He’s a prick.
Pillow had denied the claim, but Cook had no reason to trust Pillow’s judgment. In fact he had ample reason to distrust it. And he had the vivid memory of Dan pedaling off toward the horizon, lifting his butt up smartly from the seat, the better to pump and put distance between himself and his wife. If Dan was going to pass the prick test, he would have to do it on his own, without Pillow’s help. Until he did, this sentence summed up the Wilson marriage.
He folded THE HORROR! and put it back in his pocket. It was good that he did this, because a moment later Beth appeared and sat down at the table. Cook’s coffee came at the same time. Beth ordered one for herself. Then, frowning unprettily, she asked Cook why he hadn’t ordered for her. Cook gave a guilty shrug. He felt just as he had felt after dinner, when he was worried that he had offended Beth by going to the library with Dan and Robbie. This time, though, annoyance followed hard upon the guilt. What was her problem, that she kept making him feel this way?
Beth said, “There’s something you should know.” She held him in her gaze. “My parents have money.” She looked at Cook strangely, almost defiantly. It was as if she had told him a different kind of secret—that she was a paroled murderess, or a former man. “That French house I showed you, with the porte cochere? I grew up there.” She smiled slyly, as if amused to have tricked him by holding back this information. “They don’t live there anymore—they’ve moved to West County. Anyway, there it is. They have money.”
She was waiting for a response. Cook’s main thought had nothing to do with money. He wondered what it would be like to live as an adult less than a mile from one’s childhood home.
“It’s not an issue for me,” Beth said. “It’s absolutely not. But it is for Dan. He says money’s at the root of all of our problems.”
THE HORROR! wanted to leap from Cook’s shirt pocket. It begged for revision.
“They’ve helped us financially,” Beth went on, “but no more than most parents help their children. Well, maybe a little more. They helped us buy our house. They help with some of Robbie’s expenses, like camp, through a trust fund. But they never, never, throw the help they’ve given us in our face. Dan’s just waiting for them to do that. He’s poised, ready to spring at them when they do.”
Her coffee came, and she sipped it and looked at Cook. “So. There it is. Money.” She sighed and made a sour face. “I hate this. You’re impossible to talk to.” She looked away, out the windows, at the traffic.
Cook sipped his coffee. Beth looked back at him and said, “Does it seem to you that Dan indulges Robbie?”
Cook raised his eyebrows.
“The way he jumped up from the table to take him to the library last night. Do you think that’s healthy?” She shook her head, apparently dissatisfied with the way she was putting it. “He’s always going out of his way to do things for him. Of course, it’s terrific for Robbie, but from my point of view … I feel like he takes better care of Robbie than he does of me.” She seemed a little embarrassed to be saying this. She looked away again, out the window. Cook waited. She looked back at him.
“When I showed you my old house across from Forest Park, I had a memory of being a little girl there—of looking out my bedroom window at the park, and thinking how I would be married someday, and how I’d be walking with my husband on the bike path, and I’d point out the house and surprise him by telling him I grew up there, and he’d be amazed and say, ‘Really? That’s interesting. Tell me about it.’ It was an important fantasy to me. But the reality turned out different. When Dan and I came to St. Louis for the first time, my folks were still living there, and when Dan saw the house he didn’t show any of the interest I’d expected. He didn’t have any curiosity—he didn’t ask which room was mine or if I played in the park or anything like that. He just looked at the house for a long time from the car, without getting out, and he said, ‘This is gonna be a problem.’ I had no idea what he was talking about.” She took a deep breath. “Anyway, all that kind of came over me. Sorry.”
Cook made a sympathetic face. It felt a little funny to him, but he held it as long as he could.
They walked their bikes home, through a lively area of shops and restaurants that Beth referred to as “the Loop.” When they entered the gate into Dan and Beth’s neighborhood, Beth looked up and saw something that made her gasp softly. “Ooh,” she said. “The roofers. Shit. I forgot.” She hopped on her bike and took off down the sidewalk. Far ahead, Cook could see a pickup truck parked in front of Dan and Beth’s house.
