Scott Spencer

by Man in the Woods (v5)

  CHAPTER TEN

  Kate has been invited to speak before a group in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania—a gathering that she calls The Convocation of Extremely Liberal Ministers and Their Life Partners, by which Paul takes her to mean they are either gay or offbeat in some other way that makes them worthy of Kate’s barbed, teasing affection. The ministers have sent a driver from a nearby car service, and at eight forty-five on a cold Tuesday morning Shep is barking urgently at the window as a blue Ford Taurus pulls in. The back bumper bears a silver-and-purple bumper sticker that reads ALL MEN ARE IDIOTS AND MY HUSBAND IS THEIR KING, but the person driving the car is a man with a Nashville pompadour and black-framed glasses, the collar of his peacoat turned up against the wind. He is looking skeptically at the house and then goes back to the car and consults a piece of paper.

  “They didn’t send a limo or even a town car,” Kate says, turning away from the window. “My career’s in free fall!” She puts her arms around Paul and whispers into his ear, “I feel you dripping out of me.”

  His smile has a frozen quality. Ordinarily, he enjoys this benignly smutty side of Kate, and has even, with an inward boastfulness, taken some credit for it himself, believing her when she tells him that she used to be entirely circumspect in her conjugal utterances, and that if the Old Her would somehow be able to overhear the New Her, the Old Her’s face would scald with embarrassment. But today does not feel ordinary, and Kate’s dirty talk seems oddly lacking in its usual charm—it may come down to this: he does not wish to be reminded of this morning’s pleasure. It is not as if all the rituals and joys of his former life have come to a halt, but it seems as if his self, this inchoate “I” whom he pictured as the initiator and the judge of his daily actions, has now been joined by its long-lost, never-before-acknowledged, heretofore-lingering-in-the-shadows twin, a twin whose very existence is dependent on its negative capacity, who will say no to every yes.

  “Hey,” Kate says, touching his face. She wonders for a moment if she should stay home.

  “Don’t forget to tip the driver,” he says.

  “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it,” Kate says. She rises on her toes and kisses his forehead.

  Paul watches out the window, while filling the kettle at the kitchen sink. The driver opens the door for her and glances at her ass as she climbs into the backseat. The water drums into the kettle. Shep is sitting close to him now, his tail swishing back and forth on the kitchen floor. Shep is looking particularly jolly. He seems to be thinking, Oh good, she’s gone, let’s grill a couple of steaks and take naps, side by side. The Taurus backs up, begins its three-point turn. Paul sees his own reflection in the tarnished convex of the teakettle, and he thinks, He will never watch anyone from the window, he won’t ever hear the sound of water. He doesn’t exist.

  Paul follows the dog onto the flagstone patio, off the kitchen. The sound of the band saw is coming from the workshop, where Evangeline has been since eight o’clock. She always brings a thermos filled with espresso generously sweetened with raw sugar; it’s a pleasure to drink coffee with her in the morning, maybe bum an American Spirit off her. But he has promised Kate—and Ruby—that he will go to Windsor Day School this morning to see the school assembly, the theme of which is “Countdown to the New Millennium,” in which Ruby has an undisclosed role. He must shower, but first he goes back to his computer and rather than typing Recent Deaths Westchester he types Murder Westchester and when he can find nothing like that he types in Dead Body Martingham State Park, though it feels almost as if he is confessing to the police by doing so. Yet even with so forward a question he comes up with nothing and he wonders how this man’s death can go unnoted. He tries to tell himself this is good news, he even wonders for a moment, piercingly, punishingly, if the man actually died. Maybe. Maybe he had just lost consciousness and Paul, overwhelmed by adrenaline, had missed the pulse, assumed the worst, and fifteen minutes later the man had crawled out of the woods. Yet what is far more likely, Paul thinks, is that he is phrasing the question wrong. He searches the Internet for the names of the local newspapers in or near Tarrytown but he comes up with none and can’t imagine what they’d be called—the Tarrytown Tribune? The Westchester Times?—and of course there is no one he can ask. He wanders the Internet feeling not only lost but followed, remembering that everything you type and everywhere you “go” is retrievable, that the disk inside of the computer keeps an indelible record of your activities, and sometimes the police can simply yank the disk out of its casing and use it as evidence.

