CHAPTER SEVEN
Willin’
I’d been in school
during my junior year for a little more than a month when Chase and
Iris showed up unexpectedly at my apartment door. After two years
living on campus, I’d moved to a creaky one bedroom about a fifteen
minute walk from the school. I’d had a difficult time with my
roommate the previous semester and decided I really wanted to live
by myself. At the same time, I didn’t want to live alone, so I
moved into a building that housed six other people I knew from
Emerson. To me it was a nearly perfect arrangement: I got to have
things exactly the way I wanted them in my living space while also
having people to go to classes with, drink with, and crawl home
much too late with.
Though one wall of
the living room had flaking paint and the refrigerator considered
its function to be optional, I loved the place. I bragged about it
endlessly during my phone conversations with Chase and, for one of
the few times in our lives, he actually seemed jealous. He kept
telling me that he was going to come up to visit – something he had
only done once the two previous years I was away – and I told him
that he was always welcome, never expecting him to take me up on
it.
I certainly didn’t
expect him to arrive at 11:00 on a Thursday night without calling
ahead first. He stood in the doorway grinning, as though he had
just performed some huge trick. I looked over at Iris and she
simply waved.
After hugging Chase,
I told him that he was lucky I was home, that I might have been out
at a party, leaving them sitting outside the door for hours. He
reminded me that he knew that I always spent Thursday nights alone
studying because only then would I be comfortable playing all
weekend. I’d had that studying habit since I was ten. I had, in
fact, been reading an essay by Camus when he knocked on the door. I
then reminded him that he was supposed to be at school the next day
and he told me that it was a half day and that as a senior he was
morally obligated to take those off. My parents would of course
accept this kind of thing, though I wondered if they knew that Iris
was with Chase. I had no idea what Iris had told her parents and
thought it wouldn’t be cool to ask.
While I had seven
more pages of the Camus to read and Chase promised to be quiet, I
decided I could finish my work Sunday night. We went to a bar a few
blocks from the school and screamed conversation at one another
while Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and other Seattle imports played in the
foreground. Chase was much more enamored of this angst-riddled
music than I was. I simply liked how the songs went from a whimper
to a bang without notice and how there was a discernable melody
even at the highest decibel levels. After a while, we let the music
and the beer take over, assuming that we would have plenty of time
to talk the next day when I finished my only Friday class. Chase
and Iris held hands and occasionally said something into the
other’s ear, but they seemed content simply to live in that moment.
This was yet another sign that Chase had found something with Iris.
When I’d been with him on dates previously, he’d always been doing
something, always keeping the conversation rolling, and always
moving the evening along.
When we left the bar,
Chase announced that he was ravenous for something with local
flavor, insisting we find some Boston baked beans. When I told him
that I had no idea how to find these other than in a supermarket
and that I wasn’t sure that this version of baked beans even came
from Boston, he decided instead that he wanted tea. I assumed this
was a reference to the Boston Tea Party and didn’t bother to ask
for an explanation. I tried to convince him that he might want to
try other Boston specialties, suggesting a trip over to Little
Italy, but he’d decided that he wouldn’t be able to get to bed that
night without some real Boston tea. I took him to the nearest
diner.
I let Chase and Iris
sleep in my bed while I spent the night on the couch. I was nearly
asleep when the sounds of their lovemaking came through the door.
This was not the first time I had been in the next room while
someone else was having sex, but this was markedly different. My
roommate the previous year had taken several women back to his
room, filling the air with rhythmic pounding and exclamation and
the concussion of bodies flipping athletically. But the sounds that
Chase and Iris made were more serene and exponentially more erotic.
Iris’ subtle hum of satisfaction, the whisper of a hand moving
softly underneath the sheets, a warm chuckle, an intake of breath,
the quiet reverence in Chase’s voice the few times he spoke. I
found it a little disturbing to be listening to my brother this way
(and I truly had little choice) but I also found it somewhat
satisfying. I was glad that the two of them had this sexual
connection together and I appreciated anew the effect that Iris had
on Chase. I think they were still making love when I fell
asleep.
The next morning,
Chase walked into the living room in his boxer shorts, waking me up
as he continued into the kitchen. He rummaged around for a minute
and then came back to tell me that I had nothing to eat for
breakfast. He walked back into my bedroom and came out fully
dressed, telling me that he was going out to “forage.”
