Eccentric Circles

by Larry Duberstein

  “That’s priceless,” said Chapman. “And I’m sure she did.”

  “Well, we had fun arguing, anyway. She brought me rock candy, if you want something—”

  “A little something,” said Chapman, shaking out the candy for Bess. “But then we’d better let you rest.”

  “I’m rested, I’m rested. I’ve been resting for months.”

  “Some of the younger generation might need rest, too.”

  “I know,” said Nan. “You’re right.”

  She smiled and reached for Bess, who resisted briefly out of a purely instinctual perversity, then snuggled happily against her mother. Chapman kissed them both, and reflexively put his lips to Nan’s forehead again; still lukecold. Amidst a hail of arrangements, reminders, half-baked plans, and protestations of love, he bundled Bess away.

  Outdoors the temperature had dropped and they both felt the chill deeply. They were tired and, now that the visit was over, wanted to be home right away. For Bess it was bedtime, for Chapman another long day without respite. He had dashed out at lunchtime to run down a sack of groceries and had vague notions of getting to some of the laundry after Bess was in bed. His purely personal ambitions had been reduced to getting cleaned up and then reading his way into a good mystery, preferably set in Miami or L.A., someplace warm and unreal.

  They drove the beltway in silence, Chapman remembering the things he had forgotten to tell Nan, Bess gazing absently at the fragmented light slashing at the windshield. He put his hand on her knee as a replacement for the conversation neither of them desired. The knee felt terribly small and bony.

  She was already asleep when he carried her up and dumped her softly on the couch. He wrestled her out of her clothes and into a flannel gown, then hesitated: would she undream the damn gorilla if she slept in his bed?

  He let this one go. The truth was he didn’t want to share his bed with her. Bess was a sprawler, a territorialist, for one thing; plus having her there always made him tense up and go sleepless with the effort to keep from disturbing her. The sleeping-on-eggshells syndrome. Anyway, the gorilla was good, the gorilla was therapeutic, so he hauled her to her loft, kissed her cheek, and covered her shoulders carefully.

  Immediately he felt a pressure to get things done, to put his life in order, but pressured too by the need to relax. It was as though “relaxation” was on his list of things to do. He ran a hot bath in which he at least could read the morning paper, but it felt stale—it was not worth much as literature, not reading to catch up on exactly—and the pages kept getting wet despite the fact that his arms grew heavy with the effort to keep them dry.

  He made coffee and brought it to bed, where he started in on a Japrisot thriller and finally did relax, or collapse. Each sip of coffee seemed somehow to make him drowsier, until the pull of sleep was irresistible and he sank down into it with the book spreadeagled on his neck. He was soundly, deeply asleep for two minutes, then snapped awake, his mind suddenly brimming with all the chores he hadn’t got to—the phone calls, the sink jammed with pots and dishes, the godawful galloping laundry which was gradually taking over every room like a protoplasm, a cancer.…

  And Nan’s birthday, for God’s sake. He was committed, lashed to the notion of getting her something special, dreaming something up, and now there was barely time to get her anything at all. The whole list was trivial, yet it riddled him and spoiled his chance at sleep.

  He cleaned up the kitchen, then went to check on Bess. She had drifted back to the wall in an open-mouth profile, and with her feet blanketed together she looked like a big fish, a tuna. He kissed her cheek again and whispered very softly, “Fishes, Bessie, there’s nothing in the lake but fishes,” then climbed down, feeling slightly drunk or deranged from the long months of isolation. It was all such a confusing whirl, with no time to think, no way to think about it; certainly nothing was “obvious” to him, as Surprise, Dismay and Fear were obvious to Nan.

  Now he thought of Nan and the nightmare she had been enduring, of Bess and her nightmares, finally of himself, as it dawned on him—though it should have been “obvious” long ago—that he’d had no nightmares, no dreams in all these months. No dreams of needle-wielding nurses, no gorillas, no cars going off cliffs, nothing. No bad dreams, no good dreams, no places, voices, or colors: dry of dream was Chapman, a blank.

  He was staring blankly when the staccato sound, a low garbled grinding, broke in on him. It was like something stuck in a sink disposer, except they didn’t have a sink disposer, and now it was definitely swelling, accelerating, coming from Bessie’s room.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart,” he said, stroking her brow, “we’re just home.”

