A Marriage Made at Woodstock (23 page)

“Do you ever think of Ronny at
Christmas
?” he asked. Poor Ronny. Poor bastard. Doris undid the zipper on his pants before he realized what was happening. Did young girls practice on zippers the way young boys practiced on bra snaps?

“Take these off,” she whispered. She slipped out of her white slacks and then the white sweater. They landed in soft clouds on the living room floor.

“Doris,” he said, but she put a finger against his lips.

“I
never
think of Ricky at Christmas,” she said. She searched for the front opening of Frederick's shorts. “Why remember a toaster when you're unwrapping diamonds?” She eased a warm hand inside and seemed as surprised as Frederick to find an erection growing there. “Let's take those off and put
this
on,” he heard Doris say. She produced a condom from thin air, this female Houdini, this Seeress of Safe Sex. Bless her. He was so rusty on matters of the boudoir that he couldn't remember the last time he'd bought a condom, only that it had cost a quarter and had ridges of some kind encircling the tip. That had been his own Ridged Period. She lay back on the sofa and pulled him on top of her. He positioned himself on his elbows as she helped to maneuver him inside her. This was the part he liked, the woman taking charge. He had had his share of these women from the sixties. They might have worn baggy skirts and let their hair turn gray, but they kicked ass when it came to a woman's rights. Even if they didn't want them, they still demanded them.

“Oh, Fred,” said Doris, and rolled her head about on the sofa. “Oh, Fred.” He was amazed at how hard he had become. It had been almost twenty-three years since he'd made love to anyone but Chandra. And Doris was sexy, yes, but he certainly didn't love her. He still loved his wife and yet he was able to engage sexually with this near stranger. This was another separation of the sexes: Men could procreate with broken hearts, but women would die out. Men were capable of siring large families at funeral services, teetering on the very cusp of a dead wife's grave. Frederick smiled in victory, the way he had smiled when kicking the can out from under Richard Hamel's nose, all those Ingmar Bergman years ago, and now his legs felt like they were running again, his thighs on fire, his hip muscles rising and falling, rising and falling, his
great
wings
beating
still
above
the
staggering
girl
. He heard Doris murmur from somewhere below him, rising and falling. Then she bit firmly on his neck. Frederick tried not to consider the metaphysics of a hickey at forty-four. But then Doris bit him again, much too hard this time.

“Ow,” he said. Passion used to transform pain for him, didn't it? Elevate it to another threshold? Early on in their relationship Chandra had always bitten much harder than this, and he had loved it, had risen above the stinging in some Zenlike way. Now, at forty-four, he was concerned only with permanent scarring. Not to mention a severe infection. Doris bit him a third time.

“Ouch!” Frederick said. He couldn't risk another trip to the emergency clinic. They hated him down there, he was sure of it. The receptionist probably had his picture on the wall by the water fountain.
Have
You
Seen
This
Man?
But Doris seemed to have delivered her quota of bites for the evening. She returned to tossing her head about on the sofa and murmuring his name. Frederick forgot entirely about the smarting on his neck and concentrated instead on what he was doing. He and Chandra hadn't made love in months. He had almost forgotten the hot excitement of sexual desire.
During
sexual
excitement
the
extremely
flexible
tissues
of
the
penis
become
engorged
with
blood
and
the
usually
flaccid
organ
assumes
a
rigid, enlarged position known as an erection.

“Not now, Mr. Bator!” Frederick said, much too loud. Doris reached a hand up to caress his throat, to offer her support, but Frederick had stopped rocking. He had missed the goddamn tin can altogether. He rolled onto his side.

“You call it
Mr. Bator
?” Doris giggled. “How sweet.” She began stroking his back, consoling him with her touch, Earth Goddess to the Flaccid.

“Mr. Bator's an old friend,” Frederick said, his breath short, his body still tingling.

“I bet he is.” Doris giggled again. “Can I be Mr. Bator's friend, too?” She moved her hand against the limp penis.

“Doris, please,” he said. He was thinking again of Chandra, of that night at the Fiddler's Cave, of how they sang “Mrs. Robinson.” He remembered now that they had toasted Joe DiMaggio because the words of the song reminded them of how Marilyn had broken his heart. Poor Joltin' Joe. Then they had walked against the rain back to his apartment, full of Chianti and love and the future. That had been their first night in bed together, and it had been better than kicking a can away from Richard Hamel. It had been lots better. He had had big moments in his life, hadn't he? Great moments? He just didn't have the eyes to see them, the ears to hear them.
Every
ejaculation
contains
several
million
sperm
cells
, Mr. Bator said gently,
but
only
one
of
these
can
fertilize
the
female
egg, resulting in a new human being.
Tears sprang again to Frederick's eyes.