As soon as he closed
the door to the apartment, I heard the shower go on. A few minutes
later, Iris came into the living room with a towel wrapped around
her head and wearing the Emerson sweatshirt I’d bought Chase for
his last birthday.
“It was really nice
of you to let us sleep in your bed last night,” she said, sitting
down in a chair.
“I don’t think the
two of you would have been very comfortable on the couch. I guess I
never thought much about having guests over.”
“Well it was really
nice of you anyway.” She smiled and looked around the
room.
I’d gotten out from
under the sheets, had put my pants on, and had been folding a
blanket when she walked in. Now I sat back on the couch and watched
her glancing around. I couldn’t help but think about the sounds she
had made while she was making love to my brother the night before.
That soft hum was a slightly lower register than her speaking voice
and it spoke of feeling something on a deep level. I’d never heard
a woman make that sound before and I wondered if it was something
distinctive to Iris or if it was something my brother regularly
generated from his partners.
Iris’ eyes continued
to scan the room and I continued to look at her. I had of course
realized that she was beautiful the very first time I saw her (even
though at that point I thought she was beautiful and insane), but
this was the first time that I realized how sexy she was. Almost
certainly, it had much to do with what I had heard the night
before, but it also had to do with how she looked just out of a
shower. The towel didn’t capture all of the strands of her hair and
a few tickled her neck. The sweatshirt was considerably too large
for her and led me to think about the lithe body that it covered. I
stopped myself from continuing this line of thought. In the past,
it had been fine for me to appraise my brother’s girlfriends in
this way because I had known they wouldn’t be his girlfriends for
very long. But things were different with Iris and I had to
consider her in a different way.
Iris rose and picked
up the book I’d been reading the night before.
“I don’t get Camus,”
she said.
“I didn’t get him in
high school, either. I tried reading The
Fall in my sophomore year and it gave me a
headache.”
“Yeah,
exactly.”
“But my philosophy
professor this year has really helped me to connect with him. I’m
kinda becoming a closet existentialist.”
She smiled. “Your
secret’s safe with me. I don’t think I could ever be an
existentialist, though. I prefer to have a little more meaning with
my world-views.”
I promise you that a
sentence like that had never come from the mouth of any of my
brother’s other girlfriends.
“Well the last great
philosopher I embraced was Bullwinkle, so I’m likely to move on
again.”
She laughed and said,
“When Chase and I first started dating he tried to convince me that
he was a Marxist. I tried to explain to him that he really didn’t
sound like a Marxist at all. Then he told me he was talking about
Harpo Marx.”
“And he is a strict
Harpo Marxist.”
“Yeah, I guess he
is.”
A few minutes later,
Chase returned with a bag of doughnuts and took over the room
again. I left for my class around 10:00, but they stayed until
after dinner. We talked about many things, mostly inconsequential.
At various times during the day, though, completely unbidden, I
would remember hearing them together the night before. And for at
least a moment, I would have to look away.
I went into the store
the next day feeling good. Iris had confirmed her interest in my
staying in touch before we parted, the Phish double-CD bootleg had
propelled my drive home from Lenox, and I even found Tyler’s
greeting of “Morning, Captain” when I arrived
cheering.
The idyll didn’t last
very long.
Tuesdays in the store
were always quiet. Even during the height of the summer and fall,
when the inns were full most of the time and it took ten minutes to
find a parking space anywhere near Russet Avenue, Tuesdays and
Wednesdays remained relatively still. During the first hour I was
in the store, as Tyler took notes for his accounting final and Carl
put up a new shipment of Father’s Day mugs, it came to mind that I
could easily take these two days off for as long as it took to sell
the store.
It was about this
time when Carl came running up from the stockroom.
“We have a problem,”
he said, looking at Tyler.
“What’s wrong?” I
asked.
“The back room is
getting flooded.”
The three of us moved
quickly to the stockroom, where water was gushing out of a burst
pipe at an absurd rate. There was already an inch of water on the
floor and the wall that butted up against the back display of the
store was getting soaked.
“How the hell did
this happen?” I said.
Carl shook his head.
