CHAPTER TWELVE
Really Good
Seats
The next time I went
to Lenox, there was a huge upsurge in tourists and summer
residents. Iris and I spent the afternoon wandering the burgeoning
streets, dodging strollers while viewing sidewalk art displays,
sipping milkshakes while listening to a pair of talented folk
guitarists, and eavesdropping on cell phone conversations while
browsing craft shops. Of course we spent some time at the CD store
(I bought a German import of an Elvis Costello album) and then
wandered over to Paperworks. The place continued to fascinate me. I
would never have guessed that this level of creativity could be
applied to a stationery store and I promised to direct the new
owners of Amber Cards, Gifts, and Stationery here for inspiration.
Assuming we ever made a deal with anyone.
Iris was in another
great mood. She was more Lenox Ensemble Iris than High School
Sweetheart Iris in that she didn’t do anything silly or reckless,
but she was utterly relaxed. As we walked, she slipped her arm
around mine and we continued that way for much of the day. There
was nothing romantic to the gesture and I didn’t think of it that
way. But the collegiality of the act, the physical acknowledgement
that we were sharing this day together, was very satisfying to
me.
Iris had gotten us
tickets for Tanglewood that night and we picnicked on the lawn with
a meal we purchased from a natural foods store in town (though we
also stopped at a bakery for absurdly rich brownies and a liquor
store for a sauvignon blanc).
“Nice blanket,” I
said, running my hands along the soft wool.
“It was my
grandmother’s.”
“We’re sitting on an
heirloom on the grass?”
Iris laughed. “It was
my grandmother’s picnic blanket. She’d crack up if she heard you
call it an heirloom.”
“It feels so
substantial.”
“Oh, you know, things
were ‘built to last’ back then. I think this is something like
fifty years old.”
“Which means if I
drop some hummus on it, I’m a dead man, right?”
“I’d just warn you to
stay away from my grandfather.”
I poured more wine
for both of us and leaned back on my elbows. Though it had been in
the mid-eighties during the day, the evening air was much cooler,
which meant it felt exactly the way nights like these were supposed
to feel. Iris was completely prone on the blanket now, looking up
at the sky.
“I don’t do this
enough,” she said.
“Lie
down?”
She smirked and
propped herself up, gesturing around her. “This. Galleries,
picnics, Tanglewood.”
“Aren’t you supposed
to do this all the time if you live here? Isn’t it in that book of
bylaws you keep in your office?”
“That kind of stuff
drives people here, but it doesn’t mean that those of us who
actually do live here – especially those of us who live here
year-round – get around to it much. We’re taking care of business
just like everybody else.”
I thought about what
she was saying and wondered if I’d wind up treating Tucumcari the
same way I’d treated Springfield. “Glad I could pull you away from
the grind,” I said.
She patted me on the
leg. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” She took her last bite
of brownie and then finished her wine. The amphitheater was filling
up. “Want to go to our seats?”
I took another sip.
“Or we could stay here.”
“I got us really good
seats.”
“These are really good seats.”
She gave this some
thought and then laid back down. “Maybe until
intermission.”
The concert itself
was revelatory. While Tanglewood was the summer home of the Boston
Symphony Orchestra and the occasional popular performer did shows
there, tonight six experimental musicians occupied the stage. I’d
never heard of them and would never have chosen to attend, but Iris
was very familiar with their work and very enthusiastic. There were
long patches of minimalist music punctuated by short bursts of
bebop and atonal vocals. For the first several minutes, I had a
difficult time adjusting my ears, but ultimately it became
mesmerizing. Every now and then, Iris would whisper a comment about
a particular piece of the performance and her narrative added
meaning to me. She made me aware of the subtle, intentional
inconsistencies to the repetitive notes of the keyboards, to the
way the saxophonist would insert a countermelody with varying
levels of insistence during the loop. I would not have noticed
these things and Iris’ observations both impressed me and made the
pieces considerably more enjoyable. Just before intermission, I
said something about one of the percussionists and she nodded
appreciatively. I was very pleased with myself.
We did in fact take
our seats after intermission. The second half of the show was
slightly more traditional, beginning and ending with two extended
jazz pieces. The audience seemed more animated during these
performances. When the concert ended around 10:30, the temperature
was in the low sixties and, as the house lights came up, I rubbed
my bare arms.
“You wish you’d
borrowed that jacket now, don’t you?” Iris said.
“No, I’m
fine.”
