The Realm of Last Chances

by Steve Yarbrough

  When she’d finished, she asked if there were any questions. People fidgeted as they looked around the room to see if anyone else was going to speak first, but eventually a hand went up.

  “Yes?”

  The guy was around forty, with copper-toned skin and the trace of a British accent. “How does the administration justify requiring more of faculty,” he asked, “at a time when it’s cutting support for research and travel?”

  The question was neither unreasonable nor unexpected. But the truth—that the administration believed it could raise standards because there were fewer jobs, and professors were desperate—could not be plainly stated. Nor could the inconvenient fact that while the publication requirements were still absurdly low for any institution claiming university status, the administration had raised them largely to contain costs, on the assumption that more than a few would fail to meet them and would quickly be replaced by cheaper junior faculty. “We’re hoping that increased productivity,” she said, “will bring increased external support to all the departments. Right now, as a result of the stimulus package, there are already more funds in some areas.”

  “So the recession,” he said, “is a positive development if one views it in the proper light?”

  A titter passed through the room. Rather than becoming angry, she was starting to feel at home. She’d been here before. “It depends on what we make of it,” she said. “After all, one of the most productive periods this country ever experienced followed on the heels of the Great Depression. At this particular school, the enrollment jumped dramatically, new positions were created and the campus expanded to twice its former size.”

  “In other words, this is really an exciting time to be alive?”

  “It’s always better to be alive than not.”

  He didn’t respond, so she took a couple more questions and, seeing no other hands raised, thanked everyone for coming and said good-bye.

  While she waited for Donna to disconnect the laptop, the man who’d engaged her walked down the aisle in the company of a slim blonde who’d been sitting beside him. He offered his hand and, as she reached out to take it, introduced himself: “Robert Dilson-Alvarez,” he said. “Hyphenated. And this is Gwendolyn Conley.”

  She shook hands with Conley, who nodded and mumbled hello without quite making eye contact. Though Kristin hadn’t recognized either of them, she knew their names. Assistant professors in the history department, they’d be coming up for tenure in the next few months. She’d read through all the probationary files, flagging the ones she thought looked troublesome, and neither Dilson-Alvarez nor Conley seemed anything less than a sure bet. He’d published a book and several articles, and she already had two articles out and a third accepted. His teaching evaluations were some of the strongest in the school, hers spotty but acceptable. They’d each done plenty of service. “Nice to meet both of you,” she said. Then, looking directly at Dilson-Alvarez: “Did I answer your questions satisfactorily?”

  He laughed. He was a handsome man, tall, with a chiseled chin and cheekbones and wavy black hair that seemed as if it parted naturally. “You answered them like an administrator,” he said.

  “Well, that’s what I am.”

  “But not what you started out to be.”

  “No, I altered course midstream. It happens.”

  “About twenty years ago you wrote quite an interesting article on V. S. Naipaul.”

  It wasn’t an article but a lengthy and largely negative review of Naipaul’s travel book A Turn in the South, published in a now-defunct journal. The editor asked her to do it because he knew she’d lived in Chapel Hill, one of the places Naipaul wrote about. “How’d you come across that?” she asked.

  He laughed again, his perfect teeth flashing. “The way one comes across everything. I looked for it.”

  “You would’ve had to look pretty hard. Back then, I had a different last name.”

  He spread his hands, palms up. “I’m a researcher, so I know where to look. And that’s ninety percent of the game.”

  Sensing Donna was impatient to leave, she told Dilson-Alvarez and Conley she needed to excuse herself, then gathered up her materials, and they started back to their office.

  “Both of them give me the creeps,” Donna said once they were outside.

  “Really? Why?”

  A shiver rippled through the older woman’s shoulders. “I don’t know. They just do.”

  Kristin didn’t say a word but knew exactly what she meant.

  “It was brought by a messenger,” said the gamekeeper, standing stiffly at attention.

  The General recognized the handwriting. Taking the letter and putting it in his pocket, he stepped into the cool of the entrance hall and, without uttering a word, handed the gamekeeper both his stick and his hat. He removed a pair of spectacles from his cigar case, went over to the window where light insinuated itself through the slats of the blinds, and began to read.

  She stayed with the novel as she rode the Haverhill Line home, even though it moved slowly and she felt no more than mild interest. Having scanned the jacket copy, she already knew the story line was one of the oldest in literature. Some force or figure from the distant past unexpectedly returns to upset a hard-won sense of acceptance. Passions long dormant are reignited. Yesterday lurches into today and in the process obliterates tomorrow.

  though kristin might have preferred that he reverse the order, Cal had decided to address the exterior problems first, since it wouldn’t be very long before working outside became at best unpleasant, at worst impossible. So on the Tuesday after Labor Day he set about assembling the scaffolding he’d rented over the weekend from a company on the South Shore.

