A Marriage Made at Woodstock (15 page)

“Ain't this about the nicest day we've had this year?” Walter asked. “Wonderful day. Couldn't ask for a better one. Just terrific.” Frederick had a sudden urge to blast him with Chandra's garden hose. He would flatten the red-armed, red-legged, white-assed gardener (he could only assume the latter was true) with a river of cold and probably chemically impure Portland water. “It is
not
a great day,” he would hiss at Walter's burned earlobe. “So don't say it again, Walter Muller.” And then he would wrest Walter's shears from his hands and use them to cut out his tongue, which he would send to Larry with a note:
Give
this
to
Florence. It will go well with bull penis.
Or maybe he'd ship it to Chandra with a different note:
I
have
freed
this
caged
tongue
from
the
terrible
fate
of
wagging.

Frederick edged his way around to the front yard, pretending to be fixated by a vinelike growth that was creeping along the red bricks of the house. He had no idea whatsoever if it was a
good
growth or a
bad
growth. He brought forth what he hoped would be an expression that lay between gardening terror and gardening pride. Walter Muller, if he knew what the vinelike creature was, could take his pick. Life appeared more colonized in the front yard, busier, a soft buzz of activities floating in the air. Up and down the street middle-aged men were milling about in their yards like locusts that surface periodically, seven-day cycles, the Saturday Cicada. Frederick could see Home Depot marigolds, geraniums, pansies, and petunias in all the yards. Home Depot hammocks hung from trees like massive nests made by oversized orioles. Home Depot shutters edged the windows. Men with aching backs stood and proudly surveyed their three-fourths acre of land, all mown and Raided and weed-eaten to perfection,
conquered
territory
. Men whose dreams swirled above their heads like small clouds stood and looked across the expanse of their tiny prairies, their Oregon Trails, their Northwest Passages. If Frederick were to peer into their eyes, he knew he would see the flicker of wagon trail campfires. And if he could lean into their ears, as though their ears were pink seashells, he would hear “Get Along Little Dogies” and “Oh, Susanna!” and “Red River Valley.” These were men whose hours are spent in real estate, in banking, in law offices, in hospitals. Men who live their entire lives in life insurance. They had probably
all
majored in English. Frederick watched as they carefully walked the circumference of their terra firma—square-foot landowners—as Home Depot children rode bikes, tossed footballs, and glided ghostlike up and down the street on skateboards.

Jesus
, he thought, a quickening in his chest as the idea of middle age engulfed him.
We're all Willy Lomans.

• • •

It was the gardening scene that precipitated the bar scene, no doubt about it. Herbert had swung by in his big Chrysler to pick him up—Frederick no longer demanded a phone call first—and now Frederick was on his second scotch when he felt a wall of pity wash down on him. It was the last place in the world he would choose as his setting: the China Boat. And these were the two last people in the world he would choose as his witnesses: Herbert D. Stone, DVM, and an unidentified female bartender impersonating a geisha.

“I don't think I can take it anymore,” he said. His words were followed by a loud crack, a fissure in the Stone facade, most likely irreparable.

“Well, if I were you,” Herbert said, “I'd hire Maggie's lawyer before Chandra gets to him. I hate to think about what might happen to you if you don't.” He hummed a few bars of the soundtrack for
Jaws
. Frederick was unable to muster up any annoyance over this remark. He wanted, instead, to explain what was happening to him, to the world he had known, to the world in which he now fretted his hour upon the stage. He wanted to point out that human beings intend, one day, to set things right with those they have once loved. He thought of his father, Dr. Philip Stone, rigid, indifferent, aloof. Didn't most people think that the day will come when everyone puts down their angst and hugs one another? But he knew, long before Chandra left him, long before Mr. Bator began prodding him to remember the guts of his past, that when a coffin lid slams shut, the noise is so loud it reverberates forever. He had intended to make lots of changes, hadn't he? To do lots of things? He was going to reread all of the Romantic poets, the Victorians, the Edwardians, too—
someone
should dust off poor Rupert Brooke—and he was going to learn chess. Delve a little into opera, just to see what all those arias were about. He was going to get a telescope and a microscope, the better to judge a few planets, a few grains of salt. He believed he might skydive at least once, hoping to come out of the experience with both ankles intact. He had always professed a desire to write poetry seriously, not just a few gratuitous iambs on demand, a few Rod McKuenisms for Chandra, as he had done back in his college days.
If
I
should
die, think only this of me: That there's some corner in a farmer's field that is forever Woodstock.
No, he would write his
own
damn verse and let Rupert Brooke, the poor bugger, rest in peace! He truly believed that he would live for a time in Europe. He would write letters home from Austria and say clever things about St. Stephen's Cathedral, the Hofburg, Freud's birthplace, the room where Franz Kafka had written such brilliant words. He could see himself now, printing in his even hand, dipping into a plum-colored ink he had found in some dusty shop. There were a thousand postcards in him still not written. Pictures of Irish castles, Stonehenge, St. Peter's Square, the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum. A thousand postcards, and each of them fluttered in his heart as he stared at his brother and this
geisha
.

“Here I am paying alimony meant for Donald Trump,” Herbert said, “and I've had less than thirty clients all week. Look at this.” He produced a napkin from off the bar and a pen from his shirt pocket. “It's all a female code, alimony is, a secret language.” On the napkin before him he drew large letters,
A
L
I
M
O
N
Y
. “Now watch,” he said. Between the
L
and the
I
he inserted another large
L
and then an
H
. He wrote an
S
between the
I
and the
M
, and then an
E
between the
N
and the
Y
. He handed the finished product to Frederick.
ALL
HIS
MONEY
. “See what I mean?” he asked. “I'm telling you, it's a secret language all their own.” Frederick scrunched the napkin into a tight ball. Herbert would soon be convinced that he was being followed by Elvis. Or that Atlantis was somewhere in Casco Bay.

