Pastime (2 page)

Willie the Cobbler. But Susan reminded me that I tended to fall off them if

I had more than one drink, so I settled for black cordovan loafers.

As we cut through the lobby toward the bar, Callahan, the houseman, nodded at me pleasantly. I shot him with my forefinger and he looked at Susan and whistled silently.

"The house dick just whistled at you," I said.

"At the Ritz?" Susan said.

"Shocking but true," I said.

"Which one is he?" Susan said.

"Big guy with a red nose and gray hair. Looks fatter than he is."

"He looks very discerning," Susan said.

We got a table by the window in the bar, where we could look out through the rain at the Public Gardens. Susan ordered a champagne cocktail. I had scotch and soda.

"No beer?" Susan said.

"Celebration," I said. "I'm here with you and Paul's home. Makes me feel celebratory."

"When did scotch become the drink of celebration?" Susan leaned her chin on her folded hands and rested her gaze on me. The experience was, as it always was, tangible. The weight of her serious intelligence in counterpoint to her playful spoiled princess was culminative.

"Sometimes it's champagne," I said. "Sometimes it's scotch."

The bar was dark. The rain slid down the big window, and the early evening light filtering through it was silvery and slight. Susan picked a cashew from the small bowl of mixed nuts on the table, and bit off maybe a third of it and chewed it carefully.

"I was seventeen," I said, "the first time I had anything but beer. We were bird hunting in Maine, my father and I, and a pointer, Pearl the first. We were looking for pheasant in an old apple orchard that hadn't been farmed in maybe fifty years. You had to go through bad cover to reach it, brambles,and small alder that was clumped together and tangled. My father was maybe thirty yards off to the right, and the dog was ahead, ranging, the way they do, and coming back with her tongue out and her tail erect, and looking at me, and then swinging back out in another arc."

"Did you train her to do that?" Susan said.

"No," I said. "It's in the genes, I guess. They'll range like that and come back; and they'll point birds instinctively, but you've got to teach them to hold the point. Otherwise they'll stalk in on the bird and flush it too soon, and it'll fly when you're out of range. Or, if they're really good, they'll kill the bird."

Susan ate another third of her cashew, and sipped some champagne cocktail.

The light through the rain was getting grayer. The silver edge was thinning as the evening came down on us.

"All of a sudden I heard her bark-half hysterical bark, half growl-and she came loping back, stopping every few yards and turning and making her barking snarling sound that had some fear in it, and then she reached me and leaned in hard on my leg and stood like they do, with her front legs stiff and her tail down and her ears sort of flattened back, and growled.

And the hair was stiff along her spine. And I remember thinking, `Jesus, this must be the pheasant that ate Chicago.' We had just come out of the cover and into the orchard and I looked and there was a bear." "A grizzly?" Susan said. Her eyes were fixed on 21

me and they seemed bottomless and captivated, like a kid listening to ghost stories.

"No, they don't have grizzly bears in Maine. It was a black bear, he'd been feeding on the fallen apples that some of the trees were still producing.

They must have been close to rotten, and they must have been fermenting in his stomach, because he was drunk."

"Drunk?"

"Yeah, bears do that sometimes. Usually it happens close to a town, because that's where there are apple orchards, and the forest ranger types dart them and haul them off to some other place in the woods to sober up. But no one had tranquilized this one. He was loose, upright, drunk, and swaying a little. I don't know how big he was. Maybe a hundred and fifty pounds or so. Maybe more. They can get bigger. Standing on his hind legs he looked a lot bigger than I was."

"What did you do?"

"Well, the dog was going crazy now, growling and making a kind of high whining noise, and the bear was reared up and grunting. They sound more like pigs than anything else. I had a shotgun full of birdshot, sevens, I think, and it might have annoyed the bear. It sure as hell wouldn't have stopped him. But I didn't have anything else and I was pretty sure if I ran it would chase me, and they can run about forty miles an hour, so it was going to catch me. So I just stood there with the shotgun leveled. It was a pump. I had one round in the chamber and three more in the magazine, and

I prayed that if hecharged and if I got him in the face it would make him turn. The dog was in a frenzy, dashing out a few feet and barking and snarling and then running back to lean against my leg. The bear reared up, swaying, and I can still remember how rank the bear smelled and the way everything moved so slowly.

And then my father was beside me. He didn't make any noise coming.

