by David Gates
“How many of those friends of yours,” he said, wishing he had that last cigarette, “are dead?”
“How would I know?” said James. “This was one afternoon, like five years ago. Don’t you think I think about it every day? Plus all the other stupid shit I did?” He reached into his jacket pocket and tossed Finn first a book of matches, then an unopened pack of Merits. “You know, everybody’s got dead friends. Except you, right? Since you don’t have friends.”
Finn got the pack open, worked a cigarette out of it, lit it, took a first deep, wonderful drag and glanced around for an ashtray. The late afternoon sun glinted off the varnished floor. He became conscious of the faraway drone of somebody’s lawnmower; for a second there he thought of nothing at all. Then he realized he was staring at the overlapping white rings by the side of James’s chair.
“So,” he said. “I suppose this explains why you were hellbent on getting me sidetracked from my project.”
“One reason, yes,” said James.
“Why didn’t you simply tell me?”
“Because look at you. You know, I know about men who like naughty boys. And the bottom line is that they don’t like ’em to be too naughty. So.” Quick shrug. “What? Do you want me to go over and stay at my sister’s while I make other arrangements?”
Touching up just that little bit of floor, Finn thought, would be simplicity itself.
“I don’t know what I want at this point,” he said. “I want to believe that none of this really happened.”
“Oh,” said James. “Well, if that’s all. You can manage that okay, whether I’m around or not. I imagine you’ve already started.”
THE CRAZY THOUGHT
The year was round, a millstone turning slowly clockwise, and even on this Friday afternoon in August, Faye could feel it moving down toward Christmas. There were points on the circumference whose approach she always dreaded: Ben’s birthday and their wedding anniversary, both in June and safely past this time around; her own birthday, in January, when he was likely to call or send a card; May 21, the projected birthday of their aborted child; October 17, the day it died. They were like the songs she must never never listen to: “Devoted to You,” or “These Foolish Things” or “The Long and Winding Road.” She had been able to date the conception exactly, because it had been the only time for weeks. She had wept afterward, and Ben was put off, probably understandably; the next week he moved out, and never touched her again. When she went through her mystical thing about it, both her shrink and her sister Karen had explanations: she had gone off the pill because it was killing her (to increasingly little purpose), and having sex with him that afternoon was a fleeting self-destructive impulse. But lately she hadn’t been bothering to fight away mystical ideas. At this point, what harm could they possibly do?
Karen had called Wednesday night, out of the blue, to ask if she and Allen could come for the weekend. And would it be at all possible to pick them up in Burlington if they took a plane Friday evening? Because if they rented a car, it looked like they couldn’t possibly get there until after midnight. Not a problem, Faye told her, if they didn’t mind Paul coming to get them in the truck; the car was in the shop, and she still hadn’t learned to drive a stick.
“A truck?” Karen had said. “Allen will be thrilled.”
“I’m always thrilled when people are thrilled,” Faye had said. The car was in the shop because after front-end work to the tune of four hundred dollars they couldn’t afford to get it out.
Faye had never met the new husband. In the wedding pictures he looked like a pretty standard product. Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters. Well, why not. Karen had relocated to L.A. just after Faye had moved into Paul’s place on Laight Street, and she’d married Allen around the time Faye and Paul had clinked glasses at the Ear Inn to toast their plan: Paul would quit teaching and make the down payment on the farmhouse they’d found, and Faye would take that newspaper job in Burlington while he stayed home and wrote. By the time Karen talked Allen into moving back to New York, Faye and Paul had been up here for two years—during which time Faye got laid off and Paul began working for the town. Then another year just sort of went by. Faye and Paul never left Vermont, and Karen and Allen both had new jobs and couldn’t always get away on weekends. When Allen had surgery on the knee he’d damaged playing squash, Faye almost went down to lend moral support but let Karen talk her out of it. Moral support: a weird expression. Was the assumption that people’s morals needed shoring up in time of stress? Or was it moral of you to lend support? This was one of the many things that flew apart if you looked too closely.
