CHAPTER THIRTEEN
What I’d Planned for
It
Iris and I settled
into a regular pattern. It was hard for either us to get away from
our jobs (and spending time in the store was feeling more and more
like a “job” all the time) on the weekends, but Tuesdays and
Wednesdays were very slow. And so every week, I would drive up to
Lenox on Tuesday morning and drive back to Amber late Wednesday
night. These trips easily became the highlight of any week and they
made what I had in Amber seem more palatable. If contractors were
annoying me or if a customer whined, I could always call Iris,
complain a bit, listen to a story about some petty thing someone at
the Ensemble did, and then talk about our plans a few days hence.
In fact, since we’d started to see each other every week, our phone
relationship had become much richer. I could see Iris in these
conversations. I could imagine her body language during a specific
voice inflection. I could visualize her posture at her desk or at a
kitchen chair.
We’d been doing this
for several weeks at this point. On this Tuesday, we had
well-prepared, though utterly unsurprising Mexican food followed by
modern dance at Jacob’s Pillow. The performers dedicated a portion
of the program to the music of Brian Wilson, while they set another
to Thelonius Monk. It was bracing and graceful and – unlike the
meal – completely unpredictable.
“This is a sexy
town,” I said as we drove back to Iris’ house.
“You think so? I
think it’s a little on the geeky side myself.”
“No, it really is.
It’s beautiful, it keeps you guessing, it promises a lot of
pleasure, and it delivers what it promises. It’s very
sexy.”
“Should I leave the
two of you alone?”
I smiled. “I’m
complimenting you on your choice of location. You did a good job
finding this place.”
“Thanks. It pretty
much found me.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard
that kind of thing happens. You need better bread, though. That’s
the one way in which Amber beats this town. I’m bringing you a loaf
of bread when I come up next week.”
“You mean your town
is better than my town at something?”
“Amber is not my
town. It is the place where I grew up and my current temporary
residence. But it is not my town.”
“Tucumcari.”
“Or someplace like
it. Or no place like it. Who knows? But not Amber.”
“In spite of the
fabulous baked goods.”
“Yes.”
Iris laughed. “Hey,”
she said, “I forgot to tell you that Melanie is pregnant.” Melanie
was a colleague at the Ensemble and a good friend of
Iris’.
“With that guy?”
Melanie, who is gay, had been confiding in Iris for months about
her desire to have a baby and about the male gay friend she’d been
conflicted about doing it with.
“Yeah, Burke. They
just decided to make it happen. I’d been wondering why she hadn’t
been talking about it as much lately. She’s six weeks. Burke is
going to move in with her when the baby is born.”
“Doesn’t Melanie have
a partner?”
“She does, but
Shelly’s okay with it. They’re all going to live together and raise
the kid as a team.”
“That takes
unbelievable guts.”
“Well, you know
Mel.”
I had in fact gotten
to know Melanie a bit from my visits to the office and much more
from the way Iris talked about her. Certainly, if anyone were going
to make a juggling act such as this work, it would be she. She was
very centered and methodical and I’d never seen her get flustered.
Still, I was sure that there would be times when the dynamic would
get awkward between the three adults.
“That’s great news, I
guess.”
“It is great news.
It’s a long way from Ozzie and Harriet
, but we happen to be a long way from
Ozzie and Harriet.”
I nodded and decided
that Iris was right that this was good news. The household might
feel a little crowded from time to time, but the key was that the
kid would be in a situation where all of his parents really wanted
him. With that in his corner, he could deal with everything
else.
The conversation
settled for a moment and I felt an ache in my right shoulder that
had been bothering me all day. I tried to stretch it a bit as I
drove.
“I don’t know what I
did to my shoulder,” I said to Iris. “I must have slept on it wrong
or something last night.”
Iris reached over and
squeezed the shoulder a few times. “I remember the first
clandestine night Chase and I had together,” she said. “It was the
first time we had actually slept – as in actually sleeping –
together and he could barely lift his arm the next day because I
had my head on it the entire night. He made some ridiculous excuse
about it to your mother the next day.”
