He and Russell were erratic housekeepers. Once or twice a month they’d go on extravagant cleaning binges that could last for a couple of days. They’d spend hours doing laundry, and swinging around vacuum cleaners and harsh chemical sprays. Then, gradually, they’d slide back into genteel squalor. But there was nothing genteel about the squalid kitchen this afternoon. The sink was stacked high with dishes, the wastebasket was overflowing with trash, and the little table by the window was covered with junk mail and stacks of unread newspapers. Russell read history voraciously, but seemed to view current events as inconsequential. The tragedies and victories of the past at least had a beginning, a middle, and an end; until you could see the whole picture, he wasn’t interested. All the nondescript 1980s junk he sold at Morning in America suddenly took on a thin veneer of Cultural Significance when you factored in the Black Monday stock market crash, the ravages of AIDS, and the all-too-plausible announcement of Reagan’s Alzheimer’s disease.
Well, maybe this kitchen mess was a good sign, evidence that Russell needed Desmond around to hold his life together. The freezer was crammed with TV dinners, frost-covered loaves of bread, and boxes of mini-pizzas. What a poignant image this stockpile conjured up: Russell slumped over a plastic tray of pseudo-food. He might as well be eating protein pills. The bottom half of the fridge was virtually empty. Nothing to eat. So much for that idea.
Desmond checked his watch. In all likelihood he had another hour, hour and a half before Russell showed up, assuming he came straight from the store. There was time for Desmond to settle in and assert some dominance over the place, take back some of the space. Assert his right to be here. After all, he was the one who had bought this apartment. He took a swing through the bedroom—another dumping ground, laundry heaped up on a chair—then went out to the living room and circled into the kitchen. He made a stab at attacking the dishes, but as he was attempting to find the sponge under all those food-encrusted dishes, his back stiffened with resentment and he abandoned the project. Back to the fridge, but there was still nothing to eat in there. In the living room, he turned on the radio. Russell had it tuned to a Top 40s funk station—since when did he like this music?—and Desmond found the thumping bass a hammer on his skull. He looked in vain for the remote control and finally gave up and shut the thing off. He collapsed on the living room sofa and picked up a magazine called Hello, apparently a British version of People or maybe the National Enquirer. Desmond leafed through the pages, bored by the pictures of the Royal Family and the only slightly more attractive, unrecognizable British TV stars proudly showing off their grim London town houses. It was a mystery what Russell could possibly find interesting in this.
He looked at his watch. Seven minutes had passed since the last time he’d checked. He went to the kitchen, but nothing edible had materialized, so he decided to go out to get something to eat. As he was opening the door, he heard the young marrieds, Tina and Gary, arguing in the hallway. The last thing he needed was to attempt polite chitchat with those two. Now he was a prisoner in his own apartment. Except it suddenly didn’t feel like his own apartment; it felt like Russell’s. And Russell felt like a stranger.
A beer and a soak. He’d have to clean the bathtub first, no doubt about that, but that at least would eat up ten more minutes.
Desmond drew a bath and lowered himself into the warm water. Better already. He rested his beer bottle on the floor beside the tub and pulled a magazine from the rack near the toilet. A men’s “fitness” magazine. Now here was real pornography. Clinical text describing exercise and diet and skeletal structure accompanying lurid photos of big-breasted, dewy, depilated men bending over benches or hanging from chin-up bars with their legs in the air. He skimmed through the pages, searching for a model who looked anything at all like Russell, but no one could match the lean economy of his musculature. He flipped to the back of the magazine and found himself staring at a photo of a carefully groomed man in a phone sex ad who bore a striking resemblance to Brian Cody. He stuffed the magazine back in the rack and finished his beer.
