I mentioned my old supervisor Currey a while back, but what I neglected to mention is that, soon before I left, Currey found out that his wife had cancer all over her body. Here was this gorgeous radiant woman who’d come around the Home a few times, and the next thing you know, everybody’s whispering how she’s dying. You could tell from looking at Currey the day the rumor came out that it was true, too. He’s a small, wiry kind of guy whose body has an athletic sort of quickness to it; I had him pegged the first day I saw him, the day I came in for the interview. I asked who would be interviewing me and they pointed out Currey, and it was then that I decided what my history would be. I played two years of pro ball, I wrote on the application form. The Cincinnati Bengals, I decided for no good reason. I look like I could have played ball, and Currey looks like he wishes he was five inches taller and built wider, built like me. Drugs, I decided, was the sad story. This was western Massachusetts, remember, where you get points for being a reformed something. I knew while I was talking he wasn’t seeing this as anything like pathetic. When he started naming players, and almost tripped me up on the dates of my tenure, I just nodded sadly, and made him think all that was so far away I hardly thought about it anymore. I put on a face. Now I had a wife and son, I told him, and wanted to do right for them, wanted to help other troubled kids like the one I’d been myself. I almost had the teaching certificate, I said. I’d gone back to school for precisely this reason, and had just one course left to go. Hearing this last, he looked at me with a second’s doubt, but then the natural envy he felt won over. He wanted to be close to me, I could see.
After that, Currey took a special interest. When, two or three months into my employment, my wife kicked me out, he said he was going to help me land on my feet. He actually said that. I had a girlfriend, though, and I was moving in with her. There wasn’t any problem at all. But Currey invited me to his house and cooked a barbecue. It was July, very heavy air and this yard full of vegetables growing. This was before Currey’s wife had been diagnosed. She had a glow on her, and she wore something green that night. Her dress looked dark against her skin and against that whitish blond hair of hers that makes her look like Currey’s twin. I could tell she didn’t like looking at me, that I scared her or else my presence here didn’t make it the sort of family social evening she enjoyed. She tolerated me is about the best you could say. I didn’t help things much by answering her questions with just the single word yes or no. After they put their kids to bed, we all three sat there in the dark of the yard and Currey kept saying, “John’s going to be fine,” over and over. I knew as soon as I was gone Currey’s wife would say, “Don’t trust him.” No matter. I remember thinking how much I liked sitting there in the cool yard with them, drinking beer and thinking of my girlfriend back at the house, waiting. But in order to have this good moment, I had to pretend I was broken up.
My wife will tell you people like me don’t have empathy, but I find I do when I think of Currey and the cancer. Maybe it’s a different kind of empathy. I know a lot of people, my parents included, believe that if you do certain things in this life, you are exerting a kind of order, and that such order, if staunchly maintained, will keep certain other things at bay. I’m sure Currey sat on his deck many a night and saw old age coming, could feel the sweetness of all he had to look forward to made solid by the good things with which he’d surrounded himself. He couldn’t see, behind the tree, Brother Cancer waiting to steal in. Who could? And I can see now how he must feel cheated, how he must look at those same good things—the trellises and the new deck and the gas grill—with contempt now, how his whole view of the world must be toppling. I can see all that, but there’s no way I’d ever call him and say, “Come on, Currey, I’m gonna help you land on your feet.” There’s a place where empathy stops and presumption starts, and I make sure I never cross that line.
When I finally get around to calling my girlfriend Cathy, she tells me I can pick her up after work but that I’ll have to take her to her doctor’s appointment and then wait. It’s an appointment she’s had for a month, since before I walked into Dr. Petticord’s office and took over her life. Well all right, I tell her. At lunch I ask my mother which of their friends are around and which have taken off for Ocean City. I am thinking of the boats docked at the end of our street. She asks me why I want to know and I tell her I might like to take out one of the boats. I used to sail them all when I still lived here. She tells me I shouldn’t do anything without permission and I nod, not pressing things.
