Bruce remembered things he had given up for women in the past, though in each case only temporarily—things he would never have relinquished in his right mind. Things like red meat, caffeine, late-night talk shows, doughnuts, open windows, and such. He had refrained from carrying books and opening doors for one woman in grad school who called such things a “slap in the face of every able-bodied woman.”
And for a girl named Bunny, he had agreed one year not to watch the Miss America Pageant on television, although it was something he had done every fall since his early teens. It didn’t matter one bit that he made it clear to Bunny that the main reason he watched it was to laugh at the whole farce, especially the part where they asked the girls questions about current events or politics or social issues in an attempt to show that it wasn’t just a beauty contest. He also loved watching all the hilarious efforts to display the qualification called “talent,” which very few of the contestants actually possessed, although a recent marimba player and a singer who sounded like Barbra Streisand had both come close.
But Bunny, not exactly the brightest candle on the birthday cake, had turned steely on him and said she couldn’t possibly have a relationship with any man who watched such a sexist program. Which was exactly what Bruce was trying to get her to see—that the amusement derived from the whole Miss America thing was that it was so blatantly sexist while pretending not to be. He even slipped and told her that he could never truly respect anybody who entered a beauty contest, which he secretly suspected that Bunny had done at some point in her past. With a name like Bunny—well, you just knew certain things.
Anyway, he and Bunny had gone to a movie the night of the Miss America Pageant, a movie that Bunny had selected, in which one beautiful blonde was chopped into pieces, another was tortured for hours by a psycho, and yet another was strangled and thrown off a bridge. He knew there was no way Bunny would catch on to the fact, even if he tried to explain it in the simplest terms, that this particular movie was far more sexist in its depiction of the value of women than the Miss America Pageant.
Concerning the woman Virgil Dunlop had met—after colliding with her in a grocery store aisle of all things—it was clear that he was very interested in her. His manner of approach was so different, however, from what Bruce had always found successful, so deliberate in pace, so measured and careful, that Bruce was certain nothing so seemingly passionless could qualify as real love. He had considered giving Virgil a few words of advice, but with the memory of the fiasco in Montgomery still so fresh in his mind, he had kept quiet and watched.
And he still felt the shock of it all, now more than a year later, that the woman, apparently a mature, intelligent, artistic person, had eventually come around to Virgil’s religious views, had begun going to church with him, and had agreed within months to marry him, apparently responding quite warmly to his poky and cautious method of courtship. Here was just more proof of the great mystery—how could you ever figure women out?
Living with Kimberly and Matt had worked fine. At first he spent so much time at school that he did little more than sleep at their house. Later, however, Bruce had been the one to take Kimberly to the hospital when Madison was born three weeks early, and though some bachelors might want no part of a household where a new baby lived, Bruce found that he actually wanted to stay home more after that. As an uncle, he was so crazy about Madison that he couldn’t imagine what kind of overpowering, incapacitating love a father must feel.
Though he already knew he was different from most men in a lot of ways, the fact was confirmed whenever his brother-in-law was home, for Bruce would marvel that Matt could hold his daughter so casually in one arm while gesturing with the other hand and talking about the stock market or a football game or a new BMW prototype, could at other times walk right by her crib without stopping to lean over and gasp in amazement that she was, could blithely wolf down his own dinner at the table without even noticing all the cunning ways she devised of getting food to her mouth. Not that Bruce doubted for a second that Matt loved Madison. He was just so nonchalant about it.
When Matt and Kimberly had found a bigger house, one with a basement that could be converted into an apartment, he had moved with them again, doing most of the move himself during his spring break with the help of a few friends, since Matt was out of town again. And he had done most of the work on the apartment, too, with some help from Milton Stewart.
Not that he planned to live with his sister and her family indefinitely, serving as a stand-in for Matt, but for now it was working. Matt and Kimberly would be in a bind right now without him, for though Kimberly had planned to take Madison and go with Matt while he was on a three-month job in Germany this fall, everything had changed when she had discovered she was pregnant again. “I wouldn’t leave Kim if you weren’t here to keep an eye on things,” Matt had told Bruce before he left in September. And Bruce had wanted to say, “What about Madison? How can you leave her for three months?”
* * *
Bruce picked up the newspaper from the floor beside his couch now and stuffed it in the trash can. That was about all the tidying he needed to do in here. He let his eyes travel around his living room and tried to imagine what it would look like to a person seeing it for the first time. As for decorations, he had only a few items that he wouldn’t consider giving up for any amount of money, though it wasn’t at all likely that anyone would be stepping forward to make an offer, as they were rather odd things. One was a small butter churn that had been used by someone in his family generations ago. It was one of the few things he had taken when they cleared out his mother’s house four years ago. He had filled it with dried stalks of flowers and twisted twigs he had picked up on some of his weekend hikes.
The butter churn stood on a small plain maple table he had bought with his first paycheck from his first teaching job seven years ago, when he knew for certain that, after several false starts at other jobs, he had finally found a vocation that was his for keeps. The extra years of schooling, which included a semester of student teaching with a teacher not a whole lot older than he was, hadn’t deterred him once the idea of teaching science and math to kids had hatched in his mind. Looking back on it, the only thing that was hard for him to believe was that it had taken him so long to gravitate toward teaching.
