A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

by David Gates

  Eventually the husband came over to break it up, but I’d already gotten her email out of her, to send her a piece I’d read by some guy riffing about The Tempest and his woodstove and his marriage breaking up.

  She emailed back to thank me, and I emailed back to ask how about lunch? No, no lunches, no can do, but she forwarded another group email about a screening, at another bar, this one in Williamsburg, of a video that had been shot during that summer production. And a note at the top: Want to see me act up a storm?

  Since this isn’t theater criticism and who cares anyway, let me just say it was mostly shitty actors with a decent Prospero, who was black, either to make you think complicated thoughts about colonialism or because he was the best guy they had, sort of a James Earl Jones being aware that he was being a James Earl Jones. I decided not to mind the rasta Caliban either: I-man mistress showed I-man dee, and dy dog, and dy bush. Her Daisy Mae shtick was so mannered you couldn’t tell if she was good or not. She showed lots of leg, and a couple of times a panty flash. She did a toss-her-head thing, a twirl-her-hair-on-her-index-finger thing, a tug-down-the-back-of-her-skirt thing, the last of which might have been unconscious. While flirting with Ferdinand, who had Harry Potter glasses, she ran a finger down his arm, which I think I thought was good, and that bothered me since I was looking for weak points.

  When I went up to her afterward, she said, God, you too. I can’t believe I sent that out to all these people. Did you get a good look at my underwear? I think I need to get very drunk.

  I greatly enjoyed your underwear, I said. I was assuming you’d calibrated every little glimpse.

  I did not, she said. I was exploited. I mean, I sort of was. Will you make sure I get very drunk?

  Why am I elected? I said. Did your husband stalk out when he saw your unmentionables?

  He’s in California, she said. Thank God. If you don’t want to—

  No no no, I said. Nothing would make me happier. Well that’s not true. Should I spirit you out of here right now?

  I can’t not speak to people, she said. Can we in a little?

  I brought two Jamesons and slipped one into her hand without interrupting her conversation with a tall henna redhead, whose arm she kept touching in what looked like supplication. I took a stool at the bar and watched her move from person to person, clapping her palm to her forehead, her palm to her mouth, shaking her head no. When she came back to me her glass was empty. Could you wait for me outside? she said.

  She came out before I’d finished my cigarette. I’m parked over there, I said. So where shall we go?

  Oh, you’re such a smoothie, she said. She plucked my cigarette out of my mouth, took a drag and tossed it. How do you keep the fly bitches off your dick?

  I stopped at a liquor store where you bought through a Plexiglas window, and we passed a bottle of Jameson as we drove back to my place in the Village. After we fucked, she wept, then went into the bathroom. She ran water, but I could hear her vomiting, then gargling. She came out and kissed me, tasting only of my Scope. We fucked again, neither of us could come, and she started putting on clothes. She refused to let me walk her to a taxi. I pulled on jeans anyway. She said, You really don’t listen, then pushed me onto the bed. We fucked again. I walked her to a taxi, our hands in each other’s hip pockets.

  —

  She’d gone to high school in one of those Greek-name noplaces in Ohio, where of course she’d played Marian the Librarian though she couldn’t really sing—which wasn’t true, because one night I heard her lilting wordlessly while brushing her hair to go home to her husband and I thought, Man, you are in too fucking deep—and what’s-her-name in Our Town. Couldn’t wait to get to NYU, and had made herself into such a New York person that she now talked about Ohio in order to seem exotic. What’s round on both ends and high in the middle? she’d say, and nobody knew. She’d wanted to be a serious Shakespearean and went to study in London for a year, but she could never even work up a Brit accent that hung together. So now she supported herself and Ted Hughes by doing commercials. In one, she was a satisfied bank customer; in another, she and some actor threw snowballs at each other. I taped them off the television—she refused to give me copies—and during the months after I got out of the hospital I used to watch them to make myself feel like shit, which was no great achievement. I’ve still got them somewhere. No, that’s a false note: they’re in the bottom drawer of my file cabinet, five feet from where I’m sitting.

