by David Gates
“I didn’t go through what you did.”
“Then don’t be a fool. Take your lady someplace nice. You keep her with you. Me and Myron can look after all this.” He took a last bite and unscrewed his thermos. “I ever got to where I couldn’t work anymore—But hey, all of us are going to get there.”
The bodybuilder kid had finished insulating the dining room, so I started with him on the walls; I had him hold up the panels while I drove the screws. I felt so lightheaded that I had to steady the driver with two hands, got a screw started crooked, chewed out the head trying to drive it in and then I couldn’t back it out, so I ended up taking a hammer to it. The mud would cover up the mess, but the kid was watching. “You and your friend can handle the rest of this,” I said. “Now that I showed you how not to do it.”
“He’s my brother,” the kid said.
“Okay,” I said. “Better still.”
Jesse was in the living room, cutting a triangle from a piece of drywall to go in the stairwell. “Coming right along,” he said.
“I got some business over at the office,” I told him. “I might not be back.”
“We’re making progress here. Rest up and book yourself some tickets. You know where’s a good place? Hawaii.”
“Never been,” I said.
“My unit stopped off there. Some of us did. You got the money. Spend it while you still can.”
Amber must have heard me come in, but she didn’t look up from the screen; her lips were tight together and she was tapping her nails on the desk. I stood and watched her. Finally she moved the mouse and sat back. “You ever play chess?”
“When I was a kid. My father used to let me win.”
“They say if you’re good with numbers, so I’m trying to teach myself. It’s hard. The computer just comes in and destroys you every time. I might be better with a person. If it was somebody stupid enough. I’m not really fucking off, okay? It’s slow this afternoon.”
“Any calls?”
“Oh, shit! Yes! The lawyer. That I found for Uncle Bill? I have to see him next week, but you know what he says? Rough figures? Like two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Mostly from the house, but he saved a lot. What the fuck, right? I mean I’d give it all to have him back and everything.”
“Don’t let that asshole know about this.”
“I’m not. I’m not going to even tell my friends.”
“Don’t.” I sat down in my swivel chair, at the rolltop desk I used to think was cool. “Listen, what would get you to stay?”
“With him?”
“With me.”
“And be stuck here? It’s not like you can’t get some other girl to answer the phone and shit.”
“But they wouldn’t be you. Listen, what if I made you a partner? Maybe you and Jesse. I don’t mean put your money into it.”
“I don’t even get what you’re saying. Is this some fucked-up way of trying to get into my pants or something? Just because I got drunk and fucked an old guy one time—you’re even older than him. Anyway, you got your rich-bitch.”
“I just don’t want anything to change,” I said. My stomach heaved and I pulled the wastebasket over and retched into it. There was nothing to come up.
She came and put a hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay? Are you having like an episode? You want me to call somebody?”
“Like who? Just give me a minute. Then I’m going to go home and have a drink.”
“I don’t think that’s a real great idea.”
“You remember what Billy used to say—‘If nothin’ ails ya, it’s good for that.’ ”
“I never heard that one. What does that even mean?”
“Think about it,” I said. “You might as well take the afternoon. I won’t be needing you for anything.”
I was all over the road, and when I made it to my house I stayed in the truck running the heater to put off going in. The last time I’d fed the stove must have been before I’d gone upstairs with Kristin the night before, and I could see frost starting on the insides of the windows. You won’t believe this, given what I do for living, but I hadn’t touched the place since I bought it, not even blown in insulation so the house would hold heat. Dana used to get on my case about that, along with everything else. It had belonged to an old farmer named Clarence Johnson, who couldn’t keep it up anymore after his wife died and who went to live with his son in North Adams. Inside, it was the real deal: not the real deal circa 1803, when the place was built, but the real real deal: I’m a bigger purist than any of my clients. Flowered wallpaper that had turned sepia, flowered curtains that didn’t go with the wallpaper, rag rugs, linoleum in the kitchen, Depression-era cabinets with Bakelite handles, a pink electric range from the fifties—this must have been Mrs. Johnson’s call—and an old single-door Kelvinator with a foot-square aluminum freezer compartment. The cast-iron woodstove in the living room had a nickel-plated finial on top in the shape of an urn; the stovepipe, with its old-fashioned damper, ran through the wall and into the chimney with a tin collar against the wallboard. It felt as cold inside as it was out. Thermometer said fourteen. I sat on the sofa with my jacket on and the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I’d polished off half of it last night, but there was still that vodka out in the kitchen if need be. The days had been getting longer since December, but the sun was already down behind the hill.
