by Robert Cohen
No, complaining did no good. Better to shut up and do things. Better to live in the present and speak with your body, as the animals do. The Hastings men were good at that. Even Philip, the brainy one, the sensitive, psychological one—okay, maybe he wasn’t much of a doer, but he had never been a complainer either. Until the end. At the end, he’d complained plenty.
And Teddy? The best you could say was that he was in a period of flux, oscillating between action and complaint. Not that anyone these days seemed eager to say the best of him.
For a while there after the funeral he’d consorted with grief like an alcoholic friend. There were dark, sloppy nights in underground rooms. There were bitter memories and dismal confessions and awkward meandering interludes of silence. But in the end grief had proved a disappointing companion. In the end grief had little to say that was new or interesting, and what it did say was numbingly repetitive, self-absorbed. Grief just sat there, sodden and grieving, taking up space. Teddy was glad to be rid of it.
True, he still cried a lot for no reason, and behaved erratically with friends. True, the human touch still eluded him. But he knew it would return soon, whether he wanted it to or not. Meanwhile Philip had left behind, back in Wayland, a six-year-old daughter, a ten-year-old son, and a forty-year-old widow, Sonya, who also cried a lot presumably, though on their own time. On the phone with Uncle Teddy they were perky and forbearing, as if sparing him their sadness, or hoarding it to themselves. Come to think of it, the only time he’d seen the little girl, Olivia, let fly with tears was at the catered lunch after the funeral, when she’d lost her favorite doll.
“Oh, I’m sure she’s not really lost,” he’d said, sitting in her father’s chair, across from her father’s wife, with a tiny plate of salmon on his lap from which he was laboriously picking the bones. “She’ll turn up, you’ll see. Know how I know?”
Grudgingly, the girl shook her head.
“It so happens I got a letter from her just the other day. What did you say her name was again?”
“Marguerite.”
“That’s what I thought. Yes, it was from her all right. Marguerite. She wrote to say that she was on vacation somewhere really nice, but planned to come home very soon.”
“Show me,” Olivia demanded unpleasantly. Her default mode, like her mother’s, was hardness, assertion. No doubt this would prove useful in the days ahead. “I want to see.”
“I’d love to show you, cookie. If I only had it with me.”
“Where is it?”
“Why, it’s on my desk back home, of course, with all my other important letters. Tell you what.” He ignored the disapproving looks he was getting from Sonya, who’d never been one for fantastical thinking. “I’m going home tomorrow. How about if I forward the letter to you when I get back? Would that be okay?”
The tight line of the girl’s mouth appeared to weaken. “I don’t think dolls even write letters,” she said.
“Sure they do.” Had he ever sent that letter? he wondered now. He’d been preoccupied at the time with his own grief and his own children and had failed to stay as close to Philip’s as he’d intended. Still, it wasn’t too late. Dear Olivia, he’d write the girl later, when he got home, I’m so sorry if my little vacation made you sad. I didn’t mean to go away for so long. But I’ll let you in on a little secret: sometimes even a doll gets tired of living in the same house all the time. The truth is, Olivia, even plastic people get worn-out sometimes, and feel the need for a break. But let’s talk about all this when we’re together again. Which I hope will be very soon…
“I’m coming,” he announced, to whoever might still be looking for him.
Making his way through the kitchen, he found the Dunns’ cat, a pendulous tabby, squinting up at him through vertical pupils from his seat by the cellar door. Teddy was not a cat person per se—given a choice, he preferred engagement and affection from the animal world; for silent self-sufficiency and languid indifference he had his daughters, he had his wife—but the wine he’d drunk and the imminence of food made him tender, expansive. He ran his palm over the fur, the scruffy neck, the bony brow, the moist rubbery seam on one ear, the scar of an old wound. The cat rose to his touch, arching and shuddering with a deep, languid pleasure, purring like a generator fed by some delirious current. Then, almost as an afterthought, the malicious little fucker reared around and bit him.
