The Widower's Tale (8 page)

He was twenty-four when he'd found the courage to return to Boston. His cousin knew someone who had a job in a fish-processing plant in Gloucester. There were workers who spoke their language, not just Spanish. But as soon as Celestino arrived in the bus station, he'd taken the T to Harvard Square. Everything seemed shinier, more modern than he remembered--the subway train, the tiled platform, the escalator that carried him into the open air. Even the red brick sidewalks that were meant to seem ancient looked as if they'd been scrubbed. How had so much changed? How had the years passed so quickly? Yet the prosperity he saw made him hopeful. He looked for Isabelle as he walked among the college buildings, toward her family's house--where perhaps he would find her on the shaded porch.

Nothing had changed in the elegant neighborhood where the Lartigues lived. Perhaps the cars, which seemed larger. And the young trees planted along the narrow street: they were taller, dense with leaves. Now he knew the names of these trees. Sycamore, linden, magnolia, spruce. From his time at Wave Hill, he could even identify the different magnolias that flourished this far north, the ones whose late flowers were rarely damaged by frost.

The Lartigues' driveway was empty. The garage was closed. The front curtains--and with a jolt he recognized them, the same blue pattern of country scenes in France--hid the grand rooms within. The mailbox beside the door was stuffed with mail, as if no one had checked it for a couple of days.

He'd stood on the street a long time before daring to walk around the side of the house. He looked about in every direction first, to make sure that no one could see him, call the police. His heart beat hard, warning him away.

The gate, the brick path, the rhododendrons with their rubbery, almost tropical leaves: all of it the same. At the back of the house, he walked close to the edge of a window. The same green table ran from one end of the kitchen to the other. The same green cooking pots hung from a copper rack, like musical instruments waiting to be played. But now there was a dog, which jumped up at the window. It wasn't a menacing dog, but it started barking loudly.

Celestino retreated quickly to the front of the house. He hurried back the way he'd come, back toward the Square. He could still hear the dog barking as he rounded the corner onto Brattle Street.

After stopping to catch his breath, he had walked to the Charles River, a place that would always remind him of Isabelle. What was he doing? Was this folly all about her? He had been with other girls in New York. None for very long, but his life hadn't been suited to settling down, nor had he wanted to settle down. Not there. Unlike his cousin or the other
chapines
he'd met, he wanted more than a shabby apartment in Queens or the Bronx. He did not feel right in the city, and he certainly did not want to have children in the city. He could read the news, see what became of so many children born to people like him. For this reason, he could never completely trust the girls he knew. So many of them seemed to be prowling, like panthers scouting the shadows for mates. (Animal nature, hardly wrong.) The ones he liked, who did tempt him--eventually, they saw that he was not to be caught. A few raged and called him names. Sometimes he told them they were right. This he had learned from Isabelle, to know when you deserve someone's anger, even if you cannot choose to be any different.

Standing by the Charles River, watching two sculls pass by, the rowers bending together like parts of a wooden toy, he remembered going to watch a crew race with the Lartigues. That was during his first visit, when he was fifteen yet felt, in this place, so much younger. They'd had a picnic on the green riverbank. They had introduced him to pate and capers and cheeses from France.

He thought of going back to the house, waiting for Senora Lartigue. Why? To ask her forgiveness? He laughed. What would it mean after all the time gone by? Dr. Lartigue hadn't even left a will, nothing to show that he'd regarded Celestino--or so he'd said--like another child.

Soon after fleeing to New York, Celestino had telephoned his family. His father had refused to speak with him until he came home to account for his rash behavior. He let a month go by before phoning again. His father held firm. And so it remained, each time he called. Then, just one year after Dr. Lartigue's death, his mother told him that the dig had shut down--almost without warning. For one season, other men had carried on Dr. Lartigue's work, a younger professor in charge. But the following year, as Celestino's father and his crew had prepared for the start of the season, only a few archaeologists came. They had come to close the dig and take their stored belongings away. Their grant had ended, and without Dr. Lartigue's leadership, it would be hard to renew. They assured Raul that another group of archaeologists, from a museum in Antigua, would soon take over the project. There were no grand speeches to the villagers this time.

Six months later, Celestino got a short letter from one of his sisters. They were moving. A band of thugs had come to the village; there was a panic, fear that the raids had started again, even with the new government in power. People fled, or they hid. It turned out the thugs were looters looking to scavenge the site. Loyal to the end, Raul and two other men tried to defend the locked storeroom. They were beaten. The thieves were angry that the shed contained nothing but tools, books, and papers. They claimed they would return to find out where the valuable things were hidden.

