The Man of the House

by Stephen McCauley

  “So I heard.”

  He looked up at me with sudden interest and smiled without revealing his teeth. He loved hearing that people were talking about him. Unlike me, he usually assumed they were saying flattering things. “I didn’t know Vance knew about that.”

  Gordon preferred to think that Vance was my only friend, the only person who ever invited me out anywhere, the only person with whom I ever went out. While this was nearer to the truth than I cared to admit, it wasn’t the whole truth.

  “I went to dinner at Drew and Sam’s a while back,” I said. “They mentioned it.”

  “Oh, that,” he said, and poured more water from the tall, slim bottle. “Mikey and I almost went to that, but we had another invitation we couldn’t get out of.”

  I took a sip from the wide martini glass and let the thick, icy drink burn along my throat and splash down in my empty stomach. “They showed a video,” I said, “of their trip. Awfully informative.”

  Gordon slammed his water glass on the table and stared across the flickering little candle with a degree of fury that I wasn’t prepared for.

  “All right,” he said, “so it wasn’t a National Geographic special. It wasn’t a three-hour documentary on saving the rain forest. Well, guess what, Clyde—it wasn’t supposed to be.”

  “I didn’t say a thing.”

  “You didn’t have to. I saw the video, and I can imagine what your opinion was. It wasn’t a UN peacekeeping mission; it was a vacation.” He knocked back the rest of his water and glared at me.

  “All I said, sweetheart—”

  But he wasn’t about to let me finish. “At least have the decency to accept responsibility for what you meant. You don’t have to be so critical of them just because they know how to enjoy themselves. Just because they don’t live in some hovel in Cambridge with a straight man who’s a colossal bore, no matter how pretty he is. They work hard, and when they take a vacation, they like to relax. Not everyone considers sitting in an attic and rearranging your collection of antique fans a good time.”

  Gordon’s face had grown red and puffy. He was leaning over the table, glaring at me challengingly, so full of emotion, he’d forgotten to wrap his lips over his braces. I looked down at the table contritely, thrilled that I was still able to provoke so passionate a reaction. It was only in these moments of unbridled anger that the real Gordon, the Gordon I’d lived with for two years, emerged from imprisonment inside the polite, sculpted lawyer with the scrubbed face. And it was only in these moments, when his guard was off duty, that he allowed himself to acknowledge that we’d ever been lovers and that there was still some kind of connection between us.

  “And another thing,” he said, a good deal more quietly. “I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘sweetheart.’ It’s embarrassing. You’re not my sweetheart, and I’m not yours.”

  I’d had enough of my drink to let myself lean toward him and reach across the table for his hand. “There, Gordon, there is where you’re wrong.”

  He’d slipped back into control and looked around the restaurant stiffly, trying to make out exactly who was watching us and how he could catch the eyes of those people who weren’t. But if people were glancing in our direction, it was only to make sure we were looking at them. “Our relationship has been over for two years,” he said calmly. “Three, if you count the last year we lived together.”

  “Now, just a minute . . .”

  “You never made a real commitment to me then, I happen to know you weren’t faithful, and I was under the distinct impression that if I hadn’t ended the relationship when I did, you would have found some excuse to end it yourself. If you want to be honest, you’ll admit that you only really fell in love with me after I walked out. It’s ridiculous.”

  What had appealed to me as passionate honesty moments before had crossed into dangerous territory. I could feel Gordon clawing at the protective skin of my defenses, and I tried to change the subject, but combined with the martini, my anxiety made me slur: “Now, about your worgout. . .”

  He waved off the topic and adjusted his suspenders. “You just can’t deal with rejection, Clyde. I’ll tell you what Michael thinks.”

  “Michael,” I said. “Let’s not drag him into it. This is between you and me.”

  “Nothing’s between ‘you and me’ anymore, Clyde. You just have rejection and love confused in your mind. That’s what Michael says. Michael says it has to do with being rejected by your father and seeking his approval by trying to work it out through me. I can’t remember all the ins and outs, but it’s some theory like that.” He stretched his neck and looked around for the waiter. “Where did he go off to? I promised Michael I’d be back before nine.”

