“But we’ve got to get Robbie ready for camp the next day. If they stay late we’ll—”
“They can come for lunch. They’ll be gone by late afternoon. What’s the big deal?”
Dan turned to Cook. “You got any linguistic activities scheduled that might render this gala event out of the question? I’d be grateful if you did.”
Cook shook his head. He was pleased that Missy Pillow had been so easy to arrange—he assumed the in-laws’ visiting them was as good as their visiting the in-laws, and if it wasn’t, Pillow could go to hell. But he was mainly struck by the shift of agenda. In one breath Beth declares, “It’s over,” and in the next she plans a little luncheon party?
Dan sighed. He repeated his request that Beth call her mother and said he was going to take a shower. Beth asked him to take it on the third floor because she wanted to take a bath in the second-floor bathroom. Dan said, “Okay by me,” and headed up the stairs, singing something Cook didn’t recognize.
Cook was torn. He wanted to talk to Beth more, but he had something to say to Dan, too. Beth got up and went to the receiver. The Mozart had ended and she switched to FM. A blast of music made Cook jump, and Beth nodded with satisfaction. Cook hurried after Dan and caught up with him on the second floor, where he was taking a bath towel from the hall closet.
“That was a good move, Dan,” he said, “suggesting Beth call her mom. You headed off an aggravation. I know her calls get on your nerves.”
Dan peeled off his T-shirt and nodded, full of self-satisfaction. He threw his shirt over his bare shoulder. “You know, Jeremy, if you can just handle little things like this, you can make a marriage work. It’s not big things that wreck a marriage, but a lot of little things added together.” He headed up the stairs to the third floor.
“What happened today?” Cook asked as he followed him. “You’re in a different mood. This morning you seemed completely defeated.”
“Ah,” Dan said triumphantly. “Right you are.” When he reached the third-floor landing he turned and faced Cook. He puffed his chest out a little. “I’ve got some new ideas about marriage, Jeremy. First there’s my Parallel Lines Theory of Marriage. Marriage is coexistence, basically. It’s two people doing their thing under the same roof. It doesn’t have to be anything more than that. But when trouble comes up, someone has to be nice to make the trouble go away. That’s my Be Nice Theory of Marriage. Sometimes one partner has to be nicer than the other, maybe two or three times nicer, or ten times nicer. When it reaches a multiple of ten, that’s my Eat Lots of Shit Theory of Marriage.” Dan had started off calmly but had worked himself up a bit. He paused and collected himself.
“I’ve been nice all day,” he went on. “I’ve been eating shit all day. Rational men everywhere would applaud me.” He waved his arm, as if addressing a throng of them. Standing there on the small landing, his shirt thrown across his shoulder, he looked a bit like a Roman senator giving a speech. “Rational men would say, ‘Dan is working on his marriage. Dan is saving his marriage.’ I feel good. Eating shit makes you feel good. I feel pretty damned civilized right now.” He turned away before Cook could answer, and went into the bathroom.
Cook stood there for a while, thinking about Dan’s theories. He began to walk slowly down the stairs. When he reached the landing between the third and second floors, the phone rang. He could hear the rings from two phones—the one in the second-floor bedroom and the one on the landing above him. He listened for Beth’s footsteps, but apparently the music drowned out the kitchen phone. After four rings, he decided to answer it himself and trotted up to the landing.
Dan bolted out of the bathroom. He was naked except for a towel around his waist. At least he wasn’t wet, Cook observed. Dan grabbed the phone and barked a hello, listened a moment, and set the receiver on the table without another word. He leaned over the railing and yelled for Beth. Then he yelled again—a pained, primitive scream. From the phone Cook heard a woman’s voice—Beth’s mother, he guessed—saying she could call back if this was an inconvenient time, but Dan, hanging over the railing, bellowed again.
The volume on the music suddenly went down. Beth yelled, “Did you say something?”
Dan didn’t answer. He had stepped back to the phone and was staring at it.
Beth shouted, “Did you call me?”
Dan still didn’t answer. He had the phone fixed in a fiendish gaze. Cook finally yelled down the stairs, “Phone!”
