A Marriage Made at Woodstock (14 page)

“Nice house,” he said.

Doris reached out a cool finger and ran it about the rim of his glass. The Great Dane whined. Frederick wondered if perhaps it had been wired by Arthur Bowen, its eyes little cameras recording all.

“May I ask you something, Doris?”

“I'm all answers,” she said. “Ask away.” She peered at him over the edge of her glass.

“Why do you do your own grocery shopping?” He waved his martini about the room. “I mean, look at this place. You could send Larry, or the housekeeper, a bunch of people. So why do you?”

Doris laughed at this. She rummaged a hand through her perfectly blond hair.

“Florence does most of the shopping,” she said. “I only browse. But I think it's important to get out among real people once in a while. I was, after all, just a little hausfrau when Arthur met me, a clerk at our favorite IGA.”

Frederick tried not to register surprise. He took another drink of his martini and stared at what looked like some kind of wild goat. It had a narrow, pointed muzzle, short ears, and curving, ribbed horns. It may have been Pan, for all he knew, killed by Arthur Bowen on Mount Olympus and brought back to decorate the walls of his house in Portland, Maine.
Mount
Olympus, not
Stuffed
. He leaned in to read the brass plate.
Dall
Sheep
, it said.
Alaska, 1979
.

“Arthur had to crawl ten miles on his belly, over icy crags, in order to kill that,” Doris said. “You're shocked, aren't you?”

“Well, ten miles is a long way,” Frederick said.

“I mean about my meeting Arthur at the IGA. About my having been a clerk there.”

“I'm not at all shocked,” Frederick said. He
was
shocked. He had imagined it all unfolding in the proper society way. When he had thought of Doris Bowen's
coming
out
, he never envisioned that it would be from between the shelves of canned vegetables and fruit juices.

“Yes, you are,” said Doris. She touched a hand against his cheek and brushed it along his jawbone. Frederick felt a tremor, and then the quick reaction of those damned blood vessels as they spewed redness about his face.

“Well, it is a little surprising,” he said.

“You're blushing,” said Doris. “I find that so charming, especially these days. Let's have lunch.”

• • •

They ate on the patio overlooking the millpond.

“Do you like the birds?” Doris asked. “Those black swans are Australian. And those birds over there are golden and silver pheasants. And somewhere around here are chukar partridges. They live in a lovely little house beyond the pool.”

Frederick had been trying, since his arrival, to avoid the soft whiteness of Doris's cleavage. But at the patio table she leaned forward with every other sentence, causing the cleavage to consistently rearrange itself, shift about, cool white glaciers in upheaval. Frederick watched the lazy floating swans down at the pond, the butterflies lighting on the well-groomed flowers, the Great Dane chasing a stick being thrown by a young boy. He had never before thought of her as having children.

“The housekeeper's grandson,” she said as she followed his gaze. “Arthur has two horrid progeny from his first marriage. Thank God they're in college. I concentrate on raising my own child, that one there.” She pointed out at the Great Dane. Just as Frederick was about to ask about Arthur Bowen's company and which accounting firm represented him, a young man in jeans and a T-shirt dropped a fruit plate onto the table. A strawberry bounced out and rolled a couple inches.

“Larry!” Doris said. “That's not polite. Now bring Mr. Stone another martini.”

“
Bring
Mr. Stone another martini
,” Larry mimicked her.

“And stop acting like a big baby,” Doris said.

“
And
stop
acting
like
a
big
baby
,” Larry mocked. He grabbed Frederick's empty glass and left.

“Just ignore him,” Doris said, when she noticed the quizzical look on Frederick's face. “We all have our days, don't we?”

Frederick stared at his fruit plate and wondered what Joyce and Reginald were having for lunch. He almost missed Budgie. Within minutes, Larry appeared with a fresh martini. He made no response to Frederick's thank-you. Instead, he reeled around and disappeared back inside the house. Frederick noticed that Larry had withheld on the olive, for symbolic purposes no doubt.

“About Mr. Bowen's accounting firm,” he said, and felt Doris's foot rest on his own beneath the table. When he coughed uneasily, Doris giggled.

“You're the first shy man I've met since grammar school,” she said. “I thought they were all extinct, like great auks. You know, too shy to fuck.”

