Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (11 page)

I didn't hear the end of Madeleine's call. As I looked around at the disarray of my apartment, I found myself saying goodbye. I'm not coming back, I thought, half in panic, half shooting the moon. I don't know where I'm going after Mrs. Carroll's, but it won't be here. I didn't breathe a word of this to Madeleine, hoping it would go away. We packed our bags and went to sleep. Madeleine slept in my room, and I lay awake on the swaybacked blue-velvet sofa and tried to guess what was wrong with me. I felt like Huck Finn, rough-and-tumble, and I knew as sure as I was lying there that it would pass in a day or two. I would be sliding down the banister or chasing David on the shore when,
pow!
, I would have the existential equivalent of a cardiac arrest. So turn back. That is what the prudent, big-eyed animals say in fairy tales, and the hero pats their heads and passes on. The last thing I thought before I went to sleep was: What am I going to do with my plants?

I took them. And my tank of tarnished fish, who tenaciously lived on, despite my indifference. There were three of them, and they were seven years old, which probably adds up to untold decades on the fish scale. David had brought them home one winsome afternoon and called them Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The fourth one died shortly after he left, perhaps out of grief. I didn't know which one it was when I flushed him down the toilet, though David always averred he could tell them apart. I called the three survivors Blind, Deaf, and Dumb.

There wasn't much else I needed that I couldn't fit into a duffel bag and a wicker picnic hamper. I had never owned a suitcase since I had left my father's house. I think I always expected to flee Boston, and I always wanted to be free to take with me nothing more than the clothes I wore. A suitcase, by tying me down to changes of underwear and a coat and tie, disturbed my sexy picture of Rick on the road, out to make his fortune. Well, it is an academic question, since I never did go until now, and now I was taking a earful of goldfish and asparagus fern. But it goes to show you that you might as well scrap all the resolutions you make in your twenties. "I refuse to own a suitcase because it will order me around" is a dumb idea. Once, on an evening train to New York, I jerked off a bodybuilder I met when we tried to pass each other in the aisle. We sat in the back of the coach with a raincoat draped over our laps. Later he told me he was a nurse in a geriatrics ward. He was really rather delicate, like other muscle queens I've known, and he told me he was going no further than his sixtieth birthday. That, he figured, was his body's limit. He had gotten a doctor friend to agree to put a bubble of air into his blood and "needle him out," as he put it. But I know he won't do it. Things sound so noble when you're young and morbid.

I stayed in an antic mood, my pulses racing, as we made our second trip out of Boston. When Madeleine told me that Aldo had decided to bring the suitcases himself and take a vacation too, I was too far gone to be able to stop him.

"Why didn't you tell me as soon as you hung up the phone?"

"Because you seemed to be having a vision," she said. "I didn't want to spoil it."

"But Madeleine, where is this going to stop? You know, you can't invite the
Variety
critic to watch this performance."

"I have to have Aldo around. I'm glad he suggested it. Besides, you ought to meet him. He's so gay he'll make you blush. It's very bracing."

We had expected him for days. I had a horror, as I sat today on the porch steps looking out to sea, that he was going to breeze in on the heels of Mr. Farley. And he would barge in and storm her bedroom just as Madeleine's hand had taken up the pen and started to sign. But otherwise, I was afflicted with considerably fewer horrors than gripped me on a regular cloudy day in Boston. Madeleine and I had had an edgy talk here and there, as we had on Tuesday in the hall, but they always ended in sunlight. Phidias and I were still sizing each other up and spoke in shorthand. Mostly, I was on my own and free to wander. Since the house was not open territory yet, I roamed outside, on the beach and in the dunes and fields, and came back to rest on the porch. At meals, I was more and more quiet and felt like I was floating.

"He's become a yogi," Madeleine said one night at dinner. "His body temperature has dropped to forty, and his blood doesn't move at all."

"I don't think so," David said playfully. "I think he's becoming a creature of the wildwood. He used to want to fill in the sea with cement, and now he looks as if he might go off and be a sailor. I bet he could live on roots and berries if he had to. He has burrs in his hair."

