by Robert Cohen
“You weren’t trying to sneak out the back door, were you, Mr. Pierce? The bell hasn’t rung.”
“Just checking to see if it’s locked.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“What a relief. Of course,” she said, “that door’s been locked since l987. But it never hurts to check.”
He smiled. Being as he was more than a little afraid of Zoe Bender had never prevented him from enjoying her company. “Sometimes things come unstuck,” he said. “You never know.”
“Listen, I need to run over to the hospital. I left a note on your desk.”
“Don?”
“Mmm. He may’ve taken a turn for the worse.”
Don Blackburn’s now infamous stroke had come midway through his eighth-period Language Arts class. By the time Oren arrived, the children had been hustled out. The overhead projector was on, but the stencil had slipped off; a vacant square of light beamed wanly over the blackboard. Don lay on the floor beside the AV cart. The chalk was still in his hand. His mouth was disarranged but his eyes were calm. He appeared to be waiting for something good to happen. Surely this wasn’t it.
“Poor guy,” Oren said. “To go down like that. Out of the blue.”
“Oh, he’s had high blood pressure for years,” Zoe said, with the sort of casual good sense that made people think her harsh. “You could see it in his face.”
Oren nodded. He’d been looking in Don Blackburn’s face off and on for a couple of years now and had failed to see anything. Its color he’d mistaken for health, its swollen capillaries for pleasure, high spirits.
“I better run,” she said, “Gail’s alone over there. Can you cover that curriculum meeting after school? It shouldn’t go on too long.”
Gail? The town was full of people he should have been able to recognize by now and yet rarely did. His attentions had been fixed on himself. He was aware that this was not a good thing, but he was aware of it only vaguely, as he was aware at night of the cold massing at the window. It did not disturb his sleep.
“Go,” he said. But by then of course she already had.
3
Wine and Spirits
True, for a while there after Philip died he’d had a pretty rough time. But no life unravels from a single thread. Disaster is always a preexisting condition, a metastasized truth. So it would be wrong to blame Philip for the intrusion of the irrational in his affairs, and for all of what followed, a series of events with no beginning or end.
If he had to pick a middle, however, he supposed he’d choose that night of the Dunns’ dinner party, back on Memorial Day weekend.
As usual, he’d stopped off at Cork & Bottle to pick up some wine. Teddy had no particular interest in wine as a subject area, though he enjoyed drinking it of course; nonetheless his approach that evening, running his gaze across the sturdy, square-shouldered Bordeaux, the sloping chardonnays, the various Malbecs and pinots and Syrahs, could only be described as scholarly. He squinted over the labels, reading the fine print, parsing out pedigrees and percentages, getting a feel for the terroir. Every bottle seemed its own glass house, a private world of hidden lights, secret fermentations. He could almost hear the earth that had yielded the grapes calling to him through the glass, begging to be released, sprung from its cork.
He was in need of some release himself. All week he’d been up late, losing arguments with various people who irritated him. First the school board over budget and curricular issues, then his daughter Mimi over dress codes and curfews. This itself was annoying; he was accustomed to getting his way. To sit at the head of a long table, putting forth an agenda, conducting, over baked goods and coffee, a brisk, constructive dialogue—this was Teddy’s forte. But lately something had gone awry. Some sag or softness had crept into the hard core of his will. The briskness, the dialogue, and the constructive vibe were gone. He tried to compensate for this by talking way too loud and far too much, but of course that only made things worse. “You’ve gone out of your tree,” Mimi had told him, storming away. “You’re losing it completely.”
“I hate that expression. Losing it. What does it even mean?”
“Forget it. Go away.”
The slamming of a teenager’s door in a parent’s face, though often intended as a provocation, is invariably experienced by that parent as something of a relief. In this case it excused him from the chore of entering Mimi’s bedroom to hash things out and seek closure and resolution, as Gail and most of the mothers he knew surely would have. Instead he’d done the fatherly thing, what his own father had done in such moments, and his father’s father before him—gone downstairs, turned on the TV, and zoned out. Better that than to listen to any more angry and resentful comments from the women in his life. There were too many angry women in his life, and not enough angry men. With the exception he supposed of himself.
