The Tell (3 page)

Tonight, though, his students' papers, soft pencil on smudgy lined sheets or florid pink or purple ink, were definitely his and needed to be read for tomorrow. He looked at the one on top:
My mother washe peoples haredos in a store. Her shirts is always covered with hares
. He asked his students to tell the stories of their lives, but sometimes reading them made him feel hopeless. It was the one crucial lesson he could give his sixth-graders—how to explain who they were and where they came from, what encouraged them—but he was stolen away now from their accounts by the long absence of his wife. He knew that his growing disquiet was apelike and primal, his woman with another man. Wilton was strange but not exactly a stranger, and he had the indemnity of fame. It would be easy enough to go next door and yell for Mira, but to do that would be indelible and he would be the macho, barking husband forever. The jealous one. Neighbors had only first impressions and gestures to go on; everything after that was silence and spying. He read on.
She sweeps the floor and thros the hares in the garbij. Her hands smell like roses and kokonut when she come home to me
.

When he'd first moved into the house, an enthralling, improbable world, he'd brought only a few things from his two-room apartment in Fox Point. He could offer some books, a few brown towels, the fibers stiff, and his beat-up television. Amazingly, there had never before been a television in the Thrasher house. The antenna had long ago been snapped off, leaving a sharp, silver scab. Until a few months ago, the thing had sat cold in the study, unwatched except during the world's disasters, war blunders, and good games, its blank screen attracting dust, ugly in a room with a much higher class of objects. But Mira couldn't sleep after the break-in, her insomnia twisting around her like an old nightgown, and when she refused pills, the dreamy Starstella or the practical Dreamatin, Owen had carried the television upstairs, the smell of dusty electronics spiraling through his nostrils. He put it at the foot of their bed on a small table he'd found in one of the many unoccupied back rooms with their legions of empty beds. When you wake up in the middle of the night, he told her, turn it on and give it a try. She was skeptical and didn't like to be guided, but she didn't mind his concern.

She admitted that her sleeplessness ate away at her mood, dulled her, and left her to worry not just about more break-ins (that had only set off other things, she claimed) but about Brindle—never enough money, the fickleness of its century-old building, the at-risk kids getting riskier, the trembling old people falling, the addicts shooting up behind the Dumpster. She might end up letting them all down and losing the place that was everything to her. At other times, on particularly alert nights when her feet jiggled under the sheets, her worries were more fantastical—flames shooting with three-alarm exuberance from Brindle's front door, an epic flood that would breach the Fox Point hurricane barrier and float her school out to Narragansett Bay. It was this amorphous prediction of disaster that seemed closer to the truth of her middle-of-the-night restiveness, because what was fear of ruin really but a glimpse of abject loneliness and the very end of things, of death? Owen knew the fear. He'd lived with it until he'd met Mira, and he wanted to save her from its dark, invading force. Sometimes he'd wake for an instant and see that she'd put on her glasses as if they'd help her make sense of the errant illumination crossing the ceiling. What she'd landed on in those sleepless hours to soothe and amuse her was the newly installed television and
Ancient Times
. And now Wilton Deere was here in the pallid, pampered flesh, and she lingered on the third floor of his new house, doing who knows what. The clean confluence of events left Owen a little light-headed. This was like Mira in a way, to disappear, to leave him wondering.

In the kitchen again, he looked at their sagging dinner and then outside at the yard begging for the season's first cut. He went downstairs for the mower. The basement was a chilled museum of old tools and freakish, mushroomy growths and fuzzy cocoons. The metallic bite of the air barreled through his sinuses as he dragged the machine up the bulkhead stairs. It was a clattering old thing, one of an array of worn tools with wooden handles rubbed smooth from use, not by anyone in Mira's family, but by those they hired. The family's aristocratic aspirations ended when Mira's parents died with the definitive shock of a car accident when she was nineteen. To them, a son-in-law teaching at a public school would have looked like no aspiration at all. They wouldn't have approved of Owen, a tall, silent cipher. But his ambition was to unburden himself, to ignore tragedy's daily reminders, to descend and settle within this house and this marriage and their future children, and into this precise hour and every other to follow. It seemed vastly ambitious to him.

The yard was full of weeds and volunteer shoots and alive with the night tripping in to fill up the spaces where day had been. The lone dogwood tree, ripe to bursting, had a shim of slate from the roof lodged in its trunk, and the plot where he grew tomatoes, Big Boys and Beefsteaks and Early Girls, was ready to be turned over. Mira loved tomatoes and anything sweet. The mower choked on the rocks that appeared after every winter as though they were what those last, stubborn piles of snow turned into. At this hour, the neighborhood had settled into something dense and drawn in on itself. Unlike Mira, he hardly knew who lived in the houses surrounding him. He was still—and might always be—a newcomer here.

“Cutting grass in the dark,” Mira said, coming up behind him. “That's a new idea.” She pressed her cheek against his backbone. “I asked Wilton for dinner. He has nothing to eat in that house. And no car to go anywhere. He doesn't even drive,” she added with strange intensity, as if this detail suggested something much bigger.

She said nothing about why she'd been gone so long. Her breath against him was warm with anticipation, but it chilled his skin with the same premonition of disaster he'd had earlier by the sink. No, he wanted to tell her, this will not turn out well. Tell the man to go away.

“It's okay that I asked him, O, isn't it?” she said. “He's all by himself over there. The place echoes like crazy, there's no furniture, nothing but a blow-up mattress. And it will be something different, a change.” Her eyes were lit from behind. Was change what she was after?

