Maggie Pouncey

by Perfect Reader (v5)

  12

  Institutional Life

  CHRISTMAS MORNING BEGAN WITH SEX. Better, longer the second time around, though less stunning. Flora liked having sex with Paul, but she would have preferred to do it in the afternoon or evening, or at least after she’d had her coffee. She felt incompatible with most men she’d been with for this reason—morning sex. She caught herself missing the sex of her girlhood, which had occurred later in the day. There was something about high school sex. Not skill, of course. And really, she was romanticizing it. She was always doing that, getting the past wrong. But as sex became more competent, more expected, even more pleasurable, it seemed a little less exciting, less dangerous. Gone was the sense of being bad. Where the titillating fear of getting caught? No wonder academics loved adultery (along with the rest of the planet). It saved them from the suffocating appropriateness of the rest of their lives. Growing up, it became harder and harder to feel illicit. So what, you fucked. Big deal, you smoked. Okay, you went on the occasional bender. You were an adult. You knew what you were doing. You used condoms. You understood the risks. You repented with brain-pummeling hangovers.

  Flora had decided not to celebrate Christmas. Her mother, who’d grown up just Jewish enough to be deprived of the holiday, had never been very good at it, and didn’t seem to mind when Flora announced after the memorial that she would not be observing it this year. The Christmases they shared in the little house had been the most desultory occasions, deliberately gloomy—such gloom could not be arrived at by accident. Two sad presents under the tree, and later, no tree at all. So much trouble. All those dried pine needles. “I’m better at daily life,” her mother had offered as an explanation. But her father had excelled at Christmas. He’d loved it with an unabashed glee found more often in people under the age of ten. He used pillowcases for stockings, stuffing them with thoughtful curiosities—a clear plastic stapler where you could watch the interstices at work, a pocket-size kaleidoscope, a hand-carved wooden spoon with a coiled serpent tail for a handle. His cards were watercolors he’d made, with captions running across the top: “Flora-Girl at Work,” “Where Is My Flora-Girl?” The first of a small Flora behind a giant desk, the second showing a sad mouse on the phone, looking patiently out a kitchen window. He’d drawn himself as an importuning mouse, rendering her and, before her, her mother as cats. Flora still had a yellowing card he’d made her mother when she was newly pregnant. It showed a round-bellied Rapunzel-like cat, her tail trailing out a window, the humble mouse on the ground, hat in hand. The caption read “From the Mouse Who Loved the Puce So Much He Gave Her Exactly What She Wanted.”

  Flora had spent Christmas Eve at Paul’s apartment so she would not wake on the morning itself in her father’s bed. She had called him at his office that night, having no one else to call, and he had sounded as lonely as she was, and when he arrived at her father’s house to pick her up, standing there in the kitchen she had felt that if they weren’t naked in minutes, she would die. She led him upstairs, though not to her father’s bed, but up the back stairs to her old bed, the twin canopy, where she had lost her virginity at fifteen, her father away at a conference and her mother thinking she was staying with him—how much easier parents who did not speak had made a life of deception—and she pulled off his clothes and helped him with hers and they had fucked and she had come in moments. Afterward she was embarrassed and Paul was stunned, and it seemed better not to think too much about it. But the good thing about it was that while lying on his back he noticed she had done nothing to fix the leak, nothing, that is, but duct-tape a garbage bag over the offending area of ceiling, and he had reached for his pants and found his cell phone and called the contractor he knew and soon, right after the holidays, it would be fixed, or at least patched. No longer oozing, or molding. But a new roof would have to wait. Threads and patches would do for now.

  Despite the threadbare roof, the niceness of her father’s house was awkward. There Flora was, not working, never expected to show up anywhere at any given moment, and living alone in a house big enough for an upper-middle-class family of five, while Paul worked late nights to pay back his student loans and make rent on his one-bedroom in town. And there was the further awkwardness of his knowing the intimacies of her finances—knowing them perhaps better than she herself knew them. While lying post-coitally stunned and staring at the garbage bag where the ceiling should have been, he had asked her if she’d thought of selling the house. The mortgage was paid off; the local market had appreciated in recent years. “You’d make enough to buy something in the city,” he said. “More than enough.”

