“I love a man who cries,” she said. She wiped sweat from the meager hairs on his chest. Perhaps this pitiful watering would encourage a sprouting. “Men who cry turn me on.” She kissed the lobe of his ear.
“Doris, I’m really sorry,” Frederick said, but she stopped him.
“Don’t apologize for male sensitivity, Fred. There’s not a lot of it left in the world. You could ask Arthur, but he’s in Scotland killing grouse. Now I better run.”
Frederick grabbed his pants and yanked them on. At the door, he accepted Doris’s hug as genuine.
“She’s been gone six weeks,” he said, “but I guess it was seeing her move her stuff today.”
On the front steps Doris surveyed the twilight of the neighborhood. She seemed pensive now, unlike the gushing and unrestrained woman he’d met for lunch.
“I guess your wife’s stuff wasn’t too shabby to take with her,” she said. “Like my stuff was. But she left the most valuable thing behind.”
Frederick kissed her hand. It was a silly thing to do, when he thought of it later, almost too cavalier. And then she was gone, back into the neighborhood smell of marigolds and the sound of bug zappers. He waited until the blue Mercedes pulled away from the curb and disappeared down the street before he turned out the porch light. He hoped he could find the strength to climb the stairs to the marriage bed, since it was a piece of furniture Chandra had left behind. He had decided earlier in the evening that it was time to move off the Shakespearean settee in his office and back to the comfortable field of the king-size mattress. Even eunuchs deserved a bit of sleep. He heard Walter Muller’s dog bark, a volley of yaps, which caused him to peer out the den window at the street. Had Doris come back for her rain check so soon? That’s when Frederick saw the same brown car—a Chevy, he decided—pull away from the curb and drive off into the night.
Thirteen
Within the prison walls of my mind
There’s still a part of you left behind
And though it hurts I’ll get by
Without you lovin’ me, yet I
Guess there’s just no getting over you.
—Gary Puckett & the Union Gap
For a full week after Chandra and her furniture left the house on Ellsboro Street, Frederick saw no one, not even the brown sedan that had been following him. At first he hadn’t wanted to be alone. Shortly after Doris Bowen had put on her cloudy pants and skipped the white fantastic out of his side of town, Frederick had experienced a need to be near people, even if it was the boisterous crowd at the China Boat. He managed to catch his brother, Herbert, on his migratory car phone to ask about dinner that night. Things hadn’t worked out with Christine, the couch potato, or so Herbert told him.
“Really, the biggest problem was Coy,” said Herbert. “Her youngest son.”
“Coy?” asked Frederick. “Cute name.”
“It’s a nickname I gave him,” said Herbert. “It’s short for coitus interruptus.”
Frederick wanted to talk about Chandra and her elflike movers. He wanted to ask questions about life and love and maybe even death. He wanted to inquire about the pinwheels that made up families, and ask if he would survive without one. He felt quite sure now that Chandra wasn’t coming back. But Herbert was on a roll.
“I got a hot date tonight with a little temptress named Natalie,” he said, and Frederick could hear the click of a cigarette lighter. By the time Herbert was done singing Natalie’s praises, one of which might have been that she had learned to tie her own shoelaces, Frederick felt no need to talk about the newest crisis in his life.
Two days later, when Herbert called asking him to dinner, Frederick was not interested in an evening out. He himself had a date, not with one little temptress but three: the Whores of Predestination. And he had no intention at all of wearing a condom. “I just need a few days alone,” he had told Herbert. Instead, he spent seven such days. As the China Boat was cosmopolitan enough to make deliveries, he phoned nightly for his dinner and then passed the evening sitting on the screened-in porch as neighborhood children roller-skated up and down the street. He watched lots of television. On the third day he turned the answering machine down so that he didn’t have to listen as clients called in to cancel their accounts. During the long, painful nights, his hair grew silently. Unable to sleep, he lay awake and listened, hoping to hear the tiny muscles erecting the follicles, the follicles themselves secreting sebum. “Hubris, Freddy,” Chandra used to tell him. “You care too much about your damn hair.” Well, it was a good thing, he told himself, on those long black nights when only the light from Mrs. Prather’s porch seeped into the master bedroom. His hair was the only living thing he could draw comfort from, in the sparsely furnished house on Ellsboro Street. His hair was his only friend. Unlike Mr. Bator, it did not appear and then disappear. Unlike Herbert Stone, it was steady, unfailing, at least for the present.