  His time at the computer is brought to a sudden conclusion by someone calling his name. It takes him a moment to realize it’s Evangeline, calling out from downstairs. Every surprise feels as if the bottom has just dropped out of life.

  “I’m up here,” Paul says, his voice sounding far too intense.

  There is a moment’s silence before he hears Evangeline’s footsteps coming up the stairs, rising up toward him with an ever-increasing sound—she has a heavy gait; her slender legs are not made to move the freight of her steel-toed work boots.

  She has a mild, open face, with dark eyebrows and preternaturally blue eyes, and wears her hair pulled back in a Jeffersonian ponytail. Today she’s wearing wide-wale corduroy pants and a fleece vest over a brown-and-red Carhartt shirt, with pearl studs in her ears. The studs are new, probably a gift from her parents in New Orleans, who are trying to lure her back to the kind of life they had once envisioned for her by sending her jewelry, cashmere sweaters, gift certificates to Leisure Time, Leyden’s day spa, things they hope might lead her away from her life of lesbianism and carpentry.

  “Are you okay?” she asks.

  “Yeah, I’m good,” Paul says. “I’m sort of late.”

  “Really? Late for what?”

  “Oh, there’s a thing at Ruby’s school. Kate’s giving a talk so I’m going to go instead.”

  Evangeline takes a deep breath, nods. “You’re so good,” she says. It sounds as if she might be poking a bit of fun at him, but her eyes radiate tenderness. “Anyhow,” she goes on, “we’re getting a delivery. George is here. I’m assuming it’s the teak, which is very exciting, yes?”

  Paul thinks for a moment. George? Oh yes, George. The UPS driver. Evangeline knows everyone’s name, every trucker, every supplier, every parts salesman. She believes everyone is connected, and we’re all in it together. “Is he waiting for me to sign for it?” Paul asks.

  “I can do it,” says Evangeline.

  He watches as she turns, walks down the steps. She rolls her shoulders as she walks; she has a broad, flat bottom. Paul lowers his eyes, annoyed with himself for invading her privacy.

  Suddenly, Evangeline stops, halfway down the stairs, and turns. “Do you want me to keep Sheppy with me?” she says. “He’s getting used to the noise.”

  “Sure, that would be nice,” says Paul.

  Shep is downstairs, near the steps. He has found a spot where he can have the heat of the radiator, see two and a half rooms of the first floor, and keep an eye on the staircase. Though he lies flat on the bare wood, his eyes are alert.

  “You hear that, Sheppy?” Evangeline says. “You’re going to the shop with me. And mostly I’ll be checking the new wood and organizing stuff so you won’t even have to listen to that nasty old saw.”

  Having heard his name again, Shep slowly rises—he seems headed for arthritis further down the road—and when Evangeline has descended the stairs he stands next to her, as if guarding her.

  “What an awesome dog,” Evangeline says. “You were so lucky to find him. It’s so great how things can work out.” She locks her fingers together, illustrating a universe in which the pieces fit together beautifully.

  Windsor Day School is housed in a nineteenth-century Georgian mansion, surrounded by locust trees. For a century and a half the house was the property of a stern mercantile family named Norris, and it was large enough to contain the school’s limited enrollment. But now that the number of p
eople with money has increased in Windsor County, the eighteen-room house is no longer sufficient. A new, modern building is under construction, next to the old building, which will be, once construction is complete, demoted to administrative use.

  Everyone involved in Windsor Day’s expansion is supposedly making an effort to preserve some of the school’s former grandeur, protecting as many trees as possible and roping off the locally famous peony garden from the backhoe’s blade. The faux-Roman statuary have been cordoned off with yellow tape, as if they were part of a crime scene, and the school’s governing body has agreed to absorb untold extra expense so that the new parking area will not disturb the grave of Caroline Norris, Windsor Day’s original benefactress and its first headmistress. Still, the nature of the place has been forever altered, and the presence of a huge excavation drains not only the beauty but the meaning from the property in a way that seems irrevocable to Paul. Now, those trees, the statuary, even the house itself are like animals in a zoo, silent testaments to their own subjugation.