“What would I know about ejaculations, Mr. Bator,” he cried, “with you sitting on my goddamn shoulder?” He swung a clenched fist at the air above his head.

Doris glanced fearfully between his legs, then up to his shoulder. “Is this like that movie
The
Shining
, when the little boy talks to his finger?” Doris asked.

All
the
other
sperm
cells
die
in
a
few
days
, Mr. Bator added, and now the tears were spilling from Frederick's eyes, trickling down the sides of his face. All those potential brothers and sisters, dead. What a great pinwheel they would have made. What a fireworks of a family. He was openly sobbing. Would Doris hate him for being such a wimp? He didn't care. He was a human being who had emerged one passionate night—he only supposed it was nighttime—as the result of his father's body coming together with his mother's body. Had they grown to hate each other early? Was he born of teeth gritting and knuckles clenching? Did his father's indifferent beak, like Zeus's, catch his terrified mother up in a crunching of bone? Was he, Frederick Stone, hatched from a bright blue egg, the same egg that had dropped like a tiny gum ball from Leda's body? He knew only the basic facts. His father had come home from World War II, bought a new ranch-style house, and settled down in it with his young wife. And one night Frederick had made it, from out of all those other sperm, all that sibling rivalry. He had run for the tin can and had gotten the gold instead, what with several million Richard Hamels running beside him. He had won. He was alive.

“Doris, I'm so sorry,” he whispered. He had images of Chandra and her jolly elves moving pieces of his life out onto the sidewalk.

“I'm not giving up yet,” he heard Doris say. She was wearing her white slacks again and was fumbling about with the sleeves of her white sweater. “You, me, and Mr. Bator are going to take a rain check. You might call it a ménage à trois.”

She bent and kissed the tip of his nose. From beneath her elbow, Frederick could see a white thread dangling from her sleeve. He wondered what the Sluts of Kismet had in store for him, now that they'd stripped him of his manhood. He theorized about the thread Clotho would pull from her sewing basket, the one with his name on it, maybe the very one dangling from Doris Bowen's sweater. How long would it be? How thick? How strong? Would it represent the Bowen account? His ill-fated marriage? More important, had the Vaginas of Destiny fixed it so that he could never make love to another woman? He had read somewhere that Joe DiMaggio still sent a rose every single day to Marilyn's grave. Some women you can never forget. Was Chandra's image now glued to his wavering eyelids? It was most certainly there. The smell of her thighs was lingering like Swedish strawberries in his nostrils, and the incessant beat of that Boston rain was still sounding in his ears. He had seen so little, heard so little in his life. There had been exalted moments, seconds fit for a king, but his address had been on the outskirts of humanity, too far away for deliveries. Doris was kneeling beside him.

“I love a man who cries,” she said. She wiped sweat from the meager hairs on his chest. Perhaps this pitiful watering would encourage a sprouting. “Men who cry turn me on.” She kissed the lobe of his ear.

“Doris, I'm really sorry,” Frederick said, but she stopped him.

“Don't apologize for male sensitivity, Fred. There's not a lot of it left in the world. You could ask Arthur, but he's in Scotland killing grouse. Now I better run.”

Frederick grabbed his pants and yanked them on. At the door, he accepted Doris's hug as genuine.

“She's been gone six weeks,” he said, “but I guess it was seeing her move her stuff today.”

On the front steps Doris surveyed the twilight of the neighborhood. She seemed pensive now, unlike the gushing and unrestrained woman he'd met for lunch.

“I guess your wife's stuff wasn't too shabby to take with her,” she said. “Like my stuff was. But she left the most valuable thing behind.”

Frederick kissed her hand. It was a silly thing to do, when he thought of it later, almost too cavalier. And then she was gone, back into the neighborhood smell of marigolds and the sound of bug zappers. He waited until the blue Mercedes pulled away from the curb and disappeared down the street before he turned out the porch light. He hoped he could find the strength to climb the stairs to the marriage bed, since it was a piece of furniture Chandra had left behind. He had decided earlier in the evening that it was time to move off the Shakespearean settee in his office and back to the comfortable field of the king-size mattress. Even eunuchs deserved a bit of sleep. He heard Walter Muller's dog bark, a volley of yaps, which caused him to peer out the den window at the street. Had Doris come back for her rain check so soon? That's when Frederick saw the same brown car—a Chevy, he decided—pull away from the curb and drive off into the night.

