He decided to dress as casually as possible and, by doing so, project the “I don’t give a shit” mode of fashion, a notion difficult to parade in the materialistic eighties and nineties.
“So whaddya think about this Iron John philosophy, Doris?” Frederick asked the mirror. He stepped back two steps and crossed his arms. The word swagger came into his mind. “A little too primal for you, Doris? Come on, let’s tap-dance on the table. Let’s shout haikus down the commode. Let’s bake some marijuana brownies and pass them out to all those Right-to-Lifers.”
He patted a bit of aftershave about his face and wondered if Geraldo’s own face was stinging, not to mention his ass. It wasn’t just women anymore who sliced and carved and pumped and stitched their bodies in order to feel better about themselves. Geraldo said it himself, on national television, so that there could be no doubt. “I’m a jock,” Geraldo confessed. “I thought face-lifts were for sissies.” Well, they weren’t, not anymore. Face-lifts were for everybody.
• • •
The drive up to the house seemed endless. He passed what appeared to be small groves of fruit trees, apple, and maybe some plum. He crested the hill and leveled into a driveway filled with small circular flower gardens. Enormous pots bulging with blooms rimmed the drive. The front of the house was all immense, tall windows. The rest of it expanded backward, beyond more trees and arbors and what looked like a terraced pool within a stone archway. He had imagined liveried servants swarming the grounds, a veritable barricade to which he must explain his presence, but no one was about. Two cats slept in the shade of a flowerpot filled with something purple. He could hear the sounds of birds rise up from somewhere beyond the terraced pool, not the usual birdsongs and notes he might hear while walking, but exotic sounds. He pulled up in front of the house and got out of his car. He left the key in the ignition in case some valet bounded out to park it elsewhere.
When he pushed the brass doorbell, he heard instant music rise up inside the house, a jangling of notes and chords, more like the horrendous stuff blaring from the Ellsboro Street ice-cream truck than what he would expect from the Bowen residence. A woman with a face incapable of smiling opened the door. Frederick assumed she was either the housekeeper or Grant Wood’s model for the farmwife in American Gothic. He had been about to say, “Mrs. Bowen is expecting me,” but she hadn’t bothered to wonder who was expecting him or why. She beckoned for him to follow, then led him through a hallway that was heavily mirrored. Light bounced from all angles as they walked. The sections of walls that were not mirrored seemed to be alternately covered with quilted satin and realistic paintings of plants, so real that Frederick had to look again. Hanging plants; tall, narrow potted plants; little plants in dishes. None of them real. What was that “fool the eye” school of painting called? Oh yes, trompe l’oeil. Frederick had read that some Greek guy had even painted grapes so real that birds tried to eat them. But he had never understood the concept. Why fool the birds? And couldn’t the Bowens afford real indoor plants?
They turned from the hallway into a large room filled with furniture and objects so eclectic that Frederick was certain they’d been collected over many years, from many bustling world cities, from many quaint village shops: a ceramic-tiled coffee table, a painted stool that resembled things medieval, a wine-tasting table, a hexagonal gaming table, Empire chairs, paintings that looked like honest-to-God Constables and Gainsboroughs, and probably were. What appeared to be a hand-forged chandelier dangled overhead. Massive layers of curtains hung from the walls, providing the illusion of more space, as if the Bowen mansion needed such illusions. And there, amid it all, was Doris Bowen. She was seated on an Empire chaise, enjoying the picture window view of a small millpond that sported several black swans. At her feet, a huge Great Dane—a descendant, no doubt, of Cerberus—lay with its massive head on its paws, eyes on the new visitor.
“Frederick,” Doris said, and smiled. “Would you like a drink? Larry will be serving lunch in a few minutes.” Larry? Weren’t male servants called Rupert and Holmes or such?
“Martini,” Frederick said, and she rose to fix it herself. The dog turned its enormous head toward her, its eyes glued to her back. Frederick wondered if perhaps it had been a man in another life, a victim of courtly love, now content to lie at the feet of its mistress, waiting for the occasional stroke of a hand, the falling crumb. Doris poured herself a glass of wine.
