by David Gates
—
Nathan flew in from Seattle to see him in the facility—to use the facile term—then back to attend to his Lexus dealership and to be present for his son’s sixth-grade graduation. Claudia, coming in from Rome, missed Nathan by a day—the two of them hadn’t seen each other for years—and stayed on, visiting for the half hour the rules allowed and sleeping out at the house, in her old room. She told him that the girls had moved their belongings away in a U-Haul. They’d been perfectly lovely to her, she said; the thin one had invited her to go out for coffee.
When he had gotten through the worst of it and they’d discharged him, Claudia took him to have his bridgework completed; on Thanksgiving night he was able to eat with her at Red Fish Blue Fish. She had the veal, and what she said was a good Pinot Grigio; he had the branzino, a fish once unknown, and was drinking mineral water for now. She was not going back to Italy, she told him. She and Giancarlo—but this probably wasn’t the time.
“Come, come,” he said. “I’m not such a delicate soul.”
“No,” she said. “No one’s ever accused you of that.”
“Ah. I take it you’ve been talking to your mother.”
She nodded. “I’m going down when you’re, you know—sometime over Christmas.”
“When I can be trusted by myself? Well, that should be a pleasant visit.”
“Why are you so hateful about her? Because she still loves you?”
“You’re not becoming one of those truth tellers, I hope. I only meant that New York should be a welcome change from this outpost. Martine certainly found it so.”
“She was a bitch,” Claudia said.
“I was the bitch,” he said. “As they say. I’m afraid I must have liked it.” He took a sip of his water.
“Well, Daddy, look—you wouldn’t consider coming with me? Mom says Joe Family might be there.” This was her new name for Nathan.
“Thank you, no. I wouldn’t have thought that you, of all people, would still entertain that fantasy.”
She stared at him, the glass halfway to her mouth, then dropped her eyes. “I don’t know why I keep being surprised.”
“I’m sorry. As you say, I’m not a delicate soul.”
She drained her glass and held it out to be filled. “Daddy, are you not even curious? About me and Giancarlo?”
“I was waiting for you to tell me.” He lifted the half bottle, dripping, out of the thing—“humidor” wasn’t the word—and wiped it with the towel, then poured some for her. “I had assumed you didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Fine, you’re right,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about it.” She took a sip. He noticed fine traceries around her eyes and a single hard line slicing from each side of her nose down to the corners of her mouth. These lines seemed to have been drawn onto the face of the true Claudia, who had always looked young for her age—disturbingly so. “I think I’m going to apply to law school,” she said. “Given all that’s going on here.”
“Bind up the nation’s wounds?” he said.
“You can’t just throw up your hands.”
“Spoken like a woman who’s spent the last ten years in sunny Italy.”
“Yeah. Well, that’s over.” She picked up her glass again. “I was hoping maybe I could stay with you. While I get things figured out?”
“And, meanwhile, keep an eye on me.”
“Do you think you need that?”
“What a question,” he said. “What am I supposed to say?”
“You could have said no. Should we talk about what you’re going to do?”
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I’ve decided to go work in the inner city.” He had been thinking about how to phrase the joke to make its meaning more precisely double, but this would do.
“Daddy, I think that would be wonderful for you. And the people you could help.”
“The people I could help.” He clinked his glass against hers. “Here’s to them.”
—
Without telling Claudia, he wrote out a new will and faxed it to his lawyer. It left her the house and five acres, which included the barn and the tennis court; the other forty acres, with the pond and the cabin, went to Nathan; the money, fifty-fifty, to Claudia and her mother, since Nathan had done so well. The Volvo should rightly have gone to Martine: he’d heard from Jack Stephenson that she had found only an adjunct position at Fordham, and she could’ve sold the car for the money or kept it for the irony. But now that she had true love, there was no need for either. He directed that the car be auctioned off and the proceeds donated to Doctors Without Borders. He left the Jeep to Karen Friedman.
Claudia was staying at the house with him for a few more days before going down to New York. Through Jack, she’d arranged for three LPNs to come out in eight-hour shifts while she was gone. He was back in the king-size sleigh bed he had shared with Martine, which marked the place where he had shared the old double bed with Angela. Each night after dinner, he and Karen—no, he and Claudia—would play three games of Scrabble in front of the fireplace; they’d become evenly matched. Then, after trying to put himself under by puzzling out Shakespeare, he would swallow the one sleeping aid she allowed him: L-tryptophan, from the health-food store. The liquor cabinet, of course, she had emptied. One morning, when she went out to get the mail, he telephoned Rite Aid but was informed that his prescriptions could no longer be honored.
It snowed the night before he was to drive her to the train; they were calling for a foot or more. That afternoon he’d gone out to the barn and uncovered the Volvo, the blue tarp spattered with the droppings of swallows. It started right up, like the good Swedish car it was, and he moved it out into the driveway to make loading her bags easier in the morning. He had thought of simply driving off, but to where, and what then?