She laughed, and I
laughed with her, but the casual mention of her sleeping with Chase
had caught me off guard. We’d been talking about him less lately
and hadn’t really talked about him in his role as Iris’ boyfriend
for a while.
I’m not sure why what
Iris said now threw me off so much. Chase was always somewhere on
my mind and certainly I never forgot how Iris and I had become
friends in the first place. But we’d developed such a meaningful
present that the past had become a little diffuse. I’d started to
think of her as my friend and I
realized what I was feeling at this moment was a form of jealousy.
It was the first time that the mention of Chase’s name had inspired
that and I found I wasn’t particularly interested in continuing
this line of conversation. I don’t know what Iris thought of my
sudden silence or if she thought about it at all, but we didn’t say
anything the rest of the way back to her place.
“Some wine?” Iris
asked when we got in the door.
“Yeah, wine would be
great.”
Iris continued into
the kitchen. “I got some of that Super-Tuscan you were telling me
about.”
The dog bounded up to
me and I knelt to pet her. “It’s delicious. You’ll love
it.”
“I love it already. I
had a glass last night.”
I sat on the couch
and looked around the room. There were no pictures of Chase here. A
shot of her mother. One of her cousin. A very prominently placed
photo of Iris with Sam Shepard taken during his visit to see the
Ensemble’s production of one of his plays. A number of photographs
with no people in them at all.
As we drank the wine,
we talked about our plans for the next day and even for the next
week. Slowly, the discomfort from my bout of jealousy abated. I was
in the present with my new best friend, Iris, and we were talking
about the things we were going to do. As long as I looked at things
from this perspective, I was totally fine and even
relaxed.
A short while later,
Iris went to bed and I went to the guest room. There was a quilt on
the bed that hadn’t been there the week before, Iris had put a
decorative clay pot on the nightstand, and a handmade clock was now
up on a wall. These touches warmed the room, made it feel less like
a spare and more like a place where someone stayed. I assumed she
did them for my benefit and this pleased me. I lay down on the new
quilt and looked up at the ceiling. The paint was still chipped
from a leak that had happened years before and I found this
surprisingly reassuring.
I thought back to the
casual way that Iris had mentioned making love to Chase earlier.
She wasn’t someone to say anything without thinking. Had she done
this to make sure that I understood that what was developing
between us was purely friendship? Or did she do it because she had
no reason to think that I would react badly to it in any
way?
It was becoming more
and more obvious to me that Iris and I saw our relationship in
entirely different terms – even as I understood that it would be
more perilous if she didn’t feel this way. I understood that the
limitations, real or imagined, that Iris put between us allowed me
my fanciful thoughts. If she had not exercised this level of
caution, I almost certainly would have had to.
And there was the
quilt, the pot, and the clock. There were the plans for tomorrow
and the next week and, presumably, the week after that. If what was
evolving here wasn’t what I fantasized (more often than perhaps I
should have), it was still the best the world had to offer
me.
When I got up that
Thursday morning, my parents were already off to see my father’s
cardiologist. I believe this was the third time my father had left
the house since coming back from the hospital. I’m not sure what it
was about being here when my parents weren’t around, but I found
myself exploring again. This time I headed toward the
basement.
This level of the
house was perpetually “semifinished.” There was carpeting on half
of it and my father, in a burst of productivity a couple of decades
before, had nailed cedar paneling to the walls of that half. An old
Fisher television was in one corner, along with the couch that once
sat in the den. My parents still had the set plugged in and the
rabbit ears were pointed in whatever direction had provided snowy
reception the last time anyone turned on the TV. Chase and I had
loved to come down to the basement to watch this set, though it was
less for the quality of the picture than it was for the freedom to
jump as hard as we wanted on the couch. I turned the set on, half
expecting it to play Scooby-Doo or
maybe Sesame Street. When a morning
talk show appeared instead, I shut it off without changing
channels. The set wasn’t dusty and neither was the carpet or the
couch, which meant that my mother still came down here to clean,
even though no one had used this space in years.
