by JoeAnn Hart
“So why aren’t you married, then, if you think it’s so wonderful?” She was surprised by the agitation in her voice.
So was Frank. It tickled him so much he flipped himself over on his stomach so he could look at her directly. “I haven’t found the right one. I date. But most of the women who are ambitious enough to hunt down a doctor are too thin for me. Deprived. I don’t want someone who deprives herself. She might end up depriving me.”
Madeline caught him glancing at her legs. “You’re dieting, Frank. Depriving yourself, as you call it.”
“Not with Vita cooking.” He nuzzled his chin on his hairy arm. “I went to the kitchen last night for a to-go package. Poached catfish rémoulade with caviar and smoked tomatoes.” His gaze was distant, transfixed in memory. Then he shook himself to the present. “Anyway, we got to talking about the Bellows goose. We were laughing about it, and I said at least Charles Lambert hadn’t killed it, and she said don’t be too sure.”
Madeline automatically looked up to see if Scott could have heard, but he was chatting with the girls clustered in the corner. “What do you mean, ‘don’t be too sure’”
“It’s so absurd, I shouldn’t even tell you. Vita thinks Charles was with Bellows and that’s why Phoebe changed her story from a gun to a backfire once she suspected her father was in on it. Just goes to show—blood is still thicker than goose.”
“That’s insane.” Madeline sat up straight, pressing her fingernails into the teak armrests as she considered the possibility. Charles hadn’t been next to her when she woke up the day of the shooting. Then she settled back in her lounge and composed her face. But he rarely was these days, was he? He usually fell asleep in the garage, wrapped in his hammock like a giant larva.
“I wouldn’t put too much trust in what Vita has to say,” she said. “After all, why was she at the Club so early that morning? Phoebe thinks she was trying to hide something.”
“What do you mean?” Frank’s face turned heavy.
Madeline shrugged. She didn’t necessarily want to repeat Phoebe’s theory, knowing her general attitude toward chefs, “those dead-animal handlers,” as she called them. She worried about her intentions. Phoebe had recently asked about Gerard Wilton, of all people, and Madeline professed ignorance about his life outside of the Club, which was only the truth. To what extremes might her daughter go to save the world? To what nefarious ends might she employ personal information? On the other hand, Madeline needed to discredit Vita so no one would believe what she had to say about Charles. “I don’t know exactly,” she said, picking up the magazine and paging through it. “Stealing, I suppose.”
“Oh,” said Frank.
Madeline pretended to read about heated towel racks, while Frank stared over at the club-house, its Tudor facade deep in shadow with the sun lowering behind it. Then he stood up with an effort. “Last one in is a rotten egg,” he said flatly. He trundled to the pool, as graceless as a Neanderthal. Before Madeline could tell him it was probably all just a bunch of nonsense, he dove into the water. The fuchsia floated to the surface.
She felt like a complete jerk. She shouldn’t have suggested that Vita was up to no good. That was mean. Besides, trying to cover up Charles’s behavior was not going to make him any saner. While she was mulling over how to repair the damage, Scott left the girls under the umbrellaed table where they sipped Diet Coke through straws.
“Anything I can do for you, Mrs. Lambert?” he said, massaging the side of his neck. “Get you a towel or a drink or something?”
His crotch was at eye level, and all she could think of was genital jewelry, and genitals in general. “No,” she said, blushing. She looked at the watch clipped to her beach bag, as if someone were expecting her at home. “I’ve got to go. Thank you.” She would smooth things out with Frank later.
As she packed, ten crows landed one by one on the slate roofline of the pool house, waiting to clean up the day’s mess.