  “I had a dream, Pa.”

  “I know, baby, it’s okay.”

  “Can I come in your bed, Papa?”

  “Of course you can, sweetie, but let’s get back to sleep as quick as we can. Tomorrow’s another day.”

  “I know that.”

  He bundled her in on Nan’s side, as far over as he could get her wedged with the extra pillows, but she rolled straight for the middle, gaining ground on the diagonal. Chapman was about to roll her back when he saw she was already sleeping, her eyes were moving underneath the eyelids, perhaps she was already dreaming.

  The Off Season

  The main street of Abingdon, Connecticut, where I grew up, was then a block of gabled shops—one for hardware, one for dry goods, another for books and so on. The eight thousand inhabitants lived in woodframe houses, most of them white clapboard, and the children would never have dreamt of locking their bicycles. Today of course, that Abingdon is an archaeological ruin, poking up here and there from under the crush of what is called development, a perfectly commonplace outcome. Now the population is sixty thousand, and the casehardened locks cost more than did the bikes themselves once below a time.

  But I am not setting out to tell nostalgic anecdotes, nor do I wish to belabor the death of charm in Abingdon or in the world at large. Actually the town is still attractive, even picturesque out on Sandy Hook, where the summer cottages are settled willynilly among gardens, small orchards, and sunny fenced yards. A ragged stone wall still traces the two-mile beachfront back to the bridge in town. I mention the changes not to criticize or lament, but simply to describe the way I feel when I go there, to a place at once minutely familiar and altogether foreign, where such crystal memories from childhood mingle with the unblinkable evidence of growth, inevitable casualties of the particular.

  I no longer have any direct connection to the town. My friends and family have all gone, one way or another, and the shopkeepers we knew by name have left the field to anonymous franchisemen at the malls. I never see a face I know anymore, even though I lived here from kindergarten into college, and twenty years ago knew every face in town. Just last month, however, I did for once bump into someone from my past.

  I’d worked several summers at a waterfront restaurant called Willkie’s Clam House. I was a bowtied busboy there and Lew Farrow was the elegant maître d’hôtel. Lew was a pleasant (though never effusive) man and a perfectionist about his appearance—the razor-sharp crease in his trousers, equally clean part in his neatly barbered hair. He always looked as though he’d had a haircut and shave one hour earlier. And he spoke with care, selecting every phrase in sequence, as he talked of the more interesting shows and concerts in New York City, which was less than fifty miles away.

  Now I saw him strolling on the public beach, though this was two weeks past Thanksgiving and there were wafers of ice in the sand. He recognized me, too, or remembered me, and we chatted for about ten minutes before I managed to recollect the single most remarkable thing about Lew, namely that he had considered himself “married” to one of the waiters at Willkie’s, George Papas, or The Greek as he called himself. The two of them shared a rented house near the water, and shared an antique canopy bed too, embroidered like a baldachin.

  Their situation was unique. The “closet” was so all-encompassing in 196
0 that very few residents of a suburb like Abingdon even knew the word. Ike had been President for the last eight years; a man named Ronald Reagan, with a soft voice and a terrific smile, sold soap on TV, 20-Mule-Team-Borax. But Lew and George were not clandestine, they were not defensive or apologetic, and somehow their disarming sense of humor about themselves elicited a tolerant response in an environment where they might have better expected a merciless riding. Abingdon was a village of well-to-do Republicans, after all, and none more so than Art Willkie, a portly little tyrant who wore loud pants and waved a golf club, a five-iron, on his dreaded kitchen inspections.

  The staff was naturally drawn from a lower class, but that was hardly a guarantee of broadmindedness. We bus-boys were at the bottom: myself plus Dennis, James, and Slim, three brown men who would drive down together from Bridgeport in a battered white Fairlane. Immediately above us were the assorted waiters and waitresses: Big Ben, whose kindness increased with his consumption of liquor and Paul, for whom the exact reverse was true; Rose, who would re-total her tips all night like a child checking her piggybank, The Greek himself, and Marco, a dyspeptic Italian half the size of a jockey who muttered and griped on the floor and would crash trays around back in the sanctity of the kitchen. All these people and more—the women who served up the food and the two silent white-haired men who prepared it, Ann the cashbox girl (twenty-two, a sweetheart, my secret love), the Willkies themselves—all accepted the connection between Lew and George, joked with the two of them and enjoyed it. Perhaps we’ve underrated mankind, or perhaps it was just a rare exception, but not even Marco, a macho man with a chip on his shoulder the size of a glacier, undertook to fear, despise, or belittle what the two men were.