I opened the door of
the wall unit that held our games and toys. There was the copy of
Operation that we would hunch over in the early morning, determined
not to let the buzzing sound awaken our parents. There was the copy
of Booby Trap, a game that caused Chase to guffaw every time it
exploded (even when we were in our teens). There was the copy of
Stratego that my father brought home for me for no reason at all,
the only time I could ever remember him doing that. I never liked
the game particularly much, but I would play it anyway because
there was something special about it. I found the big red ball that
Chase and I would play dodgeball with (“not against the paneling,”
my mother would say, calling down from the kitchen). Deflated, of
course, but it looked like it would be ready for another match if
an air pump were available. The same basket held my catcher’s
glove, some street hockey pucks, and a Nerf basketball. On
“Olympics Days,” Chase and I would pull the basket out and compete
until we’d used every bit of equipment, keeping the “medals totals”
on a tiny blackboard. I looked up to see some of my Star Wars
action figures and Chase’s boxing gloves. My Magic 8 Ball and
Baseball Encyclopedia and his football
helmet and remote control car.
I had forgotten how
much time we spent in this basement, even through high school.
While we decidedly had the run of the house, this part was truly
our turf. Mom could come down to clean (as long as we weren’t in
the middle of something) and Dad was welcome to put up some more
paneling if the inspiration ever struck (as long as he left us at
least one wall to throw the ball against), but the basement was
ours. We’d be down there at least an hour a day, sometimes much
longer if the weather was bad. And even when we weren’t together,
one of us would often be down here.
Across from the
television was a collection of boxes that hadn’t been there when I
lived at home. I opened the first to find Chase’s schoolwork and
report cards. I didn’t need to look at these to remember that they
were mostly As, the exception being the C he got from his tenth
grade history teacher, “that maggot” Mr. Olafsson, and the Bs he
would always get in Art because he thought it was
“silly.”
In the second box, I
found a bunch of my papers, mostly high school stuff. It was
difficult to place archival value on ancient trigonometry tests and
a book report on The Man Who Fell to
Earth, but I’m sure my mother didn’t know which of these
things would be meaningful to me and which wouldn’t. There was my
speech after I became sophomore class president. Did I really say
things like “We can make the future ours” and “This school can only
do for us what we let it do for us,” or did I more effectively edit
myself when I actually delivered it? I remember a lot of applause,
so perhaps there was one further draft that didn’t make it into
this box.
Under a few more
quizzes was my acceptance letter to Emerson. I’d applied to three
other schools and gotten accepted to all of them, but this was the
one I wanted. The letter came a full two weeks after the last of
the others, but I refused to consider the option of Ann Arbor or
College Park or Syracuse. Emerson was small, it was progressive, it
had one of the best communications programs in the country, and it
was in a city I loved. The day I received it, Chase talked some guy
outside of a liquor store into buying a bottle of champagne for him
to give me.
Right underneath the
Emerson letter was one of my notebooks. Every time my father’s
store would stock a new kind of notebook (different binding,
different color, different rule size), I would make him bring me
one. I wouldn’t use these for schoolwork, but rather for personal
writing: schemes, white papers, opinion pieces, a bit of
journaling, stream of consciousness stuff that should be forever
stored in boxes. And my lists. There was a time when I attached
great importance to itemizing the best of everything. The best rock
songs (what ever made me put Sting’s “Fortress around Your Heart”
ahead of the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride?”). The best movies (a tie
between E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind for first
place). The best novels, the best ice cream, the best cop shows,
the best presidential speeches (student council not included), the
best state governors, the best TV news anchors, and, of course, the
best amusement park rides. I had notebooks filled with these and I
would review and revise them on a regular basis.
