Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll

by Paul Monette

  Madeleine had the sense that each of them should go about his own business while they waited. Tony stood at the tall dresser and looked over the silver and porcelain odds and ends. From her bed, Madeleine looked out the bay window and considered mentioning the weather. It was drizzling, and she thought to tell him that it was the first rain in two weeks. Then she thought better of it, because he might hear an unintended irony in the remark, as if she equated his coming with that of the squall line. When she glanced back at him, she was surprised at how intently he examined the terrain of the dresser, as if the totem objects of his mother, her brushes and mirror and flagons, were as real to him as the old woman Madeleine played. The things on the dresser, she thought, must haunt his dreams along with the younger woman his mother used to be. The old woman Mrs. Carroll had become was someone different, and Madeleine knew that her impersonation was successful precisely because old people are somehow all alike to the young and the real mother is always the remembered woman with the clear skin and the long bright hair.

  Aldo knocked and came in with a tray and put it down in the bay window and then poured. He had brought the house scotch instead of the Dewar's, and the whole tray was done in crystal, with a decanted half-bottle of Bordeaux for Mrs. Carroll. There was a dish of cold hors d'oeuvres face to face with a dish of hot ones, the food arranged like the petals of a flower. Aldo was very visual. And very observant. He was able to report to us downstairs that the session was in his opinion about half over, that Madeleine's act was still together, and that Tony had at last been civil to him.

  "You ought to be a caterer," Tony said when he saw the food.

  "I may yet," Aldo said. "I change careers very rapidly so as to keep in step with my karma."

  "He's from California," Madeleine interjected.

  "I was a tycoon before I was in antiques. I can tell I'm entering a food phase."

  "It looks like he's moved in," Tony said when Aldo had gone. "He's gotten a good look at the furniture, and he wants first refusal when the heirs gather."

  "You mean when I die," she said, taking the wine glass from him and raising it in a brief toast.

  "Well, he'd best not hold his breath. That could take forever."

  "It had better not. If I outlive Cicely, she'll come back from the dead and drag me down by force."

  "Cicely will live forever. She has no vital organs."

  This conversation, Madeleine thought, was more like it.

  There was a real exhilaration in being antic about death, and some things like Cicely they could laugh about together. As they turned away from what they had come to be and began to talk about the old days, a rhythm was established between them in which the past could be traveled as the present was, as if there were no certain outcome to anything. "What I mean is," Madeleine said later, "it was very impersonal for a while. We could have been remembering the scenes in a film. He would picture something we did at the beach or something I said when I was angry, and we acted as if those things were suspended in time." They were in the eye of the hurricane, where the acts of the past could be seen as having no motives or consequences. The things that had happened were pure phenomena. Every moment was all by itself.

  "I haven't forgiven this house either," he said after a while, after they had repeopled it and restored some fragment of its long lost summers.

  "For what?" she asked. She never took wine herself because she was from Burgundy and had her fill of it in her youth. But to be true to character, she took a gulp of Mrs. Carroll's wine as if she loved it. She remembered dinners in Paris where Beth Carroll had ordered seventy-five-dollar vintages, and Phidias and Madeleine each left a barely tasted glass while Beth finished the bottle.

  "For promising such a wide, virgin world," he said.

  "You can't have it both ways, Tony. I thought the world was ever afterwards seamy and corrupt because I was a whore."

  "It's hard to explain. This house—and all this," he said, gesturing out the bay window at the forest and the sea. "I thought this was like the real world I would live in." He turned and faced her. "I had no plans, you see, to live in the world you and my father and Phidias inhabited. I was so sure that the places were clean."

  "If they're not, why do you keep traveling?"

  "Because I don't know what else to do with the summer. If I'm not on the move, I think too much about my summers here."

  "When you're old," she said crisply, tired of his despair, "you'll see there's nothing sad about the past except that it's past."

  "I'm a homosexual, you know."

  "I know."