Within the prison walls of my mind

There's still a part of you left behind

And though it hurts I'll get by

Without you lovin' me, yet I

Guess there's just no getting over you.

—Gary Puckett & the Union Gap

For a full week after Chandra and her furniture left the house on Ellsboro Street, Frederick saw no one, not even the brown sedan that had been following him. At first he hadn't wanted to be alone. Shortly after Doris Bowen had put on her cloudy pants and skipped the white fantastic out of his side of town, Frederick had experienced a need to be near people, even if it was the boisterous crowd at the China Boat. He managed to catch his brother, Herbert, on his migratory car phone to ask about dinner that night. Things hadn't worked out with Christine, the couch potato, or so Herbert told him.

“Really, the biggest problem was Coy,” said Herbert. “Her youngest son.”

“Coy?” asked Frederick. “Cute name.”

“It's a nickname I gave him,” said Herbert. “It's short for coitus interruptus.”

Frederick wanted to talk about Chandra and her elflike movers. He wanted to ask questions about life and love and maybe even death. He wanted to inquire about the pinwheels that made up families, and ask if he would survive without one. He felt quite sure now that Chandra wasn't coming back. But Herbert was on a roll.

“I got a hot date tonight with a little temptress named Natalie,” he said, and Frederick could hear the click of a cigarette lighter. By the time Herbert was done singing Natalie's praises, one of which might have been that she had learned to tie her own shoelaces, Frederick felt no need to talk about the newest crisis in his life.

Two days later, when Herbert called asking him to dinner, Frederick was not interested in an evening out. He himself had a date, not with one little temptress but three: the Whores of Predestination. And he had no intention at all of wearing a condom. “I just need a few days alone,” he had told Herbert. Instead, he spent seven such days. As the China Boat was cosmopolitan enough to make deliveries, he phoned nightly for his dinner and then passed the evening sitting on the screened-in porch as neighborhood children roller-skated up and down the street. He watched lots of television. On the third day he turned the answering machine down so that he didn't have to listen as clients called in to cancel their accounts. During the long, painful nights, his hair grew silently. Unable to sleep, he lay awake and listened, hoping to hear the tiny muscles erecting the follicles, the follicles themselves secreting sebum. “Hubris, Freddy,” Chandra used to tell him. “You care too much about your damn hair.” Well, it was a good thing, he told himself, on those long black nights when only the light from Mrs. Prather's porch seeped into the master bedroom. His hair was the only living thing he could draw comfort from, in the sparsely furnished house on Ellsboro Street. His hair was his only friend. Unlike Mr. Bator, it did not appear and then disappear. Unlike Herbert Stone, it was steady, unfailing, at least for the present.

Anger was becoming his friend. At least, he and anger were now acquaintances, and he felt a strength in this. With indignation as his ally, he could begin the journey back, that horrible crusade that would take him into the whirling vortex of his life. So, on each of those nights when Frederick opened his eyes to the mottled light flickering on his ceiling, he tore away a bit of the gauze with which he'd wrapped up his past. He opened that newly formed fissure a bit more. He reminisced, is what he did. He thought of the Christmas party Chandra had given the year before. He had excused himself early in order to explore a new spreadsheet update that had finally arrived. He was curious to see how he could improve his customers' cost projections. He imagined the updated presentations would be close to dazzling. “Promise you won't run off to that damn computer?” Chandra had asked just before the guests arrived. And he had promised. But then UPS, that chariot of the gods, had rolled up to his door with a package from Midwest Micro Peripherals. Would any computer lover blame him?

And then there was her nephew's graduation from high school. Which rude lump had it been? Robbie, no doubt, because Condom Boy was currently still matriculating in high school. Having had the opportunity of late to know Robbie better, Frederick was thankful he had missed the event. He had always hated graduations anyway, including his own, so why should he attend the ceremony for one of Joyce's sons? Dr. Philip Stone had not turned up for his son Frederick's graduation. He had been invited to be the guest speaker at an orthodontist convention in St. Louis. Lying in the darkness of his bedroom, Frederick could remember the class colors, green and gold. He could even see all the streamers flying like a perfect pinwheel. What had the class motto been?
To
Strive, to Seek, to Find.
Thinking back to the problems that his generation had faced, the brutal knives of war and poverty and racism, it should have been
Angst
Now, Angst Forever
.

