Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories

by Lucia Perillo

  Yvonne Beauchemin’s house sat on the opposite side of our cul-de-sac, a stand of manicured firs between us. I suspect the place appealed to her only as an easy place to land between her frequent travels, because her own needs were few. When she was well she used to climb up onto the roof of her carport to hose the leaves off, her body as lithe as a girl’s as she stepped from the ladder’s shimmying peak. By day she wore exercise clothes, not the kind for aerobics at the club but rather those sold at the mountaineering shop in town — expensive windbreakers and nylon pants. She was not, however, the kind of woman whom I could see engaged in any sport that would make her sweat. Instead she kept chained under her carport a yellow kayak that in the early mornings I’d sometimes come upon her sliding onto the Peugeot’s roof. And I learned not to offer help, for the first time I did she fended me off.

  “This is how I work my upper body,” she said, shooting the boat onto the roof rack with one heave. Then she turned and offered me her biceps. “Feel that, Dr. Henry. Is that the arm of a little old lady?”

  Impressed, I exaggerated enough to say that I believed she could out-arm-wrestle my grandson, who was at that time on the high school football team. I told her that he also had a kayak.

  “You’ll have to have him come out and paddle with me,” she said as she tightened the straps on her roof rack. When she was through, she turned to me and winked.

  “Don’t worry. I only take lovers who’ve reached the age of legal consent.” She hopped in her Peugeot and gave me a wave, but as she was driving away, she rolled down her window to say one more thing:

  “Though you know, Dr. Henry, how much it varies from state to state. .”

  IN THE INTEREST of family togetherness I once tried to share my grandson’s enthusiasm for the water. But I came to the conclusion that being trapped for hours in a precarious plastic craft in which urination is impossible is no sport for me. Weak bladders and decaying lower backs have caused most of the residents of Infinite Vistas, which has its own boat ramp, to forsake paddling in favor of small-horsepower motors and trailers that can do the lifting in and out.

  But being prone to seasickness, I took up bird-watching instead, to feel that I was at least getting my money’s worth out of the premium we pay for being on the water. Something besides work that would take me from the house, though not for too long — I needed just a short spell from the bedside. And beauty too, I must admit that I was impelled by beauty, in a life that at that time surrounded me with all the body’s ugly exudates. The perfection of birds is like that of no other mortal thing — their sheen, their obsessive grooming. You never see them get scraggly until the bitter end, and even then it seems that it is the eclipse of their loveliness that kills them more than any underlying disease.

  In winter, when ducks fill up our bay, there is a period when as often as not on my trips to the boat ramp I’ll find at least one hooded merganser. Perhaps this is a bird you do not know, a duck with a more intricately chiseled beak than your standard mallard’s, broad at its base, then tapering to a stalk that ends in a pointed droop. The body is tawny on its sides, the stark white breast bordered by two black stripes, the delicate head concealing a crest that can inflate to show a white polygon outlined in black, one corner set behind the yellow eye and flaring at the nape. What mesmerizes me is how it looks like a mosaic built from three completely different animals: the crest of a lizard, the flanks of a fox, the stripes of a zebra. And maybe it’s just in my estimation that this seabird appears more skittish than most, being never quite sure what it is.

  Of course, there were also the strange clown-faced scoters, and the cormorants that unfurl their iridescent blue wings in the sunlight and stay poised that way as if they were fashioned out of metal. At home, I was medicating my wife far beyond what was deemed reasonable five years ago. Pain was the medium in which she floated, no cure for that, but still I was determined to glaze its jagged surface. Sometimes she giggled and grabbed at lights that flashed before her eyes, her eyes that glittered like the glittering eyes of birds that do not speak of these same things that we let go unsaid.