  It didn't seem abrupt to Madeleine. It didn't even seem like a changing of subjects. He said it as if it might explain the interlocking circles of his angers, give a conscious source for the underwater current in their meeting today. But he was not forgiving himself, either, Madeleine saw. His admission was an acknowledgment of their failure to connect in the past, a nod to priorities long abandoned.

  "Why do you suppose we've never talked about it before?" she asked.

  "I suppose because there was already quite enough ammunition against you. I didn't need to accuse you of turning me queer, too."

  "Did I?" she wondered, not about to be convinced.

  "I don't know. I hate it so. It makes me so sick of myself. I've never had the stomach to follow out the guilt and properly assign it." He had drunk down his scotch fast, and he had been holding the empty glass in his hand for some time. It was like a pipe that had gone out.

  "Well, it's not my fault if sex makes you sick. Sex is the only goddam bonus you get in life. You might as well enjoy it."

  "But there is the matter of my taste," he said bitterly. "It runs to little boys."

  "How little?"

  "Sixteen. Seventeen."

  "That's not so little," she said. "But it's just because you're lonely, isn't it? Adolescents would be dreary lovers. So afraid of being funny, and so demonic. But I'm not the one to say. I don't like children."

  "I'm not good at it, that's the problem. Being in bed with a man gives me the creeps."

  "What gives you the creeps is that you're getting old and haven't had enough. But I'll tell you something. Nobody ever has enough."

  Madeleine has never been sentimental in a film, in spite of the tacky scripts and lingering close-ups that snuff out everyone's career in the end. She never seems to be working on unearned emotion. An existential moment occurs in the climactic scene where she appears to realize that things have gone too far, that she is being blown off course and is calling into question the laws about Love that are buried in her like perfect cities. One watches her withdraw, no matter what her lines are or who is holding her or shooting her, to the ancient civilizations where she must have been a virgin queen. Those critics who have never liked her work point to that refusal to play out the scene on its own terms as the key to the fact that she is a movie star and not an actress. Her admirers know that she will give up anything to live on her own terms. What makes the moment superb is that she is the one who goes too far and then must give up the luxury of the sentiment that has gone wrong. You watch her let it go, and you see how fatal it is to be human.

  "Nobody ever has enough" must have struck that moment like a clock at noon.

  "I don't know what I'm going to do," he said.

  "I expect you'll go on drinking."

  "Doesn't anything shock you?"

  "Winter does," she said. "People don't."

  "Someday I must stop trying," he said, suddenly becoming aware of the glass in his hand. She thought he was going to put it down and leave, and she drooped her eyes a quarter-inch to say it was time for her nap. He walked out of the bay window and paused to put the glass on the dresser. That seemed to remind him of something, and he turned to her and smiled.

  "There's one other thing," he said.

  "What?"

  "My mother's dead, isn't she?"

  "What?"

  "I think you'd better tell me what's going on."

&nbs
p; "I HATE RAIN," David said.

  "So you've mentioned. But it looks like West Texas out there. If you'll permit it just one day, it will make everything green again."

  "It doesn't matter. It'll all be dead in a while."

  "In about three months. I don't think there's any need to panic yet."

  "You don't understand."

  I don't understand. When everything else is said and done, that is David's last defense. I remember five years ago when we had reached the last awful weeks, the scorched-earth phase. David had met in the park an out-of-work sociologist—they are all out of work in Boston and thus cruelly horny—and they had sex in the sauna room at the YMCA in the late morning when it was empty. Tuesdays and Thursdays from ten to eleven. I might never have found out about it except that David got gonorrhea in his mouth and in his ass and had to tell me so that we could get treatment. And I remember us waiting to get injections at the VD clinic at the hospital. I had so many crimes to accuse him of, I didn't know where to begin. At the time, his keeping it a secret seemed worse to me than the adultery, which sounded even to me like a very churchy word. But I didn't understand, David said. It had nothing to do with sex or with me. But then he couldn't really say what it did have to do with.

