by David Gates
“Right,” I said, “you’re the first person who ever got drunk and wet the bed. You should donate your body to medical science.”
“Better,” he said. “Now that’s you. Ah—here they are. I did have a lot to drink, didn’t I? Maybe we should try to forget this gruesome episode? Assuming I don’t put on a repeat performance?”
“You’ll be telling this on yourself when you’re ninety,” I said. “Adventures of your misspent youth.”
“Don’t jolly me along too much.” He opened the bathroom door. “But I do appreciate your making the effort.”
—
His daughter was going to put us up at her house, but after what happened in Montana, he called her to say we’d decided to stay at a hotel: I was used to his snoring, he said, but lately it had gotten so bad that he was afraid of keeping them awake. She must have thought I was being a princess about their foldout, or just being weird.
Madeleine turned out to be a short redhead about my age, with milky skin like the daughter’s, smiley crow’s-feet like mine (though mine weren’t smiley) and breasts that swung free under a man’s plaid flannel shirt; you could see why an old man might be hot for her. Why a young woman might too. At the door, she went up on her toes to kiss his cheek. “I love the beard,” she said. “Very manlike.” She gave me her hand.
“So where’s your friend?” he said.
“Getting stuff for dinner. I expected her back by now.”
“We were going to take you out.”
“I’ll let you guys argue about that,” she said. “I think she’s got something special up her sleeve.”
“As do you,” he said. “God, it’s good to see you.”
She threw up her little hands. “Why, Hopsie, you ought to be kept in a cage.” The two of them seemed to be amused by this. “Let’s go sit. Can I get you some tea or something? Now you,” she said to my husband, “you probably want the something.”
“I think tea, actually. It’s a bit early.”
She looked at me. “What have you done to this man?”
“We’re still on East Coast time,” I said.
“I thought that was three hours later,” she said. “Sorry, I shouldn’t be pushing drinks.”
She was putting the tea ball into a round blue-and-gold teapot that must have been a Hall—my mother had collected them—when I heard the kitchen door open, a voice I knew calling “A little help?” and I found myself on my feet and through the archway, with Madeleine behind me.
“Let me,” I said, and picked up a bright yellow canvas bag with “Nature’s Way” printed in red; she had two more bags on the doorstep, all bulging, one with stalks of celery sticking out.
“Oh my,” Madeleine said. “Did we overdo?”
“Did we? No, we are blameless. As always.” She kicked the door shut with the sole of her boot, put down a bag and saw me. “You got here,” she said. “Big change of plans—I’m going to make Flemish soup with winter vegetables. I read about it in the store. I think I wrote it down.” She unwrapped her scarf and I could see her cheeks were red.
“You must be freezing,” Madeleine said. “I just made some tea.”
“Yeah, I don’t drink that shit.”
“Since when?”
Her father had appeared in the archway. “Hey,” she said. She reached into one of the bags and held up a bottle of Rémy by the neck. “See? I made a stop just for you guys.”
“Well,” he said. “Since you went to the trouble.”
“And?” she said to me. “Do you care about my trouble?”
“You didn’t make a stop in addition to your stop, did you?” Madeleine said.
“Why?” she said. “Do I seem cerebral? No, what am I trying to say? Cel-e-bra-tory. That’s a hard word.”
“Oh, honey,” Madeleine said. “Why don’t you let me put stuff away and you can go sit with your father.”
“I think I need to get to the bathroom.” She headed down the hall, meandering rubber-legged to one side, her shoulder displacing a poster of Patti Smith.
“What’s all this?” her father said.
“I’m not sure,” Madeleine said. “This isn’t her usual.”
“Is she just drunk?” I said.
“Well,” Madeleine said. “This is Portland. I better go in and see about her.”
The house was small enough so we could hear vomiting. My husband got up and went to the kitchen; he came out with a glass of Rémy for each of us. “Cheers,” he said. “She does have a flair for the dramatic. Poor Madeleine.”
“What about her?”
“I imagine she’ll pay for it tomorrow.”
I heard more vomiting, then water running. “Should I go in?” I said.
“They’d probably rather you didn’t. This isn’t quite the jolly visit you had in mind.”
“Probably not what she had in mind, either.”
“That would be the charitable view,” he said.
I heard the bathroom door open, then the two of them moving toward their bedroom. We finished our glasses, and he got up and poured us more. “May we always have the wind at our back,” he said. “To get us the hell out of here.”
Madeleine came in and sat on the sofa. “God, I am so sorry about this. I don’t even know what to say to you. She has some friends I wish she didn’t see.”
“So is this a regular occurrence?” he said.
“No. That’s the thing. I don’t know, maybe it was you coming here—I mean, please don’t think I’m blaming you. You know she loves you. It’s just so out of character.”
“How is she?” I said.
“I think she might sleep. She feels terrible about this. As far as I can tell. When do you have to leave?”
“Early,” he said. “Unfortunately.” Our plane didn’t leave till two.
“Crap,” she said. “Well, whatever.”
“I’m just sorry you have to deal with this,” he said.
“Should we go in and say goodbye?” I said.
“I think maybe not?” she said. “We’ll all be in touch.”
