Eccentric Circles

by Larry Duberstein

  Well, I think if you have a very strong physical tie to your spouse you can survive an acknowledged infidelity—though perhaps not. Perhaps what it takes is a weak physical tie, combined with a strong sense of tradition. I don’t know. But I do know that for myself and Barbara it had ended, I had lost my wife. As divorces go, ours was surely among the least messy and most depressing. We were both young and “eligible,” there had been no issue—not so much as a dog or cat to custodize—and we were both on our feet financially. Really the divorce was just paperwork, neither of us felt it necessary to even consider leaving the firm. The divorce was in fact a relief and yet this much is also true: had we not seen Ray Davis that day, we might have remained married forever.

  I did not go to Britt. For starters I doubted she actually missed me. That had just been an arrow in Ray’s quiver. Britt felt like a long dead moment lodged far back in time. I had often wondered what she saw in me, had felt—as I’ve testified—arbitrary, temporary. Surely someone more suitable had come to hand by now. I have always been engulfed by this sense of my own unworthiness, not only with Britt Pomeroy but also before and apart from Britt.

  Except, oddly enough, for the one thing. I did like my response to Sugar Ray Davis. I did enjoy that rush of coming clean. Though devastated no doubt, I was also thrilled to see the precise moment of pain and loss flower into an amazing blossom of memorable pleasure. No big deal to you—I do understand that perfectly—yet for me it was the only moment in ten years, or twenty, maybe in my entire life, where I existed so purely for myself, or liked myself so well.

  Moving Water

  Annie Riley sat at the picture window, watching the road, drinking her coffee. The road was a twelve-foot-wide dirt and hardpan surface winding down one side of Blue Mountain; no more than a dozen times a day would a car, or more often a truck, come bouncing past.

  Winding down an adjacent face of the mountain, angling raggedly toward the roadway, was a runoff stream, narrow and gentle most of the year, a racing torrent six feet wider in May. At Riley’s, where the stream ducked under the road, there was a wooden bridge, four-inch-thick oak planks laid across the rusted iron beams that spanned the little waterway. All this was on such a small scale, so crude and so far from any real bustle, that the planks were not fastened and the bridge did not have a guard rail.

  But it was a pretty spot, especially on the downstream side where the water pooled out into a shapely oval between grassy banks, before it cinched in and meandered into the swamp maples. The deep sunny pool had once served as a neighborhood swimming hole—“Riley’s Pond”—with a high tire-swing and a sand patch laid on over the grass to create a beachfront about the size of someone’s kitchen.

  Annie Riley, sitting in her own kitchen, watching the road, could remember the rallying cry, Let’s go down to Riley’s, and the crowds of eight and ten (generation after generation, going back to her own) but she could not recall exactly when or why it had stopped. Annie had never gone far herself; she had grown up in a house in the village at a time when this tiny cottage was home to her aunt and uncle; had moved in with her husband in 1960. He died in 1975. No one had come to swim in years and no one called it Riley’s Pond either—the place had lost its name when it lost its social function.

  When Annie heard the motor approaching, she naturally waited to see who would be going by, waited for the low rumble of the planks and the dust cloud that always formed, but instead the air had gone silent. Not a woman who talked to herself, Annie Riley did occasionally push out her hip, or make the faces that went with common speech, and a little bit talk with herself, which was quite different. It was like talking with the collie dog Mischief, before she died, or with Carlton, her husband, before that. These days she had to fill in for them, that was all.

  “Curious,” she said.

  “Yes it is.”

  “Well I know it came past Harold Aho’s and there’s nothing else between me and the Aho place.”

  “I know it,” she said, and then she heard a soft splash.

  Her best look was from the tiny pantry ell, but thick honeysuckle curved up past the window sill and farther away, across the summer rye, the brush had grown tangled and unkempt. All she could know was that someone was in the pond—one person only, to judge by the quiet cleaving of the water and the lack of conversation. When the splash came it had instantly revived memories of the time before Carlton died, the two or three years of his illness when for a while there would be hippies coming to the pond, from God knew where, and swimming naked. “Ten yards from the house!” he would say and, too feeble to confront them, he would mutter about getting a good load of shot for the .22.

