“Within the month we’ll have a wider selection of French and Australian,” Frederick said as he turned down their aisle. From this new angle he could see that the man’s arms were wrapped about the woman, his head tilted forward. They were kissing. Frederick smiled after the first rush of sadness, maybe even jealousy, flashed through him. The sight of a couple in love could still leave him shaken. He was about to turn away and give them their moment of affection in a corner grocery store, when he heard the distinct laugh, almost girlish. Chandra. The Ghost of Woodstock Past. His legs seemed to disappear beneath him. He was walking on air, walking above phantom legs, all sensation gone. And the sound of his voice must have caught up with her, too, for her face emerged from behind the man’s back. They stared at each other, two people who had once been husband and wife.
“Freddy,” she said. He saw her swallow, saw her eyes flutter as she raised a hand to her mouth. There hadn’t been many times in his life when he’d seen her speechless. And as for him, wouldn’t it have been great if he had taken advantage of the moment, had tilted his head in some John Wayne gesture? Howdy, pilgrim, he might’ve said. He could have let the poet in him rise up, and finally, for the ultimate occasion. And speaking of pilgrims, I was one who loved the pilgrim soul in you. But he did none of that.
“Chandra,” he said. His blood vessels enlarged in what would be the greatest blush of his life. Blood raced throughout his veins, tingling, spreading intense warmth.
“You’re working here?” she asked. The man regarded him with what Frederick recognized as a territorial gaze, a tacit threat. She’s mine, his eyes said. And then he understood.
“Oh, so you’re Frederick,” he said. He held out a hand to be shook. “I thought you were an accountant.”
“I thought so, too,” Chandra said. Her lips barely moved. He knew she was as surprised by this meeting as he was.
“We’ll have an improved selection by next week,” Frederick said, ignoring the hand that was still waiting. “Chile, Australia, Germany. Much improved.” Then he walked on to the back of the store and through the door leading to the small office. Closing it behind him, he leaned against the wall, eyes shut, heart thumping. When he finally emerged, five minutes later, they were gone. Put it out of its misery.
For the next twenty minutes he rang up sales and then stared out the storefront window. He was a robot, one that had dreamed of seeing his wife with a new man. And then the telephone resonated throughout the small store. It was Chandra, calling him there at Cain’s Corner Grocery, calling to apologize for the embarrassing moment. It was good of her, gigantic of her, colossal even, it really was. And it wasn’t as if she’d done something wrong by shopping for wine.
“Ted is someone I met last month,” she said. “He works for the EPA.” Where else?
“He seems like a nice guy,” said Frederick. What could he say? It was the truth. The son of a bitch, the bastard, the odious prick did seem like a decent fellow. And he had such thick hair, the kind that wouldn’t recede even if it was attached to pulleys.
“Are you going to be okay, Freddy?” she asked. He thought about that. She had left him in June. She had moved her stuff out of their home. She had avoided him as though he were covered with buboes. She had given out a wrong address so that he couldn’t find her. She had hung the phone up on him, and, ultimately, she had divorced him. Now, here in September, here just days before the autumnal equinox would bring a night that would be as long as the day—his longest night to suffer through yet—she wondered if he was okay. And she had had the nerve, all these years, to accuse him of excessive pride?
“Of course, I’ll be okay,” Frederick said. He hoped his light tone assured her that he was deliriously happy. And he went on to remind her that the wine selection would grow in leaps and bounds and not to be a stranger to Cain’s Corner Grocery just because her ex-husband was employed there. HA! HA! He laughed the laugh he’d given the skeleton, on the chart back in Mr. Bator’s biology class. Then he hung up the phone and went to pieces.
For almost twenty-four hours he shook. Mr. Cain, taking pity on the mess his employee was in, had sent him home immediately. Once there, Frederick took to his bed. Covered in blankets, he shivered all night and into the dawn, until the heat of his morning shower beat some sense into him. He shook physically, uncontrollably, as though love were some awful malaria, a parasite in the bloodstream, a thing to be gotten over after excessive chills, a high fever, a bit of vomiting. But he had stepped from the warm shower, his feet cold upon the tiles of the bathroom floor, and he had known, finally, that it was over. It was over.
At first, he was struck with the knowledge of time wasted, all those letters he had written her, and the letters he had read in return, her fragile name scrawled on the upper corner of the envelope. He considered the minutes he had lost to standing before Hallmark displays, agonizing over the right card for Christmas, her birthday, a get-well message. The hours squandered in picking out the perfect gift. He considered all the family gatherings he had been forced to sit through, her family gatherings. He thought of mornings across the breakfast table when they had discussed plans to travel in their old age, nights in bed before sleep when the discussion turned to the proper course each should take if the other were to die first. He thought of all those stolen words that had spilled foolishly from his mouth. This waste of a perfectly good life was his first thought, those twenty-some years frittered away.