She gave my arm a
quick, vigorous rub and said, “You brave the elements well. So what
did you think of the show?”
“It was kind of
amazing.”
“Aren’t they
great?”
“Yeah. I wasn’t sure
what to expect, but yeah.”
“You’d never heard
any of their stuff before?”
“Nothing. How do you
know them?”
She smiled. “Some of
us just are just more in the loop than others.”
We followed the crowd
out toward the parking lot. No one seemed in a particular rush to
leave. I wondered if this was because it was early in the season or
if the music had somehow hypnotized everyone. As we exited the
amphitheater, people were handing out flyers for a huge craft fair
the next day.
“Wow, this sounds
great,” I said to Iris. “Are you going to this?”
She took the flyer
from my hand. “Is this tomorrow? Yeah, it’s great. They do it every
year.”
“I kinda wish I was
going to be around for it.”
She handed the flyer
back to me and said, “So stay. I have a guest room.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, of course.
They can spare you at the store again tomorrow?”
“They can spare me at
the store permanently. I think Tyler humors me while I’m
there.”
“Then stay. I have
some stuff to do at the office in the morning, but I know I can get
away in the afternoon. We’ll go to the craft fair. It really is
very good.”
This felt like a very
intimate act to me. Other than that unconscious New Year’s, Iris
and I had only spent the night under the same roof one time before.
I recalled the tender sounds of her making love with my brother and
I drew back inwardly, hopefully not showing her any of this.
Certainly, this was something that good friends did with one
another and, at the very least, I wanted Iris to be comfortable
enough to ask me to stay over. And the nonchalance with which she
suggested it told me that she was placing considerably less meaning
on this gesture than I was.
“It won’t be a hassle
for you?” I said.
“Do you make loud
noises when you sleep?”
“Not that I know
of.”
“Then it won’t be a
hassle.”
“Okay, then.” She
smiled, took my arm, and we headed toward the car.
A couple of days
later, my mother knocked on my bedroom door at 7:30 and handed me
the phone.
“It’s Jack Calley,”
she said.
“Who?”
“Jack Calley. He owns
the bakery across the street from the store.”
I asked her why he
was calling me, but she simply handed me the phone. I never had my
wits about me when I first woke up and I obviously sounded that way
when I answered.
“Hugh, sorry to be
bothering you at this time in the morning if this is a false alarm,
but I was wondering if there was something wrong with the
store.”
The image of another
water main break came to mind. This time the damage was so severe
that Jack could see it from across the street. “Something wrong?” I
asked.
“Well, you’re usually
open by 7:00 and the store is still closed.”
It took me minute to
remember that the woman who normally opened the store was taking
the day off. Tab was covering for her. “No, there’s nothing wrong,
Jack. Thanks for letting me know.”
I hung up and dug
around for Tab’s cell number. From the way she answered, it was
clear that she had been asleep. When I reminded her that she was
supposed to be in the store, she admitted that she’d “spaced it.”
She told me she could be there in an hour. If this was her idea of
coming through in the clutch, I didn’t need her. I told her to take
the day off, threw on some clothes, and headed there
myself.
When I arrived, there
were a half dozen people standing outside the front door. Who
stands outside waiting for a stationery store to open?
“Problem here today?”
a middle-aged man asked me gruffly as I opened the
door.
“Staff screwups.
Sorry,” I said. The man stood next to me while I cut the plastic
bands off the bundles of the New York
Times and the Boston Globe,
grabbing one of each from the pile and palming his exact change
onto the counter. Another guy walked purposefully to the magazine
rack, grabbed a copy of Barron’s, and
waited impatiently for me to ring up his sale. A woman headed
directly to the cards and, while I rang up her purchase, she
muttered something about needing to be across town in ten
minutes.
I was a little
dumbfounded by this activity. To begin with, I’d been awake for
less than twenty minutes and I never liked having to deal with a
lot of action when I first got up. I also didn’t take the time to
get coffee or something to eat and now wondered if I was going to
be hungry until 10:00 when Tyler showed up. But what baffled me the
most was that there would be any activity in the store at this time
of the morning, let alone fervid activity. Were any of these
purchases essential? Couldn’t these people have made them somewhere
else? Did they possibly warrant waiting outside of a closed store
as though tickets for a Led Zeppelin reunion were going on sale? As
the fourth and fifth people who had been at the door to greet me
completed their purchases, I shook my head and set about getting
the newspapers on their rack.