By the time he’d dried himself off, he’d killed almost an hour. He went into the bathroom wearing the damp towel and squeezed himself around the foot of the bed. It was obvious from the way the blankets were pulled back on the unmade bed and the way the pillows were dented that Russell had been dividing his time between his side of the bed and Desmond’s, probably an indication of how much he missed him. Desmond sat on his side of the mattress. The afternoon was fading quickly, but the room was still bright with sunlight and uncomfortably warm. There was a fat yellow book on his night table, the cover a sampler of different type faces and sizes, a loud, ragged jumble of letters announcing the title: Becoming the You You Deserve to Be. They should call this genre of book shelf-help, since, as far as he could tell, no one read past the first few pages before hiding them away in a bookcase. They all seemed to boil down to the same simple message: it’s all right to be selfish and self-centered. And what if it turns out you deserve to be a homeless, penniless wreck? How awful to think that Russell, in his anger at Desmond for leaving town, in his loneliness, had descended from Trollope and Tocqueville to “Dr. Ashley.”
The book was bulging with something stuck between the pages. It fell open when Desmond picked it up, and inside was a pair of large, brown eyeglasses. Not a pair that Desmond had seen Russell wear. He slowly opened the bows and slid them onto his face. The room went blurry. Whoever they belonged to had worse vision than Russell. He looked down at the book. Bifocals. He’d never understood how people navigated their way through this bifurcated world. And with all this laser surgery going on, one day soon all glasses would be nostalgia items, right up there with typewriters.
He put them back in the book and set the book on the night table, careful to leave it exactly where it had been. He wasn’t going to leap to conclusions. Maybe Russell had had his prescription changed. Unlikely, and besides, these weren’t new glasses. He swept back the sheets. No bodies there. There was no reason to assume anything. He looked back at the idiotic, infuriating “book.” If Russell was cheating on him with a man who read Becoming the You You Deserve to Be, he was getting what he deserved. On the other hand, if Russell was cheating on him, maybe he, Desmond, was getting what he deserved. As he looked out the window beside the bed to the courtyard in the middle of their building, Boris started to play the piano. So he hadn’t quit after all, hadn’t moved, hadn’t taken up painting. He started playing a slow, halting rendition of “Night and Day.” Like the beat beat beat of the tomtoms indeed. For the first time in the years Boris had been playing, Desmond wished he were able to flip a switch and turn off the practice session. He sat on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands, looking down at the floor. There, poking out from under the mattress was a black sock. He reached down and grabbed it. Inconclusive. Everyone wore socks and they were all more or less the same size. He stared at it for a moment, listening to the piano, feeling a fluttering in his chest that was either grief or rage or maybe both at the same time. The simplest thing to do would be to get dressed and leave, wait an hour and call from around the corner, telling Russell he was arriving ahead of schedule. Give him time to bury the evidence, if that’s what it was. He slipped on his underpants, T-shirt, and socks. But as he was trying to find his shirt, he heard the door to the apartment open, footsteps in the hallway, creaking floorboards. Now he was trapped. Caught. Caught double if Russell wasn’t alone.
“Desmond?”
He was standing in the bedroom, slim and bespectacled, alone, a wry smile in his eyes. “You’re early,” he said.
“I am,” Desmond said, wondering if maybe it wasn’t more a matter of being late.
Twelve
A Relaxing Weekend
1.
“Her bread is terrible,” Caroline whispered, “but I have to buy a few loaves to support her efforts. I can stop at the food pantry tomorrow and donate them.”
It was Saturday afternoon, they’d been at the
farmer’s market for twenty minutes, and thus far Caroline had done nothing but give money to animal causes and make a series of mercy buys. She was on a first-name basis with most of the farmers, bakers, and craftspeople who had tables set up under the yellow and white striped canopy. As she led Jane through the tables, she greeted each one, chatted briefly, and then pulled out her wallet and made a purchase. The pies and cookies and limp lettuce and brown cauliflower and the little jar of herbal salve were all stowed in the woven straw backpack with the leather straps Caroline lugged from vendor to vendor. The backpack, like everything else at the Wade family estate, had been purchased by Nana someone or other and used by generations of Wades for the same purpose. Virtually every dish towel on the estate, every coat hanger, every threadbare chenille bedspread had been fetishized.