  Twenty eventful years had evaporated since I’d last seen Lew Farrow, yet his every hair was in its rightful place—he had been to the same barber again this morning! And it was the same iron gray shade, so that now at age fifty-five, as then at thirty-five, Lew looked precisely forty-five. Unchanged. And I wondered if they could possibly be together after such a time, he and The Greek, unchanged. Did such situations last? Lew did say he was still at Willkie’s, holding down the old headwaiter post …

  I wondered, but I didn’t ask. Something held me back—whether fear of giving offense or just a reluctance to complicate the moment—so we shook hands, said a few more friendly words, and went our ways.

  That night I nearly called from my motel to ask Lew the question I had not asked earlier. Sitting alone over a restaurant dinner—salad, pizza, red wine—I realized what had blocked me: it was that Lew himself had made no reference to The Greek. Now I was annoyed at my own callow recalcitrance and by the casual dishonesty of all social life. Besides, wasn’t it even more offensive not to ask?

  I found his number in the book. I looked for George there too and found no listing, but of course it could have always been that way. I didn’t make the call, finally, because telephoning felt wrong. It would be better to run by his house in the morning, or maybe stop for lunch at Willkie’s, on my way out of town. But the matter took care of itself.

  My reasons for returning to Abingdon are slightly obscure to me, especially as I neither expect to nor do enjoy these very occasional visits. Whatever the reasons may be, I find them well served by long walks on the wintry beach in what resort towns call the “off off-season,” and I had gone for a last such ramble the next morning. I was coming up from the deserted marina—gaspump and gear at the boathouse, the floating docks on drums, rope-and-plank gangways—when I spotted them. They were headed across a wide stretch of pale grass and shallow snow between the boatyard and the beach, Lew walking behind in his immaculate polo coat and George riding along in a wheelchair, with a rustcolored shawl wound round his neck, blankets stacked on his lap. The Greek had always kept himself, by whatever means, a deep golden brown, burnt honey, which I associated illogically with the heavy scent he used; standing with him, you could not be unaware of either detail. Now, from a distance, he seemed to have faded several shades to a waxen jaundiced version of the tan, but it was clearly George—the dense black hair, thick continuous brow, and that worldly side-of-the-mouth smile to which he would frequently affix a remarkably sonorous, flirtatious click.

  They were on the boardwalk when I caught up and startled them out of some trance or thought, a mutual yet separate inwardness, with both of them gazing out on the slate-gray waves and the cold lowery sky. I was intruding but I wasn’t sorry, not after yesterday; anyway The Greek looked up and laughed.

  “Hey, how about it. Luigi told me he ran into the kid. How’s the kid doin’?”

  “Not too bad. It’s nice to see you again, George—I was thinking about you after I met Lew yesterday.”

  “Colder than Miss America’s left tit, isn’t it, kid. And will you look at that, not a body out there. Fourth of July now you need a pair of wings to get to the water.”

  “The town’s grown.”

  “You wouldn’t shit me, as the sparrow asked the eagle.”

  “It’s gorgeous,” said Lew absently, fixed on the cold rolling sea.

  “So tell me, kid, you still pushing trays? No way, right? You must be first vice-president in charge of the second vice-president by now, or am I wrong?”

  I told him what my work was.

  “That’s all right, that’s nice—you enjoy it, I bet. It’s good to enjoy your work, dammit.”

  The Greek had always been voluble, very outgoing, a fount of loosely held opinions. I also recalled his habit of patting people on the backside as they carted trays past his station, defenseless. “Keep moving,” he would say, with the blandest grinning mock officiousness, as he patted. He did it to me and to the other busboys, did it to Marco who cursed him foully and to waitresses, young and old alike, who abided it. No one ever saw him do it to Art or Bea Willkie, though we all egged him on to such a liberty. I could see that lovely careless enthusiasm for play in him still, but obviously there was something very wrong. He was pale and thin, and he was riding in a wheelchair. At close range, the jetblack hair was thinner too, and showed a purplish tint, from impurities in the dye.