His second thought was that it would have to begin all over again with someone new, the cards, the gifts, the mornings and nights in bed. He would have to try it again unless he was to live the rest of his life alone. But how could he unpack his old self, dig his zest for life out of the attic, where the rest of his idle youth had been boxed up and stored? And even though he was now utterly subservient to the Three Chairpersons of the Board, the Fabulous Fate Sisters, how could he trust them to treat him fairly a second time around?
At six o’clock that evening Herbert phoned. He and Maggie would be having dinner at eight. Would Frederick care to join them? Frederick was pleased to discover that he felt only gratification in hearing that Herbert and Maggie would be dining together yet again. He was thankful to learn that jealousy, even envy, were not among his emotions. Good for them. And good for him, too.
“Maggie’s got a friend, Glenna, who’s dying to meet you,” Herbert added. “So what do you say to dinner at DiMaggio’s? They serve Long Island duckling in a nice little port. Besides, it’s the perfect place for the over-forty crowd.” Frederick smiled. Perfect place, his foot. The last thing Herbert Stone needed in the first stages of his reconciliation was to run into hordes of young women such as Valerie and Sarah, all beseeching him to buy them Dirty Mothers, or Sex on the Beaches, or Screaming Orgasms.
“Why not the China Boat?” Frederick asked. He was pleased that he could still detach himself from his own personal grief in order to badger Herbert. His sense of humor would save him. It would buoy him up over the waves of remorse that were beating him against the rocks.
“To tell the truth,” said Herbert, lying, “I’m a little tired of the atmosphere at the China Boat. So what about it? You up to meeting Maggie’s friend?”
“Maybe another time, Herb,” said Frederick. How could he explain that he needed to live alone first before he looked for another relationship? After all, it wasn’t like buying a car, or a house, or even a computer. It took time. He was no different from the women he’d been listening to on talk shows, women who want to get to know themselves as adults, to live solo before they hook their lives up again to another human being. That’s just how Frederick felt. He had been passed from Thelma Stone to Chandra Kimball in one fell swoop, as though they were exchanging cake recipes—and may the Fates forgive him the sexist metaphor.
“You’re going to go out and wander lonely as a cloud, something stupid like that, aren’t you?” Herbert asked.
“Somethin
g like that,” said Frederick. His big brother knew him well.
“You’ve read too much poetry, Freddy,” Herbert said. “Besides, what did Blake know about clouds?”
“It was Wordsworth,” Frederick said, as Herbert hung up the phone.
• • •
All his life Frederick Stone had believed that everything he did could be chalked up to experience. No action would be wasted, for it would be an education in itself. This philosophy in mind, he considered, briefly, a career as The Failed Man. He, too, could make his rounds of the talk-show circuit. Oprah, in her infinite wisdom, would discourage an all-female audience from spitting on him. “Let’s learn from this creature,” she would beseech the enraged crowd. They would pass him about. He would go bleeding, his entrails growing shorter and shorter as pieces were ripped away, from Oprah to Sally Jessy to Dr. Ruth, and finally to an interview with Barbara Walters. In the end, no woman would want him again. Perhaps he could go on the road with a seedy circus to turn up at county fairs. For a modest fee, women could hurl softballs at the mechanism that would plunge him into a barrel of cold water. COME DUNK THE ASSHOLE, the sign above his head would read. Small children would wear T-shirts bearing his face, covered by a huge black X. The Failed Man. Eventually, the hottest comic actor in Hollywood would star in a movie about his life.
Frederick sat before his computer without turning it on. He felt as though he were an initiate upon the road to some discovery, a journey of the self, a regular Gilgamesh. And he must take the proper gear, the newest software, to aid him on this quest. What would today’s Gilgamesh need on his voyage? Without a doubt, Gilgamesh would have a cell phone. The computer stared back at him. Its large black eye, the eye of a cyclops, silent, foreboding, the dark face of God maybe. He couldn’t abandon it forever. He couldn’t ignore the significance it would play in the future of the world. Computerized man was on the cusp of discoveries that he had only dreamed of in the past. Would Leonardo da Vinci—Herbert’s tie person—probably the world’s greatest genius, have walked away from the idea of the computer chip? What would the perfect Renaissance man have created, sitting before the latest model of computer? And no doubt about it, Leonardo was of a dual spirit, man and nature coexisting in one body, Chandra’s kind of guy. Leonardo had refused to eat meat. “I believe the day will come when we look upon the murder of animals as we look upon the murder of men.” Leonardo had said that, five hundred years ago. Maybe he had learned something, some universal secret, while sketching all those muscles and sinews and tendons of humans and animals. Maybe he had seen a connection, a brotherhood, a sameness that most people miss. A beating heart, after all, is a beating heart. And he would be the sort of man to bring the two worlds together, the world of nature and the world of technology. If Leonardo da Vinci were president of the United States—running on an independent ticket, of course—maybe he would pass a law stating that all poets must learn computers. And all businessmen and women would be required to study mythology, poetry, music, art. Because, if the two worlds—Chandra’s world and Frederick’s world—didn’t learn to function together, there might be no world left when they flew apart.
