The Dependents

by Katharine Dion

  Ed had offered to hold their meetings at the library, but then Gene would have been deprived of the opportunity to feed his covert fascination with Ed and his off-campus life. There were enough books in the apartment to keep a person busy for years. Books about religion and medicine and philosophy, about gardening and theater and political economy. During their lessons Gene’s eye habitually came to rest on certain volumes: a thin, cream-colored copy of Siddhartha, or the black spine with white capital letters of Thoughts Out of Season. An entire shelf was devoted to books about photography, and set up permanently in a corner of the living room was a large-format camera with a flash umbrella. Gene heard it first as a rumor and later from Ed directly that if Ed wished to make a portrait of someone he encountered, he invited the person in off the street. Gene began to nourish a private hope that Ed would ask to make a portrait of him.

  There were no photographs, however, on view in the apartment, only paintings whose selection had no underlying principle that Gene could discern. Some were still-lifes with crockery pitchers and gleaming tumbled fruits, as boring as anything you would see in a textbook, while others were abstract assemblages of gruesomely paired colors, chartreuse and crimson, bronze and bird shit. Sometimes Gene caught himself involuntarily complimenting Ed’s taste, voicing some opinion that he didn’t recognize as his own.

  “You like it?” Ed said. “I like it too.”

  It turned out that everything on the walls had come from junk shops. Most of it would go back to them when Ed got sick of it.

  Once in a while Gene would remember that he and Ed had both come from small New Hampshire towns, and this fact, freshly landing for the sixth or sixteenth time, astonished him. It seemed impossible that someone like Ed could have had a childhood like his, in which children who complained of hunger were sometimes given a washrag to suck on, and pants were patched with flour sacks, and for amusement in the evenings kids would go to the park to count how many gypsy moths had been caught in the light traps by the men who were studying why all the trees had lost their leaves. To be a child born in 1931 in Colton was to be born into a town losing its life. One year the Amoskeag mill in Manchester shut down on Christmas Eve and never opened again, and three years later the last mill making cloth in Colton was closed for good. Gene’s mother said it wouldn’t be long before the men who worked at the tannery like Gene’s father would be cutting gooseberry bushes with the other ragged men on the side of the road. Gene was just a child then, he didn’t understand how it all connected, but he remembered the feeling in the rooms where adults met and addressed each other in low voices, the mood of fear and confusion that made them suddenly wheel around and speak angrily to a child who wanted to know why he couldn’t have a cup of cocoa before going to bed. Colton was men without jobs and women minding children, it was churches and waterways and the closed-down mills, and it and places like it were noticeably bare of the kind of cultural objects Ed felt at ease around. So he thought of Ed as a sort of changeling, a person whose origins didn’t entirely match his presentation, and for Gene it was a pleasant dissonance, one that inflated his admiration of Ed. He was always a little disappointed when Ed mentioned his boyhood excursions in the White Mountains or playing Skee-Ball at the beach arcade, anything that suggested they had not grown up in distinct universes.

  Once after they had not really discussed “The Wild Swans at Coole” but had engaged instead in a conversation touching on the aspiration that something, something, could be accomplished in a life, Gene asked Ed why, when it was evident he was so stimulated by poetry, he was studying biology.

  “You can’t spend all day mooning over poetry,” Ed said, “and expect to be accepted to a good medical school.”

  It couldn’t have surprised Gene more than if Ed had said he was planning to live in a cave for a career. Actually, Gene could picture Ed living in a cave more easily than he could picture him as a physician, with the inflexible hours, fixed protocols, never-ending training, and regular supervision. Ed’s father was a doctor, a nephrologist, and it occurred to Gene that Ed’s decision might have something to do with that, but Ed denied it.

  “Isn’t there some part of you,” Gene said, “that wants to be a writer? Or if not a writer, an artist?”

  The look on Ed’s face told him the question had hit its mark, but the expression was so fleeting that if Gene hadn’t been certain of having seen it, he would have wondered a moment later if he’d imagined it.

