Vance had my unimpressive height and was, to be kind about it, stout. Since getting hired at a prominent law firm, he’d taken to wearing extremely expensive business suits he had made for him by a tailor in Italy. Despite the extravagance, his wardrobe didn’t really complement his personality or his bulk or the pink puffiness and almost feminine smoothness of his face. He ended up looking like someone in costume: specifically, a girls’ field hockey coach in male drag. He also had the unfortunate habit of wearing hats, usually big, loud ones that sat on top of his head as if they had landed there and were about to take possession of his body. Tonight he had on a large panama with the brim turned down. The hats were a too obvious bid for Personality, something Vance was hardly lacking, but because he was terribly vain about them, I always felt obliged to comment.
“That’s some creation,” I said, straightening out the brim.
“No, no, no, no,” he rattled. He tended to speak so quickly, he sometimes sounded as though he were singing a patter song from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. “It’s all wrong for me. Too much panache for my small head. I bought an identical one for Carl’s mother. I thought it would be cute, the two of us in identical hats. The creep won’t wear it. Oh, Clyde, not Wuthering Heights. Read it when I was twelve and desperately wanted a nervous breakdown. It glamorizes languishing in bed with a wasting disease. Well, look what we’re dealing with now. My poor Carl.” He took a triangle of chocolate out of his jacket pocket and popped it into his mouth. “Beautiful sunset, wasn’t it?” he mumbled, melting the candy in his mouth.
“I only saw that much of it,” I said, pointing to the sky between the buildings.
“That was the best part. How are you, dear? Hold this, will you?” He handed me his briefcase, slipped off his suit jacket, and began fiddling with the suspenders that were tented out over his impressive stomach. “Monstrosity, aren’t I? Gained fifty pounds since last Tuesday. Why the hell did I just eat that chocolate?” He wiped his mouth with an initialed handkerchief. “Compulsive eater, that’s why. Why couldn’t I have been addicted to crack or something slenderizing? Well, I’m going on a diet next week.”
Vance tended to flatten any possible comments about his rapidly increasing girth by bringing it up first. It wasn’t clear to me what he was doing with his suspenders, but I had the feeling he wanted to exhibit his belly, show me what he thought of as the worst of himself right off so I wouldn’t think he was trying to hide something.
“What’s in here?” I said, hefting the briefcase.
“Oh, who knows. My secretary loads it up every night before I leave. I must have a lot to do tonight. Did I tell you about my new secretary? Dead ringer for Carl’s mother. Hell of a lot more on the ball, though. I should have bought the matching hat for her. Shall we go in?”
The restaurant was one of those dark, paneled Boston eateries that cater to elderly Brahmin businessmen. The light of day never reached the far corners of the room, creating an atmosphere of impenetrability that I suppose was reassuring to those who didn’t want to be reminded of the changing world on the other side of the heavily curtained windows. The dining room smelled of starched linen and grilled meat. The decor hadn’t been altered in decades, and the staff, mostly white-haired and glum, appeared to have been suspended at age sixty-three. Because the restaurant catered to a lunchtime crowd, it was almost always empty when Vance and I ate there, a fact that contributed to the general gloom. The hostess waved to us from across the room as we walked in, and we seated ourselves at the corner table where we always sat.
Vance settled in clumsily, jostling the table with his belly. He loosened his tie, readjusted his hat to a more jaunty angle, and shook out one of the enormous starched napkins. “Here comes the grim reaper,” he said, waving brightly to Beatrice, our perpetually dour waitress. She came toward us, not so much walking as tipping from side to side on her spindly legs.
When she’d finally made it to our table, Vance grabbed her hand. “They’ve been working you too hard as always,” he said. “Pull up a chair, Clyde, and let Bea sit down for a minute. Doesn’t she look adorable? What’s that perfume you’re wearing? I love it. Give me the name before we leave, and I’ll bring you a few bottles next time we come.”