  We were sitting in the library waiting for it to be over upstairs, and David drew the heavy drapes over the windows to shut out the rain. You had the sense with David that he was like a caged animal on a rainy day. Even at the best of times he was not likely to sit and read for very long. When he read, it was all self-improvement, books on isometrics and meditation and the like, or he would undertake a huge systematic work of Jung or Darwin, someone heavy, and put it aside at page fifty and talk about it for two weeks. I sat in the wing chair with my Dickens that I had been losing my place in all summer, and David paced. It was too much for him to suffer both a book-lined room and the rain on the same day.

  We made love when we woke in the morning, but there was too much on our minds. Not Tony Carroll, except insofar as he was so grimly gay and thus brought back the self-loathing that attended my own growing up. But I was in turmoil about David and me and how we perceived each other, that each of us seemed to believe he was mastering his life and curing his past while the other was making the same old mistakes. It was not as bad as that, but perhaps it was even worse. It could be that there were more crucial mistakes that each of us had been making all along, and they were masked by the more obvious, self-important bits of chaos that one puts in the way in order to fall over them and bloody one's knees. If it's true, I thought as we lay seized in each other's arms after we were done, listening to it rain, if I do feel in lieu of feelings only a memory along my nerves of the scenes in movies, then I can't love at all. That is much worse than the fiction of freedom that marked my fifteen years in the bars. Worse than the mating dance with David years ago, in which we vied to see who took care of whom. I don't ever sound sentimental. But I recall those purple moments on the screen and go too far and bend reality out of shape to fit them. Unlike Madeleine in the showdown scenes, I don't know when to withdraw or let it go.

  "Let's talk about Madeleine," I said.

  "I'm sorry about that, Rick," he said, coming over to stand at the back of my chair and look down at me. "There's nothing wrong with you and her."

  "I'm not talking about wrong," I said. I could almost feel the heat of his breathing on my head, but I would have had to throw my head all the way back to see him. I felt trapped in my chair by the dark fireplace. Then why don't you just get up, I said to myself. But I didn't. "I know I put her on a pedestal, but it doesn't usually matter because we live so far apart. It only happens a few days a year, when she comes to Boston."

  I could feel him shaking his head.

  "You have it backwards," he said. "When you're with her, you're fine. The two of you play it like Ping-Pong, and then you know where to leave each other alone. You're like two prosperous people who live in a big house and come and go." If Tony would only go, I thought, we would all be like that again. And then I thought it wasn't Tony's fault but the passing of summer, and it pierced me again that David and I were the same. "You and Madeleine both agree that movies and stars are for shit. It's the rest of the year that fucks you up. That's when you idolize her and act like a fan club."

  "I'm the keeper of her Hall of Fame," I said.

  "Usually people like Madeleine do that all by themselves. Have you ever met anyone else?"

  "You mean stars?"

  "Yes. They either catalog their successes at you, or they arrange it so that someone else does, and they have them on a salary. Madeleine doesn't seem to need it. You and Aldo always accuse her of being a prima donna who has to have applause, but I don't think she cares." When he mentioned Aldo and me in the same breath, he began ruffling my hair with his hand, as if to single me out. The rain had not dampened his little garden of insights. "Maybe she does do a star turn now and then, but I think it's to please the rest of us. She lets you and Aldo treat her like a queen."

  "You make me and Aldo sound like the seven dwarfs. We're very different," I said, pointlessly enough. "How do you know? Did you meet a lot of stars when you were in LA?"

  "Not the kind you mean," he said, finally letting my hair be. "But I met rock stars when I was out at the bars. It's the same trip."

