The Hazards of Good Breeding (8 page)

The “duplex” was decorated by a painfully shy, sad-eyed young interior decorator named Thelma, who was dating Rock Sr. at the time he moved in. Everything in the living room, dining room, and front hall—from the mirror frames to the coffee table—is made of variously stained wicker, which gives the place the feel of a moderately priced hotel winter garden. It took Rock only a few days after moving back in to recognize the brittle, twisted ropes of wicker as the manifestation of psychic distress.

Rock drops his keys and wallet on the coffee table (wildly tangled, rust-colored wicker with a glass top) and walks around the corner. There is time for lunch and a nap before he has to meet Jimmy Sorrens. He is halfway to the kitchen when a voice assaults him from behind. “Don't do anything embarrassing,” it says, “because I'm sitting right here.”

Rock whirls around, knocking into a delicately positioned wicker service cart and nearly losing his balance. It is Denise, who has recently given up her partnership at a prestigious entertainment law firm in Los Angeles to become an advocate for welfare mothers and domestic workers, and is liable to be hanging around the house at odd hours—something Rock has yet to get used to. Denise has never been injured or tricked by Rock, but she speaks to him in a suspicious, sarcastic voice as if she is on to inappropriate double meanings in everything he says—as if he, Rock, cannot get away with his usual degree of nonsense with her around.

“Denise,” Rock says. “Hi.”

She cocks her head to the side and gives him the kind of mincing, cut-the-crap smile Rock imagines she uses on trial witnesses to compel them into long, terrified revelations of the truth. She is not unattractive, but has a roundish face with a certain inexactness to the placement of its features that gives the constant impression she is wearing faded, sloppily applied makeup.

“Dad home?”

“No, he is not,” Denise says as if Rock has been asking gratuitous questions of her all day.

“At the office?” he says, involuntarily compelled to fulfill the role she has carved out for him.

“That's where he usually is on Fridays, isn't it?” she says.

“Right,” he says.

“Is there anything else I can help you with?”

Rock attempts a laugh, even if it is supposed to be at his own expense. It comes out sounding like he has a frog in his throat. “All set,” he says stupidly, and backs into the kitchen.

He suspects the reason Denise is marrying his father is because he is pliant and tolerant, that because of his extreme blandness, they are able to have an elaborately choreographed sex life. He imagines there is lots of role-playing—that Denise spends her time on the StairMaster in the basement developing plans and comes upstairs to Rock Sr. with orders.
This time I will be the lion tamer
, she says,
you'll be the baby
. According to a
Cosmo
article Rock read at the dentist's, these are the two most popular American role-playing games. Rock loves reading
Cosmo
. In his mind he has equated the two roles into one imbalanced scenario: Denise in leather, hissing, flicking an imaginary whip—his father a pasty mass of middle-aged flesh protruding from an enormous diaper.

Now that Rock has actually met this filmmaker friend of Denise's she has been talking up for the last two months, he has to admit he is less convinced that she is sleeping with him. She's too old for the guy, for one thing, and too unhip. But then . . . there
is
something oddly sexy about Denise, in a frightening, bloaty kind of way; she has one of those disproportionately large asses that looks downright buoyant, but her breasts are quite round and firm-looking, just the right size. Letting the thought cross his mind as he rifles through the sorry contents of the refrigerator makes Rock feel creepy. It is high time to start looking for his own place, a revelation he has had at least once a day for the last twelve months. Or else take those monks up on their invitation. He tries to conjure up a picture of getting off a plane in Tibet, some narrow runway in between two massive Himalayan peaks. It is a captivating image: Rock the adventure traveler, whittling clever objects out of yak bones or wood or whatever, developing previously unknown talents.

He pulls out a bottle of Coke and a Tupperware canister full of garlic soup cooked by a woman Rock Sr. pays to keep his refrigerator full of low-fat, low-sodium, easily reheatable foods. Then he sneaks up the back stairs so he won't have to face any more of Denise's condescending remarks and settles down on his unmade, wicker-frame bed. The soup tastes like salad dressing. The room smells of old socks. Through the wall he can hear one of the Pforzheimers' eight-year-old twins screaming for toilet paper.