• • •
Across the road, above the green hills, the sky had turned black. She’d better take the clothes off the line and hang them in the woodshed. Paul had offered to get her a dryer, but Faye wouldn’t have it: she was living in the country now, and she wanted that fresh smell. If he wanted to get her something, she said, he could start with a wicker clothes basket to replace that horrible green plastic one. “A clothes basket?” he said. Misunderstood Provider was one of Paul’s favorite roles these days. He was taking on the local accent, too, flattening certain sounds and giving others an odd depth: the a in farm was somewhere in between the a in ah and the a in hat, while the i in wife was something like the uy in Huysmans. He had learned to treat the kitchen as a living room, and to operate a chainsaw. He had his truck, which he had taken to calling his “rig,” and half a dozen adjustable caps—the fronts thin foam rubber, the backs nylon mesh—which still smelled after they’d been through the wash. To have adopted such an esthetic so convincingly was a real accomplishment for someone who knew perfectly well who Huysmans was.
She had just got the still-damp clothes safely into the woodshed when the sound of rain came up out of the silence as if somebody had turned up the volume. She walked to the open door and watched it pelt down in slanting gray lines through which waves of intensity swept back and forth; already the driveway was a pair of muddy streams running side by side with a strip of grass between. Paul would be home early: the road crew certainly couldn’t work in this.
It looked so touching, rain falling on all that green. And she liked it in the woodshed. The rough-hewn beams, the sweet wood smell. When they first moved in, she’d found a box of shotgun shells out here, on a shelf next to a can of motor oil. She brought the oil can to Paul but threw out the shells without telling him, hiding them near the bottom of a trash bag, then she’d worried for weeks that they might explode in the compactor at the transfer station. All in all, things were better up here. More coarse, yes: oafish locals sitting around her kitchen table, six-packs torn open. More coarse, less harsh—was that a meaningful distinction? New York was harsh. After her divorce from Ben, she’d moved in with Karen on East Third Street. Because she had a thing about poison, she’d vacuumed up the boric acid Karen had put out, and bought roach motels. A couple of days later she’d picked up one to check inside, and it struck her that she was looking into hell: tiny, starving creatures struggling to free themselves, or just feebly waving their antennae. Later, when she took it up with her shrink, she could see that it was explicable as a projection of her guilt and not necessarily a message from God. But at the time she’d screamed, and poor Karen had come running.
It was sometime around then that Paul had come along. Completely different from Ben, one hundred eighty degrees, which was exactly what she needed. Somebody completely right-brain, or whichever side it was that made you verbal as opposed to whatever Ben was, with a lot of books, some of them the same as hers, a novel-in-progress, a funky old Saab and a failed marriage of his own. She’d gone to hear Cynthia Ozick at the 92nd Street Y and started chatting with this man in line who was wearing a nice-smelling leather jacket; when they announced that all the tickets were sold, everybody groaned, but he shrugged and said, “Minor disappointment. I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather have a drink anyway. Care to come?” Karen had been greatly in favor of Paul. “You should grab him
,” she said. “I would.” This sounded like a threat, but it turned out Karen wanted to move to California but was afraid to go unless Faye had somebody. At first it made no sense, being in bed with this bearded man whose hair didn’t smell like Ben’s, or driving around up in the country staring at the fall colors out the window of this man’s Saab.
She looked through the slanting rain at the green hills. Beyond them was the long and winding road that led to Ben’s door, in Leavenworth, Washington. Then, down at the foot of the driveway, Paul’s truck appeared, its lights on, edging close to the mailbox; she saw his arm stretch out of the window, pull open the box and reach inside. Now he gunned it up the driveway toward the house, and pulled onto the grass by the kitchen door. The wipers stopped, the headlights went out and she watched him trot into the house, hugging the mail to his chest with one hand, his other elbow shielding his head from the rain. She listened to him calling her name.