  He’d driven all the way down to Braintree because the place he tried to rent from in Montvale didn’t seem to want his business. The guy out front demanded a huge security deposit, and when Cal asked why the figure was so high he leaned over and rested his elbows on the countertop. “No offense,” he said in a voice that suggested he wouldn’t care if any were taken, “but most people we deal with have been coming in for fifteen or twenty years. You been here for what, fifteen minutes? I haven’t traveled much and don’t know a lot of geography, but you just wrote down a cell number with an area code I don’t recognize—530. Where in the hell is that?” He was a smallish man with thinning hair, a weak chin and pale blue eyes, and for a moment Cal allowed himself to imagine how he might react if a stranger reached out, twisted him by the shirt collar and told him he ought to learn some fucking manners.

  He connected the units in a methodical fashion, laying out all the pieces in neat groups, snapping the casters into place on the outriggers and attaching them to the stage poles. The morning was warm—it had hit ninety-six on Labor Day—and once he worked up a good sweat he began to relax. By ten o’clock the three units were locked together. He propped an aluminum extension ladder against the house next to the chimney, cut himself a short piece from a fifty-foot nylon rope, hooked the rest of it over his shoulder and stuck a stainless-steel pulley in his pocket. Then he climbed the ladder and, when he was high enough, looped the short rope around the chimney and tied a square knot. After that, he hooked the pulley onto the loop, passed the remaining rope through it and, before climbing back down, took a good look around.

  He could see all or parts of more houses than he could count, and none looked as if it had been built within the last seventy-five years. One was a small Cape Cod on the next street over, and he knew from having passed it the other day while walking Suzy that a plaque affixed to the clapboard siding said 1836. Having nothing better to do, he’d come back home, typed in the address on Google and discovered an entry for the house in the National Register of Historic Places. The original owner was someone named Ward G. Osgood, whose profession was listed as “cordwainer,” a term Cal had never heard before. In Kristin’s OED, he discovered that a cordwainer was someone who made shoes and boots from the finest leather, as distinct from a cobbler, who only re
paired them.

  In all likelihood, things being what they were in 1836, Osgood would have built the house himself, perhaps with help from a friend or two. Cal had often wanted to do that but not like his father had. He wanted to build it for himself and his wife, without help from anyone, starting from the ground up. Back in California he once broached this possibility as they were returning from a party at the university president’s, where he’d spent the evening lurking behind a potted plant, emerging only to accept another drink from one of the waiters.

  “But we’ve got a house,” Kristin protested.

  “It’s someone else’s.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Whose?”

  “Whoever built it. It’s the house they wanted. We just live in it.”

  She was driving because he’d consumed seven or eight glasses of wine as well as a few slugs of bourbon. “Well,” she said, “that’s what people do in a house. They live in it.”

  “Like pigs in a pen.”

  “You’re drunk,” she observed.

  “Like chickens in a coop.”

  “We’ll be home soon. You better take some Tums.”

  “Like rats in a sewer.”

  After that evening and the unpleasant morning that followed, he kept his thoughts on the subject to himself and didn’t point out that their house, as nice as it looked, might not be around in another thirty years. It had gone up in the seventies when a developer with a mind-set similar to his father’s bought some almond groves and started building showy homes out of drywall and stucco. Pulling the white wool carpet off the floor to replace it with tile, he’d discovered that the concrete on which the house stood looked like a roadmap. To save a few dollars, the builder had skimped on the rebar that should have gone into the chain wall and slab, and as more and more cracks developed there you’d start to see them in the walls and ceiling, too. Every time it rained, the ants turned those cracks into miniature freeways. One day they’d finally take over.

  Now, standing on the ladder and looking down on so many solidly built structures that had lasted so long, he experienced a degree of wonder that he supposed must be akin to what a religious person feels upon visiting a holy site. With his own hands, he’d never made anything that would last as long as these houses. And when he was gone, he’d leave nothing behind.

  He hoisted the scaffolding flush against the wall, stabilized it, then set the Bose on the picnic table, popped in a few of his favorite discs and climbed up onto the platform. Starting at the ridge line, he began scraping down the scaling paint and used a wire brush on all the rough spots. Here and there the wood looked as if it had been sandblasted. If he had to speculate, he would’ve guessed that in this climate, with so much wind and ice and an ocean nearby, a house probably needed repainting every three or four years, if you wanted to keep it looking good, and he did. It was as fine a way to spend your time as any, and better than most.

  When he’d done everything he could reach, he climbed down and ate lunch, then turned off the music, took up his palm sander and ascended the scaffold. He worked through the afternoon, pleasantly lulled by the drone of the small motor. If it didn’t rain, he’d finish preparing the surface by Thursday or Friday and be ready to prime come the weekend.

  He knocked off around five, then drank a beer and took a shower. He and Kristin had decided to dine out for the first time since moving in. He was just toweling off when the doorbell rang, and Suzy started barking.

  By the time he’d shrugged his robe on and gotten downstairs, the FedEx guy was in the process of printing him a notice on a bar-code scanner. “Thought nobody was home,” he said, tearing off the printout and sticking it in his pocket.

  “No, I’m here.”

  “Great. I’ll get your stuff.”

  Cal watched while he returned to the van, opened the rear door, lifted out a guitar box and hefted it onto the porch. “There’s more,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know.” Cal carried it inside, and when he stepped outside again all three of the mandolin boxes were there, too. He took them in, then waited near the door while the driver brought those containing three more guitars, the mandola, banjo and Dobro. The cases inside the boxes were fiberglass and heavy, and the deliveryman was sweating badly. “If these are all instruments,” he said, punching keys on the scanner, “you must be a musician.”