That night he lay there trying to decode the scene in The Winter’s Tale where the wife is pretending to be a statue—the silliest part of a particularly silly play—but then gave up, got out of bed and went to the window. Snowflakes were pouring straight down: he tried to follow this one, this one, this one, this one. White knife-edged crests had built up on the branches of the maple tree. Then he heard a roar that shook the house: only a section of accumulated snow sliding down the slate roof.
At some point he heard the plow come through and saw its yellow blinkers light up the window. He awoke to the sandy scraping of a shovel down below: Claudia clearing the walk. Daylight, and snow still falling. He smelled coffee. He had himself dressed when she clumped in, snow sticking to her green rubber boots. “I got a path dug out to the car,” she said. “But shouldn’t we take the Jeep? I don’t know if the trains are even going to be running.”
“I thought we ought to go in style,” he said.
The snow was knee-high on either side of the path she’d made; he saw that she’d cut the sides down at an angle, just as he used to do it. When she was a child, still living here. He went out and started the Volvo, put the heat on full blast and came back inside. “Be warm in ten minutes,” he said.
She poured him a cup of coffee and turned on the radio. “Let’s see if we can get the weather.”
“It’ll be fine.” He tapped his forehead with his index finger. “My own secret station.”
“That’s half your problem right there,” she said.
“I’d call that a conservative estimate,” he said.
They slung her bags into the trunk. A couple more inches had fallen since the plow had come through, and the smooth white of the road showed only a single pair of tire tracks.
At the stop sign, the tracks went straight ahead; Breakneck Hill Road was a virgin slope. He put on his turn signal.
Claudia looked over at him. “We’re not going this way?”
“It’ll save time,” he said.
“We have lots of time,” she said. “Do you want to get us killed?”
He jammed the shift lever into park. “Would you care to drive?”
“I’d care
to live, Daddy. Do you even have snow tires?”
“I’ve been a doctor for forty years,” he said. “Do you think I don’t know what I’m doing?” He closed his eyes and listened to the tick-tick-tick-tick. “I’m sorry, Bunky.” He switched the signal off. “We’ll take the long way. It won’t make that much difference.” He pulled the lever back into drive and started the car forward; it fishtailed, then righted itself. Snow blew straight across the windshield, from left to right.
“I must be hearing things,” she said. “You haven’t called me that since—you know.”
He glanced over to see if she was crying. No. “Is it all right if I call you that?”
“As you say, it won’t make that much difference.” She reached over and patted his leg. “Sorry, Daddy. I’m just…Do you promise to take care of yourself while I’m gone?”
“Aren’t we leaving that to the professionals?”
“I told you, right? Mrs. So-and-so’s going to meet us at the station and she’ll follow you back to the house. Mrs. Chesler.”
“Now there’s something to look forward to.” He had already taken his vow of silence: not a word to any of them. If they reported him, well, he was a strange old man.
“You’ve always had women looking after you. So now they’re being paid.”
“That’s how it generally ends up,” he said.
“And you’re going to look into that volunteer work?”
“A Doctor Without Borders,” he said. “Heal the sick, raise the dead.”
“Always so modest.”
“Yes, well,” he said, “I can tell you a story about that.” The wind had shifted now and was blowing snow straight at the windshield, like an attack from the stars. An attack of the stars. “This was back when I started out in practice,” he said. “I had night duty in the emergency room and they brought in—”
“Daddy,” she said, “I’ve heard this how many times?”
“Then I guess there’s no need to drag it out,” he said. “But you see where I’m going.”
Round on Both Ends, High in the Middle
A remote white moon was howling down with its man-in-the-moon face as she swung out across the double yellow line to pass an ass-dragging old van (whose driver turned out to be the hero of the story) and we came face-to-face with a Ford pickup. I had time to read the F-O-R-D and to register that the grille looked like a modernist grid of windows. The next thing was this feeling, a certainty rather, of floating up in silence (I’m not saying I floated up—this wasn’t me anymore) and down below a car and a truck with their fronts mashed together and both hoods up as if they were chatting. Off on the shoulder, a guy getting out of a van. Moonlit view of the top of his cap, Red Sox B upside down, and his hands going to his face as he approached the truck. The driver of the truck hadn’t had his seat belt on—blood-alcohol level of such and such—and had died instantly, which I now understand means fuck-all, having had an instant of my own. I’ve told this story so many times that it’s become a story.
The guy from the van got her door open, pulled her out and walked her, his hand in her armpit, into frosted grass at the side of the road. Then he supposedly pried my door open with a tire iron. I wrote him a letter to thank him for my life, Dan somebody, from Barre, but I never heard back. She lived too. Is living still, for all I know, why would she not be, though she’s made herself hard to find. At some point she came into my hospital room, one arm in a sling, and said she couldn’t stay long. How was she going to explain this? Meaning to her husband. I said, Make a clean breast, don’t you have pHisoHex? The morphine was making everything a medical pun. But I could imagine how this might seem real to her. I got off easy, as always: just a limp you wouldn’t notice, even on rainy days. It takes months for my shoes to show the uneven wear.