  “The world doesn’t need more writers,” Ed said. “Has any writer solved a single problem we know of? I’m going to be a doctor because I want to do something with my life. It’s all probably going to end sooner than we think anyway, and before I go I’d like to know that my existence made some little difference to this freak show on earth. When you’re a doctor, you can do that. You can make people live and die. What’s a painting or a poem compared to that? I’m going to learn the human body well enough to tell it how to do its job.”

  “But isn’t there something noble about art?” Gene said.

  “Don’t ask anyone else that question, Ashe. You can ask me, but if you ask the wrong person, they’re going to shove your balls into your throat quicker than you can picture the Mona Lisa. Here’s my advice to you: if someone starts talking to you about how noble art is—or worse, how noble their art is—run the other way.”

  “I don’t think of artists as being especially dangerous.”

  “That’s why you have to get away,” Ed said. “Nobility is a concept tossed around by people who are terrified to smell their own shit. You aren’t one of those people, are you?”

  “I—”

  “Don’t answer the question. Just smell everything.”

  One day, from the window of Ed’s apartment, they watched a woman passing on the street below. She wore loose batik pants that were tight at the ankles, and in her arms she carried a Manx cat that was clawing at a pile of silver necklaces on her chest.

  “What do you think?” Ed said. “On her way to break up with her boyfriend and give him back her Valentine’s Day present?”

  “Maybe she’s going to the vet,” Gene said.

  “Should we invite her up? Her and—Whiskers?”

  “What—right now?”

  “Did you have another time in mind?” Ed said, putting on his shoes.

  “We don’t have chairs.”

  “I’ll sit on the floor. Or you will.”

  “Why don’t you invite her up,” Gene said, “and I’ll just slip out the back?”

  “Are you afraid of women or something?”

  “If you don’t go down right now, you’ll miss her.”

  “That’s all right,” Ed said, and he took off the shoes he had just put on. “We’ll let this one go.” He settled himself on a pillow on the floor. “What I want to know, my friend, is why when I start to talk about that girl on the street, you start looking like you want to jump out the window. Isn’t there a woman, any woman, you could call up right now?”

  “And say what to her?”

  “You’re having a party, and you’d like her to come.”

  “But we’re not having a party.”

  “We could be, in ten minutes. I’ll just go down to the liquor store and have Freddie send up a few bottles. Whiskey okay? Normally I’d do one whiskey and one vodka, but the only vodka they have down there is imported from a country whose politics are lousy, so my little act of disobedience is to refuse to buy it.”

  “What’s wrong with it? Are they socialists?”

  “Yes, but they’ve lost their imaginations. I was buying their vodka as long as their ideas were good—but now their ideas sound the same as everyone else’s. What’s the girl’s name?”

  “Who?”

  “The name of the girl you’re inviting over! When I go down there and get the Manx, I’d like to be able to tell her who her sister will be.”

  Gene thought for a moment. There was a girl in his poetry class who once had given him her notes when he wa
s sick. Encouraged by this, he’d invited her to go to the movies and a date was chosen, but then she had canceled the day before, saying she wasn’t feeling well. It was quite possible that she was legitimately ill, but he had been deflated by the experience nevertheless, and the next time he saw her in class he was convinced she was trying to avoid him. He considered who else he might call. “I could call my cousin,” he said. His cousin Rose worked in an insurance office in Manchester; she might come on short notice if he explained the situation.

  “Ashe, you’re not going to invite your cousin, for Chrissake! What’s wrong with you? Haven’t you been paying attention to anything we’ve been reading? And here I thought you were a smart guy.”

  For an instant, forgetting he was being teased, Gene felt the glow of Ed’s compliment. A person he regarded as well above average in intelligence and discernment thought that he, Eugene Ashe, was smart. The rapture of the praise increased his eagerness to please his friend. “I think you’d like my cousin.”

  “I don’t need you to do my fishing for me, Ashe. But it seems like I have to do yours. What’s your type? Tall and skinny? Short and fat? Brown hair, blond hair—every last hair plucked away?”