Raul told his wife and daughters that what he had to do was go directly to Antigua and find the museum, tell the archaeologists there about the looters, demand to know when they would come to continue the work of Dr. Lartigue. When the women had not heard from Raul for four months, they decided to travel to the city and find him.

Of course, they never found him. They found a museum that displayed relics like the ones Dr. Lartigue had been digging up near the village, but no one at the museum had heard of Raul--or of plans to continue the dig. The women were lucky to find jobs at a tourist hotel. What was the point of traveling back to their village? The trip they'd taken to reach the city had been risky enough.

That day in Cambridge, as Celestino walked along Brattle Street, past the regal many-windowed houses of the richest, most successful people, with no idea where he was headed or what he intended to do, he noticed two separate groups of Latino men working on the lawns. He listened to them speaking with one another. They were Mexicans, Indians from a region just a few hours from where he'd grown up. He knew their way of speaking from back in New York.

This, he thought, I can do: work on the gardens of the rich and make them grow. I will not have to keep a baseball bat on the floor beside my feet. I will not have to scrub inside the rims of toilets. Dirt, digging in the ground, he did not mind. He knew dirt well. So, it occurred to him, had his father when he had labored for those university men and believed the work would last forever, even change the fortunes of his children. Like father, like son: dreamers in the dirt.

This was how, last spring, he had found his way to Loud, joining a group of men who waited on a city corner every day to be picked up and taken out to the country for work.

He knew that the gardening would end with the first snow--he'd been through two years of this work in the city, under less successful men--and he had to wonder if winter would, once again, throw him back with all the others, sent out to shovel and blow away the snow. A season of misery. But Celestino, who had seen his first gray hair that morning in the small mirror over his sink, was determined that by the time the last leaves fell, things would be very different. He wasn't sure how, not yet, but they would be. They simply had to be.

3

From: Trudy Barnes, M.D.
To: Robert
Subject: your aunt's birthday

hi robert: don't forget clover's bday dinner fri. pls do me a favor & buy nice earrings from the upscale hippie shop nr chauncy: dangly/sexy, don't worry cost, will reimburse. clara can advise? dad will pick U 2 up at your house 6:00. granddad bringing cousins--surprise so do not tell!

xxx mom

p.s. clover's new favorite color is orange

"Hey, Clara," said Robert without turning from the screen. "Mom thinks you've got better taste in earrings than I do."

"Of course she does." Clara lay on Robert's bed, reading her geo textbook.

"Because you're a girl, that what you mean?"

"Because I'm, one, a woman; two, a woman with a sublime sense of fashion; three, the woman your mother hopes you will marry."

Robert laughed. That his mother approved of his girlfriend almost
aggressively
was an open secret; the closed secret was that he had no intention of marrying Clara, or anyone, anytime soon. He was not opposed to marriage--not personally or politically--but nowadays it was little more than a declaration of the intent to have kids. To include kids in any plans for the immediate future would have been reckless in the extreme. Never mind that his mother had given birth to him when she was still in med school. Totally insane.

He spotted an e-mail from Granddad as well, subject
Friday Night's Festivities
. And zap, an IM from Turo:
mtg7! dnt fgt!

Robert knocked loudly on the wall between their bedrooms. "Hey Turo, F to F, you droid!"

At the end of their sophomore year, it had been Turo's idea that they move off-campus together. Robert had loved their monastically snug yet privileged life in Kirkland House, their narrow beds, their institutional desks, but Turo's passionate conviction, as usual, won him over in the end.

"We'll live economically, willfully," said Turo. "We'll partake of the community as we choose, not by daily coercion."

Robert had glanced out his window at Kirkland's courtyard, where half a dozen half-naked girls were determined to bask in the April sun. "If this be coercion," he said, "then dude, free will be damned."

Turo had laughed. "And look at it this way. A place of our own would give us a certain edge. I mean, if all you can think of is sex, my friend."