I sipped for a while, thinking the thing through, ate some cereal to have something in my stomach because it wouldn’t do to vomit, then drank more while I went around opening windows, except the ones at the front of the house that somebody might see from the road. I brought the bottle upstairs—I could feel it was starting to get the job done—and ran a hot bath. I had a claw-foot tub like the Holtzmans’, but somebody (I bet Mrs. Johnson again) had dolled up the outside with pink house paint. I counted out six Advil PMs. Any more and I might puke up everything and be back to square one. I stripped down to my boxers and got in the tub. It seemed wrong to get them wet, but I didn’t want anybody to have to see the whole deal and then not be able to get it out of their head. I had the bottle right there next to me. Eventually the water would get cooler—I thought I could already feel it—and then cold, but I’d be asleep by then. I got a ridiculous image of a man in a block of ice shaped like a bathtub, which told me I was going down. When the pipes and toilets froze up and burst, somebody would end up with a good-paying job: whatever rich person got the house would want everything brought back to 1803 and they’d have themselves a showplace. I could just see it.
—
Of course it was the dumb-ass move of all time. I don’t think the water was even fully cold when Jesse hauled me out, though I can’t remember much about those minutes. Amber had called him to stop by and check on me when he got off work. He got hold of Junior Copley, who was just sitting down to supper, and Junior came around with the EMS van and they got me down to Greenfield for an overnight in the hospital. The doctor wanted me to go into counseling; I was back hanging drywall Friday afternoon. Junior and Jesse both said they’d keep it quiet, but things like that get around in a town this size. Then after a while, they just fade into the background of what people know about you.
Johnny ended up coming back to work for me. He’d driven all the way down to Daytona Beach and Arlene was pissed as hell, but he says they’re getting along better now. So I’ve got my big three together again. Myron’s talking about retiring, but Jesse, they’ll have to carry him out feet-first. I figured out I’m worth a million dollars; that’s on paper, though, and a million’s not as much as it used to be. Amber didn’t go to California; she moved to South Carolina, bought a little condo and got into veterinary school. I don’t think that’s right for her; she should be working with people. I’ll hear from her a couple times a year. She’ll send me pictures of pit bulls she’s rescued, but never one of herself. She’s got a website called forpittiessake.com, which she thought up herself. She’s going to get married someday, I know that about her.
&nb
sp; You always like to say that if you were young and starting out again you’d do this or you’d do that, but I don’t think anybody seriously means it and it’s not going to happen anyway. I took myself out of the world early on, and looking back now I don’t think I ever got close to anybody, and of course you get judged for that. Apparently there isn’t any “we”—like I had something lacking. But what everybody needs to understand, you get to a point where you can’t do anything about who you are anymore. And the same applies to other people, so that’s who you’re dealing with. And then the best you can hope for is not to do anybody damage, and good luck with that. I don’t know, maybe I’m just talking to myself here: Who made me the big authority on what everybody needs to understand? It could be that I never got the memo, and that it’s all about love, so-called, but am I the only one? You’d hate to think so.
Monsalvat
Back during the summer, a mockingbird had perched in the ginkgo tree in front of their building and kept at it all night. Paige would lie there while Richard slept, trying to count how many different songs it knew, but by the third or fourth she’d forget the first: it had been her summer of having just a hit or two of dope before bed, sticking her head out the bathroom window before she lit the pipe. Richard said the songs weren’t music, strictly speaking, but sounds meant to warn predators away from the young, and he did know music if nothing else; in that, her father was wrong about him.
