Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (2 page)

"I've thought who it is you remind me of." He paused for effect, but there
was
no effect. "Cornel Wilde. It's been at the tip of my tongue ever since I saw you."

Nothing happened. The doors closed on the elevator man staring into the middle distance, and the elevator started down. David stood in the eighth-floor hall, wondering where it had all gone wrong. He wondered still, lying in a damp swirl of summer sheets in the tower bedroom. Perhaps, he thought now, he had made the mistake of thinking that every faggot in LA wanted to know who he looked like. Perhaps he had just said the wrong name. The gardener certainly didn't look a bit like Cornel Wilde. He was, however, just the right size.

So, in a sense, it had taken him years to go to bed with the gardener, but it didn't feel as if he'd tied the past up after all. If the gardener looked like the elevator man, it was only a trick that the past played on the present, to prove to him he shouldn't make love to men who were merely beautiful. He wondered why he was so depressed. He paused for a moment on the landing, propped the tray on the banister, and stared out the great hall window at the stone pool in the rose garden. As time went on, he thought, he was coming to feel that the past he had accumulated was a set of evasions. Even today he was thoughtless and young, wishing the gardener had loved him back. And he was doomed to feel, day after day, that today he was better and wiser, when it only turned out to be time for the next wrong move.

Oh, he thought as he heaved the tray up again, I should never get laid at dusk. I never get weepy late at night. I just turn over and go to sleep.

Expertly, he turned the doorknob and swept into Mrs. Carroll's bedroom. What always touched him about her at the dinner hour was her lady's disdain for the appearance of hunger. She greeted her dinner as a diverting surprise, as if the time had flown by since lunch and here she was, only half done with her letters. And she was very positive about David's hit-or-miss cooking. "Why, it looks a little bit like what cowboys eat," she said to him once as she peered at her stew, but she said it delightedly. And suddenly all that ended. He knew she was dead, the minute he saw her. He was that accustomed to her neatness and good cheer, and she looked as if someone had thrown her across the bed. It didn't occur to him that she might be sick or asleep. Even in pain or sleep she would have arranged herself just so. She hadn't had anything to say about this.

She lay on her side, bone white, across the big bed, her arms outstretched among the books and papers she kept in piles on the port side of her mattress. Her little office, she called it. In the first moment, he learned everything he didn't know before about the fact of death. There was the pallor of the skin and the surrender of the muscles in the face. But David did not feel as frightened or as alien as he might have. She must have been reaching for something, he remembered thinking, when it happened. Or she had been reaching for something
because
it was happening. It had not taken long, he suspected, though that meant nothing next to how lonely it must have been.

How lonely it was, he thought. He carried the tray on over to the table and chaise in the bay window and set it down. He sat and absently began to eat, all the while glancing out the window at the last of the light and the gray water. He wasn't especially hungry, and he had enough sense of occasion to know that eating was fearfully out of place here. But he needed to feel the thin rim of the wine glass between his teeth, to sink the heavy fork into the tomato, brush the corners of his mouth with a damask napkin. It was weird to eat with the dead so near, so he made up for it by eating politely. If he was acting like the servant girl on the lady's day out, sneaking her lunch into the dining room to eat it with class, it was because the comforts of a fancy, high-born dinner were very real just then. Everything on that tray was substantial. It was ballast.

"Didn't you think you should do something?" I asked him.

"No," David said, a little too quickly, as if he had been expecting the question. "You see, I was so sure that something would be
done.
If I waited long enough."

I was furious at him all over again because he hadn't changed at all. He owed something to the occasion, more perhaps than he owed to Mrs. Carroll, who was past expecting much well before she died. But I didn't say anything. If I told David what I really thought, that he was a bastard and a coward, he would have shut up. So I shut up, since I had to know the story.

