Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll

by Paul Monette

  "How do we know Tony will keep his promise?" I said. I wondered if Phidias cried at the grave too. "It doesn't seem as if he's ever told the truth. He could be turning us in right now."

  Phidias shook his head.

  "Not Tony. Don't you see? You're right—all he can do is lie. He's never found a good reason to tell the truth, and so he never has."

  "What if we turn out to be the good reason?" I wasn't worried. I liked this conversation for its own sake. We sat at opposite ends of the table like laborers at dusk, as if we were about to be served a beer.

  "Ever since he was a boy, he ran away. That's what he's doing now, and it's the only thing that makes him happy. I bet he's forgotten about us already."

  "Okay," I said. "I'd just feel a lot easier if he'd never shown up."

  "No, Rick. He's the one we needed. He proved we wouldn't panic."

  "I panicked for a while," I said, not a shred of pretense left that I was the lifeguard.

  "No, you didn't." Statement of fact. He didn't let me get away with affecting a hysteria like Tony Carroll's.

  We had not talked again about David and me. I wanted to let him know my friend and I were doing fine, but I also hoped he had noticed himself. It was hard. My sharpest memory of my own father finds us in his smoky study, me telling him I was a whiz at arithmetic or reporting my viola teacher's praise or something, just so he would notice me. And my father says tautly, "A gentleman doesn't talk about himself." Consequently, of course, I can barely be relied upon to say my own name, even when asked. I was shy about telling Phidias now that everything was going to be all right with me. But I wanted to badly, because he'd complimented me.

  No time. He stood up and moved along the railing to the stairs.

  "You know when I stopped being scared?" he said.

  "When?"

  "When Arthur Carroll died. He's the last person who could have made things bad for me." He went down the stairs, and the rest faded into the language I was used to in him. "I have to go see about the paint. You know how to paint? We're going to start painting in a few days."

  He walked away across the lawn without waiting for an answer. I did not in fact know how to paint, but I wouldn't have said so then for anything, because I could learn. I fancied at that moment that I would go around in my flame-colored trunks till the end of the summer and never wear anything else except a splotch here and there of white paint.

  I went on into the house. In the kitchen, Aldo was sprawled at the table, cookbooks open all over. He was as absorbed as a pure mathematician, but he came out of it to talk to me.

  "I hope you're not hungry, because there's nothing to eat. Why are you dressed like that? Are you going to a masquerade?"

  "Don't I look like a lifeguard, Aldo? My pecs are as good as David's, and I'm a whiz at mouth-to-mouth."

  "You're a dream, honey, but that suit is too Jones Beach. It doesn't work." He sighed and buried himself again in the recipe. "You people just don't understand the class of this place."

  I fried two eggs. I silently called on the gods of the house to bless Aldo, who had such a feel for what was classy there. He had spent his life shuttling from one manicured Beverly Hills dollhouse to another, from ersatz colonial to ersatz Tudor, and Mr. Carroll and Donald Farley probably would have hated him the most of all of us interlopers. He was candid and racy with jokes about money and power the way other people are about sex. He was such a booster of the California life that you figured he should be on the state payroll. If he had been straight, he would have risen to the top of the Jaycees and died of happiness. But in spite of being an alien in New England, he had the fullest appreciation of the stature of Mrs. Carroll's house. He didn't demand that we eat in the dining room or mind our language, and he didn't really care what I wore. But like a fugitive from Tara, he knew the use of every nut dish and copper pot, and he broke out the wedding linen and the French crystal. David had had a mild case of manorhouse manners just after he arrived, but it had to do with getting his mind off Neil Macdonald. Aldo sighed over the oak and petit point embroidery and fell in love with the old world of the house as he sifted its artifacts. You would have thought the place was Venice, where all the old queens go when they die. Mrs. Carroll would have loved his sense of values.

  I ate my eggs out of the pan. Every bite was so hot that my eyes watered, but I needed the one-to-one connection between me and the food as much as Aldo needed four separate recipes for crème caramel.

