“Tell your father that Mickey said hi and wishes him the best with his recovery,” he said as he headed toward the door.
“Hang on a second,” I said as I walked around the counter. I took another package of peanut butter cups and handed them to him. “If you’ve really been buying these for the last nine years, it’s about time you got one on the house.”
He smiled, patted me on the shoulder, and walked out the door. On the way back around the counter, I took another package of Reese’s for myself. Breakfast.
The next morning I walked into the den with two mugs of tea, set them on the game table, and set up the chessboard. Without a word, my father turned off the television and sat down at his place. I moved a pawn to Queen Three and we started to play. I wasn’t any better this time out than I had been a few days earlier, but if anything I was even more deliberate and conservative. Neither of us spoke for the first several moves, though my father at one point made eye contact with me as I established the most rudimentary possible defense. There was the faintest bit of amusement in his expression.
I’d been thinking more and more lately about the women I’d been involved with over the years. They’d been something like the participants in the parade that takes place every Fourth of July on River Road. They’d stop in front of me for a moment or two, do whatever it was that they were planning to do and then move on to entertain someone else. And like a spectator at one of these parades, I would be amused for a moment and even tickled by the spectacle of it all, but I would eventually be left wondering why everyone got so worked up about these things.
As my father began to dismantle me slowly on the chessboard, my thoughts returned to these women yet again. My father took my queen’s bishop and I offered him a wan smile. I considered the fact that he knew almost none of the women I’d been with.
“You liked Gillian, didn’t you?” I said.
He narrowed his eyes for a moment and then looked back down at the board. I wondered if he thought I was trying to do something to distract him.
“Do you remember her?” I said.
“Short brown hair, green eyes, very pretty. Said ‘well’ a lot.”
I nodded and moved my knight back to King Three, where it had been three moves earlier. My father glanced at me disapprovingly.
“I had the feeling that you liked her that time I came back here with her.”
“She seemed very nice. It seemed that she liked you.”
“I think she did. I think we were doing okay then.”
He slid his Queen’s Rook to Queen’s Knight One. I had absolutely no idea why he did that.
“I never told you what happened between us,” I said.
“No, you never did,” he said flatly. I wasn’t sure if he was being sarcastic or not. I never explained any of my relationships to him.
“The lease on my apartment came up for renewal.”
“That kind of thing breaks up a lot of romances.”
“It wasn’t the apartment itself; it was what to do with the apartment. You know, do I renew for another year, do I look for something else, do we get something together? I was selling real estate then, so I had a lot of access. What I didn’t have was a lot of inspiration. It was like the lease on my relationship with Gillian had come up for renewal as well. And I knew that I didn’t really love her. She was so easy to like and she made me feel comfortable, but it was like sitting in a Barcalounger, you know? At some point, you have to get up because you can’t sit there for the rest of your life. And on top of everything else, I hated selling real estate. So I told her I was moving on.”
Other than raising an eyebrow, my father didn’t react to this. We exchanged several more moves.
“It was very different with Emily,” I said. “That whole thing in Atlanta was so strange. We met when I got that office managing job at Allied. She could never really understand that the suit-and-tie thing was a phase to me, like a costume change. She was so corporate and type A, and for a while that seemed very exciting and exotic. Do you know what finally killed us?”
“Your car needed an inspection?”
“Yeah, funny. What killed us was that this junior executive position opened up. Emily pushed me like crazy to go for it. I mean, she was relentless. She sent me memos. It would have been comical if it weren’t infuriating. When someone else got the job, she started lecturing me about missed opportunities. I quit Allied two days later and got the hell out of town.”
My father took a sip of his tea and then made another move. Since he barely spoke anymore, it was hard to tell whether his reticence now had to do with his condition or the topic. I hadn’t intended to talk to him about any of this. But I thought that shaking things up a little might actually be beneficial to him. I thought if I told him a little more about what I’d been doing the last few years that it might cause him to reconnect with the world in some small way. And since this was what was on my mind, it seemed the natural way to do it. A part of me actually wondered what he thought. I’d never really gone to him for advice, even when I was living at home. I spoke this way with my mother a little, and it was so much easier to talk to Chase than to either of them. But for any number of reasons, I wouldn’t have minded hearing my father’s impressions now. Instead, he continued to build an attack that I’d never seen before and couldn’t have parried even if I had.
I told him about how Kristina had called me “soulless” the night before I left Minneapolis. I told him how Susan just walked away. I even told him about a woman I met at a bookstore and how my interaction with her haunted me even though we never dated. All the while, he trapped and captured my pieces. As with our previous match, my defeat was inevitable, but I refused to surrender.
When he at last checkmated me (something that it seemed to me he could have done several moves before he actually did it), he took a final sip of his tea and handed me his mug. I expected him to return to the television, but he sat back at the game table instead.
“Do you know how many women I’ve slept with?” he said.
“You grew up in the sixties, Dad. I don’t know, a hundred and twenty?”