“Arthur’s in New York on business,” she said. “He’s really just killing time until he can kill something else, when the Glorious Twelfth arrives.” Frederick raised both eyebrows. “The twelfth of August,” Doris explained, “when grouse season opens in Scotland. It’s been a big deal for over a hundred years.” She gave him the martini.
“Interesting,” Frederick said. Had Chandra ever picketed in the glens of Scotland? He could envision her now, in tweeds, thwarting Arthur Bowen’s plans. The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley wi’ Chandra Kimball-Stone. Doris beckoned for him to follow. The Great Dane now lifted its head and watched.
They passed through a doorway with a corduroy valance and entered into a room with many palm trees growing up out of terra-cotta pots. The palms looked to be real.
“As you can see,” Doris said with a swoop of her arm, “hunting is my husband’s passion.”
On the walls were the heads of animals Frederick had seen only on Wild Kingdom. He recognized an elk, a delicate small-faced deer, a towering moose he hoped wasn’t Bullwinkle. He paused before some kind of antelope, grayish-brown, with long, twisted horns. He put a hand up to touch the tip of its soft muzzle.
“Kudu,” Doris told him. “From Africa. Arthur shot it while in pursuit of the Big Five. You know, elephant, lion, Cape buffalo, rhino, and leopard.” Frederick tried not to grimace. Good Christ, but Chandra would suffer a stroke to hear such things.
“Kudu, huh?” he heard himself reply.
“Arthur says that hunting keeps many African countries alive financially.” Frederick merely nodded. He knew what Chandra would say to this. And Negroes picking cotton kept the economy of the South alive. “And that’s the Cape buffalo over there.” She pointed. Frederick moved on into the room, toward a huge, fierce-looking head. It was black, nearly hairless, with horns joined at the base as though the creature wore a helmet.
“I’ve never cared much for stuffed animals,” Frederick said. Doris held a cautionary finger up to her lips.
“First mistake,” she said. “And you must remember this if you’re to get Arthur’s business. Stuffed animals are the kind you find on the beds of teenaged girls. Mounted animals are what you see before you.”
“Thanks for the lesson,” he said. Chandra would say he was selling out, but Chandra was gone. She had sold out on their marriage, and whether or not he referred to Arthur Bowen’s animal corpses as stuffed or mounted was his own business.
“Freud had it right all along,” said Doris. “You know, that gun-as-penis idea. What you see before you, Frederick dear, are lovers from all over the world. You see animals that have been mounted, and we all know what mounted means, don’t we?” She winked. Frederick shuffled his feet. He tried not to look at the marble eyes of the Cape buffalo, directly above his head. His throat seemed to be constricting.
“Nice house,” he said.
Doris reached out a cool finger and ran it about the rim of his glass. The Great Dane whined. Frederick wondered if perhaps it had been wired by Arthur Bowen, its eyes little cameras recording all.
“May I ask you something, Doris?”
“I’m all answers,” she said. “Ask away.” She peered at him over the edge of her glass.
“Why do you do your own grocery shopping?” He waved his martini about the room. “I mean, look at this place. You could send Larry, or the housekeeper, a bunch of people. So why do you?”
Doris laughed at this. She rummaged a hand through her perfectly blond
hair.
“Florence does most of the shopping,” she said. “I only browse. But I think it’s important to get out among real people once in a while. I was, after all, just a little hausfrau when Arthur met me, a clerk at our favorite IGA.”
Frederick tried not to register surprise. He took another drink of his martini and stared at what looked like some kind of wild goat. It had a narrow, pointed muzzle, short ears, and curving, ribbed horns. It may have been Pan, for all he knew, killed by Arthur Bowen on Mount Olympus and brought back to decorate the walls of his house in Portland, Maine. Mount Olympus, not Stuffed. He leaned in to read the brass plate. Dall Sheep, it said. Alaska, 1979.
“Arthur had to crawl ten miles on his belly, over icy crags, in order to kill that,” Doris said. “You’re shocked, aren’t you?”
