“Don’t call me again,” she’d told him. “I’ll see that the rest of my things are out within the month.”
“You’d better!” He hadn’t intended to shout, but that’s just what he did. “And you’d better keep Robbie away from this house!”
That’s when she hung up on him. Several times he had come close to phoning her back so that he might apologize, perhaps ask if they could sit over coffee in some quiet café, maybe one of those apple strudel places she loved, a place where copies of Impressionist paintings hung on the walls, where one had to walk through strings of plastic beads to find the john. Maybe at that same place with the potted ferns where she’d been spending so much time with Robbie. Panama Red’s. But by the time he’d gotten to the part about Robbie, he’d be too angry to call. Besides, he felt confident that she’d be calling him soon. Chandra depended on him more than she realized. He and his hair—now 1.4 millimeters longer than when she left—would await this realization.
Frederick pressed his forehead against the window. The trouble with waiting was that he had to wait alone. He had never been good at being alone. Back in his college days he had even allowed a young man with asthma and acne to move in as his roommate, rather than enjoy a quiet day alone, void of wheezing and scratching. Now the alternative to going solo in the Victorian house on Ellsboro Street was sitting at the China Boat restaurant and watching Herbert Stone tear into a duck, mandarin style. Frederick had read that there were nine classes of mandarins under the old Chinese Empire, distinguishable only by the jeweled button worn on their caps. But no one ever mixed mandarins up at the China Boat in Portland, Maine, although the menu boasted everything from mandarin buffalo wings to mandarin nachos. And none of the regulars at the China Boat appeared to be Chinese, not even the staff. The clientele ranged from fishermen to college students to over-forty baby boomers. And there seemed to be an endless supply of dead ducks down there. In the four days that his wife had been gone, Frederick had patronized the China Boat twice, for dinner and drinks with Herbert. And he had seen two such ducks expired upon plates, with slices of orange peeling nearby. He had seen those ducks disappear into Herbert Stone’s belly.
What he was beginning to feel now, on this fourth day, was the first true stabs of loneliness, of what his life might be like as a single man. Surely, he was not destined to become another Herbert Stone, a thing to be pitied, a veterinarian eating ducks, eating potential patients, for Christ’s sake. No, he would not. Frederick shook his head in defiance—a hint to The Girls—and then tapped his fingers against the glass. He would work, that’s what he would do. Maybe the Puritans had been onto something with their notion of mind-breaking labor. Maybe it hadn’t been about salvation after all, but about not being lonely.
He spent the evening of the fourth day of Chandra’s departure working on a cash-flow analysis for Dee Dee’s Flower Emporium. Dee Dee was seeking a ten-thousand-dollar bank loan that would enable her to expand the flower shop. After running amortizations on loans of varying lengths of time, Frederick decided he would suggest she go with a two-year loan. Her payment would be steep, but according to her cash flow, she could handle it. And she would pay far less interest than if she settled for a longer-term loan. When he stopped to eat a sandwich, he was surprised to see that it was almost eleven p.m. No wonder he was exhausted. So he’d gone up to their king-size bed, the Cadillac of marriage vehicles. Why Chandra had insisted on buying such a yacht of a bed had always intrigued him. But somewhere around three o’clock in the morning, his eyes still on the green puddle of light thrown off by the alarm clock, it had come to him: She could keep herself at bay in such an ocean of bed. She could set up housekeeping on one corner of the Posturepedic abyss and he would never even know it. That’s when he had panicked and dialed the number on the green Post-it, only to be told by a voice so impersonal it would make the Stone family aunts all sound like Mary Poppins, that Chandra was no longer living at the Lentz residence.
“I’m sorry I woke you, Amy,” Frederick said. He hung up and considered waiting for her to fall back asleep, then phoning again. Sorry, Amy, but did you say Chandra moved out?
Weary of staring at the clock, he went downstairs with a pillow and blanket to his tiny office. If this schedule kept up, he would be dysfunctional in a month. That was the catchword of the decade, wasn’t it? Dysfunctional mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, sisters, brothers, no one above suspicion. There were even dysfunctional pets who paid weekly visits to psychiatrists. What chance did Frederick Stone have in such a maniacal world? After all, he was only suffering from a case of hubris.