  I was about to say I don’t know where the time has gone since then, but of course I know, since I’ve taken to keeping a journal: time of getting up, time of hitting hay, progress on the porch I’m building onto the cabin, stuff done to keep money coming in, people who come to visit. (That last item is a joke. Though see the very end of this story.) My son, who’s now in film school at UCLA, his mother having raised him right, will find the notebooks in that drawer when this place becomes his, or that’s the plan. Nothing in them either to embarrass or enlighten him, just a record of how the days went. This isn’t part of that: you might call this the story of how the days began. But we don’t want to hit the woo-woo note too hard. I’ve also taken to smoking weed—can you tell?

  —

  We were lying in bed, in this very room, looking out at the bare treetops against the moonlit sky, when a string of yelping geese flew over, apparently heading south over into Plainfield.

  My God, it sounds like dogs, she said.

  ’Tis new to thee, I said. Let’s see if we can see them.

  I got up, naked, and went to the window, and she came to me, naked. There, I said.

  I pointed and cupped her rough-skinned buttock with my other hand. A wavering V, moving across the sky. Her flesh eased into my side, a breast against my rib cage. The cold air had made the nipple hard—you see I don’t flatter myself.

  That’s them? she said. They’re so high up. We must not be hearing them in real time. Do you ever have dreams where you fly?

  Used to, I said.

  So why do you think you stopped having them?

  Now you’re getting personal, I said. Okay, because I don’t need to have them anymore, how’s that? My every wish has come true.

  You don’t have to be ugly, she said. She moved away from me, got back in the bed and pulled the comforter up to her neck. I went and got in with her. This is a lot different for you than it is for me, she said.

  Okay, I said. But that’s, like, a universal truth, no?

  I ventured a hand onto her coarse hairs. Sometimes you guess right: she did something with her hips to arch up against the hand. I ventured a finger down.

  Mm, okay, she said. I’m going to pretend. Just do that. She writhed, then said, No. No, stop it, that was mean what you said. You still don’t get it that I’m smart. Would you do that some more?

  You feel good there, I said. We lucked out, didn’t we?

  Sssh, she said. Somebody will hear you.

  Somebody’s always hearing me, I said. That’s the nature of my disease.

  And you’re so unique, she said. That’s another selling point.

  Fuck you, I said. I really do like you.

  See, she said, I’m the same person as you. I’m only going to say that once.

  This was our Friday night conversation, before our Saturday night conversation, the one where I asked her if we needed to be having this conversation. On Friday night she’d been drunk and travel weary—as opposed to Saturday night, when she was just drunk—and we’d sat up sipping the Jameson she’d bought, which diffused into your tongue like stinging honey. When I got back here, a month later, alone, in a walking cast, the bottle was still sitting on the night table, and the two snifters had penny-sized pools of amber.

  —

  At the time all this happened I’d hit the wall moneywise. In order to keep my job—at a men’s magazine, if that’s important—I’d rented a studio in the East Village, where I spent Tuesdays through Fridays and drove up here late Friday nights, sometimes getti
ng in after daybreak. I’d taken over the entire mortgage on the cabin and was still covering the maintenance on the apartment where I’d lived with my ex-wife and my son. A six-hour drive, in the car with the sunroof, on which I was still making payments. But hitting the wall—what did that mean really? It was like one of my son’s computer games, where you’re about to hit a wall but then take an impossible left turn, the stones fly past on your right and now you’re in another space skimming over a field of green, then leaping a trench to land on a hillock where a monster attacks you but you biff the monster away—biff biff—and he vanishes howling and then you’re skirting another wall, in which a gate opens: you go through, everything drops away beneath you and you’re flying over an ocean where fishes are sporting. To translate: I’d send away for a new credit card, and on it went.

