“It’s been a terrific lunch,” he said. His napkin fell onto the patio, where Larry would curse to find it later. Frederick hoped it wouldn’t end up wrapped around some voodoo doll belonging to Florence, while both Larry and Willy riddled the area below the belt with sharp pins.
Doris Bowen stretched out a beautifully tanned leg to prevent him from passing. She placed a finger on his arm and made circular motions. How can those terrified vague fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs? Had Yeats pressed Maud Gonne into the rich, loose soil around some Irish millpond?
“I will do two things,” Doris said. Frederick wasn’t sure if she had lowered her voice in order to be sexy, or to find privacy from Larry and Florence and Willy the gardener. He tried to ignore those next passionate lines of the poem, that inescapable shudder in the loins, that broken wall, oh, especially that blessed broken wall! He knew the red on his face was spreading. “I will ask my husband, Arthur, to consider your business proposal.”
Did she put on his knowledge with his power…
“And I’ll wait for you next Tuesday in the parking lot. I guess I don’t have to worry about you eating too many oysters in the meantime.”
Nine
I would gladly teach you
If I could only reach you
And get your lovin’ in return.
Lady Willpower, it’s now or never,
Give your love to me…
—Gary Puckett & the Union Gap
An eyelash survives for three months and a hair of the eyebrow for three weeks, Frederick heard Mr. Bator say. It was the first month anniversary of Chandra’s departure from the house on Ellsboro Street. But the life span of hair in the human scalp is six months. Would all his hair be brand-new by the time she returned, every strand? Would she recognize him with a pristine mane? Would she pass him on the street, thinking that his eyes reminded her of someone she had known once, maybe even loved? It was almost eleven o’clock. Frederick had shaved but was not through assessing. The shower drain had seemed a bit more clogged than usual that morning and he was worried that this item might need to be recorded on his computer file of important dates and facts. His own father, Dr. Philip Stone, had died before baldness had occurred. So had the other men in the Stone family tree, those Gregory Peck look-alikes. Frederick had studied the pictures in the Stone family album, one of the few things his mother had salvaged from her infamous yard sale. The males in his paternal family seemed to be thinning and receding just before the Grim Reaper snagged them. It was a sad legacy to leave one’s sons, but it was a physical fact. More than two thousand years ago Aristotle noted that men, not women, are usually affected by baldness, Mr. Bator reminded him. But baldness is not exacerbated by the wearing of hats, tight or otherwise.
“I’ll remember that the next time I buy a hat,” Frederick said. The truth was, he was growing weary of Mr. Bator and wished he knew what had caused his old teacher to lurk in his hippocampus. Frederick had no doubt that Mr. Bator had set up housekeeping in there, in the dark folds of his temporal lobe. He just didn’t know why. Oh, he realized it wasn’t the real Mr. Bator talking to him but that, under pressure, he was rifling through some old memories he hadn’t bothered with for some time, was bringing them forward in his mind in order to deal with them again. To put it in computer terms, he was downloading archival data into RAM. But the sad truth was this: remembering Mr. Bator, and those days at Portland High, and all those mornings and evenings and weekends before Chandra, before Woodstock, was painful to do in the wake of his wife’s leaving him. And he had never known until Mr. Bator started talking that high school had been such a place of refuge. Now it had that warm, fuzzy glow to it, a cocoon in time, a hazy launching pad before the metamorphosis. At least he assumed there had been a metamorphosis. So then, what had he become? In May 1971 he had graduated from Boston University with a degree in English literature. In October of that same year he had married Lorraine Kimball, aka Chandra. But he awoke one morning in 1979 to discover that he had acquired a degree in accounting. According to most of his sixties friends—and speaking of the quintessential metamorphosis—this was akin to Gregor Samsa waking up as a six-foot-long cockroach. After all, people in business were the enemy. But Frederick Stone was going to represent the little businesses, wasn’t he? Hadn’t he said that a few times to the cabal that clustered about at wine and cheese gatherings in order to feign interest in the latest Czech poet or some dissident East German writer? What had he told Chandra’s friends who pretended they were only walking the halls of academia until their novel was sold, their paintings hanging in galleries, their poetry in demand by the multitude, their papers on the Venus flytrap published? Hadn’t he made vague allusions to the little businessman in Central America who could use some sound financial advice? Maybe even Southeast Asia, what with the shit having been blasted out of them with bombs and napalm and lies. He would remain concerned only for the betterment of mankind. Amid the chaffing noise and confinement of preppy business suits, he would go placidly in jeans and longish hair—that’s how one could identify the Still Sincere—and maybe a gold earring bead in one ear. This sparsity of jewelry for men had of late replaced the peace symbol, hadn’t it? A single earring on the male lobe meant lots of stuff. It meant pay attention here, something really hip is taking place, someone astute is passing through. And it was in keeping with the modest lifestyle of the sixties. Two earrings would be extravagant, but one, well, who was to criticize? And besides, who were these academic friends of his wife? Were they out discovering cures for cancer, publishing exciting papers that would enlighten the botanical world, digging up dinosaur bones, finding new planets? No, they were teaching by rote out of books written by other folks, tossing forth ideas thought up by other folks, discoveries by other folks, poems by other folks. Intelligence was supposed to be something that involved problem solving and creativity. Not this memorizing bullshit. So much for Chandra’s academic pals. They were well worth the loss. But he had lost Chandra, too. And by the time she packed up and left, in June 1992, Frederick had no idea at all what had happened to his gold earring. He had simply cast the thing off one day, afraid its glitter might discourage an accounting client. It had probably been melted down and was now serving as the crown in Dan Quayle’s back molar.