  "Where's Madeleine?" I asked.

  "Her Grace is at work on A Star Is Born" he said, bringing one of his books close to his face. "What kind of a fish is a blue?"

  "It's just a fish," I said, not prepared to talk about the earth's dumb creatures. "The meat is dark, and it tastes strong. Is she writing about the thirties?"

  "'Santa Monica, 1935.' That's what she wrote on the top of the page. I expect it will be lists of dinner guests and poolside games, which is just what we want. But she acts as if she's been asked to write the Psalms. She doesn't want anything from the outside world until the sun has set. Except her lunch."

  "The singing last night jogged her memory, I bet."

  "We remind her of everyone," he said. "Don't you think you and I remind her of each other sometimes?"

  "Yes."

  "Does it bother you?"

  "No."

  "Me neither."

  "At this rate," I said, changing the subject because we were both a bit embarrassed at how affectionate we'd been, "she's going to let it run to several volumes."

  "She wants to do it up fat, like Churchill on the Second World War. And he didn't know anyone compared to her."

  "I wonder where David is," I said, because I was still, as I had told Tony, looking for my friends. I had ascertained about Phidias and Aldo and Madeleine. Now David.

  "In there," Aldo said, pointing at the butler's-pantry door. It threw me off balance that he was so close, just the one door separating us. But we were going to have much less trouble putting Tony to rest now that he was on the road. I was feeling once again that David and I were safe. We were not bound by the nooses of the past, and if our being human led us back to old errors like looking after drunkards, then we had better learn all we could about making the passage safely back and forth. Six or seven years ago, in our golden age, I called us safe because we were connected to nothing besides one another, and I was probably right, as far as golden ages go. Time can stand still now and then. But we did not connect now like the bodies on the beach or the herded deer who leapt as one. We verged on each other like the sea, the beach, the marsh, the pines, wild with contrasts at the shared edges. We were living peaceably on our common borders, and we would only be as safe as our safe passages.

  I put the frying pan in the sink and walked over and swung open the door. The room was darker now than it would be in the late afternoon, and it was empty.

  "He's gone," I said.

  Aldo looked up and fixed me with a suspecting eye.

  "Why don't you let him alone?"

  "Why should I?" I asked, not angry but surprised. It was odder even than Phidias's saying I shouldn't let David take care of me. Here, Aldo seemed to have more information than I did. But he must have thought I was saying it was no affair of his, because he gave it up and shrugged at me.

  "He's fooling with the china," he said.

  I walked into the pantry and let the door swing shut behind me. David shouldn't be so angry with me, I thought. He should have slept it off. To my right, the door to the china closet was closed, and I almost knocked before going in. But that seemed too damned tentative, so I just said "David" to let him know it was me and then opened the door.

  He had taken his shirt off because of the heat, and the raw smell of his sweat filled the high, shelf-lined room. He did not turn around right away but tilted his head to the side instead, as if he were listening for something. With all those stacks of porcelain, the tureens and Toby jugs and tea things, it was like the Victorian version of an Egyptian
tomb. There was hardly room for two, but I stepped on in and closed the door as I said my breezy line: "Once you've come out of the closet, you know, it's bad form to go back in." I said it as lightly as I felt it, determined to be rid of Aldo's caution. David and I would arrive at a truce. Barring that, I thought, I was amenable to surrender.

  When he turned, I noticed three things, and in this curious order: that he was red-eyed, that he held in each hand the unequal halves of a broken plate, and that one cheek was puffed with a bruise that ran, blue-black, the length of the jawline. Well, I know I saw the wound first, but I must have willed the violence away and sought out something homely. He has broken a plate, I thought, so we will have to fix it, and then he won't cry. Then he put his arms around my neck and cried hard, the kind of crying that shouldn't be stopped. It was Tony, I knew, who'd done it, and my next thought was that I'd track him down and kill him. I raged at myself for having relented and waved good-bye. I went at the speed of light from mending a dessert plate to shooting Tony in the abdomen. He had not turned us in to the police, but the bastard had gotten back at us.