  In those difficult months Yvonne Beauchemin tried to be the good neighbor, though her help was often inappropriate. The casseroles she brought to our house were overly spiced and made with leeks or fancy mushrooms, the kind of food my wife could not keep down. She also brought books that encouraged transcendental meditation as a therapeutic tool; when Yvonne left we cackled at her expense, my wife suggesting that her mantra be “Dilaudid.” But in the early mornings, before the nurse came and I left for the office, when the surface of the bay would be glassy and scarved with mist, I’d often catch a glimpse of Yvonne in the round frame of my spotting scope, the blades of her paddle milling through the air like the legs of a complicated water insect. A shameless thought would enter my mind then, when I’d see her tracking sleekly across the water: a woman approximately my wife’s age but vigorous in a way that my wife had never been, a woman who seemed to belong to a stronger and more perfect species. The shameless thought was that each of us had somehow chosen what we were, weak or strong, dependent or not. The foolishness of my theory became apparent to me five years later, when Yvonne Beauchemin became a bald woman just as my wife had been. And soon they’d become more similar still.

  SHE WENT THROUGH the trouble to print invitations to her party; perhaps this should have tipped us off. We her neighbors assumed that her being European somehow explained the odd formality, the sense of ritual — perhaps in her native Switzerland this was simply how things were done. We were intrigued, and we were flattered, enough so that all of us who were invited showed: the Carpenters and the Ritters and the Boldukes and the Schwartzes, four couples who remained intact, and the seven widows of Infinite Vistas who were not spending the winter in Arizona or cruising the Panama Canal. Plus me, the quirk, the man whose wife had predeceased him. Since her death, I hadn’t fostered much of a social life for myself because it made me nervous, the way the women fluttered around me and spoke with the intonations of children. For years I’d set my stethoscope against many of their breasts, and I found myself also having difficulty switching tracks between their bodies and their persons. Bodies were easy: you thought in terms of what worked and what did not. But such analysis made for rocky conversation.

  You can see why Yvonne Beauchemin’s direct gaze, her no-nonsense manner, came as a relief. That she understood me was made evident when I arrived early at her party and she assigned me a duty that gave me something to do besides make small talk. My job was to take the coats from the women and pile them on the bed. One after another the linings slid from lightly perfumed shoulders with a crackle of electricity as the coats slumped back against my chest; underneath the women wore dresses or blouses that were slinky and bright. I noticed how most of them started drinking timidly, with sweet white German wine, but as the evening wore on they switched to red, an expensive Bordeaux that threw ellipses of ruby light across their faces.

  Catering was done by La Maison d’Herbe, a restaurant located in one of the Victorian houses west of town. There were vegetables en croute, an assortment of pâtés, a cheese fondue with baguettes to be ripped and dipped, a duck served with orange sauce whose meat fell off the bone. A spinach salad with shredded crab, oysters on the half shell topped with cream, tiny lamb chops so tender they could be cut with the side of a fork. All this was set out buffet-style on the dining table, which had been laid with the good linen and the silver, the house lit up with many candles, each set in a crystal stick positioned among the masks and textiles that Yvonne collected on her travels. She stationed herself by the table, a position from which she presided over the army of teenagers who filled the plates and refreshed our drinks. Her black dress draped her body like a dancer’s, her head covered in a smart, jet-beaded cap. I couldn’t help thinking that this is one of the ironies of cancer, how it gives women the body they’ve always wanted as a kind of last bequest — the high cheekbones and flattened bellies. With us s
he exchanged pleasantries while simultaneously directing the teenagers with meaningful glances and tilts of her head. But I could tell that her attention lay elsewhere, as if she’d packaged it before the evening fell and already sent it drifting on her kayak.

  Still, when I returned to the table for seconds she took my plate and began filling it herself, poking through the stuffed mushrooms with a disdainful look and moving on to the chops. “And how are your birds, Henry? Do you find the company of people as interesting as theirs? I must confess that often I do not.”

  I said that while the company may not be as good, the food is better. Then she blew a funny puff from her lips as she handed me my plate.

  “Do you know what it means,” she asked, “La Maison d’Herbe?”

