“I was thinking it would be a good name for a WWF character—you know, ‘The European,’” he says in a cheesy announcers voice. “And he’d be all tall and blond and wearing assless leather pants and a scarf or something.” His voice, he realizes, is rising inappropriately.
“Riiiii-iiiight,” Mindy says. The girl is a real pill. She probably balances her checkbook on-line and reads the wedding section of the Globe and sends theme cards to people on their birthdays and when they’re in the hospital. She probably loves the Steve Miller Band.
Stephan smiles benevolently and lifts the camera to his eye. “So how do you know Caroline again?” he asks, panning around the room.
“School, growing up, family.” Stephan’s smile strikes him as condescending.
“And you said you’re Denise’s boyfriend’s son?”
“Fiancé’s.”
“Right.” Stephan is now focusing his camera on some older couple standing by the wedding cake, but there is something phony about his show of casual distraction. Rock senses a certain real interest in his voice—as if he is trying to determine something. “And where was school again?” Stephan asks in the same tone.
Rock is beginning to feel like he is being interviewed. “Quilton. And how about yourself, you went to . . . ?”
“Rindge and Latin—public school, in Cambridge.” He says it hastily.
There is a sharp intake of breath at the far side of the tent as the poor bird, which has been batted at with a whole retinue of white linen napkins and caterers’ serving tongs, is swatted onto the ground and then, apparently (Rock sees its body fly up from the ground in an odd, closed-winged, not exactly aerodynamic trajectory), kicked out into the night air by a wiry gray-haired man in a tuxedo. There are a few nervous, halfhearted cheers from the crowd, most of whom seem undecided on this radical final solution to the bird problem. The man presses out from between them, brushing his hands off as if he has done no more than pick up a fallen roll or uncork a bottle of champagne. It is, of course, Jack Dunlap. Rock finds himself grinning. The guy is a true weirdo. People are looking after him with the kind of hostile, awe-filled consternation that always seems to follow Spider-Man in the Sunday morning comics.
“Excuse me,” Rock says, and turns to find Stephan has already moved a few yards away to get a better angle on Mr. D’s exit. The guy’s intentions are hard to get a read on, but whatever they are, Rock doesn’t like him: too smug and a little sneaky somehow. He makes his own rapid zigzagging path around the tables toward the side of the tent Jack Dunlap has retreated to. The vodka tonics have Rock seeing in sharp, abrupt chunks—a slick black helmet of hair, a heave of too much goose-bumpy cleavage, a half-eaten platter of bacon-wrapped scallops. “And they had a jukebox, and spiked punch, and everyone wore saddle shoes! It was a riot,” a woman with a ridiculous UFO-like hat is saying as Rock pushes past.
When he reaches Caroline’s father, he is out of breath and he can feel his heart beating in his left middle toe from having been ground under the leg of someone’s chair. “Mr. Dunlap,” Rock says when he is within range. He is panting slightly.
Jack turns around with a blank look on his face and then narrows his eyes with recognition. “Ron,” he says warily.
“Rock.” Rock nods encouragingly.
Jack does not correct himself. They are at the side of the tent that looks out onto the rolling swells of the golf course, blanketed in a soft moonlit darkness. Beside them a table of elderly people (five chatty women and three fairly subdued men, one of whom is staring directly at Rock with an incredulous expression and a bit of cheese stuck to the corner of his mouth) is still working on plates of roast beef, potatoes au gratin, string beans, and wilty-looking salad with pomegranate seeds, which must be murder on their dentures. It occurs to Rock, now that he has made a beeline over, that he has nothing to say.
“Quite a play the other day,” he finally says, and coughs.
Jack nods his head in perfunctory, distracted consent. His eyes are sweeping the tent in search of—who would he be looking for? Rock follows his glance and finds it stops on Caroline. There she is, in line for the buffet with two older women and Adam Lowell, a tall spindly boy a few years younger than Rock, with the kind of neck and shoulders that seem to taper into, rather than balance, his head. A human penis with little wire-rimmed glasses and enough goofy good spirits to float the Hindenburg. On the other side of the table the European, which is what Stephan has become in Rock’s mind now, is standing at one of the tent posts filming them, his video camera protruding from between the puffy white flowers the post is wrapped with.