Anyway Mimi was wrong: he wasn’t losing it. If anything he was gaining. Gaining weight, accumulating burdens, amassing a hard, briny crust of disinterest over whatever pearls of longing and fear lay cradled inside him. Sometimes when the house grew quiet, and a calm had settled over the domestic battlefields, Teddy would lay down his arms and shields and pick up the remote, flipping to one of the high, distant channels—79, 83, 97—beyond the cable’s reach, his head lolling against the cushions like a man swathed in steaming towels, waiting to be shaved clean. And any calls from upstairs or below, any signal wriggling toward him through the waves of tumultuous static, he failed to register or acknowledge. As people do, he imagined, when they’ve zoned out a little too far for a little too long.
In the end of course he’d chosen the wine the same way he always did: more or less at random and for all the wrong reasons. He liked the label, the logo, the stately antique font. He liked that it was in French, a language he did not speak well, though he often found himself employing it anyway. And then there was the price. Teddy didn’t like to think of himself as the sort of man who chose his purchases based on money alone—though he was exactly that sort of man—but the price in this case ($12) appealed at once to his vanity, his thrift, and his sense of modesty. He took the bottle to the register and paid for it in cash. The clerk handed him his change. There was not so much of it as he’d hoped. Then he crumpled the receipt in his pocket and made for the car, where the engine was still running, his wife still leaning against the side window where he’d left her, eyes open but abstracted, her thoughts picking their way fastidiously through some dewy inner forest.
After all his deliberations they were now running late. They drove in silence to the Dunns’, listening to the throb and purr of the engine shuddering beneath the hood. They could just as easily have been talking, but they weren’t. Teddy had been married long enough to realize that sometimes not talking signified a problem and sometimes it signified more or less the opposite and sometimes it signified nothing much at all. So much depended upon context. A word at breakfast, a missed opportunity in the bedroom, the tenor of a dinnertime sigh.
“How you doing over there?”
She didn’t answer. He looked at her, this person beside him, with real wonder and apprehension. Her black hair, threaded with gray, her white neck, her serious mouth, the elliptical blue smudge of her eyes, the milky veil of powder that clung to her cheek. Her long, inward-tapering fingers. Who was she? How was she doing? When he put on a piece of music, she invariably asked him to change it. When he cooked a special dinner or recounted some small triumph at work, her appreciation was mild, fleeting. It seemed they had wandered into yet another anteroom in the big house of marriage, a room with faded rugs and unpolished furniture and low-wattage lights. In the middle of sex they’d long for sleep, in the middle of sleep they’d long for sex, and so it came to pass they generally managed not enough of either, but simply—though it did not feel simple—lay stranded between, in the purgatorial half-light, while the second hand of the clock, feverishly amplified by silence, ticked and twitched. Sometimes you just had to muddle through o
n trust. Trust that your marriage was greater than the sum of its parts. Trust that even if you were only half-attentive toward each other—even if you held hands less often than you used to, kissed less soulfully than you used to; even if the only new thing about your bodies at this point was how not-new they were; even if the marriage, after twenty-two years, stubbornly refused to stabilize, refused to hold still and refused to change, even if it corseted and withheld as often as it gave and accommodated; even if it never got any easier, only harder, and then harder still—trust that this was what you’d signed up for, more or less. The epic struggle of two lives forced into one.