I sat on the couch
and flipped through the notebook for several minutes. I had to
laugh when I thought about how important these lists once were to
me and yet how I had almost entirely forgotten them. I wondered if
I should start making lists again. Best Women Who Gave Me the Time
of Day? Best Job Exits? Most Annoying Exchanges with a Customer? Or
perhaps Best Days in Lenox? Best Music for the Drive
Back?
Maybe Best Reasons
Why Iris and I Should Remain Only Friends?
I closed the notebook
and put it back in the box. I flipped through some more term papers
and post-cards before closing it up and putting Chase’s back on
top. I’d get to the other boxes at some point in the
future.
I walked past the
carpeting. I remember thinking when I was much younger that there
was some kind of magic involved in crossing from the carpet to the
concrete. That it was the dividing line to some other world. What
it really was, of course, was the byproduct of some crisis in the
store that required all of my father’s attention for an extended
period. Once the crisis was over, his desire to finish the basement
had dissipated and the floor remained half naked.
The unfinished half
served as both a repository for old things no longer useful (both
of the discarded refrigerators, my mother’s sewing machine, the
console stereo) and as storage space for Christmas decorations, the
aluminum folding table, the forty-cup coffeemaker, and other items
utilized during the occasional festivity. And there, too, under a
white sheet that had in fact gathered dust, was my woodworking
equipment.
This was as close to
Zen as I got when I was a kid. I could spend huge stretches
(usually when Chase was engaged otherwise; he would be too
distracting even if he was just watching TV) carving, sawing,
sanding, and finishing. I created pieces that often served little
function other than letting me transform them, but also lamps and
bookends and even, once, a chair. A number of these were still in
the house, but had folded so completely into my image of the place
that I hadn’t picked them out as my own inventions since I’d been
back.
In the intervening
years, one of my parents had drawn the equipment together and
pulled it under this sheet, but it hadn’t been touched otherwise. I
took the sheet off entirely now and moved things out into an
approximation of the workstation I’d used back then: workbench in
front of me, belt sander to the left, lathe and band saw to the
right. I still had a block of wood positioned in the lathe. It was
long and thin and I couldn’t remember what I’d planned for it. I
picked up a file from the bench and ran my fingers over it,
dislodging sawdust that had been in place for nearly a decade. I’d
spent so many hours here building things and imagining building
others.
I looked at my watch
and saw that it was time for me to get going to the store. I put
the file back down on the bench and gave one more glance at the
block of wood in the lathe, telling myself that I would come back
down here when I had more time.
Before my next chess
match with my father, I went out to get a couple of whole-wheat
bagels for us to have with our tea. My mother wasn’t sure why I
couldn’t just make some toast, but she didn’t object,
either.
As I’d promised
myself, I’d bought a book on chess strategy. I got it in the
bookstore in Lenox the last time Iris and I were together. (“Will
this make you a professional overnight?” she asked. I told her I
was simply hoping to give my father a better game.) I’d read it
carefully and practiced certain situations in my mind. The result
was an opening I’d never used before and I could see from the
expression on my father’s face that he hadn’t anticipated it. Six
moves into the match, though, I was once again out of my
depth.
“Did I ever tell you
about the job I had in Columbus?” I said.
My father nodded
“no,” never taking his eyes off the board.
“I was the head
sandwich guy at this huge deli near Ohio State.”
He brought out his
Queen’s Knight and said, “Well, it’s good to hear you were the head
guy.”
“All that education
really paid off,” I said. “The place was a sandwich factory. We’d
make hundreds of them a day. I had three people working for me. I
did things with smoked turkey that others could only dream of. In
other words, it was a ridiculous bore.”
“What made you think
that it wouldn’t be boring to you?”
“I didn’t really
think about it very much. I liked the town and I liked the vibe.
And the guy who owned the deli was hilarious.”
“All sturdy reasons
for a career choice.”
I moved a bishop to
Queen Four as the book suggested I do. “You know, I actually did
give some thought to my career when I went to work for Minnesota
Public Radio. I had to bullshit my way into the job after all of
the other things on my resume, but I connected there a little. The
first month or so was entry-level production assistant stuff, but I
got to know the station manager and after a while he let me do some
programming. I was good at it, I think. Not as good as I was at
making grilled jerk chicken on sourdough maybe, but pretty good. I
used to have a cassette with some of the shows, but I can’t seem to
find it.”