David. Somehow, David had pulled in his horns. He came down to my room from the tower in the middle of the first night and sat on the edge of my bed in the dark. "What do you want?" I asked, and he said "Nothing." He stayed there, I think, until I fell asleep and made no move to touch me. It was a major change in tactics from the old days, when he would try to counter my bad moods with his hands in my pants, not seeming to realize that the sex would be bad and the afterimage snarling and gloom. With David, loving never lost its aura as a cure, however much I might finish up staring at the ceiling. Besides, he was blessed with a capacity not to see sex as good or bad. Its primary feature for him was its way of turning everything else erotic. We both were always wanton, but the difference was this when we came together to live: I did it every day for fifteen years in order to put it behind me every day, and he thought about it the whole day through and didn't need to do it much at all. He loved to jerk himself off and would lie in bed for an hour bringing himself up to it. He once compared it to a man rowing in a single shell on a river clear as glass. When I did it, I felt stunned and alone and knew I had made a mess. So it probably turned him on just to sit on the edge of the bed. He knew he had made a mistake to smother and attack me on Sunday afternoon. He also could see that I had arrived back at Mrs. Carroll's in a euphoric state—"wide open to the cosmos," he called it in himself—and he wanted to keep in touch, however marginally. If he kept his hands to himself, I was willing to let him.

On the morning after the second night, I awoke to find that he had fallen asleep next to me, still in his clothes. On the fifth morning, I saw he had taken his clothes off and crept in under the covers. I was brushing my teeth on the seventh night, Sunday, a week to the day we fell into this, when his face appeared in the shaving mirror above the sink. He leaned there in the bathroom doorway.

"Why don't you come on up to the tower tonight?"

I ducked and spit a mouthful of foam into the sink. When I stood up, I didn't turn around but held his eyes in the mirror instead.

"I thought I turned down that offer."

"I thought I'd make it again. Now that you're such a beachcomber, I think you'll fall in love with the view. It's like living in a lighthouse."

"Does it warn the ships at sea that there is danger here?"

"They already know," he said. "They avoid us like the plague. I'm glad, though, because if a ship docked here, you might ship out on it."

And he turned and left. Wait, I nearly said, I haven't answered your question. Yes, I'll come up to the tower, but please tell me when you started to sound so world-weary and stripped of illusion. You sound too old. I saw that he was not going to twist my arm now either, but neither was he going to pretend it was a good idea to go on this way. He accused me in the neutral tone of his voice. Still, he was trying to show me that I could hate the boy who left me five years ago without losing the time I had with the man who had just appeared and disappeared in my mirror. More than he wanted us making love again, he wanted to have it out about the past. A week ago, he wanted to make love first. So I had won, if you could call it that.

I had not yet been in the tower. When I came up the stairs into David's darkened room, I saw him in the light of the midsummer moon. He was facing me on the bed, the sheet drawn up only as far as his hips, and he was honey-colored against the pearl white of his linen. I came up close to the bed and looked down at him as I undid the belt of my robe and let it fall to the floor behind me. I thought he was asleep because in the past he had always fallen asleep instantly, but as I pulled back the sheet, I caught a glint of moonlight in his eye.

"Are you awake?" I said.

"I was just waiting to see if you'd come. You know, you haven't even looked out the windows."

And as if it had been a command, I stood up and went to the windows. It was the old story of the moon on the sea. It had never broken my heart and had never made it feel like a valentine either. But here there was something in the distance and the height together that caught at me. I walked from window to window around the room and was monarch of all I surveyed. I took the measure of the beach I combed in daylight, where I ran and swam and threw rocks in the water, and it seemed only inches long in the scheme of things—the bay in which the house lay harbored and the set of points and inlets that zigzagged to the south. Even when I am wide open to the cosmos, I don't seek it in the scheme of things. I make do with the heft of a rock or a dive into icy water from my own staked-out bit of shore. David thought I would like to be both king and beachcomber, since I could have it both ways just by feeling free with the tower stairs. I wondered if they wouldn't cancel each other out.

