CHAPTER SIX
In the
Neighborhood
I remained diligent
about watching the store for my father for a couple of weeks after
that. One day, though, I stopped by only long enough to tell Tyler
that I was not going to stay. I needed to get in my car and get
away for the day – it was either that or stick around for another
week or so and let things get to me to the point where I just drove
off permanently.
My father came home
from the hospital three days after a successful procedure opened
the blockage. He spent his time adjusting to lean meats and
dramatically reduced sodium and working up his courage to ascend
the stairs. I wouldn’t have thought his infirmity would have
intimidated him so badly, but he slept several nights on the couch
rather than making the climb, and on the nights when he did sleep
in his own bed, he would stay there until close to noon the next
day. His doctors told him that he needed to step up his level of
exercise gradually, and at their suggestion, my mother purchased a
stationary bicycle and a treadmill. But even though she placed them
in the den where he was spending the vast majority of his time, my
father hadn’t been on either. He said he wasn’t ready.
I wondered how much
of my father’s response to recovery related to my refusal to take
over the store. It hadn’t even dawned on me that my father making
this proposition to me was as much a commitment of trust on his
part as it was a convenient way to keep the business in the
household. By turning him down, I suppose in some very real way I
had announced to him that his trust didn’t mean much to
me.
If I had felt out of
place in my parents’ house earlier, I now felt flat-out repressed.
Anything I did (or, for that matter and much to my surprise, my
mother did) could be interpreted as a disturbance and therefore a
hindrance to my father’s convalescence. I could read or listen to
my iPod in my room, which made me feel like I was still in high
school, or I could watch television with the two of them. I chose
as often as possible to do neither.
But spending evenings
out of the house was equally unfulfilling. None of my old friends
lived here anymore. Amber wasn’t the kind of place that one moved
back to. You could grow up here or you could discover the town
later in life and choose to settle down, but once you left, you
only ever returned for a visit. I reacquainted myself with several
of my friends’ parents only to learn that all of those friends had
moved to Boston, New York, or out of the Northeast
entirely.
And so I took to
going out at night by myself, something I was never fond of but
which I had grown accustomed to doing over the past decade. I went
back to the bar that Tyler introduced me to and outside of which
Iris and I kissed. The music was listenable, the bartender was
funny, and I didn’t feel particularly conspicuous if I found no one
else to talk to. I also spent a fair amount of time at The Muse, a
bookstore/café just off Russet Avenue. The espresso was good and,
while it was clearly a place where locals got together to meet,
there were always several people sitting by themselves with
magazines or novels. After my third visit there, I decided to find
out if it would take me longer to read all of John Updike’s fiction
than it would take Howard Crest to sell my father’s
store.
My progress over the
first couple of weeks was considerably greater than Howard’s was.
He’d come into the store a few times to ask questions or meet with
the store’s accountant, but he had yet to bring any potential
buyers. When I asked Howard how long he thought the process would
take, he was noncommittal, saying that, while small retailers were
always interested in Amber, they weren’t necessarily interested in
the kind of store my father had. This was a burdensome observation.
An extended sale process meant that I had committed to spending
much more time in Amber than I had intended. And all of it in a
mind-numbing work environment, a frustrating home situation, and a
social circle where I was on a first name basis with only the woman
who made my coffee and the guy who poured my drinks.
I needed an escape of
at least a temporary kind. It was a Monday, I knew things would be
quiet in the store, and I knew that Tyler was more than capable of
dealing with anything that came up. I got in my car and headed over
the Pine River Bridge. From there, I simply drove. North on Route 9
and then north again on 91. I had no idea where I was going and I
was convinced that it didn’t matter. In fact, I thought that the
simple unpredictability of the day would prove to be refreshing in
and of itself. I had an R.E.M. album on the iPod and when
“Everybody Hurts” came on, I was nearly giddy to hear the original
version and not the version that played regularly on the store
radio.
After about an hour,
I exited to get some coffee and to go to the bathroom at a diner
just off the road. While there, I decided to pull out my atlas to
see what lay ahead in this direction. As I followed the map up into
Massachusetts, my eyes shifted to the left and landed on Lenox. I
could get there in a little more than an hour by switching over to
the Massachusetts Turnpike. Iris had said she wanted to stay in
touch. This seemed like an excellent way to find out if she meant
it. I switched my iPod to The Bravery and jumped back onto the
highway, taking the surprisingly good coffee and a homemade
cranberry muffin along with me.