  As mortifying as it was to think that he and Michael had discussed my neurotic behavior, it was worse to think that Gordon cared about it so little he couldn’t even remember the demeaning specifics of what had been said. “I thought Michael was an accountant,” I told him. “What’s he doing dirtying his hands with psychology?”

  “He’s done a lot of twelve-step work. And let’s not get into a whole dismissal of twelve-step programs, all right?”

  He motioned for the check and sat back, rearranging the casual drape of his loosened necktie. I finished off the rest of my drink and felt a warm rush of blood to my face. I began to long for a bottle of aspirin.

  As soon as the check arrived, Gordon returned to affability. “How is your father, anyway? Still milking that sore throat?”

  “He’s doing pretty well. He’s got a new girlfriend.”

  “Well, at least someone’s getting on with his life.”

  Outside on Columbus Avenue, Gordon turned up the collar of his suit jacket. He wasn’t dressed for the weather, probably because all that bulky winter paraphernalia hid too much of his new form. Everyone I know who gets seriously involved in his gym membership starts to contemplate a move to southern California, where the weather is more conducive to wearing tank tops.

  “Oh, I knew there was something I wanted to tell you,” he said cheerfully. He looked over at me and scanned my body from top to bottom, the first time he’d really looked at me all evening. “That coat is very flattering. Anyway, it’s about Vance. Or about that imaginary boyfriend of his.”

  “Carl?”

  “Right. Turns out—and this is from a very reliable source—Carl is married, two kids, been living in San Diego for years now. Isn’t gay, never was, whole thing is Vance’s delusion.”

  “That can’t be,” I said. It had become quite cold, and I pulled a scarf out of my pocket and wrapped it around my neck. I took off my glasses and wiped them against my coat. “Vance would know by now. He spends the majority of his time with Carl’s mother.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t want to give up her meal ticket. And what makes you so sure he doesn’t know? You think a little thing like a wife and two kids would prevent him from mooning over the boy for the rest of his life? You and Vance, Clyde—no wonder you two get along so well.”

  He adjusted the scarf around my neck in a tender sort of way, a safe gesture now that we were going our separate ways. He stepped out into the street and raised his arm; a taxi made a dramatic U-turn and stopped in front of him. “Michael wants to have you over for dinner soon,” he said. He opened the door of the cab. “I’ll have him give you a call. What are you doing for Thanksgiving?”

  “Dinner with Agnes and her boyfriend.”

  “Boyfriend! Everyone’s in love.” Then he got into the cab, waved, and sped off.

  I’d wandered down Columbus Avenue for a few blocks before I realized that I had no idea where I was heading and had landed smack in the middle of a residential neighborhood. The martini, which had warmed me up in the restaurant, had started to make me feel chilled and hungry. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. A kind of panic came over me, a conviction that if I didn’t gobble down some food immediately, I’d pass out on the sidewalk. But there were no signs of any restaurants, just row after row of
restored brick town houses, their lights spilling out of the windows and onto the sidewalk.

  I headed toward Tremont Street, where I vaguely remembered there were rows of restaurants. I passed one after the other and peered into the windows, but I couldn’t imagine walking in and sitting down, no matter how hungry I was. Inside, groups of friends were laughing, couples sighing. The mere thought of slipping into one of those places and trying to be inconspicuous made my eyes start to itch. Michael was probably right in his estimation of my psyche, but why did it have to be so obvious, even to an accountant? What’s the point of having defenses if they’re transparent?

  I walked on and on, weaving in and out of the city streets, peering into one restaurant after the next. Finally, I ended up in Cambridge, where I slipped into a greasy sandwich shop. There was a line of bleary men waiting to order their sloppy solitary meals, and I took my place at the end of it.