Back on the settee, he fluffed his pillow and arranged his blanket about his feet. He waited for that wash of drowsiness that would indicate sleep was finally on its way, but it never came. Here, then, was the synopsis of his life, the battered CliffNotes of his existence: a middle-aged man with hair threatening to recede at any moment, sitting wide-eyed and cramped on a narrow settee at four o’clock in the morning. So what do proud men do at times like this? He considered suicide in the Japanese sense, as a means of saving face. After all, he now felt embarrassed that he had admitted his marital troubles to the likes of Joyce, Lillian, and Herbert. Even the mailman was asking intrusive questions, not to mention the incorrigible Walter Muller from next door. Perhaps his only recourse was to do himself in. He could slice his wrists with Chandra’s pruning shears, still hanging in the garage. Let her wade about in the ocean of guilt that would surely create. But then, the shears were so rusty and corroded he’d probably have to endure not only a tetanus shot, but Herbert shuttling him down to the emergency clinic in the monstrous Chrysler. The ax? He did own an ax, one he had bought to render firewood into kindling during the cold ocean winters. The mattock was a primary agricultural tool for Neolithic and ancient peoples around the world, he heard Mr. Bator whisper. Frederick suddenly remembered that he had gotten that answer wrong, one day in class. When called upon, he had blurted, “A mattock is hair hanging from the back legs of a horse.” Ever appreciative of foibles, the class had erupted into laughter. Remembering, Frederick felt his face redden, as it had that day so many years ago. But Mr. Bator had come to his rescue. “You’re thinking of a fetlock, Mr. Stone.” Bless him. He’d been a compassionate man. What had ever happened to Mr. Bator? And where could Frederick find a mattock in order to at least maim himself? Probably at Home Depot. His head nodding forward, his knees pulled upward to accommodate himself on the settee, Frederick remembered Mr. Bator’s kind, fatherly voice, his round red cheeks and full head of hair. Only then was he able to sleep.
• • •
It was the next morning, after a quick breakfast of coffee—nicely ground African and South American beans—that Frederick considered cruising Portland in an attempt to spot the red Toyota, perhaps in the parking lot of some restaurant. Maybe even somewhere on campus at the university. Did Robbie say that he was a student? Portland wasn’t New York City, after all. It was just possible that the laws of chance would enable him to find a red car out of hundreds of cars. He would’ve called upon The Girls for a bit of support, but he wasn’t on speaking terms with them, not since they’d spun his damn wheel of fortune at such a dizzying gate. And then, if she thought he was stalking her, Chandra might have him arrested. He trusted nothing and no one, not anymore. Who would bail him out? Frederick would rot in the dungeon rather than allow Herbert Stone to peer through the cell bars and ask, “Did you ever bail me out when I was going through my divorce? Just answer me that, Freddy.”
So he sat on the screened-in porch with his coffee and watched the children play on Ellsboro Street, remembering the sound of his own roller skates not so many years ago, and on a street not so far away. He wondered how it was that he had moved so quickly from the laughter and tears of childhood to firm middle age. Maybe they should have had a child or two. They had talked of having children, once upon a time, in those early years of their marriage. For a couple of years, when
they were approaching their thirties, they had even halfheartedly tried, but something was obviously malfunctioning in one of their bodies because conception simply never happened. After a time, they never spoke of it again, as though voicing it would necessitate tests, personal chats with doctors, extensive book reading, and then, a finger pointing at one or the other as the source of the problem. And so the urge for parenthood had slowly gone away, receded quietly, as snow recedes. Maybe even hair.
Out on the porch, with the sounds of a glorious summer’s day unfolding all around him, Frederick thought about the time Chandra had actually become pregnant, very early in their marriage, not from carelessness, but because of statistics. Of every one hundred women who use an intrauterine device, one or two will conceive. Chandra Kimball-Stone was one. He had wanted no part of a child that soon. He was simply not ready, financially or emotionally. They had talked often of backpacking across Europe. How could a child fit into such massive plans? But before he had voiced his concern to Chandra, who was quite pleased with what she considered an act of fate, she had miscarried. In a great wash of irony, the intrauterine device that had failed to protect her from pregnancy had also caused her to abort. It had been called the Copper-7, as though a small mining operation existed in Chandra’s womb. But instead of churning out eggs as though they were precious metals, this company was there to toss the eggs out. It had been 1972. Frederick wondered if another woman had been an unlucky statistic that year, and, if so, how she had coped with the problem. There had been other ill-starred circumstances that occurred in 1972. Richard M. Nixon had been voted in a second time as president of the United States. Vietnam was still on fire with American bombs. But what Frederick now remembered most about that year was that it was the time in his life that he had come closest to fatherhood. And whenever he saw the number printed in a newspaper or in a magazine, the first thing that flashed through his mind was the image of red blood smeared across white tissue paper.