“You know anything about that guy?” Jack asks.
“Who, Adam Lowell? He went to—”
“With the camera.”
Rock darts a look at Jack, who is standing impassively, arms folded across his chest.
“Oh—he’s making some kind of movie. . . .” Rock pauses.
In line, Adam throws his head back and laughs at something Caroline has said. Adam is always worming his way into girls’ hearts, taking the unmenacing, androgynous, best-friend back door to their affections, and, once within the general parameters, making weaselly, whiny, desperate dashes at their hearts. Rock almost feels sorry for him for the first time ever; everything from his body language to his stupid bow tie presents a perfect, obnoxious vision of boisterous phoniness that Stephan must be lapping up.
Jack seems to be waiting for Rock to continue, although he really has nothing else to say. “It’s about Concord,” Rock continues. “Some kind of documentary—I don’t know, social commentary or something.”
Jack cocks his head to look at Rock directly for the first time. It is not exactly an encouraging look, but the alcohol begins pulling words out of Rock’s mouth like one of those trick streamers under a clown’s tongue.
“He’s made a few already—about prominent places, you know, and their seamy undersides. . . . He’s got a degree in women’s studies from Sarah Lawrence, I think, and I guess he used to be a harpist for some New Age choir, but it was too hard on his fingers or his back or something—he’d been training since he was a kid. He’s still in therapy about it—he’s”—Rock makes the quotation gesture with his fingers—“‘working through it’ in his films.”
Jack is still staring at Rock, but frowning now.
Jesus—how did he get started on this? Dunlap probably thinks he’s friends with the guy or something—some kind of harp music fanatic or art film buff.
“Bullshit,” Jack says, looking back across the room at Stephan, who is now talking to Adam and Caroline, who looks somewhat disconcerted to have found herself being filmed.
“Well . . .” Rock shrugs himself lower into his jacket and looks into the bottom of his empty glass. There is a wet cocktail napkin stuck to it that he hasn’t even noticed—it seems suddenly equivalent to walking around with a piece of toilet paper on the bottom of his shoe.
Jack makes a sharp sudden sound, which at first Rock thinks is an outraged yelp, but it isn’t. It’s laughter. Jack Dunlap is laughing. A triumphant gloating feeling pushes up from Rock’s abdomen. A salty breeze blows through the tent from the ocean. It is turning out to be an all right night after all. Rock and Jack stand side by side, staring across the room.
Almost at the front of the buffet line now, Adam is demonstrating something with his hands, describing points in the air with emphatic gestures while Caroline and Stephan look on. His right hand sweeps from his shoulder toward the table and knocks the neat roll of silverware out of Caroline’s hand. “Sorry, sorry,” his voice carries all the way across to where Jack and Rock are standing as he leans over to pick up the dropped pieces. Caroline leans to help, but before she disappears behind the table she smiles at Stephan—a sort of gentle, amused smile accompanied by a little helpless shrug. There is something sweet about it, almost childish—and more than that—something intimate.
The triumphant feeling washes out of Rock completely and in its wake he can feel the fo
olish smile he has been wearing fall from his lips. Beside him Jack has shifted his gaze up at the pointed roof of the tent, as if maybe he is hoping for another bird in need of disposing. Across the tent, Stephan has lifted his camera and pointed it directly at them. Rock considers giving him the finger, but somehow, even in his drunkenness, he has a clear sense that this would be exactly what Stephan is looking for. Except, it dawns on him, that it would be him, and not Jack Dunlap. And judging from where the camera has been all night, Jack Dunlap seems to be at the heart of what the guy is after.
JACK IS NOT INITIALLY PLANNING to make this little tromp out onto the golf course his exit from the Krasdale wedding. He just needs fresh air. And silence—the Coughlin kid has talked his ear off. The band is honking away at some frantic swing tune he recognizes vaguely from every other wedding he has ever been to. Lots of sliding horns and quick twists—the kind of music that made him feel like a lumbering idiot when he was a boy in dancing school. Jack has never been a fan of dancing, or, for that matter, of music. There is always something intrusive about it; something about the composition of notes and melodies that makes him feel manipulated. He knows nothing of them except that they are constructed, put together with the same cunning and precision that goes into building a house or a legal argument.
