I hired stole my suitcases. There was an airport strike the day I was supposed to leave. I sat in a Quonset hut on the runway drinking rotgut Algerian wine for sixteen hours until I could convince someone to take a bribe and get me out."

  "You really make me see it," Aldo said. "I'll bet you teach English."

  "That's right." Tony looked at Aldo over the rim of his glass as he took a gulp.

  Aldo went on. "You know, you ought to write a letter to the Times about it. The travel section on Sunday is full of letters that would make your hair curl. Just write up the facts as if you were telling it at a party. Then people won't go to Algeria anymore, and their economy will get ruined."

  "Who are you?" Tony asked.

  "I'm in antiques."

  "What are you doing here?"

  "Appraisals. But I can't talk about it. There's a sacred trust between the dealer and his client." He turned to me. "I thought Algiers was a real kink. I had to dry out in the Canary Islands for a week before I came home. Algiers makes Vegas look like Kansas City."

  Wicked Aldo. If I had been in Tony's place, I probably would have had a small aphasic stroke if Aldo had done a number on me. But, perversely, Tony Carroll seemed to like the rough treatment he was getting from us. It meant, unfortunately, that he thought he could say what he wanted, too. I introduced myself as the summer handyman but kept a low profile and talked to Phidias in brief, telegraphic sentences about maintenance problems. Aldo cleaned up the lobster debris and managed to cut and serve a honeydew melon in such a way as to show anyone who might have ideas that the kitchen was his territory. I didn't think he had to fear any competition from Tony, who was so pasty-faced that he seemed to be in the middle, fat-thin stage of alcoholic malnutrition. It is one of my blind spots that I am not nice about drunks. I've been nice to too many, and they throw up all over you.

  So David was the only one who would talk to him. Tony sat down at Madeleine’s place and began a story about the house and the past that you knew from the beginning could go on until dawn. David nodded and looked him in the eye and made little noises of encouragement. It annoyed me that he could summon up good manners for the occasion when the occasion was cheap. I knew he could take care of himself, and I wasn't feeling jealous either. But I felt the same way Phidias did when he didn't want David to take care of me because it would hold him back. From what David had told me about Neil Macdonald and before him the primal shrink and before him the soccer player and the TV writer and the antique-car collector, he had finally learned that you can't love someone who does not see the connection between loving and taking care. Neil went so far as to prove to him that some people would rather be taken care of than loved because it's easier to hate the nurses than the lovers. It is the old double bind that goes: how can you love someone as awful as I am?—I hate you for having such awful taste. Drunks have this speech by heart, and they give it from about ten P.M. until they are left alone or fall over.

  Well, David had really learned that lesson, and I was the exam on which he was getting an A because I did see the connection. We were taking care of ourselves and would keep it up if we stayed together. That wasn't the problem here. David had this other habit, the one that let him play as he did with the dean long ago on Sea Island: letting older men particularly but plain men in general have a dose of his piercing interest and his candid, black, questioning eyes. He always said he didn't know he was doing it, and he couldn't seem to understand the difference between cruising and flirting. Cruising is blunt and satanic and carnal. It means, when you stare someone up and down, that you want to go to bed and nothing more. Flirting is too artful and subliminal to interest David much, and it tends to be something you do instead of going to bed. Because David favored the one over the other, he didn't believe that a man can practice both. He was teasing Tony and setting out lures and traps.

  Tony told his story but lost the thread. "Nothing has ever been as simple as the summers on this coast, and I am a man who works at being simple. I used to run away on Labor Day and hide, and my sad father would come and find me. I didn't have the heart to hide very well," he said, pausing to search for the next phrase. But he gave up. "Because he wasn't very bright."

  "What I love about it here," David said, "is that the land doesn't have four seasons. It has that many in a day."

  He didn't take this sweet-ass cheerful line when he was talking to the rest of us, when he bitched about the narrow summer on this gravelly shore. But when David is flirting, I think he wants to impress his listener most with how sensitive he is. And he gets sensitive in the mawkish manner of naturalists or those same travel writers in the Times that Aldo mocked. I pu
t a stop to it. I stood up and wiped my hands on the front of my jeans. I clapped David on the shoulder as if he were my sidekick in a B-western and said we had to go to work. Aldo followed us out of the kitchen, raising his eyes to the ceiling as the door swung shut. We left Tony sitting across from Phidias, his hand around the neck of the Dewar's, and we heard him say in a low voice, "Who are all these people?" He didn't have a clue about what it all meant, though the real test of course would be the next day, with the mother-and-son business.

  Aldo left us to go give Madeleine a preliminary report, and we didn't say anything until we were safe in the tower. David began to strip the linen off the bed.

  "We have to get rid of him fast," I said. "He can have a tender reunion with his ma, and then he's got to leave. Because he wants to turn this place into a Tennessee Williams play."

  "He reminds me of so many of my teachers in prep school. They used to seem so smart."

  "I'm surprised they weren't in a continuous cold sweat," I said, "with you cockteasing them all the time."

  "Is that what's on your mind?" he asked tightly, stuffing the sheets into a pillowcase. Then he flung it into the corner. We were on opposite sides of the bed.

  "That, and the sentimental crap about the seaside."

  "I was just trying to be nice. You acted like a goddam cowboy."