“I know all that,” says Hugh.
“Boool-shit! If you knew all that you wouldn’t be calling my office every fifteen minutes while I’m sitting in the mall playing chess!”
“I don’t want to be depressed again.”
“I will double your prescription.”
“Double my prescription? That’s the best you can do?”
“That is quite a lot, don’t you think?” Dr. Aram looks at his watch. He must meet his sweet wife Sitareh at Foon Choon’s in only nine minutes. If he is late she will order without him and that means the pepper steak and he will be farting all night. “You must not confuse your fear of getting depressed with actually being depressed. Your Solhzac will keep your chemicals under control until the clouds blow away and you can see the moon again. Go to church and light a candle and thank God for showing you this wonderful color. Ask him to show you more wonderful colors. Make love to someone you care about. Eat a pint of strawberries. Rent the Wizard of Oz. When you get a bill from your psychiatrist, pay it immediately. Do these things and you will be fine.”
The silence on the other end tells Dr. Pirooz Aram that his patient has surrendered. “Good-bye my good prince of Serendip!”
He hurries to the parking lot and drives his red sports car as fast as he dares toward Foon Choon’s. As he drives he worries about Hugh Harbinger. He worries about Katherine Hardihood. He worries about Ernest Not Irish. He worries about the Americans who come to him by the hundreds, demanding prescriptions for magical medicines, demanding permission to follow their hearts. Who is he, he wonders, to hand out either? He knows he is a terrible psychiatrist. He knows he should have become a dentist as his mother wished. Instead he went to Paris and then to New York and then to hell filling Americans full of drugs and full of dangerous ideas about self-realization. “Damn you, Pirooz,” he growls at himself.
23
It is the rainiest May in memory. And so far the coldest. And for several days now the denizens of Tuttwyler, Ohio have been debating just why the weather has been so foul. The cappuccino drinkers at the Day Dream Beanery tend to blame it on corporate polluters. The beer drinkers at the VFW are certain Moammar Khadafy and Saddam Hussein are to blame. But neither the rain nor cold, nor the uncertainty over their causes, can stop Chiselworth & Tubb Advertising from flying in a crew to film the new Serendipity Green® gazebo commercial for the Bison-Prickert Paint Company. The crew has big nasty lights to burn the rain and cold away. The crew has hot coffee to drink and Serendipity Green® ponchos to wear. Most importantly the crew has a deadline. It must get this 30-second Serendipity Green® commercial shot and edited and on the air by game one of the National Basketball Association’s championship finals.
And so the village square is a beehive of activity. There are not only the cameras and crew brought in to film the commercial, there are the cameras and crews from channels 3, 5, 8 and 19 sent to record this historic event for the six-, ten- and eleven-o’clock news. There is a perimeter of yellow crime scene tape and sheriff’s deputies parading in SWAT gear. There are two- maybe three-hundred umbrella-wielding local folk who have never seen a commercial being shot before and twelve or so actors flown in from New York and LA to portray the local folk. There are wardrobe people and makeup people and food-service people, and serious-looking people in Burberry raincoats who, when not yapping into their cell phones, are scowling at their big-as-bagel wristwatches. All in all, this cold and rainy day in May is nearly as festive as Squaw Days itself.
The plot of the commercial is simple enough: The happy people of Tuttwyler, Ohio, gather on a beautiful summer day to paint their old white gazebo Serendipity Green®. The actors flown in to portray these happy Tuttwylerites will not actually paint the gazebo, of course. The real painting of the gazebo was accomplished two weeks before by a team of union painters flown in from Chicago. Today is just for pretend, for close-ups of actors brushing and grinning and drinking lemonade and joyfully wiping splatters of Serendipity Green® paint off the nose of a firehouse Dalmatian flown in from LA.
And so the filming begins. The rain comes and goes. The crowd ebbs and flows. Finally there is just one more scene to shoot: A silver-haired actor, who has appeared in several national ads for pain relievers and sinus medicines, will wrap his plaid-shirted arm around Howie Dornick’s shoulder and warmly say, “Looks great Howie!” Howie will beam back at the actor and say, “I think I like it!” The real Howie Dornick, being the unappetizing man he is, will not appear in the commercial. He is being portrayed by an actor who has appeared in national ads for cholesterol-free cooking oil, instant gravy and life insurance.