I
T IS NOT EXACTLY RESPECT
that is the cornerstone of Jack Dunlap's relationship to Wheelie Barrett, although he certainly respects the man. Anyone who could play for the Bruins and weigh in at five-foot-six, 160 pounds, has a hell of a lot of balls. It is more what goes unspoken between them—the amount of small talk and boring, considerate questioning he and Wheelie do
not
partake in—that defines their friendship. “How'd you do this week?” Jack will ask. Wheelie is always in on at least one high-stakes sports pool per season, in which he employs complex and fascinating strategies, which are almost always successful. “How's Quantex?” Wheelie will ask in turn. Jack supplies Wheelie with high-risk, high-return investment tips. Neither of them asks out of politeness—they share the directness that accompanies self-interest. They have never spoken of Wheelie's son, who is in a school for deaf teenagers, of Jack's own children, or, for that matter, of Jack's divorce.

Wheelie belongs to the oldest branch of the Barrett family, whose length of residency in Carlisle, Massachusetts, exceeds even that of the Dunlaps here in Concord. He is descended not only from Dr. Jonathan Wheeler Barrett, the first surgeon to use ether in Boston, but also, on his mother's side, from Alexander Hamilton. The Wheeler Barrett homestead sits on one of the finest pieces of land in the area, in a still wild-looking corner of Carlisle. But it is owned by a fat stockbroker from Connecticut now; Wheelie and his wife live in a trailer on the edge of the property, from which his wife runs some sort of industrious but, Jack has always felt, crass pancake-mix-making business. Wheelie himself is the last of the great Wheeler Barretts, who are famous for their stubbornness, understated conviction, and laconic speech; Wheelie's brother is a fat drunk who works the night watch shift at the Ponkatawset Club and his two sisters have moved to Rhode Island with loutish, deadbeat husbands. Wheelie carries with him the air of extinction, the whiff of inevitable endings.

This evening he hoists his gardening shears as Jack drives in on his way back from work.

“Right rear tire needs air,” Wheelie says by way of greeting as Jack stops and rolls down his window.

“Hmm,” Jack says. “Caroline's been driving.”

There is a round of barking and the dogs streak past the boxwood bushes down toward the golf course in the twilight. Both Jack and Wheelie follow them with their eyes. “Looks like his limp is gone,” Wheelie says, looking after Caesar. He is standing right beside the car window now.

“It is,” Jack says. Like Jim Ridgeway, Wheelie is uncannily observant. Only, unlike Jim Ridgeway, his observations are not limited to the animal kingdom. Wheelie probably knows more about the life of the Dunlap household than any single one of its members does. He used to take the twins to Bruins games when they were teenagers and he often gives Eliot rides to school. He is also the person who drove Faith to Maclean's after the kidney-kidnapping episode. Jack can only imagine the conversation they had on the way into Boston. Despite Wheelie's silent, unfailingly discreet demeanor, all this gives Jack a certain cautious, occasionally awed feeling around him.

Wheelie rocks forward on his toes slightly. “Some guy came by here asking for Caroline this morning when she was jogging.” He looks off to the side, almost as if in embarrassment.

“Oh?”

“Long-haired guy.”

Jack waits to see if there is more.

“He asked how long you lived here. How old the house was. Where your wife was.” Here Wheelie meets Jack's eyes for a quick moment. “Some other questions.”

“Hmm.” Jack frowns. “I'll ask Caroline who he was.”

Wheelie shrugs. This seems to be all he has to say on the matter.

“All right,” Jack says.

Wheelie nods and hefts the pair of gardening shears back up to shoulder level. There seems to be a subtext to his statement—something important that he would like to transmit without saying. A man here, looking for Caroline, asking questions.

Jack blows on the invisible noise whistle he wears around his neck and the dogs streak out from the little wood at the far corner of the back meadow. He lifts his hand to Wheelie in a parting gesture and starts down the driveway to his two obedient dogs, who dash up the hill to greet him.

At the top of the steps to the kitchen door, Jack stops for a moment and looks through the screen into the kitchen. Inside, he can see Eliot sitting at the kitchen counter, carefully arranging sliced bananas on a piece of bread smeared with peanut butter. Caroline is hunched over on the love seat painting her toenails a violent shade of lavender, humming along to something on the radio. There is a warm, comfortable feeling to the room that makes Jack pause on the threshold, stopped for a moment by the quiet sense of intimacy he knows will be disturbed the moment he walks in.

“Here,” Eliot says, placing the top slice of bread on one of the sandwiches and holding it out to Caroline. Neither of them have noticed Jack on the other side of the screen door. He could be a kidnapper or rapist or psychopath on a serial killing rampage, just standing there waiting for the right moment to explode this delicate domesticity. The thought makes him feel huge and menacing, even to himself. He swings through the screen, which slams shut behind him. Eliot's sandwich drops from his extended hand and lands face up on the floor.

