In Case We're Separated

by Alice Mattison

  The bus had turned at the wrong corner, lengthening Hank’s walk. “You gotta do something, Bob. Either they changed the bus route or the driver is loco.”

  Bob nodded vaguely. “Thanks, Hank,” he said, giving back the map. The man started to speak again, but Bob’s cell phone rang, and he pointed, ducked his head, and moved to a corner of the yard to talk. Ruth waited, tired and hot. He returned. “Looks like we’re stuck,” he said to Ruth. “Somebody’s having a baby.”

  “That was Binnie?”

  “She can’t get away,” he said.

  “You don’t have a key to her place?” said Ruth.

  “She won’t be long,” he said.

  “Can I at least have a glass of water?” Ruth said.

  “Oh, my woman,” Bob said, “what have I done? I’ve left you to roast here.”

  “I’m not your woman,” said Ruth.

  “Every woman is my woman.” He laid his hand lightly on her shoulder and steered her into the building, through corridors and down stairs to a cool, dim kitchen. Glasses stood in a dish drainer on the sink. Ruth ran the cold water, filled one, drank it, filled another, leaned over the sink, and poured it over her head. The water felt good on her scalp. She washed her face and arms with a scrap of soap. A roll of paper towels was next to the sink. She dried herself—while Bob stared—then searched in her purse for her hairbrush, pulled off the ponytail holder, and brushed her wet hair. She didn’t care about him, so he could watch her wash her face. She did like his arms and hands. He was smiling slightly.

  “What?” she said.

  “Do you always do that?”

  “Pour water on my head?” He nodded. “Only when I’m hot.”

  “Do it again,” he said, and she stared back at him, at those same round brown protruding eyes his daughter had. Then he reached out with one forefinger and lightly tapped the back of her left palm.

  “Now what?” she said, but something quivered within her. Her nipples, her crotch registered his touch.

  “Let me put you in my office,” Bob said. “The guys and I will carry in the furniture.” More stairs, more corridors, and he unlocked a musty room, opened a window, turned on a fan, and left her. Ruth sat at his desk, next to the window, on his battered metal swivel chair, mildly swiveling and doing nothing else, for a long time.

  Then she examined the desk. On it was a computer, turned off, and a partially written memo in handwriting on a yellow pad. “Pursuant to policies adopted at the last coalition meeting July 10, all staff should be advised that privacy policy implementation forms must be completed by special needs individuals whenever possible and completed by staff and signed by special needs individuals if this is not possible, which is a nuisance but worth it for reasons discussed.”

  It was an appalling sentence. What a relief to be able to edit something. As Ruth worked, she could hear Bob and the men talking and joking while they carried furniture. She read the memo again, trying to figure out what it meant. After several trials she wrote, “As you know, you now must ask clients to fill out the annoying but important forms explaining how we protect their privacy. At the meeting of the coalition on July 10, the members decided that when clients can’t fill out the forms, you should fill them out and ask the clients to sign them.”

  As she continued to fuss with the sentences, the rise and fall of jocular voices became louder and tenser. She swiveled her chair—this must be how Bob ran the place, turning his chair and looking out the window—and watched. A thin black man, walking with a cane, was talking to Bob. “And I tell you, you are definitely to blame for this!” he said in a low, sonorous voice. The voice carried, and everybody turned to watch.

  “So you’re still mad at me, Carmichael?” Bob said.

  “I shall be mad forever,” said the man.

  “You know, I have no idea what I did.”

  “You did evil.”

  “I do evil all the time. You need to tell me which evil, exactly.”

  “You know which evil.” The man now turned so his back was toward the building, and after that she couldn’t hear anything. Curious, she’d paid attention—first to this place, then to Bob, then to his memo, then to the man with the cane. Now as she stopped listening, something tightened in her chest, and she remembered Shadow; again she felt the brush of his tail. At worst, she’d spoiled her life in that neglectful moment. If the cat was gone, if David couldn’t forgive her . . . There was a phone on the desk. She thought of calling her daughter, Laura, busy at work in Washington, D.C., just to say, “You don’t hate me, do you?”

  But she called David.