In the kitchen he took chilled bottles from the refrigerator and mixed up a pitcher of martinis, ten parts gin to one part dry vermouth. He searched in vain for a cocktail stirrer and settled for a plastic ruler instead. He churned the mixture vigorously so that the dilution would make the drink smooth and delectable. There was one thing he had learned while seeking a degree in English literature, by God, and that was how to make a damn good martini. But from now on he must buy his vermouth in pint bottles so that it could be replaced frequently. Let others take for granted the herb flavor that vermouth added to the tapestry. He strained his first martini of the day into a prechilled cocktail glass, plopped in two olives, and then drank it instantly. His esophagus burned from the chill, and he imagined it turning frosty. He let the drink settle for a minute and then poured a second. Now, now, he could think about Chandra.
He had not seen her since she left, not once, except for the day he followed her down Harrison Street. And that had gotten him only a glimpse of her ponytail. Twice, she had sneaked back to the house when he was away and moved out more of her belongings. Did she hate him that much? She had even taken Mike, her Ficus benjamina, who did nothing—at least in Frederick’s opinion—but eat plant food, drink water, and shit oxygen, all without ever leaving his pot in the corner. And while it was true that Mike had been just inches from being chucked into a fireplace blazing in Frederick’s mind, Chandra could have at least given them the opportunity to say good-bye. During her last visit she had left behind a note, stating that movers would eventually retrieve her larger furniture pieces, all things she felt rightfully hers. She could have dragged the house off, as far as Frederick was
concerned. And she was obviously thinking about just that. We’ll need to settle the matter of the house soon, she had noted in a P.S. He supposed that meant paying her for half of it, or selling it outright and splitting fifty-fifty. But he still couldn’t concentrate on the dollars and cents of separation, not when he longed for flesh and bone. He had truly believed, with generations of cold Stone certainty to back him up, that she would return within a few days. Now it had been thirty days. Thirty was not a few, and Frederick was no longer certain of anything. Except that a well-made martini took the edge off their estrangement. He decided a toast was appropriate for the special occasion.