Vance had an extraordinary ability to charm older women. Once when I’d first met him, he’d helped an elderly, shaky woman with too many groceries negotiate a busy intersection in Harvard Square. By the time they’d crossed the street, she’d offered to rent him the attic of her Brattle Street mansion, and he’d spent the remainder of his law school career there.
“Carl always said you were an angel to him when he worked here. The least I can do is bring you some perfume.”
To her credit, Beatrice was wary. “Feisty little guy that one was,” she said blandly. She had on hot-pink lipstick that arched up off her thin lips in a heart shape, like a child’s drawing of a mouth.
Vance nudged me under the table.
I have no idea what Beatrice thought of Vance, but I’d come to the conclusion that she had absolutely no recollection of anyone named Carl. The first time Vance had mentioned him, I suspect she’d gone along to be polite. The nonspecific little compliments she continued to toss out were obviously motivated by business sense. Vance regularly dropped twenty-five-dollar tips, even though the heavy food was undistinguished and we usually sent our plates back half full.
“Feisty,” Vance said. “He was feisty, wasn’t he? A bundle of energy. His mother claims he was always sluggish. Can you believe it? You haven’t heard from him, have you, hon?”
Beatrice pursed her pink lips and touched the froth of white hair hovering over her head, as if to make sure it was still there. “Now that you mention it. . . no, no I haven’t. Maybe next week.”
After we’d ordered, I sat back and asked Vance if he’d seen Gordon recently. I always tried to get that part of the conversation out of the way early on, just so it wouldn’t be buzzing around the table, distracting me from other topics. It seemed the only decent thing to do, since Vance insisted on paying for the meals we ate together.
“Little Gordie,” he said fondly. “I saw him at a fund-raiser a few weeks ago, poor baby. He’s not happy with that man, Clyde—you know that, don’t you?”
I shrugged. “Between you and me,” I said, “how could he be happy?”
“What’s-his-name is deadly boring, isn’t he?”
What’s-his-name was Michael, the brawny accountant Gordon had been living with for nearly a year. “Deadly. How does Gordon look?”
“He looks fine,” he said, snapping a bread stick in half and dipping it into a pot of processed cheese, “as far as looks go. I could do without the crew cut and the muscles. That style is so ridiculous on men. Much better on dykes. I hope they don’t have a gym out at Carl’s commune. It’s unhealthy, in the long run.” He peered into the pot of cheese, munching. “No flavor, no texture. I feel like I’m eating used chewing gum.”
“Gordon’s searching for meaning,” I said. “Literature to psychology to law school to the gym. A downward spiral. Next it’ll be religion, you watch. He’s the kind of lost soul those religious vipers prey upon.”
“I heard a rumor What’s-his-name is a Republican.”
“I suspected as much, to tell you the truth. Gordon should have stayed with me and let himself sit with his unhappiness. This is a phase, you watch.”
“Of course it is, dear.”
It was a mystery to me why I was consoled by these conversations with Vance, since I knew he was only telling me what I wanted to hear and I believed a mere fraction of what I said myself. I considered his feelings for Carl to be so neurotic they were almost grotesque, and I suspect he felt the same way about me. But we had a bond of insincere acceptance.
“It’s tragic,” Vance said. “Like Carl, out at that commune. His own mother admits it. Says Carl would have been a lot happier if he’d stayed in the East. Sharing a bathroom with fifteen people! Never complains, though. Never ment
ions a thing about his health to the mother.”
When Beatrice had delivered the unappetizing plates of beef, Vance sat looking at his despondently. With the shadow from the brim of his hat falling across his fleshy cheeks, he looked like a cross between Dietrich and Al Capone.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said, “or I’ll have to get a drink, and then you’ll be sorry you came.”
“I thought you were on a no-booze diet.”
“Carl’s mother knocked me off the wagon. I’ve got to stop taking her out to dinner. Thank God she goes for those cheap suburban places with the big parking lots. Early-bird special for six ninety-nine. Of course, it costs me fifty bucks in cab fare every time I take her out.”
At least twice a week, Vance took a taxi to the suburbs and treated Carl’s mother to dinner at the restaurant of her choice. “Maybe you should get a driver’s license,” I suggested.