He sat there in the bay window, he said, wondering what he was going to do. The question turned over and over in his mind all the time he was in the room. When he had played with his supper enough and finally had the presence of mind to listen to the question, he realized he meant what was he going to do about
him
, not about
her.
He switched on the reading lamp next to the chaise, and the ocean and the wide sky diminished as the light made shallow the space beyond the bay window. Phidias would know what to do. But he didn't make a move to call him. He had to decide first what
he
was going to do, before the chain of events that would attend Mrs. Carroll's passage into the earth took over. She was dead, after all, and it would only be a minute more.

He lay back on the chaise, cradling the glass of wine, and reached over and took a Gitane from the cigarette box on the windowsill. The only way he knew how to do it was to go through the story, starting at the beginning. He lit the cigarette. The story would tell him what to do. After all, the story had gotten him here. He had landed in Boston during the last week in April, in a snowstorm. He had been away five years, the last two in Miami, and he was so undone by the sudden end of him and Neil Macdonald that he instinctively fled to Boston, as if he were creeping home. Leaving Boston had been his watershed move, and yet he always swore he only left because of the weather. That is what he said in the beachy watering holes he landed in during those five years. Winter in Boston was ten months long, he would say, and spring and fall were parlor tricks. But when Neil threw him over for a toothy Cuban tennis pro, the white, whining Florida heat began to make him throw up. He took to going out only at dusk. Boston, with its tulip trees and fruit blooms aching for the first warm day, promised to be sober and pure. Better to weep for his lost youth, he thought, than for the likes of Neil Macdonald.

His real mistake was thinking his life was a story. When he told me about him and Neil or him and the gardener, he introduced them as the supporting cast in an ongoing drama, like a TV series with guest stars. One of David's stories had ended just before he went to Miami, when he lived in the Hollywood Roosevelt with the writer. I heard about it when he called me from the LA airport, about to flee to Florida. But it was already behind him. He'd started a fresh page.

"Why Florida?" I asked him.

"The Pacific is too cold to swim in," he said. "The surf is too rough." And he wasn't sorry about the experience, because he had asked all the questions about television that he had been saving up.

So it is all something of a story. I have decided it is none of my business. To think your life is a story may be just the right illusion. What was more important was this: in all this talk of leaving Boston and coming back, he made no mention of me. He was talking fast, as if I might not notice. I noticed.

As soon as he walked off the plane in Boston, he said, he knew he had misinformed himself. The first bite of the wind brought back every sullen winter day he'd ever spent here. He walked through slush to a taxi stand, his bare toes frozen to his sandals. He had figured to stay at the Y and not make contact with anyone he knew for several days, not until he had a job and an apartment, neither of which he was going to be fussy about. But the weather rooted in his guts so fast that he decided he had to have a drink. He gave the driver the name of a gay bar on the west end of Beacon Hill. "Having a drink" was one way of putting it, but he really wanted what he always wanted when it snowed. He didn't care if anyone recognized him or not. And then, when several people did, wondering where he had been all this time, he cared too much. He had been wrong, he saw, to think his five years away had been a lifetime. They barely noticed he had been missing, and they knew he'd come back. It was just a half hour, but already he felt like he'd never been gone. Then he went home with a man who had a tattoo of Santa Claus on his right forearm.

The next morning, he saw that his tan had begun to shred off like eraser shavings. The tattooed man had gone to work and didn't care if David stayed. So he slept until noon, full of shrill morning dreams about Neil. Then he stood in the kitchen window, naked, and stared out at the gray sky and the ankle-deep snow. He picked up the
Globe.
He read the classifieds and found the same jobs listed that he couldn't get in Florida. Until he came to Mrs. Carroll, whose ad had a purple ring to it and seemed like a misplaced personal.

YOUNG MAN WANTED as live-in companion for an old lady who doesn't want to be bothered. Come and go as you please. Indiscretions and irregularities acceptable.

With a telephone number that turned out to connect him with Mrs. Carroll's lawyer, a Mr. Farley, who felt compelled to provide the job description with the rigors and good breeding the advertisement lacked. David agreed to everything. He knew the name of the town she lived in meant shorefront and what he called "megabucks," and that seemed the safest method of reentry after two years in a condo in Miami Beach. At least it was the same ocean.