Now, in October, the mockingbird was a long-gone daddy and ginkgo nuts lay all over the sidewalk, looking like evil white grapes, smelling like vomit. She and Richard were both back teaching, and she’d added a little bump of speed in the morning to her drug regimen: just a bump—one—in each nostril while running water in the bathroom sink. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings, higher than a motherfucker, she’d come out of the building with that god-awful salty taste still in her throat and step around the ginkgo nuts so the Ten O’Clock Scholars wouldn’t think they were smelling vomit on her shoes. The other mornings, after she and Richard moved the cars, she could actually work again on her book, without which she would always be an adjunct and whose title she had now changed to Merrill, Mirabell and the Mystical Moment, though sooner or later she’d have to admit to herself that the alliteration was tacky. She hid her really very modest stash in her plastic makeup bag, along with the silver salt spoon, once her grandmother’s, its tiny bowl fluted like a scallop shell, the lighter and the wooden hippie pipe that was the least depressing one she could find in the head shop on Eighth Street. She kept the makeup bag in her underwear drawer on top of her diaphragm.
Paige just happened to know that she and Richard last had sex on May 24, the day after her fortieth birthday. He’d taken her to Café Loup, and he drank so much that when they got into bed and she reached into his boxers he asked for a rain check. He honored it the next morning, or, rather, she did. Then she found out about Mary Beth. He swore never again, and the never again turned out to extend to Paige as well. Nowadays Richard would wake up first, stretch and stretch, then hop out of bed: get down there, soldier, and give me twenty. He kept himself in such nice shape that she hated to watch. But. Then he’d go out to the kitchen to make their coffee while she woke up by reading a poem or two in her father’s first book, which she didn’t want to admit was his best; she’d begun keeping it on the night table. And sometimes she put her hand in her pants and did the supposedly necessary.
On a Thursday in the middle of October, he brought in coffee and said, “I need to tell you something.”
“What can this be?” she said.
“Nothing you don’t know,” he said. “It’s just—this is all really confusing to me. And I thought I might just go take some time to think.”
“If what?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“You said you thought you might,” she said. “You might if what?”
“Okay,” he said. “This is an excellent example of why.”
She closed her eyes, shook her head. “I’ve been awake for like two minutes,” she said.
“Sorry,” he said. “I guess I shouldn’t have jumped you first thing.” Jumped you? He must already have been wishing he’d rephrased that.
“Actually, I don’t think I really want to talk,” she said. “Why don’t you just go.”
—
But you know? It turned out to be a good morning. Because she was totally jazzed to teach. For her Ten O’Clock Scholars she detangled “Aire and Angels,” “The Sunne Rising,” “The Good-Morrow” and “The Extasie.” (She’d xeroxed from an edition in the original spelling, so as not to soften the alienness.) Then she cabbed it down to the World Café to meet Sally. You could count on Sally to be late, so she nursed a cup of coffee while prepping for her two o’clock class, Dante for Dummies. (Only Richard knew these nicknames. It was unfair that he should still know them.)
Sally came puffing in, wriggled out of the silk-thin leather jacket she’d gotten when the movies bought her book, handed a manila envelope across the table and said, “Here’s your care package.” Paige stuck it in her backpack and took out her wallet; Sally held up a hand. Silver rings on each finger, thumb included. “My treat,” she said. “Tomorrow’s the first day of principal shooting. I am so in the money.”
Paige had meant to tough it out, but when Sally asked how Richard was she sort of had to tell. Sally shook her head at the right places, then said she’d never told anyone this but as a matter of fact her Richard—how weird was it that they’d both married guys named Richard?—had also left for a while, taking a cab over the bridge every night to sleep at the Fort Lee Best Western. A week of that, she said, had brought him to the bargaining table.
