Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (9 page)

He bent down to kiss me. I turned my head away into the grass, but he kissed me anyway, patting his lips on my temple, moving down my face until he nuzzled the tight cords in my neck and stroked them with his tongue. Very close to my ear, I heard him say in a voice so low I couldn't catch the tone, "I don't have one, Rick." And as my face came away from the grass and I began to hold him, I believed that this was as much of the truth as he knew. I held his head close with one hand and gripped his shoulders with the other. We held still while I gave up. Those who have no plans are so unlike those who plot. I am a plotter, and I know. A plan is wrong-headed to them because it seems untrue to the life of the present, which for them just unfolds and unfolds. For me, a plan is at least something for nothing to go according to. What are we going to do now? I thought. Of course I knew that what we were going to do
right
now was make love, one way or another, but I couldn't imagine what we were going to
do
about it. How do you get out of it alive? I wanted to know, because I hadn't the last time.

We were on our sides, facing each other. I felt his body all along me, but I couldn't answer it or move against it yet. I just clung there. We kissed deeply, though, drinking each other in. The taste of his mouth was so familiar and so undiminished by the years that I kissed him with a gasp and a sob fighting in my throat. I know I think too much. I always have. But it hovered in my head that we were very, very old right now, and we held each other lovingly, but the passion and sex were something we had left behind in the past. We seemed to be recalling something sweet and very distant. It did not make me unhappy that it had come to this.

"Rick," he said, breathing the words into my mouth, "why don't we go up to the tower?"

What did I know about the tower?

"Is that where you keep your lovers captive?" I said lightly. "Your life is like a folktale, David."

"Don't say that," he said, his face going grave, an ache in his eyes. "I want us to go to bed, and I want it to be real. I don't have any fantasies anymore. I promise. Just make love to me."

Perhaps because I had lived the last minute in my head, I wasn't aware until then that his cock had stiffened against me and rode between us, pulsing against my belly. I pulled away a bit, far enough so that I couldn't feel it any longer.

"David, I can't. I don't go to bed with the people I meet. That's not what I do now."

"I don't understand." And he didn't, of course. Beds are David's life raft. They are his ballast. He can sleep until noon if he wants, and he props himself up on pillows to read in the late afternoon. If there is a telephone on the bedside table as well, he is fixed for the day.

"I've gotten sex down to a science," I said, lamely trying to be light again. "I suck people off in the baths, and I jerk them off at dirty movies. When I go to the library, I don't bother to take my library card. You don't need it in the john."

"If you don't want to go to bed with me, why am I in your arms again?"

"Because I love you. And I wanted to make love a little. But this is far enough." He stared at me as if he didn't believe a word. "That's the plan anyway," I said, reaching for the joke.

"I know what it is," he said. "You're afraid you can't get it up." I took in a breath to tell him no, and he put his hand across my mouth. "No, darling, listen. I'm not trying to test you. You don't have to fuck me." Oh stop, I thought, stop with the "darling." Don't call me things. "I told you, I know some things about myself now. Either way is all right with me. Let me fuck you."

I can't. There is more than one way, I see, of being forty-five. The usual fear of starting to die has long begun. The fear at forty that nothing would change between there and the grave has given place to the darker, insomniac fear that change is all there is and you can't stop it. You have found a new way of being alone, and the trick is that you can't talk about it, even with those who have crossed the line with you. Everyone wants to forget it, so leave them alone. It is one of the things that sells stiff drinks in a gay bar. But you see that you are forty-five in this way too, when the young outsex you. I come from a time when you fucked or you got fucked, you didn't do both. But the boys I meet go back and forth. A bullet of amyl nitrate swings from a chain around their necks, and nothing the flesh is weak enough to want appalls them. I envy them, I know, but it doesn't seem fair. Being gay, you are unmanned to begin with as you shy away from the brute straight world and the one thing men are. You finally succeed in believing that a man can be this and not just that. And see, you come to find out that you haven't gotten it quite right. Some people's houses are all doors.

"I can't."

"You'll see. Come on up to the tower. From my bed you can see everything." He sprang up and stood above me smiling, humming with energy. "Don't worry. You're going to like it here."

"In a day or two I hope to have forgotten that it ever existed."

"No, you don't. Come on."

"David," I said, "what do you want from me?" It's my own fault. I lay there and let him caper around me, and my voice came out full of melancholy humor. I should have shouted and shaken him and pushed him off the dune. I was mad enough. He had decided I was feeling what he wanted me to feel, and he steamrollered right over me. And yet he was so unencumbered by time that I held it in, just so that I could watch him. He was electric, and now he was laughing at me.

"Nothing," he said, grinning and playful. "I don't know what this
means
. Why don't we figure that out later? You can give a sermon on it. Up there," he said, pointing again to the roof terrace. Instinctively I followed the thrust of his arm again and saw that Phidias was alone there now. He leaned on his elbows on the balustrade, looking out to sea. "You can tell it to the tide and the wind. But right now why don't we go for a swim? And then go up to my room and take a shower."

"No. You go. I'll watch you."

He has always loved to be watched. He pulled the T-shirt over his head and shook his head loose from it. He dropped his cutoffs and kicked them off. As he put his fingertips into the waistband of his briefs, he looked down at me and smiled a smile I might have mistaken for Madeleine's—knowing and disbelieving at once—if I had come upon it by surprise while turning a corner. He slipped them off and stood free, and there I was again, back at square one. Leaping twice like a deer, he reached the flat sand and began to run toward the water. He is not a runner, but there is something more physical, more beautiful even, in the heavier step with which he moves, the breaks in his rhythm. He splashed in. He threw himself forward in a marvelous surface dive, slapping the water and taking off.

