It Takes a Worried Man

by Tracy Daugherty

  “Self-taught,” he’d said (not entirely true—his father, an architect, stern as any priest, had insisted Frederick breathe the Modern growing up).

  He’d hit it out of the park, the interview. He was delighted even more when the editors accepted his title for the magazine.

  Bliss. Thy name is New York.

  One more box of peas. The freezer was empty. He’d tidied up nicely. The remains of his ivy were gone.

  James Dean’s laughter rose above the willows, from the theater. Tonight, East of Eden was on. Frederick had seen it last Sunday—frenetic direction, cut-rate histrionics. Well. The cut-rate had its charms, Frederick thought, trying to empty his mind of Ruth’s tears. At least it was easy to take.

  In their (purposeful) clumsiness, their ordinariness, Mark Jarvis’s follies achieve a rare elegance: the sanctity of the everyday, the much-handled, the overlooked. In other words, they’re eerily like us. Treasure them, as you’d treasure your family—

  The phone. “Help me,” a woman said softly.

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Please help me.”

  The voice sounded vaguely … “Who is this?”

  “You know who it is.”

  “Ruth?” he said. All evening, he’d expected her call. A last goodbye, a final chat with Robbie before space and the wall of many days came between them. “Ruthie, is that you?”

  “Help me. Oh God.”

  A soft ringing filled his ears, ever since he’d torn himself from his Dewar’s. “Are you at home?”

  A roach the size of his nose scurried across the gritty kitchen floor, by the stove where Hoffmann used to wait. His faithful cat, no longer here.

  His gentle wife, no longer here.

  What have I done?

  I’ve done the right thing. “Ruthie?”

  “Love me … all I want—”

  “I do, Ruth. Honey, I do.”

  “Yes?”

  “Of course I do. But you know I can’t stay.” Say it all. “I’m not … I can’t—”

  “Please.”

  “Ruth, honey, believe me—”

  “Ruth? Who the fuck is Ruth?”

  Frederick’s fingers tingled. Oh Lord. “I’m sorry, I—”

  “Answer me!”

  Of course not. How could he have thought it was her? “This is awful. I think we’ve made a mistake.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve got the wrong number,” he said.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I’m sorry. This isn’t the hotline.”

  “Asshole.” The phone went dead.

  The stove reared on its greasy hind legs. The oven door popped open. Fangs curled from the top of the broiler. A river of gas, then blue and yellow flames. The mighty appliance burst through the wall of Frederick’s apartment, spewing fire across the park. It grew and grew, and wobbled as it grew, its burners all aglow, disintegrating, finally, in the smoke of an ashy mushroom, black on the eastern horizon—

  The following morning on the plane, still groggy from his nightmares, Frederick buckled his seatbelt. He dropped his book in his lap.

  “Scuse me,” someone said. An elderly man. “I b’lieve that window seat is mine.”

  Frederick unfastened himself, half-stood so the fellow could pass. A stewardess in a crisp blue uniform sauntered by, offering magazines. The hem of her jacket brushed the tops of her hips. This pleased Frederick immensely.

  Saucy, he thought.

  His companion took a Life. “Sure is somethin’ ‘bout Cuber, ain’t it?”

  Annoyed—my god, he needed stillness now (Time to grieve? he wondered. For his family? For himself?)—Frederick flipped the pages of his book, and tried to focus his vision. “All this futile grasping after nonsense—”

  By “nonsense,” Wittgenstein meant, apparently, metaphysical concerns, questions of right or wrong, ethics. Spiritual bounty, like the Jesuits used to teach.

  Let them go, Frederick thought, recalling Mark’s advice. Those silly old schoolboy lessons—sail them out on the wind.

  What did the Jesuits know about the art world? Or marriage?

  “You s’pose them Kennedys know what the hell they’re doin’?” the old man next to him said. “Sittin’ up there with their hoity-toity wives. Hell, Havana’s a mite too close to Houston for my taste, eh?”

  Frederick closed his eyes. Glimmers.

