Retirement Projects

by Charles Hibbard

  Chapter 16

  When you were a kid, did you ever have a really nice coloring book, the kind with real pictures instead of happy-ass bunnies with human faces, the kind you sensed – maybe the first insight of this kind for 5-year-old you – was worth taking some pains with, choosing the colors with care and keeping them inside the lines as best a little kid can, really making it all look nice? And then one day you opened up the book to start picture No. 3, the one showing Saint George sticking his spear like a toilet plunger down the throat of the dragon with its scaly agonized coils, and found that someone had gone through the whole book, scrawling all over it with maybe two crayons, orange and green, not bothering with the lines, and even messing up the pictures you'd already finished?

  I felt as though I were suddenly hearing Victor Carogna's name every few minutes, like an airport security announcement, and seeing his malicious crayon marks scrawled all over the outlines of my modest but previously well ordered life. Worse than my rage at the way he was wiping his feet on my meager existence, however, was a kind of deep mournfulness at the thought that I'd failed so completely with Leilah that she would flee into the arms of the likes of Victor Carogna, even if she'd ultimately left him behind for someone marginally more suitable.

  My first impulse after the conversation with Arthur was to scurry back to my lonely cave and hide there, like Grendel nursing his empty shoulder socket, although the news about Victor Carogna and Leilah represented the removal of something other than an arm. Beresford the bird man was bad enough. But I felt that Beresford, beyond his ornithological expertise, was not in fact all that different from me. He had my reedy build and mousy hair (although more of it), the same deferential affect, unless the topic of birds came up, the same total lack of fashion sense, even the same rimless glasses. He also had crooked teeth, whereas mine are perfect. In Beresford, it seemed that Leilah had basically adopted a somewhat more accomplished version of myself – a man with four wheels instead of two, a 4Runner instead of a Trek 800 Singletrack, but still recognizably a member of the same species.

  Getting involved “romantically” with Victor Carogna was, I thought, more like coupling with a demon. Victor Carogna, too, had rimless glasses, but his eyes glittered behind them like infernal sparklers. His hair, inappropriately thick for a 70-year-old, was of a blinding, glacial white, and the handlebar mustache had undoubtedly acquired its rich ivory stain in the practice of unspeakably lubricious rites. He had, superficially, the same wiry build, but, assuming you were able and willing to imagine Victor Carogna without clothes, you would certainly see the fibery greenish skin and sinews of some excessively fertile vegetative principle, along with a Beardsleyan sexual trunk. Not to mention the guns, the politics, the unfiltered cigarettes, the disdain for female pretensions of equality. Running off with Beresford was a statement of Leilah's not unreasonable faith that life owed her something more exciting than Randall Ducelis. Getting it on with Victor Carogna was, I felt, a rejection of our common humanity.

  Naturally I spent quite a few of the hours that followed my meeting with Arthur trying to imagine the course of the seduction. I supposed it must have begun during one of the knitting sessions. Victor Carogna, with the diabolical insight that had led him straight to my own weaknesses, would have immediately recognized a restlessness that Leilah herself may have been unaware of. Something about the nervously acute angle at which she held the needles, or a subtle excess of tension in the yarn wrapped around her slim index finger; or maybe he read the very interference patterns woven by the particular colors she chose for her knitting. I wouldn't put it past him to possess senses beyond the normal five – the ability to see polarized ultraviolet light or something. She, in turn, would have felt the heat from those smoky pupils turned on her, perhaps without even knowing where the radiation came from, and shifted a little uncomfortably in her chair. He would have arranged to sit next to her, to stroke her front panels appreciatively, to help her finish the armhole that was giving her trouble. Then the little smiling conversations in the kitchen over the Levantine sandwiches. He would have started to arrive early, or stay a bit late, after everyone else had left. (Here I was reminded uncomfortably of April's methods with me.) I tried to remember whether I'd ever come home to find them alone, with their heads together, innocently cranking the wool winder. I'd made it easy for them, of course, by always rushing off as soon as the needles started clacking. One time or another the knitting session must have ended early, or they must have taken the chance that I'd come home late, and ended up molding lascivious shapes into our expensive viscoelastic mattress, the one major home investment Leilah and I had made together, other than the Taiwanese cookware. I had to resist the temptation to strip off the mattress cover and see if I could still discern, in that compliant surface, the faint shape of Victor Carogna's stringy body intertwined with her rounder, denser form. Although I could imagine the flirtation in great detail, I still found it impossible to imagine his body actually touching Leilah's familiar contours, let alone in intimate ways. She couldn't actually like a person like that, right? So it must be that to be courted by someone with the unapologetic masculinity of Victor Carogna answered some mute and perhaps unacknowledged need to feel frilly, even in one of the brave products of the feminist revolution.

