Little Reef and Other Stories

by Michael Carroll

  I waved and the one I’d been attracted to at a party two years before, the one pushing the cart, slowed down and knitted his brows. I waved again and he stopped, looked at me, nodded. I at first read his reaction of “remind-me-again?” vagueness as a kind of admonishment. I recalled their cocoa-colored, surrogate-mom children spinning prettily in the August dusk. I remembered the pride with which the heterosexual, mostly literary couples had included them. We were very, very attractive—gay people—as long as our lives didn’t sound perverted or sordid. I acted like a housewife seeing them, pretending to be all about the wild-caught versus the farm-raised salmon but turning toward them, surprised, suddenly uncannily beholden. My mother had led my father away from their hometown to escape the storm of Christian conformity. They’d wanted to dance and drink and not be Baptists. I was a Baptist again. I might as well have been. My parents had watched me get immersion-baptized and were proud, but why? Because it meant I was a part of things, I’d made that anecdotal transition; I was visually and socially whole, until I wasn’t again.

  We came with a chili I’d spent hours that afternoon assembling with fresh ingredients, including beans I’d soaked overnight and boiled that morning. I was tired from chopping and adding it all at just the right moment. Nor did I resort to using canned tomato sauce or canned tomatoes since it was well known that the linings of the cans combined with the acid of the tomatoes made for a toxic brew—in case anyone asked, and I was sure that these mothers could taste the difference.

  While I cooked, the boys in our cove launched their Sunfish, sailing it in nonstop loops.

  In the car going over, nervous, I said, “Honey, I don’t want you wallflowering, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Since, but also leading up to, his stroke, in social settings he would hang back unless some nice young person approached, recognizing him. He hadn’t gotten his due, was the bottom line.

  “I think it’s important for you to mingle and talk to folks. It’s good for your self-esteem.”

  Eventually he said, “I will. I promise I’ll talk to people and not recede into the scenery.”

  “Wonderful, darling. Because I just think it’s so important for you and your condition.”

  I was a weird hybrid of my mother and someone else, a gay “aunt” who’d studied group dynamics at Vassar. Mom would never have used a psychological phrase like self-esteem. That would come much later, with Donahue and Oprah. She would have used “sociable,” but she was also a touch hick-irreverent. She’d have said, “Did you make any new friends, Dingleberry?”

  Skip, the private school headmaster, and Barry, the architect, had gotten us invited.

  “And you say the architect guy told you he’d just finished my last novel and liked it?”

  “As my mother’d say,” I said, “‘I wouldn’t shit you, ’cause you’re my favorite turd.’”

  “And then cackle,” he said. “God, that cackle!”

  “You didn’t grow up with it.”

  “What’s his name, the architect? What kind of architecture?”

  “Barry. We didn’t talk about it, so you’ll have to ask him yourself. We talked about you. They were saying they’d heard you’d been ill. Then we exchanged numbers and that was that.”

  We were headed to the house of the greatest novelist of my generation, whom we had met in New York at a party for him. I’d once reviewed one of his more minor books with a great deal of enthusiasm, and at that New York party I’d identified myself and he’d acted grateful, saying it was one of the smarter reviews and hugging me. We’d exchanged emails but not kept up. It had made me nervous even to think of writing him. I knew he was busy producing large Nabokovian tomes that were funny and that swept the themes of America into big bright piles. He was a dad.

  We found the long white wooden fence, after swerving around a black lab in the road, and climbed the steep drive that mounted a lawn-carpeted hill of even, flossy emerald. The view was going to be good. Perry gently and fretfully congratulated me on not getting us killed so far.

  The hour was beautiful, and I paused in my mind collecting my thoughts and willpower.

  “Let’s go home,” Perry said.

  “Yes, let’s.”

  “But we can’t.”

  “I know.”

  Perry had been decorated by French literary entities for his service to their patrimony and won prizes all over the world. He was dazzled by runaway youthful success in any country. His climb had been slow, perilous, and demeaning. He’d never starved but he’d freelanced in squalor for decades and only recently had he begun to surrender to the idea that he was content with what he’d achieved and that it was all relative—probably—anyway. I often had to remind him of this.

