Part 6 (1/2)

”Tha.s.s right. Spin, like we said, he took early retirement.”

”Phil and Deirdre?” Why did I care? My voice had trembled.

”They're still around, maybe.”

”Is the monthly charge the same?”

”We were thinkin' maybe it should go up a little. What with us providin' on-the-spot service.”

He had mastered the corporate ”we,” which diffuses and masks all manner of brutalities and denials. ”How much is a little?”

”We were thinkin', how about two thousand a month? You owe us for May. That makes four.”

”Two and two still make four. That's some increase, from thirteen fifty to two.”

He shrugged. Though I thought of him as the big one, he was several inches shorter than I. Even weightwise, I was bigger than he, though my pounds could not be mobilized like the rubbery pounds of youth. The c.h.i.n.ks in the hut, I noticed, had been stuffed with moss-defense against insects if not yet the cold-and the gypsum-board roof replaced with some plywood scavenged somewhere. They were learning. America is one big education. Two thousand was a lot of welders, for a retired man in a chaotic economy, but it was still far less than the old government had extracted from me, in dollars, for its wars and universal medical care, its mad schemes of s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps in the sky and equal opportunity for everyone. It would be hard for a boy from Lynn to grasp how much a white financial adviser could stash away over the years. He was asking peanuts.

”I'll have it for you tomorrow. I need to go to the bank for so much scrip. But I want something for it.”

He was silent, blank.

”I want you and your buddies to stay down here on this side of the-” I didn't think he'd know the word ”escarpment.” I gestured and said, ”These big rocks. Stay away from the barn and the house. I haven't mentioned any of this to my wife but if she finds out you'll be in another ballgame. She's a lot tougher than I-nowhere near as reasonable. She has that female thing of territoriality.”

He still stared silently. There was nothing in my a.s.sertions and threats that deserved an answer perhaps. All the concessions had been made; I felt a certain craven pleasure and relief.

”Deirdre say,” my opponent said at last, graciously to end the conversation, ”you scared s.h.i.+tless of your old lady.”

The spring is so advanced into near-summer it has turned soggy and lost all shape. Azalea, dogwood, lilac, the blossoms of fruit trees are all withered and fallen into the detritus of moist earth. White is the color of the moment-lilies of the valley, bridal wreath, the maple-leaf viburnum that clings to the steep bank in drooping pulpy limbs that take root at their tips. This sinister plant, when on the way down to the mailbox I put my face close to one of its wide compound flowers, has an odor of decay, echoing the mephitic aura around Spin's body. I can't believe the boys are going to drag that body elsewhere, to prove themselves to another protection customer, but I would have heard, I think, the sound of a shovel digging a grave on my land; you can't go down three inches without striking a rock. They came up, all three of them, as far as the barn to collect the packets of sepia paper I had withdrawn from the bank, and Gloria had spotted them from a third-floor window.

I explained who they were-the successors to Spin and Phil.

”I think you're ridiculous,” she told me, ”to have anything to do with men like that. And now boys. I wonder if any of them would like to work for us a few hours each week, helping out on the grounds? I'm devastated devastated that Jeremy is thinking of giving up school and going to Mexico.” that Jeremy is thinking of giving up school and going to Mexico.”

Mexico, which had remained neutral during the Sino-American Conflict, was attracting many of our young people as a land of opportunity. Those who were denied legal admission were sneaking across the border in droves, while the Mexican authorities doubled the border guard and erected more electrified chain-link fences. They were talking of a Chinese-style wall, along Aztec design lines.

”I don't think these boys want yard work. They're into criminal activity, and very dangerous. You let me deal with them.”

Gloria had been thought when young to have promise as a dancer, and until her mid-teens had taken ballet lessons. Whenever she wishes to a.s.sert herself, she straightens her back and splays her feet, as she did now. ”Ben, you really shouldn't be handing them money. It's pouring it down the drain and giving them a false sense of reality. Call the police. You say there aren't any, but I see them all the time-just yesterday morning, three of them, all young and in uniform, were directing traffic around the collapsed road on the way to Magnolia.”

”They were moonlighting,” I said. ”Or else it was bandits in stolen uniforms. They rob the armored trucks and UPS vans.”

”They were very very courteous to me.” courteous to me.”

