Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll

by Paul Monette

  "Nice is not the plan, David. That washed-out closet case could have us arrested."

  He picked a clean, folded sheet out of the laundry basket at his feet and unfurled it between us. It floated down onto the bed, and we began to secure it at the corners.

  "Don't you trust Madeleine?" he asked in a tone that can only be described as a dare.

  "Of course I do." I did. I was going on the assumption that Madeleine could bring it off. I don't know when I had changed my mind. "But how can she keep it up? This dude is just passing through, I think, and Aldo has made him so nervous I think he'll split. But if he gets to be your pal and teach you a little English and steal your dirty underpants when you're not looking, he may move in for good."

  "We'll talk about it later," David said, and he flapped open the top sheet. We moved to the bottom of the bed and tucked it in. The smell of the washed cotton was as sharp as the sea air.

  "Should we sleep downstairs in the same room?" he asked.

  "Maybe we should each have our own room, and it'll be just like a dorm."

  "Cut it, Rick," he said, and the temperature dropped. "If you want to talk about being sentimental, why don't we talk about you and the movies? And if you want to talk flirting, why don't we talk about you and Madeleine?"

  There was a pause in my head in which nothing happened, almost as if all the nerves paused at the same time and sent no information to the brain. The only thing I remember from college physics is that Einstein, on the day the general theory of relativity leapt at him out of the void, padded downstairs to breakfast and said to his wife, "I've had a marvelous idea." I could be getting it wrong since, speaking of grades, I got a seventy-eight. But it is also true that Einstein was absolutely the only one who interested me in the whole gray, pinch-printed book. Up in the bathroom shaving, he must have gone through a pause similar to mine. It is not as if I hadn't thought, all by myself, the two things David said, but I sure as hell never equated them with the two things I said about David. Could that be what I'm like, I wondered in disbelief. Could I be like David?

  I reached across the bed, put my hand behind his neck, and pulled him down onto the mattress. As I fell on top of him, I thought: I'm not angry, but we have to stop talking now. I tried to pin his shoulders down so that he would be on his stomach and not able to move, but he rolled away, and we wrestled for a long moment in a kind of embrace. Of course I was angry. I couldn't let him know something about me before I knew it about myself. I wanted him to take it back, now that he'd told me, so that I could admit it on my own and he could help me. I bear-hugged and scissored him for telling me so abruptly. We neither of us had wrestled since we were boys, I suppose, and we grappled in a way that was not so different from making love, only it was harder and meaner and somehow shy.

  And suddenly I was on top. My knees held him down at the biceps, and I gripped his wrists and sat like a jockey on his chest. He grimaced, and his face went red as he tried to heave me off. That got him nowhere, so he decided to negotiate.

  "What do you want, you cocksucker?"

  What did I want? He knew as well as I did that I would always be of two minds. In one way, I wanted something new every time I turned around. In another, I wanted the same old thing I always wanted, and it had no name, and the single feature it possessed was that I lacked it.

  "What," I asked, "are you going to do at the end of the summer?"

  My face was poised above his as if I were bent over my own reflection in still water. But I wasn't going to get away with the question. He bucked and strained and seemed as if he'd kill me if I let him go, which made it hard to want to let him go. Which was too bad, since I didn't like this scene now that it had gone on a bit.

  "Hold it, David, hold it. I'm going to get off you now."

  "I'll tell you what I'm going to do," he said in a husky whisper, and I stayed where I was until he stopped. "After I shit on you, that is. I'm going to run away with Tony Carroll and live with him in a Quonset hut. I'm going to let him piss in my mouth and handcuff me to his bed and drip candle wax on my naked ass. You don't know what the fuck you want, Rick. Let me up."

  "I'm going to, I'm going to. But cool it."

  I was hardly the convincing person in this situation to be holding out the olive branch, having thrown down the gauntlet only a minute or two ago. But I hushed him and lifted one knee. By chance he went into a convulsion of fury at the same time, and his wrist broke away from my grip as his arm came free from the mattress. The heel of his hand caught me full at the base of the nose. My head snapped back, and in the first zap of pain I thought my nose had been driven right into my brain. When I looked down at him again, he was wincing up at me as if the pain had struck him, too. And there was blood on his cheek.

