“No. Now go downstairs and watch your sisters. I told you I have some business calls to make.” Pete points to the phone on Liz’s night table as if to validate his fabrication.
“I knew you’d say that,” Jake whines. “I knew you wouldn’t even ask me why I wanted a snake or anything like that.”
“I know why you want a snake.”
“Oh yeah! Let’s hear it. Why?”
“Because you know I hate snakes. Why else would you want one?”
“Oh, duh!” Jake responds, and he turns and flees down the hallway.
Pete stares after the boy. Sometimes he gets to thinking that his son’s uprisings are all his fault, that somewhere along the line he must have ceased giving the boy as much love and attention as he requires. Each time he considers this, he resolves that the next time Jake confronts him he will bombard him with fatherly affection and see what that will do. He should have said, Yes, sure, I’ll get you a snake, what color? because Jake is as squeamish about reptiles as he is. He should have called his bluff. But Jake’s confrontations always catch him off guard, and he never seems to react the way he intends to.
Sighing, he gets up from the bed and goes to the door. He can hear the Pee Wee Herman video beginning downstairs. Liz taped it for the kids before Pee Wee’s faux pas. He told her to rid of it, but she only laughed at him. (He is weak and insignificant—Bly’s “passive man.” Otherwise, he would confront her more often, take charge of the children himself—in a way that does not provoke laughter.)
He knows that Pee Wee will incite his children to new levels of impropriety, and ordinarily he would go down and demand that they turn the video off. But today he is happy enough to think that at least he won’t be disturbed again any time soon. He closes the door, and then, because the situation demands certainty, drags the reading chair over and sets it up against it. He makes a mental note, not for the first time, to buy a lock. But even as he is making it, he is simultaneously dismissing it; he has no idea how one installs such a device.
Adjusting his glasses, he returns to the night table with greater conviction than before. Except when she goes off to visit her father—which is where she went today—Liz is almost always home. Who knows when he will have this opportunity again?
This time he grasps the knob firmly, jerks the drawer open, and stares at its contents. He sees the Bible he bought her one Christmas (he bought them all Bibles that year) and which she never opened. (“Isn’t your Bly a contradiction to your religious beliefs?” she asked him once. “No,” he answered, but he was relieved when she shrugged and picked up her own book.) Beside it is an oblong cardboard box (which he recognizes as belonging to the Monopoly game) containing some of the mysterious contrivances that Liz uses to keep her hair in place. And beside that, the diaries, four slim volumes.
He closes the drawer gently. Now he has to find the keys. Thinking they may be in Liz’s dresser, he crosses the room and fumbles in her underwear drawer. But just then the door creaks against the weight of the chair he set against it. Closing the drawer hastily, he strides across the room and bends down beside the chair so that he is eyeball to eyeball with his daughter. “What?” he asks.
“Brigit wants her ba-ba,” Katie whispers.
“So get it for her,” Pete sings.
“Okay.”
This will never do. He has to get the kids out of the house. Nothing would please Jake more than to be able to tell his mother that he caught his father looking through her diaries. Pete returns to the night table and flips through the phone book and locates Mrs. Bowker’s number. There is something strange about the old woman, but the fact is, she lives right next door, and Pete remembers Liz mentioning that she offered to sit with the kids.
Mrs. Bowker answers before the completion of the first ring, startling Pete. He moves to the window and glances out, half expecting to see her framed in her own bedroom window with the phone in her hand looking back at him. He rehearsed his inquiry, but now it takes him several false starts to deliver it. Mrs. Bowker laughs and declares that she can’t think of anything more pleasant than spending some time with his children. Pete, who hoped for this response, is nonetheless perplexed by it and removes the receiver from his ear to stare at it for a moment before replacing it.
He hurries downstairs and tells Jake and Katie to get their jackets on. Brigit’s jacket he locates himself. While he is struggling to get her indifferent limbs into it, Jake asks if this is supposed to be a fire drill. When he hears that they are only going over to Mrs. Bowker’s for awhile, Jake complains that he is too old to have a baby-sitter. And Katie insists on knowing where Pete has to go so suddenly.
