A Marriage Made at Woodstock

by Cathie Pelletier

  Frederick ate the toast while standing at the sink. Then he limped to the living room sofa with his coffee. Another few days, and the ankle would probably support his weight without too much complaint. He placed the phone in his lap and punched out the numbers to Herb’s clinic. He had time to place a quick call because it was still five minutes until Geraldo.

  Some damn programming genius had had the foresight to move Sally Jessy Raphael opposite Geraldo, instead of letting it follow, and now Frederick had to flip back and forth from one show to the other until he decided which would be most like a human carnival. It was always easy to switch off the movie stars who wished to tell America how drunk they’d been, how high on cocaine, how depressed. Avoiding them was an easy choice, but sometimes, when he couldn’t make up his mind between Geraldo’s sisters who share the same man and Sally’s mothers with more than one gay child, he used the remote control to bounce back and forth. This had been another of the changes in his schedule that he hadn’t really wanted known. Herbert had been the one to urge him to tune in. “I’m helplessly addicted,” Herbert admitted. “I tape Geraldo and my secretary tapes Sally Jessy. We exchange tapes daily. Oprah’s too sensible.” So he had given it a shot. For two and a half weeks he hadn’t missed one show or the other. That was why he should have known, long before the bartender Hannah’s revelations, long before the veranda roof and the emergency clinic, that life had dealt him the aforementioned humdrum hand of cards. Jane Smith and John Doe, average Americans, revealed secrets about themselves and their family members that would have caused those ancient Greek playwrights, the ones who wrote about Medea and Oedipus and Zeus and Leda, to gather up their flowing robes and run like hell for the Parthenon. He wished he could share this with Chandra, this new knowledge of the world. What had she always accused him of? Living on the outskirts of humanity. Well, things were different around the house on Ellsboro Street, that’s what he’d tell her.

  “I’m living right under the skirts of humanity now, Chandra dear,” Frederick said as he waited for Herbert’s secretary to answer. “I’m right between humanity’s legs, looking straight up. And I’ll tell you something, sweetheart. Humanity’s not a pretty sight.”

  Herbert agreed to lunch at Panama Red’s on Friday. He was still a bit gruff on the phone, but Frederick hoped that a scotch or two might turn the ship around. Friday would be fine. He wanted to give the ankle a few more days before he ventured out on it again.

  “How’s the ankle?” Herbert asked.

  “Sprained,” Frederick said.

  “That’s about what I figured,” said Herbert. “You overreact sometimes, Freddy.”

  Frederick bit at the inside of his cheek. It was a good thing Herbert could not see his face just then. But he would let this pass. After all, it had taken him seven days to get this far, the same amount of time required to create the Christian world, including one day for a siesta. And besides, he didn’t want to be just one colored vane fluttering in the wind.

  • • •

  Herbert had had the tofu and raisin salad along with the spinach avocado sandwich and a second scotch before he seemed his old self again.

  “I can’t wait for you to meet Susie,” he said. “She’s a good-looking woman. And, you’ll love this, she’s almost twenty-seven.”

  “Is that in dog years?” Frederick asked. The ball of brotherly banter had been tossed into the air with this remark, and Frederick had batted that ball at Herbert. He waited. Would Herbert bat it back? Could life as they once knew it go on?

  “Very funny,” said Herbert.

  “Twenty-seven is still close to being half your age,” Frederick added. He was still waiting.

  “So,” Herbert said, “you think she’s too old for me?” Frederick smiled as the ball came bouncing back into his corner. Things would be fine. He would not have to hide his frowns and grimaces in dark closets.

  “Twenty-seven is too old for you,” Frederick said. “Now that I think about it.” He was pleased at how quickly they were putting the anger behind them, how easily they were wrapping up events in the gauze of memory, tucking them away. It was a family’s job, wasn’t it, to wipe bloodstains off the hatchets? To bury the dead and go on?

  “I’m cooking dinner for Susie tonight,” Herbert said.

  “I hope she likes duck,” said Frederick.