She then walked her toes up his calf. He had seen this footwork before in movies and prayed that it was not foreplay to some under-the-table blow job. Larry would be furious, probably refusing to feed Frederick any salad. He tried to ease his legs back. Perhaps he should cross them and protect his genitalia, which he assumed was where Doris's toes were headed next.
Castration
is
performed
to
create
a
sterile
and
more
docile
animal.
Mr. Bator's voice again.
And
has
even
been
practiced
to
maintain
a
boy's soprano voice
. Frederick imagined himself asking Larry for a glass of water with the lyrical voice of a castrato singer.

Larry now came with a tray bearing plates.

“I hope Florence remembered that this is a no-meat, no-dairy lunch,” Doris said, as Larry served Frederick his salad. Croutons vaulted into the air like Mexican jumping beans.

“Honestly!” said Doris.

“And for the
lady
,” said Larry, with open sarcasm. He put a plate of cheese Napoleons in front of Doris and then disappeared again.

“He can be immature sometimes,” Doris said, leaning toward Frederick and showing more snowy cleavage. He didn't know what to say, so he didn't respond. But he had a question to ask, there was no doubt about that. He picked at his salad. The dressing seemed to have a red wine as its base.

“Safe from dairy products,” Doris said, noticing his concern. “But the cheese Napoleons are all mine. Florence refused to make them with anything but real Parmesan cheese.”

“Did you know Larry before he came to work here?” Frederick asked his question. Doris laughed, and he felt her foot again, prodding his calf, the toes climbing higher.

“This little piggy went to market,” she said. “But where in the world is this little piggy going?” He expected Larry at any minute with a scalpel. But when he appeared with their bowls of soup, Doris's foot retreated.

“Will the gentleman require a bib?” asked Larry, as he put the bowl in front of Frederick. He left again for the bowels of the house. Doris smiled.

“Sometimes, he can be even more jealous than Willy,” she said.

“Willy?” Frederick asked, cautious.

“My gardener,” said Doris.

Frederick stared at his soup. He wondered if it would be all right to dismiss himself. Her overtures were not just making him uncomfortable; he felt it might be possible they were putting his life in danger. Was Larry armed? But the Bowen account would be a mighty ship to come ashore. He doubted Walter Muller had such a large account. They ate their soup. It was a cold cream of cucumber made from, Doris assured him,
soy
sour cream, a dollop of which still floated in each bowl, along with herbs and thin slices of cucumber.

“Florence went to the health-food store at the mall,” Doris said. “She wasn't happy about it. She's Jamaican, you know.”

“It's all very good,” said Frederick. And it was. “But really, a simple salad would have been fine.” He imagined Florence at the Alternative Grocer, pawing over the tofu patties, sniffing the nutritional yeast, hefting the fake hot dogs.

Larry appeared with the main course, a large hollowed tomato stuffed with rice and almonds and served with cold asparagus spears.

“This looks wonderful,” Frederick said. He was trying to make friends with Larry, and was also confused as to why. Wasn't Larry the goddamned
help
?

“Florence wanted to serve you boiled beef penis,” Larry said. He looked at Doris and smiled with teeth so perfect and white that one might think he'd been to the orthodontist for a round of caps. His mistress must be generous. He turned and looked toward the entrance of the house. “Didn't you, Florence?”

Frederick glanced over to see a hefty black woman hovering in the doorway. She held a huge wooden spoon which jutted from the hand she had thrust upon her hip. Had she stuck her tongue out at him? Or was she licking her lips? He wished with all his heart that he could learn to go through life without food, that he would never be forced again to break bread with the loonies. He wondered if Larry and Willy had conspired to track him down in the Bowen driveway, beat him to death with a fifty-pound bull dick. He had seen one—in reality they were ten-pounders—during an open-house visit to Herbert Stone's veterinary college. A weapon like that could probably pack quite a wallop. Larry went to fetch the dessert and coffee.

“This kind of talk has me thinking,” said Doris. She scaled his calf again with her foot. “Why don't we take a walk down by the pond?”

His head felt dizzy, his stomach woozy. Was the whole fucking world an insane asylum? He imagined the Arthur Bowen Developers account drifting away, out into the middle of the millpond on a dead leaf, disappearing forever. Now Doris was running her fork up the side of his arm, tickling him, her beautiful breasts threatening to emerge into pure sunlight at any second.

“I wish I could but I really need to run,” Frederick said. “Afternoon appointment with a client.” But Doris wasn't listening.

“Do you know what I think about, each Tuesday, when I know I'm going to see you at the IGA?” she asked.