As they were driving from the estate to this market—the tent was set up in a field near the center of a surprisingly bucolic New Hampshire town—Caroline had stressed the importance of supporting the farmers and craftspeople, keeping the local economy strong and healthy, helping to combat the invasion of Wal-Mart and similar chains. Jane agreed with the whole concept on a political level and was ready to shop herself into bankruptcy, but once they arrived and she got a good look at the bruised, insect-infested vegetables, the pale uninspired lumps of bread, and the hideous pencil holders made from soup cans—to select only one example of the crafts, and not the worst one—she’d begun to wonder if it might not make sense to let survival of the fittest take its course; let the talented gardeners and whatever else thrive while the others got into more suitable fields and allowed their fantasies to die dignified natural deaths. It was probably unspeakably churlish to suggest that not everyone should be encouraged to live their dreams. The generous thing to do was to judge people on their ambitions rather than their achievements. Which was all very nice, but when it got down to having to eat someone else’s ambitions, Jane would rather bow out.
Jane watched as Caroline chatted with a round, doughy baker who bore an uncanny resemblance to his undercooked loaves. Surely Caroline’s attitude toward all of this meant that she was a better person than Jane was or ever would be. As if Jane needed one more example of Caroline’s moral superiority. She could hear Caroline complimenting the young man on a batch of brownies she’d bought from him the weekend before—and had probably tossed into a Goodwill bin on the drive home.
Jane looked over at a nearby table laden with an appalling assortment of crocheted potholders and lap blankets and other yarny items that were less easy to identify. The woman selling the stuff was seated behind the table in a green and white webbed lawn chair clicking long knitting needles. She looked as needy and earnest as everyone else here and had on a long crocheted vest with panels from—was it beer cans?—worked into the design. Two points for the efforts at recycling, but not a fashion statement that was likely to catch on. Still, she was undoubtedly another worthwhile cause, not to mention that she was geriatric, which meant you could excuse the shoddy workmanship.
“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” Jane said, picking up an orange and brown . . . something from the table. She beamed at her with her kindest smile. “The sun is so welcome this time of year.”
The woman looked at Jane through milky blue eyes. It was a warm day and Jane had worn a chartreuse tank top and a pair of purple shorts and white sandals. The knitter took in her outfit and seemed to form an opinion. “It’s not so welcome if you’ve got skin cancer.”
Oops. “No. Well, I imagine not.” Don’t Engage. Toss Her A Bone. “You do lovely work,” Jane said. “I wish I could knit.”
“Everybody wishes they could knit, but no one wants to take the time to do it. You have to work at it.” She held up her gnarled, arthritic hand. “You wish you looked like this?” She frowned with disgust. “I didn’t think so.”
Don’t Engage. “What is this?” Jane asked, indicating the orange and brown socklike thing she’d picked up.
“Hold it up!” the woman ordered. “Goes over the ketchup bottle to make it look prettier at the table.”
“Ah ha.” If you were out to make a mercy purchase, it probably helped to buy something truly useless and support a wretched, ill-tempered hag like this. “How much is it?”
“Twenty-five dollars.”
Jane somehow managed to prevent herself from screaming “You must be joking!” but astonishment evidently showed on her face.
“It’s an original pattern,” the woman defended. “And it takes me ten hours to make one of them.” This was an outright lie. In ten hours, Jane could make a sock for every bottle in the house and the last time she’d picked up a pair of needles had been in high school home ec class. “You want bargain basement, go down to Wal-Mart.”
Upon hearing mention of the enemy, the woman selling pressed leaves at the next table looked over.
“It’s just that we don’t eat much ketchup at home, that’s all,” Jane said. Do Not Engage. “I’m allergic to tomatoes.”
The woman shook her head with undisguised revulsion. “Everybody’s got an excuse. All right, go ahead, take it for five.”
But I don’t want it for any price, Jane thought as she reached into her bag. “Here, why don’t we compromise? Here’s twelve.” There had to be someone she could give it to.