  But mixing financial and sexual services seemed inadvisable.

  “Let’s leave, I think,” she said.

  And they fled with Larks to Paul’s apartment, which smelled faintly but persistently of kitchen grease from the Burmese restaurant below. They ordered pizza from a new place and brought it back, and the eating was almost as brief as the fucking, as Paul was determined to get to midnight Mass.

  He invited her to join him, and she laughed. When she saw that he wasn’t joking, she asked, “Are you religious or something?”

  “Or something?” he said.

  Who was this Paul? He flinched when she described what they had just done as “fucking.” Curse words, he called them, not swears.

  “You like cursing, don’t you?” he asked her. And maybe he was right—such words curses, sending ill will out into the cosmos like a vulgarized call to prayer.

  Flora was a mutt, with generations of intermarrying Catholics and Protestants on her father’s side, Catholics and Jews on her mother’s. No one really knew what she was, and so she was really nothing. Being nothing, she tended to forget religion was a category for other people; that in other families the Bible was the book, that the Word meant the word of God. When she was little, she had visceral reactions to churches and synagogues, struck suddenly feverish in the midst of a family wedding or bar mitzvah. “Mom,” she’d plead, “seriously, I’ve got to get out of here.” Her mother would hand over her purse, as if boredom were the problem, and not God. Now, during pious ceremonies, Flora suffered Tourette’s-like fantasies of hurling obscenities at the silent devotees—fuck, or even a word she hated, like cunt. What would they do if she did? Sometimes she imagined it so vigorously, she worried she had done it.

  “I think I’ll pass,” she told Paul—one service in a chapel already that month more than enough for her—and she climbed into his bed and fell asleep and only woke at his return to ask, “Did you all get Jesus born?”

  Either he did not reply or she was asleep again before he could.

  In the morning, he made her coffee—after the sex—and brought it to her in bed. This alone seemed a solid foundation on which to build a future, though, she reminded herself, her father had brought tea and an English muffin to her mother’s bedside each morning and it had proved not to be enough. Paul was driving to his father’s for Christmas dinner, and this time he did not invite her to go with him. He left her a key so she could lock the door behind her, and a note alongside it that read “MERRY CHRISTMAS?” She crossed out the “MERRY,” and amended it to read “WEARY CHRISTMAS! AND A HARPY NEW YEAR!”

  Alone and conscious in Paul’s apartment for the first time, Flora felt urgeless—no yen to prowl through drawers or otherwise invade his privacy. A bad sign, probably. Though there were things she could see without effort. The place was orderly and ugly, conceived without thought, like his office. Had the man no taste, or simply no money, or both? For midnight Mass, he had doffed his hiking boots for black dress shoes, which now sat stiffly by the closet door, his gray slacks hovering above from a metal hanger on the doorknob.

  “You look nice all dressed up,” she’d told him, because he did, though it was risky to compliment anomalous behavior, implying as it did a criticism of the norm.

