Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (22 page)

We still had enough lobster to keep us busy, but no one seemed to know what to say. I did. To make us seem casual and self-possessed, I began to spin a yarn about lobsters, something out of my youth I didn't know I remembered. About a lobsterman who wouldn't eat them, who said they were full of slow poison and caused cancer. I talked to him gravely at the town dock when I was a child. "He must be dead now," I said, but it didn't depress me much. When Tony Carroll walked into the room, a half-gallon of Dewar's under his arm, I was talking too much and the others were unnervingly silent, heads bowed to their dinner. We looked like any four dumb workingmen, but I at least looked like their leader.

"Are you mother's nurse?" he asked me.

"You mean David," I said, fingering him as I pointed across the table.

"We don't say nurse," David said neutrally. "She says she doesn't need a nurse."

"That's where mother gets all her power, isn't it, Phidias?" Tony said. "She defines all the words."

Phidias shrugged his shoulders and continued eating, apparently having heard it all before. I saw that Tony Carroll was almost as old as I am, and it disoriented me differently than had the similar recognition about Aldo a few weeks before. I had wrongly assumed Aldo was an Older Gentleman, and I always thought Tony would turn out to be a Boy. Because he was the baby of the family, I suppose. But also, Phidias and Madeleine seemed to talk about him as if he suffered from a very young man's loss of self. The only self that kind has to lose so far is a child's, and they lose it badly and clumsily. If they are gay as well, they lose it again and again until they come out or until they are thirty, whichever happens first. Tony Carroll was an aging baby, and he wasn't aging well. He had a drunk's baggy eyes. His face was curious because in some places it seemed drawn and tight and in others puffy and numb. He wore the sort of nondescript sport jacket and tie that told you he was about to go into a classroom smelling of boys and teach a class in lower mathematics or Latin verbs. And he was gay all right, but you could tell he hated it and kept it to himself. I felt a little leap of rage.

"How was North Africa?" David asked. David, I saw, was the one who was going to be polite. I certainly wasn't.

"Grotesque," he said, putting ice in a glass. He talked as he undid the wrappings on the bottle. Of course, we already had scotch. But people who bring their own liquor do not want to be restrained by other people's fifths and jiggers. "I had the shits in Algiers for four days, and the guide I hired stole my suitcases. There was an airport strike the day I was supposed to leave. I sat in a Quonset hut on the runway drinking rotgut Algerian wine for sixteen hours until I could convince someone to take a bribe and get me out."

"You really make me see it," Aldo said. "I'll bet you teach English."

"That's right." Tony looked at Aldo over the rim of his glass as he took a gulp.

Aldo went on. "You know, you ought to write a letter to the
Times
about it. The travel section on Sunday is full of letters that would make your hair curl. Just write up the facts as if you were telling it at a party. Then people won't go to Algeria anymore, and their economy will get ruined."

"Who are
you?"
Tony asked.

"I'm in antiques."

"What are you doing here?"

"Appraisals. But I can't talk about it. There's a sacred trust between the dealer and his client." He turned to me. "I thought Algiers was a real kink. I had to dry out in the Canary Islands for a week before I came home. Algiers makes Vegas look like Kansas City."

Wicked Aldo. If I had been in Tony's place, I probably would have had a small aphasic stroke if Aldo had done a number on me. But, perversely, Tony Carroll seemed to like the rough treatment he was getting from us. It meant, unfortunately, that he thought he could say what
he
wanted, too. I introduced myself as the summer handyman but kept a low profile and talked to Phidias in brief, telegraphic sentences about maintenance problems. Aldo cleaned up the lobster debris and managed to cut and serve a honeydew melon in such a way as to show anyone who might have ideas that the kitchen was his territory. I didn't think he had to fear any competition from Tony, who was so pasty-faced that he seemed to be in the middle, fat-thin stage of alcoholic malnutrition. It is one of my blind spots that I am not nice about drunks. I've been nice to too many, and they throw up all over you.