“I’m not sure how it started. I came back here to get a box and
there was water all over the place. I tried to close the valve over
there with a wrench and the valve broke.”
I threw my head back
and cursed. The vision of an enormous flood in the back of the
store doing untold damage – damage that would take months to
repair, thereby extending my stay in Amber – loomed in front of me
as the water continued to stream out. My cursing seemed to
intimidate Carl, who started muttering apologies. I wasn’t
interested in an apology. What I wanted was for the flood never to
have happened in the first place.
While I was seething,
Tyler was actually doing something. He went first to a valve that
he thought controlled the water in the store, but nothing happened.
As he continued to search, I continued to rant. Several minutes
went by while Tyler tried to figure out how to turn off the water.
During this time, the flood got worse. Nearly the entire back wall
of the store was soaked now.
“Of course, it’s
outside,” Tyler said and headed out the back door. Shortly
thereafter, the water stopped streaming and Tyler
returned.
“I’ve probably seen
that valve five hundred times coming into the store,” he said. “I
just never paid any attention to it.”
“This is a disaster,”
I said, looking around the room. Most of our backup stock had been
drenched. Since this was essentially cards and stationery items,
that meant that all of it was ruined. I walked out of the stockroom
to look at the back of the store. As I suspected, the plasterboard
was soaked. What I stupidly hadn’t anticipated was that the carpet
was spongy. Rivulets of water formed around my shoes.
“Can someone help me
up here?” came a voice from the front of the store. I turned to see
a man holding a magazine, looking exasperated. I turned my back to
him and cursed again.
“I’ll get him,” Tyler
said, walking to the cash register. I went back to examining the
display and Tyler returned after making the
transaction.
“This whole wall is
going to have to be replaced,” I said. “Is this a load-bearing
wall? Is the entire back of the store going to
collapse?”
“What do you want me
to do with these boxes,” Carl said from the stockroom. I stood up,
opened the back door, and pointed outside.
“See that dumpster?”
I said. “That’s the only thing you can do with those boxes
now.”
Tyler put his arm
around my shoulder. “You might want to wait until we talk to the
insurance company.”
“I don’t even know
who the insurance company is.”
Tyler took a deep
breath. I think he was doing it to try to convince me to do the
same. I didn’t take his suggestion.
“I’ll find out,” he
said. He led me toward the door of the stockroom. “Listen, why
don’t you take the register for a while? I’ll call the landlord and
cordon off the back of the store and then I’ll get the number of
the insurance company from the files.”
“This is a total
disaster,” I said.
“It’s actually only a
partial disaster. Let me take care of some stuff back here. You
handle the front.”
While Tyler worked, I
stood behind the counter, helping the occasional customer and
stealing regular glances toward the back. I knew I’d been
overreacting, but this complication was one of the few distressing
scenarios I hadn’t considered before. We weren’t likely to find a
buyer for the store while it was under repair. I castigated myself
for having cavalierly offered to stay until my father sold the
store. If I’d thought about it at all ahead of time, I would have
put an outside date on my commitment. A date that would be rapidly
approaching instead of receding increasingly into the
distance.
I allowed myself to
be furious about this for a while longer. Eventually, the simple
act of needing to be pleasant to customers calmed me down. By the
time Tyler returned to the front, I’d begun to feel somewhat
chastened by the way he had taken charge while I ranted. Certainly
if Tyler hadn’t been there, I would have eventually done all of the
things that he did instead, but I wouldn’t have done them with his
composure.
“Thanks,” I said to
him when he got behind the counter.
“It’s fine. It’s a
mess back there, but at least the customers won’t get wet. The
landlord’s going to be here in a half hour or so. The insurance
agent is Philip Watson. I’ll call him if you want.”
“No, I’ll call him.”
He handed me a piece of paper that listed the broker’s contact
information and the policy number. “You’ve done way more than your
share already.”
By the time the
afternoon came along, the landlord and Watson himself (an old
friend of my father’s) had been by to examine the damage and I’d
spoken to a contractor about getting to work on the repairs as
quickly as possible. The activity made me feel like something was
happening, even though it was really only conversation about
something happening. Feeling guilty, I even sent Tyler home early
once I was sure that things were under control. I kept Carl around,
though there was very little for him to do.