“Jesus,” Caroline says, looking up. “I didn't hear the car.”

“Hello,” Jack says, shifting his gaze to Eliot, who is stooping to pick up the sandwich he dropped, inspecting it for dirt. He is so careful and particular in a considerate, womanly way. It is, maybe, a result of the name. From the start, Jack was against “Eliot.” A name for a pansy. A bookworm. A redhead. But Faith insisted. It was her brother's name. Her dead brother. There was no persuading her out of it. “A little dirt puts hair on your chest,” Jack says.

Eliot looks up at him and then back at the sandwich he is blowing on. “It's for Caroline.”

“Hmm.” Jack loosens his necktie.

“Dad,” Caroline says, stretching her feet with their newly painted toenails out in front of her. “Do you think I can go to Skip Krasdale's wedding with you tomorrow, now that I'm home for it?”

“That's tomorrow?” Jack rifles through the mail. “I'm not going.”

“You're his
godfather
.”

Jack shrugs.

“You
anointed
him.”

“Maybe I'll stick my head in.”

“I would
think
so.” Caroline wiggles her toes. “So do you think you could call and see if it would be okay if I went, too?” There is something rehearsed about her tone, as if she has been practicing sounding casual.

“Sure.” Jack turns to look at her. “I didn't realize you'd become such a fan of old Skipper.”

“I'm not,” Caroline blushes. “I just—I think it'll be good to see who's around and whatever.”

“Oh?” Jack raises his eyebrows. “You mean all the personalityless drones?” Jack enjoys the fact this is what Caroline called her brothers' childhood acquaintances during a fight she had with Jack Jr. at Christmas.

“I didn't really
mean
that. Oh, El—you're so sweet!” she says, accepting the plate Eliot is handing her with a carefully quartered sandwich. “Thank you.”

“You're welcome,” Eliot says, turning his attention to a new slice of bread.

“Is that okay, El, if Dad and I are both out tomorrow night?” Caroline says, switching into her concerned voice. “Do you mind being here by yourself?”

Jack does not want to be a part of some new wave of concern Caroline is brewing up. She has the uncanny ability to make him feel irresponsible as a father—like someone around whom the world is about to fall. “I'll be in my study,” he says, picking his briefcase back up. “If the phone rings.”

“You don't mind old Sir Percy?” Jack can hear Caroline saying, and Eliot murmurs something in response that elicits laughter from his sister. Jack has no idea what they are talking about. And he has forgotten to ask Caroline about this man who came by asking for her this morning.

8

S
ATURDAY LUNCH ON
P
EA
I
SLAND
consists of cold lemon chicken, baby spinach salad with caraway seed vinaigrette, ropelike loaves of whole wheat sourdough bread, and three kinds of fresh chutney. For dessert there is mixed-berry tart and rice pudding. Lucy has employed an impossibly thin, undernourished-looking young Czech culinary student from the Cambridge Culinary Institute to assist/take charge of Pete and Lucy's Cantonese housekeeper, Margaret, while they are on Pea Island.

“He not wash potatoes enough,” Margaret complains to Faith, who has volunteered to help set the table. “Chicken too uncook—soft like for old lady.”

“What's that?” Faith says. She has been watching a spindly, antique-looking yacht drift across the dining room windows under power of one black sail. What does this signify? The fact of it out there on the calm blue water is unsettling.

“Chicken too uncook,” Margaret repeats, dumping a pile of forks on the table for Faith to distribute. She is a short woman, built like a bulldog, given to wearing skin-tight polyester stretch pants. Most of the time she lets the muscles of her face remain completely slack, which has the effect of making her seem permanently nonplussed, even hostile.

“In his country,” Margaret says, lowering her voice conspiratorially, “they not wash hands before cook.”

“Well, I'm sure he knows, from his school—” Faith begins uncertainly.

“Europe people not know how is clean,” Margaret cuts her off. “Like in India.” Her voice seems to be rising somewhat incautiously and Faith darts a glance at the swinging door to the kitchen. “They eat meat not even wash hands from go to bathroom.”

Faith shakes her head sympathetically, feeling somewhat less enthusiastic about the delicious smells emanating from the kitchen.

“You know Denny?” Margaret says after a pause.

“Denny?” Faith repeats, hoping she is not one of the Eintopfs—but no, she is quite sure they are Wendy, Sue, Whistler, and Bee—or is it Fee?