When he was a young man, he discovered a collection of dusty old records that had belonged to his mother, who had been, at this point, reduced in his mind to an ethereal black and white image, the smell of her perfume, and the click of heels across polished marble. Rhapsodies by Dvorak, the Mozart Requiem, some violin songs by a composer named Kreisler. He played these one afternoon in his Harvard dorm room and was sucked away into some other time and place where he did not have to keep his hands busy or his brain active, but could just sit, for hours in the brown-paneled room, watching the dust motes catch the afternoon sunlight and the snow outside be enveloped, slowly but surely, in icy blue shadow. And it made him feel what can only be described as real sorrow—unlike anything he had ever felt before: filled with not just visions, but whole pieces of himself as the little boy climbing the creaky, mothball-smelling back steps to bed in Helen’s empty house alone, or building, secretly, a model airplane in the damp basement; spending Thanksgiving by himself in the cold, abandoned dormitory of his boy’s school. His whole person was taken over and filled up with this great, oppressive sense—of all despicable things—of self-pity! He had been swept away by this unfathomable substance of arranged sounds into a deep state of melancholy. It was a profound manipulation; he has been suspicious of music ever since.
The wedding tent is set up away from the main building of the Ponkatawset Club, at the low end of the back lawn, where ordinarily parties are not allowed but which Skip’s father, Hank Krasdale, having financed the club dining room renovation, has been given special permission to occupy. On one side of the tent there is a small wood—a carefully planted stand of fast-growing pine trees—and on the other, there is the golf course, glistening faintly in the moonlight. Here, beyond the throng of bodies and moist wine-scented air of the tent, the temperature drops pleasantly and there is a cool, damp breeze rushing out of the pines across the dark grass. Jack takes a deep breath and starts out toward the rise of the third hole; here he is one man, distinguished from the earth around him by his bones and blood and movement, not the color of his tuxedo jacket, the way he stands, the meaningless words coming out of his mouth. This is how he likes it. Why did he even come to this ridiculous event? The only reason he is even Skip’s godfather is because when Skip was born, Hank wanted to buy the field Jack owns across the street from him, which Jack told him, even at the time, he would never sell. The man is a smarmy numbskull known for going through extravagant, high-profile divorces—Jack would have refused to become the boy’s godfather if Faith hadn’t thrown such a fit about the impropriety of such a thing.
Walking up the small rise of the third hole, Jack makes out what looks like a person—a small person, a child, actually, stretched out on his back on the close-cropped putting green. It makes him stop short, sloshing bourbon over the side of his hand—he has forgotten he is still holding his glass. “Who’s that?” he says, and the figure scrabbles up to a sitting position. Jack can make out a squarish head and pudgy T-shirt-clad upper body—Joe Barrett. It sends an odd chill of recoil through him, enough that he has to stop himself from stepping backward.
“Joe?” he says, squinting through the darkness.
“Yeah.” The response is faint—too soft to sound as tough as it is obviously meant to.
“What are you doing out here?” Jack says.
“Nothing.” Joe is standing up now, looking down at his feet, one of which is scuffing back and forth over the short grass.
Joe is the son of the night watchman at the club, Jack’s gardener Wheelie Barrett’s brother. Jack would not know this if he hadn’t helped save the boy’s life last winter. The kid had been thrown from a snowmobile going, it was later noted, over thirty miles an hour on a winding path through the wildlife refuge that lies in the lowland between Monument and Bedford streets. He had cleared a good four feet in the air and landed on an old, half-snow-covered threshing machine, which sent one of its spikes straight through the soft flesh of his upper arm. Which was how Jack and Rosita found him—a small body, two corduroy-clad legs, a beige parka, and a lot of livid blood soaking out into the snow around him. They had been en route to the commuter train that Rosita was going to take back to her sister’s for the weekend when a small, hysterical woman in a dirty-looking down vest and rubber boots came waving and screaming out of the brush along the road. An ugly little thing, with scraggly hair, no hat, barely intelligible, she had led them over the crunchy, ice-encrusted snow to an unkempt trail obscured from the road by a stand of trees. And in the middle of this—the overturned snowmobile with an unconscious man (Joe’s drunken father) trapped beneath it, and the surreally spiked body of the boy. Eleven years old, and improbably skewered by the rusty spike of an ancient piece of farm machinery. He was screaming—a high, weak, inhuman sound that seemed as much a cause as a result of his trauma.