Then there had been the time Chandra was presented with a humanitarian award from some subterranean group called Curators of the Mother Soil, or some such. “What are they?” Frederick had asked. “Earthworms?” But to hear Chandra talk she was on her way to Stockholm to pick up a Nobel. In reality, the Renaissance Teahouse was host to the awards banquet. The event would last most of the day, beginning with brunch, speeches, then lunch, another speech or two, more presentations, more calls for environmental change, everyone would go to the bathroom, more speeches, a couple token presentations for the organizers, then Chandra's presentation, then dinner, then special thanks to the waiters and waitresses who were so kind to spend their day carting dishes about, then everyone would go to the bathroom again, and then everyone would finally go home. At least this is how Frederick imagined the day would unfold. What had he been doing that he couldn't attend? Oh yes, the Grossmire account had presented him with an unexpected difficulty. The IRS was investigating Grossmire Imports and Frederick was obliged to sit down with James Grossmire and carefully inspect canceled checks, receipts, deductions. Frederick had cautioned about those excursions to Atlantic City, which Mr. Grossmire had insisted on deducting as business trips because he brought his pretty young secretary along. Frederick had also warned him about the numerous business lunches and dinners, all of which seemed to occur at isolated little inns and motels, a safe marital distance from Mrs. Grossmire
and
the Portland business community. When it hit the fan, Frederick was obliged to see if he might find a way of turning off said fan and filtering through the windblown, shitty debris. James Grossmire was, after all, a heady client in terms of fees rendered to Stone Accounting. But Chandra couldn't understand that. “What's one more day?” she had asked. “It's twenty-four hours,” Frederick had answered. “That's a sizable amount of time when you consider that the IRS has given us only ten days to prepare. And I've got fifteen other clients whose payrolls need attending. Isn't someone going to videotape the event? We can watch it when you get home.”

Those were his nights, coming at him with incident after incident from the past, nights bringing with them the knowledge that he had become his father, the man he had loathed and loved. He had become Dr. Philip Stone, and yet he had never even sensed it. His nights were not kind ones. But after a martini lunch, he spent his days exploring the personality of the house, one that he never knew existed: the loose bottom step going down to the basement, the crack in the bathroom window, the spider hidden with its web beneath the fireplace mantel, the dust balls under the office settee, the peeling wallpaper over the kitchen sink, the wobbly hinge on the screen door leading to the porch, a small print of Degas ballerinas leaning in an upstairs closet. These were all new discoveries to him, and he was fascinated with their minute details. It had been Chandra who found and fell in love with the house. To him, it had been simply a means of shelter from extreme heat and extreme cold in a relatively safe area. Now he saw it as an interesting shell, just as his beetle neighbors had their own shells.

This metaphor in mind, he perused the house as though its rooms were chambers of his own brain. The medulla, because it was located at the lowest point of the brain, would be the basement. The main floor, the one that sheltered his precious computer, would be the pituitary gland because, like a complex computer, the pituitary was the overlord of all other glands. The upstairs, where he had now returned to sleep and shower, would be the cerebellum, which spent its time thinking about body equilibrium and muscle coordination. Frederick enjoyed the idea of running from the cerebellum down to the pituitary, or stopping in now and then to see how the medulla was doing, down there in the basement. Every so often, especially in the mornings after he had showered, he stopped in the hallway leading to the bathroom and stared up at the attic, that forbidding cerebrum. The steps leading up to the hatch door loomed before his eyes, separate lobes. Sure, he could run about in the lower parts of the house and feel comfortable. That's how he had lived most of his life, wasn't it? Or, as Chandra liked to say, that's how he had managed so cleverly to dwell on the outskirts of humanity.

But the attic, the old cerebrum, Mr. Bator's pad, well, that was another thing altogether. Up there, feelings and emotions ran rampant. There were boxes of things up in the attic that Frederick thought he'd go his whole life without ever having to sort through. He knew there would be lots of pictures up there from his married life because Chandra had told him she intended to leave such memorabilia behind. “You keep all that stuff if you want it, Freddy.” Had it been so awful that she couldn't bear to look at a photograph? At least she hadn't drop-kicked everything out onto the lawn, as Thelma Stone had done, so that neighborhood children could break open their piggy banks in order to buy his rare-coin collection. And yet, it wasn't so much the pictures of his married life that bothered him most. Those boxes he couldn't see, the ones stacked evenly in the frontal lobes,
those
gave him the greatest pause. In them were the feelings and emotions that he'd packed up years ago and put away, like clothing that no longer fits. In the tangible boxes were his earliest school papers, his letters from his parents while at college, health records, yearbooks, school honors and awards, everything archaeologists would need in shaping a life for him, were they to unearth the attic in some distant millennium. In the invisible boxes were the things he had foolishly tried to share with the geisha from the China Boat. Those were the boxes that had PANDORA BOX COMPANY stamped onto their sides.