  David's tears stopped after a while, but he still held on to me. His face was buried in my neck. He had his arms around my shoulders, and now and then I could hear a tiny clash as the two parts of the dish hit against each other. In the interval, my anger changed too. I felt sure that I didn't have anything to accuse David of, and so it was hard to be angry at all. The absence of that censoring reflex in me made me dismiss Tony as something terrible that was over with. He wasn't worth my fury. As long as David and I were holding on to each other, everything was going to be all right. The enemy was not us. I held David close until he was ready to talk, and I looked up meanwhile at the goods that towered over us. We could have been in the hold of a ship. The old Carroll captains had once sailed back and forth to China, and we were in the middle of the loot.

  "Is he gone?" he asked, an inch from my ear.

  "Yes. You don't have to talk about it."

  He pulled away so that he could look at me, and his eyes seemed quieter now, though the sight of the bruise sent another jet of violence through me. He started to talk, but he was distressed by the broken dish, which he didn't seem to know where to put down. I took the two pieces from him and held them in one hand.

  "Don't worry about the plate," I said.

  "Oh, I didn't break it," he said, as if this matter needed to be attended to first. "I found half of it in May when I was arranging the dishes. It was cold in here then. I found it at the back of a shelf. And I just found the other half in this drawer. When you came in, I was wondering who put the pieces in two different places. And why."

  "When I came in, you were crying."

  "It made me sad."

  "Is that all right?" I said, my fingers fluttering close to his cheek. He didn't flinch.

  "It aches, but it's all right. Listen," he said, putting his hand up to make contact, and his fingertips lighted on my breastbone and rested for a bit. "I went into his room this morning to talk. Because I didn't want him to leave feeling bad about yesterday. He was still in bed, so I sat down and started talking."

  "About what?" I said, because he paused. I wanted it out fast, and so did he.

  "You and me. I tried to explain how it isn't just one thing to be gay, that everything doesn't fit. I talked about us fighting."

  I could have said just then that we would never fight again. It would have turned out to be a lie, of course, but I wouldn't have been lying when I said it. We had moods that could have shaken all these dishes into dust, and in an opposite country we went with the changing weather as if we had been designed for it, like windmills or cactus. The wonder was in the completeness of each mood. I would hate David, or he would be out to protect me, or we would be sitting in the same room racked by the loneliness in it. Very specific scenes. And, watching us, you would not believe there had ever been or would ever be anything different from the present configuration of language and the light and two grown men.

  "He saw us fight," I said.

  "I meant the kind that goes on and on," he said with the curl of a smile that flattened out on his bruised side.

  "What did he say?"

  "Nothing, but he let me suck him off." There wasn't any transition in the sentence, as there wasn't in the event, I expect.

  "What happened?" What happened, I thought, was still another conclusion to David's youth. It had ended a hundred times for me, too.

  "He came in my mouth," he said, "and then he leaned over to the bedside table and picked up the lamp. I didn't believe it, so I didn't duck." He shrugged. There was nothing further he could think of to say. It was an event wholly without details or subtleties. The damaged vision that mixed up sex and pain was what men risked when they lived in the closet, and David and I could have come up with a list of the bad loving of sick men. They were a weird given of gay life. They made love a couple of times a year, and they boiled with guilt.

  "When I came to," he went on, "He was out of the room, so I ran away. Should I have stayed and beaten him up?"

  "I don't know."

  "Would you have?"

  "Maybe. Then he'd have called the constable, though, and we would have had the case of Mrs. Carroll."

  "You're not mad."

  "At you? Christ, no."

  "Do you think I did the wrong thing?" he asked, just a shade of ambiguity in the adjective.

  "It turned out that way. It could have turned out differently."