As soon as he began to swim, I stood up and started to jog along the boards to the house. I don't know what I expected. I didn't really think that Madeleine and I could make a clean getaway. But I wanted the rest of the afternoon to be played out with Madeleine beside me, and then he would not be able to get me alone again. Can I possibly still have thought we were talking about nothing more than a Sunday afternoon? I ran the other way, away from the sea, and was panting after a moment and holding the stitch in my side. If he catches up with me, I thought as I slowed to a wheezing uphill walk, I will start crying again, and then he will lead me back to the beach to comfort me, and the sex will start all over. I can't. And I hate him because he doesn't believe me.

When I reached the line of bushes that separated the sea's land from the clipped front lawn, I heard him call my name from far away. I turned, and he waved and began to swim in. He had a long way to go. Good. I stepped through the bushes, and there was Madeleine, standing on the porch at the top of the steps, leaning against a pillar. I could not for the moment recall what scene this reminded me of. We were about fifty feet apart. It is a tribute to the control she has over her instrument that when she called out to me, the words reached my ear just above a whisper.

"Let's do it," she said.

So I was the only one not asked to commit a crime. I was being invited along, I thought, to keep them company. And I had the getaway car if they needed to make a fast break. But I can only guess, since they had all gone crazy, what they wanted me for. I knew differently. I had been running away from it all afternoon, and the stabbing in my side bore witness to the shape I was in, but someone had to take care of them. Look where they had gotten to since lunch, one in the sea and one on the roof. Someone had to put this thing together.

"Madeleine," I shouted, "how long is this going to take?"

"Just the summer," she whispered back.

"FOR ONE THING
," Madeleine said, "she couldn't stand to have an animal around."

"Don't make things up about her, Madeleine. You're trying to make her more interesting, and she's interesting enough."

Madeleine shook her head at Phidias, stood up from the table where they had been having coffee, and walked over to the stove. I was steaming clams for chowder, and next to me on the cutting board were mounds of potatoes and onions and mushrooms, sliced for the next step. Madeleine took up a handful of raw mushrooms and popped them into her mouth like grapes or peanuts. She turned back to him and gestured as she spoke, a fat white mushroom between her fingers as she waved her hand. She usually made me nervous in the kitchen, feigning interest badly, for the sake of the moment trying to convince you that she kept a file of recipe cards in her purse. Worse, she would try to help if the food seemed peasant enough to her. Some things evoked the rough and pungent kitchen of her youth, and it delighted her to have a hand in, touching the pulse of things as her mothers and aunts must have done. But in fact, she didn't cook because she didn't eat. She never wasted a wish on food. And I and my soup were safe today because she was taken up by her argument with Phidias, coloring in the portrait of Mrs. Carroll.

"You can't expect to know everything, Phidias. I've seen her. We'd walk along the streets in Boston, and she would mutter and glare if we went by someone with a dog."

"Dogs and cats," he said, nodding agreement, as if he had finally put the muddle in some order. "You said animals."

"You know what I meant," she said, as if dogs and cats were all the animals there were. And though she was talking to a farmer.

"Tell me about your daughter," Phidias said, inviting her to practice.

"You can't say anything about Cicely anymore," Madeleine said, and I was hard put to say how the voice had aged. The spaces between the words were not as equal as they might have been. The breath was thinner. "I did not bring up my children to be boring. I've said to her, 'Why don't you have a nervous breakdown, like Tony.'"

"That's not fair. Tony has never been in a hospital. Not for anything. He's never even had a cold." He could not quite add a name at the end of any sentence. He couldn't call her Madeleine, because she wasn't. With my back turned to the stove, I was ready to believe Madeleine wasn't in the room at all. But he could hardly call her Beth.

"Well, he's not
boring
anyway. Except for sex. Cicely keeps a calendar, and she fills it up tight, to the last hour. If you threw
that
away, she'd have a nervous breakdown. She doesn't talk to me."

"Why?"

"Because I don't like children.
She
says. The point is, I don't like
her
children. They're about as lively as stuffed animals. I don't like animals either," she said, coming out of the voice as seamlessly as she had entered it. The insistence about the animals sounded deliciously witty in her own voice, and she had returned to us as if out of a time warp. To prove she was really she again, she laughed her one-syllable laugh.

"Hey Rick," she said, and I turned around, "how was I?"

"You'll have to ask Phidias, Madeleine. I never heard the original."

"Well?" she said to Phidias, throwing open her hands, smoking him out.

"Better. Madeleine, I just realized you don't have any French accent when you do it. How do you hide it?"

"Phidias, I haven't had a French accent for twenty-five years. I just slur a little, and people hear French. They hear it because they want to hear it."

She does not speak cynically about what it is people want from her, but she is a realist who has studied the phenomenon of herself and come up with some answers. I have watched her annual Boston concert for thirteen years. I am convinced every time, in spite of knowing at first hand that even she has not been able to hold back
all
the changes, that I am seeing a woman arrested in full flower. You could say, and it would be true, that the myth has taken over; but at the same time you can't deny the craft and the rigorously studied effects. Madeleine pooh-poohs it. She once said to me that it works because her fans are looking at her through the blur of their own teary eyes. But I have seen her spend a whole afternoon on the stage directing the lighting men, getting the spots right for the love songs. She wants it to
work,
and the worker in her is as tireless and unpressured as the women who bake the bread and hang out white washing in the hill town north of Dijon. So the French accent is another trick she plays, and at the same time it isn't. If you told people that Madeleine Cosquer didn't have a French accent, it would make as much sense as to say de Gaulle had a button nose.