The beer can vest rattled as the woman leaned forward in her webbed chair and snatched the bills out of Jane’s hand. “Took me two days to make that. Twelve dollars! Pffft.”
Jane’s mouth dropped open. Had the woman actually spit at her? If not, it was near enough. And she was supposed to stand here and take it! “Well if twelve dollars is such an insult,” she said, “and it’s so unbearable to part with the thing, why sell it at all? Why not just have it framed and donate it to a museum?”
People at the other booths were starting to stare at her, all the farmers and bakers in their simple jeans and work shirts, staring at her in her summer clothes and city sandals, making her feel like the world’s oldest adolescent. Caroline was finalizing her purchase and making frantic hand signals to her which Jane couldn’t read. She should simply leave the hideous item here on the table, but that would probably cause a riot. She stuffed the bottle cover into her bag—what a practical design, and undoubtedly extra pretty when covered with ketchup—and walked away, leaving the old woman clicking her needles, and, for all she knew, laughing and spitting at her. This should count as two good deeds done today. Or six.
Caroline rushed over. She took Jane by the arm and led her down the aisle of tables and out from under the canopy into the unseasonably hot sun. It had been years since Jane had spent any significant time with Caroline, and in the interval, she seemed to have grown more beautiful. Or not beautiful exactly, but lovely. Everything about her was fresh and fair and lovely—the long lean lines of her body, her soft corn silk hair, her smooth pink skin. She had on a lemon yellow dress that floated around her slim body. She even smelled lemony, despite her cigarettes.
“I took you at your word about supporting these people,” Jane said, “but it nearly cost me my life.”
They walked across the bumpy, browning field, toward the lot where they’d left the car. Caroline looked over her shoulder, apparently to make sure no one was tailing them, listening in on their conversation. “I try to avoid that woman,” she said. “She and her husband are big NRA supporters and they’ve been connected to the local militia. There was even talk they were involved in a bomb threat at the State House in Concord last year.”
“Oh, shit.”
Caroline hitched the pack off her shoulder and carefully set it in the back seat of her ancient Citroën. The car smelled of worn, sun-roasted leather and cigarettes. Caroline put on her sunglasses and lit up a Chesterfield. Amazingly, given the studied, careful way she did most things, she never used a seat belt, while Jane, a slob by comparison, had an absolute mania for them. Especially when she was driving with someone as reckless behind the wheel as Caroline. Once Jane had strapped herself in with the qua
int lap belt, she pulled the bottle cover out of her bag. If Caroline weren’t here, she’d rush back and toss it at the woman.
“Don’t give it a second thought,” Caroline said, looking over. “Two dollars?”
“Twelve. I talked her down from twenty-five.”
Caroline shook her head. “The farmer’s market committee is trying to think of a way to keep her out next year.” The engine turned over and sputtered to life and there was that odd Citroën lift and they were off. Caroline went through a stop sign, not obliviously, Jane noted, but aggressively. It was nice to know that even Caroline wasn’t immune to road rage.
“I don’t know how much more evidence of consumer fraud you’d need than this,” Jane said. “Keep it, and I won’t feel as if I wasted my money.” Jane stuffed the sock into the glove compartment, noting that it was already full of parking tickets.
Once they were on a deserted, winding road, Jane settled back into her seat. She’d been dreading the whole awkward weekend, and especially had been dreading this kind of excursion, when she and Caroline would be together alone. But so far, it all had been strangely pleasant, as if she and Thomas and Dale and Caroline were just old although not especially close friends; as if this ill-advised weekend would end up neutering her flirtation with Dale. Thomas had been wise to insist they come. Even Gerald seemed to be enjoying himself. “Thanks for inviting us up here,” Jane said. “I had some doubts when you first asked us, but I’m glad we came.”
“I’m the one who should be thanking you,” Caroline said. “I’m surprised you didn’t hang up on me that day I called you. Frantic.”
“Let’s not talk about it,” Jane said. “It seems like a very long time ago.”
“It wasn’t that long ago, Jane. Whatever it was you said to him seems to have helped.”
True Enough Page 19