  One of us has been hurt, I thought, but who? In a moment I knew I was the one, that it was my blood dripping on his face. He turned his head and brought up his sleeve to wipe it away and left a smear. By now his other arm was free. I still straddled him, kneeling on the mattress now, and he was holding me at the waist and telling me quietly to put back my head. I did, and it was then that I saw Tony standing in the doorway.

  "Excuse me," he said.

  "We were just changing the sheets," David said.

  I didn't say anything. I tasted the sweet, syrup red of my own blood in my throat, and I heard it bubble in my nose. I reached up to see if it was broken.

  "I just wanted to tell you not to move out," Tony said apologetically, wanting to get this over with. "I've got my gear downstairs in my sister's old room. Phidias should mind his own business."

  My nose was in one piece. "Do you need anything?" I asked, a certain phlegm in my voice.

  "I bring what I need with me," he said, raising his glass. "Are you all right?"

  "Well"—oh how he wanted to stay and chat—"good night." He seemed so embarrassed when he walked away downstairs that I felt embarrassed for him. No one should be that out of place.

  "See? He's just lonely," David said.

  "What do you mean 'just'?"

  "Shut up. You'll start bleeding again."

  He pulled me down beside him on the mattress. The moment of rage that had made me fight had passed completely. It receded now on the opposite shore, separated from me by this half-wit injury and the clumsy scene with Tony. I had a sinking feeling that I had to say something about Madeleine and another thing about David and say them in the same sentence. I had come all this way keeping the two ideas apart because I truly thought they were apart. David and Madeleine were night and day. But maybe not. I was a washout in algebra too, but what I was looking for was a factor like pi that could change a straight line into a circle.

  "What do you want?" he asked again.

  "Anything I can get."

  "I don't think so. You're not that desperate. That," he said, making a motion with his head toward the doorway, "is a desperate man."

  "We have to talk about Madeleine," I said.

  "Do you really want to go into it now?" It was a warning. We might have to fight an even bloodier fight.

  "No. Tomorrow."

  "Maybe they'll put us in the same cell," he said, and now he was smiling and gentle, "and we can argue about it for years."

  He kissed me lightly, but I couldn't kiss him on the mouth because I felt funny about the rank, steely taste of blood on my breath. So I nuzzled his cheek, but because the blood was still sticky there, I hunched down and kissed his neck. I wondered if there was blood on the sheets.

  Just after midnight, Phidias knocked at the french doors to the balcony off the bedroom. Madeleine woke with a start. She was sure it was Tony wanting to come in, and she cursed herself for not turning the lock. If he snaps on the light, she thought, or tiptoes in with a candle, he's going to find a bedraggled and unpowdered French singer where his mother ought to be and raise holy hell. She had set the alarm for eight, though she normally slept in until after ten, to give herself the whole morning to make up. For Christ's sake, she thought, if he
has to see her so badly that he needs to wake her up, why doesn't he call her once in a while? When I brought in Madeleine's breakfast the next day and found her whitening her hair at the mirror, she told me that she had almost rasped at the door: "Can't it wait until morning, Tony? An old woman needs her sleep." Then she decided she would just outwait him. He knew his mother was a little deaf.

  She was so sure that the knocking was coming from the door to the hall that she nearly screamed when the french doors opened. "It's me," Phidias said in the dark, as if he did it every night, and she sighed with relief. Her head ached. She should never have taken a Valium to get to sleep, she decided, because she would be too groggy now to follow the Greek's train of thought. But she had decided she'd better not have her lights on and so turned in as soon as she came upstairs from the lobsters. Otherwise, she would have been up half the night writing down the winter of 1930 and the shooting of La Bonbonnière. (Released in the United States as Lovesick the following summer, it played in Manhattan for twenty minutes before it was seized by the police, who burned the only print. No one here has ever seen it, but it made her an overnight star.) On the other hand, she reasoned as she tried to wake up, if she hadn't had the Valium, she would have screamed.