He got on his crippled bike and pedaled to catch up with Beth. The truck was facing them, with the driver’s side against the curb. This gave it a faintly illegal look. It listed heavily to the curb side under its load of two ladders and several men, who seemed to be hanging all over it. They watched Beth approach. Cook was behind her, and he felt their eyes switch to him. He could feel their admiration for his nicely decorated bike and their deep respect for him as a man.
Beth stopped her bike at the driver’s door and said, “Are you Mr. Farmer?”
Cook heard murmured denials. They were not Mr. Farmer. They were Mr. Hanke.
Dan suddenly appeared from around a corner of the house. With him was a shirtless man—the chief Hanke, presumably. Dan brightened somewhat to see Beth and Cook. He excused himself from the man and walked toward Beth, who seemed a little confused and met him on the sidewalk. Cook, sensing speech was about to happen, laid his bike down in the ivy and drew close.
“I got a bid for the roof repairs,” Dan said. He glanced at Cook but showed no sign of recognition. “They’ll do it for eight hundred.”
“Let’s get another bid,” said Beth.
Dan immediately tensed. “They’re here,” he said slowly. “They can do it now. It’s hard to get these guys to show up. That’s half the battle.”
“I’ve got another roofer coming today,” said Beth. “Let’s see what he says.” She spoke evenly, but not peaceably.
“You called a roofer?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know he’s coming?”
“I don’t. I’ll go in and call him right now to make sure. Okay?”
“I kind of told this guy he got the job,” said Dan.
As if to underscore this, the Hankes began to detach themselves from their truck. They had a uniformly skinny, stringy-haired look. They moved slowly and in complete silence. Cook found this eerie until he identified it: experience told him this was the reluctant, wordless, life-cursing behavior of souls who were deeply hung over.
“Tell him we haven’t decided,” said Beth. “Tell him we’ll have to get back to him to let him know.”
Dan pressed his lips together. He inhaled sharply. He sighed. He did everything but refuse.
“You should always get two bids,” said Beth.
“I know,” Dan said wearily. “You think I don’t know that? But they’re here, and it’s a reasonable bid.”
“What do you know about them?” asked Beth.
The clang of a ladder as it banged from the truck onto the pavement made them all jump. “They’re here. That’s what I know.”
This distinction suddenly disappeared with the arrival of the second crew—the Farmers—whose truck was slightly newer than the Hankes’. It came from the other direction and parked along the curb directly in front of the Hanke truck, front bumper to front bumper. Dan, Beth, and Cook watched them come to a stop. So did the Hankes. Cook thought the two crews would buddy up to each other and talk shop, but there was none of that. Just dull staring. The two gangs—five Hankes and four Farmers—looked heavily sedated.
Beth hurried to the Farmer truck, introduced herself, and asked who was in charge. As she talked with them, Dan’s roofer, perhaps fearing an erosion of his support, looked questioningly at Dan.
“We seem to have a little problem, Mr. Hanke,” Dan called to him. “Bear with me a second, will you?” Then he went to Beth and her crew. Cook stuck close to Dan
.
“Howdy,” the man behind the wheel said to Dan, his face reddening with a broad grin. He thrust a hand out the window past Beth. He was a large, barrel-chested man. The Farmers seemed to eat better than the Hankes.
“Mr. Farmer wants to give us a bid, honey,” Beth said brightly, as if his willingness to do this were a pleasant surprise.
Dan said, “Okay. Let me handle it, though, for the sake of consistency. I want to be sure his bid is based on the same repairs. If it’s not, we’re going to get even more balled up than we are.”
“Good thinkin’,” said Farmer.
Beth accepted this as a nonusurpation of her authority. As Farmer got out of his truck, Dan went back to Hanke and asked him to bear with him while he got another bid.
Hanke, far from expressing disappointment, grinned and nodded rapidly, as if driving a nail with his chin. “Don’t I know about that. Got to please the wife. Don’t I know about that.” He drifted back to his own crew and gave them an update.
Dan and Farmer toured around the outside of the house. Farmer carried his extra weight awkwardly, reminding Cook of Ariel Sharon, with whom Cook figured he shared little else. Dan pointed to several places where the roof leaked. Farmer listened actively and sympathetically. He said he wanted to see the leakage points from inside.
