Authors: Katie Crouch
Men and Dogs (21 page)
A
FTER ELEVEN DAYS without Tom, Palmer cries. He’s cutting peppers to go in his omelet and thinking of what Naomi’s house must look like. Tapestries? Incense-stick holders?
This is when he cuts his finger. It’s not a bad cut; it doesn’t even hurt. Still, it’s a bleeder. It’s the blood that frustrates him—so hard to get out of everything. It’s all over the counter and the cutting board, and even after two Band-Aids, it won’t stop. It’s on his jeans and in the eggs and on poor Rumpus’s forehead. So he’s dealing with this, he is
dealing,
when he happens to glance out the window and see that the basil he’s forgotten to rotate has withered, and here it comes,
oh, shit, alone in the kitchen—tears.
It is clear now that Tom is never speaking to Palmer again. The breakup is perhaps Palmer’s most successful yet. As promised,
Tom came over to get his things while Palmer was at work. The rest they will divide, or at least Palmer will pay Tom back for the materials installed. It’s become a problem, of course, the renovation. Palmer should have seen this coming. They should have used more of a Legoland approach, so that items could be dismembered and carried away. How to cut apart the chandelier?
The built-in cappuccino machine? He could pry the fish tank loose, but where would it go? And what of the fish?
Palmer was surprised at first by the funk brought on by the breakup, but after a day, he embraced it. He skipped the gym.
He drank a bottle of wine a night. He watched movies starring Matt Damon. He watched
Top Chef
. He made great mixing bowls of fluorescent-orange macaroni and cheese from blue boxes and ate them on the couch next to Rumpus.
He called old boyfriends and had phone sex. He gave $5,000 to the ASPCA.
At work, at least, everything is more or less normal. It’s easy to pretend that all is as it was before, because Tom never visited him at work in the first place, and Palmer rarely talked about him. Certainly he does not tell Jenny. He can’t stand the fawning that will ensue, or the inevitable flash of hope that will cross her face. He is able to concentrate just fine anyway, maybe even better, because now he does not have to be bothered with calling Tom over the course of the workday.
(A forgotten call back would induce hours of frosty wrath.) No, now he can just be in the office,
present,
as his old lover would say, right here, fully with the sturdy canines and the yodeling, pissing cats.
Hannah, it seems, is too characteristically self-absorbed to call and check in. He hasn’t heard from her in almost a week.
Probably because Jon has been visiting. Palmer thought about going to say hello, but Hannah’s husband was there either to break up with her or to reunite. Palmer didn’t want to be around for the aftermath of someone else’s bust-up—his own being bad enough— and he sure as hell didn’t want to witness the bliss that would result if they didn’t.
Five days, though. His sister is a highly vocal person, and her silence can mean nothing good. She must be wallowing, just like he is.
He spends the morning watching the presidential campaign. He will vote Democrat, of course, but for some reason finds no joy in watching his candidate speak. It’s not that the man isn’t articulate or good-looking; he moves with the grace of a dancer, exuding almost supernatural ability—exactly the sort of person you want to meet as your captain when boarding a plane. But as Palmer listens to the commentators, their faces visibly crusty with makeup, it occurs to him that he has no faith in his choice. It’s rather like beginning a new relationship, he thinks, pouring an eleven a.m. glass of chardonnay.
You start with hope, then end up disillusioned. He’s a gay liberal Democrat living in South Carolina. He’s been beaten into submission.
What he needs, he realizes, is a project. Palmer is a big believer in the positive virtues of projects. Back in the Tom days,
projects were shared and usually centered around the house—finding the right ottoman or searching for a camellia bush of the correct shape. One thing that has eluded him for a very long time has been the perfect bench for the small garden behind the pool.
I could build the bench, he thinks as he throws away old macaroni. How hard can it be? I can just build it. It’s Saturday,
after all. The perfect day to build something. And so, with almost a spring in his step, he showers, puts on a shirt that seems appropriate for working with one’s hands, takes out a notebook, and sketches the dimensions. A simple bench: four legs and a top. A bench. A bench of wood!