Chapter Nineteen
The Grip
CHARLES STOOD in the open door of the garage, his welder’s mask flipped up on his forehead like a duck’s bill, and decided that while Madeline was still at the pool, a visit to the geese was in order. Fresh air was the universal salve, as his father used to say—and maybe it would unblock his art as well as his tongue. When Madeline came to the garage door to let him know she was going, he had no words to share what was inside him. But did anyone? People made noises and thought they were talking—saw facial expressions and thought they knew what they meant—but how close did anyone come to communicating the pain of living or the ecstasy of life? His own language had been cultivated for commerce, to assist in the trafficking of financial bonds. But where were the words for the bonds of love? He couldn’t even say good-bye. It must be something about the way she stared at him—uncertain, questioning, confused—with eyes that once held only love and adoration. She used to call him her rock, and it made him glow to think of himself as such an adult. But last fall, when she had that lump, he realized he might not always be able to see himself through her eyes—he had to see himself through his own. And he saw nothing.
He put his torch down on his workbench and took off his mask, brushing his hair back with his fingers. He knew now he had been too reassuring about the lump, too glib, and then when the biopsy came back negative, he’d had nowhere to go with his happiness, since he had never admitted how terrified he’d been. He had to reach her somehow, even if he had to forge a whole new language with his hands. But something was as wrong with his sculpture as it was with his marriage, and he felt that if he got one right, the other would follow. And he was so close now—he could feel it. His head was still swimming from his meeting with his instructor last week. Charles—as always—had been too tentative in class, standing at his workstation, welding together small bits and scraps, trying to find his way, politely agreeing with everything Vincent had to say—and not understanding a thing.
When Vincent passed his work area again, he stopped and held up the minuscule creature Charles had been working on. “Cute,” Vincent had said. “But is that what you want to say? Cute? You’ve got to get braver, Lambert.”
Charles had just nodded and smiled. “Okay, I’ll do that.”
Then suddenly Vincent was shaking him by the shoulders. “Wake up, Chuck! Wake up!” he’d shouted. “Fuck cute! Let’s see what’s inside.”
Charles was afraid to even blink. The heat, the flames, the smoke, and now Vincent—it was all so overwhelming. “I don’t understand. Inside what?”
Vincent closed his eyes and shook his head, letting his long, singed hair fall across his face. He pushed it back with both hands, squeezing exasperation from his skull. “Let’s go somewhere after class. Okay, Lambert?”
Charles kept his head down for the rest of the day, pretending to work, sure he was getting the axe. Every once in a while a student would brush a hand across his shoulders while passing, or rumple his hair. Nod, the kid with the jawline beard and iguana on his shoulder, put his face close to his so that Charles was eye to prehistoric eye with the reptile. Nod patted Charles’s face. “See you next week, right, man?”
Charles nodded weakly, thinking how much he’d miss Nod, who had taken him—an outsider—under his wing. His very first week, he’d brought him to an Army & Navy to exchange his khakis for Carhartts, his tasseled loafers for steel-toed boots. That would never have happened at the Club. He reflected with shame that he had never been all that welcoming to newcomers himself.
When class ended, he and Vincent were tucked side by side in a dark booth at the bar around the corner, and he braced himself for the fatal blow.
“Chuck,” Vincent said, wiping suds off his mustache. “It’s time you stopped confusing emotional expression with feeling.”
“Okay.”
“Did you understand what I was saying?”
“No.”
Vincent threw a sweaty arm around his shoulders. “Let’s take Italian men. We hug one another. Men
are allowed to do that in our culture. You people aren’t, not even your women from what I can tell, but that doesn’t mean we don’t all have the same emotions. Do you understand what I’m saying? What’s on the surface doesn’t necessarily reflect what’s going on in the mind and soul. Let’s take you.” Vincent pulled him even closer. “I wish I had a mirror so you could see your face. It’s as expressionless as an egg. But is that how you feel inside right now?”
Inside? Charles pondered. Inside, a large mechanical device was tightening every cord in his body from his thumbs to his chest, churning and twisting his thoughts and emotions. His skin was taut, his skull creaked with unbearable pressure. He shook his head. “No.”
Vincent picked up his glass. “I knew it. I can see something trying to escape in those little pieces you’ve been doing in class. Don’t try to hold it in any longer. Let it out in your work. I give you permission. How’s that?”