  “I assume you’re going to tell me.”

  “House of Grass. A stupid name for a restaurant.”

  “Whatever it means, the food is wonderful.”

  She puffed again, and this time I recognized it as a derisive laugh. “You all are such provincial people. My dear Dr. Henry, if you’d ever been to Paris you’d know that this food is shit.”

  “La Maison de Merde,” she said then, and laughed and laughed.

  JESSYE NORMAN was playing when we entered, the spire of her voice like a needle working heavy cloth, but somehow by the end of the meal Yvonne had segued to Chet Baker without our noticing. Dessert was chocolate truffles, a buttery pear tart, and a hazelnut torte, followed by cheeses and fresh fruit and cordials that we sipped from hand-blown vials. By this time the women were flushed and giggling like girls, and they began to touch me on the chest and shoulder as we spoke. Three of the men went into another room to watch the football playoffs, which left Dan Bolduke and me in the living room, whose heavy furniture seemed to clear a space around us as we stood there lapping at our syrupy cordials, a phenomenon that made me think I was truly drunk until I realized that Yvonne Beauchemin was going around and surreptitiously moving the davenport and chairs out of the way. Her breath shortened with each heave, causing her to stop and lean against whatever she was pushing, as if she happened to be seized by a sudden fit of reverie in the wake of the movement of each piece. Chet Baker was singing the standards I remembered from nights out with my wife back in the fifties, before we had children: “Time After Time” and “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” even the idiotic “Look for the Silver Lining” (“and try to find the sunny side of life”). His notes, wildly shy of pitch, sounded as if they were coming through a heavy fog, his trumpet weaving through them like a line of birds in flight, filling the space between his verses. A voice, I thought, full of great reluctance to be here in this world. And the intonations were languid, as if he had resisted uttering the words until the last possible second, as if he had sent them here to this living room only when he finally realized that there was no other world for them to go to.

  Then the women — how did this happen? — lifted their arms and began to swirl, swaying and bending from the waist. Dan Bolduke shambled around for a while like a good-natured oaf before he took up his wife and kissed her on the lips. When one by one the other women passed through my arms, I knew the feel of most of them, the moistness and density of their flesh. My patients, my neighbors: I am too old a man to have women for friends. And I thought it was sad that there were not more men for them to dance with, that they had no choice but to dance with each other, the way they did when they were schoolgirls.

  And so it went through two dozen songs, an hour or more, until finally I boxed myself in a corner with Yvonne, whom I did not twirl under my arm but held firm against my chest in a proper two-step. Something Gershwin, maybe “Long Ago and Far Away”— just before the final chorus I took our outstretched hands and squeezed and pressed hers to my lips. I suppose the liquor made me giddy; I remember whispering a brief ode into her knuckles. “You are lovely inside” is the part I remember. So exceedingly stupid. At that moment I was just a child.

  But Yvonne laughed and shook her hand from my grip, before handing me off to Florence Pratt. “No, Henry,” she said, “I am rotten inside”—but Florence, having come in in the middle, did not understand the joke. And as we moved across the room I could feel the cloud of her befuddlement making its own weather in between us, as Yvonne danced an outrageous tango with Dan Bolduke, who dipped her backbone into an impossible curl while she clawed the air with one of her high heels, the white of her leg slicing through a slit that ran the full length of her skirt.

  WELL, HOW THE STORY ENDS, you know, same ending more or less as everyone’s story. My wife, Yvonne Beauchemin. . in the end all we can do is add them to memory’s legions. Of course, my wife’s is a different story, though sometimes I wonder how much different. Inside the body we are all much the same, just as a bird without its pelt of variegated feathers becomes a lump of undistinguished meat. And though it has been years since I’ve done any surgery, I remember in medical school being shocked by the sameness underneath the peeled-back human skin. Yes, you can see the tumor and the place where the broken bone has knitted back together — all the flaws that give us each our individual stamp. But these things are just a fraction of the body, compared with the bulk of what we hold in common.