"All I want to do is get through the summer," she told him on the day he arrived for an interview. "I came with Mr. Carroll to this glacier of a coast because I fell in love with it in June. The rest of the year it's like Poland. You don't like weather, do you?"

Oh no, he had said, and because she saw he was telling the truth under his flaky tan, she hired him. Now he thought: that is all I really wanted myself, to get through the summer. And now it didn't appear as if either of them would. Somehow it hadn't mattered when he lived in a place where summer went on and on. One always got through in the tropics by getting by. On gimlets, on Coppertone and Chapstick, on filmy Roman shirts unbuttoned to the belly. What he wouldn't give right now, he thought, for an air-chilled car on a hot, still night. He didn't know, as the image leapt at him, whether it meant he wanted to go back to the tropics—to Florida, say—or on to the next improbable harbor, set on a summer angle to the sun. He looked over at the dead woman and tried to think what he could do for her. Then he lay back and shut his eyes to keep from crying. He couldn't think of a thing.

He must have fallen asleep, because he knew it was late when he heard the knocking on the french doors. Ten o'clock. For all he knew, there was a law in Massachusetts that said you had to report a death within three hours. Because he was groggy from being asleep, it didn't seem odd at first that someone was knocking at Mrs. Carroll's balcony doors. He had been enough of a servant long enough to feel that a knocked door had to be answered. He got up, stretched the muscles in his face and grimaced as he passed the mirror, trying to wipe the sleep away, and went toward the door.

"Beth," a voice called from the balcony, "are you there?" And David woke up and whirled around and saw the body again. This was someone Mrs. Carroll knew out there. Someone who was
going to get
upset. I don't want all this to start so soon, David thought. Give me a minute more. He stood still, wishing the intruder away, determined to wait it out. Slowly he turned back to the doors and tried to see in the half-light how they were locked.

"Beth?" The voice was louder, the first ripple of panic rising in it. Then, suddenly, as if to prove that nothing would wait for very long, the doors opened toward David, and Phidias strode into the room.

"David?" he said, stopped in his tracks, and David could tell he knew something was wrong. But unlike David, he wasn't going to wish it away. For the second or two before he walked past and saw Mrs. Carroll on the bed, he stared into David's eyes and silently demanded to be told.

"Phidias, I was going to call you."

But David's moment had passed, and now Phidias had moved past him and stood at the foot of the bed and took it in. "Oh Beth," he said, and the mildness coming into his voice shamed David and shook him so that he began to cry. He turned to the bed and watched Phidias shake his white head as if to say no, his unbrushed hair as wild as a sailor's. Phidias seemed to mean, when he called out Mrs. Carroll's name, that he had to scold her first. Beth, why didn't you tell me, he seemed to be saying, at the same time saying that it was all right. As if she might feel guilty or sorry to go without a word. Death, Phidias made it clear, was something that had to be put in its place. Is
this
all it is, he seemed to say, that you're
dead?
He sat down on the bed and rested his hand on hers where it had disarranged a tidy stack of papers at the end. The intimacy of his touch lay in its lightness. His hand sought in hers its proper repose, and lightly he let it be known that nothing had changed.

"Were you with her, David?" he said. He was crying easily, and David wasn't.

"No. I came in with her dinner." David was standing at the dresser, his hand darting from one to another of the curios, the porcelain boxes and ivory brushes, the hand mirror face down on a folded scarf. He flushed as he looked over to the bay window, where Mrs. Carroll's dinner sat, half eaten.

"Did you know about us?"

Did he know
what,
David wondered. Then, when it dawned on him, he saw how far behind he was. He should have wondered from the first why Phidias came in from the balcony, up the spiral stairs from the garden. And why so late at night. David looked at the old sunburnt farmer and thought: the worst part is happening now. If Phidias was somehow her lover, then he, not David, was the most alone here. David had always survived by being the most alone in a given crisis. He had expected Phidias to help him, and he realized that he was not the one most in need of help. When he answered "No," he let out a sob, and he knew he was crying for himself.