As I stayed in the
store, my sense of frustration returned. I walked to the back to
examine everything again. I wondered if I had missed some sign that
would have told me that this was coming, and I wondered if I could
have done something to prevent it. I wondered what my father would
have done differently. And then I wondered what Chase would have
done differently. That I knew that both of them would have acted
more efficiently and might have even minimized the damage did
nothing to salve my mood.
That weekend, my
mother went out of town with her sister for a couple of days.
They’d been planning the trip for quite some time, some kind of
annual spring retreat, and my mother intended to cancel it to tend
to my father until I told her that I would do that job instead. It
seemed that she could use the break and, sadly, taking care of my
father didn’t require much.
On my mother’s
recommendation, I hadn’t told him about the water damage in the
store because I didn’t want to depress him more than he already
was. This had the effect of making the weekend feel even more
stilted than it was already going to be. Not only was he largely
uncommunicative, but I couldn’t even come up with a conversation
starter without thinking about the mess in the store. On Friday
night, he sat staring at the television, picking at the roasted
chicken I’d brought home, and only talking to me when I asked him a
question. Between my stint at the store and the duty I was pulling
here, I felt like a full-time babysitter.
I knew I couldn’t
leave my father alone (a neighbor was staying with him while I was
in the store), but I certainly didn’t need to be in the same room
with him. Still, for some reason, I felt obligated to sit with him,
even though he was at best tangentially aware of my presence. And
so I lay on the couch, gazing at the trophies and photographs and
shop projects, while he sat in his chair watching a sitcom (two
kids frolicking and causing their parents to roll their eyes a
lot), a mawkish drama (a dysfunctional family that still manages to
love one another), and then a cop show (some kind of mystery
emerging from deep in the past). At some point, I fell asleep. The
first time in my adult life that I did that in front of a
television. When I awoke, it was a little after eleven and Dad was
giving the news the same hypnotic attention he’d given the other
shows.
“Dad, it’s late,” I
said. “Let’s go to bed.”
“I just want to
finish watching this.”
“All right, but we’re
going to bed after the news is over. I’m getting tired and I want
to help you upstairs before I go to sleep.”
He didn’t say
anything until a segment on a parade in Hartford
finished.
“I’m not going
upstairs tonight. I’ll sleep here.”
For the past three
nights, he’d slept on the sofa bed in the den, unwilling to climb
the steps to his bedroom. The doctors had told us that there was no
reason to believe that the stress of going up a flight of stairs
would do any damage to his heart, but he didn’t want to hear this.
If he was going to sleep downstairs a fourth night in a row, there
was a good chance he was simply going to continue to do it. In his
mid-fifties, my father was acting like an elderly man.
“The bed upstairs is
much more comfortable, Dad. We always put the guests we didn’t like
very much on the sofa bed.”
“This is fine. I’m
not up for climbing the stairs. If you could just pull the bed out
for me, I’ll be okay.”
I wondered what would
happen if I refused to pull the bed out for him. Would this force
him to come upstairs with me? I guessed that he would probably just
sleep in the chair. I set things up and then tried one more time to
convince him to go up to his room.
“I’m fine here, Hugh.
Go to bed if you’re tired.”
“Do you want me to
help you to the bathroom?”
He scowled at me. “I
can make it to the bathroom myself,” he said. At least I had some
sense of the parameters now.
When I came back from
the store on Saturday, we repeated the ritual. By 8:45, I was
burning up with cabin fever. He was watching a rerun of a Super
Bowl game on ESPN Classic. He didn’t even like football. He’d
always said that the only games he could watch were the games Chase
participated in when he was in middle school. I tried to pass the
time reading The Witches of Eastwick,
but the play-by-play on the television was too distracting.
Finally, I decided to leave the den. I’m not even sure Dad noticed
I was gone.
As I approached the
stairs to my room, I passed the study and noticed the computer’s
screen saver, a time-lapse video image of a lily blossoming. My
mother was a dedicated e-mail correspondent with dozens of friends
and relatives. In fact, this was the primary way I had communicated
with her over the past several years.
