A Marriage Made at Woodstock (18 page)

“What a prick,” said Herbert.

“It wasn't really Mr. Bator, of course, but I was simply fed up and, well, you remember all those stories that went around Portland High about Mr. Bator. You know, how he lived with another man and all, and how someone had seen them holding hands on the ferry to Peak's Island. I'm really ashamed of myself for calling him a closet homosexual because those were troubled times and he was a high school teacher. It must have been really rough on him.”

“So you called
him
a closet homosexual and not
me
?” Herbert asked. Frederick nodded. “You're losing it, Freddy. Do yourself a favor. Get a lawyer. Get divorced. Get on with your life.” He gave the salt and pepper shakers back.

“I wish Mr. Bator were still around,” Frederick said then.

“Master Bator,” said Herbert. “I haven't thought of him in years.”

“Don't call him that,” said Frederick.

“
Everybody
called him that.”

“Well, don't you do it. And besides,
I
never called him that. I liked Mr. Bator. He was very kind to me.”

“How kind?” Herbert asked.

“Herbert!”

“I'm just kidding you,” Herbert said. “Relax, for crying out loud.” The waitress appeared with their checks and Frederick beckoned that he would take them both. He gave her his weary American Express card.

“Do you know what happened to Mr. Bator?” he asked.

“No, I don't know what happened to him,” said Herbert. “I don't know what happened to Amelia Earhart either.”

“I wish Mr. Bator were still around to talk to,” Frederick said.

“He must be dead,” Herbert said. “We're talking over twenty-five years since he taught us.”

“That's the thing,” said Frederick. “He was old to us kids back then. But he's probably only in his sixties now.”

“Master Bator,” said Herbert. “I'd forgotten about him.”

Had Frederick really missed Herbert this past week? He had signed the check—Herbert needed to dash back to the clinic—and was waiting for his receipt when he happened to spot none other than Joyce, his sister-in-law, sitting at a table in the no-smoking section. He was about to wave a quick hello until he recognized one of her lunch companions. Robbie. The purloiner of wives. At first Frederick couldn't bring himself to look at the face of the third diner. He kept his eyes on Robbie instead, until he could stand it no longer. It was Chandra, all right.
Dark
eyed, O woman of my dreams.
He could only stare. Conversation came and went around him. Words buzzed in his ears, but he could understand no language. Time had stopped. He felt it stop, a quick jolt to the senses, and then a dreamlike reality of floating up from his table. He heard Herbert speaking, saw him standing, his mouth moving, his eyes happy again. He watched as Herbert disappeared into the foyer, but he had been cut afloat from the rest of the world. He was bouncing somewhere just above his table at Panama Red's. And from this new position, he could see only his wife, Chandra Kimball-Stone, her face more beautiful than he had remembered, than any picture could pretend her to be. Had he noticed before the choreography that occurred when she lifted her fork to her mouth? He could write long poems about how she buttered a roll, sonnets in how she sipped from a glass of water. And her mouth! Had he even realized that when she spoke her lips moved like a red liquid over her white teeth?
The
lips
are
two
fleshy
folds
surrounding
the
cavity
of
the
mouth
, said a familiar voice.

“But aren't they lovely folds, Mr. Bator?” Frederick whispered.

They
are
composed
of
the
skin
covering
the
outer
surface, mucous membrane covering the inner portion, connective tissue, and a ring of muscular tissue and the artery that supplies blood.

“It would be so wonderful to kiss those lips, Mr. Bator.”

The
functions
of
the
lips
include
feeding
and
speech.

“And kissing, Mr. Bator, the functions include kissing.” He saw her laugh, a laugh that caused her to throw her head back, throat exposed. Joyce was laughing, too. Robbie was laughing. See Joyce laugh. See Chandra touch Robbie's arm. See Robbie smile.

He realized that the waitress was talking to him, the usual restaurant niceties about having a good day and coming back real soon. Frederick saw before him the check he had signed and his American Express receipt. He stuffed the receipt into his shirt pocket and then walked to the door. He hoped Chandra hadn't noticed him. He would hate to disrupt her merriment, and the truth was that she was merry. Even with Joyce, she was
merry
. She hadn't been merry around him in how many years? A lot of them.