Anger was becoming his friend. At least, he and anger were now acquaintances, and he felt a strength in this. With indignation as his ally, he could begin the journey back, that horrible crusade that would take him into the whirling vortex of his life. So, on each of those nights when Frederick opened his eyes to the mottled light flickering on his ceiling, he tore away a bit of the gauze with which he’d wrapped up his past. He opened that newly formed fissure a bit more. He reminisced, is what he did. He thought of the Christmas party Chandra had given the year before. He had excused himself early in order to explore a new spreadsheet update that had finally arrived. He was curious to see how he could improve his customers’ cost projections. He imagined the updated presentations would be close to dazzling. “Promise you won’t run off to that damn computer?” Chandra had asked just before the guests arrived. And he had promised. But then UPS, that chariot of the gods, had rolled up to his door with a package from Midwest Micro Peripherals. Would any computer lover blame him?
And then there was her nephew’s graduation from high school. Which rude lump had it been? Robbie, no doubt, because Condom Boy was currently still matriculating in high school. Having had the opportunity of late to know Robbie better, Frederick was thankful he had missed the event. He had always hated graduations anyway, including his own, so why should he attend the ceremony for one of Joyce’s sons? Dr. Philip Stone had not turned up for his son Frederick’s graduation. He had been invited to be the guest speaker at an orthodontist convention in St. Louis. Lying in the darkness of his bedroom, Frederick could remember the class colors, green and gold. He could even see all the streamers flying like a perfect pinwheel. What had the class motto been? To Strive, to Seek, to Find. Thinking back to the problems that his generation had faced, the brutal knives of war and poverty and racism, it should have been Angst Now, Angst Forever.
Then there had been the time Chandra was presented with a humanitarian award from some subterranean group called Curators of the Mother Soil, or some such. “What are they?” Frederick had asked. “Earthworms?” But to hear Chandra talk she was on her way to Stockholm to pick up a Nobel. In reality, the Renaissance Teahouse was host to the awards banquet. The event would last most of the day, beginning with brunch, speeches, then lunch, another speech or two, more presentations, more calls for environmental change, everyone would go to the bathroom, more speeches, a couple token presentations for the organizers, then Chandra’s presentation, then dinner, then special thanks to the waiters and waitresses who were so kind to spend their day carting dishes about, then everyone would go to the bathroom again, and then everyone would finally go home. At least this is how Frederick imagined the day would unfold. What had he been doing that he couldn’t attend? Oh yes, the Grossmire account had presented him with an unexpected difficulty. The IRS was investigating Grossmire Imports and Frederick was obliged to sit down with James Grossmire and carefully inspect canceled checks, receipts, deductions. Frederick had cautioned about those excursions to Atlantic City, which Mr. Grossmire had insist
ed on deducting as business trips because he brought his pretty young secretary along. Frederick had also warned him about the numerous business lunches and dinners, all of which seemed to occur at isolated little inns and motels, a safe marital distance from Mrs. Grossmire and the Portland business community. When it hit the fan, Frederick was obliged to see if he might find a way of turning off said fan and filtering through the windblown, shitty debris. James Grossmire was, after all, a heady client in terms of fees rendered to Stone Accounting. But Chandra couldn’t understand that. “What’s one more day?” she had asked. “It’s twenty-four hours,” Frederick had answered. “That’s a sizable amount of time when you consider that the IRS has given us only ten days to prepare. And I’ve got fifteen other clients whose payrolls need attending. Isn’t someone going to videotape the event? We can watch it when you get home.”
