Another You (5 page)

The house Tony found for them was half an hour from Tony’s own house, twenty minutes from Marshall’s job. The first time she had gone to Hembley and Hembley (Tony’s little joke; he was the sole owner of the business, but he felt he should acknowledge he was a
Gemini) it had been as a client, the second as a buyer, the third as a prospective employee. “Why don’t you study and take the law boards a second time?” he’d said to her. “Why don’t you get rid of your trust-fund guilt and expand out of your parents’ converted garage?” she’d said. Checkmate: she passed the exam on her second try, then turned her attention to the next challenge and studied to become a real estate agent; he moved into a gargantuan church put up for auction by the Feds that sold far below market value. He had placed two gargoyles above the entranceway, painted the interior with richly pigmented Benjamin Moore historic colors, then written a long letter which was printed in the
New York Times
, indicting himself, as well as the system, for allowing people to take advantage, at the taxpayer’s expense, of expedient fire sales to unload properties following the collapse of the savings and loan industry. This resulted in his real estate business’s instant notoriety, plus the interest of a local congressman who took the occasion to speak for his constituents as being scandalized by the FDIC practices. The whole business became such a cause célèbre that the first day Sonja went to work for Tony, cameras recorded the employees’ entrance while TV reporters identified her as “a disaffected lawyer moving on to other things in the nineties.” The program ended with a close-up cut to the gargoyles, as a recording of Tony’s Cajun swing played in the background. Truth was, she was not so much disaffected as the repository for other people’s anxious desire to change their lives by moving from one place to another. Many clients appeared in extremis, the hysteria of selling and buying taking on a life of its own, people projecting wildly onto her so that she became their censorious parent, their skeptical employer, the devil himself if she questioned their financial stability. She forced Tony and the business out of her mind and walked upstairs to awaken Marshall.

“What’s the matter?” he said sleepily, as she rubbed her hand across his shoulders.

“Why should anything be the matter? I just thought you might want to get up and have some pancakes with me before I go off to work.”

“Winter,” he said.

“What?”

“No blueberries. Winter,” he said.

“This means you’re rejecting them?”

“Rejecting you and every idea you’ve ever had,” he said, reaching up and pulling her forward, so her face was close to his. He snuggled into her neck.

“You were sleepwalking last night,” she said.

“Wasn’t,” he said.

“You were.”

“You were dreaming,” he said.

How was it he could make her laugh just by contradicting her? Because he made her see that everything wasn’t so serious, she supposed. On the other hand, wouldn’t he be disturbed if he awoke to find her sitting by the window—wouldn’t he find it a little spooky? She did not do such things, he had already told her teasingly, because she exhibited good manners even in sleep. As he struggled up, she thought how young he seemed sometimes, hair awry, creases in his face made by lying on wrinkled sheets.

“Blueberry pancakes,” Marshall said. “It’s July. Seventy degrees out there, temperature climbing. Nice day to go rowing on the lake.”

“Are we going to do that this summer?” she said. “Last summer we only did it one time.”

“Next summer I build you a tree house, put in a grape arbor, don’t let the grass dry out, we go rowing at every opportunity.”

“I don’t want a grape arbor,” she said.

“You want a tree house?” he said, slightly surprised.

“What if I did? A sort of home office.”

“You like working at the House of Gargoyles too much,” he said. “I don’t believe you.”

“Do you believe I made pancakes?”

“You didn’t?” he said, rolling out of bed.

“I did. Big thrill, huh?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Now I’m hungry.”

She watched him walk to the bathroom, thinking how amazing it was that after all those years they had lived with the bathtub in the kitchen, now there was a large bathroom off the bedroom. It was only the fun—the mindless fun of those days she missed. Not the poorly heated, badly insulated apartments. Not the doctored canned spaghetti sauce, or the jugs of red wine that would taste, at best, as if they had no taste at all.

Downstairs, waiting for him, she poured glasses of orange juice,
started the coffee machine. A tree house—what a nice thought. Why not take advantage of being in New Hampshire? If they’d had a child, Marshall probably would have built a tree house. Or was that hopelessly old-fashioned? The child would have had to unlace Rollerblades to climb up. And would it be worth the climb, just to sneak a joint? A joint—probably now it would be crack. Or something new—some tranquillizer used on cows that had been discovered to make you feel powerful and highly accomplished, the biggest cow in the field, a cow who was going places. Well: that speculative cynicism was the way Tony thought, and not dissimilar from the way Marshall saw things. Tony never passed up an opportunity to announce that the world had gone to hell, and that you could never outguess the next ludicrous happening. So, if Tony was even half-right—and you couldn’t work with Tony day after day without at least half believing that he might be half-right, which would still account for accepting a lot of skepticism—would this be any sort of world to bring a child into?

Out the window she saw the tracks she had made in the snow the night before, taking out the garbage. Snow had drifted in, softening the impressions, making it seem someone delicate and narrow-footed—certainly not a large, shivering person wearing her husband’s heavy rubber boots—had trod in the snow. The outside world was made both simple and lovely by the snow. You could become fascinated, if you forgot you had seen it the day before, and the day before that. Like a sad situation, or a problem, it could seem quite captivating if you were thinking it through for the first time, not the ten thousandth. And what good did it do to think about it? Now that she was forty years old, did she really want to undergo surgical procedures done with no guarantee of success to risk having another miscarriage? The snow that had drifted into her footprints seemed to have already answered the question, but she would have to be a poet to explain, metaphorically, how the question and the observation were related. Just the sort of thing Marshall would present to his class, exciting them with strange new connections, implied complexities. He liked to shake them up; he’d admitted that.