“Here’s to a month, Chandra,” he said, raising his drink. “You heartless bitch.” Over the top of his glass, he noticed the clock on the kitchen stove, almost eleven fifteen. Not bad, really, considering his greatest chore that day was to run a second-quarter profit-and-loss statement for Thibodeau’s Restaurant and Lounge. And oh, yes, he also had the quarterly payroll data to prepare for Bass & Tate Plumbers, Inc., but that could wait another day or two. All in all, he was holding tight to his schedule, just like a typical Stone. Except for the martinis, sleeping on the settee in the office, rising a bit later than five forty-five a.m., letting his hair grow, appearing almost nightly with Herbert Stone at the China Boat, having lunch almost daily at Panama Red’s—which he would miss today, since it was already approaching noon—life hadn’t changed too much for Frederick Stone. He no longer thought each red car he saw coming at him in the opposite flow of traffic was the Toyota. And even if one of them had been, he had a strict work schedule and couldn’t be chasing all over town after Japanese products. True, he had tried the parking lot of Panama Red’s a few evenings before arriving at the China Boat, and then later after leaving the China Boat. And there was no harm done—after he’d delivered a client’s package—to swing by the library, wait a few minutes at the four-way stop near the post office, cruise nonchalantly past the Alternative Grocer. And yes, he’d driven down Bobbin Road every single night since Lillian had given him the address, never once to see the Toyota in the drive—not that he’d even looked—but then Bobbin Road was only a few streets away from Ellsboro. He’d used it many times since they had moved to the Victorian house. All these things he might have done anyway, even if she hadn’t left. A little driving around could cleanse the brain. No, things hadn’t changed too much in the month she’d been gone, except that his hair was now 10.5 millimeters longer, almost a half inch. Added to the fact that he was in need of a haircut when she left, his hair now had to be combed back behind his ears. Two young women at the China Boat had told him he looked like Jeff Bridges, the actor. That seemed a good thing, and so it pleased him. But he was experiencing one major change in his life, the greatest change. He missed her. He missed her hair sweeping over the pillow in the morning, her wet towel on the bathroom floor, her passion, her humor, her warm body in the bed next to him. Yet there hadn’t been much joy between them for a long time. He could call days forward in his mind, golden days when he remembered her laughter ringing out on the Boston subway, at the Dunkin’ Donuts as they bought their Sunday paper, on the beach at Old Orchard where he had recited poetry to her: Ah, love, let us be true to one another, a poem he admired so that he didn’t have the heart to steal it. And besides, it was too famous. For the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams… Frederick wondered what had happened to the woman he met at Woodstock and fell in love with. What had happened to her laughter? Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light… Was laughter like light? Did it curve depending on magnitude? It now seemed that the past, the twenty plus years of his life with Chandra, had been sucked up into some faraway black hole, a place so intensely concentrated with love and pain and joy and sadness that not even laughter, good old malleable laughter, could escape.
“Shit,” Frederick said, and poured another martini. A throbbing had begun inside his body, probably cells committing suicide. He had to do something, some physical labor, to cure the ache and loosen the pain. Maybe gardening would put his spirit in greener pastures.
Outside in the garage he searched for the shears among cans of nails, rolls of wallpaper, dried paintbrushes, boxes of Earth Day fliers. He’d never been much at gardening. Having Mike the ficus in his foster care for a month had been his only experience. And Mike was lucky because Frederick often forgot to water him. Mike, and snapping a few dead leaves from off the geranium over the kitchen sink. After all, weren’t women the first agriculturalists? Frederick had been content to watch from behind the window in his office, sitting upon his spongy computer chair, while Chandra clipped, snipped, uprooted, pruned, and got dirt beneath her fingernails. But Chandra liked that kind of work. Frederick was more interested in configuring a database than in designing a flower bed.
When he finally found the shears, they had a spider’s web entrenched between the handles, a small labyrinthine doily. Clearing his mind of what damage he might be doing to helpless worlds—he’d read far too much Zen during his pot days—Frederick wrenched the shears from their nail and made off with them to the backyard. He began his gardening debut slowly, by picking a dead leaf from one of Chandra’s shrubs. What was the thing called? He’d heard her refer to it a thousand times. “Freddy, water the hydro-something,” she’d say. He remembered this because of hydro and water. Hydrangea? Yes, that was it. He picked a second leaf from the hydrangea and tried to ignore Walter Muller, who was out in his own yard, face, arms, and legs red from sunburn.
“Yo, neighbor!” Walter shouted. He waved a singed limb over his head as though it were the claw of a beached crustacean. “Great day, ain’t it?” He bobbed his head at the firmament, his tentacles at work in the shrubbery. Frederick nodded a casual hello at Walter and then pretended to study the large green leaves of the hydrangea.
“Ain’t this about the nicest day we’ve had this year?” Walter asked. “Wonderful day. Couldn’t ask for a better one. Just terrific.” Frederick had a sudden urge to blast him with Chandra’s garden hose. He would flatten the red-armed, red-legged, white-assed gardener (he could only assume the latter was true) with a river of cold and probably chemically impure Portland water. “It is not a great day,” he would hiss at Walter’s burned earlobe. “So don’t say it again, Walter Muller.” And then he would wrest Walter’s shears from his hands and use them to cut out his tongue, which he would send to Larry with a note: Give this to Florence. It will go well with bull penis. Or maybe he’d ship it to Chandra with a different note: I have freed this caged tongue from the terrible fate of wagging.