  OF THE HOLIDAYS DISCUSSED IN THE NOTES on my mother’s recipes, Thanksgiving was the one that received the most attention. “‘Candied Potato Chips’: A wonderful Thanksgiving treat to serve the gang when they first arrive and are too excited to sit down.” “I love to give these unusual ‘Raw Turkey Nugglettes’ to the children, grandchildren, and ‘cousins by the dozens,’ right before I tuck them in at night.” “It looks like squash, it tastes like squash, no one in the happy family will guess it’s really leftover bread heels. A ‘Soak ’n’ Serve’ surprise!”

  The reality, of course, was never as bright as the fantasy depicted in those notes. There were no “cousins by the dozens,” there was no gang and, certainly, no family that could reasonably be described as happy. For years, I’d been avoiding holiday dinners by claiming I was spending the day with “friends,” a lie no one dared ask me to elaborate on. In fact, I spent most holidays alone, sitting through multiple showings of the longest movie I could find, usually a garish, unimaginably dull epic set in another century. I found it a comforting, surprisingly festive activity.

  After my disastrous drink with Gordon, I stayed locked up in my attic rooms for several days. My reading had degenerated from movie star biographies to the lowest form of printed matter—memoirs by TV celebrities, only a small step above greeting cards. Half the celebrities I’d never heard of. Not that it much mattered: my impression was that, apart from a melancholic, desperate identification with the paper-thin characters they portrayed in front of the cameras on a weekly basis, most of the people in question had no idea who they were. But as Agnes might have said, the books helped pass the time—the time until I turned the apartment over to Roger and. . . Dad, and Marcus finally broke down and had his conversation with Ben.

  I should have been reading for my class, but I wasn’t even able to skim the first few pages of Vanity Fair without developing a migraine. My timing couldn’t have been worse; after Louise’s visit, three or four students were actually showing interest in the books listed on the syllabus. Somehow she’d broken through to them—or maybe they’d been motivated by dread of being dragged through yet another rendition of Mallory’s tale of marital woe.

  I love Vanity Fair, but considering its length, I’d stuck it onto the end of the syllabus almost as a joke. Among other factors, attendance usually dropped precipitously during the holiday season, and those students who did continue to come typically complained that they had too much shopping and cooking to do to bother with reading, as if they ever did bother with it. Fortunately, Dorothea had done her senior thesis on Thackeray forty years earlier, and the subject was fresh in her mind. She’d be more than happy to take over the class, exactly what she’d been bucking for the entire semester.

  Rain was predicted for Thanksgiving Day, and when I woke that morning, the sky was slate gray, with low storm clouds gathering in the west. Louise and Ben had gone to Cape Cod for the weekend, leaving Otis in my care. He was under the blankets with me, tangled up in the sheets, a furry, breathing hot-water bottle. Most mornings since the weather had turned cold, I’d wake to find him under the covers, wrapped around my legs. “Move over,” I’d say, and nudge him, hoping he’d stay put, almost exactly the routine I’d had with Gordon.

  I had the house to myself for the rest of the weekend, not that I knew what to do with it. Despite Marcus’s reluctance, Sheila had managed to drag him to New York to visit some friends of hers at Columbia. “She’s rushing things,” he’d said a few afternoons before leaving. “I don’t like it.”

  “Rushing things?” I said. “I thought she was ‘the one.’ Besides, she practically lives here.”

  “True. But I don’t like the idea she’s so eager to have me meet her friends. Once you get hooked into that friend network, you’re backed into a corner. The problem with a woman her age is that she’s always got friends, friends everywhere. Why do they always have to have so many friends?”

  In the end, though, he’d gone to New York, possibly because the alternative plan was staying in Cambridge, taking care of his son’s dog, and having dinner with Donald, Agnes, and me.

  It was disconcerting and strangely dislocating to stand in the gloomy entryway of the house, dog by my side, bottle of cheap champagne in hand, and knock on Donald’s door. Only a few months earlier, nothing would have seemed less likely to me than spending a holiday in that grim apartment. It was even stranger to have my own frantic sister open the door, grinning, unusually composed, a pair of pot holders shaped like enormous fish stuck on her hands.