  And Annie would be thinking, It’s more like twenty yards, maybe twenty-five, and thinking, that gun hasn’t been cleaned in so long it would either be rusted useless or shoot the shooter, and she would look at her husband and say nothing out loud. Just touch his shoulders and mention she was starting the coffee if he happened to want any.

  Once he did go out there, feeling stronger and more agitated than usual, and he took the rifle with him. There were four of them in the water, two male and two female, and he waved the rifle and yelled about respect for private property and then the blond girl came up from the water toward him, naked and dripping, started over the uncut rye all smiles and apologies (though of course she was taunting him, Annie knew, flaunting herself in the face of his discomfort and fascination) so that he had to melt back to the house.

  “Did you load it?” she asked, watching him settle the gun back in its rack.

  “No, just bluffing them.”

  “Old pokerface. Pair of deuces, bumping up like crazy,” she said nostalgically, consolingly, resting a gentle palm on his shoulder, thinking about the pretty girl tan from head to toe.

  “Do you know, they could conquer the world like that. Just walk into town naked as day and take over the Town Hall when everybody ran off.”

  “I doubt it,” she said. “Sheriff Hatch would stand his ground and clap them in irons. Especially that blond one.”

  Annie didn’t mind if this was a naked person, now. Nor did fear occur to her. If it was to be crime, there wouldn’t be any splashing in the water and as far as someone taking a swim, she couldn’t see objecting. Why begrudge a swim to someone hot and happy? With her it was more a matter of curiosity.

  Minutes later, she saw a red pickup rattling past the house, a young man with slicked-back hair and no shirt at the wheel. “That was it,” she said. “Jumped in the pond after work on a hot day. What else?” But for the first time in years she considered the clean grass-smelling water flowing over warm flat rocks and thought of herself swimming, on a distant summer’s day or maybe on a warm day later this very week. Maybe tomorrow, why not?

  “Wonder why I never do,” she said.

  Same time the next afternoon, she remembered the swimmer and realized the day had trickled away. Half past four. Earlier, around noontime, she considered wading in for a dip, but it drew her interest only as an idea. The truth was that ninety degrees or no ninety degrees, she wasn’t that hot and had no desire to be wet all over. “Age, it must be,” she said. “Sure. What else?”

  Then she heard the truck bouncing down the hill, waited and heard him crash the water. Must have slipped in from the bank yesterday, jumped off the bridge today, she concluded. And it was him going by shortly thereafter, black hair plastered to his head and so careful not to look sideways to the house that went with the water. “I ought to be angry, I suppose.”

  She wasn’t, though, any more than she was hot. In fact the next morning she clipped back the honeysuckle and hacked away some of the brush around the pond. She hoped the changes didn’t show—wished the Samuels boy was mowing today so it would look like normal upkeep—but she also did drop a beach towel on the grass between the house and pond, why she could not say. To warn him off, or wake him up?—or maybe again, just to normalize the cuttings.

  “Maybe to say hello!” she said later, w
hen he was there, because he looked so hot and dusty beforehand that Annie wanted to bring him out a can of Budweiser, and looked so cool and clean afterward that she could as easily fetch him hot coffee, sit him down for a chat. He was nice enough to look at, slim and muscled, and he swam in blue-jean shorts; just peeled off his shirt, tossed his socks and shoes, and jumped in with his pants on.

  “You could hardly have him for coffee without pants,” she said, and then, feeling naughty, “though some people probably do drink it that way.”

  “I take mine with milk and sugar,” she replied.

  Every day it was the same. She listened for the clatter of the pickup, it arrived on a schedule the trains could be proud of, he parked off in the pine needles and plunged in for his bath. He never took soap into the water—one reason she liked him, he had respect—but she knew it was his bath because of the way he ruffled his hair and rubbed his arms. There was a house going up on the Newmarket Road, she had heard, and maybe he was one of the ones building it. In the back of his truck there were always sawhorses and shovels, bags of material, sticks of lumber; plus of course he never came by on a Sunday.