Frederick edged his way around to the front yard, pretending to be fixated by a vinelike growth that was creeping along the red bricks of the house. He had no idea whatsoever if it was a good growth or a bad growth. He brought forth what he hoped would be an expression that lay between gardening terror and gardening pride. Walter Muller, if he knew what the vinelike creature was, could take his pick. Life appeared more colonized in the front yard, busier, a soft buzz of activities floating in the air. Up and down the street middle-aged men were milling about in their yards like locusts that surface periodically, seven-day cycles, the Saturday Cicada. Frederick could see Home Depot marigolds, geraniums, pansies, and petunias in all the yards. Home Depot hammocks hung from trees like massive nests made by oversized orioles. Home Depot shutters edged the windows. Men with aching backs stood and proudly surveyed their three-fourths acre of land, all mown and Raided and weed-eaten to perfection, conquered territory. Men whose dreams swirled above their heads like small clouds stood and looked across the expanse of their tiny prairies, their Oregon Trails, their Northwest Passages. If Frederick were to peer into their eyes, he knew he would see the flicker of wagon trail campfires. And if he could lean into their ears, as though their ears were pink seashells, he would hear “Get Along Little Dogies” and “Oh, Susanna!” and “Red River Valley.” These were men whose hours are spent in real estate, in banking, in law offices, in
hospitals. Men who live their entire lives in life insurance. They had probably all majored in English. Frederick watched as they carefully walked the circumference of their terra firma—square-foot landowners—as Home Depot children rode bikes, tossed footballs, and glided ghostlike up and down the street on skateboards.
Jesus, he thought, a quickening in his chest as the idea of middle age engulfed him. We’re all Willy Lomans.
• • •
It was the gardening scene that precipitated the bar scene, no doubt about it. Herbert had swung by in his big Chrysler to pick him up—Frederick no longer demanded a phone call first—and now Frederick was on his second scotch when he felt a wall of pity wash down on him. It was the last place in the world he would choose as his setting: the China Boat. And these were the two last people in the world he would choose as his witnesses: Herbert D. Stone, DVM, and an unidentified female bartender impersonating a geisha.
“I don’t think I can take it anymore,” he said. His words were followed by a loud crack, a fissure in the Stone facade, most likely irreparable.
“Well, if I were you,” Herbert said, “I’d hire Maggie’s lawyer before Chandra gets to him. I hate to think about what might happen to you if you don’t.” He hummed a few bars of the soundtrack for Jaws. Frederick was unable to muster up any annoyance over this remark. He wanted, instead, to explain what was happening to him, to the world he had known, to the world in which he now fretted his hour upon the stage. He wanted to point out that human beings intend, one day, to set things right with those they have once loved. He thought of his father, Dr. Philip Stone, rigid, indifferent, aloof. Didn’t most people think that the day will come when everyone puts down their angst and hugs one another? But he knew, long before Chandra left him, long before Mr. Bator began prodding him to remember the guts of his past, that when a coffin lid slams shut, the noise is so loud it reverberates forever. He had intended to make lots of changes, hadn’t he? To do lots of things? He was going to reread all of the Romantic poets, the Victorians, the Edwardians, too—someone should dust off poor Rupert Brooke—and he was going to learn chess. Delve a little into opera, just to see what all those arias were about. He was going to get a telescope and a microscope, the better to judge a few planets, a few grains of salt. He believed he might skydive at least once, hoping to come out of the experience with both ankles intact. He had always professed a desire to write poetry seriously, not just a few gratuitous iambs on demand, a few Rod McKuenisms for Chandra, as he had done back in his college days. If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner in a farmer’s field that is forever Woodstock. No, he would write his own damn verse and let Rupert Brooke, the poor bugger, rest in peace! He truly believed that he would live for a time in Europe. He would write letters home from Austria and say clever things about St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the Hofburg, Freud’s birthplace, the room where Franz Kafka had written such brilliant words. He could see himself now, printing in his even hand, dipping into a plum-colored ink he had found in some dusty shop. There were a thousand postcards in him still not written. Pictures of Irish castles, Stonehenge, St. Peter’s Square, the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum. A thousand postcards, and each of them fluttered in his heart as he stared at his brother and this geisha.
A Marriage Made at Woodstock Page 13