“She make mess also.”

“Oh,” Faith says. “Too bad.”

“She make cook all over kitchen mess and with dirty fingernail. Always talk talk,” here she slips into a mimicking tone. “‘Margaret, you know my friend . . .' ”

Faith loses track of what Margaret is saying. But it is clear Denny does not meet with Margaret's approval. Unlike Felice, who helps take care of Faith's New York apartment (this is how Faith likes to think of it—“helps take care,” like something a
friend or concerned relation would do), there is a moral force that emanates from Margaret. Even in silence, at the edges of
the situation, she is constantly making judgments. Faith is never quite sure how Margaret feels about her. In a way, they are friends after all these years of visits—Faith has always taken the time to inquire about Margaret's bad back and nieces in Shanghai, and always offers to help in the kitchen. Margaret, in turn, sends Faith Christmas cards and enlists her in long complaining conversations over Lucy and Pete's daughter, the price of fresh vegetables, the priest in her church, sex on television. But within this, Faith senses a note of personal reproval, as if each of the wrongdoings Margaret catalogues has been carefully selected to mirror some wrongdoing of Faith's own—some harm Faith has inflicted upon Margaret, caused by the mere, but irrevocable, fact of her existence.

“She ask about you, too, sometime.”

“Me?” Faith exclaims in genuine surprise, stopping her napkin folding. “I don't know Denny.”

“She ask, ‘you know Faith husband? He used work with Rock.'”

“With Rock!” Faith says, and then realizes they are talking about Rock Coughlin, Sr.'s fiancée. “Oh—
Denise
,” she says involuntarily.

“ ‘You know Faith husband?' ” Margaret continues. “ ‘He ever make bother you?' ” Margaret stops her hands for a moment in the bristly pile of silverware she is sorting and for a split second looks Faith directly in the eye. “I told her no,” she says in an angry voice. “He not my business.”

“Oh,” Faith says again. She has not followed the story. How would Jack have bothered Margaret? But there is something in Margaret's tone that makes her feel indebted to her—makes her feel that she has been protected or stood up for. “Thank you,” she finds herself saying.

Margaret shrugs. “I not like gossip.”

D
espite Margaret's hygienic suspicions, the lunch turns out to be delicious. “Get out here and take a bow,” Pete bellows into the kitchen at Jiri, the Czech culinary student, after sampling each dish. “Best damn chicken I've ever had—Lucy, get this recipe in that book of yours.” After all these years, Pete still has Yonkers in his voice. Jiri, who looks all of thirteen years old, with his scrawny neck coming out of a too-large white cooking smock, shuffles in and out of the kitchen unsmilingly. Margaret is nowhere to be seen.

Faith has spent the meal hearing Emmett, Lucy's uninvited stepbrother, recount the adventures of starting two now-failed ski resorts in Steamboat Springs. “Who wants all that root vegetable stew and arugala salad they serve at Taos or Sun Valley?” he is saying. “I said, ‘Let people pick a nice piece of beef and slap it on the grill themselves.'” He has an oddly clear, addled voice that gives the impression of a great pressure building against his diaphragm from the inside. Faith remembers him from her debutante days as a handsome, reckless playboy most famous for having gotten some girl from Philadelphia pregnant and getting into frequent fistfights. He has, since then, thickened and gone bald, or shaved his head, or some combination of both, which gives him the fuzzy, half-cocked appearance of a newborn eagle. He has also, according to Lucy, squandered his inheritance and abandoned two hotel enterprises, three marriages, and countless fix-it projects around Pea Island.

Faith has given up nodding understandingly, which doesn't affect Emmett's monologue in the slightest. The crinkly map with Eliot's violent warning is now resting under her mattress upstairs, having been unfolded, refolded, and unfolded again, at least six times. The paper itself is irrelevant at this point, having been replicated, with exacting precision, in Faith's mind. She can peruse the map at leisure while she sits pushing a stringy piece of mango through the creamy sauce on her plate.

She should, she tells herself, stop being silly. She should be relieved that the paper was a map, not some dreadful confession. But the map seems frightening in its surprising neutrality —what is a map, after all, but a recording? An unbiased look at the most stolid and feelingless of elements—the ground itself. For Eliot to have guarded it with such sinister threats seems to hint at a deeper, darker, more disturbing secret, like one of those scary movies in which the murderer is a beautiful woman who turns out to be a man.