Lenox was in many
ways what Amber wanted to be when it grew up. One of the largest
towns in the Berkshire Hills, it was the home to dozens of craft
shops, boutiques, restaurants, specialty stores, and inns, and drew
a huge summertime tourist business from numerous superior
performing arts venues, the most famous of which was the Tanglewood
Amphitheater. It combined urban sensibility vacationing at its
country home with Colonial history. And while it thrived during the
summer, it was now very much alive twelve months a year. I’d made a
late fall trip there just six months earlier with a woman I dated
for a short while. I wonder what I would have done if I’d run into
Iris then.
A Broadway character
actor and one of her former professors at Yale founded the Lenox
Ensemble in 1987. In their early years, they did repertory versions
of the works of Williams, Albee, and Wilson, among others, and in
recent years had concentrated on staging younger playwrights who
they believed were doing important work. Last summer they had
produced their first commissioned play and were committed to doing
two of these every year in the future. I learned all of this from a
flyer I found at an inn where I stopped to get some information. I
knew how to get to Lenox, but I had no idea how to find where Iris
worked.
The Ensemble’s
offices were located in a modest farmhouse about two miles from
downtown. The theater itself was in a converted barn a couple
hundred yards away. Inside the house was a series of desks where a
handful of people in their early twenties made phone calls, typed
on computers, and sorted through papers. There were offices to the
left and to the back of this. As I entered, Iris came out of one of
these talking heatedly with a man who was easily nine inches taller
and twenty years older than she was. It had something to do with a
problem with scenery and it wasn’t clear whether they were on
opposite sides of the argument or at various stages of extreme on
the same side. At one point, Iris looked over and threw me a
surprised glance before going back to her discussion.
A guy at a computer
asked if he could help me and I sat in a chair to wait things out.
When Iris finished her exchange, she went back into her office and,
for a moment, I thought she was either going to ignore me or had
forgotten I was there. But then she walked out in my direction,
looking considerably more relaxed than she had only moments
before.
“You might be the
last person I expected to see here,” she said, kissing me on the
cheek.
“I was in the
neighborhood.”
“Do you define the
entirety of New England as your neighborhood?”
“I needed to get the
hell out of Amber.”
She looked at me,
confused. “What were you doing in Amber?”
“A question I ask
myself several times a day, starting from the moment I wake up.
Some stuff has happened. Want to hear about it?”
“Yes, I think I
would,” she said, smiling. She looked at her watch. “I have a
nightmare day. I don’t know how much you heard of that
conversation, but one of the set designers has had a creative
crisis. We think it has something to do with the woman he started
dating last month. Our first performance is in three weeks and
we’re just this side of royally screwed.”
“In other words, I
should have called first.”
“Something like that.
But I’d really like to talk to you. Can you hang around until
dinnertime? I can suggest some things to do.”
“I think I can take
care of myself. What time should I come back?”
She looked at her
watch and then back toward her office. “7:00?”
I wondered if I
should simply get in my car and head back toward Connecticut. She
was obviously very busy. But having made this move, I didn’t want
to get just three distracted minutes with her.
“I’ll meet you back
here then.”
“Great.” She kissed
me on the cheek again. “I’m sorry, but I really have to
run.”
Using up five hours
was not in any way difficult. I had my copy of Rabbit Is Rich and settled in to read for a while
at a downtown café. Afterward, I browsed through the various shops,
spending more than an hour at a used-and-rare CD store. I came away
with a replacement copy of a Richard Shindell album I’d lost in one
of my moves and bootlegs of Dave Matthews, Phish, and Umprhey’s
McGee. A little later, I walked into a store called Paperworks. It
was a stationery, card, and gift store, but unlike my father’s in
so many ways. You could buy a spiral notebook there if you wanted,
but you could also buy hand-marbled paper. You could get a Hallmark
card if that’s where your head was, but many of the cards were from
much smaller suppliers, including an entire four-foot display from
a local artist who printed them himself. And the gift items
included kaleidoscopes from San Francisco, pottery from Tuscany,
and maplewood cooking utensils from Vermont. There was plenty of
mass-produced stuff here, but also many things for sale that I
hadn’t seen anywhere else. I wondered if the new owner of Amber
Cards, Gifts, and Stationery would be this creative, and even
thought for a second about asking the owner of Paperworks if he had
any interest in a Connecticut location.
As the afternoon
continued, I decided to take a walk away from downtown. The houses
started modestly and then grew larger with more spacious lawns as I
got farther from the commercial area. For some time now, I’d
enjoyed wandering through unfamiliar neighborhoods. I usually
drove, but I actually preferred to walk. I liked to imagine what
life was like inside these houses, and when I was walking, the
stray overheard voice or barking of a dog would take my imagination
in unexpected directions. I passed one house where a preadolescent
boy wearing a Boston Red Sox T-shirt was tossing pitches to a
backstop, narrating the game action as he did so. Of course it was
the World Series and of course he was winning. In my mind, the boy
would go in to dinner in an hour or so and, while his parents
discussed zoning issues, the day’s business, or perhaps an upcoming
performance from the Lenox Ensemble, he would eat his pasta
quietly, reveling in that day’s accomplishments.