Afterwards he said he heard the dog and knew it was something, probably a bear, from the way the dog sounded. He had a shotgun too, but he also was carrying a big old.45 hogleg, a six-shooter he'd had ever since he was a kid in Laramie. And he stood beside the dog, next to me, and took that shooter's stance that I always can remember him using, and cocked the.45 and we waited. The bear dropped to all fours, and snorted and grunted and dipped its head and turned around and left. I can see us like a painting on a calendar, my father with the.45 and the dog between us, snarling, and yipping, and me with the shotgun that, if he'd charged, the bear would have picked his teeth with."

It was dark now outside the Ritz bar, and the rain coiling down the windowpane looked black. Susan had finished her cashew and was leaning back in her chair, holding her drink in both hands, watching me.

"The dog was no good for birds the rest of the day, and neither were we, I suppose. We went back to the lodge we were staying at and put Pearl in our room, and fed her, and then my father and I went down to the bar and my father ordered two double 23

scotch whiskies. The bartender looked at me and looked at my father and didn't say anything and brought the whiskey. He put both of them in front of my father and my father pushed one of them over in front of me.

" `Ran into a bear in the woods today,' my father said without much inflection. He still had the Western sound in his voice. `Kid stood his ground.'

"The bartender was a lean, dark guy, with a big nose. He looked at me and nodded and moved on down the bar, and my father and I drank the scotch."

"And he never said anything to you," Susan said.

I shook my head.

" `That brown liquor,'" Susan said, " `which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank.' "

"Faulkner," I said.

Susan smiled. "You're very literate for a man who has to buy extra-long ties."

"I had acted like a man, in his view, so he treated me like a man, in his view."

" `Not women, not boys and children,'" Susan said.

"Sounds ageist and sexist to me," I said.

"Maybe we can have his Nobel prize posthumously revoked," Susan said.

Pearl was sitting in the backseat looking steadily out the window on the passenger side, mostly motionless except when she turned her head to look out the other window. She had wanted very much to come and neither Paul nor

I could quite think of a reason sufficient to leave her staring after us with that look.

A school bus passed us going the other way and I felt the pang I always felt in early fall, the remembered pang of school. So many days like this

I remembered in the brick elementary school, the lights on inside, the day wet and shiny outside, cars moving past the school with their wipers going, and the smell of steam pipes and disinfectant and limitation and tedium, while outside the adult world moved freely about.

"How was it last night?" I said. I was drinking a cup of coffee as I drove, something I prided myself on doing with the cover off and never a drop spilled. Paul drank his out of a hole he'd torn in the cover. A boy still, with things to learn.

"She's good," Paul said, "very interesting. Essentially it's just a one-woman show, like, ah, whosis, Lily Tomlin, except a lot more angry and foulmouthed."

"I never heard of her," I said.

"I know her from New York," Paul said. "She's just a regular downtown performer, like me, trying to find performance space someplace in the East

Village, except that she was lucky enough to be denied an NEA grant. Now she's making big money. And playing high-visibility theaters. And getting written up in Time."

"Have you thought of applying?"

"The tricky part is to make a grant application good enough to get approved by the peer review panel, and still exotic enough to be officially re jected."

"Maybe I should take Susan," I said.

Paul laughed. "She might like it," he said. "You'd hate it."

We pulled off into Lexington. The traffic was at a crawl, stuck behind a school bus that stopped every few blocks and took on children.

"Do you know your mother's new boyfriend?" I said.

Paul shook his head. "Never met him. His name is Rich something or other."

"What's he do?"

"My mother says he's a consultant."

"Self-employed?"

Paul shook his head. "I don't know. She seemed a little vague about what he did. She never wants to talk much about any of her boyfriends. Like I said, she's always embarrassed about them."

We went through the middle of Lexington, past the Battle Green, with the

Minuteman statue at the near end of it and the restored colonial buildings across the street. Paul was staring around at the town as if it were a

Martian landscape.

"Every Patriots Day there was a big parade in town," Paul said. "It was always exciting. Every April 19, I'd wake up excited, and my mother and father and I would come down and get a good spot and watch for the parade, and afterwards we'd go home and there'd be nothing to do and I'd feel let down, and the next day would be school."

I turned into Emerson Road.

"Parade was usually good, though," Paul said.

Patty Giacomin's house was as I remembered it, set back a bit from the road, among trees. The trees were probably fuller than they had been ten years ago when I'd come out here before. But they looked the same and so did the dense spread of pachysandra that did service as lawn around her house.

The house itself was angular, and shingled; mod 29

ern looking without violating either the site or the colonial town in which it stood.

I parked next to a Honda Prelude in the driveway. We rolled the windows half down and left Pearl in the car. I went and opened the trunk and took out a gym bag with tools in it. As we walked toward the house I automatically felt the hood of the Prelude. It was cold.