  “No. I just play them.”

  The young man, who was African American and probably no older than twenty-eight or thirty, looked up in confusion. “Well, if you play ’em,” he said, “in my book that means you’re a musician.”

  Cal had learned a long time ago that there were some conversations you should walk away from, because the words you had to use often meant different things to different people. Each ten-penny nail was pretty much the same as every other, but the woods you drove them into varied greatly; some resisted, others splintered. Nevertheless, he couldn’t stop himself from pointing at the delivery van. “If you had to,” he said, “could you change the oil in that rig?”

  The FedEx guy shrugged. “Sure. I mean … Yeah, I guess I could.”

  “Would you say that makes you a mechanic?”

  The young man sighed and looked down at his feet, then turned the scanner around so Cal could see the screen. “I need you to sign right here,” he said. Walking back to the van, he shook his head. He was still shaking it as he drove away.

  Cal had been feeling some anxiety about shipping the instruments, which he’d packed up himself and labeled FRAGILE. So even though he knew he ought to get dressed—Kristin would be home soon, and their reservation was for seven—he couldn’t resist the urge to check on the one he loved most.

  He cut the tape on the first box and freed the case, spilling Styrofoam peanuts all over the floor. FedEx had made him ship it unlocked, so he only had to pop the snaps open to the first nice guitar he’d ever owned, a 1953 Martin D-18 with a sunburst finish that he’d bought in Modesto when he was twenty years old. The guy who sold it to him, a drywall hanger he’d met on a construction job, couldn’t play it anyway. It had belonged to a brother who’d died in a West Virginia mine.

  Cal pulled it out, surprised once again that it weighed next to nothing. Resting it on his knee, he tuned it to pitch. When he strummed the first chord, he forgot where he was as well as where he’d been, not to mention what he’d done and whom he’d known. He lost sight of the room in which he was sitting—his eyes had closed—but it gave a lot back, the walls and floor returning crisp sound.

  He picked through “Man of Constant Sorrow,” then segued into “The Wabash Cannonball,” which somehow became “The Great Speckled Bird.” As always, when he heard the sound the Martin made, he felt as if he had little or nothing to do with it, that he was the instrument and it was the artist, that it would tell his hands what to do and save him the trouble of making any choices.

  He didn’t even notice when Kristin entered the house. She stood there and listened, watching him with envy, trying to remember how it felt when you surrendered so thoroughly to love.

  the reason for the party was ostensibly Frankie’s birthday—his forty-first—but that couldn’t even come close to explaining the guest list. In addition to Matt, he’d invited three or four couples who lived on his block, Dushay and his mother, plus Paul Nowicki and Matt’s ex-wife. When Matt asked why he’d included the Nowickis, his friend said that just the other day he’d been elected to the board of the local PAWS chapter, which of course Paul headed. Since they both belonged to the same civic organization, it would be awkward to exclude him.

  Neatness counts, Frankie liked to say, and Matt couldn’t deny he’d fashioned a neat argument. “When did you sign up?” he asked.

  They were having this conversation shortly after closing time. Through the window they could see Dushay standing beside his old Accord, parked directly across the street in front of Felicia’s Bistro. He was searching his pockets, one after another, looking for
his car keys, which dangled from the door lock where they had probably spent the day.

  “I joined awhile back,” Frankie said.

  “How far back?”

  “Maybe three or four weeks ago. Not long after he came in to see you.”

  “Just like that.”

  “Well, he called me and asked. He’s trying to get more merchants to participate. You know Paul’s got a thing about pets.” Frankie pulled his apron off, laid it on the counter, walked over and opened the front door. “Douche?” he hollered. “They’re in the frickin’ lock.”

  Dushay looked down, saw the keys, then turned around and grinned.

  “Look how you’re living,” Zizza said, his back to Matt as though he couldn’t bear to say this to his face. “You never see anybody except me and the fucking Douche Bag and whoever comes in here to buy a sandwich. And ninety percent of those people you don’t even notice. There aren’t a lot of single women around, but there’re a few, and whenever one of ’em comes in and tries to talk to you, what do you do? Same thing you do with everybody else. Slap the shit on the shingle, bag it and take their money. ‘What’s wrong with Drinnan?’ people ask. ‘Used to be the life of the party. Now he thinks he’s too good to work here?’ ”

  Matt pulled his apron off and hung it on a wall peg. If this had been a scene in one of his three aborted novels, he probably would’ve made the character based on himself say something about how, if he was so bad for business, he’d gladly bow out and find work elsewhere. But this wasn’t a novel, and nobody would knowingly hire someone who’d embezzled thirty-five thousand dollars from his former employer. Only a special kind of fool did that.

  He walked up to the front and stood beside Frankie. “Therefore you intend to administer shock therapy. Throw me in a pot with my ex-wife and my replacement, in front of an audience, and for good measure you’ll have Dushay standing by with his mother, to remind me I don’t even have a shoulder left to cry on and had better start trying to find one. You’re really something, you know that?”