  We were getting out of the car when he said, “Do you think it’s because we fool around?”

  “Do I think what’s because we fool around?”

  “Do you think the reason we don’t get invited to things up here is that I write about being promiscuous, and our having other partners? Do you think that impedes you?”

  “Yes,” I said, flinching a little, “but I don’t care. Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”

  “But does that make you mad? Am I getting in the way of your career, writing about it?”

  “Not in the least,” I said, counting the contacts I might have had. “I like my freedom.”

  “I like it, too. But a funny thing, now that I’m on a cane, they’ll probably think …”

  He looked across at a scenically rail-fenced pasture, high-grown without any animals.

  I got out and came around and got his fucking cane out of the back seat. The lobster pot, a tall ironstone vessel, was full near to the top with chili on the floor behind my seat. Just a lady at the covered-dish supper in the fellowship hall after the church service, me and my shitty chili.

  I was helping him out of the car when he added, “The old libertine can barely move.”

  “That’s hilarious,” I muttered, though how I cared for him. “Here. Grab my hand.”

  “They probably believe I deserved it, the old lech.”

  “Don’t lose your nerve, Myrna.”

  The avenging angel in the title of this piece was a goat farmer responsible for making the area’s most famous artisanal cheese. It was sold locally but got as far as Boston, and there was a specialty shop in Brooklyn that sold it, too. “Chèvre Chad” it was called. More on him in a bit.

  The minute we approached the house there was a carnival of emitted music and lights.

  The children of local craftsmen and schoolteachers were tumbling down the grassy slope together with the children of seasonal literary aristocracy, a painterly sight not unworthy of Mary Cassatt, who’d been in the area a century ago. The older kids were up on the terrace sharing fun YouTubes with one another on their iPads and snickering, “Awesome, right? What a moron!”

  In another minute I was alone, relieved of the pot, on the patio of the old, large house—a Victorian manor of captains’ dreams. This was a perfect world, a Valhalla absolved of cigarette smoking and Jell-O molds. Nearby, a table groaned with salads and fixings, perfect clean meats.

  The great writer’s wife had nothing to do suddenly, or else she wouldn’t have stopped to talk to me. She was drinking a beer and came up to me as though no time had passed since we’d first met at that party years ago in New York, and she said, “We’ve been so worried. We’d heard he was ill. But he’s getting around fine, right? We just didn’t expect you guys to be here.”

  “Day by day,” I said, drinking a matching beer and having decided I’d only drink two.

  “He looks great. I need to go in and check on things in a sec. Skip and Barry say hi.”

  “Oh,” I said, suddenly chastened. “Aren’t they here?”

  “Last night they went to Bar Harbor for lobster and both of them got food poisoning.”

  It was getting dark and my cell went off in my pocket, vibrating against my right thigh.
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br />   It was Faith, I saw from the display. I answered and the writer’s wife panicked away.

  I went to a corner of the terrace away from the screaming children’s voices and answered.

  “Hi, it’s Faith,” I heard punily, and I thought of how Faith, a recent undergrad from Ohio State in cultural anthropology when I’d first met her, would have remarked on all this. I thought of terms like “tribalism” and “reference groups.” Back then she could swing a phrase and deploy the nomenclature. “How are you? I hear music. Are you at a party, in Maine? Is it a bad time?”

  “Yes, I’m still in Maine,” I said, “and yes, at a party. You’re good, lady.”

  I thought that, too, she would be envious, the leisurely writer’s life. She would make fun of it, but it was what she’d wanted for herself and, as trappings minus kids go, what I’d wanted.

  “Is this a bad time?”

  “I can move somewhere quieter,” I said, stepping onto the immaculate lawn. “Better?”

  I thought of her old East Harlem apartment, the drafty box, her crucifix on the wall. But she wasn’t living there anymore. She and Rakesh were up in godawful Westchester somewhere.

  “It’s a bad time, right?” There was a hooty catch in her throat. “Because I hope not.”

