The Man of the House

by Stephen McCauley

“I was kind of hoping you’d take him out tomorrow. Do you think you could?”

  Otis swallowed the last of the pill and licked his nose lustfully.

  ALTHOUGH SHE DIDN’T MOVE IN, SHEILA, like most of Marcus’s girlfriends, started living at our apartment in the casual on-again, off-again style of a student. Shortly after Marcus showed up with her at the cookout, a tube of expensive French shampoo had appeared in the bathroom; a thick appointment book—a leather-bound item that looked alarmingly like a Bible—was usually somewhere near the kitchen phone; great pots of stew or pasta sat rotting on the stove for days, meals that had been abandoned mid-preparation in favor of passion. Sheila’s official residence was one of those rambling Cambridge apartments with four bedrooms, three baths, two living rooms, and, at any given moment, an indeterminate number of graduate-student occupants. Her exact age, however, remained something of a mystery. I could tell she was so young she’d turn angry and defensive if I dared to ask her, so I didn’t dare ask. In a few years she’d no doubt start to feel old and get defensive about that. Only twenty-seven-year-old women answer questions of age with a blunt, numerical response. (It’s never a problem to ask a man his age, since most men have deluded themselves into believing they’re at their peak from twenty to sixty.)

  Most days, Sheila and Marcus showed up at the apartment late in the afternoon, long after Ben had dropped off Otis and headed for home. Despite her gooey, flirtatious interest in Ben at the party, Sheila seemed too wrapped up in his dashing daddy to spend a lot of time socializing with anyone else. So when I heard about the planned outing to the museum, I immediately became suspicious.

  Like Marcus, Sheila seemed to exist primarily on coffee. She stumbled in from Marcus’s bedroom each morning in the long thermal underwear she apparently wore to bed every night—the pants too small and clinging to her long, flawless legs and the shirt riding up over her belly button—and started the water boiling. Neither of us had much to say to the other, so we usually pretended to be even more sleepy than we were and spent a great deal of time yawning and rubbing our eyes and muttering complaints about the weather and insomnia. In less than a month, our relationship had begun to look like that of a long-married couple, from the lack of conversation right down to the lack of sex.

  The morning after Ben told me about the upcoming field trip, I lay on the sofa in the kitchen and, over the top of the newspaper, watched Sheila sweep her hair off her face and commence coffee production. She had unpainted, almond-shaped nails, but the tips of her fingers were always stained with black ink, curious since, to my knowledge, she didn’t do calligraphy or write with a fountain pen.

  “Mmmmm, cold,” she mumbled. “God, another cloudy. Unhh, can’t open my.”

  “I know, I know,” I said. “Last night. Wasn’t it, though? Freezing.”

  We suffered through a few more minutes of this and then let ourselves retreat to the comfort of silence. Finally, I gathered the stamina to ask her if she was looking forward to spending an afternoon with Ben.

  “I am,” she said. “He’s got such a sweet, sad expression.” She yawned and lifted her hair up off her face. “And I think it’s important Marcus and I spend some time with him. Don’t you? I mean, he can’t really get settled into his dissertation until he’s resolved this.”

  “That’s true,” I said. At least he’d taken the step of telling Sheila about his son, even if he hadn’t come around to telling Ben himself. Marcus’s options for confidants were limited; like most unusually handsome straight men, he had a hard time finding male peers who were willing to be seen with him, let alone listen to his complaints. “But,” I said, “I thought the problem was that he can’t resolve this until he’s settled into his dissertation.”

  “That, too.” Sheila stretched and sighed as if someone were massaging her neck. She didn’t appear to think the Ben problem was any of my business. “Your sister called last night.” She flipped her mane off her shoulders and shut her eyes. “I told Marcus to write down a message, but he probably forgot.”

  “Did you talk to her?” Something about the idea of Agnes talking to this sensual woman struck me as tragic and unfair.

  She nodded. “She’s coming to Cambridge this weekend for a date and wants you to take her daughter to a movie.”

  That idea struck me as even more tragic and unfair. “What movies are fourteen-year-olds seeing these days?” I asked. Sheila was probably closer in age to Barbara than to me and, being a grad student, could afford to take pop culture seriously.