The director, fashionable ponytail sticking from the back of his bald head like the tail of a tadpole, picks up a megaphone. “We’ve got audio in this shot people,” he says. “That means quiet, quiet, quiet! Am I understood?”
He is understood.
And there is quiet.
There is quiet for exactly five seconds.
Then there is a communal shriek.
The crowd divides like the Red Sea.
Deputies in SWAT gear spin like a tabletop of Hanukkah dreidels into the yellow crime scene tape.
A pewter-colored American-made Japanese luxury sedan, Yobisch Podka’s Insipientia blaring from its open windows, bulls into the Serendipity Green® gazebo. Splinters fly.
24
Howie Dornick is high on his ladder painting the ceiling of the gazebo when he sees Dick Mueller and Delores walk hand-in-hand across the north end of the village square. He does not care much for Dick and Delores as individuals—they are both a little holier-than-thou when it comes to religion and patriotism, and Dick always treats him like he’s a little bit retarded—but he sure admires them as a couple. For years he admired the way they kept their love affair private and now he admires how they flaunt it, holding hands and kissing and patting each other’s behinds. He hopes the day will come when he and Katherine Hardihood can be a public couple, shopping together for groceries, eating together in restaurants, walking together across the square, laughing and touching no matter how unappetizing everybody thinks they are.
And Howie Dornick can see that this day is coming. Coming soon. Their collective courage is growing by leaps and bounds. Already they’ve been a couple in Wooster, unashamedly conspiring with the Bittinger boy. Already they have been a couple in the cemetery, exhuming ol’ Seth Aitchbone in broad daylight. How long can it be before they stroll bravely into the Daydream Beanery and sit at one of the window tables and sip their hazelnut coffees and wipe muffin crumbs off each other’s chins? Any week now that could happen.
Tonight they will be taking a big step in that direction. They will be going as a couple to Bill Aitchbone’s house.
He makes sure he is finished painting exactly at 4:15. He makes sure it takes exactly forty-five minutes to take his ladder and empty paint cans back to the village maintenance garage and to clean his brushes and scrub the specks of Serendipity Green® paint off his face and hands. At exactly five he starts for home. As he walks his stomach feel like it’s full of sparrows. He does not want to confront D. William Aitchbone tonight or any night. Still, he wants to get it over with. He passes the freshly repaired and freshly painted gazebo. It looks good as new. He passes the newly painted Serendipity Green® houses on South Mill. No matter how hard he squints, these impressive giants are not the same Serendipity Green® as the Serendipity Green® on his humble two-story frame. How can they be? How possibly can the Bison-Prickert Paint Company mix his lifetime of misery into their paint?
When he reaches his driveway he signs the Serendipity Green® tee shirts of two old women with humped backs and bowling pin breasts. Their tee shirts are not really Serendipity Green®. But the Indonesian sweatshop that made them has come pretty close. He does not sign the tee shirts across the front as the old women ask, but across their humped backs. He picks up a half dozen boxes and tins of Serendipity Green® cookies and cupcakes left on the porch by various pilgrims. When he r
eaches the kitchen he throws them into the Serendipity Green® garbage can Hugh Harbinger sent him.
His kitchen table and counters are covered with the various Serendipity Green® appliances Hugh sent, none of them truly Serendipity Green®.
He showers and and then sits down on his Serendipity Green® toilet seat and dries off with a fluffy Serendipity Green® towel. He hears Katherine Hardihood’s librarian’s knuckles banging on his back door.
They are both too nervous to eat anything substantial, so they nibble on oyster crackers and sip a little ginger ale, as if they had the flu. They watch the Cleveland news: an east-side fire has claimed the lives of two babies; a hidden camera has caught the assistant city finance director drinking beer at an east side strip club when he should have been working; a teacher at a suburban high school has been indicted for having sex with eighteen former students, possible many more. Then they watch the national news: Israel is balking at the President’s latest Mideast peace proposals; Russian generals are suspected of selling biological weapons to North African terrorists; the attorney general of the United States may or may not appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Vice President’s alleged role in the Montezuma’s Revenge affair—or as Dan Rather calls it, Revengegate.