Pete lowers his head to Brigit’s shoulder. She smells of baby powder and dog hair. “I’m going out to get something that will be a surprise,” he says, lifting his head and smiling at his shrewdness. (Shrewdness, Bly says, is not the same as deception. The naive man deceives. The shrewd man has “Zeus energy.”) Katie and Jake eye each other suspiciously, but as a surprise is intrinsically desirable, they say nothing more.
When Mrs. Bowker opens the door, Pete sees that her three grandchildren are there visiting, turning somersaults on the furniture beyond her. He wonders if he has made a mistake in asking her to mind his kids. What if one of them gets hurt? What if one of the bigger ones knocks Brigit down? And all because he’s decided that he must get a look at his wife’s diaries, that he must, after all these years, ascertain whether she loves him or not.
He opens his mouth to explain to Mrs. Bowker that he has changed his mind, but he can’t think how to say so without seeming impolite. Katie and Jake, meanwhile, have already divested themselves of their jackets and are moving toward the Bowker tumblers. Mrs. Bowker extends her arms toward him, and the next thing he knows, Brigit is gone and he is staring at the door knocker.
As he turns toward his yard, his eye falls on his car. Here is another problem; he told the kids he was going out. He thinks of leaving with the diaries, but that seems a far greater offense than simply reading them in the house. He hurries in, finds the car keys, rushes back out, and drives around the block. Recalling that the Peabodys are vacationing in Florida, he parks the car in front of their house. He locks the door and jogs back home, attaining the back door by passing behind the hedges that separate his house from his other neighbor’s, Mr. Benson’s. Panting, he runs upstairs and begins to hunt for the diary keys again.
As he is dragging the reading chair back over to the door, he hears the dog crying in the kitchen and considers letting Simon out but then decides that the kids might see him from a window. Simon is a labrador retriever, but he has never retrieved anything inedible in his life. Furthermore, he is old and his bladder muscles don’t work as well as they used to. Pete resolves to clean up the mess later.
Everything seems to be going wrong. Maybe it is a sign. He rolls his eyes ceiling-ward, half expecting to hear an authoritative voice declaring that this is, in fact, the case. His index finger inches its way to his bottom lip and drags it down to his chin. The Peabodys might have asked the police to drive past their house in their absence to make sure there are no signs of foul play. He didn’t think of that before. Would his old white Volvo appear to be an indication of foul play? He lowers his head and slowly pulls at the drawer. Trying not to look at the Bible, he removes the diaries and spreads them out on the bed. Although he knows it’s ridiculous, his mind affixes itself to a vision of the police bursting in, bounding over Simon’s puddle, rushing up the stairs, kicking in the door, hurling aside the reading chair …
He feels he must be quick about his business. His mind is like a tornado cloud, swirling along with its police vision and rapidly picking up other visions along the way. He finds the keys in Liz’s drawer and unlocks all the diaries. Thumbing through them with trembling fingers, he manages to find the one that is most recent and begins to read—or rather to skim, because he is too nervous to actually take much in. He catches words, phrases, enough to assure him that he has
n’t come to anything pertinent yet. Then, as he is turning a page, he sees Maddy’s name. He slows down and reads an entry word for word, guiltily, because his own name is not even mentioned. It isn’t long before he forgets the reason he came to the diaries in the first place.
The last entry was written two days before his birthday, two days before he decided that he had to find out whether his wife loved him or not. In it, Liz laments that she hasn’t seen Maddy in almost two weeks. And here is his name too. Pete worries so much, he reads. It’s funny. He wants me to live in the present, and here he doesn’t live there himself. His worrying puts him in the future, always speculating on what’s going to happen and never on what’s happening now. If he knew about Maddy, he’d say I’m still living in the past. He’d say I haven’t kept my side of the bargain. But I have, in fact. Maddy isn’t the past for me. She is the present. Pete’s the one who’s failed.