Rather than reading,
I decided to spend a little time online. I went to Google and typed
“New Mexico.” Of course, there were nearly three million items
returned, but I managed to find some truly informative sites on the
first several screens. One site even allowed me to match my
temperament with my ideal New Mexico location. While I would have
expected to be directed to Albuquerque or Santa Fe (admittedly
among the only places I knew in New Mexico), the program directed
me toward Tucumcari, a tiny frontier town out on the old Route 66.
The only previous reference I’d had to Tucumcari was in Lowell
George’s song, “Willin’” and George had hardly provided much
information. I followed a link to the town’s Chamber of Commerce
site and spent a good half hour surfing the place’s history,
attractions, and community development plans. I even found a
restaurant that I would surely visit once I got out there. Before
leaving the site, I requested a booklet about the town and several
brochures.
When I got off, I
felt better than I’d felt in a few days. Spending the time
exploring New Mexico reminded me that my stasis in Connecticut was
only temporary, that the store would eventually sell, and that I
would be free to make my way West. To get my kicks out on Route
66.
I picked up my Updike
book where I’d left it on the stairs and decided to check in on my
father before going to my room. A Denver Broncos drive against the
Green Bay Packers had my father’s absolute attention. I wondered if
he would notice if I changed the channel.
“Dad, do you need
anything before I head upstairs?” The sofa bed was already open,
since I hadn’t bothered to fold it in in the morning. He didn’t say
a word as John Elway completed another pass to Ed McCaffrey. It
dawned on me that it was entirely possible that he didn’t know who
won this game – if he was even actually paying
attention.
“You sure you don’t
need anything, Dad?”
As the Broncos
huddled up, he turned to me. “Yeah, a new body,” he
said.
“I’ll see if I can
order you one online in the morning. I’m going to read in my room.
If you need me, give me a call.”
He turned back toward
the game. I watched him for another minute, stupefied at the way
he’d decided to kill the clock.
On Sunday, the store
was busier than I expected it to be and I stayed behind to give the
late shift a hand. When I got back to my parents’ house in the late
afternoon, my mother had returned from her trip. I hadn’t been
expecting her until after dinner, but was relieved to see her
there. We talked for a couple of minutes about her weekend and then
I told her I was going out again.
“You aren’t staying
for supper?” she asked.
“I’ll get something
wherever. I’d kind of like a little free time.”
She looked toward the
den. “Was this too much for you?” she asked crisply.
“Not too much, Mom.
But definitely enough.”
“I’ll see you later,
then.”
I called Iris the
next day and she invited me up for the following Wednesday. As had
been the case the first time I drove to see her, I felt a little
looser and a little more liberated with every mile that passed. It
was as though the enervating frequencies sent out from Amber began
to fade as I put more distance between them and myself. Though the
trip was nearly two hours long, it energized me.
I met Iris at her
office a little after seven. As soon as she saw me, she grabbed her
sweater, kissed me on the cheek, and we were out the
door.
“That was
surprisingly easy,” I said.
“Calm before the
storm. Opening night is next Wednesday. By Friday, there will be
all kinds of crises – real and imagined. But right now everything
is on track and everyone is happy.”
“Lucky
me.”
“Yeah, you wouldn’t
want to be here Friday night.”
We went to a
restaurant in town where Iris was hoping to get us a table on the
porch. Unfortunately, every one of them was occupied and we were
parked in a cramped spot in the bustling main dining room. We could
just barely hear ’60s R&B above the chattering of nearly a
hundred patrons and the clattering of dishes being speedily
bussed.
“Cozy little spot,
huh?” she said as we were seated.
“Is it always this
busy?”
“I didn’t think it
would be on a Wednesday night, but yeah, it’s really popular. You
should see it in the summer. At least if we were outside we’d be
able to talk.”
A couple got up from
the table across from ours and a busboy was there as they took
their first step away, throwing plates into a bin.
“This is fine,” I
said. “They really do like to turn those tables, don’t
they?”
As if in response, a
waiter was at our side, asking if we’d decided what we wanted to
order. We hadn’t even looked at the menus and I laughed, though he
didn’t seem to think anything he’d said was funny. Feeling
pressured, I opened my menu and the waiter said he’d be back in a
minute. In most restaurants, this would mean that he would be back
sometime in the next hour, but no more than a hundred seconds
later, he was standing at our side again.
“My heart is
pounding,” I said to Iris after the waiter left.