True, it wasn’t a proper bite, in that the skin, as Gail would point out later, wasn’t punctured. There was no blood and no pain. Only a vague, dreamy numbness, a sensation of distance. He recalled Livingstone’s account of being mauled by a lion: Like a patient watching his own surgery under chloroform. Not that this puny creature bore even the most vestigial and attenuated resemblance to a lion.
Still, all through dinner and dessert, his arm retained the impression of the animal’s fangs. Teddy waved it around, brandishing the marks like a license.
“Wait, do cats even have fangs?” Will asked. “I thought they were teeth.”
“Only until they sink into your skin. Then they become fangs.”
“How strange,” Fiona Dunn said. “He’s never done that before.” Her tone was musing, almost suspicious. Fiona was Gail’s partner, a specialist in property and divorce, sinewy and brittle and shrewd. Like all lawyers she was inclined to seek out precedents. “I can’t think of a single time.”
“Well, great,” Teddy said, “now that will be easy.”
“There’s not even any blood,” Gail observed. She sounded almost disappointed.
“I doubt poor old Rex is capable of drawing blood,” Alex said. “He’s, what, fifteen years old? He can hardly get down the stairs.”
“I’ve got news for you,” Teddy said. “Old Rex is healthier than you think. He’s got the jaws of a lion.”
“I think you’ve made your point,” Gail said.
“Poor baby.” Fiona held up the wine bottle. “Will this help?”
“God, yes.” The problem with other people’s pain, Teddy reflected wistfully, was that it was fundamentally boring, like other people’s dreams. There was no way to convey it that would make it feel real. “Pour away. Is that the wine I brought?”
“I have no idea. Was yours red or white?”
“Never mind.”
“I can’t drink red wine,” Carol Dennis put in. “It gives me headaches.”
“Me too,” Gail said.
“We have to finish this bottle,” said Alex. “It’s no good having leftover wine. The damn cork never goes back in.”
“That’s why I like screwtops,” Will said.
“Oh, you’re hopeless,” Carol said in an odd, high-pitched voice. “You haven’t the mistiest notion of civilization.”
“That’s from this old movie we just saw,” Will explained. “What was the name of that thing, hon?”
“Search me.”
“This big industrialist, he retires early and goes off to Europe. But his wife keeps stepping out on him with younger men…”
“Dodsworth,” Alex said, between yawns.
Will glared at him.
“C’mon, it’s a classic.”
Teddy pushed back his chair. “Now where are you going?” Gail asked.
“Be right back.”
She nodded, unsurprised. He was known for his turbulent stomach.
Going through the kitchen, he saw all the corn husks, the squeezed-out limes, the congealing oil rings and moldering cheese. It was an occasion for wonder, how so few people, in the satisfaction of such prosaic appetites, could leave so much detritus behind.
And lo, in the Dunns’ burgundy-colored bathroom, the intrepid explorer was rewarded for going forth. For there, in a brief but thorough survey of the medicine cabinet, he discovered the bottle of Percocet left over from Alex’s hernia operation the previous March.
He swallowed two pills down dry, then sat on the toilet leafing through magazines, waiting for something good to happen. It took a while. The scent of potpourri, of sti
ffened petals and spiced herbs, filled the room. Down the hall he could hear Gail’s low, confiding voice, “…the eternal husband. Every night in bed. You wouldn’t believe how good it is…”
Sometimes his love for his wife and the need to distance himself from the sound of her voice occupied roughly the same space in Teddy’s chest. He was not, he knew, the eternal husband; it was the name of a book by Dostoyevsky. With books as with legal cases, Gail preferred the strays. The minor ones, the difficult ones, the foreigners, the underdogs, the overlooked. Between her books and his you could hardly move around the bedroom at this point. But then books and marriages were well suited to each other, Teddy thought. Both were middle-class adventures: they conspired to keep you at home, sitting still, being good. Meanwhile the mind went sneaking off under cover of darkness, traveling the world, kissing strangers in parking lots, suffering torments and temptations no one could see.
