Retirement Projects

by Charles Hibbard

  Chapter 7

  They met pretty much every week, rotating from one apartment to the next. I'd met them all a couple of times, when Leilah had them at our place, but my usual tactic was to flee after perfunctory greetings and maybe a cookie or two. I told you – social laziness. They'd bring tons of food and pick at it all afternoon while they knitted and nattered. Once I came home early and found them all still there, a half-dozen or so, scattered comfortably around our small living room amid the wreckage of all the snacks. There was a powerful atmosphere of familiarity and contentment in the crowded space. They all smiled to acknowledge my arrival, but without interrupting the steady motion of their needles, which continued their rhythmic rise and fall like the wings of dragonflies drying in the morning sun.

  I remembered that peaceful scene when I discovered, by opening the emails that continued to crowd our inbox even after Leilah left, that it was her turn to host the knitting group. She, being preoccupied with her affair with the birds and the birdman, or perhaps because Beresford spent so much time in regions with no cellphone network, had neglected to cancel the event or reschedule it. With the splashing of the orange juice ringing in my ears, I decided to let it ride, answered the email queries about starting time, and assigned food to bring, in what must have been a convincing imitation of Leilah’s electronic voice, which I developed by studying the old messages in the outbox. On the appointed day all the knitters, including Victor Carogna, showed up on schedule.

  It didn't take them very long to get out of me what had happened, and why my wife, their friend, was missing. While they mulled over that information without saying much about it, they were kind enough to pretend that my sudden interest in knitting was sincere, and gave generously of their time to get me started casting-on what would turn out to be my perpetual scarf. But though they listened with apparent sympathy to my personal problems involving Leilah, they were noncommittal in terms of advice. And really, what do you say to a guy whose marriage of 25 years has suddenly dissolved and run down the drain, and he doesn't have a clue as to why? Certainly they weren't going to tell me all the things I'm sure Leilah had told them about our relationship. No doubt for them there were also concerns of sisterhood and personal loyalty. But I was equally sure that plenty of analysis would take place both in person and by all available electronic means as soon as I was out of the way; and my blood ran cold at the thought of how much damage could be done in a 140-character tweet.

  So for a while Betty was my only pal in the knitting group. Or she would at least talk to me, I suppose because one of the things about memory loss is that everything's new every day, and to her I've always just been this nice boy (I'm 60, she's 85) who suddenly appeared next to her on the couch, struggling with a pair of #5 needles and tearing out a lot of yarn whose lovely, rich colors never failed to attract her attention. “Oh, look how beautiful that is,” she'd say, every week when she saw it. She never seemed to notice that at one meeting the yarn was wrapped in a nice skein, at the next knitted into a narrow scarf-like band, then pulled out and rewound into a bedraggled ball, and then knitted back into another half scarf, but always the same yarn, which she'd fondle admiringly, saying “Oh, look how beautiful that is!”

  The other person, of course, who really talked to me was Victor Carogna, but he was at the other end of the niceness spectrum from Betty. He's a stringy older guy with white hair, a yellowish, waxed handlebar mustache that sticks out beyond his sunken cheeks, and a steely glare behind thick lenses; sort of in the mold of what I imagine to be the older Wyatt Earp, in his Los Angeles, bare-knuckle-boxing referee days. Victor Carogna, to my surprise, is by far the most accomplished knitter in the group; but his talents are devoted to – or wasted on, I’d say – one bizarre project after another. When I joined the group he was working on a sweater that featured a handgun – a .357 Magnum, he let us know even before it began to take shape – slanted dramatically across the front and surrounded by a corona of what appeared to be flowers but were actually, upon closer examination, blooming exit wounds in a riot of carefully selected colors.

  I've watched in vain for some element of censure in the way all the strong, independent women of the group treat Victor Carogna the ex-cop, gun nut, proud NRA member, staunch anti-feminist, and right-wing Neanderthal. Of course, the .357 Magnum didn't impress them qua gun, or at least they never talked about its length, thickness, heft, hardness, stopping power, or other gunny qualities. What impressed them was the incredible intricacy of Victor Carogna's work, the way the cables separated and rejoined around each of the encircling blossoms, the internal colors in the cylinder of the gun, all chosen with perfect taste, which gave it a spooky 3D appearance, and the way Victor Carogna did it all without referring to a pattern. There was no pattern, since he designed the thing himself and kept it all in his head. When he finished that, he immediately started on a scarf bearing a romantic, high-angle representation of the Hiroshima A-bomb detonation. And meanwhile he'd sit there at every meeting, knitting tranquilly, sneering at the ladies’ bleeding-heart liberal attitudes whenever they ventured onto social or political topics and holding forth on the need for a heavy military hand in foreign affairs, and domestic too, for that matter, and our culture’s lamentable drift away from solid Darwinian principles.