For once they got to eat in the dining room. Karen and Allen had brought four bottles of a better-than-okay California Merlot, and cheeses, olives and bread from Zabar’s; Faye made sauce with their own tomatoes, which had just started to come in, and fresh pasta with her pasta machine. Paul’s contribution was to keep the music going, though Faye thought she detected an edge of something when he put on Merle Haggard. He filled his wineglass again—they were already on bottle number three—and claimed Merle Haggard looked like King Hussein, which no one was prepared to dispute.
“Okay, Famous Look-Alikes,” Paul said. “For ten points: Mama Cass.”
“You mean think up somebody that looks like her?” Karen said.
He nodded. “Famous writer.”
“Who was Mama Cass again?” said Allen.
“Mamas and the Papas,” Karen said. “Faye used to have their album when I was in fourth grade.”
“So ten points,” said Paul. “Looks just like her. Famous, famous writer.” He glances around the table.
“Would I know this person?” Allen said.
“I would hope so. You want another hint? Eighteenth century.”
“You’ll have to tell us,” Karen said.
“Samuel Johnson.”
“I don’t see that at all,” Karen said.
“I’m not really familiar,” Allen said.
“Allen’s more into John Le Carré,” said Karen.
“Come on, I read good stuff, too.”
“Nothing wrong with John Le Carré,” Paul said. “I’d a hell of a lot sooner read him than fucking John Updike. If we’re talking about Johns here.”
“You realize that’s the second mean thing you’ve said about John Updike?” Karen said. “Why do you have such a thing about him?”
Paul snorted. “I wonder.”
Faye swirled the sediment in her wineglass. Alcohol was so interesting, she thought. Interesting just to sit here with all this loud talk going on around you and yet to feel safe. She’d probably feel even safer lying down on the bed, and maybe in a while she’d get up, excuse herself and go do just that. The dishes could wait until morning: no cockroaches up here. And Paul could flirt with her sister all he wanted because Karen’s husband was on hand.
“Hey, actually I’ve got one,” Allen said. “I’m thinking of somebody that looks just like Cecilia Bartoli.”
“Who the hell is that?” said Paul.
“Cecilia Bartoli? Opera singer?”
Paul shrugged. “I heard of the Three Tenors. That’s what opera singers you get up here in the boonies.”
Now, what was this about? Paul never missed the Metropolitan Opera broadcast on Saturday afternoon—unless his redneck friends were in the house. His all-time favorite tenor was Jussi Björling.
“But you get PBS, don’t you?” Allen said.
Faye poured herself more wine—just a touch. Karen’s husband was going too far with Paul, but she was too drunk to imagine how to warn him.
“I told you,” Paul said. “This is the fuckin’ boonies, right? I like it to be the fuckin’ boonies. Because all that crap is interchangeable. You know? Spaghetti-bender of the month. I mean, after a certain point”—waving his hand, he knocked over the current wine bottle, then quickly righted it, leaving just a splash of maroon on the white tablecloth.
“Good hands,” Allen said. “So you give up?”
“I don’t give up,” Paul said. “I just don’t happen to know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“I give up,” Karen said. “If that helps.”
Paul turned to her. “You don’t believe me about Samuel Johnson. Don’t go anywhere.” He got up and headed for the living room, walking surprisingly well.
“Does anybody want to hear my thing?” Allen said.
“I do,” Karen said.
Faye took another sip.
“Your sister,” he said.
“What? No way,” said Karen. “Okay, you’re cut off.”
“But it’s true,” he said. “Am I crazy?”
Faye closed her eyes and began to count. Maybe to fifty, she thought.
“There. Check it out,” she heard Paul say.
She opened her eyes and saw him laying a book beside Karen’s plate: a gray paperback whose cover showed a fat, peevish-looking, full-lipped man in a wig.
“Okay,” Paul said, “now picture Mama Cass.”
“I am,” Karen said. “I think you’re as nuts as my husband.”
Faye closed her eyes again and considered proposing Richard Dreyfuss, but she couldn’t tell if the game was over or not. Anyhow, it might take things someplace weird.