  “Freddy? Did you mean by what you said the other night?”

  “What did I say?”

  “Come on,” said Herbert. “You know what I’m talking about.” He did know. You’re a closet homosexual. That’s what’s wrong with you.

  Frederick leaned back in his chair, clinked the salt and pepper shakers together. How could he explain?

  “Do you remember Mr. Bator?” he asked. “He taught us biology in high school.”

  “Master Bator?”

  “Don’t call him that,” said Frederick.

  “Everybody called him that,” Herbert said.

  “Well, don’t you do it,” Frederick said.

  “What about him?” asked Herbert.

  Frederick paused to think. The abrasive music of forks and knives at other tables rose up around them. How would he word this and still sound sane?

  “I’ve sort of been hearing his voice a lot lately,” Frederick said. He had no other recourse, not after the remark Herbert thought was meant for him. “I mean, I know it’s just my subconscious mind working overtime, but it sure seems real sometimes.”

  A waitress appeared with a water pitcher, filled their glasses hurriedly, and then disappeared.

  “He talks to you?” Herbert asked. He took the salt and pepper over for himself and began to tap them together. “What does he say?”

  “Lots of things,” Frederick said. “Sometimes it’s stuff he said in class, things I memorized for tests. Other times it’s stuff I read years ago and then forgot. Sometimes it has to do with ideas about life that I guess I’ve always felt but didn’t realize, and Mr. Bator expresses them for me.”

  “So he talks to you,” Herbert said again. He was still waiting for an explanation.

  “Well.” Frederick cleared his throat. “I was at my wit’s end the other night at the emergency clinic. I thought I’d see Chandra at Bobbin Road and didn’t. My ankle was hurting. And Mr. Bator had been bugging me all day about how time waits for no man, and how time is essentially a meaningless idea.”

  “What a prick,” said Herbert.

  “It wasn’t really Mr. Bator, of course, but I was simply fed up and, well, you remember all those stories that went around Portland High about Mr. Bator. You know, how he lived with another man and all, and how someone had seen them holding hands on the ferry to Peak’s Island. I’m really ashamed of myself for calling him a closet homosexual because those were troubled times and he was a high school teacher. It must have been really rough on him.”

  “So you called him a closet homosexual and not me?” Herbert asked. Frederick nodded. “You’re losing it, Freddy. Do yourself a favor. Get a lawyer. Get divorced. Get on with your life.” He gave the salt and pepper shakers back.

  “I wish Mr. Bator were still around,” Frederick said then.

  “Master Bator,” said Herbert. “I haven’t thought of him in years.”

  “Don’t call him that,” said Frederick.

  “Everybody called him that.”

  “Well, don’t you do it. And besides, I never called him that. I liked Mr. Bator. He was very kind to me.”

  “How kind?” Herbert asked.

  “Herbert!”

  “I’m just kidding you,” Herbert said. “Relax, for crying out loud.” The waitress appeared with their checks and Frederick beckoned that he would take them both. He gave her his weary American Express card.

  “Do you know what happened to Mr. Bator?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t know what happened to him,”
said Herbert. “I don’t know what happened to Amelia Earhart either.”

  “I wish Mr. Bator were still around to talk to,” Frederick said.

  “He must be dead,” Herbert said. “We’re talking over twenty-five years since he taught us.”

  “That’s the thing,” said Frederick. “He was old to us kids back then. But he’s probably only in his sixties now.”

  “Master Bator,” said Herbert. “I’d forgotten about him.”