Seventeen
“Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.”
—E. E. Cummings
This girl was a child
Existing in a playground of stone.
Then one night her world was changed
Her life and dreams were rearranged
And she would never be the same again.
This girl is a woman now.
—Gary Puckett & the Union Gap
On Saturday afternoon, Eddy Walsh called to say that the bank had approved the loan for his prospective buyers. Within the month, that nice young couple would become the new owners of the lovely Victorian house at the end of the cul-de-sac on Ellsboro Street, the only house left in that neighborhood with the old-fashioned, screened-in front porch. Frederick and Chandra had bought it for seventy-five thousand, fifteen years earlier, because she had fallen in love with just the sight of it. Now, after paying off the remaining mortgage and deducting Eddy’s percentage, they would be left with ninety thousand dollars to split, forty-five thousand each. Not a bad investment. Except that, at least to Frederick, there seemed a sadness in the fact that a man from the bank could hand him a slip of paper, Pay to the order of, and it would represent the years of his married life.
After hanging up the phone from giving Eddy the final go-ahead, he filled his cup with fresh coffee and went out to the front porch. It being Saturday, his neighbors were about, raking leaves into piles, stacking firewood in their backyards, putting up the occasional bird feeder, inserting bulbs into the ground for spring blooms. He could see Home Depot marigolds, wilted now in some of the lazier yards up and down the street. A few of the punctual homeowners had already replaced their dead marigolds with fresh Home Depot pansies, perfect colors for fall. Smoke was now corkscrewing out of a chimney here and there, the first fireplace fires of autumn. Even the Mullers had stoked their hearth. Frederick saw a wisp of gray rising into the air over their house, followed by that fresh forest smell of hardwood. No doubt about it, it was another apparent metaphor: autumn was putting summer out of its misery. He wondered if there was a poem in that notion. He could find himself a shoe box lid and jot it down, the way Tom Wingfield did in The Glass Menagerie. But Frederick had already decided that poetry was not his strength. Just as he was getting rid of the Victorian house, a painful memory of his past, he had decided to abandon his literary dreams as well. He was no poet. He was a man who had once studied English literature but now had a degree in accounting, the possessor of a good business mind. That was all. And it was enough. Besides, Kenny Perkins: Tales of a New England Vet would be published the following year. One author in the family was enough.
It was to be his Saturday off from Cain’s Corner Grocery, but now he was walking his usual walk to the store, and dreading his arrival. This was the day he must tell Mr. Cain that he would not be coming back to work. He whistled as he walked, the way he had done as a child on dark nights, frightened to be strolling home from choir practice, frightened of leaves in the wind, noises dribbling from back alleys, shadowy shapes in the graveyard, frightened of his own mortality. Yet what did he have to fear now, in the glorious afternoon sunshine of late September, with that marvel of ocean spilling before him, gulls fluttering above its surface? He had nothing to fear but the rest of his life. He had nothing to fear but that same old mortality.
Mr. Cain was most upset to learn the news.
“You can’t be serious,” he protested. But Frederick was as serious as a receding hairline. How could he tell the old man that there was something in Chandra’s having found him there behind the cash register, having exposed him, as though he were the rotting throb of a bad tooth, that had spoiled the place for him? He hadn’t been ready to be rooted out when he was. Now, and again like that bard of yore, he would need to travel on.
“Things were just starting to pick up,” Mr. Cain said. He rubbed dust from a bottle of sweet pickles.
“And they’ll continue to do so,” said Frederick. It was a good thing Mr. Cain had not computerized yet, as Frederick had been urging him to do. He would have had to add COMPUTER SKILLS NECESSARY on his HELP WANTED sign, thus narrowing the body of applicants. “But I’m going to keep a close watch on you. You’ll be fine.” Didn’t Mr. Cain remember that he had walked in just ten minutes after the sign had been posted, his eyes red with grief and his clothes smelling of gin? But people were reluctant to let go of their heroes, and yet heroes had a hard time staying put. That’s what sunsets were for.
“It used to be that selling milk, bread, butter, sugar, and some candy was all you needed to do well in the grocery business,” Mr. Cain said. “How am I supposed to know about things made out of sheep shit?” He waved his hand at a package of tofu hot dogs.
“I’ll come back to check up
on you,” Frederick said. “And now that your grandson will be graduating from college, you’ll be in good hands.” He patted Mr. Cain’s shoulder. He would miss the old man and his little store. The bell jangled as he opened the door.
“Freddy?” said Mr. Cain. “You need a good haircut, son.”
A Marriage Made at Woodstock Page 28