It was what Philip used to call an unfunny paradox. After two decades as a therapist in Boston, Philip knew a lot about paradox. But Philip was dead. That was a paradox too.
Meanwhile Teddy could still hear her voice, that distant, cellolike murmur, going on about that goddamned book. No one interrupted her. Why would they? She was known as a woman of mercurial enthusiasms; it was part of her charm. The way her face in company opened suddenly like a flower, inviting you to gaze, just for a moment, at the pollinated brightness inside. Men were always trying to figure her out, wondering if she were brilliant in a way they failed to apprehend. True, she was no longer beautiful: her ankles were thick, her breasts had fallen, her round expressive face gone webby with lines. But she had a loveliness, an aura, sidelong and intermittent, like the thrum of a hummingbird; it brushed against you and was gone. Teddy liked to think of her as the kind of woman other men went home and thought about while they lay with their wives. Even he thought about her that way sometimes, a woman he’d spied across the room at a party, all slender and bright. Did everyone think such thoughts about his spouse? Or was it only people like him thinking them about people like her, people who seem always to be thinking about something else?
“I’ve always preferred the friend of the family,” Alex was saying.
“Who wouldn’t?” Fiona said.
The weight of the cell phone in Teddy’s pocket was like a stone. He took it out and frowned at the blank window. It was like trying to read a broken compass.
He wished his daughters were around. For each other, if not for him. They were sisters; no matter how old they grew or how badly they got along or how widely they traveled, a few slimy fragments of the original eggshell would cling to their backs. You carried them with you, the whole cast of characters. And yourself too, he thought. Yourself too.
Personally he’d have liked to be free of him by now, that fat, angry kid who still shadowed his days, bouncing tennis balls off the ceilings, grabbing the biggest brownies on the plate, pitching fits over slights. Impossible to satisfy that kid. Always wanting and demanding. Forever getting banished from the dinner table, sent upstairs to sulk like Achilles amid the disorder of his room. Crybaby, the old man would yell after him, what are you even crying about, crybaby? What now? Do you even know?
At least Philip, like Jacob to his blundering Esau, had learned to avoid trouble, to be subtle and contained. While Teddy got sent home from school for talking back to teachers, and thrown out of the Indian Guides for errant marksmanship with arrows, and grounded for lighting up Marlboros in the basement, Philip went on quietly earning A’s, leading his Cub Scout troop to distinction, playing first trumpet in the marching band, and smoking good Colombian grass all through high school in his immaculate bedroom. Yes, Philip had learned to fly under the radar. Teddy had taken longer to wise up.
Sometimes he wondered if he’d wised up too well. The crybaby had been banished from the table for good. But who was left? He felt his adult will, his rage for order and peace, hardening around him, constricting his bones like a cast.
“You think you’re unique?” Philip would taunt—a real Hastings tradition, taunting the firstborn—when he aired such complaints. “You think you of all people should be spared the terrible fate?”
“Of getting old you mean?”
“Of becoming yourself. Your one and only self.”
“See, that’s the thing, Philip. One’s not enough.”
“Good. Glad to hear it. ’Cause it’s people like you who keep me in business. Thousands of dollars in my pocket every month because one’s not enough, Philip, I want to be more fulfilled, Philip. It never ends,” he said. “The single ones want a spouse. The childless ones want kids. The ones with kids are so overinvolved they’ve forgotten how to be adults. Somewhere between the nursery and sickroom they got themselves lost. Now they want to know why. They want more meaning. More direction.”
“So what do you tell them?”
“I tell them to get loster.”
“What kind of a shrink are you? People come to you because they’re in pain, and here you’re telling them to go off and make things worse.”
“Exactly,” Philip said. “Not that I’m anyone to talk. My idea of a big adventure these days is to take off in the middle of the day and go see a matinee down at Coolidge Corner. Some long, depressing, highbrow stuff in Danish or Farsi. I like to sit in the back row and fantasize how maybe that mysterious young Japanese woman across the aisle will come put her tongue in my mouth.”