Still staring, Dan said, “Stand clear.” Then he undertook a remarkable thing. First, he rotated the towel encircling his waist so that the slit was at the exact rear. This allowed him direct access to the crack between his buttocks—ordinarily not a pressing need in the telephonic arena, but it enabled him to do what he did next, namely, pick up the receiver and insert it through the slit of the towel into the crevice of his buttock cheeks. Cook watched with growing interest. By clenching his cheeks in a way that reminded Cook of marble statuary, Dan was able to hold the phone without using his hands at all. As if to call this to Cook’s attention, he raised his hands above his head. At this point, the towel fell from his waist to the floor, and Cook, viewing Dan’s profile, was privileged to behold two projections, one of pale flaccid flesh, the other of hard jet-black plastic.
The railing on the landing featured one-inch-square wooden pickets, and Dan now made use of these as a prop in the next act of his drama. He twirled so that the phone, still in its viselike clench, pointed straight at the pickets. He pressed his cheeks with his hands for a secure hold, then squatted and backed into the pickets. On making contact, he proceeded to scrape the phone back and forth along them like a little boy scraping a stick on his way to school. Back and forth he went, his pace quickening, until the phone popped free and clattered to the floor, where it rolled and twisted as if propelled by the puzzled female voices coming out of it.
Dan grabbed the phone and hung it up. He picked up his towel from the floor and returned to the bathroom.
The rest of the night was fairly normal. After his shower, Dan went downstairs to the bedroom and closed the door. Beth continued to listen to music in the living room. Cook went right to THE HORROR! Given Dan’s behavior, he just had to strike his old hypothesis and enter a new one. He beheld the result:
She’s a bitch.
He’s a prick.
Money.
He’s a failure.
she thinks he’s failure.
He thinks she’s a bad mother.
The in-laws.
Then he lay down on his bed and read, hoping that he didn’t get called to the phone.
Some time later, he went downstairs. Robbie was in his room, getting things organized for camp. He handed Cook a sheet titled “Big Muddy Checklist” and asked him to read the items aloud one by one. They worked through the list, with Robbie calling out “Check!” for each item. He sounded like Ike on the eve of D-Day. Just when things were at their messiest—when everything was strewn all over the floor—Robbie suddenly got tired and said he was going to bed. Cook imagined him getting up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and stumbling over the mess. When Robbie went to brush his teeth, Cook quietly cleared a little path from the bed to the door.
He went back up to his room. He heard Beth come up and go into the second-floor bathroom, then into the bedroom. She closed the door behind her. He heard their voices through the floor, but just a few sentences—short ones, with long pauses between them. Then there was no sound at all.
Cook read well into the night. He felt on call, like a doctor. But no one beeped him.
The next morning, when Cook went into the bathroom to wash up, he looked out the window to the backyard. Dan was down there mixing concrete in a wheelbarrow.
“Let me get this straight,” Cook said to the window glass. “Your in-laws are coming for lunch in a couple of hours. Your son is going to camp for two weeks tomorrow. You’re going to Italy for two weeks the day after that. Your marriage is approaching meltdown. And
you’re putting up fence posts.” He watched Dan through the window—watched him pull and push the sloshy mix with the hoe—and he wondered just who Dan was. What made him tick, and what did he want, and what did he fear?
Nineteen
They were playing Meet the Linguist. Cook hated to play Meet the Linguist.
The in-laws had arrived in a bunch, and Beth had herded everyone out onto the deck, where her parents had settled at the glass table, and Cook—again introduced as “an old college friend”—had ended up with brother Bruce near the hors d’oeuvres table. After some chat about Bruce’s printing plant, Bruce asked Cook what his line of work was (“General linguistics,” said Cook), then what the point of it was.
Cook said, simply, that linguistics was “interesting.”
Bruce said, “So say something interesting.”