At seven they kiss and hug and head for Bill Aitchbone’s soapy white Queen Anne. “You know we’ve got to do this,” Katherine Hardihood says to him as they force their way up the sidewalk like Columbia River salmon.
“I know,” Howie Dornick answers.
South Mill is never more impressive than in June. The maples and oaks are in full leaf. Men are not yet sick of mowing and fertilizing, and every lawn is as trim and smooth as a golf course green. Many thousands of dollars worth of petunias and pansies and impatiens have been planted. Most impressively, the spring rains have scrubbed the soapy white Victorians and Greek Revivals of their winter filth. They sparkle under the afternoon sun like movie star teeth.
But South Mill is a nervous street this June. A metamorphosis is underway. A number of homeowners have already slathered their soapy white houses with glistening coats of the Serendipity Green® latex paint now being featured at all Bison-Prickert stores. A number of others are busy scraping their clapboards. Soon Tuttwyler won’t just be famous for Squaw Days, it also will be famous for its street after street of Serendipity Green® houses.
Howie Dornick and Katherine Hardihood reach the Grabbenstelter’s flat-roofed Italianate. Ken and Kelley Grabbenstelter have just painted it a ripe persimmon red, not as an act of rebellion against the copy-cat Serendipity Green® houses, but as a beacon to draw attention to their Serendipity Green® window frames and shutters, their Serendipity Green® porch posts and Adirondack chairs, and the impressive wrought iron fence stretching from property line to property line, now transformed into a living hedge by a coat of Bison-Prickert’s rust-resistant Serendipity Green® enamel.
They are standing on Bill Aitchbone’s porch much too quickly. Katherine smashes the door bell button with her librarian’s thumb. Bing-bingly-bingly-bing! “You don’t have to say anything,” she says to Howie. “I know exactly what to say.”
He is relieved. “Whatever you say.”
D. William Aitchbone does not come to the door. Not after the first Bing-bingly-bingly-bing! or the sixth. Their courage flags. “Maybe he’s dead in there,” Howie Dornick says. “Nobody’s really seen him since he drove into the gazebo.”
Katherine Hardihood presses her nose into the door crack and sniffs. There is no evidence of a rotting corpse. She bangs on the door with the callused meat of her librarian’s fist. “Bill Aitchbone! Answer the door!”
Suddenly Howie Dornick is overcome with the need to find Bill Aitchbone dead. He hardens his shoulder and pulls in his neck, ready to ram. But first he tries the doorknob. The door is unlocked. They shuffle in.
It is a beautiful house. There are beautiful wallpapers. Beautiful chandeliers with dangling crystals, beautiful white carpets and blue carpets and all of the furniture in the living room is oak. “Bill? Bill?” Katherine Hardihood shouts sweetly between investigative sniffs. “Bill? Bill?”
They drift into the kitchen and admire the stainless steel cooktop and gray granite countertops. They frown at the pile of dirty plates in the twin sinks. Most of the plates are smeared with spaghetti sauce. There also are several cereal bowls encrusted with Cheerios. “Jiminy Cricket, Bill? Are you alive?”
An answer explodes up the basement stairs. “Down here, for christsakes.”
And so Howie Dornick and Katherine Hardihood find D. William Aitchbone in his basement, playing with his electric trains.
It is a remarkable sight: D. William Aitchbone is sitting atop the vibrating clothes dryer. He is wearing nothing but boxer shorts. He badly needs a shave and a shampoo. Surprisingly, this manliest of men has very few hairs on his chest, but there is enough hair erupting from his armpits to weave a pair of good sized bird nests. His nipples are no bigger than Lincoln pennies. His hands are locked around a bottle of Miller Lite. His trains are racing around the rim of a long plywood table. Inside the maze of tracks is a miniature replica of the Tuttwyler village square.