So David was the only one who would talk to him. Tony sat down at Madeleine’s place and began a story about the house and the past that you knew from the beginning could go on until dawn. David nodded and looked him in the eye and made little noises of encouragement. It annoyed me that he could summon up good manners for the occasion when the occasion was cheap. I knew he could take care of himself, and I wasn't feeling jealous either. But I felt the same way Phidias did when he didn't want David to take care of me because it would hold him back. From what David had told me about Neil Macdonald and before him the primal shrink and before him the soccer player and the TV writer and the antique-car collector, he had finally learned that you can't love someone who does not see the connection between loving and taking care. Neil went so far as to prove to him that some people would rather be taken care of than loved because it's easier to hate the nurses than the lovers. It is the old double bind that goes: how can you love someone as awful as I am?—I hate you for having such awful taste. Drunks have this speech by heart, and they give it from about ten
P.M
. until they are left alone or fall over.

Well, David had really
learned
that lesson, and I was the exam on which he was getting an A because I
did
see the connection. We were taking care of ourselves and would keep it up if we stayed together. That wasn't the problem here. David had this other habit, the one that let him play as he did with the dean long ago on Sea Island: letting older men particularly but plain men in general have a dose of his piercing interest and his candid, black, questioning eyes. He always said he didn't know he was doing it, and he couldn't seem to understand the difference between cruising and flirting. Cruising is blunt and satanic and carnal. It means, when you stare someone up and down, that you want to go to bed and nothing more. Flirting is too artful and subliminal to interest David much, and it tends to be something you do
instead
of going to bed. Because David favored the one over the other, he didn't believe that a man can practice both. He was teasing Tony and setting out lures and traps.

Tony told his story but lost the thread. "Nothing has ever been as
simple
as the summers on this coast, and I am a man who works at being simple. I used to run away on Labor Day and hide, and my sad father would come and find me. I didn't have the heart to hide very well," he said, pausing to search for the next phrase. But he gave up. "Because he wasn't very bright."

"What I love about it here," David said, "is that the land doesn't have four seasons. It has that many in a day."

He didn't take this sweet-ass cheerful line when he was talking to the rest of us, when he bitched about the narrow summer on this gravelly shore. But when David is flirting, I think he wants to impress his listener most with how sensitive he is. And he gets sensitive in the mawkish manner of naturalists or those same travel writers in the
Times
that Aldo mocked. I put a stop to it. I stood up and wiped my hands on the front of my jeans. I clapped David on the shoulder as if he were my sidekick in a B-western and said we had to go to work. Aldo followed us out of the kitchen, raising his eyes to the ceiling as the door swung shut. We left Tony sitting across from Phidias, his hand around the neck of the Dewar's, and we heard him say in a low voice, "Who
are
all these people?" He didn't have a clue about what it all meant, though the real test of course would be the next day, with the mother-and-son business.

Aldo left us to go give Madeleine a preliminary report, and we didn't say anything until we were safe in the tower. David began to strip the linen off the bed.

"We have to get rid of him fast," I said. "He can have a tender reunion with his ma, and then he's got to leave. Because he wants to turn this place into a Tennessee Williams play."

"He reminds me of so many of my teachers in prep school. They used to seem so smart."

"I'm surprised they weren't in a continuous cold sweat," I said, "with you cockteasing them all the time."

"Is that what's on your mind?" he asked tightly, stuffing the sheets into a pillowcase. Then he flung it into the corner. We were on opposite sides of the bed.

"That, and the sentimental crap about the seaside."

"I was just trying to be nice. You acted like a goddam cowboy."

"Nice is not the plan, David. That washed-out closet case could have us arrested."

He picked a clean, folded sheet out of the laundry basket at his feet and unfurled it between us. It floated down onto the bed, and we began to secure it at the corners.

"Don't you trust Madeleine?" he asked in a tone that can only be described as a dare.

"Of course I do." I did. I was going on the assumption that Madeleine could bring it off. I don't know when I had changed my mind. "But how can she keep it up? This dude is just passing through, I think, and Aldo has made him so nervous I think he'll split. But if he gets to be your pal and teach you a little English and steal your dirty underpants when you're not looking, he may move in for good."

