The New Yorker Stories (82 page)

“Vic, don’t be obtuse. I want you to do one of those cutout things with it. I want you to take what I’m completely sure is something terrible and transform it. You know—that thing your grandmother taught you.”

“Oh,” he says. “You mean, like the fence and the arbor with the vine?”

“Well, I don’t know. It doesn’t have to be that.”

“I haven’t practiced in a while,” he says. “Did you have something particular in mind?”

“I haven’t read it,” I say. “But I think I know what it says. So how about a skeleton with something driven through its heart?”

“I’m afraid my grandmother’s interest was landscape.”

“I bet you could do it.”

“Sailboat riding on waves?”

“My idea is better.”

“But out of my field of expertise.”

“Tell me the truth,” I say. “I can handle it. Did you buy groceries to cook that woman dinner?”

“No,” he says. “Also, remember that you dumped me, and then for a finale you married some jerk, so I’d be entitled to do anything I wanted. Then you call and want me to make a corpse with a stake through its heart because you don’t like your new sister-in-law, either. Ask yourself: Am I so normal myself ?”

Banderas nearly topples me, then immediately begins sniffing, dragging the afghan off the sofa. He rolls on a corner as if it were carrion, snorting as he rises and charges toward the bedroom.

“That’s the letter?” Vic says, snatching the envelope from the center of the table. He rips it open. “Dear Sister-in-law,” he reads, holding the paper above his head as I run toward him. He looks so different with his stubbly beard, and I realize with a pang that I don’t recognize the shirt he’s wearing. He starts again: “Dear Sister-in-law.” He whirls sideways, the paper clutched tightly in his hand. “I know that Tim will be speaking to you, but I wanted to personally send you this note. I think that families have differences, but everyone’s viewpoint is important. I would very much like—” He whirls again, and this time Banderas runs into the fray, rising up on his back legs as if he, too, wanted the letter.

“Let the dog eat it! Let him eat the thing if you have to read it out loud!” I say.

“—to invite you for Thanksgiving dinner, and also to offer you some of our frequent-flier miles, if that might be helpful, parenthesis, though it may be a blackout period, end paren.”

Vic looks at me. “Aren’t you embarrassed at your reaction to this woman? Aren’t you?”

The dog leaps into the afghan and rolls again, catching a claw in the weave. Vic and I stand facing each other. I am panting, too shocked to speak.

“Please excuse Tim for disappearing when I came to the door of the Oaks. I was there to see if I could help. He said my face provoked a realization of his newfound strength.” Vic sighs. He says, “Just what I was afraid of—some New Ager as crazy as your brother. ‘I’m sure you understand that I was happy to know that I could be helpful to Tim in this trying time. We must all put the past behind us and celebrate our personal Thanksgiving, parenthesis, our wedding, end paren, and I am sure that everything can be put right when we get together. Fondly, your sister-in-law, Cora.’ ”

There are tears in my eyes. The afghan is going to need major repair. Vic has brought his best friend into my house to destroy it, and all he will do is hold the piece of paper above his head, as if he’d just won a trophy.

“I practiced this afternoon,” he says finally, lowering his arm. “I can do either a train coming through the mountains or a garland of roses with a butterfly on top.”

“Great,” I say, sitting on the floor, fighting back tears. “The butterfly can be dreaming it’s a man, or the man can be dreaming he’s . . .” I change my mind about what I was going to say: “Or the man can be dreaming he’s desperate.”

Vic doesn’t hear me; he’s busy trying to get Banderas to drop a starfish costume he’s capering with.

“Why do you think it would work?” I say to Vic. “We were never right for each other. I’m in my fifties. It would be my third marriage.”

Carefully, he creases the letter a second, then a third time. He lifts the scissors out of their small plastic container, fumbling awkwardly with his big fingers. He frowns in concentration and begins to cut. Eventually, from the positive cuttings, I figure out that he’s decided on the train motif. Cutting air away to expose a puff of steam, he says, “Let’s take it slow, then. You could invite me to go with you to Thanksgiving.”

