“What about other colleges?”
“They’re not hiring guys of my age and ethnic persuasion. I don’t mean to complain. It’s just how things are.”
“Do you regret leaving that tenured job back in—what was it?”
“Illinois. No. The town itself was little more than a Kmart between the sorghum fields. I’m originally from the Hudson Valley and I missed the East.”
“Kettle Hill Farm would require your complete attention, Mr. Fayerwether. It’s not part-time. You couldn’t have other clients.”
“As it happens, my only other client just now is the Trost estate in Middle Stepney. And it’s been sold, finally.”
“Have you been there since …” she couldn’t say it.
“Yes, I’ve been there since just after the Trosts’ plane was shot down over Bermuda two years ago. The gardens were extensive and it all would’ve gone to hell. Before that, of course, I was at the Litchfield Arboretum, as I mentioned over the phone.”
“Still, you’re rather an advanced amateur, isn’t that so?”
“No more than you are, Mrs. Darling,” he said.
Maggie resumed walking, leading the way to the wisteria pergola that connected the medicinal herb garden to the swimming pool.
“Can you manage a crew? Bob, er, my previous gardener took care of it all, payroll, workman’s comp. You know, like a chief contractor.”
“Yes, I can do it like that,” he said.
They walked in silence the rest of the way back to his car. He seemed comfortable with silence. She liked that. In fact, she had already decided to hire him when she held out her hand to shake and said she would call him the next day after reviewing all the candidates and making up her mind. Goddamnit, she thought, he was so handsome. And human nature was so pitiful.
4
The Alien Monster
She awoke to something like the sound of a kitty cat going through a brush chipper, a shrieking and clattering that alarmed her so frightfully at first that she leaped up, seized the fireplace poker from its stand, and took a defensive posture behind the chaise lounge in the corner of her bedroom. She half expected to be assaulted any second by some heinous, giant devil bat of the kind one sees on the cover of supermarket tabloids, but then the noise became the tearful shouts of a young woman pounding and kicking a door and rattling the doorknob.
“Open up this minute you fucking cowards!” she shrieked.
Maggie now recognized the distorted voice as Alison’s. She ventured out into the hallway. At the far end, Alison pounded on the door to the Shaker bedroom with the flat of her hand. Her voice achieved a note in an upper register so piercing that Maggie worried about the valuable glass ewer in a niche beside the stairwell.
“I know you’re in there,” Alison shrieked.
Maggie hurried down to her and tried to calm her, but Alison more or less batted her way out of the attempted embrace.
“He’s been fucking her for weeks!” Alison shrieked.
“Who has?”
“Your asshole son!”
“Hooper?”
“Is there another one?”
Suddenly the door was thrown open and Alison, off-balance as she swatted at it, nearly crumpled onto Lindy, who stood there in her flannel robe looking dazed and hurt.
“You wicked slut!” Alison growled. “Cradle robber.”
“Is he really in there?” Maggie asked her old friend.
“This is so unfair,” Lindy said, her mouth twitching at the corners like a dam cracking before a reservoir of emotion. “I can’t believe you’d think—”
“Hooper!” Alison wailed.
A figure larger than Lindy stirred behind her in the darkness. Then he came forward, a handsome Latin-looking young man in boxer shorts, with hooded eyes, a tattoo of a snarling black cat on his left shoulder, a gold chain featuring a small gold skull pendant with ruby eyes, and luxuriant black hair, which was just now being gathered into a queue with a rubber band. He was very handsome, Maggie could not help but observe. Model handsome. And obviously a lot younger than Lindy. Perhaps half her age. Maggie frankly didn’t know what to feel, except a kind of peculiar wary admiration.
“You’re not Hooper,” Alison said, suddenly conversational.
“I yam Javier,” the young man said, scratching his ripply abdominals.
“Satisfied?” Lindy glanced first at Alison and then at Maggie with the glow of a true martyr. Her eyes brimmed with tears as she gently closed the door in their faces. Blubbering was audible within.