Those were his nights, coming at him with incident after incident from the past, nights bringing with them the knowledge that he had become his father, the man he had loathed and loved. He had become Dr. Philip Stone, and yet he had never even sensed it. His nights were not kind ones. But after a martini lunch, he spent his days exploring the personality of the house, one that he never knew existed: the loose bottom step going down to the basement, the crack in the bathroom window, the spider hidden with its web beneath the fireplace mantel, the dust balls under the office settee, the peeling wallpaper over the kitchen sink, the wobbly hinge on the screen door leading to the porch, a small print of Degas ballerinas leaning in an upstairs closet. These were all new discoveries to him, and he was fascinated with their minute details. It had been Chandra who found and fell in love with the house. To him, it had been simply a means of shelter from extreme heat and extreme cold in a relatively safe area. Now he saw it as an interesting shell, just as his beetle neighbors had their own shells.
This metaphor in mind, he perused the house as though its rooms were chambers of his own brain. The medulla, because it was located at the lowest point of the brain, would be the basement. The main floor, the one that sheltered his precious computer, would be the pituitary gland because, like a complex computer, the pituitary was the overlord of all other glands. The upstairs, where he had now returned to sleep and shower, would be the cerebellum, which spent its time thinking about body equilibrium and muscle coordination. Frederick enjoyed the idea of running from the cerebellum down to the pituitary, or stopping in now and then to see how the medulla was doing, down there in the basement. Every so often, especially in the mornings after he had showered, he stopped in the hallway leading to the bathroom and stared up at the attic, that forbidding cerebrum. The steps leading up to the hatch door loomed before his eyes, separate lobes. Sure, he could run about in the lower parts of the house and feel comfortable. That’s how he had lived most of his life, wasn’t it? Or, as Chandra liked to say, that’s how he had managed so cleverly to dwell on the outskirts of humanity.
But the attic, the old cerebrum, Mr. Bator’s pad, well, that was another thing altogether. Up there, feelings and emotions ran rampant. There were boxes of things up in the attic that Frederick thought he’d go his whole life without ever having to sort through. He knew there would be lots of pictures up there from his married life because Chandra had told him she intended to leave such memorabilia behind. “You keep all that stuff if you want it, Freddy.” Had it been so awful that she couldn’t bear to look at a photograph? At least she hadn’t drop-kicked everything out onto the lawn, as Thelma Stone had done, so that neighborhood children could break open their piggy banks in order to buy his rare-coin collection. And yet, it wasn’t so much the pictures of his married life that bothered him most. Those boxes he couldn’t see, the ones stacked evenly in the frontal lobes, those gave him the greatest pause. In them were the feelings and emotions that he’d packed up years ago and put away, like clothing that no longer fits. In the tangible boxes were his earliest school papers, his letters from his parents while at college, health records, yearbooks, school honors and awards, everything archaeologists would need in shaping a life for him, were they to unearth the attic in some distant millennium. In the invisible boxes were the things he had foolishly tried to share with the geisha from the China Boat. Those were the boxes that had PANDORA BOX COMPANY stamped onto their sides.
A week into his hiatus Frederick was thinking that perhaps it was time to battle the attic boxes, taking with him a pitcher of martinis as a bodyguard, when someone rapped on the front door. He felt the nape of his neck tingle. It was a Tuesday, seven weeks since Chandra had left, if anyone was keeping track. Tuesdays used to mean grocery shopping, didn’t they, in that other life he used to live? Could it be Doris Bowen? He no longer gave any thought to Bowen Developers or the massive account their business would mean. Doris was a pleasant, attractive woman, one that might fall into the friend or acquaintance category. But she was not someone for him to fall into bed with. Had she returned in the grips of estrus for her rain check? He felt his penis attempt a chin-up, then fail miserably. If Doris thought she had learned the meaning of flaccid the previous week, a deeper education awaited her. Maybe it was the drinking. Or maybe it was that sex and all its tempting promises wasn’t important to him just then. He opened the door to let a pale Herbert Stone into the kitchen. Frederick wasn’t surprised. Herbert often surfaced from his dates with pubescent women looking as though he had the bends. And now that Herbert could boast a literary agent and an editor, heaven help the pretzel shape his psyche would end up in.