There is a lumberyard north of the city that he decides to visit. Tom has mentioned it when talking of his work. He sometimes goes there with his builders. Palmer looks up the address—it’s way out in North Charleston, a vast plain of superstores and conference hotels near the airport. He prints the directions and heads for the BMW. He hasn’t turned on his stereo in days, so he reaches down and flips the knob.
Eckhart Tolle’s soothing voice fills the air, telling him to live in the
now.
Palmer squints with confusion, then realizes he’s listening to one of Tom’s CDs. What the hell does that
mean,
Eckhart? he wants to ask. If all that matters is now, why, exactly, am I still so fucked up from yesterday? He presses eject and throws the disc out the window, watching as it sails behind the car and bounces into the road. He gives a loud yawp into the October air. He is free, he is a man, he is a
woodworker
.
Pulling into the parking lot of the lumberyard, he is pleased with what he sees. Despite being dwarfed by the neighboring
Costco, it is an honest-looking sort of place, with a wooden door, a hand-painted sign, and a few large trucks in the gravel parking lot. The yard itself is enormous. On the left, a large hangar filled with long planks of wood, meticulously stacked and organized. On the right, a small building labeled office and purchasing. Following the lead of the other capable-looking,
directed men, Palmer pulls a huge metal dolly out of the stall.
It feels good, buying things from a store like this. He walks up and down the aisles, admiring the pine, the oak, and the mahogany. He frowns. Which woods are environmentally friendly? Which are hardest? Why are some planks $12 and others $145
? After much deliberation, he chooses pine and oak. Pine, because he likes the smell, and oak, because of his memories of the moss-glazed oak tree behind his house on Atlantic Street. Oh, this will be a good bench. This bench will save him, will pull him out of heartbreak and lethargy into a better place where he will meet new people and buy a better house and find a less-troublesome lover who does not insist on babies and
feeling
all the time. Maybe after this bench, he will make a table, chairs, a sofa. Perhaps he’ll fill his new house entirely with wood furniture made by his own hands. It will be practical. Easy to clean. Good for Rumpus.
He enters the office, dragging his half-loaded dolly behind him. No one’s at the counter. Palmer is usually patient and polite at empty counters, but today he is feeling antsy. He’s wasted so much time finding his purpose. Suddenly nothing else on
Earth could be as important as making this bench.
“Hello?” he calls out.
He hears movement in the back office. A moment later a large man in a flannel shirt and baseball cap comes out—just the sort of man you’d expect to work at a lumberyard.
“Hi, there,” Palmer says. “I’d like to pay for these.”
“All right.” The man begins punching numbers into the computer, barely even glancing at the wood.
“Will it be an extra charge to have these cut?”
“Oh, we don’t cut,” the man says. He looks at Palmer and suppresses a smile. “No, no. We don’t cut.”
“But I saw a band saw out back.”
“Well, we cut for
big
jobs. Sure, we’ll cut for those. But not four pieces of wood.”
“Wouldn’t it just take a moment?”
“Ain’t you got a saw?”
Palmer, who already does not particularly like this man, now finds himself falling into a dangerous zone of contempt. Is a saw
necessary
for manhood? Does a gentleman
need
a saw over, say, a cum laude degree from the Citadel, or a veterinary medicine MD from Emory University?
“Sure—but, I mean—isn’t there any way I could pay a little extra and have this done here?”
The man shakes his head. “Don’t have the manpower. Not on Saturday.” The man is giving him an unmistakably condescending look.
It’s the same kind of look given by the straight men who bring him their pets.
I screw women and you don’t,
the look says. When this happens in his office, Palmer does not get angry; instead he lets his hand or the sleeve of his white coat brush a body part of the person in question, causing the perpetrator to blanch with fright.