"We'll talk about it later," David said, and he flapped open the top sheet. We moved to the bottom of the bed and tucked it in. The smell of the washed cotton was as sharp as the sea air.

"Should we sleep downstairs in the same room?" he asked.

"Maybe we should each have our own room, and it'll be just like a dorm."

"Cut it, Rick," he said, and the temperature dropped. "If you want to talk about being sentimental, why don't we talk about you and the movies? And if you want to talk flirting, why don't we talk about you and Madeleine?"

There was a pause in my head in which nothing happened, almost as if all the nerves paused at the same time and sent no information to the brain. The only thing I remember from college physics is that Einstein, on the day the general theory of relativity leapt at him out of the void, padded downstairs to breakfast and said to his wife, "I've had a marvelous idea." I could be getting it wrong since, speaking of grades, I got a seventy-eight. But it is also true that Einstein was absolutely the only one who interested me in the whole gray, pinch-printed book. Up in the bathroom shaving, he must have gone through a pause similar to mine. It is not as if I hadn't thought, all by myself, the two things David said, but I sure as hell never equated them with the two things I said about David. Could
that
be what I'm like, I wondered in disbelief. Could I be like
David?

I reached across the bed, put my hand behind his neck, and pulled him down onto the mattress. As I fell on top of him, I thought: I'm not angry, but we have to stop talking now. I tried to pin his shoulders down so that he would be on his stomach and not able to move, but he rolled away, and we wrestled for a long moment in a kind of embrace. Of course I was angry. I couldn't let him know something about me before I knew it about myself. I wanted him to take it back, now that he'd told me, so that I could admit it on my own and he could help me. I bear-hugged and scissored him for telling me so abruptly. We neither of us had wrestled since we were boys, I suppose, and we grappled in a way that was not so different from making love, only it was harder and meaner and somehow shy.

And suddenly I was on top. My knees held him down at the biceps, and I gripped his wrists and sat like a jockey on his chest. He grimaced, and his face went red as he tried to heave me off. That got him nowhere, so he decided to negotiate.

"What do you want, you cocksucker?"

What did I want? He knew as well as I did that I would always be of two minds. In one way, I wanted something new every time I turned around. In another, I wanted the same old thing I always wanted, and it had no name, and the single feature it possessed was that I lacked it.

"What," I asked, "are you going to do at the end of the summer?"

My face was poised above his as if I were bent over my own reflection in still water. But I wasn't going to get away with the question. He bucked and strained and seemed as if he'd kill me if I let him go, which made it hard to want to let him go. Which was too bad, since I didn't like this scene now that it had gone on a bit.

"Hold it, David, hold it. I'm going to get off you now."

"I'll tell you what I'm going to do," he said in a husky whisper, and I stayed where I was until he stopped. "After I shit on you, that is. I'm going to run away with Tony Carroll and live with him in a Quonset hut. I'm going to let him piss in my mouth and handcuff me to his bed and drip candle wax on my naked ass. You don't know what the fuck you want, Rick. Let me up."

"I'm going to, I'm going to. But cool it."

I was hardly the convincing person in this situation to be holding out the olive branch, having thrown down the gauntlet only a minute or two ago. But I hushed him and lifted one knee. By chance he went into a convulsion of fury at the same time, and his wrist broke away from my grip as his arm came free from the mattress. The heel of his hand caught me full at the base of the nose. My head snapped back, and in the first zap of pain I thought my nose had been driven right into my brain. When I looked down at him again, he was wincing up at me as if the pain had struck him, too. And there was blood on his cheek.

One of us has been hurt, I thought, but who? In a moment I knew I was the one, that it was my blood dripping on his face. He turned his head and brought up his sleeve to wipe it away and left a smear. By now his other arm was free. I still straddled him, kneeling on the mattress now, and he was holding me at the waist and telling me quietly to put back my head. I did, and it was then that I saw Tony standing in the doorway.