  These days I’m out of debt, like wise old Ben Franklin but not so fat and femmy, having lost twenty pounds and shaved my head. Studio in the East Village long gone, maintenance on the apartment off my back, thanks to my ex-wife’s smart investing and, I have to say, her charity, and the cabin and its ten acres paid off in six more years. My son says he doesn’t want the place, but we’ll see about that. From this window, you can see his swing—or you could if it were daylight—still hanging from the big maple tree. I cut the seat from a pressure-treated two-by-six: it will outlast the ropes, already rotting, then me, then him. I used to push him and he’d fly out over the bed of daylilies, stretching to touch the toe of his sneaker to this one high branch. Blackberry brambles and tall grass now grow where I used to stand behind him, and the bare patch of earth is gone where his feet used to come down. The only thing worse would have been to keep clearing it all with the lawn mower every year—but we can’t have that tone taking over, it’s worse than the woo-woo. Let’s get back to something like Ben Franklin being fat and femmy, that was good. I’ve cut up my credit cards, like the people on The Dave Ramsey Show, though I wrote the American Express number down so at Christmas I can still send shit from Harry & David. Okay, we like the word “shit.”

  The people on my Christmas list: now that would tell you something. My mother in the assisted-living place outside Washington. (Ah, but is there any other kind of living? I live assisted by whoever does those rotisserie chickens at the Price Chopper in St. Johnsbury.) The two editors who still give me work. My ex-wife and my son: gifts neither acknowledged nor returned. This is the year I crossed off my father, whom I ordered to be moved from the hospital in White Plains to the assisted-dying place, a mile from the Price Chopper. I visit on my shopping days, but he no longer knows me, and even if Royal Riviera pears could be mashed into the feeding tube, there’s a limit, is there not? But I still send gifts to his nurses: the fat one, the other one, and the one with the nose stud. And to the doctor who put the titanium screw in my leg, then removed it. And to Dan somebody in Barre, whose card I always sign off on as “A Friend.” He probably gets shit from his wife—looking down I saw moonlight glint off his wedding ring, although, as I say, it wasn’t me—who probably thinks she knows what “Friend” means.

  —

  When I got out of the hospital I emailed my ex-wife and asked if we could have lunch sometime. She was actually the one who said, No, no lunches, no can do—I attributed that line to my Friend as an in-joke, though who was there to be amused? I emailed the Friend too, but it bounced back. All I’d said was I hope you’re well and that your life is good. Now you’d swear that was harmless. I Googled her once—that “once” is another false note, but this late in the story we need a little hit of the elegiac—and didn’t even find a Facebook page. So I assume—well, I don’t know what to assume. The worst? The best? Her twentieth high school reunion was coming up, I found out that much, and they were looking for her and three other people. It would bring everything around nicely if I said I’ve had no Friends since, but there’s no end of Friends, though there is eventually. My latest just went home a couple of hours ago, because she has to be up at six thirty to get in and open her store. Another refugee from New York, except she’s been here since the eighties. She’s my age—strands of white, which I’ve decided to find fetching, in the single braid that goes down her back—but with a yoga body. Her store carries mystical books, herbal cosmetics, hoodoo powders she gets from a place in New Orleans. She will not stock crystals or dream catchers, which she calls wankery. If you know her, she’ll sell you weed, which is how I got to know her. That sounds circular, but what I mean is she sells weed to the nurse with the nose stud, who introduced us. The first night she and I got high together, I asked if she’d ever had an out-of-body experience—I was getting ready to start telling my story—and she said, Is there any other kind?

  Locals

  When I was nineteen years old, I dropped out of the Berklee College of Music, where I’d been studying guitar—the one thing I’d ever been halfway good at—to tour with a band that wanted a screaming lead player, and when that all got too stupid, I moved back in with my parents in Connecticut, stayed in my room trying to get scales and modes and arpeggios up to speed and coming to realize that never in a million years. My father was at me to go to work for him and start regular college in the fall; he owned a chain of furniture stores, and a salesman had quit at the one in Westport. Then Mike, my hippie older brother, called from the hill town in western Mass where he was living in a cabin on a dairy farm, doing chores in exchange for rent, and said I should come hang out; it was a cool place, with a small lake and a bar where maybe I could get a job playing. This was the summer of 1975. Mike picked me up at the bus in Greenfield, and I remember driving with him up along the river and the train tracks, through Martin’s Falls and Crowsfield, then taking the turn-off for Bozrah, over a concrete bridge built by the WPA, onto a narrow road up out of the valley, following a brook with whitewater tumbling over the boulders, then past the town hall and post office, the church with the square steeple, the general store and the white clapboard houses, and on to a farm at the top of a dirt road and getting out of his car into the quiet, looking off at the green humpbacked hills and smelling that good air. It made me think I’d had enough of the world, and I still think so.