  Had Frederick really missed Herbert this past week? He had signed the check—Herbert needed to dash back to the clinic—and was waiting for his receipt when he happened to spot none other than Joyce, his sister-in-law, sitting at a table in the no-smoking section. He was about to wave a quick hello until he recognized one of her lunch companions. Robbie. The purloiner of wives. At first Frederick couldn’t bring himself to look at the face of the third diner. He kept his eyes on Robbie instead, until he could stand it no longer. It was Chandra, all right. Dark eyed, O woman of my dreams. He could only stare. Conversation came and went around him. Words buzzed in his ears, but he could understand no language. Time had stopped. He felt it stop, a quick jolt to the senses, and then a dreamlike reality of floating up from his table. He heard Herbert speaking, saw him standing, his mouth moving, his eyes happy again. He watched as Herbert disappeared into the foyer, but he had been cut afloat from the rest of the world. He was bouncing somewhere just above his table at Panama Red’s. And from this new position, he could see only his wife, Chandra Kimball-Stone, her face more beautiful than he had remembered, than any picture could pretend her to be. Had he noticed before the choreography that occurred when she lifted her fork to her mouth? He could write long poems about how she buttered a roll, sonnets in how she sipped from a glass of water. And her mouth! Had he even realized that when she spoke her lips moved like a red liquid over her white teeth? The lips are two fleshy folds surrounding the cavity of the mouth, said a familiar voice.

  “But aren’t they lovely folds, Mr. Bator?” Frederick whispered.

  They are composed of the skin covering the outer surface, mucous membrane covering the inner portion, connective tissue, and a ring of muscular tissue and the artery that supplies blood.

  “It would be so wonderful to kiss those lips, Mr. Bator.”

  The functions of the lips include feeding and speech.

  “And kissing, Mr. Bator, the functions include kissing.” He saw her laugh, a laugh that caused her to throw her head back, throat exposed. Joyce was laughing, too. Robbie was laughing. See Joyce laugh. See Chandra touch Robbie’s arm. See Robbie smile.

  He realized that the waitress was talking to him, the usual restaurant niceties about having a good day and coming back real soon. Frederick saw before him the check he had signed and his American Express receipt. He stuffed the receipt into his shirt pocket and then walked to the door. He hoped Chandra hadn’t noticed him. He would hate to disrupt her merriment, and the truth was that she was merry. Even with Joyce, she was merry. She hadn’t been merry around him in how many years? A lot of them.

  He walked, is what he did. In spite of his sore ankle just recently workable, he walked. He left his car in a far corner of Panama Red’s parking lot and went for a stroll down along the water. Sandpipers raced in ahead of the waves. People ambled on the beach. Dogs left their wet prints behind as they tore down the strand, becoming black bouncing dots until they finally vanished. Frederick walked. He had abandoned his shoes and socks beside a bench at the pier, and now the water and sand rode up between his toes. He wanted to talk to Mr. Bator about laughter, about why Chandra would share it with some people, not others. Not him. Laughter was a strange vehicle. Humans use a few muscles to laugh that would be unused otherwise. If you tickle a month-old baby, he will laugh a genuine laugh. Why does that happen? Frederick passed a volleyball game in progress, university students, judging by their T-shirts. Their own laughter followed him down the beach.

  “When a human being laughs, Mr. Bator,” said Frederick, “the diaphragm moves up and down and the outgoing air stimulates the larynx. The sound that this action produces is known as a chuckle.” He heard Mr. Bator himself laugh, a resonant, ghostly laugh, as he had done one morning in class, more than twenty-five years earlier. There had been a huge chart of the human skeleton hanging at the front of the classroom, and someone had drawn a large balloon coming out of the skeleton’s mouth. Inside the balloon, they’d written Ha! Ha! in large block letters. “Okay, class,” Mr. Bator had said. “I think this is a good time to talk about the mechanisms of laughter.” He had been such a good teacher, an excellent teacher. What difference did it make that he lived with another man? What injustice was there in touching the hand of someone you love, on a ferry boat ride, on a summer night? “They were on the ferry boat, get it?” Richard Hamel had joked. God, but he had hated Richard Hamel, mumblety-peg cheat that he was.

  “That was me, Mr. Bator,” Frederick said. “I was the one who drew the balloon on the chart.”