Out on the golf course there is a rush of wind through the pines. “Why aren’t you home in bed? It must be past your bedtime.” Jack is surprised to find his voice has taken on a thick, gruff quality.
“Waiting for Pop.” The boy shrugs. “He works until midnight.”
Jack nods and stares at him. A distinct strain of music separates itself from the general buzz of voices emanating from the tent and floats across through the night air toward them.
On that afternoon, in the snow, Jack had stood there, stunned for a moment, before snapping into action. He told the wailing, screaming woman (who turned out later to be Joe’s father’s girlfriend, the owner of the snowmobile) to shut up and go back to the road to call an ambulance. As if through some unspoken agreement, he and Rosita had moved toward the terrifying hump of dingy corduroys and blood-slickened parka. The spike had gone straight through the boy’s arm, about two inches below his shoulder—a half inch to the right and it would have been his lung; the boy would be dead now, Jack was told later. Rosita wrapped her hands around the boy’s arm and shoulder, steadying it, while Jack slid one hand under his back and one just below the spike, then wrenched upward in one smooth motion. There was the slick feeling of the nylon parka, like a wet sail, and the impossible sucking that must have been the boy’s flesh. And there was the sound of Rosita’s voice, strangely calm and low, speaking to the boy, stopping his wheezy screaming.
“You don’t want to wait inside?” Jack asks. “Or in there?” He motions at the tent.
“Un-unh.” The boy shakes his head emphatically.
“Hmm.” Jack nods and glances back at the bright squares of yellow light that compose the tent from here. It looks frivolous and impenetrable, like something on a television screen. He does not, he realizes, particularly want to go back there, either.
“Look,” the boy says, approaching him shyl
y. He is holding his arm out, pulling the T-shirt sleeve back with his other hand.
Jack looks at the pale appendage being proffered. It is marked with a deep, indented purple scar that spiders its way along the bone for about four inches between his elbow and shoulder.
“No more bandage,” Jack says heavily.
“I’m taking Spanish in school,” the boy offers, kicking at the ground again.
“Oh?” For a moment Jack can’t think what this is supposed to mean. But then he remembers: uno, dos, tres, was what Rosita was saying. This is how you count in my language, holding this boy’s hand and speaking as if they were sitting snugly on some living room sofa, her eyes unflinching.
“Aha.” Jack stiffens. A shriek of laughter from inside the tent hurtles through the darkness. The boy is looking up at him, waiting for something with a guarded but insistent expression on his face. Jack can almost feel this more than he can see it in the moonlight. “Well, take care of yourself,” he says, stepping backward and then turning to walk away from the tent toward the parking lot across the grass.
Behind him, he can feel the boy’s presence like a distant banging that works its way into a dream.
10
THE DRIVEWAY SHINES white and chalky in the moonlight, a wide bright path that narrows and darkens under the scraggly, intertwined limbs of the beech trees as it nears the road. There is no one home, no one around to hear, but Eliot walks softly anyway, measuring his footfalls so that the crunch of gravel beneath his feet is no louder than a sigh. On his back, his backpack sits snug and heavy, like a parachute. The night is sticky, heavier than the day, and full of the wet, decaying smells of summer.
Eliot is not actually scared out here in the night. It is scarier to be in the house, with its distant, darkened rooms and creaky sounds, its feeling of live emptiness. Inside, there are all those portraits of stern, unhappy-looking ancestors and the constant, unacknowledged presence of the attic overhead. Eliot is afraid to walk through the dining room, with its framed brass rubbing of Sir Percival in a full suit of armor, lifted from the knight’s own Westminster Abbey grave. People were smaller back then, according to Eliot’s mother. He has always taken this to mean the reproduction is Sir Percival’s actual size. Eliot is already two inches taller than the dark, skeletal form in the rubbing, and the image of its ghost walking around eye level with the sideboard is unnerving.
The Hazards of Good Breeding Page 11