“Right,” Paige said. “I guess I’m not sure what to wish for.”
“What about a couple of sturdy twenty-four-year-olds?”
“What about them?”
“They’re a good thing, twenty-four-year-olds, I can tell you that,” Sally said. “I mean, I know you run more to fifty-five-year-olds.”
Richard was in fact fifty-three.
“I doubt I’ll be running to anybody,” Paige said.
“Yeah, well, give it time,” Sally said. “You too might come to the bargaining table.”
When Paige got home, his suitcases were gone. He’d left the bookshelves gap-toothed, and his depredations showed among the CDs. She decided to break her rule this one time and opened Sally’s envelope. Wowzer: now there was a generous friend. She did a couple of bumps just sitting there on the sofa big as life. Then she put on Timeless: Hank Williams Tribute, her new good thing, which Richard had not taken—he considered it, quote, fourth-rate—and got busy shoving books together and fine-tuning the alphabetizing. After that she moved the bed back from the windows, as she’d been wanting to, and did what that necessitated in terms of the dressers and the floor lamp going where. In the bathroom, she scrubbed his soap scum off the walls of the shower stall. With this very, very good product called Zep.
She began marking up the Ten O’Clock Scholars’ first set of papers, comparing Sonnet 34 (greatly underrated) with the “Full Fathom Five” song. It touched her to see them pretending they had a preference. She got through five of them—four and a half—then took a break with Merrill’s essay in The Poets’ Dante, which might be crucial to this one chapter of her book. But she hit the wall, as always, when she got to the part about how Dante’s universe was a “cosmological solution of Einstein’s equations in general relativity theory”:
Let who can, experience for themselves the full complexity and symmetry of the resulting figure. Roughly, two spheres are joined at every point through their “equator,” itself a third sphere of sheer connectivity, and the whole suspended within a fourth dimension. The figure has finite volume but no boundary: “every point is interior.”
She could not experience this. Because it was insane.
She reshelved the book and called her father.
“Well of course, kitten,” he said. “We’d be d
elighted. Honored. We’ll be in bed, but you know where we keep the key. Don’t say it on the phone. So just you? Sans Rick-hard?” The first time Richard had met her father, he’d gotten drunk and gone into his rap about how Bayreuth in effect was Monsalvat; the phrase “sacramental spaces” had been the deal breaker.
He coughed. “Well, we’ll just have to bear up, won’t we? I’ll have Abigail make up the bed off my study. You’ve got the tube-o-lator in there, DVDs, stay up all night if you want. We won’t hear a thing.”
“The tube-o-lator?”
“It’s a young person’s expression,” he said. “I’ve decided to be young from now on. The old-person thing simply wasn’t working. Anyway. Manifold options in there. Books, even, if you’re feeling earnest.”
“Heaven itself,” she said. “I’m a fool for options.”
—
Her Cavalier was parked around the corner on Eighty-Third. Only yesterday morning she and Richard had done their routine of moving both cars, then sitting together in his Saab until eleven sharp, drinking coffee and sharing the Times, Paige trying not to snuffle. Richard called the Saab “the Roundhead”—wasn’t that good? Didn’t you have to give it up for him? Mary Beth had. Not a student but an ex-student, which made it ethical. He’d taken her for drives in the Roundhead, Paige had gotten that much out of him. To where, he’d refused to tell. That refusal, too, was ethical.
She got off the Thruway at New Paltz and found a dark place to pull over and have her nightly couple of tokes. As she came up her father’s driveway, the Islamic moon was about to touch the pointy hemlock. As in Wordsworth, where the moon goes down behind the cottage and he thinks, Dum dum dum and dum dum dum if Lucy should be dead. Not Ah my foes and oh my friends—that was Edna St. Vincent Millay burning her candle at both ends—but something to the tune of that. (She’d only taught this about a million times.) What about Holy shit and holy fuck if Lucy should be dead? Okay, getting too silly now.