  “Yeah, I’ve got it. But what the hell, it’s a great country. Here even a queer Greek can get The Big C. Listen, it’s okay, it’s the fucking land of fucking opportunity.”

  “Cancer? How serious, George?”

  “Serious? Listen, kid, how serious is death? Not very serious, I hope. Like anything else, it calls for a few adjustments to be made. Right, Luigi?”

  “Death?” Lew mouthed. “Oh yes, G., but let’s not, shall we?” Whereupon he turned to me and launched a few well-oiled sentences on rays and chemicals, and hope.

  “Oh shush,” said The Greek. “Tell him the goddamn truth, Lewis. I’m dead, and it’s just our good luck we never had kids. Did you know that Lewis never could get pregnant?”

  I began to smile, then saw they weren’t. If it wasn’t a campy joke, I was not sure what it was. George looked bemused and bitter, Lew hurt or simply sad. I could feel the weight of their troubles pressing down on me, and the harsh doxology of the damp freezing wind. They might be starting a spat, or continuing one I had interrupted a few minutes back. It was time to go—I wanted to go now, someplace warm, for a cup of coffee—but just then The Greek asked me to draw the shawl in around his neck. Wind ripped across the open sand; it was beginning to snow, large slow flakes falling on the ocean. Lew gently touched his friend’s head and looked past him toward the lifeguard stand, where a teenaged couple huddled together kissing in the cold.

  “Keep moving,” said George, in a perfect impersonation of himself, right down to the unmistakable leer, and Lew complied.

  “Yes, G.,” he said, and pushed off down the creaking boardwalk toward the shuttered pavilion. I walked along too, thinking how impossible it was to know what anyone else was thinking; feeling sorry for George, for them, even a little sad and sorry for myself somehow. We all were silent for a minute or two while the wind ranged and rattled inside the lo
ng train of wooden lockers, then The Greek began to curse inflation and the national debt and the conversation resumed in fits and starts.

  Lemon Trees at Jaffa

  From his desk, Paul Pollard could look down at the skaters in Central Park and follow their bright gliding coats against the cloudwhite ice. He loved this elegant overview, savored it, and its tranquility kept him from minding that his two o’clock was late.

  It was a pro bono anyway. If the guy never showed, he would not have to sit there like Ron Weller, calculating out the lost dollars. They were all lost on a pro bono; it was wonderfully relaxing. He took the cases out of genuine interest and for the sake of variety, not charity alone; he enjoyed doing them and, unlike Weller, could put enjoyment before billability, at least some of the time. How much richer one was for having defended the former Miss Liberty Bell against a charge of lewd entertainment last month—a gal who could appear so fresh and young and pretty that Pollard half expected he’d end up buying Girl Scout Cookies from her that first Tuesday, yet who in full regalia could lift your wig five feet in the air.

  He would not be interviewing denizens of The Fuckorama for this one. This was trivial and routine, apart from the coincidence of the name. He had gone through school with a Ken Busby. They had been friends, though it was Kenny who nailed the only A-plus in Howison’s chem class, an outcome which secretly galled Pollard at the time. They had also been part of a regular ice hockey game, twice a week all winter for several years running, and, watching the skaters in the park below, Pollard recalled those bygone matches with a wistful pleasure. The pond was actually a watertrap on the golf course—a perfect sheet of ice, oval and close to the road. They would hop the stone wall and waddle over the frozen turf in skates.

  This other Kenneth Busby, the two o’clock, was up on a simple trespass, though there were earlier problems on the printout—trespass, shoplifting, an assault … Pollard gave a cough. The damned assault would make it tough. One might offer up the poor drunkard, pitify him helpless and paint him harmless, yet how was one to put it over when the fellow was not only helping himself to watches by the armload but harming—bless us and save us—a seventy-year-old gal at a bus stop! Almost peevishly he thought, Can’t even a bum manage things more intelligently than that?