  Paul knows this property from when he first came to Windsor County as a twenty-year-old, after a summer working on a fishing boat in Alaska. He had come to Leyden ostensibly in pursuit of a girl named Roberta McNulty, whom he had met in Seward, where she was sunning herself on a warm Alaska afternoon on the shores of Resurrection Bay. She was a high school senior, traveling with her parents and her younger brother, but she and Paul managed to steal time and privacy, and Paul felt for her everything from admiration to lust. Come see me, she whispered in his ear during their final good-bye, with her entire family standing twenty feet away, her father’s foot resting on his suitcase, her mother with her oddly short arms folded over her fulsome chest. I will, he whispered back. I promise.

  When Paul collected his final week’s check from his boss he immediately set off for her hometown of Leyden, New York. It was good to have someplace he needed to be, and good to think there was someone who might be waiting for him, someone to whom, however tangentially, he was obligated. He had never broken a promise, never, and he never intended to. He made his way, slowly, forwarded like a piece of mail with the minimum postage, traveling on boats, buses, trains, and in the backseats of those passing motorists he could entice with his thumb and good looks. He figured the journey would take, at most, two weeks, but certain distractions presented themselves on the way. He ran out of money, he helped to put out a forest fire, he joined in a frantic, futile search for an insurance claims adjustor who absconded with a neighbor’s five-year-old son, he dislocated his shoulder in a school-yard basketball game, he ended up staying three weeks in Colorado Springs with two brothers who picked him up on the highway one evening when he was running a fever of a hundred and two, he met a guy who made mandolins who patiently taught him a lot about woodworking and wood itself, he fell under the spell of a slender, sad-faced girl who worked in a bakery in Lima, Ohio, and spent a week kissing her and listening to her dream of becoming a songwriter, all the while trying to keep his heart fastened to the image of Roberta McNulty. The memory of her was starting to cloud over. He imagined arriving in Leyden, going to her high school as it was letting out for the afternoon, with the idea of surprising her, and then failing to pick her out from the rush of students leaving the building. It wasn’t as if he no longer remembered her, but there was no one thing he remembered about her as vividly as he remembered the barely audible gasp of breath she took before speaking, and the smell of chocolate on her fingers as she stroked the side of his face.

  When he finally arrived in Leyden, it was winter. There was no snow, only sheets of cold rain. The village reminded him of Connecticut, the people in a stupor of comfort, the little shops, the penny-candy mentality of the place, nothing like the bare-knuckled beauty of Alaska. On his first night he went to a bar, with just enough money left for a beer, and met Walter Seifert, an elderly radio and TV repairman from Prague whose wife had died a few months ago, and Seifert told Paul he could stay at his house on Belmont Street for thirty dollars a week. Living next door to Seifert was a boisterous drunk named Dave Markay, who, with his longtime buddy named Butch Kirkwood, also a steady drinker but not nearly so boisterous, had a house-painting company called True Colors. Dave saw Paul scraping the ice off Seifert’s front walk and asked him if he wanted to work as a painter for seven dollars an hour, and Paul, who had always been in the habit of letting things happen to him, said it sounded like a fine idea, and the next day he was at the Norris house, which was already Windsor Day School, painting side by side on the second floor with Dave and Butch to the strains of the Allman Brothers while the teachers and the students did their best to work around them.

  Weeks went by. There was always some reason to delay getting in touch with Roberta. He had lost her phone number, he couldn’t recall her address, he was dead tired at night, he was waiting to save a little money so he could come to her as a grown-up rather than just some pathetic kid—if she’d wanted a little boy there were plenty of those to chose from at her high school. But as bad luck would have it, Roberta’s father owned an office-supply shop, and he appeared one morning at Windsor Day, delivering an electric typewriter. McNulty took a moment to place Paul but once he did he wasted no time letting him know that the distant good manners he had shown Paul in Alaska would not prevail here on McNulty’s home ground.