  Being in the apartment with Paul, she’d not noticed the bareness of the place. It was willfully unfinished. Nothing on the walls-
no family photographs even, or museum prints. No lamps, only the harsh glowering of overhead fixtures. What furniture he had could be taken apart into a hundred pieces, like a puzzle. What he did have were books. A tall, precarious wood-laminate shelving unit cluttered with paperbacks was the apartment’s central feature. Which was the novel where the low-class man is killed by toppling books? In the bedroom, next to a stack of solved crossword puzzles (there was no bedside table), a threatening heap of periodicals—The New Yorker, The New York Review, The New Republic, and fat glossy journals from every conceivable southern state. Being an educated person took a lot of time, left little space for other activity. No wonder her father had resisted the Internet. He’d had no room in his life for more print, digital and ephemeral though it was. Did one read so religiously for enjoyment, or to be able to respond with a firm and knowing yes when asked if one had seen so-and-so’s latest piece in such and such? The world small and insular, a self-perpetuating colony, with the same names springing up on tables of contents and mastheads, the cast of characters interchangeable. Of course she was an outsider, excluded from, though related to, the anointed. She often felt with the Darwinians and other, less provincial intellectuals that she was being tested, that they were poking her brain for gaps in learning, seeing if she knew what they had deemed important for her to know. She was jealous, defensive, insecure—she was Holden Caulfield railing against “phonies.” Or maybe the whole literary intellectual scene really was a colossal snooze. Maybe her father had nominated her to it as an improving punishment, like doses of prune juice or Bikram yoga: Finally, in death, I’ll make my daughter smart. Or, by choosing her over someone more qualified—someone like Paul—was he, too, testing her, assuming she’d be unable to meet the rigors of the responsibility with her lazy, flaccid brain?

  She grabbed her long black coat, which had absorbed the unappetizing smell of the apartment, threw it on over her shirt and the old pair of plaid flannel pajamas she’d borrowed from Paul, put Larks’s leash on, and left. The town was sealed for the holiday, windows along the common dark. On the common, the plastic, lightbulbed menorah stood beside the brown-hued manger in politically correct vulgarity. Where were the Jews? The nonbelievers? In the city, they’d be well on their way to matinees and Chinese food. She could go back to her father’s house and order delivery, watch television. How cheery. Or she could drop Larks off and go to a movie—she liked seeing movies by herself. But she found she was walking in the direction of the President’s House. It would be decorated like a frenzied Yuletide catalog at this time of year, wreaths and ribbons, poinsettia and holly, and a strapping, showy tree. At the annual Darwin Christmas party, Betsy, who still worked at the house, served suckling pigs that looked like pigs but had apples in their mouths and grapes for eyes, which Flora as a girl found disgusting and wonderful. Her father’s half-teasing mantra to Betsy for the endless stream of college events was “Ship ’em in, ship ’em out,” but Flora had loved the parties that first year, till the end, and especially the Christmas party—the crowds, the muddle of adult talk, the attention she got from being her father’s daughter. One of Darwin’s physicists was a near concert pianist, and at the Christmas party he played all the carols and the faculty and families gathered around to sing together. The party was a few days before Christmas, so there would still be plenty of leftovers. A funny thing about institutional living, how protected it was from change, the rules of the calendar guaranteeing a sameness from president to president. The wife (if she could be bothered) might have chosen new colors for the walls, traded out a painting here and there for others from the college museum collection, but no doubt the house looked now much as it had twenty years ago.

  Flora walked up the steps through the old rhododendron bushes, Larks pulling, wanting to investigate within, as she had as a child.

  “Okay, wild Larks,” she whispered, and freed him from the leash. He disappeared into the branches.

  Venues of childhood often appear smaller later in life, but the big house was not one of them. It had been a long time, but the house was every bit as big as she remembered. There was a car in the driveway, lights on in the kitchen, but she couldn’t see anyone. She walked to the front door but stopped herself from knocking. No one used the front door. They used the side door, which led into the sunporch and the kitchen. The front door was for parties, or strangers. For guests. From where she stood, her hands cupped around her eyes, her face pressed against the window, Flora could see the Christmas tree sparkling with light, just where she remembered it standing, beside the fireplace in the west living room, the refuse of unwrapping scattered across the rug. The wife had repainted—the walls looked a pale blue or gray, the room brighter than it had been in her day. Maybe the family had gone out for a walk.

  Once, her boss at the magazine had asked if she thought they might photograph the house for a spread on restoring historic homes. She’d said, “Believe me, you don’t want to. It’s hideous.” And maybe it was hideous. She couldn’t trust herself to know. What a strange place to live, to grow up. The house made her want to pound her fist against its callous brick. Yet it was still the definitive house for her—when someone said the word, it was what she saw. And it seemed unbelievable that she could not come and go as she pleased, that she was lurking, trespassing.