After lunch I go down to the dock and look at the Heers’ and the Coopers’ boats, the last two left, and settle on the Heers’. It takes me an hour to find where Ray Heer hides his keys, and by then it’s gotten hot, so I take off my shirt and lie down on the dock. It must be that I check out then, because the next thing I remember is opening my eyes to see the sun in a different place, just a few inches above the topmost house on the bay. It’s a pretty sight. I stretch up my hands and keep waiting for a sound. There’s a car every once in a while, but no kid’s cry, no sound of a woman shouting, or a man. Where I grew up, in the house my parents lived in before they built this one, the streets were always full of kids. Now I imagine the kids are all inside, waiting at their TV screens for their mothers to bring them little snacks on a tray. When I think back on my life, it seems to me that a silence came over everything. Maybe it was in the seventies; in any event, there is a definite sense of before and after. Some tide of life receded back then. I felt like I was running with a lot of people and then I was running alone. My friends, all the boys who fancied themselves wild, seemed to have gotten scared, and I could not then understand why. We all had the same kind of parents, big, dim, and overprivileged. At night our parents got into cars and drove into Baltimore to see the road company of Man of La Mancha. That was their idea of a good time. Afterward, they screwed. We heard them sometimes, heard our mothers shout things like “Goddamn!” in the night, and wondered where those women went during the day. During the day, they played “The Impossible Dream” on the stereo and dusted. They made these sharp divisions between things.
My wife used to ask me how I could lie so much. She said, how can you lie to Currey, how can you tell him you were a football player when you never were? I told her there were a lot of reasons and then I just stared at her and I saw the same fear I used to see in the faces of my friends. Everybody’s afraid of falling through the cracks. Everybody has their own personal vision of hell, and for a lot of them, I suspect, it’s just an inch or two below the ground they walk on. So they test each step, and like as not pull back. The only difference between me and them, I suppose, is that I’m not afraid of falling. I tend to land on my feet, you see, with or without Currey’s help. I suspect others would, too, more than wouldn’t, anyway, if they let themselves go. But they don’t, they’re afraid of knowing that about themselves. So they stay in their houses, quiet as mice, listening for the crack. And even for the careful ones, it comes. Currey heard it, that’s for sure. It seems to me that even if you play by the rules, the same thing happens. We’re just fools to believe otherwise.
At five on the nose, I’m at Dr. Petticord’s office, waiting for Cathy. Then I take her to her appointment, sit in the waiting room thumbing through a copy of Newsweek. I read about AIDS and then about some Russian dancers performing in Minneapolis. Newsweek thinks these Russians are the cat’s meow. There are kids here waiting to see one of the doctors, and their presence makes me think of my son, Will. I used to take him to the doctor’s. He was decent company, but I never allowed myself to think about a future together for us, fishing trips and such. I let it be, and that was what made it good. He misses me, I know, but he’s got his grandfather. There’ll be a man around, at least, to keep him from his angry mother. You came from her, I’ll tell him if he ever asks. You came out of her blood and bone and desire. I never had any part of it. I’ll be like those black fathers you read about who, when they see the kids they’ve fathered in the neighborho
od, they pass right by them. I just fucked your mother, boy, is what they say.
After Cathy’s done, we go to eat at a fish take-out place. Then I bring her down to the Heers’ boat. There’s no one on the dock and it’s almost dark, so it’s okay. She asks whose boat this is, and I say people’s. We make out a little. She still wants to know. I lay her down on the bed, which forms a V from being nestled into the bow. I’m going to have to watch my head here ’cause it’s low. It’s always very solemn for me, and I study her big eyes in the blue light coming in off the dock. She’s got little breasts, but down below there’s substance enough to make up for it. I don’t like them real skinny, though I do tend to like them small. When I undress I enjoy the way she holds herself back at first. She wants me to make her into what she is. Women like Cathy like to come to that stupid moment in the middle of the act where they half-shout, “I’ll do anything for you, tell me what to do!” They don’t understand they’ve been doing that from the first.