“I’d love to, but I know so many cabdrivers now I’d feel I was letting them all down. When is Miss Morris arriving in town?”
“I have no idea. Soon, I imagine.”
“Do you think you could talk her into coming to my book group? I haven’t been to a meeting in two years, and dragging her in might be just the coup that would let me start up again.”
Like virtually everyone else in Boston, Vance was a member of a book discussion group, one of those organized gatherings that sounded a lot like dinner parties to me and resembled my classes at The Learning Place. Vance never attended meetings of his group because he had a crush on one of the other members and got too nervous in his presence to talk articulately. Still, he read more than anyone I knew or had ever known, although when he found the time, I couldn’t imagine. In addition to working sixty hours a week, watching every television show in existence, taking on a significant number of pro bono cases, and eating compulsively, he went through two or three novels a week, everything from Flaubert to the kinds of lowly romances that had driven Emma Bovary over the edge.
“You’re trying to exploit her success,” I said sternly. “Anyway, she’s not going to any book groups until she’s given a lecture at one of my classes.”
Vance looked at me pityingly and shook his big head. He was unabashedly critical of my job. A couple of years earlier, he’d made use of some connections he had at a private school outside the city and, after helping me to plump up my résumé, had finagled me an interview for a teaching position. But that had been right around the time that Gordon had departed and I’d moved in with Marcus, and I hadn’t followed through on any of it. He was always offering to reopen the doors for me, but I never felt as if I was quite ready. The headmistress was one of his sixty-plus-year-old female friends, and he routinely warned me that if I didn’t make some move soon, his connection was likely to take her retirement and move to Florida. Frankly, I was more concerned that if I didn’t make a move soon, I would cross over into that pushing-forty age group that’s viewed suspiciously at job interviews, especially if the job involves working with minors.
Vance took off his hat and scratched his scalp. Because he constantly wore hats, everyone assumed he was bald, but he had a full head of tight brown curls. For years, I’d been trying to encourage him to get a shorter haircut or have his hair straightened; the curly mop made him look especially matronly, a little like Margaret Rutherford, give or take a couple of decades. “I suppose Louise will want to start up another torrid affair with Marcus the minute she arrives in town,” he said mournfully. Along with everyone else I knew, Vance was fascinated by Marcus.
“I seriously doubt it,” I said. “I don’t think she cared that much about him to begin with.”
“Are you sure he doesn’t walk around the house stark naked day and night, taunting you with his body, humiliating you and begging for admiration?”
“I’d have noticed by now.”
“I suppose so. Oh Christ, why did I order this side of beef? My arteries are hardening just looking at it. Did I tell you Carl’s mother calls herself a vegetarian? It’s the new trend out in the ’burbs. They think it’s healthier to say they’re vegetarians, even though they still eat chicken, pork, beef, lamb, veal, and anything else that had a face. Oh-oh, better start eating—here comes the living dead.”
After Vance had assured Beatrice the food was delicious and she’d tottered off, he pushed his plate away from him. He put on a pair of tiny Ben Franklin spectacles, read the ingredients list on the bread stick wrapper, and began a ravenous attack. Dipping into the pot of cheese, he sighed and said tonelessly, “I saw your delightful father at one of the restaurants Carl’s mother insisted we go to.”
“My father?”
He nodded. “And one of the worst restaurants, too. All they had on the menu was Boston scrod. Will you tell me what’s wrong with this city? I’m giving serious consideration to moving to New York. I’ve even got a lead on a great two-bedroom. Do you think Carl’s mother and I could get along?”
“Doubtful,” I said. “And I don’t think it was my father you saw at the restaurant. He’s a semi-invalid. He’s supposedly dying. I’ve told you that.”
“It definitely was him, dear. Same guy I saw at your mother’s funeral. The one who asked you, right in front of me, if I was a ‘lesbo,’ remember? Did wonders for my self-image. He was having a grand old time with some babe and a youngish man who looked like her son.”
As far as I knew, my father hadn’t so much as cracked a smile in twenty-five years, not counting laughing at someone else’s misfortune.