He walked, is what he did. In spite of his sore ankle just recently workable, he walked. He left his car in a far corner of Panama Red's parking lot and went for a stroll down along the water. Sandpipers raced in ahead of the waves. People ambled on the beach. Dogs left their wet prints behind as they tore down the strand, becoming black bouncing dots until they finally vanished. Frederick walked. He had abandoned his shoes and socks beside a bench at the pier, and now the water and sand rode up between his toes. He wanted to talk to Mr. Bator about laughter, about why Chandra would share it with some people, not others. Not him. Laughter was a strange vehicle. Humans use a few muscles to laugh that would be unused otherwise. If you tickle a month-old baby, he will laugh a genuine laugh. Why does that happen? Frederick passed a volleyball game in progress, university students, judging by their T-shirts. Their own laughter followed him down the beach.

“When a human being laughs, Mr. Bator,” said Frederick, “the diaphragm moves up and down and the outgoing air stimulates the larynx. The sound that this action produces is known as a
chuckle
.” He heard Mr. Bator himself laugh, a resonant, ghostly laugh, as he had done one morning in class, more than twenty-five years earlier. There had been a huge chart of the human skeleton hanging at the front of the classroom, and someone had drawn a large balloon coming out of the skeleton's mouth. Inside the balloon, they'd written
Ha! Ha!
in large block letters. “Okay, class,” Mr. Bator had said. “I think this is a good time to talk about the mechanisms of laughter.” He had been such a good teacher, an excellent teacher. What difference did it make that he lived with another man? What injustice was there in touching the hand of someone you love, on a ferry boat ride, on a summer night? “They were on the
ferry
boat, get it?” Richard Hamel had joked. God, but he had hated Richard Hamel, mumblety-peg cheat that he was.

“That was me, Mr. Bator,” Frederick said. “I was the one who drew the balloon on the chart.”

Several herring gulls floated like old dreams above his head. The organic smell of the ocean, of things living and growing, things dying and rotting, came and went on the breeze. He thought of Chandra's larynx being stimulated by the diaphragm moving up and down, up and down.
Ah, love, let us be true to one another, for the world which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, is a world where things grow in order to die, where women like Hannah look over their shoulders as a life's vocation, where fathers and mothers sometimes make big mistakes, where war comes and goes like a shower of rain.
Bouncing black dots had appeared far down the strand. He watched them race toward him, getting larger and larger until they were dogs again. In the distance a firecracker erupted, a hangover from the Fourth of July, which had passed in a panoply of fireworks, colorful pinwheels filling up the skies. Frederick walked on. Evening was coming in full force when he finally returned for his shoes and socks, to discover them gone. Why would someone want a pair of used shoes and socks? What was wrong with some people?

He went barefoot into the liquor store for the bottles of gin and vermouth, and then into Cain's Corner Grocery for the olives. He had gin and vermouth and olives at home, but he didn't want to chance running out of anything. Let Herbert say he was overreacting. There was no doubt in his mind that the Big Drunk was the next step in his life, a ceremonial rite to be observed. Many people of both sexes, nice folks who've been
extraneared
by their loved ones, had most likely been down to the liquor store, followed by a visit to Cain's Corner Grocery for the olives. One can't avoid the Big Drunk. It was probably even mentioned in some of those self-help manuals:
First
comes
Denial, then Anger, then the Big Drunk, then Acceptance.
He would be a better man—he had no doubt of this—in the morning.

By the time he unlocked the kitchen door, his bag of bottles clinking happily in his arms, he was limping again. There were two messages on his answering machine. The first was from Herbert, announcing that he'd be at the China Boat later in the evening for after-dinner drinks with the elderly Susie, in case Frederick felt like dropping by. The second was from Lillian, his mother-in-law.

“Frederick, dear,” Lillian's message began. “Lorraine was by today to pick up Joyce for lunch and, well, she confessed that the address she gave me, the one on Bobbin Road, was a false one. She seemed to think I'd give the real one to
you
. I'm calling, of course, because I wouldn't want you to go over there and—” He rewound the words. They passed in a vigorous whir.