Robert admired Turo's urge to resist convention, and once he'd pointed out to his dad that they'd save significant money by living off, even his parents were cool with the plan. But while the choice had been a good one for Robert (that part about the "edge" was true; even Clara seemed to crave him more for his independence), he wasn't sure it was great for Turo. Lately, he'd become so mega intense, so involved in what he called "the underground" (as if they lived in the 1960s, as if anything metaphorically subterranean, truly hidden or secret, were possible now) that he had practically forgotten how to just
be
with other people. Just sit around the kitchen and talk. Sports, girls, parties, profs, just stuff. Between high school and Harvard, Robert had spent a long summer working on a nature preserve in Costa Rica. Not like he'd lived a third-world life (he was just another baby fatcat, no fooling himself about that), but he definitely felt as if he'd opted out of so-called civilization: basically powered down. After the initial freak-out of going offline cold turkey, he'd concluded that plain old-fashioned hanging out, ears off the iPod umbilical, phones and laptops away, no narcotizing of any kind (okay, maybe that great
cerveza
the locals drank), was crucial to your baseline sanity. "I did a low-tech detox," he joked once he returned.

He wondered what it meant that people were so busy reminding him where to be and when. Was he unreliable? Flaky? Hostile to commitment?
Negativo
, as Turo liked to say.

Vertebrates started in half an hour. He spun his chair around. "Cla-
rah,"
he whispered. "Rah-rah
-raaah."

Clara looked across the horizon of her tome. She wore a drab, almost colorless dress, yet it was amazingly hot: so flimsy that Robert could see her navel through the fabric across her belly. Between the top of one long black stocking and her rucked-up hem, he could see two inches of thigh.

Robert began to crawl across the bedroom rug on all fours.

Clara rolled her eyes, but she was into it. She closed the book gracefully, marking her place with the highlighter pen, then swept back her fine yellow hair, exposing her delicate collar bones. "Purr," she commanded. She gazed imperiously at Robert, over the edge of the bed. She inched her body down just enough so that she could reach the door with one foot. She closed it.

Robert purred. Clara laughed her Tinkerbell laugh.

"Now, bobcat," she said, pointing a finger at him, "behave yourself."

Robert counted: twenty-three people, and the meeting was supposed to have started fifteen minutes ago. Twenty-three wasn't so bad, though two and possibly three of these people were clearly crazies, the straight-up, non-PC term for the rootless if not homeless townies who showed up anywhere they could hope for a free snack or cheap vino. (They'd be disappointed tonight.) Or even just a chance to spend time under a ceiling. It didn't have to be too cold or hot outside. These early October nights were perfect still, the air like bathwater, soothing and romantic if you were comfortably off, had a home and bed waiting at the end of your day. During his time in Costa Rica, sleeping in tents and hammocks in the great tropical outdoors, Robert had learned this: no matter how beautiful or temperate your surroundings, if you've grown up mostly indoors, you begin to miss that sensation of being enclosed. Four solid walls and a ceiling kind of define the space you consider "normal." Pathetic but true. So some of the crashers at the meeting were, whether they knew it or not, just clocking free indoor time.

Turo stood at the table in front of the chalkboard, chatting with the speaker he'd invited, a woman named Tamara ForTheEarth. She was a freegan, one of these new extremists who tried to live their lives without consuming anything new: everything tangible, including food, was scavenged. According to Turo, Tamara had even rejected her surname as opportunistic (her dad was some well-known judge in Boston).

Turo kept checking the clock on the wall. Robert knew he was disappointed by the turnout; he'd put posters up all over campus, and he claimed that the new Web site was getting a lot of traffic. He had support from the Environmental Action Committee and even (weirdly) the antiwar coalition. Little more than halfway through their freshman year, Arturo Cabrera had been profiled as a Difference Maker on Harvard's TV station. Robert met him just after that, volunteering to post
Reuse Awareness
flyers beyond the fringes of campus. He'd quit his job in the student laundry to join Turo's campus recycling project.

"Hey, everybody," Turo said at last, waving at the small audience. "Thanks for showing up tonight. Two quick points of business before I turn it over to our visitor. First, let me remind you that donations are always welcome." With mock affection, Turo leaned sideways to put his arm around a supersize mayo jar sitting on the table. "Our intradorm recycling project is up and running again, for the third year, and we need funds to keep renting our storage pod and the van. I'd also love to draft more troops. Not to align myself with the powers that be--or should I say
betray
--but it doesn't hurt to see our undertaking as a war against complacence."

He turned back and smiled at the guest. Tamara ForTheEarth was suspiciously gorgeous. That is, and Robert would never have confessed this to anyone, not even Clara (especially not Clara), she was so picture-perfect, with her red hair and her long legs (shapely ankles in mismatched socks), that a certain unappealingly caveman reflex told him she had to be about surface much more than substance. (But oh the substance
of
that surface.)

While Turo introduced her, Robert sized up her breasts.
Those
were no hand-me-downs. He wondered if she'd be in Turo's bed that night, on the other side of the wall. Ah, well, Clara was no consolation prize.