“I’m so humiliated,” Alison said. Maggie tried to gather the distraught girl into her arms, but she slipped away and hurried down the hallway to the stairs. Maggie followed her as far as the balustrade. She imagined Alison and Hooper locked in conjugal combat in the orchard cottage like grown people, a spectacle that made her instantly ill. It wasn’t until she returned to her own bedroom that she realized Hooper couldn’t be in the cottage—why else had Alison been in the big house looking for him? Yet his Saab was there in the driveway. Where was Hooper? Life was getting so horribly complicated, it was worse than nauseating.
In a little while a car came up the driveway. Maggie flew to the window wondering, What now? Roving plunderers? Serial killers from Norwalk? Her world seemed to be under an alien invasion. It turned out to be a Danbury Red Top cab. A shadowy female figure hurried past the yew hedges burdened with duffel bags and clutches. Alison! She was leaving! The driver got out and helped her load the trunk and then they were off. So, Maggie thought, massaging her throbbing temples, Hooper had gone and wrecked his first serious relationship. Attempting to picture his face, she came up with something that was more Kenneth than Hooper, and it shocked her. She suddenly wanted a drink. On her way to the kitchen to fetch a glass of sherry, she noticed a dim light flickering under the door of the bath beside the North Woods guest room. She padded past the Shaker bedroom, from which could be heard the grunts and creaking springs of ardor as Lindy went at it with her new paramour. What was life coming to on Kettle Hill Farm? A few short months ago it had seemed all stuffed turkeys and crafts, wholesome things, parties and dinners with dear friends and notables, brilliant conversations, lovely days in a garden not run riot, stability, fruitfulness, order, bounty … ugh! She shuddered recalling the moment that Laura Wilkie flitted from the fateful powder room on Christmas Eve, shattering her world like a blown-glass Christmas tree ornament.
She knocked on the door to the bathroom. There was a muffled groan, male, she thought. Hooper? Who else but?
“Hooper,” she whispered. “It’s Mom.”
He responded with another, weaker groan, resonant of illness and tragedy. At once she entered the unlocked room to find Hooper supine in the tub with a candle flickering on the edge of the sink and a nearly empty Scotch bottle bobbing in the water between his surprisingly hairy legs.
“You’re drunk!” she said.
“You’re crazy,” he muttered.
“You’re absolutely pickled!”
“Yeah, well, t’morrow I’ll be sober an’ you’ll still be crazy,” he maundered and then hooted at his own joke.
Maggie shrieked more than once. There was clattering in the room next door, and shortly Lindy and Javier appeared in the doorway.
“It’s okay, we’re here, okay?” Lindy said, trying to assume command, though clearly horrified herself.
“Do joo know thees man?” Javier asked cocking a thumb at the tub.
“Of course I do. He’s my son,” Maggie said, trying to control the hysteria that struggled in her like a monster.
“Hey, lookit. Iss my ol’ Aunt Lindy,” Hooper said, his head lolling against the tiles. “See ya gotta new boyfriend. Wassyer name, boyfriend?”
“I yam Javier.”
“Put’er there, man.” Hooper held his hand out limply as though to slap five. In the flickering candlelight, a set of scratches was visible on his wrist. They were seeping rather than bleeding, but now the monster burst out of Maggie and
she wailed uncontrollably. The commotion only put Hooper to sleep. His arm slid back into the tepid water leaving smoky wisps of blood suspended in the water, while the years seemed to drain from his face as the small muscles relaxed. Despite a mat of chest hair, he looked like a ten-year-old boy again.
“Maggie, just calm down,” Lindy said. “Get him out of the tub, Javi.”
“He tried to kill himself!” Maggie wailed.
“They’re just scratches.”
“Because of you!”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You’ve been fucking my son!”
“How could I be fucking Hooper when I’ve been fucking Javier?”