He tried to move his arm away from the probing fork without insulting Doris, wife to those developing millions. He suddenly pitied himself, the way Chandra pitied businessmen in those notorious gray flannel suits, men who'd do anything for the almighty buck. He also felt very stimulated by Doris Bowen's advances. He imagined the two of them together, naked in the tall reeds about the immaculate millpond, her back pressed into the sweet soil, an earth goddess. He would
mount
one of the Australian swans first, in a flurry of black feathers, before he pried Doris's trim thighs apart. Zeus had
become
the swan, his
great
wings
beating
still
above
the
staggering
girl, her thighs caressed by the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill
. Christ, but Yeats had been a horny bastard. Frederick wiped a beaded row of sweat from his upper lip. He stood up, pushing back his chair.

“It's been a terrific lunch,” he said. His napkin fell onto the patio, where Larry would curse to find it later. Frederick hoped it wouldn't end up wrapped around some voodoo doll belonging to Florence, while both Larry and Willy riddled the area below the belt with sharp pins.

Doris Bowen stretched out a beautifully tanned leg to prevent him from passing. She placed a finger on his arm and made circular motions.
How
can
those
terrified
vague
fingers
push
the
feathered
glory
from
her
loosening
thighs?
Had Yeats pressed Maud Gonne into the rich, loose soil around some Irish millpond?

“I will do two things,” Doris said. Frederick wasn't sure if she had lowered her voice in order to be sexy, or to find privacy from Larry and Florence and Willy the gardener. He tried to ignore those next passionate lines of the poem, that inescapable
shudder
in
the
loins
, that
broken
wall
, oh, especially that blessed broken wall! He knew the red on his face was spreading. “I will ask my husband, Arthur, to consider your business proposal.”

Did
she
put
on
his
knowledge
with
his
power…

“And I'll wait for you next Tuesday in the parking lot. I guess I don't have to worry about you eating too many oysters in the meantime.”

I would gladly teach you

If I could only reach you

And get your lovin' in return.

Lady Willpower, it's now or never,

Give your love to me…

—Gary Puckett & the Union Gap

An
eyelash
survives
for
three
months
and
a
hair
of
the
eyebrow
for
three
weeks
, Frederick heard Mr. Bator say. It was the first month anniversary of Chandra's departure from the house on Ellsboro Street.
But
the
life
span
of
hair
in
the
human
scalp
is
six
months.
Would all his hair be brand-new by the time she returned, every strand? Would she recognize him with a pristine mane? Would she pass him on the street, thinking that his eyes reminded her of someone she had known once, maybe even loved? It was almost eleven o'clock. Frederick had shaved but was not through assessing. The shower drain had seemed a bit more clogged than usual that morning and he was worried that this item might need to be recorded on his computer file of important dates and facts. His own father, Dr. Philip Stone, had died before baldness had occurred. So had the other men in the Stone family tree, those Gregory Peck look-alikes. Frederick had studied the pictures in the Stone family album, one of the few things his mother had salvaged from her infamous yard sale. The males in his paternal family seemed to be thinning
and
receding just before the Grim Reaper snagged them. It was a sad legacy to leave one's sons, but it was a physical fact.
More
than
two
thousand
years
ago
Aristotle
noted
that
men, not women, are usually affected by baldness
, Mr. Bator reminded him.
But
baldness
is
not
exacerbated
by
the
wearing
of
hats, tight or otherwise.