  But she shrugged and yawned. “I’ll ask Benjamin,” she said.

  Later in the afternoon, I walked to Louise’s office with Otis in tow. Every few feet, he stopped dead, his paws planted on the pavement. Each time I looked back, he was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at me with a forlorn, not-so-fast expression in his big black eyes. “You’re pushing it,” I told him, “but it isn’t going to get you anywhere.” If I could deal with the change in the afternoon program, he could, too.

  As I was dragging Otis through the front door of the building, two women stopped me. “We don’t allow dogs,” one of them said. She was a wan woman with the anesthetized expression of a poet. Cambridge was crawling with brilliant, medicated poets collapsing under the weight of hypersensitivity and inherited wealth. “Several people here have environmental disease,” she said. “I don’t think you’d want to be responsible for sending someone into an allergic reaction or a coma.”

  At that moment, nothing would have pleased me more. “I’m visiting Louise Morris,” I said.

  The women looked at each other, frowned, and walked on.

  Louise was stretched out on her daybed under the sloping walls, staring up at the ceiling and running her hand through her hair. She gestured toward the chair behind her desk, muttered Otis’s name, and let her hand fall lazily to the floor. As I sat down at the desk, I saw in the open top drawer a sandwich bag with a few roaches and with crumbs of pot clinging to the plastic.

  The radiator beside the desk was clanging and gasping out heat, and the window was open, letting in a chilly breeze.

  “Should I close it?” I asked.

  “It gets too hot,” she said. “Then I open it and it gets too cold. I don’t know what to do.” She sat up on the bed and tried to lure Otis onto the mattress, but he held his ground. She put her elbows on her knees and rested her face in her hands.

  “I’ve been reading your mother’s cookbook,” she said.

  “No wonder you look so exhausted. I thought it was from the pot.”

  “Probably a little of both. Has Agnes ever made any of the recipes?”

  “Doubtful. She doesn’t like to cook, and she doesn’t like to eat. Food makes her anxious.”

  “Some of them sound almost tasty, in a musty, churchbasementy way. I’m not saying anyone would publish them—I don’t think they’d risk the potential lawsuits, for one thing. But it’s admirable, Agnes doing all this just to try and earn your mother some posthumous appreciation.”

  “I don’t deny it. But she’s getting her hopes up in a hopeless situation.” Of course, half of life seemed to consist of getting your hopes up in a hopeless situation, and I hadn’t yet discovered what the other half consisted of.

  A gust of cold wind blew in and scattered the papers on Louise’s desk. I reached out to stop them from blowing away.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Louise said. “They’re all disorganized anyway. Like everything else in my life. How does that girl next door expect me to get anything done if she’s talking all the time and throwing parties?”

  As every other time I’d been there, the office next door was silent. If the wan, comatose woman I’d seen leaving the building was the resident poet, it was hard to imagine her speaking above a calculated whisper.

  “Do me a favor, will you, Clyde? Call the geological museum and find out what time they close this afternoon.”

  “I guess you know about the outing, then.”

  She nodded
. “Ben told me about it this morning, all very casual and oh-by-the-way. I couldn’t be happier about it,” she said, and lay back down on the daybed.

  My real estate agent’s name was Taff. She had a desk in a bright, storefront office on Mass Ave, halfway between my apartment and The Learning Place. When I left Louise that afternoon, I stopped in for my appointment with her.

  I’d fallen into a relationship with Taff in pretty much the same way I fell into all my relationships, from the most superficial to the most intimate. It had started out as a matter of convenience—she happened to be free when I’d initially walked in—and quickly escalated into some strange form of loyalty. I didn’t especially like her, and I could tell she wasn’t crazy about me. She realized immediately that I was conflicted and confused about the apartment search for my “brother” and would never bring in more than a few hundred bucks for her in any case. There were several other agents in the office with desks near Taff’s with whom I probably would have had an easier and more productive rapport. But once Taff and I had made our initial, coincidental contact, I couldn’t abandon her for one of the robust, sarcastic women nearby, whom I occasionally heard saying things like: “You’re desperate, he’s desperate, you might as well make an offer.” Then, too, there was a strong component of hostility in my loyalty, possibly because Taff was so closely linked in my mind to Roger; a part of me loved watching her smile harden when she saw me walk into the office.