And theirs was a good marriage, Teddy thought. A busy, sexually ongoing affair, with interludes of comfort and laughter that eased the nerves and cajoled the heart to unclench its bloody fist. He didn’t even want to think about what a bad marriage was like. Though he often did, of course. Bad marriages were something of a growth industry among his friends. Bad marriages had too many interludes of comfort, and of the wrong kind. Comfort became a mistress, an object of guilt and pleasure, a silken, cooing presence who understood how hard you worked, how oppressed you were by the needs of others. And then in time the guilt faded, and there was only the comfort, and the necessity for more of it, for a larger and better appointed comfort zone in which to lounge around by yourself. And your spouse was only a shadow, a dark mirror in another part of the house. And the good marriage was no longer a good marriage. Yes, Teddy had seen it happen. He’d seen it happen to a number of his friends.
“You were out in the yard today,” Gail said. “I can always tell. You get all flushed and healthy and purposeful-looking when you work outside.”
“Do I?”
“Mmm.”
But it hadn’t happened to them. He had not abandoned Gail: he loved her more intemperately, depended on her more absolutely than ever. He had wanted a strong-willed woman and he had got one. If she had turned out a bit too strong-willed, and if it was on some level baffling and depleting to be married to her all the time, that was hardly Gail’s fault; no doubt it was baffling and depleting to be married to anyone all the time. That was only the B side of the record. The A side, the money side, was this: this feeling right now, this bottomless proximity, like a reservoir that never emptied, only filled.
His marriage was the triumph of his life. To have already done it, chosen and been chosen, to have made that profound, implausible compact, and out of what? Ephemeral longings, scraps of loneliness and lust, a catalog of insecurities as long as one’s arm, and a piece of embossed paper from the state licensing authorities. Miraculous.
“I got a lot done out there.”
“Of course you did,” she said. “You work yourself like a pack-horse. You’re so impatient to get it all done, you wind up going twice as fast as you should.”
Then he remembered his irritation that morning when he’d discovered that the work gloves were missing, and the garden hose, hopelessly tangled, was unscrewed at the source, and the hedge clippers were rusty from being left out in the rain. People were often careless about things they didn’t care about. And Gail was careless about a lot of things, most of which Teddy did care about, and arguably too much. But to bring out his ledger of petty complaints now would invite an argument, so he kept them to himself, the way people do in good marriages, and for all he knew in bad marriages too.
“I picked up a bottle of Grenache,” he informed her modestly. “Some new hybrid. Anyway it was on sale.”
“You don’t need to justify getting a nice wine. It’s what people do.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” Her tone in all fairness was not so much argumentative as absent, preoccupied. She was in one of her lonely planet moods for which he could find no index. “Forgive me. I’m feeling punky tonight. I don’t know why.”
“Maybe we should have stayed home.”
“Interesting how you always say that the very minute before we arrive.”
“It’s because I always mean it, I guess.”
“At home with me and the girls, you’re restless and bored, you resist going out, but then if someone—i.e., me—forces you out, you wind up enjoying yourself way more than I do. No offense but it’s a little maddening, frankly.”
“And here I am thinking it’s quirky and endearing.”
“I know you do, Bear.”
“I mean,” he said, “thinking you think it’s quirky and endearing.”
The silence that followed this exchange, like that which preceded it, might have been either charged with meaning or devoid of it—or neither, or both—but there was no time to investigate it now, they were already pulling up to the Dunns’ front yard, already at the door, already saying hello, already exchanging pleasantries in the language of that foreign country they still visited occasionally, where other people lived.
Immediately upon entering the house he all but threw the bottle of wine at his hostess, Fiona Dunn. Fiona, without bothering to peek inside the bag, handed it off to her husband, Alex, who coolly inspected the label with his usual air of half-concealed superiority and then whisked it off to the kitchen. Where, Teddy reflected dolefully, it would go the way of all wines, sitting around for months in the company of other bottles, probably better ones, brought by other friends, probably better ones, from previous dinner parties that would probably turn out to be better ones too.
In Fiji—where had he read this?—when a warrior comes to your hut for dinner, he brings a fresh corpse along. It’s what people do. But then Teddy Hastings was no one’s idea of a warrior.