“I'll remember that the next time I buy a hat,” Frederick said. The truth was, he was growing weary of Mr. Bator and wished he knew what had caused his old teacher to lurk in his hippocampus. Frederick had no doubt that Mr. Bator had set up housekeeping in there, in the dark folds of his temporal lobe. He just didn't know why. Oh, he realized it wasn't the real Mr. Bator talking to him but that, under pressure, he was rifling through some old memories he hadn't bothered with for some time, was bringing them forward in his mind in order to deal with them again. To put it in computer terms, he was downloading archival data into RAM. But the sad truth was this: remembering Mr. Bator, and those days at Portland High, and all those mornings and evenings and weekends before Chandra, before Woodstock, was painful to do in the wake of his wife's leaving him. And he had never known until Mr. Bator started talking that high school had been such a place of refuge. Now it had that warm, fuzzy glow to it, a cocoon in time, a hazy launching pad before the metamorphosis. At least he assumed there had
been
a metamorphosis. So then, what had he become? In May 1971 he had graduated from Boston University with a degree in English literature. In October of that same year he had married Lorraine Kimball, aka Chandra. But he awoke one morning in 1979 to discover that he had acquired a degree in accounting. According to most of his sixties friends—and speaking of the quintessential
metamorphosis
—this was akin to Gregor Samsa waking up as a six-foot-long cockroach. After all, people in business were the enemy. But Frederick Stone was going to represent the little businesses, wasn't he? Hadn't he said that a few times to the cabal that clustered about at wine and cheese gatherings in order to feign interest in the latest Czech poet or some dissident East German writer? What had he told Chandra's friends who pretended they were only walking the halls of academia until their novel was sold, their paintings hanging in galleries, their poetry in demand by the multitude, their papers on the Venus flytrap published? Hadn't he made vague allusions to the little businessman in Central America who could use some sound financial advice? Maybe even Southeast Asia, what with the shit having been blasted out of them with bombs and napalm and lies. He would remain concerned only for the betterment of mankind. Amid the chaffing noise and confinement of preppy business suits, he would go placidly in jeans and longish hair—that's how one could identify the Still Sincere—and maybe a gold earring bead in one ear. This sparsity of jewelry for men had of late replaced the peace symbol, hadn't it? A single earring on the male lobe meant lots of stuff. It meant
pay
attention
here, something really hip is taking place, someone astute is passing through
. And it was in keeping with the modest lifestyle of the sixties. Two earrings would be extravagant, but one, well, who was to criticize? And besides, who were these academic friends of his wife? Were they out discovering cures for cancer, publishing exciting papers that would enlighten the botanical world, digging up dinosaur bones, finding new planets? No, they were teaching by rote out of books written by other folks, tossing forth ideas thought up by other folks, discoveries by other folks, poems by other folks. Intelligence was supposed to be something that involved problem solving and creativity. Not this memorizing bullshit. So much for Chandra's academic pals. They were well worth the loss. But he had lost Chandra, too. And by the time she packed up and left, in June 1992, Frederick had no idea at all what had happened to his gold earring. He had simply cast the thing off one day, afraid its glitter might discourage an accounting client. It had probably been melted down and was now serving as the crown in Dan Quayle's back molar.

In the kitchen he took chilled bottles from the refrigerator and mixed up a pitcher of martinis, ten parts gin to one part dry vermouth. He searched in vain for a cocktail stirrer and settled for a plastic ruler instead. He churned the mixture vigorously so that the dilution would make the drink smooth and delectable. There was one thing he had learned while seeking a degree in English literature, by God, and that was how to make a damn good martini. But from now on he must buy his vermouth in pint bottles so that it could be replaced frequently. Let others take for granted the herb flavor that vermouth added to the tapestry. He strained his first martini of the day into a prechilled cocktail glass, plopped in two olives, and then drank it instantly. His esophagus burned from the chill, and he imagined it turning frosty. He let the drink settle for a minute and then poured a second. Now,
now
, he could think about Chandra.

He had not seen her since she left, not once, except for the day he followed her down Harrison Street. And that had gotten him only a glimpse of her ponytail. Twice, she had sneaked back to the house when he was away and moved out more of her belongings. Did she hate him that much? She had even taken Mike, her
Ficus
benjamina
, who did nothing—at least in Frederick's opinion—but eat plant food, drink water, and shit oxygen, all without ever leaving his pot in the corner. And while it was true that Mike had been just inches from being chucked into a fireplace blazing in Frederick's mind, Chandra could have at least given them the opportunity to say good-bye. During her last visit she had left behind a note, stating that movers would eventually retrieve her larger furniture pieces, all things she felt rightfully hers. She could have dragged the house off, as far as Frederick was concerned. And she was obviously thinking about just that.
We'll need to settle the matter of the house soon
, she had noted in a P.S. He supposed that meant paying her for half of it, or selling it outright and splitting fifty-fifty. But he still couldn't concentrate on the dollars and cents of separation, not when he longed for flesh and bone. He had truly believed, with generations of cold Stone certainty to back him up, that she would return within a few days. Now it had been thirty days. Thirty was not
a
few
, and Frederick was no longer certain of anything. Except that a well-made martini took the edge off their estrangement. He decided a toast was appropriate for the special occasion.