We’d been coming back from our Saturday night in Burlington. I’d picked her up at the airport the night before—she’d told her husband a lie that she said wasn’t my problem, or maybe she said it wasn’t my business—and driven her down to my cabin. We’d seen each other only in the city, but we had a long weekend because of Columbus Day and I wanted to give her the full-on Vermont. So we’d gone to the Flynn and heard Leila Josefowicz with the VSO, playing the hell out of the Adams Violin Concerto. Two ladies in front of us chattered through the first movement about how awful it was. Subscribers feeling baited and switched—I could sympathize. On the other hand, the Rite of Spring première had been a long time ago. I finally said, Would you mind shutting the fuck up? Something I wouldn’t have said had the ladies been gentlemen. As the truck came at us, I also had time to think of this: that my last act on earth had been uncharitable.
Not that it would have been my last act on earth in any event. After the concert we went to some Seattleoid restaurant: she had the pork loin with prune sauce and jicama, and I had a steak—how could they ruin that?—with wasabi mashed potatoes. I asked her how was the far pork. She said, Far pork? Ah, oui, entendu. We split a bottle of pretty much okay Washington State Shiraz. She asked if I’d thought Leila Josefowicz was hot. I said I had, but that the conductor was her husband and I was a great respecter of people’s marriages; had she thought he was hot? So-so, she said, I like it that we can cop to this stuff. Do you not have this with your husband? I said. No, she said, he thought that was getting into the danger zone. Ah, I said, well, everybody has things they keep to themselves, do they not? Like what things, she said. Oh, I don’t know, I said, like minor annoyances—do we need to be having this conversation?
I put down what I hoped was a working credit card, signed the slip and said, Shall we? It would be a long drive back to the cabin, down 89 to Montpelier and then over toward St. Johnsbury, but she didn’t want to end the evening. As opposed to never wanting the evening to end, if you see the distinction. So we found a bar where a shaven-headed bouncer, pretending not to be a bouncer, said hello at the door. I couldn’t understand what the place was about: too crowded to dance, too loud to talk, the music too blurry to decode. I said things into her ear, the point mostly being to brush her ear with my lips, and she shook her head, not a specific no but a general can’t-hear-you, or a general you-don’t-get-it. We seemed to have a better time in bed, and wasn’t all this in the service of that? After three rounds of drinks, I helped her along the sidewalk to where we’d parked, first by her elbow, next with an arm around her waist. She kept her hands in the pockets of her jacket until I felt an arm slip around and a hand on my side, then the hand went away and back to her pocket. Either she was disgusted now to touch the old-guy softness, or, or, or. Oh my God, she said, look at the moon.
I drove while she manned the radio and found us a show called The Bible Only Church of the Air, where a woman preacher with a hillbilly accent kept soaring off her sermon into gibberish: O hoola hoola shackalacka! Do you think this actually means anything? she said. Yeah, I said, it means she’s a schizophrenic. The station must have been beaming in from far away—as they do here late at night, from Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, the baseball cities. It faded into static, and she said, Oh shit, I think she was just about to come.
When we got off of 89, she asked if she could drive the rest of the way. She seemed okay, and I wanted to please. Appease, I guess I mean. And can we have the thing open, she said, and blast the heater? The roof thing? I want that moon.
—
I’d met her at a bar party, one of those things where somebody sends around an email, the occasion being to celebrate somebody else’s installation that had been written up in the Times—why not get it out there what kind of people we were? The bar was a good call, sparing everybody the installation itself. I liked her kinky blond hair, advertising wildness. And let me fine-tune that: I liked her need to advertise her wildness. I checked the left hand. Oh. But.
I asked how she knew Rachel, so on and so on, I won’t walk you through it all. She was an actress, back to looking for auditions after a summer in Pennsylvania with a production of The Tempest that had played vill
age greens all over the state. Tiki torches in bamboo holders, Martin Denny on a boom box: the director had wanted a Trader Vic’s vibe to send up the postcolonial thing. And his theory of Miranda—she had been Miranda—was to bag the airy-fairyness and do her as Daisy Mae. She stopped chewing gum only to speak her lines, which actually worked because—I knew the play, right?
No, I said, I came into town on the last load of turnips.
Well, fuck you too, she said.
Now this is promising, I said. I pinched her ring between my thumb and forefinger. Let me ask, I said, did you take that off for verisimilitude?
She yanked back the hand and said, Who are you again?
Oh, I said, some aging longhair putting the moves on you.
I’d managed to figure out that much, she said.
Ooh, I said. Cruel.
Is that what you like? she said.
Actually, no, I said. I like ’em simple and loyal. Big chest if possible. I said this because she was on the small side, which was really what I liked.
Then it’s good I’m married, she said. I don’t think I’d quite do. In any respect.
Ah but I’m not, I said. This had been true for a year.
Oh, see, I automatically assumed you were, she said. Most men aren’t this blatant if they can really follow through.
Whew, I said, I need to look at that one when it stops spinning. Get you a drink?
Good, that’ll piss my husband off, she said. That’s him. The black T-shirt.
Huh, I said. Very Ted Hughes. So why does he let you go to parties if you’re not allowed to drink with strangers?
You wouldn’t get it if you’re not married, she said. It’s like normal life except you always go home with the same person.
Actually, I was married, I said.
She dropped her mouth open.
Fuck you too, I said. What are you drinking?