“You never let him
see you sweat, though.”
I caught her up on
the water disaster in the store and the glacial pace at which the
contractor had begun to deal with the repairs. The person I’d hired
had convinced me that he would need to replace the back wall and
then informed me that he needed to do this in a very slow, very
deliberate fashion. I didn’t know enough to know whether he was
playing me or not, but since he was yet another friend of my
father’s, I felt that I had to trust him. After he dealt with the
wall, he would need to do considerable work to the stockroom and
replace a huge piece of the carpeting. The fact that he refused to
be governed by a schedule was flat-out depressing.
Iris told me about
the resolution to the tempest with the set designer – it turned out
to be less about his romantic entanglements than it was about an
adjustment to his antidepressant – and then about an actor they
needed to replace on very short notice because he broke his
contract to take a gig out in Utah. She related both of these
stories matter-of-factly and I could imagine that she dealt with
the actual situations in much the same way. I admired her for this.
Either one might have been enough to send me packing.
The meal came
promptly and I felt a bit compelled to eat it as quickly. As we
tended to our food, we did-n’t say much to each other. I could just
barely make out the harmonies of “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” over the
din. At another table, a man animatedly explained a painful breakup
to a friend.
“So what’s happening
with your father?” Iris asked as our coffee arrived.
“He’s managed to
confine his entire existence to the den.”
“Well, from what I
remember, it’s a nice room.”
“I guess I should
consider it a good thing that he’s not sitting in the
garage.”
“Are you
worried?”
I shook my head.
“Worried is the wrong word. Confounded would be a better word.
Flummoxed maybe. He’s fifty-five.”
“You have a right to
be flummoxed, though I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say that
word out loud before. He’s gonna come out of it, though, right? If
he’s relatively okay physically, he’d have to, wouldn’t
he?”
“He should. I’m
guessing he will. It’s just so bizarre seeing him this way. I mean,
he was never a Type A guy, but at least he was always
motivated.”
Iris sipped her
coffee and seemed a little hesitant before she spoke
again.
“Was this what he was
like after Chase died?”
Of course she
wouldn’t have known. I recalled my father’s thousand-yard stare out
the window and the stoicism that followed until the day I left.
“That’s definitely the last time I’ve seen him this resigned. But
at least then he had a better reason.”
“If it’s any
consolation, my mother’s been driving me a little crazy lately,
too,” she said.
“What’s going
on?”
“She went out on a
date last Friday.”
“Wow. First one since
your dad?”
“First one that
‘counts’ as my mother puts it. About a year ago, some friends
invited this widower over to some dinner parties. She assumed they
were trying to set her up with him, but she wouldn’t give the guy
the time of day. This time it was someone she met at a craft fair.
He took her to dinner and it sounds like they had a very good
time.”
“Great.”
“Except that she’s
feeling insanely guilty about it. I mean can’t-get-out-of-bed kind
of guilt. She thinks it diminishes my father’s memory if she likes
another man.”
“That’s
silly.”
“Try finding a half
dozen delicate ways to say that and you’ll understand what my phone
conversations with her have been like lately.”
“So is she going to
go out with him again?”
“She’s screening her
calls. She can’t decide what to do.”
I shook my head and
just said, “Families.”
The check arrived
and, seeing that there were others waiting for our table, we
dutifully paid it. We’d been in the restaurant less than an
hour.
“That was kind of
brisk, wasn’t it?” Iris said when we got outside.
“I’ll never complain
about slow service again.” We walked toward the parking lot. I
certainly didn’t want to drive back to Amber yet.
“It’s kind of early,”
Iris said. “Do you want to go to a movie?”
It was nice to have
her suggest that we extend our time together. We drove to the local
theater and bought tickets for the movie with the nearest start
time. It didn’t matter that the movie wasn’t particularly
interesting and it didn’t matter that we couldn’t talk during the
show. It was just good to be in the same place with her and to bump
fingers with her on occasion as we reached for the
popcorn.
On the way back to
Connecticut that night, I played some Temptations songs on my iPod
as a reminder of the music I could barely hear in the restaurant. I
sang high harmonies and pounded out the syncopated rhythms on the
steering wheel.
Iris and I had set
the time machine on “now” tonight.