  “By the way,” I said that afternoon, “what’s Taff short for?”

  “That’s it,” she said proudly. “Taff, just Taff, doesn’t stand for anything.” Possibly to get back at me, she added, “What’s your brother’s name?”

  “Roger,” I said.

  Otis was prostrate on the floor at my feet, and at the mention of the name, he sighed. Taff pulled back her head and eyed the dog suspiciously.

  Her blatant disinterest, bordering on outright disapproval, made me feel momentarily nostalgic for the days before I’d met this particular mutt and fallen prey to unconditional, remorseless, sentimental devotion. For most of my adult life, I’d been bored senseless by the skull-numbing stories people tell about their pets, stories that frequently sound more like hallucination than reportage: “He lies in bed with us and reads the paper.” “He turns on the TV at six-thirty on the dot every evening.” “She uses the toilet!” Now, when I was out walking Otis, I frequently stopped to chat with other dog owners and thought nothing of spending fifteen or twenty minutes discussing the minutiae of eating habits, bowel movements, and adorable little gestures made with paw or hirsute, gargoyle ears. I understood exactly what Taff was feeling toward Otis, even as I gave him a protective stroke.

  “Roger’s the prodigal son,” I said. “My father’s favorite. To tell you the truth, we never really got along. I’m doing the whole thing as a favor to . . . Dad.”

  “I’m beginning to get the picture,” Taff said. “I suppose he wouldn’t settle for anything in your neighborhood.”

  “I doubt he would.”

  She closed up the book of listings and shut her blue-lidded eyes for a moment. Her lashes fluttered slightly as she spoke, as if she were trying to force her eyes open but couldn’t quite manage it. “You’re just going to have to tell him he can’t have everything. He can have space or he can have location, but in that price range, he can’t have both. You don’t have both, do you?”

  “Not really. But my father doesn’t exactly understand the housing situation in Cambridge.”

  Her eyes popped open. “Well, then just sit down and have a man-to-man talk with Roger and this father of yours and set them straight! I understand these things, Clyde; I have a sister who’s the prodigal son in my family.”

  “I’m not especially good at man-to-man talks,” I confessed. “I’m better at trying to please and then resenting it for a few decades.”

  She sighed. “I’ll try to come up with something. Okay?”

  She uttered this last word with a tone of finality that was about as subtle as a shove out the door. It was obvious she was trying to get rid of me, silly dog and all, but for the first time, I felt some affection toward her and thanked her profusely for her help and her advice, even though I had no intention of taking the latter.

  When I returned to the apartment that afternoon, Marcus was reheating a pot of stew left over from several days earlier, stirring round and round dreamily with a wooden spoon as he stared out the window. I took a seat at the kitchen table and started to leaf through Sheila’s appointment book. It was stuffed with movie reviews, editorials, and news stories she’d ripped out of assorted magazines and papers. In the back, there was an ad for an upcoming sale of men’s sportswear at I. Magnin.

  “Where’s Sheila?” I asked.

  “She had to head over to the library, make up for the time she lost this afternoon. She’s a diligent girl.”

  “How was the museum?”

  “Oh . . . great stuff over there. Boulders, crystals, granite slabs. I guess everything in life is interesting if you look at it closely enough.”

  He had his back to me, so I couldn’t read the expression on his face. But his voice was more rueful and sad than usual. As I watched him stirring the pot, I noticed that the gas had gone out under it. I was about to say something, but it probably didn’t matter all that much; Marcus ate dutifully but without any particular interest. The surprise wasn’t that the burner had gone out but that he’d attempted to heat his food in the first place. Sweets were the only food he had a real passion for—ice cream, chocolate-covered raisins, napoleons—but like all men with that passion, he satisfied his cravings furtively.

  “Ben’s a funny little kid, isn’t he?” he asked.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Quiet, sad. Smart, though; knows more about rocks than I know. It was the kind of thing my father used to do with us, take us to museums, give Otto and me a big lecture on anthropology, celestial navigation, evolution. Then we’d go home and he’d quiz us. I wasn’t big on that. Otto retained a lot more than I did. He always did have more staying power than me.”