  The builder never altered a thing and neither did Annie, though she felt he should ask about using the pond, that it was only appropriate, as he could see this was not exactly the wilderness here. He never did, though, never even looked in the direction of the house; just boldly made himself the owner of the water and made her, the deedholder, feel furtive and a little guilty.

  It was on a Thursday, after six weeks of this, that he missed the appointed time. Annie was naturally let down. To her it had no better meaning than any other tick of the clock, but no lesser one either. It was as though a day went by and four-thirty never happened. She caught a strangeness from that, and a sense of being cheated, slightly. Then she guessed he might be sick (or worse, injured on the job) and wished she had been nicer to him, had brought him the beer instead of just thinking about it.

  He wasn’t sick, though, or hurt. A few days later she decided he was finished with the job, that was all. They weren’t going to be out there on the Newmarket Road forever building the one house and maybe that was how long it took, six weeks. Anyway, three misses stretched out to six and so on, until after two weeks she was certain he wouldn’t be back again.

  “Too bad,” she said, then quickly replied, “But why say that? What’s it matter, really?”

  True enough. It was something she had come to like, to look forward to and even consider briefly in the evening once or twice, yet it was a small, a very minor matter. Soon enough it would be too cold to go in the water anyhow, for July turned to late August awfully quickly these past few years. Already the afternoons were getting chilly in the shadow of Blue Mountain, with the pondwaters darkened hours before sunset. There were even a few red leaves reflected, harbingers, like the first gray hairs on a young woman’s head.

  It was September actually, a hot windless Saturday, when the builder did come one more time. Annie knew it was once more only—true she’d been wrong he would never, but she really did know that this was the one last—and she stood at the sound of his truck and straightaway started pacing nervously between the kitchen and the picture window. She went back and forth half a dozen times and then, without thought, she was out the door and bolting across the yard toward him.

  He was already standing waist-high in the water, shaking his head like a puppy. Annie had no plan, no speech ready, and as she came closer, and saw him glance up startled and sheepish, she realized how unlikely any speech from her would be. Ludicrous, surely, to offer him a bottle of beer as recompense for his trespassing! Almost to the grassy bank, she had no pretext for being there, other than the fact the land was hers.

  “Don’t you know,” she said firmly—though the words came unwilled, sliding out from somewhere inside her and unfamiliar—“that this is private property?”

  She said it simply because there was no other choice, no other sentence that fit in with her sudden radical presence there. The instant the words were out, they seemed to her harsh, undeserved (his face all innocence and apology) and for that matter unmeant.

  “I just hoped it was all right, getting wet in here. Sorry if I was wrong.”

  Annie had already yielded the point of course and was grateful now to find there were other sentences she could say after all.

  “Well, maybe it’s good someone gets some use of it.”

  “Still, if it’s yours—I should have asked permission.”

  “It’s moving water,” she argued. “Just leaks on down the hill. Probably no one should own it in the first place.”

  “I guess it is,” he shrugged.

  “Maybe no one does own it. I mean the water itself.”

  “That could be,” he said, agreeable on all legal points and still apologetic, though he did remain in the water. It crossed her mind that maybe today, this one time, he had his pants off and must wait for her to leave; in a passing flash, she imagined him walking toward her, the way that hippie girl did to Carlton so long ago.

  Then it came to her, clear as could be, that the builder did not really see her or hear her at all. That he was agreeable, polite, because it cost him nothing. He had taken over her girlhood pond in the same way—cavalier and uncaring. Yes, she had been fixed on him these weeks but he was oblivious to her, whether as a plot of land, a face in the window, or a real woman standing there conversing with him.

  Not that he was evil. His life was right now, that was all, or soon. It was out ahead of him and she was simply not in it. Of course she wasn’t. Yet it was somehow not easy to grasp the way she was not in his life when he was so distinctly in hers. And when she looked up again (maybe a minute later, maybe two) he was in the red pickup saying sorry, and thanks, and it had been nice of her to be so generous about it. He was not relaying any real gratitude, Annie knew, only flapping his gums on cue. She saw he had a small red rose tattooed onto his left shoulder, nestled in twining greens.