Another thing people do, he thought, is attend dinner parties on Saturday evenings when they’d prefer to stay home and watch the basketball play-offs on their enormous flat-screen televisions. Teddy as a rule hated dinner parties. He hated small talk; hated listening to stories about other people’s children; hated eating and drinking to excess around other people’s tables; hated above all knowing that despite these aversions he’d inevitably wind up doing these things anyway, and enjoying them more than he should. Already tonight he’d knocked down a glass and a half of wine, several generous handfuls of pistachios, and a dozen olives, and they’d only been here ten minutes. You’d have thought he’d starved himself all day when in fact he’d had a late and enormous lunch.
To restrain his rogue appetites he thrust one hand deep into the pocket of his slacks. There it had to content itself fingering his keys and jiggling his change and, just incidentally, brushing up against his penis, which, summoned by friction, began to lift its stupid head, and rise.
A boner! At his age! He didn’t know whether to be appalled or relieved.
He waited for someone to notice, to call attention to the bulge in his pants, the swollen contours of his shame. But no one was even looking his way. The house was full of people whom on some level to which Teddy did not quite have access at the moment he recognized to be his dearest friends. And yet they all steered clear. Who wouldn’t? For months he’d been like this, moody and erratic, susceptible to sudden panics. Aside from Gail and his daughters, one of whom was in a foreign country and the other might as well have been, and three or four people at school—Carol, his secretary; Jeff Mazza in PE; Renee Daley—he tolerated no one. For a while he’d had hopes for that new hire, Pierce, in the friendship department, had gone so far as to recruit him for the Wild Bunch, his weekly basketball game, but after a few months of intermittent attendance the guy had stopped coming altogether. Unreliable. Anyway he wasn’t much of a ballplayer, Pierce. He ran the floor well but he lacked aggressiveness; he never went all out, never drove to the hole or took a charge. Teddy knew the type. Philip too used to hang at the top of the key, biding his time, avoiding contact with the big studs in the paint. Mama’s boys. He knew what they were like. That pampered, ironical look. That indolent slouch. That sly, grudging aura of not-yet. That was what came of being the favorite, the darling, the bright, skinny, good-looking one who waits for a clear shot…
Yet here
was the injustice: Somehow, when he was with such people, Teddy’s own best qualities—his force and vigor in the paint, his ability to do things and not just think about them, to fix a car, lay a floor, patch a wall—seemed trivial and commonplace even to him. Why? Especially when neither Philip nor, he was willing to bet, Oren Pierce had ever owned so much as a working wrench?
How easy it was, to step back and view this entire evening at the Dunns’ through Philip’s end of the telescope. In their ordered happiness Philip would find only smugness; in their warmth and vitality he’d see sublimation; in the subjects they spoke of he’d home in on the vanity and the materialism but miss the implied depths, the worries and sorrows that shadowed the words. It was unfair of course, it was ungenerous and reductive, but then there was no arguing with Philip. Philip was dead. Philip was gone. Philip was exempt; he floated like a thought bubble over the comic strip of the days.
“What’s the matter with you tonight?” Gail asked. “You’ve hardly said hello to anyone.”
“Well, no one’s said hello to me.”
“What are you, four?”
“Actually I was looking for that bottle of wine we brought. Have you seen it? I was hoping for a taste before it disappeared.”
She put a hand on his arm. “Maybe you should ease up in the wine-tasting department. Pace yourself.”
“I am pacing myself.”
“I realize that,” she said. “That’s what worries me.”
Across the street, dogs were barking behind invisible fences. Fringes of twilight hung on the trees. The Bonavidas were pruning their rosebushes, the leaves so green you could not see the thorns. The apple trees were in blossom; brown wasps, sun-dazed, bonged against the screens. Women whisking bare-armed down the sidewalks, the blooms on their cheeks like the flush of love. The sway of their soft, fruit-colored dresses—plum, gooseberry, peach—turned on a sprinkler in Teddy’s chest, sent forth a spray of liquid melancholy that was indistinguishable from happiness.