  “Afghanistan,” he’d say with a faint smile, “wouldn’t be particularly missed. And its destruction, or at least the leveling of a couple of the smaller cities, would send a very clear message to those towelheads. The way we’re going now, that situation could drag on for years.”

  “Oh, come on, Victor,” one of the younger women would giggle, her needles flying a little faster, “you’re just saying that to get a rise out of us.” Victor Carogna was totally serious, of course. But I do think he likes to stir up the women with his outrageous pronouncements. They tolerate him because of his knitting and, in my cynical view, because they all secretly want to sleep with him, despite his age, mustache, and general creepiness. Except for Betty, who doesn’t want to sleep with anybody, and just thinks he’s funny. “He doesn’t care what anybody thinks, does he,” she'll say, laughing, after Victor Carogna loads all his yarn and needles into his Soldier of Fortune tote bag, puts on his worn suit jacket, and takes his leave. “He just says what he wants. But I love the way he’s so fascinated by afghans.”

  Yes, Victor Carogna always said what he wanted. None of the factors that restrained the women in the group were of any interest to him, and he was on my case right from the start. As soon as it became clear what had happened to me, his eyes narrowed and began to glitter behind the thick spectacles. Victor is considerably older than I am, and his irises, once I imagine a velvety black, have faded to the kind of smoky gray you might find in the shadow of an urban garbage can. He has the weather-beaten face and squint lines of your classic high-plains drifter, the result of too much time spent in his vegetable garden in Cupertino, where the merciless summer sun produces an abundant crop of supremely tasty heirloom tomatoes, along with a lot of skin cancer. For the August meetings he likes to bring a bag of his harvest for the girls, along with a single flawless and tasteless Safeway tomato for invidious comparison. And his remarks on almost any topic bear the same relationship to the careful, politically correct commentary of the rest of us as do his tomatoes to the Safeway variety. This contrast was particularly noticeable with regard to my Leilah troubles, since the rest of the group, as I’ve mentioned, was striving to maintain some kind of neutrality. He seemed to be offended by my abandoned state, and to hold me totally responsible for it. He wasn't at all sparing with his advice – later it occurred to me that he might have felt he owed me something, although Victor Carogna is not really the sort of man to acknowledge that sort of debt. He questioned my intelligence, my perspicacity, my courage, my compassion, my assertiveness, and the size of my reproductive equipment.

  “You need to quit your whining and whimpering, Ducelis,” he sneered as soon as the topic came
up. “You got exactly what you deserve. The fact that she dumped you for a birdwatcher shows she's got some gumption at least; more than you do, for chrissake. She saw there was a problem and she DID something about it. You, on the other hand, are sitting on your ass waiting for someone to explain what happened. You're just validating all her complaints about you!” This was a bit of a surprise, because I naturally hadn't told them any of Leilah's complaints, although I'm sure there were many. “And now you’re moping around the house feeling sorry for yourself,” he continued, “not doing shit, angling for sympathy from your friends. You think we want to hear about it? Jesus Christ man, it's been a coupla months, and what have you done with yourself? Why don’t you at least go out and get laid? There’s a ton of nookie hoofing it around the streets these days – I’m sure you’ve noticed. Go get some of it, that’ll take your mind off your troubles, give you some new ones to worry about. Where's your balls, for chrissake.” This made the rest of the group stir uncomfortably, but that's all. As I've mentioned, Victor Carogna can say virtually anything on knitting day without creating much more than a giggle.

  The group's makeup is a testimony to the ability of the fiber arts to haul in all kinds of fish on its fuzzy lines. Betty is the oldest, of course, and, at 60, I come after Victor Carogna in the lineup. Then there's Janet, a little younger than me, plump and sharp-tongued. She favors purple clothes, garish fingernails, huge jewelry, and a lot of makeup. She's a rich divorcee, and Victor Carogna is always after her too, prodding her to find herself a man. “Oh PLEASE,” she'll tell him, “I finally managed to get myself loose from one of those, and now you want me to hook up with another one? Give me a break.” Victor Carogna will then sneer “What are you, a dyke? Don't you get a little itch every now and then?” And she'll reply, “That's why God made vibrators. They're a lot less muss and fuss. All you have to do is change the batteries now and then. And you can shut them up in the dresser drawer when you're done.” Janet is one of several group members who met at the Wells Fargo branch where they all worked. She has since moved on to the office of my dentist, where she schedules the appointments and fills out insurance forms with negligent and lippy virtuosity.