Under the table Emmett's bare knee has found Faith's and is pressing insistently against it. “He's a great guy,” he is saying. “A real ass-kicker. A lot like Jack, actually.” His knuckles graze her knee.

Faith nearly drops her coffee cup.

“Who's this?” one of the Eintopfs, an affable, round-faced man with squinty eyes and a Bahamas T-shirt that says
WE BE JAMMIN'
, under a colorful cutout of a Rastafarian, interjects. Faith has no idea and no desire to hear the answer. Excusing herself before Emmett can direct more nonsense at her, she makes her way around a chatty knot of Eintopfs to Lucy's end of the table, where Lucy and a leathery-faced woman with a square chin and tennis whites on are discussing—could it be?—Handi Wipes.

“Luce—” Faith whispers, “I'm going to go lie down—”

“My oldest friend, Faith Dunlap,” Lucy says, clapping an arm around Faith's waist. “Did you know Wendy's parents knew your parents?”

“Yes,” Faith says politely. “We were talking about that this morning.”

“Faith and I have known each other since, when? Ninth grade, is it, Faithey?” Lucy says for the benefit of the near half of the table, which is now smiling up at her with benevolent interest, as if she is a child who has been called in to say good night to her parents' dinner party.

“Right,” Faith says, forcing a smile. It occurs to Faith that Lucy has described her to these people as a recently released mental patient. At the far end of the table she can still hear Emmett jabbering at least five decibels louder than necessary. The French cousin, she realizes idly, does not seem to be present.

“Wonderful,” one of the Eintopf's says.

“Our access to embarrassing Lucy stories!” another quips.

Faith's smile feels as if it is made of heavy, crumbling plaster of paris.

“I'm going upstairs to take a little rest,” she whispers to Lucy when the group's thirst for entertainment has redirected itself to a college friend of Pete's, who is offering up imitations of Pete as a Harvard sophomore. “Okay, Faithey,” Lucy says distractedly. “You do that.”

F
aith wakes up with
the image of the bike trail spread out before her. She can tell from the light that she has slept longer than she intended to—the bright strip of sunshine on the green-painted floorboards has yellowed and lengthened into a rectangle the size of a gravestone. The thought of the map transports her seamlessly from sleep to waking, and before anything else has had the chance to enter her mind, she is sitting up on the cot, looking out over the overgrown flagstone terrace at the water, seeing instead the dark path, marked roads, and the paler, thicker line of the Charles River.

There is a movement below—a hand waving from the terrace that jars Faith from this train of thought. She realizes that she has been staring, gape-mouthed out at the sea, her forehead resting on the glass windowpane.

Someone—Jean Pierre—is now motioning with his arms for her to open the window. Obediently, but not without resentment, Faith complies.

“You are looking sad,” he says. “Come have a cocktail.” He is still wearing the fishing hat, but has changed into a short-sleeved navy blue shirt and olive green trousers. Twice this morning, Faith bumped into him speed-walking around the island in a tiny pair of nylon shorts and no shirt. His chest was startlingly
there
—round and firm and brown with a gold cross nestled in the symmetrical covering of dark curly hair like a dropped coin. He has showered and shaved and looks much milder and less intimidating now that he is fully clothed.

“Oh, no,” Faith says. “I mean—I have to change and get ready and I'll come down—aren't we having cocktails on the front porch?”

Jean Pierre smiles and shrugs. “Maybe these Eintopfs” (he says the word with a certain degree of derision) “are on the porch. I thought you were not in such a mood—yet.”

“Oh, no—yes—well, I've got to get changed,” Faith says lamely.

“And I will bring you a cocktail here. Which one?” Jean Pierre is still sitting, arm draped confidently over the bench, smiling up at her.

“Which cocktail?”

“Exactly.”

“Well, all right—gin—no, a glass of wine would be fine. Thank you.” Faith pulls down the shade. How does one refuse such an offer without being impolite? This is exactly the sort of thing she needs to remember. Say what you mean, Dr. Marcus says. Think of your own wants—not what other people want from you. But the more Faith ventures out into the world beyond her apartment, the more she cannot imagine Dr. Marcus in it. Does he have friends? Acquaintances? Does he go away for weekends? Or to cocktail parties? In her mind's eye he stands out among a crowd of people—a bright-colored Lego man whose feelings are as solid and uncomplicated as plastic bath toys. It would make her giggle if she didn't see the map on the cracking gray backside of the shade she is pulling down—insistent in its offering of information as incomprehensible as writing on some ancient cave wall.