“Can I get you another drink?” the geisha asked Frederick. “Anything at all?” She was leaning on her elbows, hands under her chin. Frederick considered the invitation. Perhaps he could express himself to this stranger. She was probably the closest he would ever get to Japan. And after all, geishas were expected to be knowledgeable about the elegance of the past as well as hip to present gossip. It
was
part of their job to entertain men in public restaurants. Frederick decided to chance it.

“What's your name?” he asked.

“Hannah,” she told him.

“Hannah,” Frederick said, “when my sister was born, I was told that my mother was going to the hospital to have her tonsils out. I was five years old before I realized that Polly was a permanent part of my family.”

“Ah, come on, Freddy,” said Herbert. “Is this necessary?” Frederick held up a hand to silence him. He would start at the very beginning, with those adolescent angers, and work his way up to Dr. Philip Stone's cold indifference. To his mother's sleepy impassivity.

“When I was seven my father raped me,” Hannah said. “See this?” She produced a thin arm from out of the loose sleeve of her gown. Round scars, like small craters, formed a latticework running along the ulna. “Cigarette burns.”

Frederick felt very foolish now for his revelation about Polly's birth. He didn't have a single scar to bring forth, except the one he'd received when he cut his foot on that soda pop bottle at Willard's Pond, on a Boy Scout outing. Or the one from the mumblety-peg incident, when Richard Hamel had tossed a jackknife on Frederick's hand during a particularly vicious championship game. And Richard Hamel had
cheated
as well, insisting that the knife was not leaning too close to the earth on
fives
, and he had won. Up until the day they graduated from high school and went their separate ways, Frederick had hated Richard Hamel. He looked at Hannah. Could he share his jackknife scar with her? Could he explain how it hurts to lose a childhood championship game by defraud? He decided against it. She had probably
swallowed
jackknives in her day. She would open her mouth and say, “See this?” And he would lean forward in order to look down her throat, where he would see scars on her larynx, her pharynx, her palate. My God, but she had been raped by her father at the age of seven!

“Or you could hire Larry Wells,” Herbert now said. “He'd be like
Jaws
II
. Only partially effective but not so costly.”

Frederick's felt his eyes watering. He wanted to unburden himself of the albatross, to tell his sad story to these two wedding guests. Like the albatross, he had thought himself able to stay aloft in windy weather for a long, long time. But he had been plucked out of the matrimonial skies by his wife and, again like the bird, was now living on squid, better known as tofu. He was attracted to ships' garbage, namely the China Boat regulars. He wanted to remind his brother how loud coffin lids could slam shut, and how their father's had closed with a rude
thunk
, the final insult, as he and Herbert stood by. Polly had not been there. She was busy with her own dying. Their mother had remained at home, sound asleep. But he found he couldn't talk about the family Stone, not even with a cold wind lashing about that opened fissure. He decided he would talk about
other
families. He would tell Hannah how the Brady Bunch was all grown up. And that Dale Evans was eighty years old now. It was true that even his
false
notion of family was crumbling. Even Robert Young, the dad that all of Frederick's generation had pined for on
Father Knows Best
, had attempted suicide with a rubber hose, in his garage, drunk. All the things you thought you could depend on, all the familiar landmarks, were disappearing. The Union Gap were probably all grandfathers by now.

“Wouldn't it be great if Mayberry was a place you could go to?” Frederick asked. He heard the break in his voice and knew that his composure was abandoning him. But he no longer cared. “You could go and sit on the front porch with Andy and Barney and Floyd. And Aunt Bea would bring you a bowl of homemade peach ice cream. And Opie would be having some major math problem at school that you could help solve.” It
would
be great. It would be
heroic
even, because Andy wouldn't let fathers rape their little daughters. None of the tiny Mayberrians would have a single cigarette burn. And Helen Crump would tell Opie the truth about a potential baby sister. Frederick wanted to tell Hannah how his own father had
never
touched him, and that there had been pain in that, too. He wanted to explain how he had never come to know the meaning of
family
. Instead, he had watched from a distance, at Christmastime in department stores, from a corner table in some restaurant, at movie theaters, city parks. He had always been fascinated with how a real family seemed to work, like some great pinwheel, the children colorful vanes revolving happily around the parental stick. Now, at forty-four, he wanted a pinwheel of his own. But with Chandra gone, with Polly and Dr. Stone dead, his chances were made of smoke. No wonder men like Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty seek out, in their fifties, girls so young that a dozen children lie unborn inside them. “I just wish we could all live in Mayberry.”

“Look out,” Herbert said to Hannah. “You're witnessing the nervous breakdown of the television generation.”

But Frederick was listening to another voice than Herbert's, one warm and assuring. A Robert Young kind of voice, before the rubber hose, before the bottle of booze that bleak night out in the exhaust-filled garage.
Time
is
more
puzzling
than
space,
Mr. Bator said softly,
because
it
seems
to
flow
or
pass
or
else
men
seem
to
advance
through
it. But the passage or advance seems to be unintelligible.

“Time,” Frederick said. And that's when he knew what he had to do. He knew that some scars don't show up as small round craters. That sometimes a game of mumblety-peg was all sharp, glassy edges. He would take charge of time and not let it
pass
unintelligibly
. He would advance through time like some kind of titan soldier. He would grab Cronus by those hoary, hairy balls. He stood up from his bar stool and looked at Herbert, who seemed ready to flee.