Maybe if his mother hadn’t gotten so distracted taking care of his father, she could have given him some suggestions to save all the wasted time—he had tried sitting at a desk, standing behind a sales counter, processing loan applications, tallying columns of figures, balancing books. Majoring in business had been a colossal mistake, but back in college he hadn’t been overly concerned about long-range career goals. All his goals back then had been mostly short-term, and they always involved girls. He had been good at math, had been able to coast through his accounting classes with a minimum of effort, which left him with a lot of free time to spend on his many short-term goals.
Besides the butter churn, he had a lamp he really liked. It had a black metal base in the shape of a slender tree trunk with a fat black toad sitting beside it, and the shade, the really stunning feature of the lamp, was made of mica, giving off a warm amber glow that turned out to be more ornamental than functional. When it was turned on, the lamp provided one of the few spots of real color in his living room, which was mainly different shades of tan. Beside the lamp sat an old pair of World War I binoculars that one of his great-uncles had taken from a dead German soldier.
In one corner of the living room was propped a flagpole from which hung, curiously, a large flag of Qatar, which he had found neatly folded in a trunk among his father’s collection of foreign coins and stamps, college pennants, and baseball caps. The flag had appealed to Bruce for two reasons: first, because of its simple design, a rectangle with a sawtooth dividing line, and second, because of its colors, white on one side of the jagged line and brown on the other. He thought it was probably the only brown flag in existence.
At first he hadn�
�t known what country the flag represented, hadn’t even known for sure that it was a flag until he was looking through an atlas one day while cleaning out his mother’s house and saw the name Qatar printed under a flag exactly like the one he had found in his father’s trunk. As far as he knew, his father had never set foot in Qatar. Bruce wondered if his father had even known where Qatar was.
The walls of his living room were mostly bare except for a mounted pair of cow horns that had been his father’s as a child, an old shotgun, and, above his beige-and-brown tweed sofa, The Painting.
After he had found out that Celia next door worked at an art gallery, he had meant to ask her to take a look at The Painting sometime and give him her opinion of it. But then she kept acting so paranoid whenever he came anywhere near her that he had never followed up. It didn’t matter anyway what she thought about it or what kind of actual monetary value any appraiser placed on it. It might not be what so-called experts would call great art, though Bruce thought there was a good chance that it could be, but what mattered most was that he liked it.
The Painting, which was untitled and unsigned, had suggested different things to him at different times, but if pressed to give it a name, he would call it Bridge at Nighttime. It was an oil painting, mostly black, gray, brown, cream, and white with a few brushstrokes of the darkest, deepest blue. The frame was a brushed silver less than an inch wide. Bruce had no idea who had painted it or where it had come from. His grandmother had been an artist in her youth, but she had done mainly portraits, which she always signed.
He had discovered it in his father’s workshop, leaning against a wall behind a stack of boxes labeled Garage Sale that contained all sorts of useless trifles. Before she lost the love of her life and therefore her love of life, his mother had been fond of garage sales, not only of going to them but also of organizing her own. Whether she had intended to sell The Painting at an upcoming garage sale or had purchased it and never got around to hanging it in her own house, Bruce had no way of knowing. When he had tried to ask her about it four years ago, she had merely shaken her head and said, “Oh, Bruce, Bruce, it’s all just a bunch of . . .” and had trailed off before screaming a single curse word, a word she would never have let him say while growing up.
Thankfully, she or somebody else had wrapped butcher paper around the painting so that it had been spared an accumulation of dust and dirt over the years. Bruce hadn’t even shown it to Kimberly or Suzanne, both of whom were busy amassing piles of stuff to take home, but had set it in his pickup truck with the few other things he was taking.
After she moved into the assisted living place, Bruce had quit asking his mother much of anything. He had learned that any question about what she had been served for supper or whether she had gone to bingo or exercise class the day before would be met with the same response: a dry flat laugh punctuated at the end by a single word of profanity. Yet she was perfectly capable of lucidity. Over the telephone one day she had said out of the blue, “Remember that pistachio green suit I bought you for your fourteenth birthday? It came from Packard’s Menswear in Hattiesburg. I sold it for five dollars to a Negro boy after you left for college.”
In the kitchenette Bruce pulled an extra chair up to his card table and set out three glasses and three bottles of cold IBC root beer, along with forks, plates, and napkins. Nothing fancy, but it would do. No sooner had he decided to seat Joan Dunlop facing the window and sink instead of one of the bare walls than he laughed out loud. Here he was again, finagling a way to please a woman.
He thought about Joan Dunlop, whose face, though not pretty in the classical sense, had its own kind of beauty. She had silky black hair, Oriental fine, and a smile that went up higher on one side of her mouth than the other. She wasn’t a woman who laughed very much, and never mindlessly. Bruce had already decided that she must have gone through some rough spots in life to give her such dark incisive eyes. She seemed to size a person up in a glance. She didn’t joke around much, but she had a kind of serious pleasantness that made you want to behave well in her presence, like a favorite respected teacher.