“I’d offer you a chair at the kitchen table,” said Frederick, “but Chandra took the chairs and the table. It was a gift from her mother.” Herbert leaned back against the sink and shifted about uneasily on the balls of his feet. Frederick put on a pot of coffee. “You don’t look too good,” he added.
“You look like hell yourself,” Herbert said. “You’ve got dark circles under your eyes. You look like the pet raccoon I treated last week.”
“Did the raccoon’s wife leave him?” Frederick asked.
“Freddy?” Herbert’s feet shifted again.
“Have you any idea how interesting the architecture of these old Victorian houses are?” Frederick asked. “So many ornate, flowery carvings.” He handed Herbert a cup of black coffee. He had been instantly thankful to see his brother appear like some good omen in the kitchen door. If he hadn’t, Frederick was determined to tiptoe up to the attic and open the musty boxes, the certificates, the letters, the photos, the melancholic notes of auld lang syne.
“Freddy?” Herbert said again. Frederick didn’t want to talk of things serious. And Herbert’s tone indicated things serious. Maggie was probably hauling him back into court for some extraneare misdemeanor. Or perhaps he had impregnated a female who was still wearing a training bra.
“How about lunch today at Panama Red’s?” Frederick asked. “We can talk about your problems then. Don’t tell me, let me guess. Kevin Costner and Tom Cruise are fighting over who’ll play Kenny Perkins, vet vet in a Corvette. Come on, Herb, I’ve been eating at home all week.” He tried to pour more coffee into his cup, but Herbert put out a hand to stop him.
“Freddy,” Herbert said. “Our mother has died.”
• • •
The sun was setting over Panama City as the plane banked, causing Frederick’s miniature scotch bottle to slide off the tray table and roll away on the floor below. He replaced the tray in the seat back and then leaned into the window to peer out. Far below he could see the magnificent white of the beach, a long, dazzling shoelace. The Gulf of Mexico lay beyond the glittering sand, its shallow greens turning to a thickly blue as the water deepened. He had never liked the idea of his mother moving to Florida. She had vacationed there twice in her life, successfully, and it was this experience that convinced her to leave Maine after her husband’s death. Now she had lived her own death, had swallowed enough pills to ensure an unbroken sleep. No small sons playing war on the living room floor, no bell on the
ice-cream truck, no loud rain on the roof, no lilting concerto would ever disturb her. Another lost coin in Florida’s Fountain of Youth. Another streamer torn from the Stone pinwheel. But they would bring her back to Maine, her two sons, and put her into the earth there. Her only stipulation had been that she not lie next to her husband and all those other dead Stones in Woodlawn Cemetery. To assure this, she had purchased a small plot in another Portland cemetery, one that overlooked a clutch of pine and birch trees, where birdwatchers came to catch the spring warblers. So, like Hospitalers, like Knights Templar, Frederick and Herbert were coming to escort their mother home from her crusade. The following day, they would fly back to Portland, the coffin safely tucked into the belly of the plane, an embryo sleeping its dream.
The taxi weaved so in traffic that Frederick thought he might be sick. Herbert had said little during the flight. He was her firstborn, after all. Frederick had always been a bit jealous of that unbreakable bond between Herbert and Thelma Stone. He had even imagined that the two had had a couple of relatively happy breast-feeding years until Frederick came along to create a threesome. The condo looked the same as they had seen it last, pinkish in color and surrounded by planted flowers and shrubs. Frederick paid for the cab as Herbert patted about beneath a pink cement planter for the key.
“Here it is,” he said. “Right where Mr. Regis said it would be.” Frederick was tired from the news and from the trip. He hoped he could find sleep in his mother’s condo, a stranger’s home. They had discussed it on the plane. They would flip for the guest room, and the loser would sleep on the couch. Neither was ready to sleep in their mother’s bed. It was on this bed that the superintendent had found her. “We’ll see what it’s like,” Herbert had said. “If it doesn’t feel right, we’ll go to a motel. Mr. Regis is meeting us for breakfast.” Mr. Regis had been appointed executor of the will. Thelma Stone had not trusted either of her sons with such a task.
A Marriage Made at Woodstock Page 21