“Well, ten miles is a long way,” Frederick said.
“I mean about my meeting Arthur at the IGA. About my having been a clerk there.”
“I’m not at all shocked,” Frederick said. He was shocked. He had imagined it all unfolding in the proper society way. When he had thought of Doris Bowen’s coming out, he never envisioned that it would be from between the shelves of canned vegetables and fruit juices.
“Yes, you are,” said Doris. She touched a hand against his cheek and brushed it along his jawbone. Frederick felt a tremor, and then the quick reaction of those damned blood vessels as they spewed redness about his face.
“Well, it is a little surprising,” he said.
“You’re blushing,” said Doris. “I find that so charming, especially these days. Let’s have lunch.”
• • •
They ate on the patio overlooking the millpond.
“Do you like the birds?” Doris asked. “Those black swans are Australian. And those birds over there are golden and silver pheasants. And somewhere around here are chukar partridges. They live in a lovely little house beyond the pool.”
Frederick had been trying, since his arrival, to avoid the soft whiteness of Doris’s cleavage. But at the patio table she leaned forward with every other sentence, causing the cleavage to consistently rearrange itself, shift about, cool white glaciers in upheaval. Frederick watched the lazy floating swans down at the pond, the butterflies lighting on the well-groomed flowers, the Great Dane chasing a stick being thrown by a young boy. He had never before thought of her as having children.
“The housekeeper’s grandson,” she said as she followed his gaze. “Arthur has two horrid progeny from his first marriage. Thank God they’re in college. I concentrate on raising my own child, that one there.” She pointed out at the Great Dane. Just as Frederick was about to ask about Arthur Bowen’s company and which accounting firm represented him, a young man in jeans and a T-shirt dropped a fruit plate onto the table. A strawberry bounced out and rolled a couple inches.
“Larry!” Doris said. “That’s not polite. Now bring Mr. Stone another martini.”
“Bring Mr. Stone another martini,” Larry mimicked her.
“And stop acting like a big baby,” Doris said.
“And stop acting like a big baby,” Larry mocked. He grabbed Frederick’s empty glass and left.
“Just ignore him,” Doris said, when she noticed the quizzical look on Frederick’s face. “We all have our days, don’t we?”
Frederick stared at his fruit plate and wondered what Joyce and Reginald were having for lunch. He almost missed Budgie. Within minutes, Larry appeared with a fresh martini. He made no response to Frederick’s thank-you. Instead, he reeled around and disappeared back inside the house. Frederick noticed that Larry had withheld on the olive, for symbolic purposes no doubt.
“About Mr. Bowen’s accounting firm,” he said, and felt Doris’s foot rest on his own beneath the table. When he coughed uneasily, Doris giggled.
“You’re the first shy man I’ve met since grammar school,” she said. “I thought they were all extinct, like great auks. You know, too shy to fuck.”
She then walked her toes up his calf. He had seen this footwork before in movies and prayed that it was not foreplay to some under-the-table blow job. Larry would be furious, probably refusing to feed Frederick any salad. He tried to ease his legs back. Perhaps he should cross them and protect his genitalia, which he assumed was where Doris’s toes were headed next. Castration is performed to create a sterile and more docile animal. Mr. Bator’s voice again. And has even been practiced to maintain a boy’s soprano voice. Frederick imagined himself asking Larry for a glass of water with the lyrical voice of a castrato singer.
Larry now came with a tray bearing plates.
“I hope Florence remembered that this is a no-meat, no-dairy lunch,” Doris said, as Larry served Frederick his salad. Croutons vaulted into the air like Mexican jumping beans.
“Honestly!” said Doris.
“And for the lady,” said Larry, with open sarcasm. He put a plate of cheese Napoleons in front of Doris and then disappeared again.
“He can be immature sometimes,” Doris said, leaning toward Frederick and showing more snowy cleavage. He didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t respond. But he had a question to ask, there was no doubt about that. He picked at his salad. The dressing seemed to have a red wine as its base.
“Safe from dairy products,” Doris said, noticing his concern. “But the cheese Napoleons are all mine. Florence refused to make them with anything but real Parmesan cheese.”