—
When we got home and I went through the mail, I found a birth announcement from my brother and his wife—what was this, number three?—and an invitation to Andrea’s wedding, forwarded from the old address in Rhinebeck. To a Thomas Somebody, at St. Somebody’s Church in Belmont, Massachusetts, June something. Below the engraving, in her handwriting: Please please please come. Miss you. Much loves, Andy. P.S. bring the huz!
Of course I’d neglected her, along with my other friends—that’s what the “Miss you” was about. She’d stopped offering me pieces when Mirabella went under and she’d gone on to Marie Claire, and then I think to Vogue, and now she was someplace else. She’d come up to Rhinebeck for a weekend, back during the living-in-sin era; then the three of us had dinner in the city, and after that I’d taken the train down to meet her for lunch a couple of times. The huz had said she depressed him.
“Why, because she’s not pretty?” I’d said.
“I wouldn’t mind that so much. You bring enough pretty for two. It’s more, what would you call it, the non-pretty syndrome.”
“You mean she tries too hard.”
“Ah,” he said, and kissed his fingertips at me. Back then it still made me wonder—these little things that seemed faggy. I imagine you’ve wondered too, but it was just him.
True, when Andrea was around men the voice went up, the hands were always going, fluttering, playing with her hair or—the worst—tugging her blouse down, since she was a little overweight, and she would make her eyes go wide and ask them questions and then say “Really?” But when you were one-on-one, she sat still and you could talk. Okay, I can’t defend “Much loves,” and certainly not from a grown woman, I don’t care how long she’d been working at those magazines. At Yale she’d done a paper taking down Lionel Trilling’s takedown of Ethan Frome, on which her professor—not Harold Bloom, but not nobody—had written: Against my better judgment, you ha
ve persuaded me about this lady. So what sort of creature must Thomas be? Either he was someone who had come to see her—knowing men, I wasn’t hopeful—or he was as graceless and overweight and desperate as she was, which you’d suspect from a back-to-the-hometown church wedding in June.
—
This was the spring when I gave up and went back to work. Ever since Portland—I want to forget Cleveland, where my husband drank too much again and slept on the floor beside the bed as a precaution—I’d been writing a paragraph and deleting it, then a sentence, then a phrase, and getting out my one-hitter by ten in the morning, which made it a long day until the late-afternoon drink. I was too ashamed to call Andrea, or the Newsweek editor—at that point, though I didn’t know it, he must have been burning through his long-term disability—and I couldn’t think of anyone else. Good job of keeping up your connections. The only thing I could find anywhere nearby was a job as the so-called managing editor of a free want-ad paper in Kingston, organizing the stuff that came in—cars, sporting equipment and musical instruments with photos; sad personals without—and coming up with filler: quotes, maxims, fun facts, quizzes with the answers upside down, a joke column called “Strictly for Laffs,” with a line drawing of a toothy goon laffing. I knew not to tell the so-called publisher—a printer who also did flyers for local supermarkets—that I’d worked at Newsweek, and Yale became UConn. I accounted for the years since I’d written my column by killing off my brother and sister-in-law (yes, in a car crash) and having to take care of their children. I suppose he gave me the job because no one else with any qualifications could afford to work for so little. It was an hour each way, but at least I no longer had to trust the Tercel; my husband had bought me a red Subaru, girly but with all-wheel drive. The radio was all about Iraq—this was 2003—but I’d usually catch A Word in Edgewise around the time I was driving over the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge, and I would read malign significance into the expressions whose always-surprising origins she’d chosen to explain: letting the cat out of the bag, going haywire, a pretty kettle offish, taken down a peg. On the weekends I smoked when I dared, but my husband took time from his painting so we could be together. He brought me on expeditions that had a volkish vibe right out of Lolita: to Lago di Giorgio, where we ordered prime rib at log restaurants—he did; I had the salad bar—and wandered through the outlet stores, which had nothing either of us wanted; to musty-smelling country motels, which he chose for the campiness of their neon signs, where we played miniature golf among fat tourists and their fat children; to state parks where we picnicked at picnic tables, saw lakes and trees. I thought his sense of irony had gone critical; I should have realized he was running out of money.
We only went down to the city a couple of times that spring, when the Met put on an opera he was sure wouldn’t be set in a disco or a Las Vegas casino; lately he’d only wanted to see tenors in tight pants and open shirts, sopranos in big dresses, soldiers with helmets and breastplates. Instead of getting us drinks in the lobby—they were overpriced—he brought airplane bottles of Dewar’s, and we downed them on the sly during the intermissions, while looking at the costumes in glass cases. “Some brave soul,” he said, “needs to grab a whip and drive the moneychangers from the temple.” One night, we got stuck in traffic on the West Side Highway, even though it was eleven o’clock, and he said, “I hate the future.” “I don’t think it’s exactly the future anymore,” I told him. “All right, fine,” he said, “I hate the present. Isn’t that what you’ve been waiting to hear?”
I’d broken the news to him about the job only after I’d been hired, and then only after the first drink. “Ah,” he’d said. “The first move in the Great Extrication. I can’t say I didn’t see it coming. For what it’s worth, I’ve enjoyed our little idyll. Next thing we know, you’ll be making friends.”