In a little while, Cathy closes her eyes and goes into that dreamy place. Her mouth opens. It’s nice to watch. All day long at the therapist’s office, she’s been waiting for this, and now I make a present of it. This is our whole agreement, though we could never say that out loud. Then we lie there, and she still wants to know whose boat this is. I ask her what does it matter, and she says she wants to know things about me, who my friends are and stuff. I say nothing, but I can feel she’s not going to let it go. Does it have to do with the screenplay? she asks finally, and it makes me laugh to think what a bad lie this one is. What’s so funny? she asks. I suppose I should be grateful she hasn’t gotten to the point of criticizing my laugh. It’s still all part of the one thing. What I do now is get up and go looking for Ray Heer’s liquor cabinet. When I finally find a half-empty bottle of Glenfiddich, I pour two tumblers and bring one to Cathy. This is the weirdest thing, she says. I say, what? That I don’t know anything about you except that you’re Dr. Petticord’s patient. Well how about I drop out, I say, and then you won’t even know that? She drinks like she’s thinking about it and I listen to the water making its little lapping sounds against the boat.
She’s sat up, though; there’s some resistance in her posture I can see I’m going to have to probe.
Come on back to bed, I say. Come on lie down, Cathy. She tilts her head so I am looking at her profile, but she doesn’t lie down. She’s twenty-four, and she’s been waiting all her life for a man who looks like me to walk through the door. I say this not out of conceit, but because I look the way a lot of women imagine their future husbands to look, tall and regular. Once that man comes into her life, though, it’s not a matter for Cathy of simply falling hard; she’s too shrewd for that. There are calculations still to be made, expectations to be met, basic standards. These are what absorb her as she offers me her profile. It’s not hard to see the life Cathy imagines for herself. At heart, it’s no different from the life my friends’ mothers had: “The Impossible Dream” on the stereo, dustrag in hand. Only for Cathy it wouldn’t be “The Impossible Dream”; something more modern, something to make her feel more in tune with her time. Still, it’s what I call the interior life, a life lived inside, within the fortress.
I want to see where you live, she says all of a sudden.
Is it such a big deal? I ask. But I can see right away she’s very serious. I try to delay her, but eventually we get dressed and drive up the hill to where my parents’ house sits overlooking the Severn.
It’s impressive; I suppose that’s got to be said, though it’s really just a big box with hundreds of windows. The architect’s whole idea seemed to be to start with a central ugliness and try to redeem it with light. Nice for him. My parents must have seen it as some grand opportunity to start over, to remove whatever shabbiness once attached to their early, messy romantic lives. Apparently, the ideal is to live out a mature existence surrounded by golf trophies and issues of Baltimore magazine.
This is where you live? Cathy asks, impressed. I think up to now she’s believed, on the basis of the car I drive, that something would have to be done about the scale of my ambitions.
It’s my parents’ house, I announce, unembarrassed. I’m staying with them.
The light is on in the big second-floor room, where they are probably now watching television. The window facing us is wide and broken by thin strips of cedar. The glass is slightly ridged, so that any stray robber would not be able to tell, as Cathy and I are not now strictly able to tell, whether the light signifies the presence of bodies, of life, or merely a light turned on in an empty room. I know their habits, though, so I can easily imagine them sitting there with their evening cognacs, watching one of those TV shows where life seems slowed down to an unbearable degree, and everyone’s main business seems to be the thinking up of wry wisecracks.
Are you going to take me in and introduce me? she asks, unable to move her eyes from the place.
This is a bad time, I say to the back of her head. Then I flick on the radio, with the idea that I might distract her. She’s turned to me now. I can feel the weight of her focus. Girls like Cathy may not have tremendous intelligence, but the two or three things they do know they carry like bricks behind their eyes. If she meets my parents, she becomes an entity in the house. She gets discussed over the morning eggs. She knows all this, and it gives her a little thrill.