Now here he was, old enough to be somebody’s grandfather. That was the trouble with life. Just when you got far enough up the hill to catch a clear-eyed look back at the shit pile where you’d been wallowing, just when you knew some stuff, there was no trail to take you back there so that you could repile the shit accordingly. Frederick watched the children skateboarding past the house, the three dogs inspecting one another, sparrows flitting about in the shrubbery, the mailman clanking away at the boxes on his route. From the end of Ellsboro Street he could hear the excitement of the ice-cream truck, its loudspeaker blaring out “Turkey in the Straw.” These were the sights and sounds of life going on in Portland, Maine, on Ellsboro Street, on the planet Earth. And Chandra was right. He was on the outskirts of such life. It had passed him by as though he were a character in some Victorian novel, a poor wretch buried away in debtors’ prison because he hadn’t paid any dues at all. Well, he would pay more attention to life. That was one reason that he had agreed to have dinner with Chandra’s sister, and this was a slice of life that Miss Seminars of the Mind herself avoided. Frederick finished his coffee, waved at the children, and considered buying the dogs some chew sticks on his next shopping trip before he was finally able to walk back into a house grown so lonely.
Back at his computer, he found it impossible to concentrate on work. Struggling to compile a financial statement for Susan E. Brown, one of Portland’s newest chiropractors, he kept lapsing off, an image of Chandra coursing through his mind. He decided that his anxiety could be traced to the fact that he had agreed to have dinner at Joyce’s, eight o’clock that evening. But being with Joyce and Reginald was better than sitting home watching the wind do wild things with the cherry tree. Or watching Herbert Stone debone another bird. He left the financial statement to fix himself a drink. He had never been into martini lunches because he never went to lunch with anyone, not unless he had to meet Chandra downtown after some protest. He decided then that if he was going to personify the Establishment to his wife—and he was quite sure that he did—he would do so with his first martini lunch.
A pitcher of martinis on the coffee table, Frederick put his feet up on the ottoman and reached for the phone, which he rested in his lap. He waited for a minute and then dialed information, only to be told that Chandra Kimball-Stone did indeed have a new phone number—oh, the speed of the nineties!—but that it was unlisted.
“But I’m her doctor,” Frederick insisted. “Her test results are in and, quite frankly, I think she’ll wanna know about this.”
“Sir,” the operator said. “I didn’t get off the bus to Portland yesterday.” She was far too imperious for Frederick. He suspected the day before yesterday as her arrival time.
“But what if she dates your son?” he was asking as the operator disconnected him. The whole damn world was disconnecting Frederick Stone, and there he was, floating away like some kind of boat person.
Frederick poured another charitable martini and sipped at it. He had never had an easy time with women, it was true. His mother had been distant and aloof—why else would she have ended up with Dentist Stone?—and Frederick remembered how she began to sleep later and later into the day as the years wore on. Afraid to wake her, he and Herbert waged silent wars with their toy soldiers, soundless canons firing, troops marching in long, quiet columns, thousands of boots with ghostly footfalls, airplanes dropping muted bombs, mouths opening in hushed pain, guts spilling silently onto imaginary plains. Maybe this was why, when Walter Cronkite brought the noisy Vietnam war right into American living rooms, Frederick was ready to be a pacifist. He just couldn’t stand the racket of war. He could thank his mother for that.
