Amateurs (9 page)

On their respective housing applications, John and Archer had reported an interest in music, French, and late but quiet hours, presenting themselves as more placid and artsy than they would prove to be, and in fact John's interest in music didn't run much deeper than Archer's commitment to French. Funny how they'd been matched so impeccably through misrepresentation, though the Freshman Dean's Office would have had other interests, class mingling maybe
chief among them. John, though never a dynamo, grew less retiring than he'd been at home, partly owing to the boost of Archer's quick acceptance, the unbelievable fact that someone like Archer enjoyed his company. Their suite's third resident, an intimidatingly focused mathematician, may even have seen Archer and John as out-and-out partiers, though that was wide of the truth.

Back at his apartment, John took off his tie by undoing the knot rather than brutally pulling and stretching the thing, inserted cedar shoe trees into his bench-made wingtips, and brushed his suit while a kitchen timer rattled for three minutes. Based on past experience, Archer would eventually call to make good on the proposed jog, but it would take a while. Better, sometimes, to remind him. He wrote
CALL
A on his wall calendar, then inserted an arrow to move the call date ahead a few days, lest an exact two weeks seem too planned.

May 2011

“That you, Ania?”

Sara took the stone path from the driveway to the patio, rounding her shoulders apologetically as she entered George's field of vision. “No, Grandpa, it's Sara.”

“Of course it is,” he said, perhaps guessing her visit was forgotten rather than unexpected.

“Sorry to just turn up on your doorstep like a foundling,” she said. Her father, Chick, had insisted on the surprise element. “I had some business in Chicago; then my phone died.”

“These phones!”

She sat down on the chaise longue. The Japanese garden had fallen into somewhat embarrassed circumstances, but the patio was in good shape, the nearby hedges trimmed, the grass mowed. “Beautiful day,” she said loudly.

“I can hear you.”

Only planning to stay for a few days, she needed to gather as much info on George's lucidity as she could without getting full-on interrogational. “Isn't Ania dead, Grandpa?”

“Yes, that's right.” A brief hush. “I suppose I've taken to calling her daughter by that name.”

“Would it help to write down—”

“She doesn't correct me but sometimes flinches.” He took a sip of what looked to be bourbon. He was wearing an open cardigan over a gas-blotted guayabera, formerly his yard-work shirt. “Fix you anything?”

“No, thank you, I'm fine.”

“Marion loved Dr. Pepper. She'd add rum and think we didn't notice.”

“That sounds like her,” Sara said, not sure if it did. “Feeling all right since your fall?”

“Fine, fine.”

Squirrels shook an oak branch.

“These chairs look good,” she said. She patted the meshed vinyl between her legs.

“John refurbished them.”

“Ah.”

“It took several years.”

“Where is he, anyway?”

“I don't know.”

“At his other job?”

“Yes.”

“And what do you make of—”

“Well.” George put his hands on his knees and stood up. “Nap time.” Gesturing toward the trees, he added, “Though with these damn birds you can't get a lick of sleep.” He made his hand into a beak.

“I might catch a few winks myself. Think I'm coming down with something.”

“Mi casa . . .”

This was the second time in five years that Sara had been asked to run reconnaissance on her grandfather, as well as the second time in five years that she had visited him. She had promised to join what remained of the family for Thanksgiving '09 but had bailed at the last minute, citing a freelance deadline, the imminence of which was significantly exaggerated. She thought the excuse would seem more plausible if she told her dad that she had procrastinated on the assignment, that she had already asked for two extensions, that the editor was on the cusp of dismissing her as a deadbeat. (Why, she later asked herself, were her lies so self-incriminating?) She wasn't racked with guilt over her grandfilial neglect, but it needled her now as she snooped around George's abandoned office and sporting den, its walls decorated with dusty-nosed African hunting trophies, its closet equipped with superannuated tennis gear, a teal vaporizer, an armory of redundant windbreakers. She lay down on the daybed and resumed reading an oppressively acclaimed novel in which so far there were two incorrect subjunctives. Despite the ambient chirping, George was snoring in the bedroom across the hall.

Chick had requested and funded both visits, the funding unnecessary but accepted without protest. The first trip, around Christmas of '06, sought to determine whether George could go on living independently in the house he and Phyliss had bought sixty years earlier; the second sought to determine whether he could go on living under the suspect care of John Anderson. Chick had recently passed through Lammermuir and had ideas of his own, but he was looking for a second opinion, or he wanted to poke the embers of Sara's loyalty. “You won't want to see him next in his coffin,” he had said over the phone, though as a rule the Crennels were cremated.

Loath as she was to admit it, Sara's inspection so far told of John's professionalism. The house was clean and in many spots obsessively ordered; the kitchen was stocked with healthful food; a promising
menu was taped to the fridge. George was grouchier than in his younger days and no longer consistently rapier, but for a man born before the establishment of the League of Nations, he was in good health. He didn't seem hobbled by his recent fall. Still, Sara resented John's weaselly presence here. He had horned in on the caretaker-factotum search back in '07; then, like Dick Cheney, he'd nominated himself to Chick (busy and suggestible) as the fittest candidate. He was the main reason she had reneged on that Thanksgiving.

Chick didn't think John should still hold an outside job, selling navy blazers and orange polo shirts part-time at some mall, but Sara was glad now to have a few quiet hours before she had to face him. She blew her nose, dropped the tissue on the floor. The last time she'd lain on this daybed was the night after her grandmother's funeral, only a few weeks after Sara's sixteenth birthday. The dominant notes during dinner had seemed to Sara deficiently reflective, everyone talking and asking about the usual things: hockey and Newt Gingrich and O. J. and what classes one was taking, what plans one had for college. Over dessert, the oldest extant cousin casually applied a slur to Carol Moseley Braun and wasn't properly rebuked. Sara retreated to George's den shortly thereafter. Fifteen minutes later, Aunt Marion was leaning against the doorjamb. “Mind if we hide out together?” she asked.