He smirked. It was the most expression I’d seen on his face since he returned from the hospital. “Not everyone participated in free love. I’ve slept with exactly one woman in my life. Which hardly qualifies me as an authority regarding the ups and downs of relationships. But I dated quite a few women before your mother and you know what I learned? Love isn’t hard work. It might be trying, but if it feels like hard work, it probably isn’t love.”
He raised himself up on his arms, walked over to his easy chair and reached for the remote control. I’m sure that little soliloquy exhausted him. I sat at the table for a few minutes thinking about his message. Was he endorsing the breakups I told him about? Was he telling me that I didn’t know anything about love? Was he assuring me that I’d know it when the right thing came along? I had no idea, but the virtual outburst from him left me strangely reassured.
I put the chess set away and made a note to myself to get a book on the game before our next match.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
What I’d Planned for It
Iris and I settled into a regular pattern. It was hard for either us to get away from our jobs (and spending time in the store was feeling more and more like a “job” all the time) on the weekends, but Tuesdays and Wednesdays were very slow. And so every week, I would drive up to Lenox on Tuesday morning and drive back to Amber late Wednesday night. These trips easily became the highlight of any week and they made what I had in Amber seem more palatable. If contractors were annoying me or if a customer whined, I could always call Iris, complain a bit, listen to a story about some petty thing someone at the Ensemble did, and then talk about our plans a few days hence. In fact, since we’d started to see each other every week, our phone relationship had become much richer. I could see Iris in these conversations. I could imagine her body language during a specific voice inflection. I could visualize her post
ure at her desk or at a kitchen chair.
We’d been doing this for several weeks at this point. On this Tuesday, we had well-prepared, though utterly unsurprising Mexican food followed by modern dance at Jacob’s Pillow. The performers dedicated a portion of the program to the music of Brian Wilson, while they set another to Thelonius Monk. It was bracing and graceful and – unlike the meal – completely unpredictable.
“This is a sexy town,” I said as we drove back to Iris’ house.
“You think so? I think it’s a little on the geeky side myself.”
“No, it really is. It’s beautiful, it keeps you guessing, it promises a lot of pleasure, and it delivers what it promises. It’s very sexy.”
“Should I leave the two of you alone?”
I smiled. “I’m complimenting you on your choice of location. You did a good job finding this place.”
“Thanks. It pretty much found me.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that kind of thing happens. You need better bread, though. That’s the one way in which Amber beats this town. I’m bringing you a loaf of bread when I come up next week.”
“You mean your town is better than my town at something?”
“Amber is not my town. It is the place where I grew up and my current temporary residence. But it is not my town.”
“Tucumcari.”
“Or someplace like it. Or no place like it. Who knows? But not Amber.”
“In spite of the fabulous baked goods.”
“Yes.”
Iris laughed. “Hey,” she said, “I forgot to tell you that Melanie is pregnant.” Melanie was a colleague at the Ensemble and a good friend of Iris’.
“With that guy?” Melanie, who is gay, had been confiding in Iris for months about her desire to have a baby and about the male gay friend she’d been conflicted about doing it with.
“Yeah, Burke. They just decided to make it happen. I’d been wondering why she hadn’t been talking about it as much lately. She’s six weeks. Burke is going to move in with her when the baby is born.”
“Doesn’t Melanie have a partner?”
“She does, but Shelly’s okay with it. They’re all going to live together and raise the kid as a team.”
“That takes unbelievable guts.”
“Well, you know Mel.”
I had in fact gotten to know Melanie a bit from my visits to the office and much more from the way Iris talked about her. Certainly, if anyone were going to make a juggling act such as this work, it would be she. She was very centered and methodical and I’d never seen her get flustered. Still, I was sure that there would be times when the dynamic would get awkward between the three adults.
“That’s great news, I guess.”
“It is great news. It’s a long way from Ozzie and Harriet , but we happen to be a long way from Ozzie and Harriet.”
I nodded and decided that Iris was right that this was good news. The household might feel a little crowded from time to time, but the key was that the kid would be in a situation where all of his parents really wanted him. With that in his corner, he could deal with everything else.
The conversation settled for a moment and I felt an ache in my right shoulder that had been bothering me all day. I tried to stretch it a bit as I drove.
“I don’t know what I did to my shoulder,” I said to Iris. “I must have slept on it wrong or something last night.”
Iris reached over and squeezed the shoulder a few times. “I remember the first clandestine night Chase and I had together,” she said. “It was the first time we had actually slept – as in actually sleeping – together and he could barely lift his arm the next day because I had my head on it the entire night. He made some ridiculous excuse about it to your mother the next day.”
She laughed, and I laughed with her, but the casual mention of her sleeping with Chase had caught me off guard. We’d been talking about him less lately and hadn’t really talked about him in his role as Iris’ boyfriend for a while.