Howie and Katherine inch forward. They study the miniature village square. Every buildings is exact. But this is not the Tuttwyler square of today. There is no Daydream Beanery. No Just Giraffes or Pizza Teepee. No art galleries or antique shops. Nosireebob. D. William Aitchbone’s tiny Tuttwyler has H.W. Colby’s Hardware and Borden Brother’s Shoes and Porter’s Western Auto and Morton’s IGA and Klinger’s Paint and Sylvia’s Family Restaurant and Grinspoon’s Department Stores. There is no tiny wooden Indian holding a pizza and none of the Matchbox cars parked around the square are newer than a ’57 Chevrolet.
D. William Aitchbone’s tiny Tuttwyler, however, does have one appendage that pre-Interstate 491 Tuttwyler did not. It has a gazebo; and just like the real gazebo, this tiny gazebo has been updated with a coat of Serendipity Green® paint, at least a quart of it, poured like syrup over a stack of pancakes; the gazebo also has been flattened like a pancake, as if God Almighty had angrily thrust one of his sledge-hammer-like hands down through the firmament.
“Happy now, Howie?” asks D. William Aitchbone as his uninvited guests explore the little town and watch the trains go around.
Howie Dornick can’t be sure, but he thinks he knows what D. William Aitchbone means. And yes, he is happy now. Seeing Bill Aitchbone in his underwear with nothing but a vibrating dryer and bottle of beer to keep him company makes him very happy, indeed. But he says nothing. His woman wants to do all the talking. He will let her.
“We didn’t come here to talk about Howie’s happiness, or yours,” she says. “We came to talk about Squaw Days.”
D. William Aitchbone takes a mouthful of beer and grimaces it down his throat. “My favorite subject.”
“Not after today,” says Howie Dornick.
“Bill’s being sarcastic,” explains Katherine.
D. William Aitchbone grimaces another swig. “You guys want to hear my big surprise for this year’s parade? I’m going to march buck naked with a big Serendipity Green® A painted on my white ass. Like that idea, Howie?”
Howie Dornick answers, “Really?”
“He’s still being sarcastic,” his woman explains. “He’s referring to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 17th century novel about a woman who’s convicted of adultery and forced wear a scarlet letter A on her dress.”
“What’s that got to do with his ass?” Howie Dornick wants to know.
Again his woman explains: “By painting a Serendipity Green® A on his ass and parading naked, Bill would be blaming his adultery on you.”
“My alleged adultery,” says D. William Aitchbone.
“And why is his alleged adultery my fault?” Howie Dornick asks Katherine.
“Because he’s got to blame somebody besides himself.”
D. William Aitchbone starts laughing. Beer dribbles down his chest and makes his Lincoln-penny nipples
glisten.
Katherine Hardihood explains further: “You see, Howard, having a wife with an illegitimate half brother—correct me if I’m wrong, Bill—has been the one thing that’s kept his life from being perfect. Being related to dumb old Howie Dornick.”
Dumb old Howie Dornick nods his head wisely. “Ahhhh.”
“And now that he’s been caught putting his manhood where it doesn’t belong …”
“Allegedly putting,” says D. William Aitchbone.
“… he has subconsciously and symbolically tied all of his misfortunes to Artie Brown’s original sin of impregnating your mother. Karen leaving with the kids. Woody being mayor. Paying all those inheritance taxes on his uncle’s farm. You ruining his first year as Squaw Days chairman by painting your house that god-awful color. And most importantly, I suppose, his not being man enough to control everything and everybody, the way the great Donald Grinspoon would have controlled everything and everybody.”
“Wow,” says Howie Dornick.
D. William Aitchbone has stopped laughing. “So what’s so damn important about Squaw Days that it can’t wait until I’m sober?”
Katherine walks to the wall and pulls the plug on D. William’s Aitchbone’s trains. She pulls the plug on his vibrating clothes dryer, too. Now that she has the silence a librarian deserves, she begins: “First let me say, Bill, that I take no pleasure in telling you any of this …”
To which D. William Aitchbone says, “I bet.”
“… but I have to tell you, because it is the truth and everyone has the right to know the truth …”
To which D. William Aitchbone says, “Nobody cares about the truth.”
“… Well, I care about the truth And you’re going to care about it. You know I’ve never been happy about Squaw Days. The disgraceful carnival it’s become …”
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