  “He even got married,” I reminded him.

  “He even stayed married. His oldest kid starts college next year. He’ll probably finish his Ph.D. before I do.”

  Whenever a person gets honest about his faults, no matter how serious the faults or how dire the consequences, I immediately forgive him. My attitude probably accounts for the fact that I’ve spent more time confessing my own faults than trying to correct them. In any case, I immediately pitied Marcus his whole overwhelming dilemma.

  “You just need to . . .” But I didn’t complete the sentence. It seemed cruel to remind him of how much he needed to do.

  He turned around to face me, his head at an angle, his hand still clutching the spoon. “I have to tell you something, Clyde. I have to say I didn’t really feel anything for Ben. I mean, he’s a nice kid, he’s bright and all, but I didn’t really feel anything for him. I mean, I didn’t feel anything special for him.”

  “You just need more time.”

  “Yeah, I need more time,” he said. “I need more time for everything. We’re taking him to a play next week.” He turned back to the stove and turned off the unlit burner, hoisted the pot onto a trivet, and served himself a bowl of cold stew. “I didn’t really like that museum all that much, to tell you the truth,” he said. “All those rocks. I’ve been tripping over rocks for the past ten years. Can’t get around the damned things, can’t get under them, can’t get over them.”

  He sat down at the table opposite me, lifted up a spoonful of stew, blew on it to cool it down, and ate it. “She’s not a bad cook, that Sheila,” he said.

  CLYDE?”

  “Agnes. I thought you were coming to Cambridge this afternoon.”

  “I’m in Cambridge, Clyde. I’m at a pay phone in the store around the corner from you. Unlock the front door for me so I can dash in.”

  “Why didn’t you just ring the bell?”
<
br />   “I didn’t want to stand on the stoop and have Donald see me and think I showed up an hour and a half early because I’m anxious about our dinner. I’d be sending the wrong message.”

  “Is Barbara with you?”

  “She went to buy a tape or a CD or whatever it is with Louise’s son.”

  “With Ben?”

  “Mmm. Cute, isn’t it? The two of them?”

  “I suppose so. Listen, dear, while you’re there, pick me up some toothpicks, will you? They’re near the paper goods at the front. And a box of saltines, if you would.”

  “I’m not going shopping, Clyde. Please. What if Donald walked in and saw me standing in line at the cash register? He’d think I was out of my mind.”

  Agnes looked around the living room nervously. “You don’t think he can hear our voices through the ceiling, do you?”

  “Oh, Agnes,” I said, “just try to relax.”

  “I’m tired of everyone constantly telling me to relax! I’d like to know what’s so relaxing about relaxation. Dad is always telling me to relax, but as soon as I do, he complains that their dinner is late.”

  I leapt on this comment as if it were money. “‘Their’ dinner? Whose dinner? Who’s they?” I kept waiting for Agnes to bring up the subject of Diane so I could talk with her about the situation without having to take responsibility for giving away our father’s big secret. But as quickly as she’d let the words slip, she retracted them.

  “His dinner. His. Don’t hold me accountable for every word, Clyde.”

  I brought her to the study on the top floor and told her to take a seat in one of the big, drunken chairs. She made a move in that direction, but instead of sitting, she started to pace back and forth on the slim strip of floor directly under the peak of the roof. She had on a remarkably stylish navy-blue suit, wool from the looks of it, with a jacket that was pinched in at the waist and gave a flattering curve to her hips. Her hair was as close-cropped as it had been the previous month, but there was a slight auburn tint to it, as if she’d conditioned it with henna. I scanned her body to try and find the piece of jewelry or the overdone accessory that would derail the whole wardrobe effort, but there wasn’t one. If I knew nothing about her and had seen her—on the subway, let’s say—perhaps I would have seen a trim, manicured woman in an attractive outfit, anxious but coping. But much of what we see in people’s faces and forms is what we know about them, and it was impossible for me to look at Agnes without seeing an abundance of context—her divorce, her cookbook, and those big, useless vitamin pills she was trying so unsuccessfully to sell.