There was no answer when we rang the bell. The house had that stillness that Paul had mentioned. In the interests of not looking like a jerk, I tried the doorknob. It was locked.

"I already did that," Paul said.

"It's a Dick Tracy crime stopper," I said. "Always try the door before jimmying it."

"Great working with a pro," Paul said.

There was no sign of flies on the inside of the windows, which was encouraging. I looked at the door. There was a keyhole in the handle. No other lock, so it was probably a spring lock, though it didn't have to be.

It could be a combination spring and deadbolt, but at least there was no separate keyhole which there would be most certainly for a deadbolt. There was a strip of molding down along the lock side of the door to prevent someone from slipping a flat blade like a putty knife in there and springing the lock. I looked at the molding closely. The house was stained rather than painted, which made it easier to see the line where the molding butted up to the doorjamb. While I was examining it, I took a deep inhale.

I smelled nothing dead, which was even more encouraging.

"Okay," I said. "I'll open this thing unless you have a better thought."

Paul shook his head. His face looked tight. I took a flat chisel from the bag, and a hammer, and gently loosened the molding along the door strip. No point trashing the house.

"I'll get this off intact," I said. "We can put it back on when we get through."

Paul nodded. I pried the molding away, a little at a time, all along its length, and then got a flat bar under it at the nail holes and pried it carefully loose so that it came off nails still sticking through it. I handed it to Paul and he leaned it against a tree. I put the flat bar and the chisel and the hammer away and got out a putty knife with an inch and a half blade and slid it into the door crack at the latch and felt for the lock tongue. I found it and pressed and felt the tongue give and the blade of the putty knife push in. I held the putty knife in place with my right hand, and with the flat of my left, pushed the door open. There was no smell.

"We're not going to find anything bad," I said to Paul. "Promise."

"That's good," he said. His voice was a little hoarse.

We were in a small entry hall, with a polished flagstone floor, then up a couple of steps to the living room, the kitchen to the right, a view of the woods straight ahead through the big picture window across the back. Off the kitchen, constituting a short L to the living room, was a dining area where once Patty Giacomin had served me dinner and propositioned me. It hadn't been me, really, just the need to validate herself with a man, and there I was. I had declined, but I remembered it well. I always thought about the ones I'd missed, and speculated about how they'd have been, even though wisdom and experience would suggest that they'd have been much like the ones I hadn't missed. The thing was, though, that I always thought about the ones I hadn't missed, too.

The house was still and close, and neat. We walked around, checked the bedrooms. Patty's big, pink, puffy bed was made, her bathroom was orderly, though it didn't look like it had been put in order by someone who was leaving. Around the mirror were postcards with amusing pictures.

"I sent her those," Paul said, "from wherever I was performing. She kept them."

The other bedroom, where Paul had slept, was perfectly neat, with a high school picture of Paul still in its cardboard frame set up on the dresser.

The picture had been taken the year he'd graduated from prep school, three years after I'd met him, and already the aimlessness had disappeared from his face. He was still very young there, but it was a face that knew more than most eighteen-year-old faces knew.

Paul looked at the picture. "Three years of therapy," he said.

"And more to come," I said.

"For sure," he said.

There was a neat green corduroy spread over the single bed, with a plaid blanket folded neatly at thefoot. There was a student desk with a reading lamp on it and a green blotter that matched the spread.

We went back downstairs. On the coffee table in the living room was a green imitation leather scrapbook. I picked it up and opened it. Carefully pasted in were clippings: reviews of Paul's dance concerts, listings from the newspaper of performances to come. There were ticket stubs and program covers and the program pages listing Paul's name, or Paige's or both. There were pictures of Paul, often with Paige, sometimes with other dancers, taken in places domestic and foreign, where they had danced. I handed the album to him without comment and he took it and looked at it and sat down slowly on the couch and leafed slowly through it.

"I used to think," he said, "that because she was so needy of my father, and after she lost him, so needy for other men, that she didn't care about me." He turned the pages in the album slowly, as he talked. He'd seen them already. He wasn't looking at them. It was merely something the hands did.

"Sort of an either-or situation. Me or them. It took me a long time to see that it was both. That she cared about me, too."

"As best she could," I said.

"Her best wasn't enough," Paul said.

"No. It's why we separated you."

"And we were right," Paul said.

"Yeah."

Paul closed the album and put it back on the coffee table.

"If she'd gotten some help, maybe if she would have seen somebody…"

I shrugged.

"You don't think so."

"No," I said. "I don't think she's smart enough. I don't think she's got enough will."

Paul nodded slowly. He looked down at the scrapbook on the coffee table.

"She is what she is," he said.