Jeremy had come to us from a local fundamentalist college. He had a handsome but small head no wider than his powerful, flexible neck, so that at moments he displayed a serpentine grace. I had become dependent upon him; his appearance on a Sat.u.r.day or Sunday morning would galvanize me into an attack on the outdoors I no longer could muster by myself, however earnestly Gloria nagged. Together, Jeremy and I would lop, haul, dig, Preen, trim, mow. He had long slipped away from fundamentalism and would confide, if he seemed sluggish, that he had been hitting the bars in Gloucester and had gone on to some girl's apartment. But his natural Christian mannerliness spared me any details that might have made me jealous-whether the girl had a roommate, if she got into the act, if the girls did anything to each other while he watched-details my thick skull craved, out in the laborious suns.h.i.+ne. Jeremy can start all the power tools-the leaf blower, the weed-whacker with its spinning nylon string-that gum up, for me, on their infuriatingly viscid and approximate mixtures of oil and gasoline. As we grub away side by side at some desolate patch of garden which Gloria wants to restore to the supposed state of glory it enjoyed in the fabled days of household staffs and freshly imported Italian gardeners, I reflect on how little it takes to breed a relations.h.i.+p: paternal and filial feelings flow between us like inklings of s.e.xual attraction. One day when a black hornet stung me below the eye, his voice shook in worry and concern, which I tearfully shrugged off. He admires my limberness as we scramble about on the rocks with armfuls of clippings for the burning pile or the compost heap, or together s.h.i.+nny into the ornamental apple trees to clip off the upright suckers that are poking into Gloria's view of the sea. I encourage him to go to Mexico. I tell him he is lucky to be young in a world that is full of gaps and the opportunities underpopulation affords. My world when I was young, I tell him, was crammed with other so-called baby boomers, so that I advanced and made my little pile only by means of twelve-hour days and claustral conformity to the fully staffed pecking order. As he ducks into his old Nissan with a supple undulation of his sinuous bare-naped neck, I feel an erotic pang.

s.e.x seems everywhere, now that humid heat has become a daily thing. Warm weather creates s.e.xual hallucinations. In the waiting room of my periodontist, the smiling hygienist summons a male patient (not me) upstairs to a ”b.l.o.w. .j.o.b,” or so I hear her say. Near the beginning of my vast dental experience there was a Miss Edna Wade, a.s.sistant to Dr. Gottlieb, one of two Jews in Hammond Falls (the other ran the little local movie theatre, which closed in the Seventies). In cleaning my teeth, Miss Wade pressed her great round breast against my hot ear until its wax melted and I feared the zipper on my fly would rip.

With Gloria off to Boston on a cl.u.s.ter of her errands- shopping for slipcover material, having lunch at the Calpurnia Club and tea at the Ritz with a pre-war friend from the Winsor School, topped by a facial and a pedicure-and the outdoors a forbidding jungle, I went to my cache of p.o.r.nography, which is tucked behind a uniform set of st.u.r.dy Bible commentaries once owned by Gloria's reverend great-uncle, and excited myself with the absurd combinational permutations of a paperback called Rex and Flora: Virgin into Vixen Rex and Flora: Virgin into Vixen. When my erection, in response to Flora's expert administration of f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o to a delivery boy, had attained fall stretch, with my left hand cupped nurturingly about my b.a.l.l.s, I admired it-the inverted lavender heart-shape of the glans, the majestic tensile column with its marblelike blue-green veins and triple-shafted underside. Stout and faithful fellow! My life's companion. I loved it, or him; erectile heat suffused my system with the warm blood of well-being; for these pumped-up instants I felt no need to justify my earthly existence; all came clear. I wished that my neck were as flexible as Jeremy's so that I could dip down enough to do an adoring Flora on myself, imbibing at least that first translucent drop of pre-c.u.m (as the p.o.r.n books spell it) if not the thicker, curdled cream my swollen old prostate gland sluggishly releases, minutes after my climax.

If I did not have so many friends, at the club and at the office, who have had prostate operations and suffer the indignity of incontinence and the desolation of impotence, my erection might have been less prideful. Often enough in my youth it had been a mere embarra.s.sment, an inconvenience to be cleared away, dismissed with a hand or a handy v.a.g.i.n.a, so as to get on with life's real business. What was so real, I now try to remember, about that business? Showing up on the dot of 8:35 a.m. at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise, playing honest lago to the blind and innocent Oth.e.l.lo of the filthy rich, trying from the safe distance of State Street to outguess Wall Street in its skittery, dragonish gyrations-chimerical and numerical ephemera, in the backward glance. Nothing as solid and real, I feel, while my grip on my best self slackens, as this stiff p.r.i.c.k, a gleam of tasty pre-c.u.m unlicked at its tip.