“I don’t think they’d much appreciate ‘letting out’ at the office,” Charles said, and Vincent spritzed a little beer across the table.
“Okay, let me put it another way: Art can say things that a person can’t. You might have all these things inside, but they’re locked in. But the intense heat of a torch can cut through anything. Even your tough hide. I want you to do something big for your final project. Bigger than you.”
Charles reflected on the enormity of what he was being asked to do, and it frightened him. “I don’t know about that.” He looked up at the TV screen over the bar, on which some new hotshot golfer played to a hushed crowd. The scene looked so calm and controlled. He wished he could crawl inside and join that safe little world. “I could get hurt.”
Vincent took both of Charles’s hands in his scarred ones. “Look at these smooth palms. You don’t even know what there is to be afraid of yet.” He ordered another round, then sat back. “Besides, scar tissue is stronger than the surrounding tissue. Just like a weld.”
That had been a week ago, seven days of internal changes. He picked up a sketchbook, put a pencil in the back pocket of his jeans, and closed the garage door behind him, heading off to work. Vincent was right. His “work” was no longer in the office. His work was on a whole different plane now. He was also right about what he said about his own kind. Yes, his friends and family might stiffen with a touch, but they still had their feelings—it didn’t mean his father had been a cold fish inside, even if he acted like one. And who knew? Maybe even fish had feelings, only we don’t have any way of finding out what they are because they don’t know how to tell us.
He headed to the wooden gate in the privet hedge that separated their backyard from the course. On his way, he stopped to pat the goats and wished he could take them with him—they were such good company, and he was sure they’d get along famously with the geese. He wondered why it was he’d rather be with animals these days, instead of his friends. Maybe it was because he never heard from his friends anymore—not even Andrew, who used to be a compulsive phoner. What had happened? What was happening?
Charles strolled toward the lake, an area he had once viewed as treacherous because a slice at an adjacent hole could mean a ball in deep water. Now he drew comfort from the spot, often coming to sit on the bench under the oak to contemplate the beauty of the geese and to chew on that old acorn, What is life? As he crossed the fairway, he noticed how few golfers were around. There was Howie Amory, of course, probably on his second obsessive round of the day, trying to break 100, but other than him and a foursome, that was it. Phoebe’s daily demonstrations were having quite an effect, and he was proud of her for such tenacity—just look at how many others she was able to talk into joining her. It was a real movement, and he hoped the geese appreciated all the effort. Oddly enough, they seemed to be in hiding, staying clear of the fairways and congregating at the far side of the lake. Then he saw what they saw—Ralph Bellows, huffing about on the slope.
Charles was going to turn back to the house, but then he thought, no, he had to face the man sometime, let him know that he didn’t appreciate the discharging of firearms so near his family.
“Lambert,” called Bellows, out of breath. “Come help me. Goody Cooke dropped one of my guns somewhere around here a couple of weeks ago and I still can’t find it. The police stole it, that’s what I think. I know how these operations work.”
“Goody was with you?”
“Well, you don’t think I came out here alone?” Bellows lifted up the branch of a pine tree and peeked underneath, almost knocking off his fore-and-aft deerstalker hat. “I had Anthony Paxton and Malloch Smith too. Hunt Club men. We prepped at Andover together, did you know? We had some wild evening, Charles, you should have been here.”
“The newspaper said you were alone.”
“I told them I was alone,” said Bellows, scratching around in the deep rough with his feet, looking for the gun. “The others aren’t members, so why drag them into it? Good eggs, those men, smart enough to hunker down as we drove past the cleaning van coming in. If only I hadn’t swerved into it. Foreigners. Can’t speak a word of English, but they know how to read a license plate? What’s this, eh?”
He reached under a bush and pulled out a hunk of goose feathers, the blood dried to black, then threw it back where he found it.