A sixth person, an
elderly man, had been waiting with the others, but patiently. He
browsed a few magazines while I prepared the papers and then picked
up a Times, a Globe, and a package of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups
before coming to the counter.
“Where’s Ellen this
morning?” he said.
“She had some family
thing.”
“Did you think the
store was supposed to open later?”
“It’s my father’s
store and it’s been opening at the same time for more than thirty
years. It would be kind of hard for me to get it wrong.” I said
this curtly, expecting yet another complaint. “Someone else was
supposed to be here.”
The man nodded and
handed me three singles. It became immediately obvious that he
wasn’t planning to bitch about my inconveniencing him and I felt a
little guilty about speaking so stiffly.
“You’re Richard’s
kid, huh?” he said. “You look a little like him. I heard about his
problem. How’s he doing?”
“He’s all right. The
doctors think he’s going to be fine.”
“That’s good. He’s a
good man. Been here a long time, always nice to the
customers.”
I wondered if that
wasn’t a polite reproach for my tone of voice. I handed the man his
change and he pocketed it while at the same time pulling out four
dollar bills and putting them in his other pocket.
“Everything’s okay
with Ellen, right?” he said.
“She’s fine. Just had
something to do with her daughter this morning.”
“That’s good.” He
smiled at me. “We’ve become friends, you might say, over the last
few years. I come see her every morning during the week. Get my
papers and my candy and we catch up a little. Then I’ll go over to
the coffee shop and get my French Roast and my blueberry scone and
sit there and read for a while. I guess you’d call it a ritual.
Been doing it every day since my Dorothy passed nine years
ago.”
The man had been
doing the same thing every day for nine years. I couldn’t imagine
how anyone could become so completely locked into the same habit.
Did he mean that he’d been coming to the store and the coffee shop
for all that time? Or did he really drink the same French Roast and
eat the same blueberry scone every single day? Did he ever buy a
Crunch bar or perhaps a Milky Way? I wondered if there was a story
behind this ritual. I wondered if his wife used to come into town
to get the papers before she died. Maybe she made him blueberry
scones on Sunday mornings. Or maybe all of this was new, a way of
showing that he’d been able to move on, at least a little, after
she died.
I never considered
that the small talk we exchanged with customers had any value, but
now I thought about the kinds of conversations Ellen had with this
man. Was there some role that she had in the ritual that I needed
to fill? Had she told Tab about it (and if she had, would it have
mattered, since Tab would almost certainly have “spaced it”)? I’m
not sure why, but I felt the need to entertain this guy for a
couple of minutes. I asked him about his plans for the day and told
him about the fair I’d gone to in Lenox. He told me about his
garden and his youngest daughter coming to visit him from
Philadelphia and about the books he loved to read. Finally, he
pulled the four dollars from his other pocket and told me that it
was time for him to get down to the coffee shop. I wondered if they
had his meal waiting and if I’d screwed up his schedule by opening
the store late.
“Tell your father
that Mickey said hi and wishes him the best with his recovery,” he
said as he headed toward the door.
“Hang on a second,” I
said as I walked around the counter. I took another package of
peanut butter cups and handed them to him. “If you’ve really been
buying these for the last nine years, it’s about time you got one
on the house.”
He smiled, patted me
on the shoulder, and walked out the door. On the way back around
the counter, I took another package of Reese’s for myself.
Breakfast.
The next morning I
walked into the den with two mugs of tea, set them on the game
table, and set up the chessboard. Without a word, my father turned
off the television and sat down at his place. I moved a pawn to
Queen Three and we started to play. I wasn’t any better this time
out than I had been a few days earlier, but if anything I was even
more deliberate and conservative. Neither of us spoke for the first
several moves, though my father at one point made eye contact with
me as I established the most rudimentary possible defense. There
was the faintest bit of amusement in his expression.
I’d been thinking
more and more lately about the women I’d been involved with over
the years. They’d been something like the participants in the
parade that takes place every Fourth of July on River Road. They’d
stop in front of me for a moment or two, do whatever it was that
they were planning to do and then move on to entertain someone
else. And like a spectator at one of these parades, I would be
amused for a moment and even tickled by the spectacle of it all,
but I would eventually be left wondering why everyone got so worked
up about these things.
As my father began to
dismantle me slowly on the chessboard, my thoughts returned to
these women yet again. My father took my queen’s bishop and I
offered him a wan smile. I considered the fact that he knew almost
none of the women I’d been with.
“You liked Gillian,
didn’t you?” I said.