I am conscious as my days dwindle of how poorly I have observed the world. The plants in their pulpy, modest complexity; the styles of sky and sea which like the whorls of fingerprints never quite repeat; the precise tint and fit of the rust-stained chunks of granite the vanished Italian masons built so lovingly into walls and terraces all over this property and its miles of brothers along the North Sh.o.r.e. Sitting on the toilet yesterday, I suddenly saw as if for the first time the miraculous knit of the Jockey underpants stretched across my knees. Tiny needles, functioning in cunning cl.u.s.ters at inhuman speeds, had contrived to entangle tiny white threads with perfect regularity to form this comfortably pliable, lightweight, and slightly elastic fabric. Engineers had planned and refined generations of machines, giant looms deploying batteries of hooked needles scarcely thicker than a hair yet containing moving parts, minuscule springs and latches, to duplicate mechanically the intricate knitting action of patient human hands. On all sides I am surrounded by such wonders of fabrication, those of human creation most decipherable but no less deserving of praise than those of that blind weaver, Nature.

But in fact I am dull and disintegrating. Strange complaints send dispatches along the neural network. A sharp little come-and-go pain beneath my left ear-the first cry from a lymph node choking on cancer cells? A sensation, upon awaking, of a film upon my eyes, obscuring vision for a half-hour into the day. Sudden thrummings and twitching just beneath the skin of my face. Sudden urgent urinary requests from below my belt. Not to mention arthritic finger joints, nocturnal stomach aches, and the mysterious murmurings and twinges the heart emits as it labors away day and night in the mushy total darkness within my rib cage. Which of my many interior slaves will first rebel and bring down in a chain of revolution my tyrannical reign? How much thankless effort these visceral serfs exert to maintain idle, giddy, fitful consciousness upon its throne inside my skull!

This morning a radio voice between doses of Offenbach and Buxtehude promised temperatures in the eighties; the sea, I noticed, was smoky in its flat calm, somewhat the way it is on the coldest January day, when the sub-zero air pulls vapor up up into its crystalline nothingness. The widespread mist this morning blurs the horizon and all but obliterates the little dark strip that is the South Sh.o.r.e-Hingham and Coha.s.set and all that-where useless old lecherous men are also rising and putting on exquisitely manufactured underpants. into its crystalline nothingness. The widespread mist this morning blurs the horizon and all but obliterates the little dark strip that is the South Sh.o.r.e-Hingham and Coha.s.set and all that-where useless old lecherous men are also rising and putting on exquisitely manufactured underpants.

Walking down to the mailbox for the Globe Globe, I pause to study the pink laurel, just now, in mid-June, coming into bloom. Each apparent single bloom, as with my spent rhododendrons, is a cl.u.s.ter of small sticky-stemmed pink-white flowers, each a strict pentagon with a deep-green center, a decorative circle of blood-colored angles and arcs, and ten stamens whose dark-red anthers are socketed halfway up the pentagonal vessel's side, each white filament arched like a catapult spring, the pistils erect and ruddy-headed in the center, the whole formation as precise and hypnotically concentric as a Hollywood water ballet filmed from above. Amid such patterns infinitely multiplied we make our aimless way; nature's graph paper, scored in squares finer than a molecule's width, deserves tracing less coa.r.s.e than our erratic swoops of consciousness. All this superfine scaffolding, for what? The erection for a few shaky decades of a desperately greedy ego that tramples through the microcosmic underbrush like a blinded, lamenting giant.

The two pretty laurel florets I had on my desk to pose for my description yesterday are shrivelled today to the size of squashed insects. Their etched petals and pistils and anthers had been mostly water and are now returned to the vapor of the air.

And, walking down the driveway, I saw that though the Siberian iris are gone and the daylilies yet to bloom a few white iris have hoisted their flags-those floppy petals that each have, I discover in Peterson's Field Guide to Wildflowers Field Guide to Wildflowers, distinct names. The upright one is a standard, the lower one a fall, and the smaller ones are called, it seems, style arms.

Gloria's peonies are in full fluffy romp, and her roses a few days short of unfolding. A clump of great phallic lupine lords it over her small garden behind the former greenhouse, a garden fenced in by a bal.u.s.trade salvaged by the previous owner when he tore down the seaside veranda. The lupine petals are miniature pouches, purple and white distributed up and down the stalk like school colors in a cheerleader's pom-pom.