“Blah, blah, blah,” he said. In the kitchen, he mixed up a pitcher of martinis and then hobbled with it into the living room. He found his
Greatest
Hits
of
Gary
Puckett
& the Union Gap
and put in on the turntable.
Woman, woman, have you got cheating on your mind? Why am I losing sleep over you? Lady Willpower, it's now or never. Young girl, get out of my mind.
He wondered how old the Union Gap were when they had their Big Drunk. Younger than forty-four, he'd guess. Oh sure, he'd puked his guts out on prom night, but that was understandable. In those days a high school boy drank whatever he could steal from his dad's liquor cabinet. Because Dr. Philip Stone was a teetotaler, Frederick's old school chum Nicholas Dimopoulos had agreed to bring the booze. How could Frederick know that Nick would turn up with four bottles of ouzo?

The first pitcher was a pushover. He made a second, adding a touch more gin to this batch. In his glass the olive sank to the bottom like a little green submarine. Or better yet, Alvin, the round underwater camera that nosed all through the
Titanic
, finding a bottle of wine still unbroken, bits of dishes, jewelry. The only thing Alvin didn't pick up was the melody of that last song, played as the big ship sank. Frederick had always imagined that it was down there somewhere, lingering, floating about the ballroom maybe, stealing down to the captain's quarters on lonely nights. Would he have stood and sung as the great vortical mouth of water rose up to take him down? Or would he have donned a dress and tried to sneak into a lifeboat with the other girls? “You never went to Vietnam, did you?” Herbert had accused. “You went to Woodstock.” Well, what of that? War was wrong. Even Herbert Stone agreed to that. But Herbert Stone hadn't wanted to go to college right away. He wanted to sow a few oats, travel about the country. What he got instead was drafted. Frederick, on the other hand, managed to stay at Boston University with a straight-A average. College material, not Vietnam fodder. Was he scared to go to Vietnam?

“You bet I was,” he confessed, and raised his martini glass high. “I was scared shitless.” That didn't make war any less wrong, did it? Herbert could have gone to Canada. A lot of guys they knew did that. A lot more guys they
didn't
know went to Canada, like Jesse Winchester, the singer. Look at all those songs he wrote as a result! And besides, Woodstock was a lot tougher than Herbert gave him credit for: all that rain, only the occasional sandwich, a poor sound system. Jesus H. Christ, but he had GONE TO THE WRONG HOUSE! He had knelt before the bedroom window of complete strangers, had fallen from their slate roof, had flattened their bush! He had been trying his martini best to ignore the consequences of Chandra's using a fake address—Bobbin Road was so familiar to her, of course, she'd choose that—but he found he couldn't escape it. How cruel, that's what he kept thinking. How absolutely
cruel
.

“Mr. Bator?” Frederick said, his eyes tearing. “Can you believe what she did? Don't you want to discuss female deception down through the ages?” A short silence followed. “Answer me, Mr. Bator, damn you!” Frederick shouted. “We can start with Eve, and then Delilah, and then Cleopatra! And don't forget what Elizabeth Taylor did to poor Eddie Fisher!” There was no reply. Mr. Bator had obviously crawled into the thick blankets of Frederick's temporal lobe, had locked the door and fallen asleep. After all, nobody wants to listen to a drunk.

Frederick both limped and staggered into his office and flicked on the light. There was the blasted picture of Chandra and him at Woodstock. They were kids, just fucking kids. How could they know what might lie ahead? How could they ever dream that one of the roads they would choose one day, for different purposes, would be Bobbin Road? His eyes were now blurry with tears. He flopped into his chair and pulled open his desk drawer. Was that it? No, that was a box of staples. Ha! Ha! He laughed the same laugh he had given to the skeleton. Was
that
it? No, that was a stack of index cards upon which he had scribbled poem ideas for many years and had yet to computerize. There it was. He retrieved the old address book, the one with his mother's phone number in Florida. There had never been any need to computerize numbers he rarely used, and his mother's was certainly one of them. So was the number in Connecticut, where Polly's survivors lived. His head bobbed suddenly, and it made him chuckle.