  “He came back,” he said as soon as he heard her voice. “Shadow walked in the door twenty minutes ago.”

  “Oh, David. Oh, David.” She started to cry.

  “I know.” He sounded teary as well. “He’s smarter than any of us.”

  Ruth heard Bob coming down the corridor. “Did you hear from Binnie?” she said to David. “She’s going to be late.”

  “I know. It gives me more time. I’m cleaning.”

  “You all right?” Bob said, opening the door.

  “Did you do evil?” she said. Then to David, “Okay, sweetie.”

  “Okay.” She hung up, and turned to face Bob. “The cat came home.”

  “I thought it would.”

  “Did you do evil?” she asked again.

  “Probably.”

  “Is that a habit of yours?”

  Bob paused, more serious than she’d expected. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say a habit. What’s that?” He stood behind her, one hand on her shoulder, looking at the pad. “You can’t say ‘client,’ ” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Stigmatizing. Also, ‘special needs individuals’ means something.”

  “But it’s not English.”

  He sighed. “We’ll talk about it.”

  “But it’s okay on the whole?” she said.

  “Oh, it’s much better. Let’s get coffee. There’s a place not too far.” Ruth pulled her hair into a ponytail again, and followed him down the stairs and out of the building. A breeze had started up. She said, “Tell me about this evil you do.” It would take time. They had plenty of time to be friends, she reflected, because they probably shouldn’t be lovers until after the kids broke up—and maybe got over breaking up. And for all she knew he had someone already. More time. Could she take a lover who was such a bad writer? He was worse than her last lover.

  He looked at her. “Do you mind if I smoke in the van?” he said.

  She did mind. “Do you mind if I mind?”

  “Yes, but all right. I’ll do it here.” He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket, turned out of the breeze to strike a match, and inserted a cigarette between his lips. He had a dark mustache, but it was cut short, so she could see that his mouth was wide, his lips pleasantly full. It would take time, as well, to get him to quit smoking. Bob stamped out his cigarette in the littered driveway. “I drink, too,” he said.

  “So do I. A lot?”

  “You’ll decide.” They climbed into the van and she fastened her seat belt. So did he. He twisted his body to look behind him as he backed out of the driveway. They drove to an old luncheonette. She had iced coffee, he had hot. Tired, they spoke little. He called Binnie, who was on her way home, and they returned to the van. He knew half a dozen shortcuts on the way to his daughter’s place, and knew where to park. Leaving the furniture for now, they walked with long matched strides in the cool air, arms and legs light, legs fully extended, as if they imitated horses. Their left legs stepped forward in the same plane, then their right, as if horses paced as one—gaily painted carousel horses, or even live horses.

  Boy in Winter

  My first lover, James, died of AIDS many years ago, before The New York Times had noticed the epidemic. Gay men were dying, some had Kaposi’s syndrome—that was all anyone could say so far. My cousin Richard worked for the city, and I knew from him that people in the health depart
ment were beginning to be alarmed. Richard was in love with James, we all knew that, but he was Richard, who took my hand to cross me when I was a little boy, who once—he was eleven, I was six—flung himself upon me, so we both fell to a subway floor, to keep me from running off a train in confused panic at the wrong stop.

  Richard came often to visit James and me. He’d grasp one of us by the arm. “Brad,” he’d say. “James, Brad, James . . .” James and I weren’t a happy, stable couple except in Richard’s mind. He was mourning us, reminding himself we were a couple, firming his determination to keep his nonsecret a secret. I don’t think he acknowledged to himself that he was gay until he fell in love with James. For me, caring for James was something like caring for my mother, who had died not long before of cancer. I gave the intimate help that sick people require, and in both instances, as I did so I often caught myself murmuring the same unplanned words, not to my mother or to James but to myself: “Soon over, no matter, soon over, no matter.” I couldn’t have said what I thought would soon be over, or what didn’t matter.

  Two years after James died, I met Warren Beckwirth, who designed the cover of my first book, about changes in the Brooklyn neighborhood where I grew up. Change became my subject, and later I wrote two more books about how communities had become different, but what drew me to Warren might have been a look of permanence. The day we met, as he rummaged in the confusion of his office, I stood behind him and noticed his big feet in heavy shoes, his thick legs, held slightly apart, as if Warren expected gusts of wind to pass through my publisher’s art department, wind that would not topple him.