  Robbie, crying, crouched beneath the rusty steel wings of an angel, the sky all red above him: an image from last night’s dreams. Ruth came running through the garden. “Too small!” she yelled. “He won’t be safe there! For God’s sakes, can’t you see he’s grown?” The sky bubbled, a burning crimson canvas.

  “Miss?” It hurt to open his eyes.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Can I get a Scotch, please?”

  “As soon as we’re off the ground, sir.”

  “I’m tellin’ you, we get JFK here in Texas, out of his sweet-smellin’ ol’ rose garden, he’ll learn a thing or two about life in the real world. Where’d you say you’re goin’, friend?”

  The plane began to hustle down the runway. The tilt. The disconcerting lift. Frederick listened to the bell in his ears. He felt, for a moment, weightless, bathed in solid white from the window. The man beside him was waiting for an answer. On the fellow’s face, a blissful grin.

  Frederick gripped the seat. His forearm turned a shallow red. It was scarred, from the night he’d dropped his knife, but not too badly, he noticed, not too badly. Thank you, Ruth. Dear Ruth. He turned to the man. “Paraguay,” he said.

  Henry’s Women

  Henry had already bought a bottle of pinot noir before he remembered he’d have to drink it all himself.

  A steamy, rain-dark evening in Houston. Kate lived west of Rice: funky student housing, beer signs and naked-lady posters in most of the grimy windows. A hamburger joint sealed the street at the end of her block, along with a second-run cinema. Tonight, Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast was on.

  Kate’s place was a surprisingly large walk-up: six rooms, two stories above a liquor store.

  Kate and Ben’s place, Henry reminded himself. As recently as last week she’d shared it with the capricious bastard. Henry’s nerves nearly folded him in two.

  She met him at the door wearing an airy smock. Elegant yellow. Apparently, she took his gaze to be critical. Frowning, she turned her head and twisted a curl of her hair. “Maternity clothes,” she said. “Yuck.”

  “I think it’s nice.” She noticed the bagged bottle in his hand. “I forgot you couldn’t drink,” he said.

  “Would you like some?”

  “A small glass. After I wrestle your boxes.”

  “I really appreciate this.” She stood aside to let him in.

  Eight boxes, tightly taped, blocked most of the chairs and the couch in the living room. Henry carried them, one by one, up the rickety attic steps. “Geez, what’s in these?” he asked, huffing.

  “Clothes, college yearbooks—I don’t even know,” Kate said. “Ben packed them himself. I just want them out of sight.”

  With the boxes finally stowed, Henry settled on her couch, an old hounds-tooth affair. The room looked spare now (had Ben already moved his share of the furniture?). A framed David Hockney print (L.A. pool, pale blue) hung above a portable black-and-white television; azaleas drooped in clay vases on a tiny glass-topped table. Henry smoothed his straight black hair, dabbed at a scuff on his shoe. Kate brought him a glass of wine.

  With obvious pain she bent forward, toward the couch. Henry held out his arm. She smiled, shook her head no, then plunked herself down.

  He sipped his pinot noir, and accidentally made a sucking sound. He felt himself blush. “So,” he said. “Do you know what the baby’s going to be? Or do you believe in that sort of thing? The tests and stuff.”

  “Oh yes, I’ve been through it all. Amniocentesis, ultrasound. Doctor says it looks like a girl.”

  “Right.
I guess they make you take the tests.”

  “They’re all girls at first. I think. I mean, I don’t understand this chromosome stuff, but something odd has to happen to make the X-Y switch—to make a hoy.” She poured herself a glass of Fresca. “Ever been married?”

  “No.”

  “Smart.”

  “How’d you meet Ben?” he asked. If she’d told him the other night, he didn’t remember.

  “Computer convention, downtown Ramada, six years ago. No—seven, now. He’s a television newswriter.” Kate was with Wang.

  “Is he your first? Husband?”

  “Only. And last.”

  Henry fingered the stem of his glass. She was more bitter, tonight, than the last time they’d talked. “I understand,” he said, though he didn’t, not really; nor did he know if he should have accepted her slightly desperate invitation this evening.

  Last Saturday, when he’d met her at a friend’s dinner party, she’d been astonishingly direct about the wreck of her marriage. “We still love each other,” she’d confided to him over stuffed lobster and long-grain rice. “But he can’t handle the baby.”