“Here's to a month, Chandra,” he said, raising his drink. “You heartless bitch.” Over the top of his glass, he noticed the clock on the kitchen stove, almost eleven fifteen. Not bad, really, considering his greatest chore that day was to run a second-quarter profit-and-loss statement for Thibodeau's Restaurant and Lounge. And oh, yes, he also had the quarterly payroll data to prepare for Bass & Tate Plumbers, Inc., but that could wait another day or two. All in all, he was holding tight to his schedule, just like a typical Stone. Except for the martinis, sleeping on the settee in the office, rising a bit later than five forty-five a.m., letting his hair grow, appearing almost nightly with Herbert Stone at the China Boat, having lunch almost daily at Panama Red's—which he would miss today, since it was already approaching noon—life hadn't changed too much for Frederick Stone. He no longer thought each red car he saw coming at him in the opposite flow of traffic was the Toyota. And even if one of them had been, he had a strict work schedule and couldn't be chasing all over town after Japanese products. True, he had tried the parking lot of Panama Red's a few evenings before arriving at the China Boat, and then later after leaving the China Boat. And there was no harm done—after he'd delivered a client's package—to swing by the library, wait a few minutes at the four-way stop near the post office, cruise nonchalantly past the Alternative Grocer. And yes, he'd driven down Bobbin Road every single night since Lillian had given him the address, never once to see the Toyota in the drive—not that he'd even looked—but then Bobbin Road was only a few streets away from Ellsboro. He'd used it many times since they had moved to the Victorian house. All these things he might have done anyway, even if she hadn't left. A little driving around could cleanse the brain. No, things hadn't changed too much in the month she'd been gone, except that his hair was now 10.5 millimeters longer, almost a half inch. Added to the fact that he was in need of a haircut when she left, his hair now had to be combed back behind his ears. Two young women at the China Boat had told him he looked like Jeff Bridges, the actor. That seemed a good thing, and so it pleased him. But he was experiencing one major change in his life, the greatest change. He missed her. He missed her hair sweeping over the pillow in the morning, her wet towel on the bathroom floor, her passion, her humor, her warm body in the bed next to him. Yet there hadn't been much joy between them for a long time. He could call days forward in his mind, golden days when he remembered her laughter ringing out on the Boston subway, at the Dunkin' Donuts as they bought their Sunday paper, on the beach at Old Orchard where he had recited poetry to her:
Ah, love, let us be true to one another
, a poem he admired so that he didn't have the heart to steal it. And besides, it was too famous.
For
the
world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams…
Frederick wondered what had happened to the woman he met at Woodstock and fell in love with. What had happened to her laughter?
Hath
really
neither
joy, nor love, nor light…
Was laughter like light? Did it curve depending on magnitude? It now seemed that the past, the twenty plus years of his life with Chandra, had been sucked up into some faraway black hole, a place so intensely concentrated with love and pain and joy and sadness that not even laughter, good old malleable laughter, could escape.

“Shit,” Frederick said, and poured another martini. A throbbing had begun inside his body, probably cells committing suicide. He had to do something, some physical labor, to cure the ache and loosen the pain. Maybe gardening would put his spirit in greener pastures.

Outside in the garage he searched for the shears among cans of nails, rolls of wallpaper, dried paintbrushes, boxes of Earth Day fliers. He'd never been much at gardening. Having Mike the ficus in his foster care for a month had been his only experience. And Mike was lucky because Frederick often forgot to water him. Mike, and snapping a few dead leaves from off the geranium over the kitchen sink. After all, weren't women the first agriculturalists? Frederick had been content to watch from behind the window in his office, sitting upon his spongy computer chair, while Chandra clipped, snipped, uprooted, pruned, and got dirt beneath her fingernails. But Chandra liked that kind of work. Frederick was more interested in configuring a database than in designing a flower bed.

When he finally found the shears, they had a spider's web entrenched between the handles, a small labyrinthine doily. Clearing his mind of what damage he might be doing to helpless worlds—he'd read far too much Zen during his pot days—Frederick wrenched the shears from their nail and made off with them to the backyard. He began his gardening debut slowly, by picking a dead leaf from one of Chandra's shrubs. What was the thing called? He'd heard her refer to it a thousand times. “Freddy, water the hydro-something,” she'd say. He remembered this because of
hydro
and
water
.
Hydrangea?
Yes, that was it. He picked a second leaf from the hydrangea and tried to ignore Walter Muller, who was out in his own yard, face, arms, and legs red from sunburn.

“Yo, neighbor!” Walter shouted. He waved a singed limb over his head as though it were the claw of a beached crustacean. “Great day, ain't it?” He bobbed his head at the firmament, his tentacles at work in the shrubbery. Frederick nodded a casual hello at Walter and then pretended to study the large green leaves of the hydrangea.