  The year Warren and I began living together, he brought me home for Christmas. The trip was a novelty for me, a New York Jew. His parents, Beverly and Warren Sr., lived in Wanda, Wisconsin, where they shrewdly ran a small business, making canvas bags of ingenious design that sold mostly through ads in the back pages of Yankee and The New Yorker. They were parents so clear-eyed they’d accepted their son’s homosexuality without protest, only attentive head shakings. Once something made sense to the Beckwirths, they couldn’t oppose it. I was enthralled by them and by Wanda, where people smiled at me in what seemed like a sad and quiet way, and within days the Beckwirths and I were persuading Warren to move to Wanda with me and run the business, so his parents could retire to a one-story condo in North Carolina. Beverly’s sweet logic made me weep, and Warren Sr. called me “son.” My own father had left my mother and me when I was a baby. Eventually Warren agreed that he might be happier running Bags of Wisconsin than working in the art department of a publisher that, rumor had it, was about to be sold to a larger one, which would have its own art department and might well dump Warren. So we moved.

  I was writing about change in Healdsburg, California, once a dusty town of migrant farmworkers, now a chic setting for wineries and tourists. I flew there occasionally, and wrote up my notes in the old green frame house we bought from Warren’s parents. Warren had entered my life encumbered with an antique oak desk and swivel chair, acquired in an adventure involving a former lover and a country auction. The desk had scarcely fit in our New York apartment and Warren never wrote at it, but I loved it, and sometimes spread my note cards on it, taking pleasure in its solidity and proportions. Now the desk was a grand presence in our Wisconsin dining room, glowing in afternoon sunlight. We bought a German shepherd puppy named Gloria, and every morning we’d run a few miles with Glory. When we reached the turnoff to Bags of Wisconsin’s small cinder-block headquarters, in which Warren had installed a shower, he’d leave Glory and me and run down a hill to greet his employees, who were led by two geniuses, both named Betty. Home in our airy house, with squeaky varnished floorboards and maple trees outside, I’d pace and mumble my sentences into existence while Glory slept. At my computer was an office chair with lumbar support, but I spent hours in Warren’s oak armchair, my feet on a windowsill, shuffling note cards. When my book was published I began one about Wanda, which used to be a market town and was now vaguely suburban, vaguely industrial. I got a part-time teaching job at a college an hour away, and commuted there twice a week.

  Warren designed a line of ripstop nylon bags in vivid colors, and continued to offer the old canvas ones, which seemed to look forward to grime and mud stains. He undertook a catalog and, a few years after that, began to sell on the Internet. As the years passed, he became the first openly gay man in the Rotary Club, then a member of the city council. He grew bald and his smile became creased like his father’s. “I might run for Congress,” Warren said one morning.

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “I suppose not.” Two years later he did mean it. The incumbent, a charming homophobic conservative, was unbeatable, and nobody but Warren wanted to be the sacrificial Democrat. The business was doing well enough that we could put a little money into a campaign managed by the husband of one of the Bettys. We received donations from distant gay organizations, and All Things Considered did a two-minute segment on Warren as part of a piece on small-town gay candidates. Our big event was The Run for Congress, a ten-mile race that ended in front of Wanda’s town hall. Warren, Glory, and I ran with a few supporters on a chilly fall day, and to our chagrin, Warren’s opponent entered the race and reached the finish line before either of us. Warren lost the election more decisively than we expected. A few weeks later he began to talk about leaving Wanda to study at Harvard for a year. “You’re portable,” he said to me, as if I were my own laptop. “It’s only a year.”

  “But we’re happy here,” I said, shocked. As we argued during the next months, he applied to a one-year “midcareer” master’s program in government. “But why?” I kept asking.

  “To meet people who aren’t benighted. To see what comes next.”

  “Doesn’t Bags of Wisconsin come next?”

  “Maybe so, maybe not.”