  After Janet there's a large jump in age, the other three women being in their 20s and 30s. Sharon is a redhead who is a good deal taller than she'd like to be and wears enormous hoop earrings to compensate. She's still behind the counter at Wells, claiming that the job is easy and leaves her plenty of time for her hobbies, like knitting, and her high-maintenance boyfriend, who raises show chickens when he's sober. She stays with him despite the chickens and his drinking and his failure to hold a job, because her height and her big body, slightly tilted around the hips, have given her a lifelong feeling of insecurity where men are concerned. Betty is her mother, by the way – that's how she got in the group.

  Ayn you already know something about. She's still at Wells, too, but she got herself trained and moved up to being a currency trader at a big downtown branch. She works long hours at the bank and makes lots of money, but her real love, other than Rolf the one-eared X-treme biker, is ironman competitions. Sometimes she'll show up at the knitting sessions with her powerful thighs still encased in spandex, stripping off her bike helmet and fingerless gloves to pick up her needles and start stitching.

  And then there's April. She lived upstairs at the time Leilah left, with her boyfriend, Arthur, who she met at the bank. They're the couple whose conversations and footsteps I can sometimes hear through my ceiling. Even before the knitting group I had a little more of a relationship with her because Leilah and I sometimes took care of her giant black cat, Mitochondrion, while she and Arthur were out of town. She's a short blonde with the kind of round, compact body that makes men think of fertility and slow, luxurious sexual intercourse. At least, that's what she makes me think of, or used to. She recently quit Wells Fargo and has been working on freelance projects, as she puts it, for Arthur, who seemingly has another life outside the bank. She's the only one who ever defended me from Victor Carogna's attacks. “Come on,” she’d say, laughing and completely unfazed by the scandalous nature of his remarks, “You’re embarrassing the poor guy.” And she'd turn her wide smile on me for maybe a little longer than necessary. “Poor guy my ass,” Victor Carogna would growl, and I would blush, feeling a powerful desire to trim the ends off his handlebar mustache with an ax, because I was trying to impress everyone with my sorrow and sensitivity, whereas Victor Carogna, with his comment about getting laid, had of course exactly nailed my secret thoughts, some of them directed at people currently knitting a few feet away from me.

  Plus I’m sure Victor Carogna himself, even at his advanced age, would take his own advice if his wife roared off on the back of somebody’s Harley-Davidson, which was unlikely however because she had multiple sclerosis, and he waited on her hand and foot when he wasn’t tending his tomatoes. He had left the San Francisco police 20 years before, disgusted by the ascendancy of bleeding-heart liberals in the department, the advent of sensitivity training, and the coddling of drunks, drug addicts, jaywalkers, and even hardened criminals. It had become department policy to understand the personal problems that had made such people what they were, and somehow to help them get treatment, instead of just whacking them around and taking them off the streets. Victor Carogna had protested vehemently, doubtless in the same blunt terms he used in the knitting group when political topics were discussed, and at some point it had been agreed that he would take early retirement. This had turned out to be a boon financially, because to supplement the generous police department pension he began to play the stock market, successfully of course – Victor Carogna did everything well, from gardening to high finance. Retirement also allowed him to devote more time to his wife, once her MS appeared with its attendant symptoms and obnoxious treatments. He remained a close and vocal observer of the political scene, however, and had been heartened in recent years by the shift in public opinion occurring around social issues and the reemergence of good and evil in the world, as exemplified by the World Trade Center events and the government’s satisfyingly hard-line response to them. How knitting got into the picture I don't really know. It's hard to imagine Victor Carogna clacking away with his #5s at a SWAT team meeting. Possibly he didn't take up the needles until after retirement. All that is known for sure is that he was already highly adept by the time Leilah met him at the Peninsula Fiber Arts Symposium and invited him to join her knitting group.

  One of the most annoying things about Victor Carogna and all his sarcastic advice, from my point of view, is that it's impossible for me to imagine him sitting around brooding about his fate the way I often do. “You gotta DO something, Ducelis,” he's told me over and over. “It doesn’t matter much what it is. Your real problem is you spend too much time whimpering about your problems. If you don’t want to get laid, then get a Krispy Kreme franchise, or rob a bank or something. Paint this fuckin apartment.” Looking around at the dingy walls of my living room. “When was the last time you painted this room?” And I’ll mutter something about volunteer work or Oh yeah I should really do something about this place.

  But the truth is, once Leilah took off I was paralyzed. And despite his tough talk, Victor Carogna may have actually sympathized with me in some stripped-down Victor Carogna kind of way. The compassionate ladies of the club were willing to listen and maybe even feel what I tried to project as my pain, but aside from psychobanalities they had no suggestions and seemed, despite their formulaic murmurs of sympathy, largely indifferent to my plight. Victor Carogna, on the other hand, having identified my fundamental defect as a lack of masculine vitality, set about correcting it in his usual direct way: he taught me to shoot. Never mind that this ended up being just another part of my problem, rather than a solution. His intentions were good. Or they may have been.