  “I had a feeling you’d be late,” she chided. “I told Donald to plan on it.” She came into the hallway and planted a kiss on my cheek, knocking my glasses off my nose in the process. The entryway was flooded with the smell of roasting turkey and the toxic melon-and-lilies scent of Summer Meadow. Agnes knelt on the floor to pat Otis, but when the dog saw those big fish coming at him, he lay down and rolled onto his back.

  “Does he think I’m trying to hurt him?” Agnes asked.

  “No, no,” I said. “That’s a sign of love. Trust, love, devotion, all those dog things.”

  “You’re just trying to reassure me, Clyde. I guess that’s what family is for, isn’t it?”

  Since the last time I’d been in the apartment, the living room had been transformed. Or if not quite transformed, at least furnished. The brown log of a sofa had been replaced by a big puffy love seat with enormous cushions that looked as if they’d been inflated with helium and were about to float away. Opposite the love seat was a set of plump matching chairs and, in front of it, a glass-and-chrome coffee table. The lamp shades, the slipcovers, and the walls were all the same maddeningly vague, creamy beige.

  Certainly it was an improvement. Still, the pieces of furniture were so uninvitingly far away from one another and placed so exactly at right angles, they appeared to have been set in place according to a master plan and then nailed down. There were two pictures on opposite walls, identical prints of an autumnal field with a flock of birds flying over it. Your basic Father’s Day card, blown up, stuck in a plastic frame, and hung a few inches from the ceiling. There was a big fake Boston fern in a basket plunked on the top shelf of an empty, laminated-wood bookcase.

  “It looks like a whole new apartment,” I said.

  “Well, Donald wanted to feel as if he was settling in,” Agnes said, “so I got a few magazines and we worked on it together. I’ve done some interior decorating professionally, you know.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “E and A Resources has had a few calls for interior design.” This comment was uttered with what struck me as astonishing self-confidence, the very same kind of self-confidence, in fact, with which Donald spoke about his own unlikely business. Even if it was misplaced confidence—it was a stretch to call cleaning someone’s oven interior design—it was a pleasant switch from her usual self-flagellation. “Donald’s been through a lot,” she said. “He’s just starting to come out the other side.” She pulled off the big pot holders and sat down on the arm of the love seat. “It was a shock to him when that girlfriend left
him. After almost twenty years.”

  “Twenty years!” I sank into one of the chairs, and the cushions rose up around me.

  “They were sweethearts since junior high. I don’t know if he told you,” she said softly, “but he developed some health problems when he found out she’d turned into a lesbian.” I assumed this meant he’d had a variety of nervous breakdown. She looked up at me apologetically. “Not that that has anything to do with you.”

  “I’m just happy you found each other,” I said.

  “I’ll always be grateful to you for inviting me to that cookout, Clyde, even if nothing comes of this relationship.”

  I was pleased to see she’d already rewritten history and had me, instead of Marcus, inviting her. If I played it right, I could probably claim responsibility for arranging the whole relationship, assuming it didn’t end tragically. “But something’s come of it already, hasn’t it, sweetheart?”

  “Yes, yes, it has. I just wish I could have introduced him to Mom.” At the mention of my mother, her eyes filled with tears and she leaned against the back of the love seat with a deep, exhausted sigh. “Do you think she would have approved? He’s younger than me, and between you and me, I don’t think his income is that high.”

  “I’m sure she would have approved, if she’d seen how happy he’s made you.”

  She stood up and walked toward me, to embrace me, I suppose, but she tripped on a little throw rug and nearly kicked Otis. He whimpered and raced out of the room, and Agnes retreated to the arm of the love seat. “I wish you could find someone, Clyde. I really do. You couldn’t convince Gordon to come to dinner?”

  I felt my jaw clench. If I spent enough time with her, Agnes always hit my rawest nerve. But it was my own fault. I’d encouraged her to continue thinking of Gordon and me as a couple because it had served my own distorted perceptions so well. For the past few days, as I lay under my blankets devouring one insanely banal memoir after the next, I’d been trying to reorganize things in my own brain and kick the brawny little brat out of my thoughts once and for all.