  When we’d spoken a month before, Faith was thrilled with her life and was in love with her baby boy, Matthias, and couldn’t be happier living up in Westchester County, she’d said. We were talking a bit more frequently now that she didn’t have the distractions of New York to keep her busy, only her daily loads of laundry. She was making her own baby food. Rakesh was still working in the city and she could arrange her days between feeding and diapering Matthias.

  “What is it, darling,” I said, “not enough for Matthias’s college? He eighteen already?”

  She laughed. She said, “Rakesh won’t take his meds and he’s acting crazy, just insane.”

  “Meds?” I said, and I thought of her sweet-natured, dutiful husband and I stopped.

  “He’s bipolar, and I guess I never told you about it and he thinks he’s Superman and gets into this thing and I don’t know what to do. He just gets into this thing, this thing I don’t get.”

  “Is he there now?” I said, panicking a little.

  “No. He’s gone off to Costco. We were supposed to go together but he huffed off alone.”

  “By himself? Will he be all right?”

  “I guess so,” she said and sniffled. She hiccupped and started to cry and then stopped.

  “Are you—should I—? Wait, but is Matthias okay?”

  “Matthias is fine. He’s my little man, he’s so wonderful.” And then the little catch in her throat again. I heard her let loose with a series of grief chuckles. “He’s my fucking soldier, he’s so great. He’s right here smiling up at me. Hi! He’s wonderful. You should come see him when you get back, you’d be shocked how much he’s grown! But yeah, Rakesh gets into his thing—”

  “Of course I’ll come see him and you, the day after we get back, I promise. But—”

  She laughed, chuckling and hooting, and said, “You don’t have to treat it so urgently. I’m not going to fall apart. But if I could just get Rakesh to come home and cool off, and if we could get to a meeting. He’s always better after a meeting, just like me although I never skip mine. He gets sad and angry and resentful, so angry! It’s like this burning resentful fire in his eyes, and he gets on the internet, while I’m busy ironing or what have you, and starts in on me about the Pope, about the Catholic Church. ‘Do you know what fucking happened in 1455? It’s right here!’ And I try to tell him about the media, that you can’t trust it just because you read it on Wikipedia …”

  “Why won’t he take his medications, if he’s got a problem? If it makes him better?”

  I was saying the perfunctory thing—what people would ask me. They were holding me accountable, but I had a sometimes noncompliant patient myself, always difficult to explain.

  “He doesn’t trust it, he said it makes him feel like a zombie, I tell him don’t drink coffee! He goes ballistic if he has more than one cup, if he has even one cup. I’ll tell you one thing, and you’ll probably remember this, I used to diss psychopharmacopeia out of hand, like this was just one more big liberal conspiracy to get us in line with the left-wing world-hegemonic agenda and be zombies! And I still sort of believe that, if you look at other countries around the world, which have faith-based societies and that don’t gobble this stuff at a drop of a hat—but I’m a believer in it now. I thank God for these research-based corporations that sincerely do want to help people.”

  She was chugging her way into the old pressured speech, my shrink had called it. I might as well settle in for the next several minutes because I might not have time to interrupt her.

  “I didn’t believe but then I had nowhere else to turn, and I prayed on it—then I knew.”

  I turned toward the little shimmering cove: “I’m glad you’ve come over to the dark side.”

  “I don’t know what was wrong with me, spotting corporate evil behind every little thing,” she said. “I’ve only told his mom, who keeps saying, ‘Faith, Faith! Please don’t leave my son!’”

  I caught a glimpse of the greatest writer of my generation not looking over. In the time I’d known Faith, he’d probably written a million brilliantly flying, silvery-pinball sentences. He was tall and dark and handsome, the usual, but he was brilliant beyond my capabilities, or my reach. I was a flea to his elephant. I wanted to wrap this up, but then Faith laughed sweet trills.

  “When do you think he’ll come back?” I said, feeling that she really was getting better.