He is numb, and even putting away the diaries and the keys seems to require more concentration that he can easily muster. Like a sleepwalker, he glides down the stairs with his eyes fixed on nothing. He goes out into the street, walks around the block, finds his car, and begins to drive.
He is not ready for the kids yet and is glad he still has an hour or so before he is due to pick them up. He remembers that he told them that he was going out for a surprise. If he returns without one, they will complain to Liz. She will want to know where he went if not to obtain a surprise. He can imagine himself retorting, “Well, you’re the one who’s full of surprises!”
So now, even with this other thing on his mind, he has to think about the damned surprise.
All these years he assumed she was trying along with him; that she had put the past to rest and had set a course for the future. He wanted to join a support group, but she wouldn’t hear of it. It was too public for her. They agreed to support each other, to become bigger rather than smaller, to embrace their grief rather than have it embrace them. For her, it meant having more children. For him, it meant putting his talents into the service of others. But she never followed through; she never even tried. She had the children, yes, but it was only a cursory gesture; he can see that now. When he talks to her about his concerns regarding Katie and Jake, she laughs. She says he worries too much, that there’s nothing wrong with them, that he’s forgotten what it’s like to be a child, that they’ll grow up to be just fine. The time he’s put in considering that, trying to see if she might be right. Her carefree attitude, he understands now, has its foundation in indifference. She doesn’t care how they turn out anymore than she cares about their marriage. Her focus is all on the past. She’s brought the past into the present so as to be able to justify it. His Maddy, not dead, but living yet. A ghost! Her effort was a half-effort. She hasn’t kept her side of the bargain at all.
As he is driving down Main Street, toward the strip mall, an idea slithers into his mind that is so impeccable that he nearly forgets about the terrible revelation he came across in Liz’s diaries. He could go to the pet shop and buy a snake. He imagines that that is precisely what Batman would do. A snake, he remembers Bly saying, represents the dark side of manhood. Maybe, if he could get Jake to recognize his dark side … The children will think he spent the entire afternoon searching for just the right one. So what that he detests snakes. Jake will see it as an act of love. Later, he can poison the thing. Or, if Jake admits that he’s afraid of snakes too, exchange it for a hamster. He will have his alibi, and additionally, the admiration of his son.
As he parks, he notices a small boy on a bicycle, a two-wheeler with training wheels. The boy, who can’t be more than four or five, is riding parallel to the sidewalk, in the parking lot. Pete guesses that he must be the son of one of the strip mall’s merchants.
He bypasses the child and goes into the pet shop. The woman behind the counter seems familiar to him. He stares at her a moment, trying to remember. Then it comes to him: His wife once belonged to a drawing group, and this young woman was the model the night the group met at his house. He took her coat when she came in. He recalls that he was hurt because Liz didn’t bother to introduce him. But later, Liz showed him her sketches. The woman had modeled nude.
She asks if he needs some help, and already heading toward the back of the shop, he shakes his head. There, staring at the snakes, he considers the amount of eye-contact that will be needed in order for him to make a purchase. He imagines that the woman will recognize him and assume that Liz showed him the nude drawings of her, that she will know very well that he has pondered the slope of her breast and the curve at the top of her thigh. It will be awkward. He wonders, too, in what manner of container one carries home a snake. He imagines the snake he has singled out (the smallest of the lot) sitting beside him in the car in a clear plastic bag, writhing, sincere in its effort to find a way out. Pulling his jacket collar up around his face, Pete bends his head and skulks away.
Outside, he wonders how he will introduce Jake to the Wild Man when he hasn’t met him himself. He wonders too whether he should tell Liz what he knows. If he doesn’t, he will be conspiring with her dark side. But if he does …
He is so busy wondering that he nearly bumps into the child on the bicycle. He hurries past him and gets into his car. He is just about to pull away when he changes his mind, turns off the ignition, and gets out again. “Get up on the sidewalk!” he hollers. “Don’t your realize that you could be hit by a car? What do you think will become of your parents then?”
The little boy’s face flashes with indignation, but he rides to the slope and turns up onto the walk anyway.