As a girl, she had likely been studious, but not stuffily so, and smart as a whip, with a wicked wit if she chose to use it, which she probably didn’t often do. Not one of the popular girls, maybe even a little unsure of herself, though she shouldn’t have been. Middle of the road as far as looks went, but not much concerned about it. Not very interested in school affairs, but appearing to have her eyes fixed instead on some large threatening object in the distance, some weight of responsibility other girls didn’t have.
Back in the living room, the thought of running the dustcloth over a few surfaces crossed Bruce’s mind, but he dismissed it in favor of selecting some CDs for background music. His collection of CDs was much smaller than his collection of videotapes, but the ones he owned he really liked. He chose one called “Mountain Songs,” played by flute and guitar, and another of Sylvia McNair singing Jerome Kern songs.
And just as he heard the opening tune of “Barbara Allen,” there were footsteps at his door, a sharp knock, and the voice of Virgil Dunlop. “Come on, Healey, open up! Food’s here!”
27
Emblem of Suffering
November was Bruce’s favorite month, partly because he still enjoyed celebrating his birthday but also because of the way the world turned gold in the fall. October was pretty, of course, and in these parts was considered the peak month for fall foliage, but November was even better, in Bruce’s opinion, when the leaves floated down and spattered the ground with color. They couldn’t be allowed to collect indefinitely, however, which led to days like today—leaf blower in hand under a pure blue sky.
It was Friday afternoon, and Bruce was glad for the weekend that stretched out before him. If he took care of the leaves now, he would have the day free tomorrow. There was no better time than fall to hike in the North Carolina mountains. He already had it planned. He would get up early, then wash his truck and take off for the day, pick up a sandwich somewhere, hike, take some pictures, maybe poke around over in Walhalla, Westminster, Clayton. Just walking down the main street of some of those little mountain towns did his soul good, transported him back to a time when things were innocent and uncomplicated.
He looked up at the sky before cranking up the leaf blower, trying to think again of just the right word for that particular color of blue, that solid layer-upon-layer of absolutely serious blue. It was different from the pale, hopeful blue of a spring sky or the lazy, meandering blue of the summer sky, and certainly from the exhausted, washed-out blue of a winter sky. This blue looked like it was baked on, enamel hard.
He heard a car door close and looked over to see his neighbor, Celia, firing backward out of her driveway. It was unusual for her to be home at this time of day. She usually didn’t get in until five-thirty or six. Maybe she was playing in a tennis tournament.
He wondered if she had noticed him standing stock-still in his backyard holding a leaf blower and staring up into the sky. There was a time when he might have cared, but since their argument through her window three months ago, he had reached the definite conclusion that any woman with that many hang-ups was a lot more trouble than she could possibly be worth, regardless of how nice she was to look at. He was done with women anyway, at least when it came to any kind of personal relationship. The Montgomery experience had changed him for good.
He had talked at length with Virgil Dunlop about how God could expect bachelors to keep the seventh commandment, and he had decided that the best way for him to do it was to simply stay away from women. That’s why every time he had slipped and found himself at Celia’s apartment door, he had hated himself for his weakness. He could only look at their big shouting match back in August as a blessing. He had watched her off and on since then, sure, but for the most part he had been delivered of the temptation to talk to her.
Kimberly and Suzanne had both been hinting for months now that it was time for him to start dating again.
Kimberly had even tried the old trick of bringing somebody home for him to meet one day back in July. She’d used the pretext of needing his help in choosing fabric for reupholstering a sofa. And there was nothing really wrong with the woman, nothing at all that he could see. She was a trim, tan, thirty-something elementary schoolteacher named Lindsay, who divided her time in the summer between lifeguarding at the YMCA, which was how Kimberly and Madison had met her, and interior decorating, which was something she did year-round on the side.
Kimberly had wanted Lindsay to see the colors in the living room where the sofa would go, she said, and also give her some advice about using a cornice board as part of the front window treatment. Then she had called downstairs and asked Bruce to come up and see the swatches of fabric she was considering, to help her decide on one—if there was ever a more transparent matchmaking ruse, Bruce couldn’t imagine what it would be—and then later loudly asked Lindsay to repeat her full name and phone number before she left, both of which she wrote down on a piece of paper. “I’ll keep this handy right here beside the telephone,” Kimberly said, patting it conspicuously as if to say, “Right here, Bruce, here’s where it will be in case you’d like to follow up.”
As soon as the front door closed, Bruce said, “Nice try, Kimbo, but don’t ever do that again, not ever. I’ll do my own picking when the time is right, okay?”
Though Kimberly pretended at first not to know what in the world he was talking about, she finally shrugged her shoulders and said, “Oh well, no crime in trying.” Later she said to Madison, as Bruce sat at the kitchen table with them one night, “Here, punkin, let’s try some peas. Just ’cuz we had an itsy little problem with them once doesn’t mean we can’t try again, does it, sweetie? We mustn’t make up our minds too soon about anything, huh? Give things a second chance. Isn’t that right?”
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