“Jesus, Philip.” Of course the Carthage Twin did not play afternoon movies in any language. “I don’t have time for that shit.”
“So come up with something better. You’re more resourceful than I am anyway. Your problem is you don’t know it. Somehow you’ve decided I’m the existentialist and you’re the nice selfless responsible citizen. That’s what’s killing you.”
“But it’s true. You are selfish. I am more responsible.”
“No offense, Ted, but I liked you better when you were running around the woods like an Indian shooting off those plastic arrows of yours. You used to beat me up for snoring at night, remember? Of course it was you that snored, but that’s okay, I didn’t mind. At least it was the real, genuine, aggressive you. Now you’re Mr. Goody Good, Mr. School Principal, Mr. Town Selectman, and what do you do? You beat yourself up. You call that progress? You think it makes dear old mom and dad, down in their graves, approve of you now? I bet you don’t even jerk off anymore, do you?”
“That’s a bet you’d lose, Bro.”
“Yeah, but how guilty do you feel after?”
Now, whether as a tribute to his late brother or as an insult to himself, or because he could think of no better way to pass so much time slumped on the toilet, Teddy went ahead and jerked off—a desultory little self-encounter that took all of two minutes and ended unsatisfactorily. He stood, hollow and light-headed, and zipped up his pants. The water in the toilet was pink for some reason. Away it went. Away the pale, gluey semen, spiraling and formless; he washed his hands of it completely. Back in the dining room, voices were rising in laughter. How long had he been gone? He turned off the light and followed the sound down the corridor to its source. It was like following a rope out of a cave.
“It’s this Israeli boy,” Gail was saying when he got back to the table. “Gabi. He just got out of the army. He’s on his way to Africa, she says.”
“Who?” Teddy asked.
“Nobody.” A membrane flicked over her eyes like a curtain. “Someone you don’t know.”
“Speaking of Africa,” Alex said, “I hear the Lions Club’s going this summer. There’s an article in the Courier. They’re going to build a school.”
“A worthy endeavor,” Fiona said drily.
“Don’t you find it offensive,” said Carol, “the way we talk about Africa like it’s all one place? It’s got like forty different countries in it.”
“Fifty-six,” Fiona said. “Jeremy did a report.”
“Wait, the Lions?” Will said. “Are those the guys with the party hat
s who drive those wacky little cars in parades?”
“Those are the Shriners,” Fiona said. “And they’re called fezzes.”
“Maybe I should volunteer,” Teddy said. “I could use a new project.”
“You’ve already built a school,” Gail reminded him. “You’ve been building that school for twenty-five years.”
“This would be literally though. Hammers and bricks. Rebar.”
“I don’t see the difference,” she said.
“My sister went to Guatemala last year,” Carol said, “with this Habitat group from Oregon? They built a whole house.”
“Don’t forget that environmental studies person she met down there,” Will said. “Ethan something.”
“I told you, they didn’t have sex. They just fell asleep in the same bed.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ve always dreamed of sleeping with an environmental studies person.” Alex was playing with a bit of candle wax, rubbing it into a ball. “Out under the canopy, with all the flora and the fauna.”
Fiona smiled coolly, flexing a bone in her wrist.
“It’s funny,” Carol said, “the trip only lasted a week. But she talks about it like it was the most intense experience she ever had. She almost didn’t come back, she said.”
“That’s not funny,” her husband said, “it’s sad. One week in the third world, she hammers some nails in a board, sleeps with a man she doesn’t know, and that’s how she makes a difference?”
“You’re right,” Carol said. “Absolutely. It’s a lot better sitting around watching old movies on TV.”
“Why didn’t she stay?” Teddy asked.
“There was a sale at Filene’s!” Will cried. “What do you mean, why didn’t she stay? This is her sister we’re talking about. The woman lives on sushi and lattes. She’s got a four-hundred-thousand-dollar house in Portland with radiant heating and cathedral ceilings. Also, I might add, a husband and two kids. How long do you think she’d last down there on her own, going off to the outhouse after another meal of plantains and curried goat?”