I’m not sure why what Iris said now threw me off so much. Chase was always somewhere on my mind and certainly I never forgot how Iris and I had become friends in the first place. But we’d developed such a meaningful present that the past had become a little diffuse. I’d started to think of her as my friend and I realized what I was feeling at this moment was a form of jealousy. It was the first time that the mention of Chase’s name had inspired that and I found I wasn’t particularly interested in continuing this line of conversation. I don’t know what Iris thought of my sudden silence or if she thought about it at all, but we didn’t say anything the rest of the way back to her place.
“Some wine?” Iris asked when we got in the door.
“Yeah, wine would be great.”
Iris continued into the kitchen. “I got some of that Super-Tuscan you were telling me about.”
The dog bounded up to me and I knelt to pet her. “It’s delicious. You’ll love it.”
“I love it already. I had a glass last night.”
I sat on the couch and looked around the room. There were no pictures of Chase here. A shot of her mother. One of her cousin. A very prominently placed photo of Iris with Sam Shepard taken during his visit to see the Ensemble’s production of one of his plays. A number of photographs with no people in them at all.
As we drank the wine, we talked about our plans for the next day and even for the next week. Slowly, the discomfort from my bout of jealousy abated. I was in the present with my new best friend, Iris, and we were talking about the things we were going to do. As long as I looked at things from this perspective, I was totally fine and even relaxed.
A short while later, Iris went to bed and I went to the guest room. There was a quilt on the bed that hadn’t been there the week before, Iris had put a decorative clay pot on the nightstand, and a handmade clock was now up on a wall. These touches warmed the room, made it feel less like a spare and more like a place where someone stayed. I assumed she did them for my benefit and this pleased me. I lay down on the new quilt and looked up at the ceiling. The paint was still chipped from a leak that had happened years before and I found this surprisingly reassuring.
I thought back to the casual way that Iris had mentioned making love to Chase earlier. She wasn’t someone to say anything without thinking. Had she done this to make sure that I understood that what was developing between us was purely friendship? Or did she do it because she had no reason to think that I would react badly to it in any way?
It was becoming more and more obvious to me that Iris and I saw our relationship in entirely different terms – even as I understood that it would be more perilous if she didn’t feel this way. I understood that the limitations, real or imagined, that Iris put between us allowed me my fanciful thoughts. If she had not exercised this level of caution, I almost certainly would have had to.
And there was the quilt, the pot, and the clock. There were the plans for tomorrow and the next week and, presumably, the week after that. If what was evolving here wasn’t what I fantasized (more often than perhaps I should have), it was still the best the world had to offer me.
When I got up that Thursday morning, my parents were already off to see my father’s cardiologist. I believe this was the third time my father had left the house since coming back from the hospital. I’m not sure what it was about being here when my parents weren’t around, but I found myself exploring again. This time I headed toward the basement.
This level of the house was perpetually “semifinished.” There was carpeting on half of it and my father, in a burst of productivity a couple of decades before, had nailed cedar paneling to the walls of that half. An old Fisher television was in one corner, along with the couch that once sat in the den. My parents still had the set plugged in and the rabbit ears were pointed in whatever direction had provided snowy reception the last time anyone turned on the TV. Chase and I had loved to come down to the basement to watch this set, though it was less for the quality of the picture than it w
as for the freedom to jump as hard as we wanted on the couch. I turned the set on, half expecting it to play Scooby-Doo or maybe Sesame Street. When a morning talk show appeared instead, I shut it off without changing channels. The set wasn’t dusty and neither was the carpet or the couch, which meant that my mother still came down here to clean, even though no one had used this space in years.
I opened the door of the wall unit that held our games and toys. There was the copy of Operation that we would hunch over in the early morning, determined not to let the buzzing sound awaken our parents. There was the copy of Booby Trap, a game that caused Chase to guffaw every time it exploded (even when we were in our teens). There was the copy of Stratego that my father brought home for me for no reason at all, the only time I could ever remember him doing that. I never liked the game particularly much, but I would play it anyway because there was something special about it. I found the big red ball that Chase and I would play dodgeball with (“not against the paneling,” my mother would say, calling down from the kitchen). Deflated, of course, but it looked like it would be ready for another match if an air pump were available. The same basket held my catcher’s glove, some street hockey pucks, and a Nerf basketball. On “Olympics Days,” Chase and I would pull the basket out and compete until we’d used every bit of equipment, keeping the “medals totals” on a tiny blackboard. I looked up to see some of my Star Wars action figures and Chase’s boxing gloves. My Magic 8 Ball and Baseball Encyclopedia and his football helmet and remote control car.
I had forgotten how much time we spent in this basement, even through high school. While we decidedly had the run of the house, this part was truly our turf. Mom could come down to clean (as long as we weren’t in the middle of something) and Dad was welcome to put up some more paneling if the inspiration ever struck (as long as he left us at least one wall to throw the ball against), but the basement was ours. We’d be down there at least an hour a day, sometimes much longer if the weather was bad. And even when we weren’t together, one of us would often be down here.
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