“You know,” Palmer says, “I can see the band saw out there through the window. I could use it myself. It would only take—”
“You?” the man barks. “Think we got the insurance for that?”
“Look, is there someone I could speak to? A manager, perhaps?”
The man now folds his muttonchop arms into a surprisingly neat square.
“Perhaps.”
The word, spat. He disappears into the office. Palmer is left to wait several minutes. He hears laughter seep in from the back room. But just as Palmer decides to screw this place anyway and take his money to Home Depot—he wasn’t going to, but now he gets why franchises with enforced customer service really
work
—a manager emerges. He’s a tall, lanky man with a droopy face and tired eyes partially hidden behind wire glasses. He wears a polo shirt tucked into a pair of jeans. Palmer cannot stop looking at the jeans. The jeans are not terrible, which is surprising.
North Charleston has the potential for truly bad, acid-washed, high-waisted jeans. These are only moderately bad—what Tom would call dad jeans.
The man hesitates and then puts out his hand. “Hey, Palmer.” “Shawn,” Palmer says. “Hi.”
What does Palmer remember about Shawn?
I remember you used to hiccup before you laughed. You swore
that celery gave you a fever. Your freckles turned almost blue if you
swam too long in a pool. You twisted the pillow when you slept, and
sometimes, when you sat in a chair, you tucked your feet under your
body, as if you were a resting bird.
The band saw, of course, is no problem. Shawn won’t let Palmer do it himself, but he does let him watch.
“I discourage it,” Shawn explains. “I cut for one person, and I’ll get all sorts of crazies back here asking for custom-cut things. Some old lady’ll ask me to cut her a stopper for the bathtub. Things like that. But I can do it sometimes.”
“My boyfriend loves this store,” Palmer says. “Tom Salinger?”
“Oh, sure. The architect. Man, he’s a real stickler.”
There is no sign of surprise from Shawn at Palmer’s indirect announcement that he is openly gay. He must have guessed that
Palmer would come out. Or perhaps he heard it; someone told him in passing. And then there is the more likely scenario—that
Shawn doesn’t particularly care.
“So, do you live close by?” Palmer asks, as friendly and noncommittal as he knows how to be.
“I live in the Oats.”
“Where?”
“One of the new developments off Bees Ferry Road.”
“Oh, yeah. Those are nice.”
The saw wails higher now as Shawn passes the first piece of wood through the blade.
“Got two houses, actually,” Shawn yells over the noise. “One for me, one for the wife and kids.”
“Divorce?”
“Yup.”
“Kids, though?”
“Yeah.”
The saw roars up again, almost immediately hitting an unbearable shriek. Still, Palmer is glad for it. He looks at the wood.
The pieces are taking shape now, which excites him. He can see the legs in his head.
“You doin’ this in oak?” Shawn asks.
“And pine. Oak and pine both.”
“Pine’s really soft,” Shawn says. “Those are very different woods.” “All right.” Palmer tries to keep the annoyance out of his voice. He doesn’t want opinions.
“I’d go all oak if I were you.”
“I’ll work it out,” Palmer says.
The saw wails again. Palmer hears a ringing sound in the inner sanctum of his ear.
“So, I never asked . . . ,” Shawn says, pausing. Palmer’s heart begins to thrum. “Never mind.”
“What?” Palmer asks, trying not to seem too eager. Could it be possible that Shawn is still in love with him? Does he really have that power?
“I was just wondering. It’s a little—oh, fuck it. Coach ever come after you?”
Palmer blinks.
“Coach?” he repeats.
“Yeah.
Man,
he would not leave me alone.”
Palmer tries to picture the coach, vaguely remembering a large, red-faced man with an oppressive laugh.
“About soccer?”
“No, Palmer. Not about soccer.”
Other information is coming back now. Something about a scandal, after they’d graduated.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what you think I mean.” Shawn takes the next piece of wood and runs it through. Palmer waits for the noise to stop.
The smell of wood sap has suddenly grown overwhelming. “Guy was a perv.”