“Did you know Larry before he came to work here?” Frederick asked his question. Doris laughed, and he felt her foot again, prodding his calf, the toes climbing higher.
“This little piggy went to market,” she said. “But where in the world is this little piggy going?” He expected Larry at any minute with a scalpel. But when he appeared with their bowls of soup, Doris’s foot retreated.
“Will the gentleman require a bib?” asked Larry, as he put the bowl in front of Frederick. He left again for the bowels of the house. Doris smiled.
“Sometimes, he can be even more jealous than Willy,” she said.
“Willy?” Frederick asked, cautious.
“My gardener,” said Doris.
Frederick stared at his soup. He wondered if it would be all right to dismiss himself. Her overtures were not just making him uncomfortable; he felt it might be possible they were putting his life in danger. Was Larry armed? But the Bowen account would be a mighty ship to come ashore. He doubted Walter Muller had such a large account. They ate their soup. It was a cold cream of cucumber made from, Doris assured him, soy sour cream, a dollop of which still floated in each bowl, along with herbs and thin slices of cucumber.
“Florence went to the health-food store at the mall,” Doris said. “She wasn’t happy about it. She’s Jamaican, you know.”
“It’s all very good,” said Frederick. And it was. “But really, a simple salad would have been fine.” He imagined Florence at the Alternative Grocer, pawing over the tofu patties, sniffing the nutritional yeast, hefting the fake hot dogs.
Larry appeared with the main course, a large hollowed tomato stuffed with rice and almonds and served with cold asparagus spears.
“This looks wonderful,” Frederick said. He was trying to make friends with Larry, and was also confused as to why. Wasn’t Larry the goddamned help?
“Florence wanted to serve you boiled beef penis,” Larry said. He looked at Doris and smiled with teeth so perfect and white that one might think he’d been to the orthodontist for a round of caps. His mistress must be generous. He turned and looked toward the entrance of the house. “Didn’t you, Florence?”
Frederick glanced over to see a hefty black woman hovering in the doorway. She held a huge wooden spoon which jutted from the hand she had thrust upon her hip. Had she stuck her tongue out at him? Or was she licking her lips? He wished with all his heart that he could learn to go through life without food, that he would never
be forced again to break bread with the loonies. He wondered if Larry and Willy had conspired to track him down in the Bowen driveway, beat him to death with a fifty-pound bull dick. He had seen one—in reality they were ten-pounders—during an open-house visit to Herbert Stone’s veterinary college. A weapon like that could probably pack quite a wallop. Larry went to fetch the dessert and coffee.
“This kind of talk has me thinking,” said Doris. She scaled his calf again with her foot. “Why don’t we take a walk down by the pond?”
His head felt dizzy, his stomach woozy. Was the whole fucking world an insane asylum? He imagined the Arthur Bowen Developers account drifting away, out into the middle of the millpond on a dead leaf, disappearing forever. Now Doris was running her fork up the side of his arm, tickling him, her beautiful breasts threatening to emerge into pure sunlight at any second.
“I wish I could but I really need to run,” Frederick said. “Afternoon appointment with a client.” But Doris wasn’t listening.
“Do you know what I think about, each Tuesday, when I know I’m going to see you at the IGA?” she asked.
He tried to move his arm away from the probing fork without insulting Doris, wife to those developing millions. He suddenly pitied himself, the way Chandra pitied businessmen in those notorious gray flannel suits, men who’d do anything for the almighty buck. He also felt very stimulated by Doris Bowen’s advances. He imagined the two of them together, naked in the tall reeds about the immaculate millpond, her back pressed into the sweet soil, an earth goddess. He would mount one of the Australian swans first, in a flurry of black feathers, before he pried Doris’s trim thighs apart. Zeus had become the swan, his great wings beating still above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed by the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill. Christ, but Yeats had been a horny bastard. Frederick wiped a beaded row of sweat from his upper lip. He stood up, pushing back his chair.
A Marriage Made at Woodstock Page 12