  How many times had it happened? That son of a bitch! And there he'd sat, stitching an AK-47 into the sweater for his baby niece and telling me I should go out and get laid, asking me where my balls were. And the rest of the group – all Leilah's friends, sitting around knitting with faint smiles while Victor Carogna lectured me. His taunting was doubtless instrumental in alerting April to my status as a potential customer. Maybe he'd even suggested it to her directly, forecasting the financial benefits for his own shady business with Arthur. He was beginning to assume, in my mind, the outlines of a sardonic spider, with eight gleaming, all-seeing eyes behind eight rimless lenses, and sensitive furry pedipalps caressing the threads of all our lives – mine, Leilah's, Arthur's, even April's, ready to spring at our tiniest movements.

  To add to my problems, Julia the night nurse knocked on my door the next afternoon, while I was trying to loosen up my thinking by washing the kitchen floor. This is a useful psychological trick that my mother taught me 50 years ago. Something about the rhythm of the mop, the intensity of the focus on those enigmatic little blobs that always seem to dot a kitchen floor, the warm water spreading and then being subsumed back into the sponge, carrying with it the taint of old food. . . Clarity would often arrive during the drying phase.

  I looked out through the little peephole and saw only a blob of green, so I knew it couldn't be Arthur. Julia nodded approvingly at the sponge mop as she came in. Raton came trotting in right behind her, looking up out of the tops of his eyes without raising his head. After some brief salutations it quickly developed that Julia needed another favor. She was headed for London in a few days and had nobody to take care of Raton. She would have wanted to take him with her, but the Brits would quarantine him for god knows how long, he'd never flown before, etc. etc.

  “He's a sweet dog, but he's a little neurotic, and he turns into an ax murderer if I try to board him. I know you're retired. I'm just wondering if you'd mind staying in my apartment with him for the week. Or at least spending a lot of time there. Since it's just downstairs. I mean, you could go out of course, but if you'd just be there part of the time. And sleep there. He gets particularly freaky at night.”

  Horrified, I tried to stall by asking her what was happening in London.

  “I'm taking a design course at the Victoria and Albert Museum,” she told me. “I'm already signed up and I've got the tickets and everything. I've been planning it for months. My usual dog sitter is a fugitive from justice.” She laughed a little nervously. “They caught her trying to smuggle ferrets across the Nevada line, so now she's afraid to come back into the state. I'm leaving in a couple of days, and I don't know what to d
o.”

  The blue-green eyes really did look nice with the nurse's outfit, and I liked the laugh lines, but I had to nip this Raton thing in the bud.

  “I don't mind walking him occasionally, but I'm not really a dog person,” I said.

  “Oh, I know, I'm not either. I wouldn't even have a dog, except a friend of mine, this retired cop, had to get rid of him because his wife is sick, and I couldn’t say no, he's just such a sweetheart.”

  “The dog or the cop?” I asked, dreading the answer.

  “Well both, actually. But he was going to have to send Raton to the pound. I just couldn't stand the thought of them putting him down.”

  “I'm allergic to dogs,” I lied.

  “So am I,” she said. “It wears off after a while.”

  “But he's your dog!”

  “I know, that's my problem. That's why I need somebody to take care of him for that week I'm gone.”

  The conversation was not, as I had intended, leading away from the dog. She scorched me with one more beseeching look, and I caved.

  “Oh, thank you SO much! It'll be really easy, and I know you'll end up loving him. I'll return the favor sometime.” There was no point in reminding her that I didn't have any animals for her to take care of. She left hurriedly, promising to give me a complete set of instructions and a supply of Benadryl for the week.