When he heard the moving van pull away, followed by the loud muffler on the Toyota, he limped to the window and lifted the curtain just a bit. He wanted to make sure she wouldn’t see him. Once, she did turn to look back at the house, sorrowfully, he thought. He watched as the big orange and white van cut the corner, Chandra following close behind. Then he went directly to the kitchen. Lunch must be almost over since he noticed that the martini pitcher was nearly empty. He found the Post-it note with the new phone number on it. He stared at it only briefly, afraid he may memorize it otherwise.
“Don’t you dare remember that number, Mr. Bator,” Frederick said. Just days ago, he would have killed for a gift like this, a chain linking him to her, however fragile. More tears weighted his eyes. He must destroy the Post-it quickly. He must think of those times up ahead when he would ache to hear her voice. But he had come to realize that if any reconciliation was possible, she would have to make the first move. Buoyed up with martini courage, he found a book of matches. He struck one and watched as it flared nicely. His eyes still teary—she had looked so damn beautiful—he dipped the corner of the green Post-it to the flame. Fire ate into the paper and Chandra’s new number, all seven lovely digits, disappeared in its wake.
• • •
It was almost six o’clock when Frederick realized that he had not bothered to bring in that day’s newspaper. He finally found the thing on the corner of lawn near Mrs. Prather’s fence. Was the goddamn paperboy myopic as well as uncoordinated? Raggedy Andy could run a more orderly route. He was about to take the paper back into his house when he heard Walter Muller’s car turn into the yard next door. If he walked across the lawn now, Walter would undoubtedly see him. Perhaps if he just stood, unmoving and treelike, he would go unnoticed. He froze there, paper under his arm. Walter got out and slammed his car door. He spotted Frederick immediately and waved. Then he inhaled a large breath of air, releasing it dramatically.
“Isn’t this a lovely evening, Frederick?” he asked. “This is my favorite time of year. A lovely time to be alive. Just smell the air.” It was as if Walter Mullins were taking part, perpetually, in some god-awful musical.
“Beam him up, please, Scotty,” Frederick whispered. He nodded his head at Walter.
“Mrs. Muller and I were talking about you just this morning, Frederick,” Walter said. “Anytime you feel like a home-cooked steak, just tap on the back door.” Jesus. They’d be tying red handkerchiefs to all the bushes on Ellsboro Street before it was over. There’d be a hot meal for an honest man down on his marital luck wherever Frederick turned. And couldn’t he use the front door?
“I’m a vegetarian,” Frederick said, and heard what might be classified as a tsk tsk in response. He waved auf Wiedersehen at Walter Muller—surely all Mullers were descended from German millers—in what he hoped was a neighborly fashion, although he had no idea what that was. Chandra had always accused him of waving like the Queen of England, with that constrained, anal gesture, the royal hand oscillating robotically above the elbow. Frederick headed back across his lawn, hoping this would end their chat.
“I was telling Mrs. Muller just this morning,” Walter bulldozed on, “that I always saw a light burning in your office when I got up in the mornings. But I don’t see it anymore.”
Frederick pretended not to hear this. He was about to step back inside the house, his fingers on the doorknob, when he heard his name called. From out of the shadows of lawn and shrubbery, the outline of a woman emerged, Venus from her clamshell. His heart kicked against his rib cage. It was the female prerogative, according to the old saw, to change her mind. He felt almost giddy, detached, the way he did as a child playing Kick the Can with Richard Hamel and the gang, and the opportunity to kick finally gave itself up to him. Running to the can was a slow-motion job, his arms rising softly into the evening air, falling, his knees lifting, legs thrusting outward. And then, that precious moment when he felt his toe move backward inside his shoe on impact, saw the can rise and spin and shine in the moonlight. A lifetime—he knew this—had just taken place. And it was such a sweet lifetime, this lifetime of victory, that he had often wondered, as he walked home tossing the silver can up into the air over and over again, as though it were a magnificent coin, he wondered how the future could ever top it. Now he knew. This was how. Chandra had come home.