“We’re gonna go inside,” Dan called to the Hankes from the front steps. “Bear with me, okay?” As often happens when a group is addressed, no single person took responsibility for the role of hearer, and Dan’s plea was answered with stares.
They stomped around inside for a while, where Cook, in the closer confines, reassessed Farmer’s enthusiasm: the guy stunk of booze.
When they came out, Farmer went to his people for a conference. Dan, Beth, and Cook were left alone for the first time since they had been in the park.
“Where’d you two go?” said Dan. “I turned around and you were out of sight. I looked all over for you. Did you take a different path?”
Beth said, “Yes.” Then she said, more coolly, “Did your man go inside the house?”
“No.”
“Hmm. My man seems to know what he’s doing.”
While her man, Farmer, continued to consult with his crew, Dan’s man, Hanke, sidled up to Cook, gave him a looking over, and said, “You a roofer, too?” He said it very softly, evidently not wanting Dan or Beth to hear. His strange assumption seemed to be that if Cook was a roofer, Dan and Beth might not know it, and he didn’t want them to find out.
Cook shook his head and said he was just a friend. Hanke nodded and went back to his crew and conferred with them. Perhaps there was a ground swell of curiosity about the silent stranger.
Farmer returned to Dan and Beth. He talked at length about the difficulty of doing this, the near-impossibility of doing that, and the superhuman efforts required to do the other. He slapped himself sharply on the belly with both hands and bid the job at seven hundred dollars.
“That’s a hundred dollars less,” Beth said right away.
“I know,” Dan said testily. “Isn’t subtraction wonderful?” He turned to Farmer. “Can you do it today?” He sounded hopeful for a yes, but Cook knew he wanted a no. Dan wanted to win, and winning meant getting his guy, Hanke, up on that roof, even if it cost an extra hundred dollars.
“Sure can,” said Farmer. “If we get started now.”
“Do you have references?” said Dan.
“References?”
“People you’ve done work for that could recommend you.”
Farmer gave this some thought. “We’re just startin’ out in the business. But we’ll do you right. Don’t worry about that.”
Beth said to Dan, “Do yours have any?” Dan called out, “Mr. Hanke, do you have any references?”
“Yeah,” Hanke said, taking a step forward. “There was that guy over on … over on …” He faded out, then came back. “He was a doctor. I forget his name.”
Dan turned to Farmer. “What kind of guarantee can you give against future leaks?”
“One full year,” Farmer said proudly.
“Three years,” Hanke called out.
“Five years,” Farmer countered.
“A lifetime,” said Hanke. “The lifetime of the house or the owner—whichever comes first.”
Cook decided he would rather fall from the roof and land on his head than try to process this sentence. He reached out and put one arm around Beth, and he put his other arm around Dan, and he said, “Can we step aside a moment? Can we do that?”
Dan looked at Cook as if he had spoken in the Icelandic dialect of Schnorrfark. Frowning, he turned to Farmer and Hanke and asked them to bear with him a second. Cook took Dan and Beth down the sidewalk a ways.
“There’s an old saying in The Pillow Manual,” Cook said sagely. “To wit, ‘A divided marriage is an inefficient unit.’ Dan, Beth—what we have here are two roofing crews. One is certainly drunk, and the other wishes it were. Both will take your money and do nothing for your roof but harm it. Send them home. Get someone who doesn’t have amnesia about his references. Get someone who doesn’t promise guarantees that are a thousand times longer than he’s been in business. Do it right.”
He left them there and went inside the house.
There immediately followed a period of small rebellions. After Dan dismissed both roofing crews—a treatment that surely must have perplexed them—he stomped down to the basement without a word and began to clean it, emphasizing demolition in the early going. Beth went right to the piano and practiced the same four or five nerve-jangling measures over and over. Cook, after a few minutes of aimless wandering on the first floor, became fully aware of the hostility Dan and Beth felt not only for each other but—at the moment, at least—for him as well, and he withdrew to his room. Singing obscene lyrics to go with Beth’s music, he sat at his little yellow desk and tore into the forbidden, sealed portions of The Pillow Manual, slipping his flat hand in at the bottom of each page and whacking the tabs apart with sideways karate chops.