As if some such far-fetched poem really existed, and had already been shared by the two of them, he came into the kitchen smiling.

Dear Martine
,

I begin this note with a comma after your name, having been corrected previously by Alice, who tells me that a colon should be reserved for business correspondence. A comma is apparently a more pleasant way to begin
.

I enclose a brochure of wicker rockers, which I mentioned before I’d try to get to you as soon as possible. Alice cannot decide between the ones on p. 4 and the larger ones, p. 16. In my experience, Macy’s may well be out of both styles, and if one is in stock and the other not, that solves our problem right there. But I think either would be fine and leave it to you to cast the deciding vote
.

Let me change my mind about something I told you to mark on the calendar before we left for New York. I don’t think, after all, that it would be a good idea to have the dinner on July 4th, even though that is the only day the Burks can be with us. We recently viewed a performance during which several flares were shot into the sky, and I could tell that Alice was very unnerved. I suddenly envisioned us out on the back porch, having dinner, and realized how upset she would be to see fireworks in the distance. I am trying as much as possible to keep her happy, and also to see that she enjoys the house again. Frankly, if she did not think of it in conjunction with your presence, I’m not sure she’d be eager to return. You may already know more than I; surely it cannot always be easy to keep everyone’s confidence and not feel that sometimes, in your silence, you are misleading someone else. These awkward situations arise often enough in business. I’ve had to smile through recitations of situations-in-the-works when I’ve already been the recipient of privileged information about the outcome; I’m all too aware that people’s private circumstances are often the exact opposite of the way they are presented. I’m not above sneaking off a letter to you behind Alice’s back, as we see! Something must be done so that she does not equate private gestures with possible betrayals, though
.

Item
#2.
Do you think we should get a dog? I think you are the best person to ask, because dog owners always tell you to get a dog (though they’re full of warnings), and people who don’t have dogs seem to feel you shouldn’t even take on a house plant. Alice has often reacted with immediate warmth when she sees certain dogs, though in thinking back, it doesn’t seem to me that this has been true lately. But please do not worry: I am not sending you off to find us a dog, just asking you to order a set of rocking chairs. We can discuss the dog when I get there. Maybe whispering as she leaves the room.… Oh, I should not make fun. Or I should make fun of myself for being so unsure of what would please my own wife that I feel I must consult you
.

I don’t say this to burden you, but you do realize how we both depend on you. Nothing could come as more of a surprise to me, because I think of myself as rather reluctant in matters of true friendship
.

With affection
,
M
.

3

WHEN MARSHALL WALKED
into the house and checked the answering machine, he found three messages: the first was from Emmet Llewellyn, President of Benson College, asking Marshall if he would be available to have sherry, late in the afternoon, with a wealthy woman whose daughter had graduated from Benson. The girl’s mother was now considering sponsoring an annual poetry prize, which the President understood would be the first step toward working with the college and offering an endowment to bring in visiting poets. “I hate these machines,” Emmet Llewellyn said, with much more conviction in his voice than when he asked Marshall to appear on short notice to help entice a rich woman to donate money. The second message was from Sonja; she had called to say that Dr. Llewellyn’s secretary had called her at work because they were trying to track down Marshall about something very important. “Sherry and a hit up,” Sonja said with a sigh, telling him to call her if he hadn’t already received Llewellyn’s message, or if he needed further clarification. Was she exasperated with him, or with them—she should only blame them—because they’d called her at work about something that was clearly not an emergency? The third message was from “Barbara. Secretary to President Llewellyn. The President would appreciate your calling him as soon as possible regarding the visit of Mrs. Adam Barrows.” She pronounced the last three words very slowly and distinctly, as if she were saying “I need help” in a foreign language she was unaccustomed to speaking. She left the President’s phone number at the beginning and end of the message. As he picked up the phone to return the call, he briefly considered telling the secretary
that he was sorry he hadn’t called back sooner, but he had some trouble finding the phone number. What the hell: he had tenure. And if you didn’t keep yourself amused at Benson, certainly no one else was likely to amuse you, unless you still had a taste for students’ outrageous stories about why work was late or enjoyed tracking the course of the plague that inevitably killed numerous family members during the time the students were scheduled to take final exams.

“Thank you so much for calling,” President Llewellyn said. “And I very much hope you can make yourself available for about an hour this afternoon.”

The one thing Marshall liked about Llewellyn was that he had a big pig of a dog, a rottweiler-black lab mix, he thought it was—that he brought to school with him. Why not send in the dog? It would be just as charming as anything he could muster.

“Yes,” Marshall said. “But in your note to me, when you thought Mrs. Whatever-Her-Name-Is—”

“Mrs. Adam Barrows. She refers to herself that way. Keeps us guessing about her first name, but not about what generation she’s from,” the President said.

“Yes. You thought she was coming at the end of the week. I said—”

“You said you didn’t remember her daughter, but let me tell you, Professor Lockard, that girl remembers you, and as you must realize, our college would be most pleased to have an endowment that would allow us to bring in a visiting poet. No need at all to state what you don’t remember.”

“I’ll pretend that I’m being tortured,” Marshall said. “I’ll just state my name—”

“Good one,” President Llewellyn said. “I was in Korea. You?”