  Henry had been flattered by the apparent ease she felt with him (she didn’t open up to just anyone at the dinner, he’d noticed). And he’d felt moved by her beauty in spite of her swollen belly.

  Or—the thought disturbed him still—because of it.

  Always before, he’d been drawn to slender, boyish figures. He promised himself he wasn’t going to stumble over the first woman he saw now, at his first outing in weeks. For God’s sake, he hadn’t been that lonely since Meg.

  As they’d eaten dinner, to protect what he’d convinced himself was his brutally Meg-bashed heart, he had tried to find Kate ugly. Mentally, he had listed hateful words: bulbous, eggplant, behemoth. But no matter how meanly he’d barbed his thoughts, she looked gorgeous. He’d felt a surging sexual urge in her direction.

  She’d gone on about her unexpected pregnancy, her financial pressures, Ben’s ambivalence about the baby, and his decision to leave. Henry had lost himself in her long, starry earrings, her slender nose, her light-brown eyes. Her sweater had kept sliding up on the boldly curving mound of her abdomen. It was the best thing he’d seen in months.

  By dinner’s end, charmed by her candor, shocked by his ratcheting pulse (he had felt physically winded), Henry had given her his numbers, home and work—a clumsy moment—and told her to get in touch with him if he could help her in any way.

  Then, this morning, she’d called him at the office. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said.

  “No, no.” He’d just traded eight quarters for a vending-machine sandwich, turkey with mayo. He wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, as though she could see him. “How are you?”

  “A little queasy today. I’m kind of embarrassed—”

  “What is it?” Henry said.

  “Ben’s being a first-class shit. I need help lifting boxes.”

  “I’m off at five.” He had to meet with a couple of clients and go through last year’s tax returns with them. “Can I bring you anything? Food? Medicine?” Did pregnant women take medicine?

  “I’ve got some spaghetti if you’d like to stay for dinner,” she said. “Bring a jar of sauce, the Paul Newman stuff? Tastes like motor oil—I’m afraid everything tastes vaguely automotive to me these days—but I like Paulie’s eyes.”

  She refilled his glass.

  “I see Beauty and the Beast is playing down the street,” Henry said.

  “Oh, I love that movie.”

  “Would you like to go see it? Maybe tomorrow?”

  “I don’t think so. Too romantic.”

  “Nothing wrong with a little romance, right?” He sounded nerdy to himself.

  “Except it’s a lie,” Kate said. “I mean, who ever thought I’d end up raising a kid by myself?”

  Henry felt brave now. The wine. Her startling honesty. “Did you ever consider not having it?”

  “No. That’s not a problem for me, you know, I’ve got no religious qualms about it, but … I always wanted a child,” Kate said. She was going to cry, Henry saw. “The truth is, I didn’t think Ben would really leave.”

  He didn’t know what to say. He held her hand. “It’s okay. Listen, why don’t you let me cook the spaghetti? You sit still.”

  “Oh, the spaghetti. I forgot.”

  Idiot, Henry chided himself. Now she probably figured he only cared about his stomach.

  “That’s nice,” she said.

  He’d been stroking the back of her hand.

  “You know, the worst part about pregnancy …” Kate squeezed her thighs with her hands. “It’s what it does to your conception of yourself. As a woman, I mean. I look in the mirror and think, what a bloated, ugly—”

  “No,” Henry said.

  She turned to him. “Do you think I’m—?”

  He placed his palm on her belly. “I think you’re exquisite,” he said.

  The tears came now. She tried to laugh. “I’m being vain—”

  “Shhh.”

  Neither of them made the spaghetti. Henry finished his wine and left (he’d forgotten Paul Newman anyway). “Are you sure you can drive?” Kate had said.

  Something seemed to have solidified between them, but they were shaken by the suddenness, and felt a need—they both knew it without speaking—to step back and think. She had made him promise to call.

  Weaving home in his car, a little drunk, he wondered what he’d fallen into. Rebound, he thought. This poor, lovely woman’s ricocheting all over the city.

  And what about him? Maybe he was needier than he’d dreamed.

  A baby? A little girl?