And birds. It has been a wonderful spring for birds. The mother swallow pokes her tiny sharp head over the edge of the nest as she furtively sits hatching her clutch. A s.h.i.+ny brown bird hangs upside down in the farthest extension of the drooping hickory twigs outside my window, worrying at something invisible to me-a grub, an arboreal sweetmeat of some sort. Robins, it has come to me sixty years after my first-grade teacher, Miss Lunt, made so curiously much of them, spend more time hopping along the lawn and driveway than they do in flight or on a branch; and their flight has a frantic beating barrel-bodied quality, like that of pheasants. Without knowing it, they are forsaking the air. In some millions of years robins may be as wingless as dodos and great auks but, instead of extinct, as common as rats, and as little cherished. In n.o.ble contrast, the swallows dip and flip through the ether as if they own the invisible element.

Beatrice was in the neighborhood with her two boys and came by for tea. She and Allan live in Wellesley; of my two sons he has more nearly taken my path through life, beginning, however, not in semi-rural poverty but in suburban comfort. He works in Boston finance, not as I was, a hand-holder of individual rich widows and booze-sodden scions, but as the a.s.sistant manager of a mutual fund, that marvellous device whereby even the slightly monied ma.s.ses can partake in a conglomerate portfolio. His is called Pop-Cap, or Low-Yield, or Slo-Grow, or something. For a time he was in Chi-Hi, specializing in issues trading on the Hong Kong and Shanghai exchanges. The great war put a crimp in that. Yet, since by the terms of the Sino-American treaty the island was rea.s.signed back to our faithful allies the British, Allan sees sees wonderful opportunities ten or so years down the road, when mainland China becomes less radioactive and reacquires an infrastructure. wonderful opportunities ten or so years down the road, when mainland China becomes less radioactive and reacquires an infrastructure.

Beatrice is dark-haired and beginning to go stout. But just beginning-her face is a pearly madonnaesque oval with sumptuous long black eyebrows that thicken toward the bridge of her nose, giving her an aristocratically vexed look. Beneath her pinched white nose her rosebud lips are often pursed and sulky. Her figure's growing opulence was emphasized in a crisp summer frock, coral in color, that exposed her upper arms and when she crossed her legs, as we sat on the side veranda, gave me plenty of pale thigh from which to avert my eyes. Having so ripe a young woman-”young” changes its meaning; she is about thirty-five-as my guest (Gloria being off to a Garden Club conference in Framingham on die diseases and parasites common to flowering shrubs) had a lyrical illicit side, an incestuous shadow we tried to disperse by sitting out here in the afternoon suns.h.i.+ne while Quentin and Duncan played on the lawn. Played, that is, in spurts of about five minutes; Quentin, though older, was sluggish and suspicious and kept dragging himself to his mother's side, thumb in mouth though he is almost six, while his three-year-old brother hyperactively scampered and skidded from rock to bush to the croquet b.a.l.l.s and mallets I had brought out of a spidery corner of the gardening shed for their visit. I had also found a semi-deflated soccer ball, which in one minute flat had vanished into the nebulous, depressed area of p.r.i.c.kly wild roses just off the side lawn.

”Duncan hit me,” Quentin said, removing his thumb for the time it took for this utterance. ”With one of those sticks,” he said, popping his thumb back in and rolling upward to his mother's face eyes the same seductive sherry-brown as her own.

Beatrice still smokes, endearingly. Accepting the child's heavy head on her bosom without burning him or spilling her tea intensified the look of black-browed vexation that I found attractive.

”Mallet,” I said, pedantically grandpaternal. ”Those colored sticks are called croquet mallets. You're supposed to hit the ball through the little hoops with them. They're called wickets. Shall Grandpa show you again?”

I had shown them once. Little hyper Duncan had listened intently and then with a whoop of glee had whirled through the layout I had set out, whacking each wicket until it went flying. Now the child, dressed in flowered bib sunshorts, had toddled to Gloria's rose bed and was rapidly tugging off buds, chanting in antic.i.p.ation of our rebukes, ”Naughty! Naughty!”

”Dunkie, you cut that out!” Beatrice called, but lazily, wearily, in a rote tone the child could ignore. She dragged on her cigarette and let her voluminous exhaling express depths of quiet desperation. The smoke made its way among Quentin's glossy curls, and the child solemnly blinked his pink eyelids. The languor of the child's frail, unambitious white limbs disturbingly suggested to me how my daughter-in-law would dispose herself in bed.