"... and I haven't set foot in a retail outlet of any kind for at least two weeks. Here's a tip. Carry a counter in your pocket"--she held up a small metal object, like a stopwatch, which she clicked a few times--"and register every time you make a monetary transaction, plastic included. You will be shocked at the level of your dependence on money. My housemates and I have given up credit cards altogether. We do pool some necessary cash for mega containers of aspirin and baking soda and things like that," she said. "Baking soda's what we use for toothpaste. Food staples--bread and butter and crackers and things like that--we get from restaurants that toss them out for frivolous Health Department code restrictions, some of them completely random. They're designed to beef up the profits of the food suppliers, not protect the health of consumers. If you send an articulate rep to these places, they'll set food aside for you on a daily basis."

She described how she and her housemates had found their furnishings on the sidewalk, how they had a whole library of nothing but tossed-aside books. (Tamara ForTheEarth shared an abandoned house in Everett with nine other people, all of whom had adopted the same surname.) Another tip: college campuses, especially in May, were a gold mine. "Outside the dorms, you've got these Dumpsters filled with treasures. I mean, here at Harvard? I don't want to get insulting, but you guys are major waste-rels, throwing away perfectly functional TVs, microwaves, hairdryers, things like that. Even laptops!"

Someone in the front row muttered loudly, "Freegans use microwaves and hairdryers?"

"Good question, because, actually, no," said Tamara. "In my house we do have a toaster--we use electricity, I admit that--but the frivolous stuff, the TVs and microwaves and things like that, we just liberate from the Dumpster so
somebody
can use them, so they don't go to a landfill. It's called waste reclamation." She wrote on the blackboard DUMPSTER DIVAS and spoke about a group of women who called one another whenever they spotted a Dumpster that could be mined for usable goods. The ones who could drop everything would convene at the Dumpster once it was dark, sort through the contents, and arrange them on a nearby sidewalk, making it easier for passers-by to take these treasures home.

Robert thought of the desperate urban characters who laid such objects on a bedspread on the sidewalk and tried to sell them for the cash that this woman despised so much.

"You have to learn to embrace the random. That's key." Eagerly, she turned to the board and made a list of Web sites and activist groups: freecycle.com, freegan.info, Really Really Free Markets, Trash Talk, swaporamarama.org.... Trash Talk, she explained, was a monthly meeting, over a gourmet potluck meal made from grocery-store and restaurant refuse, about how to minimize all interaction with corporate America. "And as should be obvious, the less you spend money on, the less you have to work. Two years ago, I was a paralegal, totally enslaved. Now I'm almost finished with my first novel."

Robert raised his hand. "Are you going to sell your novel to a publisher?"

Slowly, catlike, she smiled. "Good try. But no. I'll be printing an on-demand limited edition myself. On the backs of term-paper drafts and classroom handouts, thanks to Turo here." She turned her sly smile on Turo.

Turo stepped closer to her and said, "All that paper we're collecting from your rooms? We reuse as much of it as possible. So don't crumple!"

Murmurs of approval.

Robert had to give it to Turo: he was learning to walk the talk. But he was also getting way too obsessed with
preaching
the talk. And who came to these meetings? Aside from the crazies, the Birkenstockers, the neo-lefties, the rich kids who wanted to stick it to their Republican parents ... until it was time for the LSATs. Nothing wrong with spreading the word, but Robert had yet to see Turo actually reading for his courses. When Robert mentioned this, Turo admitted he'd "fallen a bit behind."

"WTF, man! Already?" said Robert. "You cannot 'use the system' if you opt out of it."

"
Negativo
on the stress," said Turo. A nicer way of telling Robert to mind his own business, stop acting like a mom.

Robert could already predict that night's kitchen conversation (unless Tamara FTE wound up in Turo's bed). Turo would say that his guest speaker proved you could make a difference while opting out. He was prey to that kind of elastic logic. Like "embrace the random." Couldn't you argue that was sort of what Bush had done when he'd pulled his Jesse James act on Iraq?

But Robert applauded, along with everyone else. He had to admit this woman was impressive as well as hot. When someone asked if she had handouts with the Web sites and other information she'd written on the board, she shook her head vehemently. "But Turo's got scrap paper and pencils," she said. "Be sure you pass it all on. Recycle the politics along with the paper." With her hands, she made an aggressively enthusiastic circular motion in front of her very fine breasts. It was stagey, ritualistic. Which bugged Robert all over again. Her gesture reminded him of the way football players thrust their arms in the air after making a touchdown. Except even that was more spontaneous.