And he hadn’t known much about his sister, Polly, except that she had grown up pale and pimply, four years younger than he. He had been told that his mother had gone to the hospital to have her tonsils removed, but she had returned three days later with a baby girl swaddled in pink. For years Frederick would get this demented urge to stand up at Sunday dinners, to fling the peas and carrots, to shout, “Liars! Liars!” at his parents. Instead, as he and Polly grew toward adulthood, he observed his sister from a distance, she with her hair rolled up tightly in brush curlers, her eyebrows plucked into thin upside-down smiles. When he thought of Polly, he thought of her in terms of things: a garter belt hanging over the rod of the shower curtain, the nylons still attached to it like puffy legs. Eyebrow tweezers lying on the back of the commode and looking very much like some miniature instrument of medieval torture. Or, once in a while, a white cotton slip with the faint outline where a bloodstain had been. He thought of her as smells: the cloud of Johnson & Johnson baby powder, nail polish, some brand of perfume she was always ordering from a catalog, the aroma of her winter sweaters as they lay drying on newspapers in the laundry room. One day she simply disappeared, ran off to Connecticut with a dental student named Percy Hillstrip, her father’s apprentice, whom she had married after a quick courtship. She was seventeen years old and uninterested in college. She seemed happy enough to bear children in a suburb of Hartford, in between typing up bills to be sent to Percy’s clients.
When his sister left, Frederick had been in his last year of college, coming home to Portland only once a month. Thinking about it now, all he could remember about Polly’s departure was that something had been different about the breakfast table. He tried vaguely to recall, with the pitcher of martinis imploding, if he had ever spoken one truly complete sentence to Polly in all those years they had shared the same house. Dentist Philip Stone had often noted that Polly was the major disappointment of his life, his two sons being minor ones. “He hates Polly,” Mrs. Stone once noted, “because she’s committed the sin of happiness.” Each Yuletide, Frederick had received pictures of Polly’s kids, two boys and a girl, signed “To Uncle Fred with lots of love,” and in Polly’s handwriting. One Christmas the children were standing with their heads poked through a sheet with three holes in it. Around the holes, his sister had painted yellow halos. He wondered whe
re the picture was now—Chandra saved everything—and how old that niece and those nephews must be. Polly had died in 1984 of ovarian cancer, two months after Dr. Philip Stone himself finally succumbed to the weak heart that had claimed so many handsome male Stones. Frederick didn’t wonder about his father’s life, but he sincerely hoped that his sister’s short one had been happy, that her sin had been great.
And he had always wished that his mother could be happy. But long before her husband died, Mrs. Stone had slowly turned into Miss Havisham, wearing funeral black instead of wedding white. The petunias hadn’t time to root on her husband’s grave before Thelma Stone carted all of the movable household items, except for some clothing and the huge family scrapbooks, out onto the front lawn of her ranch-style home and offered them to the public for piddling amounts. Potential buyers were encouraged to shop inside the house as well, to browse among the heavy pieces which a thin widow could not budge. This was the same house that Philip Stone, an army captain, had come home from World War II to purchase. The ranch style itself had been new then, an architectural dream. And it was the same ranch-style house he had brought his young bride to, the house where he raised his family. His rare-coin collection went for five dollars, his grandfather’s solid oak desk for ten. By the time Thelma Stone phoned up her sons and announced that she was selling the ranch-style house for five hundred dollars—in case one of them wished to buy it—Grandmother Stone’s grand piano had been whisked away for twenty-five dollars.
“I’m moving to a condo in Florida,” Thelma Stone had told Frederick. “The only snow I want to see from now on will be on a Christmas card.”
“Mother,” Frederick had pleaded. “You can’t put all our family heirlooms in a yard sale!”
“This isn’t a yard sale,” she had answered. “It’s a life sale. If you want the house, bring cash.” By the time Herbert and Frederick had roared into the drive of the ranch-style home, even tourists were clambering about, inspecting the silver, sniffing at Philip Stone’s custom-made suits. That was the day Herbert, with assistance from the family lawyer, became executor of his mother’s estate. Thelma Stone had gotten her Florida condo, while the ranch-style home sold a year later for nearly a quarter of a million dollars. The last time Frederick visited his mother, three years earlier, she was resplendent in her black regalia, which was topped off with enormous black sunglasses. She was Miss Havisham in a little white condo on the beach, a finicky Pekingese on the sofa beside her. So much for family values.
A Marriage Made at Woodstock Page 7