  “You know what? It’ll be fine. No kidding. I just needed somebody to talk to for a minute,” she said. “I thought if I could just talk to somebody until he got home, and then he could see me getting off the phone and knew I’d had to talk to someone—maybe that’d put the fear of God in him. Okay? Jesus! I’m such a baby! Please go back to your party. I’ll be fine. It’ll be fine.”

  Where we left off, I promised to call her in a day or two—a pattern with my mother, too.

  When I got off a teenage goth girl was standing in front of me, and she said, “Difficult?”

  She turned out to be the writer’s daughter, and I said, “I remember when you were little.”

  “Really? How disgusting. That must have been gross. I was such a weird little freak.”

  “Not. It was at a party for your dad during the summer. You weren’t wearing shoes.”

  “Like I said, gross. Were you as bored as I probably was? Are you bored now?”

  She followed me to the kitchen, their beautifully appointed modern country kitchen.

  Her mother came back and said, “You know my daughter, Courtney? Your chili’s to die for, by the way, divine. I had a taste but there’s an intense group lining up for it. Word’s good.”

  I said, “I cooked the beans from scratch last night.”

  “I could taste that. Courtney’s a vegetarian, aren’t you, love?”

  “That I am. Thanks for mentioning it, Mom. It’s so polite to our guest, you big cow.”

  I remembered this kind of banter with my mother, how we’d tease each other, say hateful things, so that later we could make up and hug and kiss. And I remembered the slow drift away.

  “Court, could you go up and tell Dylan and Bowie and Josiah that dinner’s on? They are ignoring the grown-ups.” The writer’s wife turned and said to me, “Playing Jarhead Desert Kill.”

  “Listen to her,” said Courtney, “it’s called Desert Command: Jarhead Kill Shot.”

  “Like that makes it any better. Did you notice your partner—or is he your husband—you guys get married yet?—talking to our friend Chad, the goat farmer? And we prided ourselves on thinking Chad was straight. We tried setting him up with Tara the green grocer. Have you tasted her jams, the wild blueberry, natch, being to die for? Tara’s the ginger talking to my honey.”

  �
�She’s gorgeous, but no, I haven’t tasted her jams.”

  “Utterly over the moon for Chad, who thus far has given her not one whit of regard.”

  “What a great party,” I said, “full of attractive, interesting, friendly-looking people.”

  “But seriously, it’s none of my business, and God knows I’ve already had too much beer and all, but have you guys tied the knot yet? I think it’s the duty of every gay couple to marry.”

  “Really. Why?”

  “Don’t be vigilant and the bastards win.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Look at reproductive rights. Already we’re twenty years behind where we used to be.”

  “Which really does suck,” I said, as though I was worried. She’d gone to Columbia with Barack Obama and studied political science alongside him, and I added, “You’re amazing.”

  But she didn’t appreciate it. I got the feeling that with a husband like hers, the winner of a Pulitzer, she’d expected to be president herself by now; she was grinding her energies down by wasting time talking to me. There were CEOs of major progressive start-ups here, too. I knew my audience with her was about to end, but she was married to the great man. I couldn’t unstick.

  Chad had long blond ringlets and a child’s beautifully startled eyes, and he looked the part of God’s chief swordsman in the ultimate desert battle, the Last Days, the Apocalypse, which had been pre-recorded in my young churchgoer’s Book of Revelation. He had the plump, narrow, and overall Aryan Cupid’s-bow lips throwing into relief the purity of his complexion with their coral, high cheekbones, the works. Dusty-emerald eyes that followed my partner’s and, yes (as of late), fiancé’s quick glance over at me, but Michael the Archangel didn’t cease working the Cupid bow.

  “Isn’t he hot?” she said finally. “But aren’t you jealous? Says he’s just a Zen goatherd.”

  “I’ve never met a goatherd before.”

  “Better go over there now,” she said and laughed. “We never thought Chad read.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t,” I said, feeling a twinge of assertiveness. “That wouldn’t matter.”

  “So you are jealous? Sorry. I never should’ve mixed wine and beer. Never should’ve crossed genres. You know what Court, my oldest and dearest, did? Stop looking at hot Chad!”