  Mike’s pot was so strong it made me paranoid, and the bar at the lake turned out to be all shitkicker music, so there went those temptations. I helped out some at the farm and put up a handwritten notice at the general store: Lawns Mowed, Leaves Raked, General Yard Work, Reliable Service, with Mike’s number repeated across the bottom where you could tear it off. He told me the locals did this shit for themselves, but I’d noticed that people with money were discovering the place: two and a half hours from Boston, four from New York. I spent forty dollars on a decent used mower, and if somebody called I’d bring it around in the trunk of Mike’s old Ford Fairlane, which didn’t look too professional. Still, there’s a right and a wrong way to mow a lawn—my father taught me that—and I’d always rake up after, so the weekend people started asking if I also did handyman stuff: put up a new gutter, fix a leak around the chimney, replace cracked clapboards, paint the house. Sure, let’s get together on a price. While I didn’t really know what I was doing, it was all pretty intuitive, and Mike’s farmer let me borrow tools and a ladder. When I got more calls than I could handle by myself, I talked Mike into coming to work for me. On account of my father, “businessman” always had a bad sound to me, but it turned out that’s what I was.

  My company still does lawns and landscaping, anywhere in a fifty-mile radius; we cut, split and deliver firewood, plow driveways in the winter. Our main business, though, is construction. I’ll still put on a tool belt myself, but a lot of days I’ll just be driving from one job site to another, making sure stuff’s getting done right. At any given time I might have up to a dozen people working for me—master carpenter, plumber, electrician, a heavy-equipment operator who doubles as a mechanic, a girl to run the office and answer the phone, and a revolving cast of Asscrack Harrys for the grunt work. Though I’d rather do renovations and a
dditions—I hate to see it getting too built up around here—if somebody comes in and buys five or ten acres and wants a nice log house, I won’t turn away the business. I’ve probably done my own part in fucking up the look of things. I had to put up a metal barn on Watch Hill Road, where I’ve got my office, for all the equipment—backhoe, dozer, tractor and brush hog, plow trucks, a flatbed. I had them leave a row of trees so in the summer you can’t see it when you go by.

  Mike moved to Alaska twenty years ago; he said it was getting too suburban here, which I took to be aimed at me. He’d be sixty-eight, so he’s probably still alive, but I didn’t even know how to get in touch with him when our father died. My main guys now are Myron Stannard, Jesse Biggs and Johnny Iaconelli. Customers love to watch Myron when he’s doing tree work: he’s a rock star up there in the cherry picker, with an Asscrack Harry as his chainsaw tech to hand up a fresh saw when the one he’s using starts to get dull. Jesse, who does the heavy equipment piece, moved up here from Hartford to get away from what he called “the crime”—like there was just one. He’s the only black man in town. Both of them can bang nails and do whatever else, but Johnny’s my master carpenter. He’s not as old as the rest of us—he’s got to be late forties—and he’s been with me the shortest time. Myron warned me he could be hard to handle when he was drinking; still, he’s the best around, and I’ll take a drink myself. So will Jesse. They’re artists, those three. I’m the one who knows how to run a business, though, and how to deal with the clientele; I get why get rich people have a boner for plank doors, woodstoves, Hoosier cabinets and eight-over-eight windows. I keep track of sources for salvaged wainscoting and hand-hewn beams, or I can take a drawknife to a beam from the sawmill and make it look hand hewn. I bought an old house myself, on a dirt road. I’ve got three albums with pictures of all my projects; mostly to show clients, but some nights I’ll just take them out to look at them.