  “No sense arguing,” she said, and as the truck pulled itself up to the top of the world and rolled off, she was already nodding in agreement: “Nothing to argue about.”

  The Undertaker’s Choice

  We were gathered at the lip of Micky’s grave when I finally began to wake up, and it was the sight of the backhoe approaching that did it.

  The damned thing had dug the hole earlier, clean and square like geometry, and now it was coming over the grass with Micky’s coffin. What I mean is you expect to see one or two scrofulous gravediggers drying out in the sun, or see their rusty shovels wedged in loam, but even more so you expect the old amenities: to bear the weight on family shoulders, to speak a quiet word, scoop a handful of earth, untangle a flower from the bouquet. These guys even had the dirt hidden, under a slick green tarp.

  Not that it was their fault The Mick was dead, or even that I couldn’t seem to get going in the right direction—could only think wasn’t this one hell of a day to be dead, such perfect summer, so blue and bright. At the funeral home a tall bird with a mop said I was late, they had already left in the limos, for the church. There, at St. Paul’s, I barely beat the doors closing, barely negotiated the woozy gangplank slope of the aisle with the organ rolling through that sudden cathedral dark; could barely make out the faces of family, though of course everyone was there, even the fourth and fifth layers, the New York branch, not to mention all Mick’s tough pals from the foundry.

  They had set up the box on canvas stretchers and the friar wandered around it with his pots of incense and water rites and the Latin incantations. Then he spoke a few platitudes about my nutty brother who he never met and who would never have stood still for one second under the ill-fitting generic tributes being ladled onto his contrary reckless brow. All the while I could only look at the outside walls of the box and see Mick perfectly alert inside them, grinning his cockeyed ironic grin, waiting to spring one more joke on us, thumb his nose at one last mass.

  And then we were in Beaver
Cleaver Hell, in the middle of some endless suburb the limos were endlessly gliding through, riding behind the box, and still I could not picture Micky dead, stiff under layers of wax and rouge. Now I wondered was he really in there, so confined? Man, did The Mick ever hate confinement! But no one had been permitted to look—too horrible, they said—so was there someone appointed, by someone else, to make absolute certain of these matters? Who was it? And another thought, my old man paid fifteen hundred bucks for that plastic crate. What if they figured why waste it; what if they sneaked it back to their gloomy barns, scrubbed it down and sold it again for another fifteen hundred, or even marked it up ten percent to cover cleaning expenses?

  Anyway there we stood, looking at the backhoe like a tribe of mutes, and they made known they wanted us gone barely a minute after. It was my sister Jeannie who shook them off—ushers, or whatever they were—and peeled back the tarpaulin. On her knees, weeping, she started scooping earth with her hands. We all came to do the same and soon everyone’s eyes were wet and red, though Jean was the only one whose tears you could hear. There was a lot of hugging before they finally packed us back in the limos, all except me, since my car was the only one at St. Paul’s.

  The hearse was now empty, of course, and the head of operations stood alongside it like a sales ace caressing his showroom special. I went up and asked if he happened to be heading back by way of the church, knowing he wasn’t but figuring the price might include a few loose ends of this sort.

  “Of course,” he said, but right off, as though he had been waiting just for me, my chauffeur, and he gestured me onto the broad plush seat with such a gracious smile I felt something like happiness stir in me, though my brother was dead and I didn’t know the man from a hole in the ground.

  “Happy to ride you over,” he said, starting up the big soft engine, and sliding out a spotless ashtray for me as we passed through the grillwork gates. It was preposterous, and yet to hear a human voice, speaking the most ordinary human words, made me feel almost human too. It did me some good. I hadn’t said a word out loud since I hung up with my mother yesterday and now I felt like talking, even to the point of just making conversation. So I posed him the obvious—why a man would choose to do what he did for a living. A mortician and maybe a dentist are the people I would ask that question, out of genuine curiosity.