A Marriage Made at Woodstock (9 page)

Back at his computer, he found it impossible to concentrate on work. Struggling to compile a financial statement for Susan E. Brown, one of Portland's newest chiropractors, he kept lapsing off, an image of Chandra coursing through his mind. He decided that his anxiety could be traced to the fact that he had agreed to have dinner at Joyce's, eight o'clock that evening. But being with Joyce and Reginald was better than sitting home watching the wind do wild things with the cherry tree. Or watching Herbert Stone debone another bird. He left the financial statement to fix himself a drink. He had never been into martini lunches because he never went to lunch with anyone, not unless he had to meet Chandra downtown after some protest. He decided then that if he was going to personify the Establishment to his wife—and he was quite sure that he did—he would do so with his first martini lunch.

A pitcher of martinis on the coffee table, Frederick put his feet up on the ottoman and reached for the phone, which he rested in his lap. He waited for a minute and then dialed information, only to be told that Chandra Kimball-Stone did indeed have a new phone number—oh, the speed of the nineties!—but that it was unlisted.

“But I'm her doctor,” Frederick insisted. “Her test results are in and, quite frankly, I think she'll wanna know about this.”

“Sir,” the operator said. “I didn't get off the bus to Portland yesterday.” She was far too imperious for Frederick. He suspected the day
before
yesterday as her arrival time.

“But what if she dates your son?” he was asking as the operator disconnected him. The whole damn world was disconnecting Frederick Stone, and there he was, floating away like some kind of boat person.

Frederick poured another charitable martini and sipped at it. He had never had an easy time with women, it was true. His mother had been distant and aloof—why else would she have ended up with Dentist Stone?—and Frederick remembered how she began to sleep later and later into the day as the years wore on. Afraid to wake her, he and Herbert waged silent wars with their toy soldiers, soundless canons firing, troops marching in long, quiet columns, thousands of boots with ghostly footfalls, airplanes dropping muted bombs, mouths opening in hushed pain, guts spilling silently onto imaginary plains. Maybe this was why, when Walter Cronkite brought the noisy Vietnam war right into American living rooms, Frederick was ready to be a pacifist. He just couldn't stand the racket of war. He could thank his mother for that.

And he hadn't known much about his sister, Polly, except that she had grown up pale and pimply, four years younger than he. He had been told that his mother had gone to the hospital to have her tonsils removed, but she had returned three days later with a baby girl swaddled in pink. For years Frederick would get this demented urge to stand up at Sunday dinners, to fling the peas and carrots, to shout, “Liars! Liars!” at his parents. Instead, as he and Polly grew toward adulthood, he observed his sister from a distance, she with her hair rolled up tightly in brush curlers, her eyebrows plucked into thin upside-down smiles. When he thought of Polly, he thought of her in terms of
things
: a garter belt hanging over the rod of the shower curtain, the nylons still attached to it like puffy legs. Eyebrow tweezers lying on the back of the commode and looking very much like some miniature instrument of medieval torture. Or, once in a while, a white cotton slip with the faint outline where a bloodstain had been. He thought of her as
smells
: the cloud of Johnson & Johnson baby powder, nail polish, some brand of perfume she was always ordering from a catalog, the aroma of her winter sweaters as they lay drying on newspapers in the laundry room. One day she simply disappeared, ran off to Connecticut with a dental student named Percy Hillstrip, her father's apprentice, whom she had married after a quick courtship. She was seventeen years old and uninterested in college. She seemed happy enough to bear children in a suburb of Hartford, in between typing up bills to be sent to Percy's clients.

When his sister left, Frederick had been in his last year of college, coming home to Portland only once a month. Thinking about it now, all he could remember about Polly's departure was that something had been different about the breakfast table. He tried vaguely to recall, with the pitcher of martinis imploding, if he had ever spoken one truly complete sentence to Polly in all those years they had shared the same house. Dentist Philip Stone had often noted that Polly was the major disappointment of his life, his two sons being minor ones. “He hates Polly,” Mrs. Stone once noted, “because she's committed the sin of happiness.” Each Yuletide, Frederick had received pictures of Polly's kids, two boys and a girl, signed “To Uncle Fred with lots of love,” and in Polly's handwriting. One Christmas the children were standing with their heads poked through a sheet with three holes in it. Around the holes, his sister had painted yellow halos. He wondered where the picture was now—Chandra saved everything—and how old that niece and those nephews must be. Polly had died in 1984 of ovarian cancer, two months after Dr. Philip Stone himself finally succumbed to the weak heart that had claimed so many handsome male Stones. Frederick didn't wonder about his father's life, but he sincerely hoped that his sister's short one had been happy, that her
sin
had been great.