Coping Stones

C
ahill—Dr. Cahill to those who knew him in his small town in Maine—had decided that his screened porch should be relocated. Wouldn’t it be better to winterize the current porch, adding a door at the far end which would lead to a new, smaller porch, perpendicular to the original? That way, he could walk out of the kitchen in the winter with his cup of freshly brewed coffee and his vitamin drink (those mornings when he went to the trouble to make it) and enjoy the late-blooming flowers on an enclosed, heated porch. In the summer, he could set up a makeshift desk—probably just the card table—and not have to worry that rain would ruin his paperwork. There was so much paperwork! His wife, Barbara, used to manage most of it, but she’d been dead for more than eight years, and, except for what his accountant did and the occasional question he asked his tenant, Matt, he dealt with it all himself now, and not a bit of it had anything to do with medicine.

Matt lived in Cahill’s renovated barn. Thirty-two years old, he had already suffered a divorce (at twenty-four) and the death of his second wife, who’d been knocked out of her kayak by a low-hanging branch and drowned, in Canada. Several times during the past year, Cahill had noticed Matt coming home with a woman, but he’d also noticed that the woman—or women—almost always left the same night. Once, he had been lured into playing a game of croquet with Matt and a woman named Leora, but usually he avoided contact when Matt had company; he felt that Matt became sour and withdrawn when women were around, as if he were still suffering through adolescence. But Matt—Matt was his preoccupation. Cahill had the sense to extend fewer dinner invitations to his tenant and friend than he wanted to, because the man needed his freedom. If Barbara were alive, and if Matt’s wife had not died, Matt would no doubt have been living somewhere else, and Cahill would have had more interesting things to think about. It was just that his world had shrunk since he’d retired.

Right now, Cahill was talking to a man Matt had nicknamed You Know What I Mean, a tall, perpetually windblown-looking carpenter whom Cahill had recently advised to have what he felt sure was a skin cancer removed from the side of his nose. His real name was Roadie Petruski, and, as Roadie tried to smooth down his electrified hair, Cahill listened to his beliefs concerning pressure-treated wood: “You know yourself, Doc, these things leach into the environment. Before you know it, your lungs are Swiss cheese, you know what I mean? This genetically engineered corn, the Europeans don’t want nothing to do with it. But us? We always got optimism. You probably read about rat kidneys shutting down when they was fed the stuff ? I read it in one of those doctor’s-office magazines—meaning no disrespect. My advice is always to seal up pressure-treated boards with the best sealant available, and even then you don’t want to walk on it without shoes, you know what I mean?”

“Whatever you think best in terms of flooring, Roadie,” Cahill said.

“Not up to me! Always up to the customer!”

“Well, I certainly agree with what you’ve informed me of, so let us proceed as you suggest.”

“That’s the thing, Doc. That’s the direction you want to go.”

In the distance, a cardinal twittered on a tree branch. If Cahill had had his binoculars, he would have raised them—he loved cardinals—but they were on the back porch. The same back porch that was going to be transformed into a heated room off the kitchen. Matt must be at home, Cahill thought: he could faintly hear Mick Jagger singing. The bird, too, must have heard the music, because it swooped away, dipping down for just a second to check out the goings-on on the porch.

A man he and Matt had dubbed You Got No Choice had visited a few days earlier. He’d come from town hall to inform Cahill that a wall on his property was in need of maintenance, and that, as the owner of the property on which the wall stood, surrounding a four-headstone cemetery dating back to the eighteen-hundreds, Cahill was responsible for repairs; he had no choice. There had been a lot of freezing during the winter, the man explained, and spring had been unusually wet. Such things accelerated deterioration. Cahill was told that he must keep “vegetation” six feet from the wall in all directions (he had no choice) and that no mortar could be used in rebuilding it. “I took a look just now, Doc, and from what I can tell it’s pretty much just a matter of replacing some of them coping stones along the top,” the man said, moving one hand up and down to indicate peaks and gulleys. “And—just to remind you—it’s all gotta be done by hand.” He handed Cahill a Post-it note with “
URGNT
fx g-yard wall 7/16” written on it in pencil, and then nodded while backing away, as though he were taking leave of the Queen of England. If Cahill hadn’t known better, he would have thought he was being made fun of. The man climbed into his truck and drove away, music blaring. Tchaikovsky’s notes bit the air like muriatic acid.