Meanwhile, Javier had extracted Hooper from the tub and had him over one of his exceedingly broad Toltec shoulders like a sack of masa harina. Lindy directed him into the North Woods room where Hooper was deposited on the massive peeled-log bed. Maggie immediately saw to the wounds on his wrists, which, it was now rather obvious, looked as though they had been inflicted by a slightly annoyed tabby cat. Bandages were clearly unnecessary but she tied a couple of cotton guest towels around them so he wouldn’t stain the 520-threads-per-inch percale sheets. She hoped that he would not throw up on them, either.
“Thank you for helping, Javier,” she said politely, taking in the tattoo and the skull pendant. Back in college, she recalled, Lindy had been more disposed to men in Brooks Brothers button-downs.
“No problem,” he said diffidently and went back to bed.
“I wasn’t doing what you think,” Lindy whispered moments later in the hallway as they prepared to retire to their rooms. “Really, Maggie. The idea. Disgusting.”
“Where did you find this new guy?”
“Javier? He … he was waiting to see Doctor Klein.”
“He goes to your shrink?”
“Well, yes. Obviously.”
“That doesn’t sound very macho.”
“What a racist thing to say, Maggie!”
“Excuse me. He just doesn’t seem the type to visit a shrink.”
“Because he’s Hispanic, right? This is a new low for you.”
“A new low?” Maggie echoed back emptily.
“Yeah. Who just flew back from a fling in Venice with a guy young enough to be her own child?”
“It’s not the same, Lindy, and you know it.”
“Because he was British, I suppose, and a big fucking rock star, right?”
Maggie felt ashamed and exhausted and utterly disarmed.
“I think all this New England country-living bullshit is melting your brain,” Lindy said bitterly and left Maggie alone in the hallway, shivering.
5
Farewell
Sherry wasn’t potent enough. Maggie brought out a single-malt Scotch instead, a Glenpuladrule, knocking back a first shot like a customer in one of those old Third Avenue bars with the steam tables full of corned beef and cabbage and then pouring herself two more fingers to sip slowly in a fluted flip glass. The clock over the sink said quarter to four. When the phone on the kitchen table rang, she regarded it like a small UFO full of malice from another world. But rather than dash it against the wall or continue to listen to it ring, she reached for the handset, being, after all, just a little curious to know what kind of goddamned idiot would call at this hour.
“Swann here.”
She couldn’t help laughing. All the tension and horror of the night was transformed alchemically, it seemed, into a lucid recognition of life’s absurdity.
“Sounds as if you’ve forgiven me,” Swann ventured.
“No, I was just wondering what sort of goddamned idiot would call at this hour of the night.” She cracked up again. “Now I know.”
“What time is it there?”
“Going on four A.M.”
“Zounds! I miscalculated.”
“Anyway, I hardly forgive you, you toffee-glazed priapic piece of English shit.”
“I’m awfully sorry.”
“How’s Regina?”
“Did you really want to chat?”
“Sure. I’m sitting here in the kitchen getting bombed on seventy-dollar whisky because my son tried to slit his wrists tonight.”
“Good heavens! Whatever for?”
“I don’t want to talk about it. How’s Regina?”
“She’s moved on to Teddy Dane.”
“I guess she’s just mad for experience.”
“No, the thing is he’s really a lovely chap.”
“Well, yes …”
“And I think it’s true love.”
“What was it we had, Swanny?”
“Oh, my dear Mrs. Darling. I am so unworthy of you.”
“That’s a nice way of putting it.”
“But, you see, I was paralyzed with worry. How could the two of us make a life together? In hotel rooms and strange cities? It seemed quite hopeless and impossible, and I couldn’t bring myself to discuss it openly.”
“I was having the same thoughts, dear boy.”
“You were?”
“I couldn’t find the words to tell you it wasn’t going to work out. I wasn’t cut out to be a groupie. If it’s any consolation, I would’ve had to come home in any case.”
“It’s small consolation. I find myself consumed with desire for you. Yet I shall never have you again. Shall I?”
“That’s right.”
“You mean, right I shall or shall not.”
“Not. Never again.”
“I ask because I have to return to New York in a month to mix the album.”