MARTHA
Martha Bowker herds her daughter and grandchildren toward the door. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she replies impatiently over Marilyn’s protestations. As soon as the last one is out, she closes the door and leans against it to collect herself. She called Marilyn and told her to come and get her brood hours ago, when she first learned that Pete was coming over with his. She can’t imagine what took her so long.
She appraises the living room. There are papers and crayons and game pieces everywhere. But at least Pete’s kids are settled now. The baby, Brigit, is rocking herself to sleep on the rug in the hallway. Her constant drooling is enough to make anyone sick, but Martha doesn’t think that it will stain. Katie is in the kitchen eating the cookies that the children practically burned the house down making. And Jake, the one that she has been waiting all afternoon to have a word with, is all alone, finally, sitting on the sofa in front of the television set.
Martha takes a deep breath and detaches herself from the door. “Do you lovely children have a regular sitter?” she asks pleasantly as she makes her way around the sofa.
Jake glances at her. Then his eyes return to the screen. “Mom hardly ever goes out,” he answers flatly.
Martha sees that he has finished his Hershey bar. She reaches into her housecoat pocket and fishes out another. Then she sits down beside him and gently places the last of her lures on his lap. Jake glances at it, then at her. He leans away from her, until his elbow comes to rest on the arm of the sofa. She waits until he has begun to unwrap the candy to speak. “Well, she’s out today,” she persists, but Jake only shrugs.
Martha sits back and folds her arms. The boy is impossible, no help at all. There are times when she thinks that she should just give up. There is another neighbor, Eric Benson, who is of nearly as much interest to her as the Arroways. (It is a fact that Mr. Benson rakes his leaves and weeds his garden by moonlight.) But the problem is that Mr. Benson’s house is on the other side of the Arroways’. Martha can barely see into his yard from her window. Unless she can come by a like-minded assistant, the possibilities for infiltration are practically non-existent. But that is something to think of later.
She plants a smile on her face and pretends to be enjoying the show along with Jake. She laughs when he laughs, grunts when he grunts—although she doesn’t even know what they’re watching. When she notices that a commercial has appeared on
the screen, she says, “So, how is your mother feeling these days?”
“Good,” Jake says without looking at her.
Good. Well, at least that was concise, if not exactly heartfelt. Martha stares at the television images and tries to remain patient. She scours her mind for the right question, the one that will effect a discourse between them. She reminds herself that she must advance carefully. She is branching out now, after all. Some new tactics may be called for.
When her preoccupation first began, back in 1980, its target was primarily Pete. She was in the hospital (for surgery on a broken hip) when she realized that the Peter J. Arroway whose novel had been transporting her from her unsettling experience was the very same Pete Arroway who lived next door to her. Not to say that his book was all that good. Its characters (mostly philosophy professors and their spouses) were uniformly ostentatious. And by contrast, the plots he devised for them were as unabashedly trite as those of any soap opera. But the language which he devoted to his otherwise inferior tome, Martha thought, was actually quite beautiful. And thus, when she learned from one of her visitors of the terrible tragedy that had befallen the Arroways during her prolonged hospitalization, her reaction, after her initial feelings of pity and compassion had passed, was to wonder whether the experience might effect in Pete’s work a depth of realism that would be equal to the prose of which he was capable.
But in her subsequent encounters with Liz (who walked the family cur during the time frame in which Martha was likely to venture forth to retrieve the morning paper), she learned that Pete had given up fiction writing altogether. And probe though Martha did, Liz could not be made to say whether this was the result of the tragedy, the reviews of the novel, some of which were scathing, or the fact that Pete had written three unpublishable manuscripts prior to it.
Martha’s curiosity in the matter increased by the day, and there were many times when she thought to approach Pete herself, perhaps even to encourage him toward the literary promontory (though it was a mere hummock) which she had envisioned for him. But on those rare occasions when they emerged from their doors simultaneously, she received no more than a quick nod and a mumbled greeting from him, and she had no opportunity to initiate the interview she intended.
Homebodies Page 6