Following the encounter, Cahill proceeded directly to Matt’s, where he knocked and entered to find him starting a new painting of a fruit bowl. Matt’s still lifes were distinguished by the unconventional objects he included—plastic rhinos, a single beaded earring, a Princess Di figurine lying on its side. Cahill was gratified not to see a beer bottle on Matt’s table. The daytime drinking was new, and not a good sign. The painting class—of course it was harmless, and no doubt interesting, but did he imagine that solitary painting was a way of rejoining the world? In his opinion, Matt had got entirely too large a payment from his wife’s life-insurance company. Cahill had a millionaire living in his barn and functioning variously as his repairman, class clown, snow-removal guy, and sometime chauffeur. But he liked Matt, relied on him. The cliché would probably be that Matt was the son he never had, but then his daughter, Joyce, was enough like a son: in spite of his dire warnings, for years she’d taken steroids and lifted weights. The year her mother died, she had come East and chopped down the dead trees on his property and sawed and stacked them for firewood. She had size-11 feet encased in men’s work boots, and a tattoo on her arm of the nation’s flag, below which lurked a spiny lizard with a tongue unfurled to capture an insect. It seemed likely that Matt had a nickname for Joyce, too, but he’d had the good manners to keep quiet about it.

Cahill examined Matt’s odd painting and pronounced it “coming along.” He grumbled briefly about the visit from You Got No Choice, which provoked—as Cahill knew it would—negative generalizations about the self-righteousness of New Englanders.

On his way back to the house, Cahill went to inspect the graveyard. He had not noticed that the wall there was in need of repair, nor had he thought that anyone would tell him that fixing it was his responsibility. In the plot lay two children, one aged three, the other eleven months, the cuts in their stones mostly filled with moss. Their mother had died at twenty-three, the father at seventy-one—a good age to have attained. No headstone indicated another marriage. Pink and white phlox grew nearby, and sometimes—rarely, but sometimes—Cahill would cut a few stalks and put them in one of his late wife’s crystal vases to commemorate her domesticity.

That afternoon, Napoleon, the neighbor’s basset hound, paid a visit and was rewarded—though Cahill knew it was wrong—with one saltine. Cahill flipped through a copy of
Science News
and, finally, an hour or so later, walked the basset hound to the road, picking him up for the dangerous crossing, then down four houses, where he saw that Breezy’s car was gone and the back gate unlatched. He led the dog into the backyard and firmly shut the gate.

A week or so after You Got No Choice stopped by, a letter arrived from Code Enforcement informing “Property Owner Cahill” that he was in violation of an assemblage of hyphenated numbers. He was so angry that he could hardly focus on what it said. You Got No Choice had told him that he had thirty days in which to make repairs. Nevertheless, after he made a cup of tea and stopped fuming, he put on his work clothes and stalked into the yard. He took his tool kit with him, though he didn’t know why; it seemed the sort of job best done with one’s hands. He saw that his tool kit contained work gloves, so he put them on and set about replacing the rocks that had fallen. Some were missing, but where had they gone? Matt must have moved them to mow and stacked them somewhere. But he’d already interrupted Matt once that morning, so he decided to find the few rocks he needed elsewhere. He took off the gloves and dropped them back in the tool kit. As he did, a wasp came out of nowhere, like a stealth bomber, and stung him. He yanked his hand sideways in pain, wincing and squeezing his wrist. In the house, he made a paste of baking soda and water in a teacup and smeared it on, then swallowed an antihistamine, just in case.