He narrowed his eyes
for a moment and then looked back down at the board. I wondered if
he thought I was trying to do something to distract
him.
“Do you remember
her?” I said.
“Short brown hair,
green eyes, very pretty. Said ‘well’ a lot.”
I nodded and moved my
knight back to King Three, where it had been three moves earlier.
My father glanced at me disapprovingly.
“I had the feeling
that you liked her that time I came back here with
her.”
“She seemed very
nice. It seemed that she liked you.”
“I think she did. I
think we were doing okay then.”
He slid his Queen’s
Rook to Queen’s Knight One. I had absolutely no idea why he did
that.
“I never told you
what happened between us,” I said.
“No, you never did,”
he said flatly. I wasn’t sure if he was being sarcastic or not. I
never explained any of my relationships to him.
“The lease on my
apartment came up for renewal.”
“That kind of thing
breaks up a lot of romances.”
“It wasn’t the
apartment itself; it was what to do with the apartment. You know,
do I renew for another year, do I look for something else, do we
get something together? I was selling real estate then, so I had a
lot of access. What I didn’t have was a lot of inspiration. It was
like the lease on my relationship with Gillian had come up for
renewal as well. And I knew that I didn’t really love her. She was
so easy to like and she made me feel comfortable, but it was like
sitting in a Barcalounger, you know? At some point, you have to get
up because you can’t sit there for the rest of your life. And on
top of everything else, I hated selling real estate. So I told her
I was moving on.”
Other than raising an
eyebrow, my father didn’t react to this. We exchanged several more
moves.
“It was very
different with Emily,” I said. “That whole thing in Atlanta was so
strange. We met when I got that office managing job at Allied. She
could never really understand that the suit-and-tie thing was a
phase to me, like a costume change. She was so corporate and type
A, and for a while that seemed very exciting and exotic. Do you
know what finally killed us?”
“Your car needed an
inspection?”
“Yeah, funny. What
killed us was that this junior executive position opened up. Emily
pushed me like crazy to go for it. I mean, she was relentless. She
sent me memos. It would have been comical if it weren’t
infuriating. When someone else got the job, she started lecturing
me about missed opportunities. I quit Allied two days later and got
the hell out of town.”
My father took a sip
of his tea and then made another move. Since he barely spoke
anymore, it was hard to tell whether his reticence now had to do
with his condition or the topic. I hadn’t intended to talk to him
about any of this. But I thought that shaking things up a little
might actually be beneficial to him. I thought if I told him a
little more about what I’d been doing the last few years that it
might cause him to reconnect with the world in some small way. And
since this was what was on my mind, it seemed the natural way to do
it. A part of me actually wondered what he thought. I’d never
really gone to him for advice, even when I was living at home. I
spoke this way with my mother a little, and it was so much easier
to talk to Chase than to either of them. But for any number of
reasons, I wouldn’t have minded hearing my father’s impressions
now. Instead, he continued to build an attack that I’d never seen
before and couldn’t have parried even if I had.
I told him about how
Kristina had called me “soulless” the night before I left
Minneapolis. I told him how Susan just walked away. I even told him
about a woman I met at a bookstore and how my interaction with her
haunted me even though we never dated. All the while, he trapped
and captured my pieces. As with our previous match, my defeat was
inevitable, but I refused to surrender.
When he at last
checkmated me (something that it seemed to me he could have done
several moves before he actually did it), he took a final sip of
his tea and handed me his mug. I expected him to return to the
television, but he sat back at the game table instead.
“Do you know how many
women I’ve slept with?” he said.
“You grew up in the
sixties, Dad. I don’t know, a hundred and twenty?”
He smirked. It was
the most expression I’d seen on his face since he returned from the
hospital. “Not everyone participated in free love. I’ve slept with
exactly one woman in my life. Which hardly qualifies me as an
authority regarding the ups and downs of relationships. But I dated
quite a few women before your mother and you know what I learned?
Love isn’t hard work. It might be trying, but if it feels like hard
work, it probably isn’t love.”
He raised himself up
on his arms, walked over to his easy chair and reached for the
remote control. I’m sure that little soliloquy exhausted him. I sat
at the table for a few minutes thinking about his message. Was he
endorsing the breakups I told him about? Was he telling me that I
didn’t know anything about love? Was he assuring me that I’d know
it when the right thing came along? I had no idea, but the virtual
outburst from him left me strangely reassured.
I put the chess set
away and made a note to myself to get a book on the game before our
next match.