A week into his hiatus Frederick was thinking that perhaps it was time to battle the attic boxes, taking with him a pitcher of martinis as a bodyguard, when someone rapped on the front door. He felt the nape of his neck tingle. It was a Tuesday, seven weeks since Chandra had left, if anyone was keeping track. Tuesdays used to mean grocery shopping, didn't they, in that other life he used to live? Could it be Doris Bowen? He no longer gave any thought to Bowen Developers or the massive account their business would mean. Doris was a pleasant, attractive woman, one that might fall into the friend or acquaintance category. But she was not someone for him to fall into bed with. Had she returned in the grips of estrus for her rain check? He felt his penis attempt a chin-up, then fail miserably. If Doris thought she had learned the meaning of
flaccid
the previous week, a deeper education awaited her. Maybe it was the drinking. Or maybe it was that sex and all its tempting promises wasn't important to him just then. He opened the door to let a pale Herbert Stone into the kitchen. Frederick wasn't surprised. Herbert often surfaced from his dates with pubescent women looking as though he had the bends. And now that Herbert could boast a literary agent and an editor, heaven help the pretzel shape his psyche would end up in.

“I'd offer you a chair at the kitchen table,” said Frederick, “but Chandra took the chairs
and
the table. It was a gift from her mother.” Herbert leaned back against the sink and shifted about uneasily on the balls of his feet. Frederick put on a pot of coffee. “You don't look too good,” he added.

“You look like hell yourself,” Herbert said. “You've got dark circles under your eyes. You look like the pet raccoon I treated last week.”

“Did the raccoon's wife leave him?” Frederick asked.

“Freddy?” Herbert's feet shifted again.

“Have you any idea how interesting the architecture of these old Victorian houses are?” Frederick asked. “So many ornate, flowery carvings.” He handed Herbert a cup of black coffee. He had been instantly thankful to see his brother appear like some good omen in the kitchen door. If he hadn't, Frederick was determined to tiptoe up to the attic and open the musty boxes, the certificates, the letters, the photos, the melancholic notes of auld lang syne.

“Freddy?” Herbert said again. Frederick didn't want to talk of things serious. And Herbert's tone indicated
things
serious
. Maggie was probably hauling him back into court for some
extraneare
misdemeanor. Or perhaps he had impregnated a female who was still wearing a training bra.

“How about lunch today at Panama Red's?” Frederick asked. “We can talk about your problems then. Don't tell me, let me guess. Kevin Costner and Tom Cruise are fighting over who'll play Kenny Perkins, vet vet in a Corvette. Come on, Herb, I've been eating at home all week.” He tried to pour more coffee into his cup, but Herbert put out a hand to stop him.

“Freddy,” Herbert said. “Our mother has died.”

• • •

The sun was setting over Panama City as the plane banked, causing Frederick's miniature scotch bottle to slide off the tray table and roll away on the floor below. He replaced the tray in the seat back and then leaned into the window to peer out. Far below he could see the magnificent white of the beach, a long, dazzling shoelace. The Gulf of Mexico lay beyond the glittering sand, its shallow greens turning to a thickly blue as the water deepened. He had never liked the idea of his mother moving to Florida. She had vacationed there twice in her life, successfully, and it was this experience that convinced her to leave Maine after her husband's death. Now she had lived her own death, had swallowed enough pills to ensure an unbroken sleep. No small sons playing war on the living room floor, no bell on the ice-cream truck, no loud rain on the roof, no lilting concerto would ever disturb her. Another lost coin in Florida's Fountain of Youth. Another streamer torn from the Stone pinwheel. But they would bring her back to Maine, her two sons, and put her into the earth there. Her only stipulation had been that she not lie next to her husband and all those other dead Stones in Woodlawn Cemetery. To assure this, she had purchased a small plot in another Portland cemetery, one that overlooked a clutch of pine and birch trees, where birdwatchers came to catch the spring warblers. So, like Hospitalers, like Knights Templar, Frederick and Herbert were coming to escort their mother home from her crusade. The following day, they would fly back to Portland, the coffin safely tucked into the belly of the plane, an embryo sleeping its dream.