  ASHES

  When his father died, Tim would have flown back to Chicago for the funeral, except that his father had insisted that there be none. “Why give everyone the chance to stand around jawing about what a son of a bitch I was?” he grumbled long-distance during the last days of his illness. “When I die, just throw me in the goddamn hole.”

  But the hole was a problem, because Tim’s mother was buried in her family’s plot from which Tim’s father had gotten himself banished forever, after some bad behavior at the luncheon for the bereaved. And his second wife had years ago purchased a grave site for herself next to her first husband. Now she told Tim she’d decided “just to roll with” the plot she already had. Truth be told, her marriage to Tim’s father never really took like the first one did.

  Best thing, she offered, would be for Sam to be shipped out West, let Tim decide where to take it from there.

  These last words frightened Tim, who was not sure what “it” meant. For a few days he expected Sam to show up on his doorstep in a giant box with his toes poking out like a bunch of grapes.

  So when the UPS man dropped off only a modest box full of packing peanuts, Tim was relieved; inside was a smaller cardboard box with a metal cap, marked HUMAN CREMAINS. Also enclosed were his father’s dog tags, and a bottle of Crown Royal whiskey in its purple bag, which Sam had bought when Tim was born, to be opened at his wedding. Maybe it’s time to admit defeat, his stepmother had scribbled on a scrap of paper.

  Go on, add it up, Tim dared himself as he clawed through the peanuts: this twelve-year-old whiskey had sat for another forty-three years inside its bottle. Bringing the total to fifty-five, whiskey old enough to join the AARP.

  TIM HAD TROUBLE thinking of himself as middle-aged; his young adulthood — the years his high school friends had married miserably and bred — he’d spent tromping around the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, working on and off in the Giffort Pinchot National Forest. Those days in the Giff: where had they gone? And how could they have left him with such a big gut in their wake?

  One of Tim’s friends from the Forest Service had settled in the same town — and hurried over when the box came. “Tim’s wedding whiskey,” Ivan purred. “The pretty purple baby.”

  “I’ve got the something old, and you’ve got the something borrowed,” Tim said as he pried the bottle from Ivan’s hands.

  “Count your blessings, man.” Ivan settled into Tim’s battered recliner, kicking out the footrest. “If this was your wedding, you’d have a lot more people trying to horn in on the juice.”

  Tim poured two tumblers a quarter full and knocked glasses with Ivan before he swallowed. The whiskey gave him a suntan from the inside out.

  “Aaah,” Ivan exhaled from the back of his throat. “I could easily drink a who
le fifth of this myself.”

  A hockey game flickered on the TV with the sound turned down, while on the stereo Neil Young lit into another screeching guitar riff. Tim’s idea had been that he and Ivan, at this point in life his oldest buddy, would drink the whiskey with a quiet, ceremonial intent while Tim chewed on a few choice anecdotes about his father. But all he could think of was Sam standing outside, blasting the hose at dogs he suspected of shitting in his yard, Sam throwing his slipper at the TV, Sam borrowing Tim’s BB gun to shoot the mourning doves burbling outside the window. Then Ivan began to play some serious air guitar, his head thrown back, his mouth a crater with a crumbling rim. Watching him, Tim felt himself getting annoyed at the fact that Ivan had grown the exact same beard as him without asking his permission. A U-shaped goatee without the mustache, something to gain a little cred with the high school kids, down whose throats each year Tim crammed the Louisiana Purchase.

  “What’s wrong?” Ivan asked, sitting up.

  Tim shook his head. “Nothing.” The bottle was sitting in the kitchenette next to the morning’s dishes, the neck sticking from the felt bag like a headless aborigine shrugging from her frumpy dress. “Nothing except that it wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be me and my dad wearing cummerbunds and sneaking swigs behind the church.”

  “Oh, I had a wedding once. Believe me, it was overrated,”