  A pair of university students—female, male—went jogging past a pizza parlor in the rain. Henry watched them in the neon bath of a Pepsi sign. I’d like a small deep-dish, extra cheese, with pepperoni and X-Y chromosomes, please.

  At home he made himself a bologna-and-pickle sandwich and caught the tail end of a Tracy-Hepburn movie on TV Affectionate repartee, romantic wit—bullshit, he thought, in Kate’s weary voice. Still, he enjoyed the couple onscreen.

  He looked around. His apartment seemed especially barren tonight, though in fact the chairs had taken over. Meg had kept only the green recliner. Somehow, Kate’s half-empty place had felt more welcoming and whole than his well-stocked kitchen and den.

  The pink envelopes in which he mailed his rent checks (supplied annually, in packets of twelve, by the investment firm that owned his building) sat on the counter next to his cutting board and knives. The Hot Pink of Authority, of single people living in generic rooms all over this quarreling, splitting city. He stuffed the envelopes into a drawer.

  The smell of Kate’s hair came back to him. Coconut. Sea breeze. Sweetness and … Jesus, too much wine, he thought. He sat to stop his spinning head. The chair was hard. “Damn it,” he said aloud, hoping to nudge his mind off Kate, “that green recliner was mine!” Meg had kept the best piece and cast off the no-goods. In the shock of their separation, he’d agreed.

  “Time to renegotiate,” he spurred himself.

  He remembered, then, that today—tonight—was his birthday. Twenty-eight. In his two years with Meg, she’d always remembered to plan a celebration.

  He toasted Katharine Hepburn. “Happy birthday,” he told the snowy screen.

  That night he dreamed pregnant dreams: rising dough, hot-air balloons, great windy dirigibles.

  His first girlfriend, Markie Barnes, was a dentist’s daughter. They were sophomores in high school together. The night she told him he’d be the luckiest boy in the world tonight, she also said, “I’ve got, you know, medicine to keep it safe.”

  He didn’t know what she meant. Had she smuggled a pain-killing drug out of her father’s office? Would they need relief? Later, he misunderstood her again and thought she’d called the sticky stuff “homicidal jelly.”

  He’d slept with two women in college, Natalie Sparks and Lisa Baines
, neither of whom really loved him—they’d made that persistently clear—but each time, with each woman, the sex had been without pain. They both loved movies, especially the old Hollywood romances—Lubitsch, The Thin Man series—that played at the repertory theater near the Rice campus. Each Friday night it was cheeseburgers or pizza, kisses in black-and-white, then blind groping in the stale mess of a dorm room: textbooks, Glamour magazines—or at Henry’s place, his roommate’s exotic beer bottle collection.

  “Don’t worry about babies,” Natalie used to tell him. “We’re covered on that front, hon.” He wondered what the panting, the salty taste of popcorn on Natalie’s full lips, had to do with the glib banter between Nick and Nora Charles.

  Lisa liked to wait until the last possible moment, after she’d urged him inside and he was well past controlling his impulses, to whisper, “Come on, come on, that’s it, you can’t resist me, can you, honey, I’ve taken care of everything.” He’d never bought a condom, not once.

  He understood he tended toward the “passive” (a term he’d learned in an introductory psychology course, junior year). He knew he should take more initiative in life, but somehow, preparing for sex, premeditating it, always felt to him like the morning his mother had caught him pawing through her panty drawer. He’d been—what?—nine or ten. Frightened. Embarrassed. After her sputtery scolding that day, he stayed out of women’s spaces, though his curiosity often swelled, like the smell of mothballs in a bolted closet.

  Two years ago, when he’d met Meg at a jazz bar on lower Westheimer, he learned right away that she was the take-charge type. She introduced herself to him—“Larsen,” she said, “Meg”—and bought him a drink. She asked him home a week later, after their second date. It was her idea that they move in together. She was the one who ended the affair.

  In all that time, it didn’t occur to him to ask her about birth control. Of course she’d see to it. She saw to everything. To even raise the question would have insulted her organizational skills, on which she prided herself keenly. “You know that book, The Five-Minute Manager?” she asked him once. “I do it all in three.”