  "Last night you said I was wrong," he said, not willing to let it go.

  "I was wrong," I said, and I liked the force of the echo. "Come here."

  He didn't have far to come, since we were only a foot apart. It seemed best to keep holding on. I wrapped my arms around him and spread my hands along the muscles of his shoulder blades. He told me in my ear where he had run, down the beach to the boathouse, up the field to the quarry, then through the woods and into the pasture with the cows. So the sweat on him was the sweat of miles. He said that for hours he couldn't stand still in one place, and he didn't see the irony in that and how he stood now, resting against me. I had had the notion from Madeleine's window that the whole estate was a board game. As I thought of David running out the knot in his heart, I had a different notion. This was the deer's habitat. It needed the range of the whole territory it was born to own, since it was meant not to stand still. Mrs. Carroll, I thought, must have felt that people had the same need, though they only knew it by a wave of suffocation filling their heads like a migraine. All summer, then, the land had been right for us, because it fit the shape of our running away.

  "Do you know why I like it in here?" he asked. He began to gently squeeze my sides and run his hands up and down, but very slowly.

  "I think so."

  "Tell me."

  "Because it makes you sad."

  "You mean, I'm like Aldo," he said, laughing at the thought. "I want the house filled with state dinners and balls and five-course lunches."

  "No. This is the place where nothing is touched, isn't it? And now that you've put it all in order, it makes you sad that you can't protect it forever. You'd hide this room under a mountain if you could."

  "It's crazy, isn't it? Tom Swift and his treasure. It doesn't even matter that it's china. It could be a lot of anything."

  "Are you really all right?" I asked, and I opened my mouth against his neck and tasted him.

  "I'll feel a lot better when you fuck me."

  I held him out at arm's length, this guileless boy in the blue jeans, and said no.

  "You fuck me," I said.

  No doubt about it. You come to an impasse now and then.

  But wasn't he too shaken up to make love? He thought not. He said it would clear his head. You could say that he hadn't learned anything at all from the nightmare early in the morning, because here he was again, still out to prove that a tumble in bed was a miracle drug. But I didn't say so. The kinds of desire are as various as the kinds of running,
and we would never know either without the range. I admit it: I still wished I could make the connections. Between David in Tony's bed and David here. Between the singing last night and standing half-naked now. But I didn't dare go into it too far, because it was all contrasts, wherever I looked. The china closet and the whole outdoors. Madeleine and Mrs. Carroll. Midsummer and after. It seemed that the answer might be in the question, in contrast itself, but I was not ready to follow that out.

  "What do we do, flip a coin?" David asked, reaching over and tugging at the waistband of the orange suit.

  "Let's go to bed," I said, "and count up as far back as we can and see who deserves it."

  But it was not what you would call an insoluble problem. We both deserved it. So all we had to do was do it twice. When we burst out of the butler's pantry and into the kitchen, Aldo was fixing a tray with Madeleine's lunch. "Don't fall for lifeguards," he said to David as we passed. "They get lost at sea." But who was listening? We ran through the house and up the stairs, and all the pictures on the walls tilted as we thundered by. Madeleine bellowed for quiet. We locked ourselves in the tower, stripped, and fell to it like sailors wrecked on an island. You could tell that we weren't really thinking, because we didn't of course have to bolt the door. We were safe enough.

  Now that I live by the sea all year, I only bathe in it for two weeks, at the end of August. The water is too cold before that. The air is too cold after the beginning of September. I have always swum as well as I walk, but it has been my fate to live in a place where swimming is a sometime thing. It is certainly my own damn fault, but for most of the year I am a fish out of water. Well, who isn't. I have been a bit bedridden in the last few years, and I would like to end by being "sea-ridden." So, on the last nice day of the summer, I am going to swim away and not come back. If I get washed up, I want to be buried on my own land. But if I am lucky, I will stay right out there and get picked up by the Gulf Stream and be warm forever.