  Several herring gulls floated like old dreams above his head. The organic smell of the ocean, of things living and growing, things dying and rotting, came and went on the breeze. He thought of Chandra’s larynx being stimulated by the diaphragm moving up and down, up and down. Ah, love, let us be true to one another, for the world which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, is a world where things grow in order to die, where women like Hannah look over their shoulders as a life’s vocation, where fathers and mothers sometimes make big mistakes, where war comes and goes like a shower of rain. Bouncing black dots had appeared far down the strand. He watched them race toward him, getting larger and larger until they were dogs again. In the distance a firecracker erupted, a hangover from the Fourth of July, which had passed in a panoply of fireworks, colorful pinwheels filling up the skies. Frederick walked on. Evening was coming in full force when he finally returned for his shoes and socks, to discover them gone. Why would someone want a pair of used shoes and socks? What was wrong with some people?

  He went barefoot into the liquor store for the bottles of gin and vermouth, and then into Cain’s Corner Grocery for the olives. He had gin and vermouth and olives at home, but he didn’t want to chance running out of anything. Let Herbert say he was overreacting. There was no doubt in his mind that the Big Drunk was the next step in his life, a ceremonial rite to be observed. Many people of both sexes, nice folks who’ve been extraneared by their loved ones, had most likely been down to the liquor store, followed by a visit to Cain’s Corner Grocery for the olives. One can’t avoid the Big Drunk. It was probably even mentioned in some of those self-help manuals: First comes Denial, then Anger, then the Big Drunk, then Acceptance. He would be a better man—he had no doubt of this—in the morning.

  By the time he unlocked the kitchen door, his bag of bottles clinking happily in his arms, he was limping again. There were two messages on his answering machine. The first was from Herbert, announcing that he’d be at the China Boat later in the evening for after-dinner drinks with the elderly Susie, in case Frederick felt like dropping by. The second was from Lillian, his mother-in-law.

  “Frederick, dear,” Lillian’s message began. “Lorraine was by today to pick up Joyce for lunch and, well, she confessed that the address she gave me, the one on Bobbin Road, was a false one. She seemed to think I’d give the real one to you. I’m calling, of course, because I wouldn’t want you to go over there and—” He rewound the words. They passed in a vigorous whir.

  “Blah, blah, blah,” he said. In the kitchen, he mixed up a pitcher of martinis and then hobbled with it into the living room. He found his Greatest Hits of Gary Puckett & the Union Gap and put in on the turntable. Woman, woman, have you got cheating on your mind? Why am I losing sleep over you? Lady Willpower, it’s now or never. Young girl, get out of my mind. He wondered how old the Union Gap were when they had their Big Drunk. Younger than forty-four, he’d guess. Oh sure, he’d puked his g
uts out on prom night, but that was understandable. In those days a high school boy drank whatever he could steal from his dad’s liquor cabinet. Because Dr. Philip Stone was a teetotaler, Frederick’s old school chum Nicholas Dimopoulos had agreed to bring the booze. How could Frederick know that Nick would turn up with four bottles of ouzo?

  The first pitcher was a pushover. He made a second, adding a touch more gin to this batch. In his glass the olive sank to the bottom like a little green submarine. Or better yet, Alvin, the round underwater camera that nosed all through the Titanic, finding a bottle of wine still unbroken, bits of dishes, jewelry. The only thing Alvin didn’t pick up was the melody of that last song, played as the big ship sank. Frederick had always imagined that it was down there somewhere, lingering, floating about the ballroom maybe, stealing down to the captain’s quarters on lonely nights. Would he have stood and sung as the great vortical mouth of water rose up to take him down? Or would he have donned a dress and tried to sneak into a lifeboat with the other girls? “You never went to Vietnam, did you?” Herbert had accused. “You went to Woodstock.” Well, what of that? War was wrong. Even Herbert Stone agreed to that. But Herbert Stone hadn’t wanted to go to college right away. He wanted to sow a few oats, travel about the country. What he got instead was drafted. Frederick, on the other hand, managed to stay at Boston University with a straight-A average. College material, not Vietnam fodder. Was he scared to go to Vietnam?