“Frederick? Is that you?” He recognized the voice before he saw the face. “I’m so glad that phone books list addresses,” she said, her words followed by the incessant heels, clicking like a ticker-tape machine up the paved walk. Money walking. Liquid gold.
“Doris Bowen,” Frederick said, and moved aside so that she could glide past.
Frederick made them a pitcher of martinis while Doris walked about in white cotton slacks, a white cotton sweater, and surveyed all the empty spaces that Chandra had left behind. Frederick wasn’t comfortable with this inspection of his barracks. He felt as though his entrails had been nailed to each blank wall, each swath of floor that had once known a stick of furniture. And now here was an outsider strutting about as though the living room was an art gallery.
Doris accepted the martini and they arranged themselves on opposite ends of the sofa.
“It was sort of like this with me and Ronny,” she told him, “except I was the one to leave and, well, after all, I left for a multimillionaire. I took nothing with me. Everything I owned was too shabby.” She shook her head in amusement, remembering.
“Do you miss him?” Frederick asked. “Ronny, I mean?” He waited. Somehow, her answer would pertain cosmically to him, to Frederick Stone, to his estranged relationship with Chandra. If Doris missed Ronny, then perhaps Chandra missed Frederick. Do women pine for the men they leave behind? Even the men they despise?
“No,” Doris said, much too quickly. “No, I don’t miss him.”
“I mean, like on your birthday,” Frederick said. “Or his birthday. Maybe at Thanksgiving when the whole family gathers. Maybe you miss him when you carve the turkey?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t miss him. But I always carved the turkey.”
“Oh, come on,” Frederick urged. “Surely there are times when you hear a song that used to be your song, yours and Ronny’s, and you miss him a little.” Doris was gracious enough to give the notion even further thought.
“No,” she said. “I can’t say that I do.”
“Let’s say you’re walking along the ocean and you remember how the two of you used to walk there. Or you see the snow falling just so, and you remember your first snowball fight.” He felt his eyes tear up. “Or you smell strawberries on a summer’s day and it brings back a scene from twenty years ago, a loving scene, with Ronny in it. Don’t tell me that these things happen only in Ingmar Bergman films, Doris. You must miss him once in a while.” He tipped his martini and was not surprised at how easily it slid down his throat. Goddamn women. And they were supposed to be the sentimental sex.
Doris leaned over and took his glass. She placed it beside hers on the living room floor. The coffee table, being Chandra’s, was no longer there. Then she eased her rear down the length of the sofa until she was sitting next to him.
“Do you know who I think of when I walk along the ocean?” Doris asked. She reached over and undid the top button of his shirt. “I think of you. And do you know who I’d think of if it was snowing?” She undid another button. “I’d think of you.” She worked down to the last button and undid it too. Frederick watched her lips moving, full lips, the pumped-up kind that so many women were buying these days from plastic surgeons. He imagined that, one day, nursing homes in Hollywood would be full of wrinkly women with gigantic lips. Chandra’s mouth, however, had been that sweet little oval, the kind one sees painted on porcelain dolls. “And when I smell strawberries,” Doris continued as she eased his arms out of his shirt, “I think of us having sugared ones for breakfast, in a huge canopied bed, with the rain coming dow
n outside, and a fire snapping in the fireplace.” She pulled his T-shirt over his head and tossed it onto the floor. Frederick looked down at his bare white chest. Unlike the hair on his head, the chest hairs weren’t plentiful enough to recede. There were still a few straggling about in the gully on his breastplate, discussing whether or not they should spread out. But they’d been talking about doing that since high school, to no success. Doris ran a finger about his left nipple and Frederick felt it harden in a rush of blood. He said good-bye to the Bowen account as her lips descended upon his neck. It was true that he found her attractive and sexy. But with all that money came another dimension that hadn’t existed with the other women he slept with, before Chandra. It had not existed even with Chandra. It was that dimension of power, of enormous wealth, of immeasurable clout. Frederick had had a lifetime of women in long faded skirts, women who couldn’t wait for their hair to turn gray so that they could show the world how they refuse to dye it, who drove Volkswagens with dented fenders, who stuck candles into empty wine bottles, who used cement blocks to build bookshelves, who always bought ginger root at the market, who kept a box of orange pekoe tea bags in their cupboards and far too much incense on their coffee tables. Before he married, Frederick had awakened in canopied beds where he looked up to see wind chimes circling like doves above him, prints on the walls from Picasso’s Blue Period, Goya’s Black Period, jeering posters from Joe McCarthy’s Red Period, heaps of turquoise jewelry lying on a dresser, a song from Abbey Road on the stereo. “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” He felt Doris urging his hand beneath the cotton sweater and then up to her breast. The breast was sleek, almost slippery, and he imagined that’s how store-bought breasts must feel. He tried not to concentrate on the silicone, or the fact that he was holding a handful of the stuff. It wasn’t radioactive after all. Ralph Nader would be anti-tits if it was. Doris leaned forward to kiss him and her tongue seemed to explode in his mouth, probing here and there. He canted his head backward, breaking the kiss.