  Gene wasn’t sure if he was supposed to take the question seriously, or if he was being teased again. “I’m not stuck on a girl’s hair,” he said. “As long as you like her, I’m sure I will too.”

  “You’re breaking my heart, Ashe, and the only ones who are allowed to do that are beautiful women I’ve never seen naked. You understand? In the meantime, let’s have you work on being a little less skittish, okay? I don’t want to invite the girl over for you and then have you running down the stairs.”

  In the weeks that followed, Gene perceived that he had failed some tacit but nevertheless definitive test of the friendship. But if after that their conversations ranged a bit less widely, there were other explanations besides an unspoken rift. The semester was coming to an end, finals were upon them, and summer jobs had to be found. They parted on friendly terms and promised to look each other up in the fall.

  In the fall Gene was relieved when, first thing after he had settled on his classes, he went by Ed’s apartment and the two of them stayed up talking into the night. A lot had happened during the summer—Ed had applied to medical school and gotten two interviews, with more potentially coming, and Gene had gone on a few dates with one of his cousin’s friends. Ed, for the first time in a while, had a steady girlfriend, whom he’d met at a costume party at which she was dressed as a bottle of No-Cal and he as a straw. Gayle Carey was nineteen years old, she had a job processing work orders at the naval shipyard, and Ed promised that Gene would meet her soon. Ed also had another girl he wanted Gene to meet, someone he knew from high school who he felt “shouldn’t go to waste.” Gene figured there had to be something wrong with this girl if Ed didn’t want her for himself. She was probably ugly or slow-witted or mean-spirited or ratty.

  None of these turned out to be true. Maida Halloran was attractive and intelligent. She had a lovely neck shown off by short blond hair, and there was a restraint in her manner that came off as a form of acquired dignity, as if she had been injured once and had decided not to allow it to happen again. She didn’t talk often about herself, but she had spent the previous two years at Bates before she’d had some sort of disagreement with the administration. Gene took her general reticence on the topic as an indication that she didn’t particularly mourn her collegiate life. She had come to Durham because her father had been able to find her a job with one of his contacts, and she was working in the office of an architect and had acquiesced to Ed’s proposal to take her around and introduce her to people.

  It was a cataclysmic interruption in Gene’s life that he should suddenly come to know not one but two delightful women at the same time. He liked Ed’s girlfriend almost as much as he liked Maida. Gayle was the kind of person who stood up to greet you when you entered the room even if you’d only been gone long enough to get limes for the drinks. When you insisted she sit down, she didn’t listen, helping you with your coat and whatever you were carrying and then fixing you a drink when you were the one who was supposed to be making drinks for everyone else. Maida was pretty, but she was also slender, and some thin girls carried a perpetual tension in their bodies that made him feel like the slightest touch would send alarms up and down their nerves. Gayle had that pleasing roundness that was the opposite. Gene wasn’t accustomed to touching women casually, but Gayle hugged or patted or tugged at people with the affection of a puppy. No one could be afraid of a person like her, a sentiment that was close to feeling that she could be an ally for the rest of your life.

  Gayle was terribly naive about certain things—she thought food stamps were a kind of postage, and a pessary a type of fish—and this aspect of her personality galled Ed. Of particular dismay to him was Gayle’s tendency to regard the naval shipyard where she worked as an independent entity rather than as a branch of the armed forces. Ed was convinced of the widespread, amoral collusion of politicians and military personnel, and in an attempt to bring Gayle’s views more in line with his, he collected news reports about the unconfirmed hydrogen-bomb test on Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific. “Now how do you think the bomb got to the middle of the ocean?” he said to Gayle, who just laughed as if to say Ed couldn’t seriously expect her to opine on something she knew nothing about. “Think,” Ed said. “Just stop and think for a minute.” Gayle pretended to study the article. Then in a tone of mild surprise she said, “It sounds like there was a fire on the island. Maybe it was set by the people who live there.” Ed responded by turning from her and asking Maida what she thought of the treaty with Japan. Gene understood Ed’s frustration, but he personally found Gayle’s lack of intellectual posturing refreshing.