“‘Babe’?” I asked. “What do you mean, ‘babe’?”
“Some creature in her late sixties. Same age as Carl’s mother. A lot better-looking, too, but don’t ever say I told you so. Frightening hairdo, though. Cotton-candy-in-a-tornado look. Very in, in the ’burbs.”
“What do you mean, ‘grand old time’? And ‘youngish man’? How young? How do you know it was her son?”
Vance put his panama hat back on his head and cleared out a space on the table in front of him. He pulled a handful of sugar packets out of their container and started to arrange them on the starched white tablecloth. “Here’s the booth Carl’s mother and I were in. Here’s the booth with your father and the babe. Here’s the waiters’ station. I could see the Boston scrod on their plates. I thought about going over and introducing myself, just to bug your old man, but Carl’s mother hates it when I leave her alone, even to go to the bathroom. They were having a little party. Your father ordered some champagne, and they were toasting the son. Your father had his arm around the son’s shoulder. More than that I can’t tell you. What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal,” I said, beginning to think that maybe there was some truth to what he was saying, “is that he’s supposed to be dying. And broke, too. So what’s a penniless dying widower doing out with a babe and her son? Ordering champagne?”
“What was I doing out with a horror like Carl’s mother, poor dear? What are you doing out with me? Oh, Clyde, find me a nice boy. I’m so lonely. No, no, no, never mind. It wouldn’t work out. I’ve got to start that diet tomorrow. Don’t they give any courses in bulimia at The Learning Place?”
“Not that I’m aware of. Though I’m sure they’ve considered it.”
“Do something else with your life, will you, Clyde? Oh Christ, here she comes again, the zombie parade. Order some dessert or something, anything to boost the bill a little.”
When I’d left Vance and taken the subway back to Cambridge and climbed up the creaking flight of steps at the back of the house to my attic rooms, I reread Agnes’s note. But I couldn’t find anything in it to indicate that Dad had been going out with any babes, no matter how carefully I read between the lines.
I called Agnes.
Now that E and A Resources, Inc. was closed for the day, she answered the phone with a halting hello, as if she was expecting a heavy breather or a death threat. My sister, like most people who reside in communities far enough outside the cities to be considered safe, lived
with one foot in a perpetual panic attack.
“Agnes,” I said. “It’s your brother.”
“Clyde?” she asked, as if there were another choice. Agnes was always stating the obvious, an indication of her touching insecurity and an altogether infuriating habit.
“I got your letter,” I said calmly. There was no point in trying to be direct with Agnes, since it made her even more nervous.
“I had to send it, Clyde. You weren’t returning the messages I left on the machine. I wish you’d let me know if that answering machine is broken. I sent in the warranty on it—”
“The machine is fine, sweetheart. It was the perfect gift. I just haven’t had a chance to call, I’ve been so busy, with teaching and all.”
“Ever since you became a professor, you’ve been too busy for everything.”
“Please, Agnes,” I said. Considering the circumstances at the so-called Learning Place, “teacher” would have been bad enough.
It was still quite warm, and a humid breeze was blowing through my rooms. I could hear a couple of the neighborhood teenagers issuing threats to each other and a few of the nasty dogs behind us barking. “How’s the business going?” I asked.
“Well, Elizabeth’s optimistic about the vitamin sales. I’m still not sure. The pills are a little hard to swallow. They’re biggish. I hope that doesn’t hurt business.”
I didn’t say anything. The vitamins bore an unsettling resemblance, in size and color, to dog biscuits. Scurvy was a more appealing option than trying to gag down one of those every morning. “What’s all that noise?” Agnes asked. “It sounds as if someone’s being attacked by animals.”
“I’m sure it’s just people attacking each other. What’s going on with. . . Dad?”
She let out a long breath, as if she were practicing her yoga. Agnes, the least physical person in the universe, had signed up for a yoga class last January. She claimed that it had changed her life, although there was no evidence to support the claim. “Oh, Clyde. I’m not sure, but I think he’s getting worse.”
The Man of the House Page 5