“The crows couldn’t leave well enough alone, could they?” he said. “Wish I’d been there when they dropped a gut on Humpy’s car.” Bellows rubbed his lower back, exposed where his pink Lacoste shirt rode up his flesh, and chuckled through his nose. “That shook him up some, eh?”
“Romans used to cut open birds and read the future by the intestines,” said Charles, looking at the sky. “I wonder what that goose gut said about ours.”
Bellows glanced at Charles suspiciously. “The guts predicted my goose was cooked.” He snorfled at his own joke. “I guess everyone agreed it was a backfire until then.”
“Phoebe had thought it was a gunshot at first,” said Charles. “That’s why she called the police.”
“She’s the one?” Bellows straightened up. He squinted at Charles. “Did she see all of us?”
Charles turned and looked at the back of his white Colonial off in the distance. There was Phoebe’s third-floor window. If she had looked out when she heard the blasts, how could she have missed seeing four men with guns, even in poor dawn light? “I don’t know.”
“Well, she was right to call the authorities,” said Bellows, scratching his inner thigh in deep thought. “You can never be too careful these days. Tell her she’s forgiven.”
“She doesn’t need to be forgiven,” said Charles, chafing at the suggestion that Phoebe had done anything wrong. “You might have killed someone.”
Bellows lifted his hat and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Warrants. Court dates. Such a bore. As soon as it’s over, I’m going to Penobscot for the rest of the summer.” He looked around him. “If the police didn’t steal the gun, I’ll bet the grounds crew did. I should check the pawnshops.”
Charles reached under the bush for the piece of goose Bellows had thrown back. Two joints of a wing. A fox must have dragged it this far and then abandoned the meatless appendage. He stood up and weighed it in his hand—it was like air, as he supposed a wing should be—all hollow bone and feather. He opened it up like a fan, then closed it. Opened it, closed it. The feathers spread and then condensed—folding in on themselves.
“Remarkable,” said Charles as he turned away from Bellows to wander back to his garage.
“Hey,” called Bellows. “Give me a hand here.”
Charles kept on walking, with his sketchbook under one arm and a wing in his hand, marveling at nature’s miracle of engineering. Open and close, open and close. And from this simple movement, access to the heavens.
“Lambert!” called Bellows. “This isn’t sporting!”
Chapter Twenty
The Dress Code
VITA SAID GOOD-BYE to her mother and hung up the phone, and in the same motion let her
head come to rest on the counter, knocking off her toque. Her mother wanted her to take Saturday night off to go to a Wellesley alumni event, which was going to include MIT as well.
“Evita, honey, what better pool to draw from?”
Had her mother flipped like a crepe? Didn’t she know by now that Saturday was her showcase night at the Club, and the busiest?
“Don’t you remember the T-shirt I used to wear, Ma? ‘MIT Men: The odds are good, but the goods are odd.’ Besides, I don’t want a man. I want a skillet. A family doesn’t mix with my professional life right now.”
There had been muffled silence at the other end, and the good-bye was distant and sad. Now Vita would have to carry that sorrow with her for the rest of the day. Usually only cooking could cure her of the mother blues, but today she had to tend to a different pot, making sure that all the board members were thoroughly buttered by Monday night. She’d already dazzled them with servitude. Her staff had been spreading it on thick all week, bowing and scraping, but she only had the weekend left to cement the board’s loyalty to Gerard with food.
It was Friday morning, just three more days until the board meeting. She turned her attention to the computer screen in front of her, scrolling down a year’s worth of orders, sifting through to see what the board members had eaten. Did they like seafood? Red meat? Were they wine drinkers? Or drunks? It was a form of archaeology, discovering what sort of people they were by examining past evidence, but instead of religious artifacts, dinners. Stillington was no surprise. His meals burned as hot as his temper. She could serve him red coals on the tip of a trident and he’d still ask for Tabasco, which he used so liberally as to kill all other sensations. This weekend, no matter what he ordered, she would add a side of her habanero chutney, and at the end of the night, she would present him with a jar to take home.