  “Would you mind telling me what in the hell you are doing here?” he asked, and when Paul, not trusting himself to give a calm, masterful answer, remained silent, McNulty muttered, shook his head, and walked away.

  Now, whatever chance the reunion had of rekindling the attraction they’d felt for each other on the chilly, rocky shore of Resurrection Bay would be wrecked by misunderstanding and resentment. But by the time Paul went to bed he was, in truth, giving more thought to the recurring pain in his shoulder than to the botched reunion with Roberta. Dave had given him a book called Heal It Yourself, which had a whole section about shoulder injuries, and Paul had fallen asleep with that book on his chest and the interrogating glare of his bedside lamp not six inches from his face.

  Though Leyden was a small town, with fewer than five thousand full-time residents, he never once ran into Roberta, not at the supermarket with the sawdust on the floor and the smell of freezer burn in the air, nor the post office with its WPA mural of Indians and settlers sharing sheaves of wheat and bushels of corn, not at the gas stop nor the little park. He thought it was possible that Roberta at one time or another had caught a glimpse of him and quickly changed course, to spare them both the embarrassment. Yet even this much thought about Roberta, and where she might be and what she might do, was infrequent.

  Paul knew how to stave off an unwanted thought, how to deprive it of attention so that it died of neglect. Back then, for instance, he hadn’t thought of finding his father in that walk-up railroad flat in over a year, and when it did come back to him again it was as if the whole thing had happened to someone else, except that it hadn’t, but nevertheless it perplexed and fascinated him, how things you thought would kick your ass forever and ever can over time lose their power.

  Beautiful girls, lost to time.

  Men lost to their own violence, or the violence of others.

  Today, walking quickly from his truck to the school, Paul has an inkling that he has arrived late for today’s assembly, and when he mounts the whitewashed stone steps to the front entrance and sees no one milling about he feels a sour twist of self-reproach. He had had every intention of being there a few minutes before the hour so that he could sit close to the front where Ruby could see him, especially since she had already voiced her disappointment over her mother’s not being able to come today. But, alas, it wasn’t to be. A combination of not looking at the clock, talking to Evangeline, and getting lost in his computer had all conspired to make it so he was walking into the school a full half hour after the assembly had begun.

  In the entrance foyer, where once the Norrises’ butler admitted visitors, a store-bought maple desk has be
en set up in the sloping space between the two main stairways—one that curves off to the east side of the house, the other to the west. A gaudy chandelier, some of its flame-shaped bulbs burned out, creaks back and forth in the breeze Paul brings in with him. A male teacher sits at the desk, British in his features, with blue eyes, soft sandy hair. He puts down the New York Times. “May I help you?” he asks. Paul doesn’t have the mild, tidy appearance of most of the Windsor Day parents, who are for the most part lawyers and doctors, landowners, drivers of expensive automobiles—in other words, Paul’s clients.

  “I’m here for the assembly,” he explains. The teacher cocks his head curiously, not wishing to be impolite by asking any further questions but clearly waiting for some clarification. “Ruby Ellis?” Paul says.

  The teacher brightens, rises from his chair. “Oh, yes, well I think you’re in luck. Ruby’s class hasn’t had their turn yet. Come, I’ll show you in.” The teacher leads Paul through the corridor, every few steps looking back at him over his shoulder and smiling encouragingly. What had once been the main floor of the Norris house has been divided up into classrooms, a science lab, a language lab, a music room, an art room.

  “Here we are,” the teacher says, in his kind voice, opening the doors to what was once the Norrises’ ballroom, a cavernous French-windowed room that many years ago Paul had helped to paint, and though the slate-blue walls are sorely in need of freshening up and the eggshell ceiling is water-stained, he is glad to see his old work still exists—nineteen gallons of Benjamin Moore Shaker Afternoon, straight out of the can.