“What’s it like for you, living here?” Karen said. They were walking up the path to where Faye knew there were blueberries, both swinging Medaglia d’Oro coffee cans. Faye had made holes in them with Paul’s electric drill and attached pieces of clothesline for handles.
“I don’t know,” Faye said. “It’s like—I don’t know. I mean, it’s like living anyplace, except it’s … I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Sorry,” Karen said. “I didn’t mean it to be a tough question.”
“Oh no, it’s a legitimate question. I just, I don’t really think about it. I mean, is it better than the city? You know, sure, in some ways. Having the space. Plus just being able to just go out your back door.”
“Allen and I talk about it sometimes,” Karen said. “I mean, we eventually do want to have kids, and it would be so much better in a place like this. But right now there’s no way.”
“You don’t think? I bet if Allen played his cards right he could get a job on the road crew.”
“Right. How’s Paul dealing with that?”
Faye shrugged. “Like a pig deals with shit. He’s running the grader, he’s running the backhoe, the bushhog—whatever it all is. The big roller. Last winter he was on night call for the snowplow. All he needs is a gun rack for his pickup.”
“He doing anything on his book? Wasn’t that part of the idea?”
“The magnum opus? You never hear about it anymore. I assume it’s fallen by the wayside.”
Karen shook her head. “Waste.”
“I don’t know,” Faye said. “Waste of what? He claims he’s happy. Gets him outdoors, plenty of exercise—hasn’t he given you the whole rap?”
“What about you, though?”
“What about me? I’m here, no? If I ever think of something else, I’ll think of something else.”
“There aren’t any other papers or anything?”
“Sure, this is the land of opportunity. Can’t think why everybody isn’t up here.”
They climbed over a tumbledown stone wall into a field of thigh-high saplings. A jay screamed. Faye squatted and stretched out her hand, palm up, to touch one leaf in a patch of low, tidy-looking bushes.
“A blueberry bush,” she said, pronouncing the article like the letter A.
“God, look at them all,” said Karen, getting down on her bare knees. “You weren’t kidding.”
“No, not my style. You can pick her
e. I’ll hit the other side.” The first berries started pinging into the coffee cans. Then only the rustling of the bushes as their hands tore at the berries, and the screams of the jays.
“It’s so quiet here,” Karen said. “I actually had trouble getting to sleep with nothing but the katydids.”
“Yeah,” said Faye. “This is the time of year you start hearing them. I still have trouble myself. It’s like, the one thing stands out more when there’s just silence. Though I personally didn’t hear jack shit last night.”
“I bet. I was worried you might be sick, but Paul said you were okay.”
“Paul should know.”
Karen shot her a glance. “Are you guys fighting?”
“That’s a quaint enough way to put it. No.”
“Oh.” Karen went back to picking, then stopped and stared at Faye. “At the risk of being put down definitively,” she said, “I would like to note that (a) I’m your sister, (b) you do not seem happy, and (c) if something’s wrong I’d be glad to listen.”
Faye shook her head. “It’s not really any one thing. Just the usual.”
“I know I shouldn’t ask this,” Karen began.
“No, you shouldn’t. Whatever it is. I’ll tell you one thing: about sixty-five percent of the problem is that I’m hung over and this sun is giving me a headache. We must have about enough. Let me see what you’ve got.” Karen tilted her coffee can toward Faye. “Well, not quite. We want to make two pies, and these things cook down.”
“You make them in twos?”
“The frugal hausfrau,” Faye said. “Costs money to run that gas stove, you know. Actually, one is for you guys to take with you.”
“Really?”
“No,” Faye said. “I’m kidding you again.”
By the time they got back to the house they were both sweating, but it was cool in the kitchen. Karen lifted the tightly rolled bandanna from around her head and shook her hair out with both hands. It struck Faye that she’d only seen this style in magazines. Then it struck her that Karen obviously had been wearing the bandanna all morning.