“Yeah—I mean, no.” She closed her book. She'd brought two on the trip:
Foucault for Beginners,
one of several illustrated précis from a series she'd been collecting for about a year; and the Mary Gaitskill book she was about to finish.

“Don't mind Grace,” Marion said. “She's a pig, but it's too late.”

“She's nice, usually.” The Crennels weren't without their divisions, which sometimes led to all-out enmity and estrangement. Sara had noticed her father and Steve, Grace's son, roll their eyes at each other during Marion's eulogy. The gesture was true to form but disappointing, even considering the eulogy's shortcomings, its weird
braid of sanctimony, local history, and score settling. Marion, typically a no-show at family events, was often spoken of in joking terms, and Sara could never tell to what degree hostility outbalanced affection in this ridicule, or if the hostility was mostly that of the bully or mostly that of the castoff. Sara had only met Marion four times aside from unremembered baby meetings, but she idolized her as the cool Crennel, the one with ties to avant-garde film and Subaru loads of yellowing radical bona fides. For much of the seventies and eighties Marion had been a social worker in Berkeley. Now she and her partner ran a catering business.

Marion stepped into the room, sat sideways on an easy chair, and lit a cigarette. “Looks like I'll have my first and last smoke in the same room,” she said. They were in Marion's former bedroom, Sara was reminded. Marion described how it had been furnished in the fifties and early sixties: the squat bookshelf, the peach vanity, the Japanese tissue-box cover. Then she asked about the Gaitskill book. Few took an interest in Sara's reading, except sometimes to argue that she was doing it too much or at unsuitable times. “When I read her,” Sara said, “it makes me want to write, to write for people, I mean, because I want to make someone else feel how I feel when I read her.” Marion smiled—not condescendingly—and said she'd felt the same way when she discovered Doris Lessing. It didn't seem that Marion was saying she'd felt the same way because youthful feelings pass like batons from one generation to the next, but rather that they, Marion and Sara, were really alike, akin in spirit as much as in blood. Marion had even written a novel, she said, or most of one, but had never shown it to anyone, not even to Corinne. “Wow,” Sara said. “But,” Marion advised, “you shouldn't be so clandestine.” A few days later, with a receptive, sophisticated reader in mind, Sara started working harder than ever on her writing. For her that meant slowly and sedulously, and by the time she had two presentable pieces, Marion was sick. Sending her the stories no longer seemed appropriate, or
rather the stories no longer seemed appropriate, too trivial for a dying woman's time.

Now she heard John entering through the mudroom. They met in the kitchen. His beard was fuller than before and ended in a curling point.

“Whoa!” he said.

“Sorry to ambush you—I'm not ambushing you. My dad asked me to pop in.”

“He did? He was just here, not two months ago.”

“He worries, is all,” she said.

“This about that fall? Like I said, it wasn't bad. Missed his hip altogether. I just reckoned you should know—Hey, George.”

Her grandfather was coming down the long hallway in a different cardigan, past Chick's old bedroom and its blanched baseball pennants, past the so-called front door on the side of the house, past the second bathroom and el cuartito, finally to the kitchen. “Sare Bear take you unawares?” he said.

“The more the merrier,” John said.

George glanced toward the fridge and touched his stomach. “Tengo hambre, Juan.”

For dinner John served rosemary chicken, brown rice, and a quinoa salad brightened by cubed cucumbers and gibbous watermelon.

“No bread?” George said.

“There's rice, Grandpa.”

“Is rice bread now?”

“And quinoa,” Sara said. “If anything, there's an excess of grains.”

Unfazed, John got up to close the sliding glass doors that looked out on the patio and garden. On his way back to the table, he touched Sara's shoulder. “Nice cashmere.”

“It's a blend.”

He sat down, reached over to feel the sleeve, knitted his brow. “Can't be a blend.”

“John.”

“I'd trust Beau Brummell on this one,” George said.

“How's the editing and whatnot going?” John asked.

“I'm still making a living. Lucky in this market.”

“Yeah, Archer says it's a squeeze.”

“Early in the season for watermelon,” George said.

“I can't wait for Archer's new one,” John said. “He posted a rave review from
Circus
the other day.”

“
Kirkus.
” A slip—Sara's: she was trying to grow out of these pointless corrections. Also, it wasn't a rave.

“That's the one,” John said.

“Was he ‘humbled'?”

“Don't recall him saying anything along those lines. You'll be at the wedding, right?”

She sensed that he already knew for certain she would be there. If only he were less pathetic, she could feel better about finding him insufferable. “Yes,” she said.

“This is the wedding I told you about, George.” John's tone was artificially upbeat.

“That Greek's wedding?”

“Greek? No, he's Ukrainian. Half Ukrainian.”

“Early in the season for watermelon. Not too bad, though.”

“Kristen Hanson will be staying here while I'm away.”

“Fine.”

“After dinner,” John said to Sara, “maybe you'd want to take a peek up in the attic at some of your grandma's old clothes. Some great pieces up there.”

“She had a wonderful eye,” George said.

“There's a tweed skirt suit with a Givenchy sort of look.”

“I went through that stuff years ago, John. Most of it doesn't fit me.”

“If there's something you like, it'd be no trouble for me to let it out 'fore you leave.”