“Do you ever think of Ronny at Christmas?” he asked. Poor Ronny. Poor bastard. Doris undid the zipper on his pants before he realized what was happening. Did young girls practice on zippers the way young boys practiced on bra snaps?
“Take these off,” she whispered. She slipped out of her white slacks and then the white sweater. They landed in soft clouds on the living room floor.
“Doris,” he said, but she put a finger against his lips.
“I never think of Ricky at Christmas,” she said. She searched for the front opening of Frederick’s shorts. “Why remember a toaster when you’re unwrapping diamonds?” She eased a warm hand inside and seemed as surprised as Frederick to find an erection growing there. “Let’s take those off and put this on,” he heard Doris say. She produced a condom from thin air, this female Houdini, this Seeress of Safe Sex. Bless her. He was so rusty on matters of the boudoir that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d bought a condom, only that it had cost a quarter and had ridges of some kind encircling the tip. That had been his own Ridged Period. She lay back on the sofa and pulled him on top of her. He positioned himself on his elbows as she helped to maneuver him inside her. This was the part he liked, the woman taking charge. He had had his share of these women from the sixties. They might have worn baggy skirts and let their hair turn gray, but they kicked ass when it came to a woman’s rights. Even if they didn’t want them, they still demanded them.
“Oh, Fred,” said Doris, and rolled her head about on the sofa. “Oh, Fred.” He was amazed at how hard he had become. It had been almost twenty-three years since he’d made love to anyone but Chandra. And Doris was sexy, yes, but he certainly didn’t love her. He still loved his wife and yet he was able to engage sexually with this near stranger. This was another separation of the sexes: Men could procreate with broken hearts, but women would die out. Men were capable of siring large families at funeral services, teetering on the very cusp of a dead wife’s grave. Frederick smiled in victory, the way he had smiled when kicking the can out from under Richard Hamel’s nose, all those Ingmar Bergman years ago, and now his legs felt like they were running again, his thighs on fire, his hip muscles rising and falling, rising and falling, his great wings beating still above the staggering girl. He heard Doris murmur from somewhere below him, rising and falling. Then she bit firmly on his neck. Frederick tried not to consider the metaphysics of a hickey at forty-four. But then Doris bit him again, much too hard this time.
“Ow,” he said. Passion used to transform pain for him, didn’t it? Elevate it to another threshold? Early on in their relationship Chandra had always bitten much harder than this, and he had loved it, had risen above the stinging in some Zenlike way. Now, at forty-four, he was concerned only with permanent scarring. Not to mention a severe infection. Doris bit him a third time.
“Ouch!” Frederick said. He couldn’t risk another trip to the emergency clinic. They hated him down there, he was sure of it. The receptionist probably had his picture on the wall by the water fountain. Have You Seen This Man? But Doris seemed to have delivered her quota of bites for the evening. She returned to tossing her head about on the sofa and murmuring his name. Frederick forgot entirely about the smarting on his neck and concentrated instead on what he was doing. He and Chandra hadn’t made love in months. He had almost forgotten the hot excitement of sexual desire. During sexual excitement the extremely flexible tissues of the penis become engorged with blood and the usually flaccid organ assumes a rigid, enlarged position known as an erection.