“So what was the
problem this time?”
“Stuff got weird with
Kristina and it sort of affected everything.”
“Kristina was the
woman you were seeing in Minneapolis?”
“Yeah. And when
things started to go south for us, I found it a little hard to hang
on. And at that point the radio thing started to be a little bit of
a hassle.”
My father returned
his focus to the board.
“You know, I’ve never
once been fired,” I said.
“Congratulations.”
“I’m not bragging,
but I thought you might have been wondering. I’ve never left a
place because of that. Though there were one or two times when I
thought I could be fired if things kept going the way they were
going.”
My father made his
move and then sat back in his chair. I glanced over the board
carefully to see if he had somehow checkmated me while I wasn’t
paying attention.
“Do you know what
Amber was like thirty-four years ago?” he said. “They weren’t
exactly selling out the inns for $250 a night. It was all very
speculative back then. Some good years when the town seemed to be
going somewhere and then a number of down years would
follow.
“I leased the space
on Russet Avenue during one of those down periods. We had a little
bit of money and we’d had some encouraging conversations with the
town planners. It seemed like a good idea. Obviously, it turned out
to be a good idea, but those first few years were a
bitch.”
He breathed deeply
and then exhaled. “I loved making that store work, though. I was
always moving merchandise around to see what drew the customers’
attention. I tried out different lines to see which ones worked
best, I changed the colors of the walls, the kind of music we
played, the volume of the music we played, and even the hours we
were open. In those first few years, I was tinkering all the
time.”
We exchanged moves. I
had never heard my father talk about the store this way before.
He’d never told me about the work that had gone into making it what
it was. For as long as I could remember, it had looked relatively
the same.
“Of course, not long
after we opened the store, your mother became pregnant with you.
There was so much going on back then. A couple of stores closed on
Russet Avenue and I was worried that I was going to have to close
mine too if things didn’t pick up. I was in the store from opening
to closing just about every day while your mother took care of you.
I felt bad for leaving her alone like that, but I knew that my job
was to put money in the bank. And then she got sick.”
“Mom got
sick?”
“Very sick. You never
knew about this?”
“I’m pretty sure I
would have remembered.”
“A terrible stomach
problem. She lost a lot of weight and needed to spend most of her
time in bed. The doctors kept giving her different things to do
about it, but none of it seemed to work. It was a rough stretch for
both of us. I was worried that she was going to be like that
forever – or that it could be even worse than that. I wanted to
take care of her, but I couldn’t give her all of my attention
because of the other responsibilities. She didn’t get better until
a couple of months before she became pregnant with your brother.
The doctors finally got it right, I guess, because she’s been fine
ever since – though you’ll notice she stays away from spicy
food.”
I glanced toward the
kitchen, even though I could-n’t see it from where I sat. “I can’t
believe I never knew about that.”
“It was in the past.
And things turned around after that. Anna was feeling better and
the store was treading water. And then that article about Amber
came out in the Times and suddenly we
were the next big thing. People moved in, tourists started coming,
and business took off. By the time your brother was born, things
were moving.
“I like to say that
it was my marketing genius that made the store the success it’s
been. But in truth it was just a number of very good
breaks.”
It was fascinating to
hear my father speak this way. Aside from the fact that he was
speaking this much at all, he was telling me things I never knew
before, adding a voice-over to the home movies I had in my
mind.
My research into the
game of chess didn’t pay immediate dividends. The inevitable
checkmate happened sooner than expected. Sooner than the last
match, for that matter. My father hadn’t even finished his
bagel.
He looked at the
clock on the far wall. “You’ve gotta get to the store, don’t
you?”
“I have a few
minutes.”
“Nah, you’ve gotta
get to the store. There’s a show I want to watch
anyway.”