  Many of my interviews had been with the benighted—that is, I’d noted homophobia, racism, or anti-Semitism—but each person I’d talked to, in conversations lasting so long that twilight fell, makeshift suppers intervened, or bars closed, was gradually revealed—somehow—to be decent and caring. My resistance to Warren increased; Wanda’s very stop signs came to seem delicate with meaning. At first we argued, then we became silent or unpleasant. “Stay here, then,” Warren said several times. One night in my helplessness I got so angry I took a swing at him. I didn’t try to connect, but I knocked off his glasses, which snapped as they skittered across the floor. In his new glasses—much smaller lenses, with metal frames—Warren looked like someone else.

  A few days later he said, “Don’t you have a nephew in Boston? You can look up your nephew.” Find another crazy Jew who bats his arms around, I thought he meant.

  “Cousin,” I said. Richard’s nephew—his sister’s son—lived near Boston. I stayed in touch with Richard, who was still a city planner in New York. Maybe he visited his nephew. Starting with Richard’s image, I began to picture Cambridge bookstores and libraries, coffee shops where I could meet Richard or read galleys: the book on Wanda was almost done. I tried to stay civil as we rented out our house and put most of our furniture into storage. There was no way to take the oak desk, but I insisted on bringing the swivel armchair, which separated into a heavy base and a contoured seat with a slatted back. I took a leave from my teaching job. In late June I drove east on Route 90 with middle-aged Glory in the backseat, catching sight now and then of a U-Haul truck driven by Warren.

  The only apartment we could afford that would take a dog was in Somerville, the town next to Cambridge. People said Somerville was interesting, with the amenities that accompany graduate students and professional people when they move into a working-class town. But when I took Glory out to our small bare backyard, and waited, shovel in hand, until she squatted, I was aware only of what I didn’t like: houses crowded together and covered with aluminum siding, grassless yards, radios playing loud music. We ran on glaring sidewalks from which humid heat rose in visible waves. One day as I
ran alone—Warren was in summer school, studying statistics and economics, scared and excited—an SUV hurtled down our steep, narrow street and struck a boy of ten or twelve sauntering across. He didn’t fall down, and insisted when the driver jumped out that he was fine, man, fine. The kid and the van departed and I stood still, holding Glory’s leash tightly and repelled by a place where everyone expected to inflict or receive pain. “Nonsense,” said Warren that night. He was on his way out and he glanced back at me. “Brad, give it a rest, will you?”

  After running, I’d shower and work on my copy editor’s queries. Yes, the name “Burt”—Carroll Burt, a former mayor of Wanda—was spelled “Burtt” when it belonged to Carroll’s uncle, Landon. No, the Garfield family did not have two daughters named Mary Ellen. Warren took the T to Harvard Square, so I had the car, but I hated driving on the narrow streets. On good afternoons, Glory and I walked to Davis Square and I tied her up outside the used bookstore. I’d buy iced coffee and walk back with her, up and down hills, feeling a gingerly, grudging satisfaction.

  The phone rang one dark fall afternoon when I’d postponed a walk too long. “Brad—Richard here—there’s an incredible pianist performing with the symphony—” Richard said this into the machine because the phone had caught me on the toilet.

  “I’m here,” I said, picking up.

  “Lucky boy! You escaped from the Midwest!”

  “I like the Midwest.” Richard was once a pianist. Wanda had no art, he had pointed out, on his single visit in the years we lived there. He discovered a French restaurant thirty miles away, but no music he’d sit still for. “Debussy,” he was saying now. Richard was coming to Boston.

  “I can’t wait to see you,” I broke in. “Warren and I are barely speaking.”

  “Oh, you and Warren are fine.” Richard had never been with anyone long enough to consider living together, and regarded Warren and me as a couple comparable in dramatic potential to his parents. With a flurry of e-mailing and two more phone calls, Richard organized an evening. His nephew, Josh, was included, and so was Josh’s girlfriend. “They live together,” said Richard. “Right near you. She’s Asian.” Warren was too busy for Richard’s concert, but I agreed to attend. Richard said I should pick up Josh and the woman, who had no car, and we’d all meet for dinner. “Can’t we take the T?” I said.