"It does make me feel a little like Rapunzel," I said. "But you're right, it's ravishing. Tell me what everything is out there. As the crow flies, where is the world?"

I walked over to the bed again, and he was fast asleep. It felt like a slap in the face. I sat down and reconstructed what we had been setting down as rules. If I had succeeded, it was in forcing him to be confounded by the distance that channeled between us. But he had agreed by agreeing that it could be
seen
that way, not that it
was
that way. Damn him. I believed that there was only one gospel interpretation of what had broken us before, and the crime and the punishment were rooted in David's illusions. He thought not. So he had turned the problem over to me, as if to say "
You
think of something." He knew I couldn't, of course. He slept like a baby and left me sentry over the whole luminous curve of the planet. I wish I could say that I stood watch until the sun bleached out the moon and brought on the sober blue of the sea. But I curled my body around him and buried my face in his salty hair. I stroked the flat of his stomach. I was not aware of the windows again until I woke to the full dazzle of the morning sun. I lay on my back, my cock as stiff as the needle on a sundial. The tower room was as hot as a furnace, and David had gotten up and left, I didn't know when.

As things stood on July third, then (and they didn't stand still), I was sharing a bed with my long-lost lover in an eagle's nest, but we had left the loving out of it so far. I walked the beach and took the sun and ended up with my head in my hands at the iron table on the front porch. Phidias and Madeleine huddled from breakfast until dinner over the project. I had wondered aloud to Madeleine what went on among the cows and whether Phidias's farm wife complained, that he should spend so much time on the coast. "I don't know," she said, giving me a look. "Why don't you go ask them?" David had abandoned his polishing and stayed outside, but he must have found his own windless inlet because we never crossed paths. He was tanned so dark that it seemed a pity to clothe him. His skin sheathed him like an animal's coat, and he walked on the pads of his feet like a light-footed Indian.

Curiously, it was the gardener and not David who was prodding me about sex. There was only so much gardening that needed to be done in the front yard, since the hedges fronting the sea were meant to grow wild, and David watered the window boxes on the porch rail. The lawn needed mowing no more than once a week. And yet he made an appearance every day. As I sat in a mild trance at the table or on the steps, I would hear the clippers or the chink of a hoe farther along the porch. Then he would come into view, looking as if he were studying the condition of the shrubbery that lined the porch. He would stand there intently and strike poses. He took his T-shirt out of his back pocket and rubbed the sweat away from his bare chest, or he put a hand to his groin and rubbed himself as if absentmindedly. He was a little too chunky and slow in his limbs for my taste. Still, when he held the rake upright in one hand and leaned his elbow to rest on the bar of it, it threw his steamy body into a pose full of lust and abandon. I was meant to make the first move. He would only give me a perfunctory nod as he passed the porch. My return nod was almost imperceptible. There had been no progress.

It never rains but it pours. That day, as I shook with the jitters about the imminent showdown with Mr. Farley, the gardener gave another turn to the screw. He came across the lawn, his hands in his pockets. He looked down meditatively at the grass and stopped here and there to kick at it with one foot, as if he were measuring the spring in it. He passed very near to me and stooped down at the foot of the porch steps. He worked at the dirt with his hands until he was able to bring up a handful of it. He held it to his face and sniffed at it. Then he turned.

"This soil is too sour for good grass," he said. His eyes were wide, dark, and impudent.

"Really? How can you tell?"

"Like this," he said. He brought his hand to his mouth and took a bite of the earth. Without wincing, he worked it around in his cheeks and seemed to savor it, as if he were tasting wine. Crumbs of dirt clung to his lips. Then he turned his head to the side and spat hard, wiped his mouth, and spat again. "It
tastes
sour. Sweet soil tastes sweet. Try it," he said and held out his hand. When he grinned, two of his front teeth were covered with a thin mud.

"No thanks," I said. "I'll take your word for it." And I saw him look over my shoulder at something behind me. Then the screen door to the front hall slammed, like thunder following lightning, and I heard David's voice as he walked up.