Bruce’s wife, Doris, walked up to them at that moment and said, “Yes. Say something interesting.” She said it in a light way clearly intended to make up for her husband’s aggression. She had been with the two of them earlier, but when they had started to talk about the printing business she had drifted down the deck to the table, where Beth was talking with her parents about Robbie’s new camp. Now she was back with Cook and her husband. She had a tired look that suited her apparent dissatisfaction with the available conversation.
Cook tried not to disappoint her. First off, he told them why so many unrelated languages have words sounding like “mama” and “papa” that mean “mama” and “papa.” Then he told them about the three levels of diction in English, giving them examples of triplets for the same concept, one native English, one borrowed from French, and one borrowed from Latin, increasing in formality in that order: “fear,” “terror,” “trepidation”; “goodness,” “virtue,” “probity.” Finally, he gave them his killer of an explanation for why some people say “Missouree” and others say “Missouruh.”
Doris seemed as fascinated as her energy level allowed her to be. But Bruce was a tough sell. All he had given Cook was a nod, a frown, and a cleared throat. Cook decided it was time to tell him about Thoreau’s Indian.
“One more little linguistic story,” he said. “Henry Thoreau writes about it in one of his travel books. Thoreau was on a canoe trip with a friend, on some river in Maine, and they picked up an Indian who traveled with them for a few days. One night around the campfire, Thoreau and his friend were discussing some point, gesturing in the normal way. The Indian knew very little English—too little to follow their talk—but at the end of every exchange, he would say, ‘He beat,’ pointing either to Thoreau or to Thoreau’s friend, depending on who he thought had won. The Indian had appointed himself judge of their chat, and he was picking the winner just from their gestures!”
Doris laughed. “Talk about competitive,” she said. Cook looked at her husband. Bruce evidently found no personal meaning in the story. He was busy frowning at the remains of the shrimp he had just bitten.
“Beth,” Bruce called, “where’d you get these shrimp?”
Beth stopped in midsentence—she had been speaking to her mother—and gave Bruce a blank look. “In the open-air market.”
“They tell you they were fresh?”
“No,” she said impassively. She turned back to her mother.
“Because they’re not,” her brother said. “They’ve been frozen.” Getting no further response from Beth, he speared another shrimp with a toothpick, dipped it in some red sauce, and held it out for Cook. Something in Cook rose up in resistance, but he dutifully took it and ate it.
“Well?” said Bruce.
Cook chewed and looked at the sweat glistening on Bruce’s forehead.
“Well?”
“Let him taste it, honey,” said Doris.
“How long does it take to taste a shrimp?” Bruce said to her, his eyes still on Cook. “Well? Frozen?”
Cook swallowed. “I have no idea,” he said.
“If you had to say, what would it be?”
“I couldn’t.”
“If you had to.”
Cook laughed. “I do have to, what with the way you’re going on, and I still can’t.”
“If your life depended on it.”
Cook glanced at Doris.
“He’s always like this,” she said.
“I’m holding a shotgun to your head,” Bruce said. “If you refuse to answer, I shoot. Now, frozen or not?”
“Coming through!” Dan called out as he backed into the screen door from inside. He sounded almost like a happy host. His hands were occupied with a platter, on which lay sprawled a huge raw fish. “Coming through!” Since no one was in his way, and since he easily managed the door by himself, his cries hung in the air, unanswered. He threw a grin out that didn’t seem to land on anyone and went down the stairs to the patio.
Cook wanted two things: to avoid being shot by Bruce’s shotgun, and to get a closer look at Beth’s parents in action—presumably the point of Missy Pillow. Thus far he had gotten the merest impression of them. Beth’s father had a remote air, but Cook couldn’t tell if this came from arrogance, shyness, the general distractedness of age, or specific confusion about who Cook was. As for Beth’s mother, Cook associated her with Dan’s phone antics, and on meeting her he had found it hard to look her square in the face. His only feeling about her, based on a few sentences of hers that had drifted his way, was that she was absolutely conventional.