I walked for nearly
an hour and then went back to my car. On the way, I picked up a
bottle of water at a convenience store and I sat in the car,
sipping, listening to Richard Shindell, and wondering what I would
do with the time that remained before I could see Iris again.
Completely unbidden, I leaned my head against the side window and
dozed off.
I got back to the
farmhouse a little after 7:00. It was considerably quieter now and
dimly lit. The guy who had greeted me when I arrived earlier that
day was still seated at his computer.
“You’re looking for
Iris, right?”
“Yes, I
am.”
“She said you’d get
here around now. The latest in our never-ending series of crises
came up but she said she’d try to get back as close to seven as she
could. Said you could wait in her office.”
I thanked him and
went to Iris’ office, which was lit only by a table lamp. She had a
poster of B.B. King on one wall and of Twyla Tharp on another. Just
to the right of her desk was a photograph of an abandoned country
road in a handmade frame. In spite of first Iris and now the guy at
the computer telling me that her day – in fact, all of her days –
had been hectic, there was little sign of commotion on her desk.
There were probably hundreds of pieces of paper there, but they
were all neatly arranged and seemed eminently accessible. A
bookshelf against the far wall held a wide array of titles from a
history of the Berkshires to one with local codes and ordinances to
several business and accounting books to the collected works of
Tennessee Williams to novels by Janet Evanovich, Barbara
Kingsolver, and Saul Bellow.
As it got close to
7:30, I thought once again about heading back toward Amber. I was
going to get home very late and I was sure that Iris would
appreciate not having to entertain me after all these difficult
hours at work. I decided to give it another fifteen minutes and
then, when that passed, decided to give it fifteen minutes
more.
I was flipping
through the book of ordinances when she came in a little before
8:00.
“Thinking about
running for city council?” she said.
“Nah, purely
pleasure. This book is un-put-down-able.”
She kissed me on the
cheek and then walked behind her desk, looking through a stack of
messages as she spoke.
“I’m really sorry I’m
so late. I thought I’d be back here before you returned, but my
hand-holding mission turned into a full-blown therapy
session.”
“If you want to call
tonight off, I’m totally okay with that.”
“No, jeez, after
making you wait all this time? To tell you the truth, I’m looking
forward to the diversion. If you hadn’t shown up, I’d have just
wound up staying here all night obsessing about everything that’s
going to go wrong in the next two weeks.”
She walked behind her
office door, retrieved a sweater, and put it on.
“Let’s go,” she
said.
“You’re
positive?”
“Extremely
positive.”
We drove in separate
cars to Stockbridge for sushi. As I looked at the menu, it dawned
on me that these kinds of Japanese restaurants had become as
comforting and familiar to my generation as roadside diners had
been to previous ones. You could travel all over the country and
find the same dishes as you found in The Plum Tree in Stockbridge,
Massachusetts. The quality might vary, the preparations might even
range slightly, but you could essentially order before you walked
in the door.
“So did you have fun
playing hooky today?” Iris said.
“More than I even
thought I would. To tell you the truth, I had sort of forgotten
that I was playing hooky.”
“You’ll have to show
me how to do that. Now explain to me what the hell you’re still
doing in Amber. You haven’t decided to move back there, have
you?”
“Are you kidding? I
think that’s grounds for institutionalization in certain states.
No, the thing with my father turned out to be worse than expected.
He had another heart attack. He’s got a good chance of being okay,
but he can’t work in the store anymore.”
She wrinkled her
nose. “That must be tough for him.”
“As indicated by his
expression, his demeanor, and the way the belt of his robe drags
behind him if he ever decides to get up and walk.”
Iris shook her head.
“I would think it would be hard. I mean he’s gotta be worrying
about his health and he’s definitely gotta be upset about losing
his career.”
“I know. And I do
feel for him when I’m not annoyed at how defeated he seems and how
much of a crimp he’s put in my plans.”
“You mean the reason
you’re still in Amber?”
“Yeah, that. He asked
me to take over the store for him.”
Iris’ eyes doubled in
size. “You didn’t – ”
“No! Please. But I
told him I’d take care of things until he found a buyer. The way
commercial real estate flips around on Russet Avenue, I figured I
wasn’t committing to very much. But the market for stationery
stores seems a little depressed at the moment.”
“So you’re feeling
just a tiny bit tied down?”