“New York is full of pert young things.”
“I take it you will be unavailable.”
“Your grasp of subtext is unerring.”
“Well, then.”
“Oh, before you go, how’s the film going?”
“It’s a heap of rubbish. Tesla’s gone utterly Hollywood. Most of the scenes now end with explosions. If it doesn’t ruin my career I shall feel extremely fortunate. By the way, you know, I don’t think Regina cared for me one jot.”
“How could you tell?”
“Because she was in another man’s bed before nightfall.”
“Well that’s a pretty good sign right there. Say, how’s that young Steve Eddy?”
“Nigel debauched him utterly. I predict he will never recover.”
“I predict that you will recover, Swanny.”
“Do you think so?”
“You can always sing in a saloon somewhere.”
“Quite right. But how about yourself, Mrs. Darling?”
“I can always make sandwiches somewhere.”
“What a bloody good sport you are.”
“That’s me to the very core. A good sport.”
“Good-bye, my dearest Maggie Darling.”
“Good-bye you wretched boy.”
Part Seven
Lost and Found
1
The Absent Objet
Things were missing. The first thing Maggie noticed—by its absence, that is—was the ruby ewer that lived in the niche by the stairwell. She’d come across the piece the summer of 1989 at a tag sale in Maine among a clutter of cheap china sauceboats, cheaper plastic teacups, and other unwanted effluvia of some deceased spinster’s dissolving household. A Sotheby’s employee later appraised the ruby ewer at $1,200, the monetary value being quite beside Maggie’s love of its sheer excellence as a wrought object. Now it was gone. Her mind leaped to certain obvious culprits—so obvious that the leap instantaneously provoked overwhelming pangs of shame and guilt for the very leaping. For example, Quinona the laundress, a twenty-year-old single mother from Norwalk who was sometimes ferried to Kettle Hill Farm by obvious male gangbangers. Or Javier. She tried to tell herself it was only the tattoo that prompted her suspicions, but a harsher voice nagging inside insisted she was a racist bitch. So had similar thoughts about Florence, the day maid. Her very suspicions disgusted her so much that she couldn’t bear to think of the ruby ewer at all anymore, however e
xcellent it was.
But then her silver Lincoln and Foss coffee urn turned up missing the morning that Reggie Chang drove up from the city with a crew of stylists and assistants to begin shooting the photos for Keeping House.
“Someone’s pinching things around here,” Maggie whispered to Nina while the assistants set up the props for a vignette in which Maggie would be shown cleaning a crystal chandelier with baking soda and a toothbrush.
“Who’s pinching whom?” Nina whispered back.
“No. Stuff’s missing.”
Nina visibly stiffened and the air seemed suddenly heated between them.
“Are you accusing me?”
“Would I mention it if I suspected it was you?”
“I really don’t know.”
“Oh, come on, Nina. I trust you absolutely—”
Reggie interrupted: “We’re ready for you, Maggie.” Nina marched back to the kitchen where she was testing recipes for the summer catering season. They never did get a chance to clear up the misunderstanding, since Nina departed at four o’clock while Maggie was demonstrating a method for regilding old picture frames in her crafts room.
Around five, while the crew rearranged furniture for some shots of Maggie dusting a valance in her second-floor boudoir, she happened to glance out a window and see Walter Fayerwether’s Volvo motoring up the driveway. When it pulled up to the boxwood border a blond woman stepped out—a rather young blond woman, not more than twenty-five, it appeared from a distance, and rather shapely, too, in perfect blue jeans and a clingy short-sleeved, scoop-necked magenta top. Shocking, Maggie thought, wondering at the same instant why she was shocked. But her meditation was cut short when the young thing reached back inside the car and honked the horn—three vigorous blasts. Moments later, Walter himself appeared through the arbor, all loose joints and smiles, waving at the girl. To Maggie, the tableau smacked of a magazine advertisement for country casuals, by way of a porn movie. Walter gave the blonde a little smooch and a familiar squeeze. The two of them hopped into the Volvo and drove off.
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