I raced off the porch to rescue Gloria's roses, which had been a bit tough-stemmed for Duncan to damage much. He had p.r.i.c.ked himself on a thorn, and his little square stubborn face, yellowish with a child's unthinkingly acquired tan, creased and wrinkled as a wail of protest built up inside his chest. He squinted up at me dubiously and then, with one shaky suppressed sob, held up his p.r.i.c.ked thumb to my face. It was sticky like an old penny candy against my lips; his face gave up on holding back tears. I lifted him into my arms and, though my knees threatened to buckle under the weight of his soul in that curious elderly reflex of mine, carried him into the shelter of the porch.

He showed his mother his wounded thumb. ”Grandpa kiss,” he said.

”Thank you, Ben,” Beatrice said. ”I can't keep up with him.”

”Beatrice, who could?” Our first names leaked into the sunny air like rumors of an affair. Undressed, she must have as many white k.n.o.bs as a thunderhead. ”How's, uh, Number One's number-two problem?”

”Some days he seems to have the idea,” she allowed, pa.s.sing the teacup and saucer around Quentin's obtrusive curly head, ”and then he loses it. When Al and I talk poo to him he looks at us as if we're incredibly crazy and in very very poor taste. I guess it poor taste. I guess it is is sort of disgusting if you think about it. Like a lot of things. But don't normal children, if it feels good, forget about its being in bad taste?” sort of disgusting if you think about it. Like a lot of things. But don't normal children, if it feels good, forget about its being in bad taste?”

”I would think,” I said, as if I personally didn't know. I s.h.i.+ed my mind away from picturing my daughter-in-law settling her white bulk on the toilet seat and letting her ample fundament part to give nature its daily toll of fecal matter. Feels good, does it? Here on the veranda, as the westering sunlight advanced like a slow tide across the porch boards and lapped at our feet, the click of her cup and the sigh of her exhaled smoke seemed embarra.s.singly loud. The buggy heat held the muted smells of excrement, s.e.x, death. The kousa dogwoods that Gloria had had the tree service plant, over toward the yew hedge that screened us from the Kellys, bloomed in their unsatisfactory way: white bracts strewn among the green leaves like pieces of paper sewn to the upper side of the boughs. I searched for a topic to fill our silence. ”How's Allan liking his work?”

Beatrice responded pouncingly. ”He loves loves it,” she exclaimed with exasperation. ”All that computerized buying and appraising. He can't stop talking about the wonderful Asians, the ones that are left, their enterprise and diligence and so on. I think he thinks Westerners are relatively decadent, and overweight. Like me. I feel I should be j.a.panese or something to please him. One of those little Thai beauties he comes home raving about after one of his trips to Bangkok.” it,” she exclaimed with exasperation. ”All that computerized buying and appraising. He can't stop talking about the wonderful Asians, the ones that are left, their enterprise and diligence and so on. I think he thinks Westerners are relatively decadent, and overweight. Like me. I feel I should be j.a.panese or something to please him. One of those little Thai beauties he comes home raving about after one of his trips to Bangkok.”

Both boys had begun to wriggle in our arms at the mention of their father's name. Duncan became a bundle of wiry muscle; as he and Quentin returned to the mallets and b.a.l.l.s on the sunstruck lawn, the older boy's movements were by comparison mincing, female, constipated. He had inherited, perhaps, my melancholia. I thought of it as coming upon me in old age, but in truth I had always moved on the edge of depression. The house in the Berks.h.i.+res had step-worn floors and moldy wallpaper clinging to the plaster walls of the narrow stairwell. Oilcloth on the kitchen table, linoleum on the floor. Fields of sallow corn stubble outside, and the unheeding rush and swoosh of traffic along Route 8. Great headlong loads of cut logs, tree corpses, went by, from the pine plantations to the north, whose murky aisles of trunks showed a few splotches of sun and hid bear-shaped intimations of mortality. The doll's house in the neglected bas.e.m.e.nt. The marauding deer in a ruined world. The blurred corpse of the millipede. The laurel florets shrivelled to nothing. As a child I loved life so much the thought of its ever ending cancelled most of the joy I should have taken in it.

”Gloria's not much here, is she?” Beatrice asked, showing me her profile as she gazed toward the boys, softening any malice in the question.

”Gloria,” I said loyally, ”is astonis.h.i.+ngly busy. She works like a dog on this place, and then rushes over to the gift shop. Her two partners, she says, are utter featherheads. And then there are appointments with her hairdresser, her manicurist, her aerobics instructor-I can't keep track of how many people she has on her personal maintenance crew.”