And he had always wished that his mother could be happy. But long before her husband died, Mrs. Stone had slowly turned into Miss Havisham, wearing funeral black instead of wedding white. The petunias hadn't time to root on her husband's grave before Thelma Stone carted all of the movable household items, except for some clothing and the huge family scrapbooks, out onto the front lawn of her ranch-style home and offered them to the public for piddling amounts. Potential buyers were encouraged to shop inside the house as well, to browse among the heavy pieces which a thin widow could not budge. This was the same house that Philip Stone, an army captain, had come home from World War II to purchase. The ranch style itself had been new then, an architectural dream. And it was the same ranch-style house he had brought his young bride to, the house where he raised his family. His rare-coin collection went for five dollars, his grandfather's solid oak desk for ten. By the time Thelma Stone phoned up her sons and announced that she was selling the ranch-style house for five hundred dollars—in case one of them wished to buy it—Grandmother Stone's grand piano had been whisked away for twenty-five dollars.

“I'm moving to a condo in Florida,” Thelma Stone had told Frederick. “The only snow I want to see from now on will be on a Christmas card.”

“Mother,” Frederick had pleaded. “You can't put all our family heirlooms in a yard sale!”

“This isn't a
yard
sale,” she had answered. “It's a
life
sale. If you want the house, bring cash.” By the time Herbert and Frederick had roared into the drive of the ranch-style home, even tourists were clambering about, inspecting the silver, sniffing at Philip Stone's custom-made suits. That was the day Herbert, with assistance from the family lawyer, became executor of his mother's estate. Thelma Stone had gotten her Florida condo, while the ranch-style home sold a year later for nearly a quarter of a million dollars. The last time Frederick visited his mother, three years earlier, she was resplendent in her black regalia, which was topped off with enormous black sunglasses. She was Miss Havisham in a little white condo on the beach, a finicky Pekingese on the sofa beside her. So much for family values.

• • •

Frederick was still tipsy from his first martini lunch when he arrived at Joyce's house for dinner. He was wearing the one hundred percent cotton sweater Chandra had bought for him on his birthday, wool being on the outs. Joyce was still thirty pounds overweight, but she had Chandra's same nose, same copper-colored eyes. Her husband, Reginald, was still dull. Yet they appeared genuinely glad to see him, Joyce giving him a quick kiss on the cheek and Reginald emphatically shaking his hand.

“Martini,” Frederick said when Reginald gestured toward a small bar in the living room. He watched as Joyce fetched a platter of munchies, listened as Reginald shook ice in a pitcher. He felt immensely hypocritical. Hadn't he helped Chandra lambaste Joyce and her husband for years, measuring one of their handicaps against another? Reginald, who taught high school history, was hard of hearing. Frederick had always assumed that years of listening to Joyce's whine had eroded his brother-in-law's eardrums. Eaten them away for good. The anvil, the hammer, the Eustachian tube, all turned to jelly under the bombardment of sound waves. Now Frederick was mildly embarrassed that he had ever thought ill of Joyce. After all, she had taken him in when his own wife didn't seem to want him. He felt a comfort in being in Joyce's home, that his presence there connected him in some psychic way to Chandra. Joyce was Chandra's sister, would always be Chandra's sister, forever linked. Frederick, on the other hand, might not always be her husband.

As he waited for his drink, he mentally counted the Avon knickknacks which Joyce had tiered on a shelf over the sofa. In a mass-produced artwork next to the row of Avon treasures, some orphan-looking children, those little urchins with eyes like dark plums, stared at him judgmentally. They seemed to know that Chandra had dumped him.