“Not now, Mr. Bator!” Frederick said, much too loud. Doris reached a hand up to caress his throat, to offer her support, but Frederick had stopped rocking. He had missed the goddamn tin can altogether. He rolled onto his side.
“You call it Mr. Bator?” Doris giggled. “How sweet.” She began stroking his back, consoling him with her touch, Earth Goddess to the Flaccid.
“Mr. Bator’s an old friend,” Frederick said, his breath short, his body still tingling.
“I bet he is.” Doris giggled again. “Can I be Mr. Bator’s friend, too?” She moved her hand against the limp penis.
“Doris, please,” he said. He was thinking again of Chandra, of that night at the Fiddler’s Cave, of how they sang “Mrs. Robinson.” He remembered now that they had toasted Joe DiMaggio because the words of the song reminded them of how Marilyn had broken his heart. Poor Joltin’ Joe. Then they had walked against the rain back to his apartment, full of Chianti and love and the future. That had been their first night in bed together, and it had been better than kicking a can away from Richard Hamel. It had been lots better. He had had big moments in his life, hadn’t he? Great moments? He just didn’t have the eyes to see them, the ears to hear them. Every ejaculation contains several million sperm cells, Mr. Bator said gently, but only one of these can fertilize the female egg, resulting in a new human being. Tears sprang again to Frederick’s eyes.
“What would I know about ejaculations, Mr. Bator,” he cried, “with you sitting on my goddamn shoulder?” He swung a clenched fist at the air above his head.
Doris glanced fearfully between his legs, then up to his shoulder. “Is this like that movie The Shining, when the little boy talks to his finger?” Doris asked.
All the other sperm cells die in a few days, Mr. Bator added, and now the tears were spilling from Frederick’s eyes, trickling down the sides of his face. All those potential brothers and sisters, dead. What a great pinwheel they would have made. What a fireworks of a family. He was openly sobbing. Would Doris hate him for being such a wimp? He didn’t care. He was a human being who had emerged one passionate night—he only supposed it was nighttime—as the result of his father’s body coming together with his mother’s body. Had they grown to hate each other early? Was he born of teeth gritting and knuckles clenching? Did his father’s indifferent beak, like Zeus’s, catch his terrified mother up in a crunching of bone? Was he, Frederick Stone, hatched from a bright blue eg
g, the same egg that had dropped like a tiny gum ball from Leda’s body? He knew only the basic facts. His father had come home from World War II, bought a new ranch-style house, and settled down in it with his young wife. And one night Frederick had made it, from out of all those other sperm, all that sibling rivalry. He had run for the tin can and had gotten the gold instead, what with several million Richard Hamels running beside him. He had won. He was alive.
“Doris, I’m so sorry,” he whispered. He had images of Chandra and her jolly elves moving pieces of his life out onto the sidewalk.
“I’m not giving up yet,” he heard Doris say. She was wearing her white slacks again and was fumbling about with the sleeves of her white sweater. “You, me, and Mr. Bator are going to take a rain check. You might call it a ménage à trois.”
She bent and kissed the tip of his nose. From beneath her elbow, Frederick could see a white thread dangling from her sleeve. He wondered what the Sluts of Kismet had in store for him, now that they’d stripped him of his manhood. He theorized about the thread Clotho would pull from her sewing basket, the one with his name on it, maybe the very one dangling from Doris Bowen’s sweater. How long would it be? How thick? How strong? Would it represent the Bowen account? His ill-fated marriage? More important, had the Vaginas of Destiny fixed it so that he could never make love to another woman? He had read somewhere that Joe DiMaggio still sent a rose every single day to Marilyn’s grave. Some women you can never forget. Was Chandra’s image now glued to his wavering eyelids? It was most certainly there. The smell of her thighs was lingering like Swedish strawberries in his nostrils, and the incessant beat of that Boston rain was still sounding in his ears. He had seen so little, heard so little in his life. There had been exalted moments, seconds fit for a king, but his address had been on the outskirts of humanity, too far away for deliveries. Doris was kneeling beside him.
A Marriage Made at Woodstock Page 20