“Just a tiny
bit.”
Iris sipped some
green tea and seemed to give my plight serious consideration. After
a moment, she looked back up at me and held my eyes for a beat. As
she did, I realized that I didn’t want to spend our time together
complaining. I hadn’t made the long drive to bitch.
“I can handle it,” I
said.
She took another sip
and put the tea mug down. “Of course you can.”
While we ate, we
talked about the production that the Ensemble was working on and
the various ways in which Iris contributed to it. As always seemed
to be the case with small creative groups, Iris’ functions varied
on an almost daily basis. While her primary responsibilities were
managing staff, freelancers, and finances, at any given moment she
could find herself giving an interview to a local paper, running
lines with one of the actors, or offering the artistic director an
opinion on productions under consideration. Though she did a fair
amount of eye rolling and sarcastic muttering while she talked
about the Ensemble, it was abundantly clear that she was engaged in
her work. She didn’t hold hands, perform counseling sessions, and
stay in the office until midnight because someone had to. She did
it because she knew it would help.
We talked about what
she did when she wasn’t working and she mentioned that the café
where I’d stopped during the afternoon was one of her favorite
places to go for lunch. She also told me that she spent a lot of
time in Paperworks and that the greeting card artist I’d noticed
lived down the street from the house she rented.
“Do you think there
is anyone in Amber who considers my father’s store to be one of
their favorite places to hang out?” I asked
rhetorically.
“Your father’s store
has a different function. He provides a service and the community
appreciates it. Where the hell else would I have gotten my
protractors when I was growing up?”
“You probably only
came into the store because you were hoping to get a chance to talk
to Chase.”
Iris chuckled, but
didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she smiled and said, “That’s
only because his cute older brother was always hanging out in the
back room.”
I smiled, though I
knew that none of what she said was true. If anything, I spent more
time behind the cash register than Chase because he would get too
distracted talking to customers, and there was no chance that Iris
would ever have come into the store looking for Chase’s “cute older
brother.” Like every other female of a certain age, Iris thought of
Chase as The Boy.
When our meal was
over, I asked Iris if she wanted to stop by the coffee bar a few
storefronts down.
“I’m okay with it if
you are,” she said. “I’m not the one who has to drive for a couple
of hours.”
While my day in Lenox
had been a pleasant diversion and while I was cheered that there
wasn’t any lingering awkwardness from the last conversation we’d
had, this encounter was feeling too much like an interlude to me:
friend stops in from out of town and you go out for a quick dinner
together to catch up. I hadn’t driven to the Berkshires with any
agenda in mind. In fact, I hadn’t even started driving that morning
with the intention of going to the Berkshires. But now that I had
seen Iris, I needed to know what we were currently
doing.
I got us both coffee
and we sat down. She took the lid off her coffee, allowing steam to
waft up around her chin.
“Always ridiculously
hot,” she said.
I looked down at my
cup, but kept the lid on it. “Listen, I have to admit that I
understood only about every third word of what you were saying that
last time I saw you.”
She held the cup to
her lips and her eyes shifted focus for a moment. I’m sure she
would have been much happier if we had simply pretended that the
kiss and the subsequent discussion about it had never happened. She
took a small sip and recoiled from the temperature.
“Way too hot,” she
said and put the cup back down. “You really didn’t understand what
I was saying?”
“I got the message. I
just didn’t get the meaning behind the message.”
“It’s not that deep a
message, Hugh. Our history is just a little too
complicated.”
“I understand that.
But, you know, we always had a good time talking and it seems that
we’ve had a really good time talking lately.”
“That only makes it
more complicated.”
I held up my hands.
“I’m not looking for it to be complicated. I just want to clarify
something: when you were saying ‘hey, maybe we can get together
every now and then,’ were you defining that as once every four
years or so?”
“We’re friends, Hugh.
I don’t think about parameters.”
“And neither do I,
usually. But to be honest with you, for as long as I’m stuck with
this thing with my father’s store, you might be the only real
friend I have for hundreds of miles. I just wanted to make sure
that we could do this again in the relatively near
future.”
She laughed. “I’ll be
happy to come out and play whenever I can. And you know, I’ll be
down to see my mother every month or so and we’ll set things up
then, too. If you remember, the last time we spoke, you were
heading for New Mexico.”
“I’m still heading
for New Mexico. Just very slowly.”
“That might make
these casual get-togethers a little tougher.” She reached out for
my hand, squeezed it, and then put hers back on her coffee cup.
“But until then, stop by whenever you’re ‘in the neighborhood.
’”
I nodded and burned
my tongue on the coffee. This wasn’t what I wanted to talk about or
even how I wanted to talk about it.
But it was
something.