How about tomorrow night? I ask. My mother would love to make you dinner, but she needs some warning. Then I look at her. She’s deciding whether to believe me or not. Would you like to see the yard? I ask.
Since the house is built into the side of a hill, there’s a delicate ladder of steps we have to descend. At the bottom, my parents’ land flattens out for several yards, and they’ve set up an arrangement of wrought-iron latticework furniture at the very edge, just before the land begins to slope down again toward the river. I sit Cathy down on one of these chairs. There’s a fine view of the river, but her eyes are all on the house. She’s nervous, I can tell, like maybe I’m lying about all this and we’re going to be caught. I pat her hand. It’s still warm and the soft river scent is intoxicating. Stop looking at the house, I want to say. Instead I look down through the trees and wait out my time.
It occurs to me as I’m doing so that though this particular set of furniture has been here as long as I can remember, I can still count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve seen anyone sitting here. It seems another one of my parents’ elaborate arrangements, things set up carefully and tastefully to accommodate life and then left empty. Life skirts them somehow, having this tendency to dry up around good things. I think Currey might agree with me here. It tends to land elsewhere, in unrulier places.
There was a run I used to take up in Massachusetts, in the late afternoons. It would lead me past this one house, big yard, messy as hell, real Tobacco Road material. An empty tractor-trailer sat out in the backyard rusting, and the dog they kept was always trying to nip at me. One afternoon, the two kids who lived in the house were out on the older kid’s go-cart, something his father must have patched together for him. They were going round and round in circles, the little one in the big one’s lap. It struck me that day that what I was seeing in their faces was the great gift all the earnest, worried parents like my wife and Currey are searching for: family happiness, I suppose you’d call it. Everyone’s ideal. My wife was always trying to dress Will up and put him behind the fanciest, most high-tech toys. He’s a handsome boy, though a little on the pale side, and he tended to shy away from the robust life. My wife was always looking at him a little disappointed, like why wasn’t he enjoying all the bounty she offered him, why did he seek out corners and resist the fancy swing set? Cathy had that bug, too, I could tell, that lust for the Good Life, the one that comes ready-made, that we believe we can just step into. She couldn’t stop looking at the big wall of the house and thinking we were trespassing. So I got down on my knees before her and tried to distract her. At first she pushed me away, bu
t it must be said Cathy has her sensual appetites, too, and she drew my face up after a while and said, “No, I want something else to go there.”
What I was looking for was an act whose elegance might redeem the lawn furniture; well, let’s go further, might redeem the whole landscape, bring people out of their houses to watch and stare. What I like about my own body is that it has mass; I’m not one of those little flitting, spoon-chested men you see in bathing suits and wish would put their clothes back on in a hurry: you’ve got to take me in. So when she took my shirt off, I was glad to have my wide white back exposed. Oh Cathy, I must have said, or some such, being in the early stages of excitement. There’s nothing splendid about her, as I said, and when she’s naked I don’t want to worship her so much as cover her, the way you might want to feed some starving child or bathe some filthy stranger. Oh here, escaped my lips, and I thought of the perfect sense of it, that we were about to do the deed on these chairs, and that for just these few minutes Cathy wasn’t engaged in some mean calculation as to her own future. Instead, she was welcoming in her sordid present—“Come on in,” she was practically saying—some black-haired stranger who for all she knew might end up killing her or leaving her but for now was just doing the one perfect thing. And splendidly, too, I might add, with her head cradled softly in one large hand. She had started, too, her eyes half-closed and her mouth partway opened, when the big searchlight came on and I looked up and saw my father on the rear deck, scowling.
“That was an asshole thing to try and do” is what my father says after the drinks are poured and we are sitting in the living room. My first impulse is to correct him: I did more than try, Dad. He’s a tall man who carries himself with a certain grace, but no one in their right mind would ever call him handsome. I get my looks from my mother’s side.
Country of a Marriage Page 7