“What were you doing for so long over there?” he asked.

“We talked, that's all, and looked around. He hadn't even been on the third floor yet.”

Wilton appeared at that moment, a white-shirted, perfectly timed apparition with a bottle of wine in each hand. His house wasn't entirely empty, apparently. He pointed at the mower and moved the bottles under his arms like cocked rifles. It seemed to Owen that he'd overheard their conversation. “Please tell me I'm not going to have to do that. I'm not the mowing type.”

It was hard to imagine Wilton with all his domestic bafflements and his prissy shoes ever pushing a lawn mower or cleaning a toilet or boiling an egg. “Not if you pay someone to do it for you,” Owen said, and looked at the man's profile, which had become pensive for a moment. Was he wondering how he'd managed to find himself here of all places?

After his show had gone off the air, Wilton Deere had disappeared. If Owen ever heard his name again, he'd forgotten the face to go with it. He considered what it meant to fade away so thoroughly like that, to be known and then hardly known at all. Would you know who you were anymore, would you know your own pretense if no one was there to tell you? The man had gotten an infusion of celebrity, and once unhooked from its IV line, he'd slipped, desiccated, under the bed. And now, to end up in Providence, a city that claimed to love progress but didn't know what to do with outsiders, a place that was proudly peculiar and proudly backward, in a house he could never fill by himself. But Mira had given him back some of his color and blood. He'd found his fan and his admirer, and his face softened. Wilton's sigh sounded almost content, and he turned to give them a broad, hungry smile.

W
ilton perched in the kitchen doorway until Mira waved him in and showed him where to sit, and then he ran his hands across the scarred wooden table as if reading the hieroglyphics of a family history. He was captivated by the simplest dinner they served; by the chipped plates, last survivors of old, gold-rimmed sets; by a chrome toaster on the counter with its hairy black cord, nothing new or gleaming here; by the mismatched chairs. It was as if he'd been boxed up for years, shut out of a peopled life.
So this is a pepper grinder. This is a marriage
. Mira lit two candles and Owen savored Wilton's red wine. It was like nothing he'd tasted before and made him melt into the flickering hour. He knew he was being seduced.

“There was one episode I liked a lot,” Owen said, when they'd been at the table for a long time and the candles were sputtering stubs. He was loose with the drink, the time, and the talk about
Ancient Times
. Wilton gave them no more than they asked for, claiming there was nothing more idiotic than an actor going on and on, and about television, no less. Though Owen had not seen the show in more than twenty years, the story lines and pictures came back to him with surprising clarity.

Ancient Times
had been about the inept staff of a nursing home that sat high up on a bluff in a plantation-like building. The residents often spent entire episodes sitting in rockers with blankets across their soggy laps, mumbling semidemented comments. Bruno Macon was the well-intentioned activities director who wore Italian suits that were always smeared with canned corn by the time the credits came on. With his elastic expressions of haplessness and self-deprecation, he tripped over boxes, flew down stairs, and got caught in the workings of adjustable beds. He landed face-first in butterscotch pudding. He was an acrobat of humiliation and grace, a man who could take mortification's blow as long as it came softened with love. He gazed at his decrepit, snarling charges as if they were the boundless Atlantic Ocean, things of beauty.

“Which episode was that?” Wilton asked. He was a slyly unenthusiastic eater, attending to each strand of spaghetti and maneuvering the slivers of garlic to the side.

“When you discovered a stash of vodka bottles one of the residents was hiding in his closet.”

Mira looked between the two men. “I don't know that one.”

“That's the beauty of reruns,” Owen told her. “Wait long enough and you'll eventually see everything. It could almost make you believe in reincarnation.”

Wilton turned to Owen. “I'm getting the impression you watched a lot of television in your day.”

At thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen years old, watching endless television while his father shut his door and wrote his books about the mysteries of beach erosion and toad populations, Owen had felt a little better about his motherless life in a drafty cottage in Cape Cod in the thick of locust and scrub pine. The ruminating pond was in front of him and at his back was all uncertainty, a landscape of highway, dunes, and shuttered summer houses. The woods had natured on without him and the season's clouds had drifted by, while in his face was a different kind of life on the screen—loud, colorful, and riotous with ads for things his father would never buy. He hadn't cared what was on—sitcoms, dramas, baseball games, news. He'd liked the late-night talk shows with their parade of shiny guests and all that jocularity, all that fake persuasion. He drank more wine now and considered television's peculiar power over memory. It imprinted a picture because a rehearsed moment was as close to perfect as you could get. You could watch a scene over and over and it was always the same, while what was true and troubling was never fixed and wiggled out of your hands every time you tried to grasp it.

“I watched all the time,” Owen said. “Anything and everything. Half of my understanding of the world I got from television.”

“And the other half?” Mira asked.

“The other half was knowing that what I saw was on television wasn't true at all,” he said.

“Which left you,” Mira paused, and gave him a teasing smile, “where, exactly? Half-formed?”

“A mess?” Owen said.

Wilton frowned at a drop of oil on his shirt. “Don't you think that vodka episode was in bad taste, though? Poking fun at demented old people in wheelchairs, ladies who soiled themselves? Old drunks? I was just the actor. I did what I was told, so what could I say?”

“He opened the guy's closet door and the bottles just kept tumbling out,” Owen explained to Mira. “A hundred bottles. He was log-rolling on them.”