“You have friends,” I said. “Anyway, it’s not about that.”
“I did have friends.” It was true that no one had visited us lately. “No, you’re right, you’re too young for all this.” He swept his hand across the landscape, taking in the river, the mountain, a boat moving downstream, its sail pink in the afternoon light. “It must look like death itself to you.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “I was just losing my mind trying to be, I don’t know. What I’m obviously not. I feel like I’m disappointing you.”
“Let’s say it’s not what I’d envisioned for you. But I suppose that wasn’t my business, was it?”
“It’s not like you held a gun to my head,” I said. “A normal person would have died for a chance like that.”
“And you’re sure you’re not just going through a rough patch?”
“On the way to what?”
“On the way,” he said. “Oh well. At your age, you have a different view of things. Will they be paying you decently?”
“No,” I said.
“Then it’s not entirely without dignity. Are they giving you insurance at least?” He’d dropped his coverage—not a good idea for a man who’d just turned seventy-three—because the premiums had gone up to six hundred a month. He’d been worried enough to visit a walk-in clinic when we got back from Montana, but he wouldn’t go see the urologist to whom they’d referred him.
“Well, the drugstore next door gives flu shots,” I said. “They have a sign about it.”
“Oh,” he said. “But it’ll pay for your gasoline? And you’ll continue to have a roof over your head. Assuming we’re still…what would one call it?”
“You’re making this into some big catastrophe,” I said. “Nothing’s going to change—I mean, you don’t want it to, do you?”
“As long as you don’t,” he said. “Probably longer.”
—
My mother’s birthday was in May, and although she’d told me that seventy was nothing to celebrate, my husband offered to take her to dinner in the city and have us all stay at the Carlyle.
“I thought we were broke,” I said.
“Bent,” he said. “No worse than a forty-five degree angle. What would you do, put her on a bus back to New Jersey?”
“We could have her here.”
“And stick her in the cellar?”
“It’s a beautiful room,” I said. “I mean, you designed it.”
“For functionality, yes. I suppose we could give her our room. She doesn’t piss the bed, does she? Should you invite your brother, just for form’s sake?”
“He’d never come.”
“How quickly they catch on, these young people. You will have covered your bases. You see, I’m looking out for you.”
But he did come. He couldn’t afford to bring the family, not that I’d asked him to, so the wife—praise Jesus!—stayed home with the baby and the two little ones. “Well,” my mother said when I told her, “that was very thoughtful of you.” She seemed content with what reconnecting she’d already done, and, having seen one grandchild, could handle the disappointment of not seeing more—just my interpretation. I had to work, so my husband drove to LaGuardia to pick him up, then out to Saddle River to get my mother on the way back. When I got home, I found the menfolk out on the deck, my husband with a glass of whiskey, my brother with a can of Diet Coke. My mother was in taking a nap. My brother got up—he was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt with a black tie—and took my hands to keep me at arms’ length. “This is some house,” he said. “I was just getting the story on it. That somebody’d see a movie and then haul off and build the thing—that blows me away.”
“Maybe it just shows I don’t have much imagination,” my husband said.
“Did you remember to pick up the cake?” I said.
“I did. Mission accomplished. As our president would say.”
My brother sat down and looked out across the river. “So what do they call that mountain over there?”
“You’re right,” my husband said. “We don’t need to get back into that. As I said, you have to excuse an opinionated old man.”
“I better get started on dinner,” I said. “Can I bring you something? There’s cheese, crackers, olives…”
“I don’t want to get filled up,” my brother said.
“I’m fine, thanks,” my husband said. “I might come in and replenish. How are you doing with yours?”
“Still working away,” my brother said.
In the kitchen, I said, “So how badly did you two get into it?”
“We managed to step back from the brink,” he said. “I keep forgetting there really are people like that.”
“This is where we live,” I said. “You should come over to Kingston with me sometime.”
“No,” he said, “this is where we live. Thank God. Maybe our lesbian Unitarian could come and exorcise the place once he’s out of here.”
At dinner, my brother reached out his hands to me and my mother. I took his and reached for my husband’s, but my mother said, “I’m sorry, but it’s bad enough being this old without having to humor you. And your pushiness. Which is all this is.”
My brother turned red. You had to feel sorry for him. A little. “I didn’t mean to—you know, I just don’t see that it hurts anybody to give a word of thanks.”
“Well, why don’t we all join hands and say the Lord’s Prayer backward and see if we can get the Devil here?” She turned to me. “Isn’t that what he thinks we do?”
“I really don’t want to get in the middle of this,” I said.
“Okay,” my brother said. “Let’s not ruin your birthday.”
“May I propose a toast?” my husband said. “To a lovely lady, in honor of an occasion I know she’d rather not have mentioned, but which we all celebrate. Many happy returns.”
“You’re very sweet,” she said. “I shouldn’t have caused a scene.”
My brother put his napkin in his lap. “No, I shouldn’t have been so—what you said, pushy. I guess it’s just being around people who, I don’t know, people who are used to—”