  Sometimes Gene had the sense that Gayle didn’t have a No in her body, that her body would give and give and never turn someone back no matter what they asked, no matter how enormous or desperate their need might be. One evening, when the four of them had spent the day together and she was the last of his passengers to drop off, he asked her if he could come inside to see her apartment, which she shared with two other girls on the first floor of a large house. He asked her mostly because he was curious about her life, but also because he just wanted to know what she would say. Her kitchen was cozy and cheerful, with striped yellow wallpaper bursting with yellow roses, and a yellow sugar bowl on the table in the shape of a bird. She made a pitcher of fresh lemonade, though it was already quite late and she had to get up early for work the next day. It was only when he noticed her rubbing her neck that she admitted she had a headache. He led her by the hand into the dark sunporch and had her sit on the bench, facing out toward the night. He started at her temples, rubbing gently, allowing his palms to brush against her cheeks, the lobes of her ears, her neck. There was something thrilling about her vulnerability to him. He brought his face close to the back of her neck—it smelled of the lemons she had squeezed. His hand swept down to her waist, the suppleness there surely just a prelude to the suppleness of her breasts. But abruptly she was back on her feet. She said she couldn’t stand to have a fuss made of her.

  Not long after this he asked Ed a question that had been on his mind a while: Why did he like Gayle? Gene understood why he liked Gayle, but it was something of a mystery to him why, out of all the women Ed had dated, he’d chosen Gayle Carey to be his girlfriend.

  “I guess it might seem improbable at first,” Ed admitted. “She can be a little square, right?” He smiled a brittle smile. “Don’t be fooled,” he said. “The square ones—they’re the ones with the darkest stuff in here.” He tapped two fingers against his chest. “All their wholesome piety is hooey. They’re the ones with the most to repent for, the most to hide. I like to crack them.” The brittle smile expanded. “And I think they like to be cracked.”

  Gene figured it would not take Ed long to crack Gayle and move on, putting an end to the fun the four friends had togethe
r. But Ed and Gayle were still dating six months later when Ed invited Maida and Gene to spend a few weeks of the summer with them at White Pine Camp, the Donnelly family property. Gene still hadn’t acted on his amorous interest in Maida and he took Ed’s invitation as a gentle ultimatum—either he would make something happen with Maida that summer, or he would have to give her up.

  The four friends went to White Pine Camp for two and a half weeks in July, and continued their tradition of blundering around. There were hikes up Mount Orry to hunt for birds’ nests and snake eggs; monologues delivered on the old stone foundation of the local factory that had once produced bobbins and clothespins; tramps through the woods and marshy bottoms to collect wild strawberries; trips down to the millpond choked with pickerelweed to cut its rangy purple flowers for the table; canoeing and horseshoes; and of course escaping from the sun’s heat every day with a dip in the lake.

  Just before the trip Ed had been offered and accepted a spot in medical school at the University of Michigan, and there were times when he and Gayle entered into a contentious conversation about the future of their relationship. At those moments Gayle looked at Ed with such forlornness and longing that it seemed everyone in the room was slightly embarrassed for her. Selfishly Gene couldn’t help feeling dismay whenever the topic arose because it always threatened to ruin what otherwise could have been another perfect day. Evidently, Maida felt the same annoyance. One afternoon when Gayle began to adopt a familiar injured tone, Maida said, “Oh, enough already, Gayle. Let the rest of us have some fun.” Unfortunately Ed chose this precise moment to smile, prompting Gayle to run off crying—though not before she had said, “If everyone is against me, then why am I here?”

  The next time the conversation veered in this direction, Maida and Gene removed themselves from the scene. In theory this was a promising development—it gave Gene an opportunity to spend time alone with Maida—but in reality it was a source of enormous anxiety for him, because as soon as she wasn’t expected anywhere she went for a long swim. He was left watching her slip away from the shore while he stood hesitant in his swim trunks on the beach, feeling like a confirmed land animal.