But having done this much, Cook slammed the manual shut without reading a word. If he failed with the Wilsons, he wanted it to be Pillow’s failure, not his own, and that meant sticking by the rules. As for his lapses into speech—in the park with Beth and just now with both of them—he felt he hadn’t done anything wrong. He had had no choice, really. Only a clod would have withheld words on those occasions.
Beth’s practicing came to an end. Cook heard footsteps on the first floor, then on the second, in the master bedroom directly below him, then on the first again. The front door opened and closed. He looked out the window and saw Beth get into her car and drive off. He remembered Dan mentioning some parent conferences she had to go to.
Cook wandered down the stairs to the first floor. He went to the piano and turned on the small music light. The sheet music was open to a piece by Darius Milhaud. Cook had retained very little from his three years of piano lessons as a boy—mainly memories of the neighborhood dachshund that chased him to and from each lesson, and of his piano teacher’s husband lurking out of sight in the kitchen and constantly clearing his throat, as if in comment on Cook’s playing. But the three years of piano had been followed by five years on the trumpet, so he could still read music, at least in the treble clef. He plinked a few notes. They sounded fairly right. He plinked them again.
“I don’t have to listen to that shit from you,” Dan shouted from directly below.
Cook’s hand froze over a D-sharp, his eyes stuck on the music. It slowly dawned on him, as he wondered what to do next, that the treble and bass clefs of the piece were written in different keys; the former had four sharps, the latter three flats. He had never seen anything like this before. He pointed to it and whispered to the floor, “This sums up your marriage, asshole.”
“Sorry!” Dan called. He followed it up with some mutters. His apology seemed genuine and spontaneous. He couldn’t possibly have heard Cook’s comment. Cook decided to see what he was doing.
“You’re right,” Dan said to him before he was all the way down the stairs. “You’re right you’re right you’re right. We are inefficient.” A bare bulb shone brightly in Cook’s face, and he couldn’t see Dan clearly. He moved around to get a better view but immediately bumped into a standing roll of tin. Dan stood in a small clearing in the center of the basement, surrounded by junk that was piled halfway to the ceiling. He threw a cardboard box to the floor and stomped it until it was small enough for him to fit it into a trash bag.
“We’re ridiculous. I was in the middle of Forest Park when I remembered the roofers were coming, and I shot right back here. I’ll bet Beth forgot about her roofers until she saw mine. Am I right?”
Cook nodded.
“The question is, why didn’t I tell Beth I’d called a roofer? Why didn’t she tell me she’d called one? I’ll tell you why: we were fighting. When you’re fighting you don’t want to say, ‘Hey, honey, guess what? I called a roofer.’ There are gaps like these all the time around here. Complete breakdowns. Anyway, thanks. You were right.”
Dan stretched an arm out, inviting Cook to survey the basement mess. “You get married and have a kid, next thing you know you’ve got a basement that looks like this.” He picked up a box. “Look. Robbie’s car-seat box. It’s been down here for ten years. The box is here and the seat’s hanging over there somewhere. What sense does that make? Jesus. Our whole life is down here.” He looked around. In the harsh light of the bare bulb his face looked angry, but when he spoke, his tone was not. “Look at that. The gates to keep Robbie from falling down the stairs. I labeled them and taped the screws to them and saved them for our long-awaited second child. But we fought too much for that. Beth said no more until we worked things out. Helluva policy.” He pointed to a corner of the basement. “Old drywall, piles of it, crumbling, mildewed. That’s gonna be fun to clean up. I’ll probably get some lung disease from it. Over there’s our kitchen table from our first apartment in St. Louis—an old cable spool. It’s got knotholes in it that your dinner would drop into and just disappear in. Do I miss those days? Hell if I know. Our early years are a blur. Here.” He threw Cook a box. “Smash this if you want to help. Stomp it into as small a piece as you can.”
The Full Catastrophe Page 11