  He left me, and I heard him go over to the outside doors and, opening them, bring in the fragrant breeze. There was no sound to the rain, as there had been when we woke up to it, but I knew it was still raining because he would have said so if it was over. Or he would have walked out, but he stood now on the threshold and seethed at the gods. I knew I was angry at him and that it was my way of doing something with the anger I felt at myself. I didn't want to listen to him talk about his rock stars and compare them to anything Madeleine might have felt. Yet I knew I didn't need to protect her. One evening, a week before, David told a story at dinner of being on the set of a pornographic film. He and Madeleine went on amiably about the craftspeople while I sat rigid and hated the implication that there was something in common between his film and hers. I was the one who acted in need of protection. It wasn't David's fault, then or this morning. I didn't know what he was feeling about me, but I didn't blame him, whatever it was.

  "I don't like the rain either," I said.

  "Oh, I know. You'd probably even say so if I weren't around."

  "No, I never have." Get up, I said to myself. Stop hiding out in this goddam chair. So I did. I got up, and I threw down the Dickens and lost my place, and I didn't care, because he wasn't as good as he used to be. I did not, after all, have to finish every book I started. Nobody (alas) was keeping score. "But I don't want to admit that it makes me sad because there's so much of it. You know?"

  "Sure. Come look at it."

  I walked over and stood next to him. I didn't want to go to bed with him right now, but I would have given anything to start the morning over happy, with a clean and clear-hearted fuck.

  "It frightens me," I said, "when I think you feel the same things I do. I don't know why. It's supposed to make me happy. People who meet and fall in love stay up all night agreeing with each other, don't they?"

  "For the first few nights," he said wryly. "Then they're on their own. The rain looks like it covers the whole ocean, doesn't it? It looks like it's raining everywhere."

  He was looking out at it, but I wasn't. I had developed the power not to see it, and besides I was more interested in watching him. Standing next to David in the doorway, loving him as I did, I liked the light wind and the fine mist it blew over us. And he didn't look so stricken either, though I was not ready to tell him so. I believed him that the rain must have thrown him into grief all through his youth and was the perfect outward image of his boredom and the meaningless run of time. I meant it when I said that it hurt me, too. But I think he was mournful now that the pain he suffered was not as simple as the rain. He hated the weather now for its indifference and no longer believed in its willful furies a
nd cold shoulders. And he couldn't admit the change.

  "I lie to you sometimes," I said, "so you won't know I agree with you."

  "The difference between you and Aldo," he went on, as if there hadn't been a break in that conversation, "is that you insist that you know Madeleine best. His act is different. He thinks she'd be out on the street if he didn't keep his hand in."

  "No one knows Madeleine very well," I said, thinking to begin modestly but about to make it clear that no one knew her better. I understood her best is how I would have put it.

  "No one knows about Phidias," he said, but I didn't know what he was trying to say. I thought he must be telling me that he, too, knew someone better than anyone else. Or it was an oblique remark about Mrs. Carroll and how, with her dead, Phidias had lost the person who had him by heart. As with the rock stars and the pornographic film, it seemed a forced and inadequate comparison to Madeleine, and so I ignored it and looked out at the gray, low-roofed world.

  "You don't either, do you?" he asked.

  "We get along all right," I said, not caring a whole lot. Why were we going on about Phidias? "I haven't spent much time with him."

  "Rick, they were married."

  Please don't let him mean Madeleine and Phidias, I thought. But there wasn't anyone else he could mean.

  "How do you know?"

  "He told me. Way back at the beginning, before the two of you came here." From the look on his face, he seemed sorry he'd told me, though as I went back over the confusion of the last several sentences, I felt how firmly he'd wanted to teach me a lesson. That wounded me. It seemed to be fighting dirty to use the truth like a weapon when the truth hurt all by itself.

  "Isn't he married to the woman on the farm?" I asked, feeling off balance. But who had ever seen her? If this had been a Hitchcock film, the farm woman would never have existed at all.

  "Now he is," David said. "I mean he and Madeleine were married in France in the twenties. For three or four years. When they came over here, they broke it off. She went to Hollywood, and he came to work for the Carrolls. I don't know where he met the farm wife."