  Watching, Flora became invisible. She could only see; she was only eyes. She was like one of the ghosts in the portraits in the Ghost Game she’d played with Georgia, haunting the house. She longed to go inside, to touch the fabrics, to climb the stairs, to smell the cedar linen closet, to see what had been done to her old room, and for a moment she couldn’t stop herself from ringing the bell. “I’ve got it,” a voice called, and a man appeared—the new president, the handsome Brit. He saw her and looked at first confused or worried. In her attire, her hair unbrushed, she might be taken for a demented homeless person, if homeless were a category of person that existed in Darwin. But then she could see the president recognize her, and he held up his hand in greeting, and she turned and ran away like a child, tripping over the long pajama bottoms as she hurried down the stairs.

  She heard the door open and called behind her, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. Merry Christmas.”

  She ran back toward her father’s house. There was nowhere else to go. Soon she was too winded to run anymore. She hunched over to catch her breath. She pulled up the sagging pajamas and tied the waist tighter. She was old. Being out of breath had once been part of daily life. God, what would the man think? She was a demented homeless person. Pretty lucky, as far as demented homeless people went, with better clothing and access to a shower and many more life options; but fundamentally, demented, and without a place she called home.

  It was as she walked up the driveway to her father’s house that she noticed the limp leash in her hand and remembered that she had left Larks behind, nosing around the presidential grounds.

  “Fuck,” she said. Should she call over there? Walk back? Would he get hit by a car trying to find his way to her? She stood frozen, panic rising like water poured slowly into a glass. Why wasn’t there someone she could ask what to do? Why wasn’t there anyone to fucking help her?

  And then, as if summoned, a car turned into the driveway. The car she had seen outside the President’s House, with the president driving, and Larks in the backseat. For a moment her cheeks flushed with color. But relief surpassed embarrassment.

  “Larks!” she called, and she opened the back door and squatted down, and they were both so happy to see each other, Larks’s whole shining body wagging—his standard greeting. This was the point of dogs—no blame, no grudges, negligible memory.

  “Would you like to come back to the house?” the president asked through his unrolled window. Such an Englishman to simply not mention what had led them to this moment. “Have a look around?”

  “Thank you so much. And it’s so good of you to ask.” She wasn’t sure which to make excuses for—her behavior or her aloneness. “But I
have company coming.”

  He nodded. “A first-rate dog,” he said. “Your father had one hell of a throwing arm. Walking to the office in the mornings, I’d often see Larks bounding after a tennis ball. They made the post-presidential life look awfully good, the two of them.”

  “Poor Larks,” she said. “Now he has to settle for my pathetic tosses.”

  “‘I’m well out of it, my friend,’ he’d say whenever I stopped to chat about the job. He defied that F. Scott Fitzgerald line on no second acts in American life, didn’t he, your father? Second, and third, in his case. Always working on something new. But then, people are always quoting that line to disagree with it, to note the exception, aren’t they?”

  What a kind man, making her feel not a lunatic, but someone worth talking to. Had her father mentioned his newest new work, his latest act, to him? “Maybe it was he, Fitzgerald, who had no second act,” Flora said. “‘All theory is autobiography’—that’s someone else’s line, no?”

  “Betsy talks of you, fondly and often.”

  “How’s she doing? I owe her a phone call.”

  “Very well. Still threatening retirement and working hard as ever. I’ve tried to make her promise she’ll stay on till my time is up, but she’s not having it. She won’t commit, as they say.”

  It was as if they were distant relatives, with enough common ground (literally) to feel they knew each other—a deceptive intimacy in making your life in the same rooms. Could she ask if his wife was miserable, if his family was on the brink of disaster? No. Not that. And anyway, he looked a happy sort. “The room at the top of the stairs,” she said, “across from the chandelier—what is it now?”

  “My daughter’s room. Painted in stripes, these brilliant striations of color, which she fell passionately in love with. Betsy said you created that look. Sure you won’t come see it?”