Cook felt it would have been rude to leave Bruce and Doris and go directly to the table to be with Beth’s parents. He hit on a plan. He would excuse himself, ostensibly to help Dan at the grill, and once he had checked in with Dan, he would ease over to the table where Beth sat with her parents. This felt like the typical sort of foolish maneuvering he engaged in at parties to avoid bores—or that he feared others engaged in to avoid him. He excused himself and trotted down the stairs. Behind him, a pretend shotgun went off, and he heard Doris say, “Oh stop it.”
At the patio grill, Dan was staring at the glowing stack of coals. He took no notice of Cook. “Okay,” he said unconvincingly. He set the platter on the rock wall, picked up a small dead branch from the ground, and spread the coals out with it. He stared at the result. “Okay,” he said.
“Nothing but the best tools, eh, Dan?” said Bruce, suddenly appearing from behind Cook.
Dan frowned. Then he looked at the branch, with its smoldering tip. Cook had the impression that Dan wanted to poke Bruce in the eye with it. But he just dropped it and put the grill over the coals. He picked up the fish platter and eased the fish onto the grill. He looked at the fish. “Okay,” he said.
Bruce said, “Don’t you have hamburgers or something for the kids?”
“Oh, shit,” said Dan, and he turned and hurried to the stairs and into the house. As he went in, Robbie came out with Bruce’s two children—a noisy boy somewhat older than Robbie and a docile-looking girl a little younger. They headed for the Ping-Pong table. Beth’s father swung his chair around, away from the glass table, to watch the children. He called out to them, but they didn’t seem to hear him. Doris was now at the table with the adults, uninvolved in their conversation. Her glance fell on Cook, and they looked at each other for a moment.
Bruce chuckled. “Old Danny boy,” he said, shaking his head. He eased the fish over to one side of the grill, where there were no coals underneath. “His heart’s just not in it. He hates having the family over—always has. So look what he does. He forgets the burgers and puts the fish on first. Your heart’s got to be in a thing or you might as well not do it.” He looked at Cook. “Am I right?”
Cook was reluctant to agree with anything coming from Bruce, but he said, “Yes. You’re right.”
“Get into it or get out of it. That’s my philosophy. Take the business. I knew it was there if I wanted it. But did I want it? A son inherits a family business, everyone says big deal, he sat on his ass and it fell in his lap. You have to fight that all your life. Did I want people saying big deal, it fell
in his lap?” He grinned. “Hell, yes. Because I loved it. I loved the print shop. I’ve loved it since I was a kid. And over the years, it’s become mine. It’s become mine as much as if I’d built it out of an empty lot. That’s because I was into it. That’s what it takes.”
“Who owns it, exactly?”
Bruce took a moment to answer. He seemed a little disappointed that Cook hadn’t responded directly to his self-lionization. “Dad, Beth, and me. He’s handing it over to us, year by year. He’s no kid.” Bruce looked up at the deck. A quarrel over the rules had broken out among the children. Beth’s father shouted something to them, and they quieted down and resumed playing.
“Dad’s an amazing guy,” Bruce said. “Great business instincts. It’s tough for him to let go of it. Just think about it.” Bruce looked at Cook. “Your own kid taking over everything you’ve created, and in a year it could be right in the toilet. It must be awful. I’d hate it if I was him.”
“He’s probably proud,” Cook said. “If the business is going well …”
“Sure it is. But you never know.”
“But if it’s going well, he’s probably proud.”
“But you never know what’ll happen! It’s terrifying!”
The screen door banged. They watched Dan come out with a platter of hamburger patties. Bruce frowned in annoyance. “What in the hell is he doing now?”
Dan had set the platter on the broad railing and had gone to the Ping-Pong table, where Robbie was shouting at his older cousin. Dan said that if there was any more arguing he would put the equipment away.
“That’s what I said,” Dan’s father-in-law called out.
Dan began to explain the rules to the children, slowly and carefully, demonstrating each one with the ball. Bruce laughed softly as he watched. He was no longer impatient for the hamburgers and even seemed amused by Dan’s detailed instructions.
“What about Dan’s role in the business?” Cook asked.
Bruce’s face became expressionless, save for a quizzical smile at one corner of his mouth. “Why do you ask?”
The Full Catastrophe Page 24