  Of course, Phidias was accustomed to the moonlit entrance to Beth Carroll's bedroom, and Madeleine didn't have the heart to scold him. As he sat on the bed and briefed her about Tony Carroll, in the rose light of the miniature bedside lamp, Madeleine felt certain that the years of midnight meetings were in his mind. Tony's arrival was a crisis that both Madeleine and Phidias were convinced she could handle. There was no need for a strategy session, since they had already been over the details of Beth and Tony a dozen times for Mr. Farley's visit on the third. Phidias wanted an excuse to be there at night.

  "I don't think he left until after two," Madeleine told me as

  I pulled open the draperies and mixed her coffee and scalded milk. "We went over some things I can't get right in the memoirs, and I read him what I've written. He says I'm jealous of the girl I was, and I said I thought she was a dodo. Then we came downstairs and had a brandy and talked about Beth. The nights are the worst, Rick. Anyone will tell you that. When is my baby boy coming up?"

  A little before noon, it turned out. Tony had clearly had a couple of drinks before he walked in, because he was hostile right from the beginning. The rest of us didn't know how to set him up for the meeting, so we decided we should steer clear. David ran into him at about eleven when they passed each other at the door to the second-floor bathroom. David didn't have his shirt on because he had been shaving, and Tony, his face constricted by a searing hangover, had taken a sad look up and down David's bare chest as he shuffled past and closed the door. They hadn't said anything. At eleven-thirty, Tony appeared in the kitchen, dressed and somewhat put together. Aldo was layering a lasagna and tried to be cheerful and talk food talk. He offered Tony breakfast—eggs and pancakes and sausages and grits. He sounded, as he put it, "as down-home as a waitress who can retire on her tips to Daytona Beach before she's fifty." Tony said no and got his bottle out of the pantry, looking suspiciously at the level to see if anyone was nipping it behind his back. We relayed our readings of his mood to one another, and at a quarter to twelve Phidias stuck his head through the french doors one last time and gave Madeleine the word.

  For the first few minutes, Tony stood just inside the door and talked from as far away from her as he could get. Madeleine had been concerned, when she originally agreed to take on the children, about the business of kisses and embraces. She told Phidias she was convincing as close up as three feet, but there were bits of putty and tape that would show if anyone got nearer. Nothing to worry about, Phidias said. Kisses had never been much in the Carroll tradition from the Mayflower on down, but the last several Christmases had been marked by a no-man's-land between everybody and everybody else. The policy with Tony was distinctly "hands off." When he walked in, he looked at her and then looked away at the room as if it were a dream he was having against his will. Madeleine told me later that she knew he was gay the moment she set eyes on him.

  "I got your card," she said, testing the timbre of the voice. "Why did you go there?"

  "Why do I go anywhere, Mother?" he asked, as if the question were deliberately aimed.

  "Well, I don't know. Didn't you have a good time?"

  "That's not the point. The point is, I wrote John and Sis that I did. And I sent chatty little cards to the headmaster and my department chairman and the creature who runs the switchboard at the school. Therefore, I have shown all the powers that be that I am a worldly-wise and self-reliant bachelor. John and Sis will say I'm finding myself. The school will say I'm broadening myself. Thus, they will avert their eyes and let me keep drinking."

  "How did Farley get hold of you?" she asked, wondering if he was so transparent because he was accustomed to dealing with adolescents.

  "Farley? Why, I didn't send a card to Donald Farley. That was naughty, wasn't it? No, he didn't get hold of me. What does he want?"

  "I wanted to see you."

  "What do you want?"

  "I wanted to read my will."