“Lorraine was always flighty,” Joyce said as she fixed herself a drink, something with butterscotch schnapps in it. Watching Joyce's mouth move, heart-shaped and small, was like watching Chandra's own. “I'll be honest with you, Freddy. I'm really surprised that it lasted this long.
Really
surprised. And so is Reginald. Aren't you, honey?”

“WHAT'S THAT?” Reginald asked too loudly, as those with hearing problems often do. Joyce's question had bounced him out of his torpor, however, and he handed Frederick a fresh martini. A shock of reddish-gray hair cascaded down over one of Reginald's eyes, both of which sat behind silver-rimmed glasses. He reminded Frederick of some English gamekeeper who'd just come in from the weekly rabbit kill, a Mellors kind of chap, sniffing at Lady Chatterly's hem, a little too close to nature for his own good.

“
Very
surprised,” Joyce added.

“Are you saying you think my marriage is over?” Frederick heard a distinct panic in his voice. He felt a wild terror rising in his chest. It would be so lovely just to see Chandra again, just to speak to her, touch her hair. This was cruel and unusual punishment, this abandonment, this hiding out, forcing him to seek companionship from Joyce and Reginald. Cruel and unusual. “There's counseling, after all. And who understands counseling better than Chandra? Surely, you can't think it's over?” Joyce stared at him with intense interest, studying his face closely.

“Are you suicidal?” she asked. “It's okay to tell me.”

A grass-green bird with a yellow head and bluish tail swooped into the living room in a burst of chirps and squawks, circled the ceiling once, and then was gone.

“THERE GOES BUDGIE!” Reginald said.

“Of course I'm not suicidal,” said Frederick. “I just don't want a divorce.” He could feel sweat forming on his brow, his face flushing.

“Well, I know you're not
stupid
,” said Joyce. She was dipping a carrot into sour cream. “That's why I assumed that you must be suicidal.”

“CAN WE EAT?” Reginald asked. “LASAGNA, RIGHT?” Frederick promised himself that he would examine his own portion of lasagna carefully, just in case Budgie had been hit with a fit of diarrhea while airborne in the kitchen.

“Joyce, this isn't making me feel better,” he said. He longed to ask:
Didn't you invite me over here to make me feel
BETTER
, you insidious troll?
He said nothing. His eyes had begun to burn.

“VEGETARIAN LASAGNA?” Reginald wondered. Above his head, the plum eyes of the urchins seemed to be growing even sadder.

“Yes, vegetarian, to accommodate Freddy's lifestyle,” Joyce explained.

“I really don't think divorce is in the air at this point,” Frederick said, more to himself. Maybe
Budgie
was at least listening.

“Horsefeathers,” said Joyce. She wagged a finger. “You're going through denial, mister.” Frederick tried to smile, then realized that it probably came off more like a tic. What was he doing in this abominable house? With this deaf man and this insufferable woman. He hoped Chandra was satisfied.

“TIANANMEN SQUARE WAS A NASTY MESS, WASN'T IT?” Reginald said, as Joyce ushered them all into the dining room. English ivy seemed to be rampant. It curled about door casings, wound around lamps, encircled picture frames. It was like being in an immense terrarium. Any day now and the family would need machetes just to find the table. Joyce shuffled Frederick over to a chair next to a sullen young man. He had met Joyce's two sons before, at those demented family holidays, and remembered them only as rude lumps.

“We're getting Bobo a toy poodle,” Joyce said as they sat down. “For company,” she added.

“It's nice to see you again, Bobo.” Frederick nodded at the boy. Joyce laughed. Even Reginald heard well enough to appear entertained. Something rustled in the ivy.
Budgie.

“And you say that
my
generation is dumb,” the young man said to Joyce. He shook his head in disgust. “Freakin' incredible,” he added.

“Bobo's our cat,” Joyce said. Frederick heard Budgie give a low squawk.

“I see,” he said. He finished the martini and nodded appreciatively as Reginald poured more from the pitcher. Joyce rattled ice in her glass, swirling it around. Directly above her head a huge pot of ivy cascaded down in long strands. From her position beneath the plant, Joyce had a massive head of ivy-green hair, all the leaves neat as curls. She crunched an ice cube.