  And that broke the tension for him at last. He laughed out loud like a cough. Then he came forward to the foot of the bed, and she was surprised at how clumsy and wavering he was. Aldo had always been her image of a man at war with his body because he was fat. She came from places where you were thin or else. But Tony seemed less to have given up on his body—as Aldo had, his bread sopping round in the gravy—than never to have caught the drift of it at all. Madeleine had come upon every sort of neurotic at one time or another, and Tony was something else. "Crazy people," she said to me later, when it all came out in detail, "and people who punish themselves are obsessed with their bodies. When they crack up and fall apart, they study it. They're like people bent over cutting their toenails—they're hypnotized. But that boy is bodiless. He tries to divert your attention from it. Housewives do that."

  "Your will!" Tony said scornfully. "How positively Dickensian. Is it to be our last chance to beg for land? I have an idea. Why don't you award the family jewels on a point system? We'll decide who's been the most cruel to you, who's been the most indifferent. It will be like a parlor game."

  Madeleine told me she really didn't know what to do. Phidias had promised her it would be like this, but somehow she didn't believe that in the event it would be so sad. She thought there would be in their bickering a certain briskness and a quirky kind of humor. But it was more brutal than she expected. And she was expected to reply in kind. What she had secretly supposed all along was that she could turn this relationship around and let the sun in at last. It was her own damned fault.

  "You take to drinking from your father's side of the family," she said. She assumed it was typical of them not to answer each other's questions but instead to go on to the next assault. "It's hereditary, did you know that? They've proved it."

  "My father didn't drink."

  "Your father didn't drink like you do. He just drank enough to feel sorry for himself. It didn't take very much. A double old-fashioned would do it. I don't call a man a drinker because of how much he drinks."

  "How illuminating. Is the same thing true about sex?"

  "What do you mean?" she asked, making an old-lady gesture at the ribbons at the neck of her robe.

  "That it doesn't matter how much you do it. To be an adulterer, you can make it an everyday thing, or you can sin once in seven years."

  "Adulteress is the word you mean, I think. What a churchy word. Have you come home so that we can talk some more about Phidias and me?"

  "For once, dear lady, I have not come home to call you a whore." He was wearing a tight grin and holding on to both posts at the foot of the bed. Madeleine was offended by the histrionics because it was just plain bad acting. Madeleine had never been in an American school except once, when she heard a daft man in New York give a lecture about the tranche de vie pattern in
her films. It had made her queasy to listen, and Tony was doing the same thing.

  "I was sitting in a bar in Algiers," he said, "kind of taking sips at a Pernod. I had dysentery, see, and I didn't want to jostle my insides too much. And there was a Britisher there, about fifty, but he talked like a schoolboy about rugger and his old Classics master. And he just hated his parents because they went and got divorced when he was fifteen. Divorced." He fairly shrieked the word at her. "Well, I started to brag about our family secrets. Lady Chatterley and the milkman, I told him. And I realized something." He smiled a grim little smile, and then the tone lowered. The dramatics fell away. "If John and Sis and I had only had sex lives of our own, we wouldn't have kept up this punishment of you. See, John and his wife do it with their clothes on. Sis lies there like it's someone burning her with cigarettes. And I don't do anything at all. So it's our own fault. I don't forgive you, but it's not your fault."

  She didn't feel forgiven either, but she was touched by him and (curious for her, who let people alone) wanted to protect him. It struck Madeleine that people do give speeches half the time. But in the last few weeks, she told me, she had not been accustomed to hearing them. As I said, we had all been together here long enough to speak in code, and we had each other's number too well to let anyone spin out a whole speech without a hoot. Her protective instinct sprang from this: it was the first time Madeleine felt that we had replaced the Carrolls as the family in the house.

  "You figured all that out in a bar in Algiers?"

  "Dysentery is like truth serum. Why don't we have a drink? I bet it's afternoon."

  "Do you usually wait until noon?"

  He shrugged and turned away. He wasn't guilty about the drink, but he seemed exhausted by his own bile and was signaling for a break. Madeleine picked up the old horn that interconnected the bedroom and the kitchen and asked: "Is anyone there? We want liquor." She told Tony that he might have to go down himself, and then Aldo's voice answered back: "We read your Mayday, Commander. Over and out."