Man in The Woods (3 page)

In the tenth row, Paul Phillips, the man who came in with Kate, lowers his head and jams his hands into the pockets of his brown leather jacket. The few times Paul has observed Kate in her public life and witnessed the effect she has on people have been entertaining experiences. He is not unfamiliar with successful people, but he has never had a relationship with a woman of large and worldly achievement, and the pleasure it brings him to bask in the reflected glow of her success has been a surprise to Paul, with an unexpectedly erotic component. There is something grand about going home with a woman everybody loves. Heretofore his romantic life has mainly involved women who worked with their hands—potters, gardeners, weavers, carpenters like himself, and one chiropractor—or else winsome idlers living on the dregs of family fortunes. Despite the pleasure Kate’s fame brings him, he is not prepared to become a part of her public life, and as those seated near him turn to look at him he feels not only embarrassment but a degree of irritation. The woman next to him, who, judging by her notebook and her tote bag, works for CBS, looks at him with professional curiosity. She is half-Asian and reminds Paul strongly of a woman he once worked for. A woman wearing a serape in a pew across the aisle gives Paul the thumbs-up sign and an elderly couple with cottony hair and merry blue eyes looks at him fondly.

There’s nothing to be done about it, but a couple of hours later, in the hotel room Kate’s publisher has secured for them, saving them the two-hour drive back upstate, Paul says to Kate, “When you talked about your boyfriend all those people were staring at me.”

“No way,” she says. She is in bed, trying to corral her ego and, for the most part, succeeding after the evening of adoration. “I was careful not to look in your direction.”

“They knew it was me anyhow,” Paul says. “There weren’t that many men there.”

He doesn’t want to sound annoyed, especially not after a big night for her, and surely not in bed. A room service cart presents its own reasons for him to be of good cheer: a spray of orchids, a shrimp cocktail, a bowl of cut fruit. Even though this particular place is not really to Paul’s taste, he has spent enough nights sleeping in unheated cabins, in tents, or on bed frames without mattresses to be forever mindful of creature comforts others might take for granted. But if you are in bed and you lean your head back, you ought to feel either the wall or wood, but Paul’s head rests against the bed’s upholstered headboard and though the softness is vaguely pleasant, upholstered headboards are suburban elegance, a cut or two above the padded toilet seat. Simplicity, durability, and reality are what please Paul, and all of these can be expressed by not hiding the materials out of which objects are made.

Most places in the city are ten degrees too warm for him, including this room, the closeness of which brings up bad memories. Now, while Kate is under the covers in her pale orange silk pajamas, and wearing socks to keep her feet warm, Paul is on top of the comforter, in nothing but his boxers.

“Look at you,” Kate says, “stretched out like that.” She runs her hand over his chest, down to his belly. “I hit the trifecta. Sobriety, faith, and now you.” Her finger hooks under the elastic waist. “Off?”

Paul lifts his hips, takes off his shorts. His penis flops over to the left, his pubic hair glistens darkly. His chest is as smooth as a boy’s, except for the kinky fringes around his nipples. Kate has a passing fancy to lick him. Instead, she reaches for a piece of mango and eats it. She often has quick, errant bursts of desire, some of them a bit outré, but marvelously so. Sometimes she feels a kind of erotic Tourette’s and wants to say things she has never said to a lover, like
It’s okay to be rough, if you want to, why don’t you slap me on the ass and pull my hair
. She has yet to surrender to the temptation. What generally restrains her is not the imagination of the act itself but the shadow it would surely cast over everything that followed. How do you talk to someone after you have asked them if they would like to do some of the things that occur to her? The conversational pall would be crushing. Who could she be after, if she were to act out these impulses? It would be too much for daily life to bear, it could be neither absorbed nor forgotten.

“I’m feeling all seven of the deadly sins,” Kate says, patting her cheeks, in an imitation of a Victorian lady overcome with the vapors. She is calming herself the only way she knows how—by talking. “Lust, naturally,” she says, “the first sin you led me to. Wrath at the thought of anyone else ever getting to look at that beautiful penis, including urologists. Sloth—isn’t that one?—because I would gladly spend the rest of my life in bed, if it was with you. Greed, because I want to hoard you like gold. Gluttony, because I want you to fill me up in every imaginable and, frankly, unmentionable way.”

Paul rolls closer to her, begins to gather her in his arms, but she places her hand on his chest so she can continue speaking. “Pride, because you are so beautiful and I love to watch when people see us together. And—what is that?” She counts silently to herself. “That’s only six. What’s the seventh?”

“I don’t know,” Paul says.

“Come on,” Kate urges, “you didn’t even try. There’s seven of them, try to think of the last one.”

“Sneezy,” Paul says.

“Oh, I know,” she says. “Envy’s the seventh. I’ve got that, too. And it’s you that I envy. I wish I were half as beautiful as you. So that’s the seven, and mama’s got them all.”

“I love the way you look,” Paul says.

“I need to drink more water,” says Kate. “I’m really not aging well.”

Kate is the oldest woman with whom Paul has ever been intimate. He has never known a woman who paints her toenails, just one of Kate’s manifestations of grown-up femininity. She diets, she regularly visits a hairdresser. She chooses her clothes with great care, trying things on and discarding them, especially if she is to make a public appearance. She will pay a hundred dollars for a jar of silky cream to rub into the lilac indentations beneath her eyes, and somehow believe the magic of the stuff will make her appear younger. And it does! It actually works. The previous women in Paul’s life have not worried about their age, and they have been casual, confident of their beauty, finding their power at the edge of gender rather than at its center. They were Levi’s and T-shirt types, outdoorsy women more at home at a campground than in a manicurist’s chair. Being with Kate makes Paul feel pleasantly and proudly older, as though he has at last taken his place in the world of men. It once seemed as if he was going to have one of those lives that have no particular rhyme or reason, the kind in which people appear and disappear and you never know with whom you’re going to have Christmas dinner but you don’t worry about it because you rarely end up alone. But now there is order to his life and no longer any mystery as to where he will be next week, or next month. At long last, adulthood has begun.

He awakens a couple of hours later, startled into consciousness by a dream, into a room that is still dark, except for a narrow crack of diffuse street light coming in through the curtains, which Kate has parted. She has left the bed and sits now in a chair near the window. He looks at her watching the street. He wants to make certain nothing is the matter. Once, months ago, he was awakened in the middle of the night by the sense that something was wrong and found her in the living room in the downstairs of her house, curled into a chair, weeping into her hands. “I’m lonely,” she said, “I feel so lonely.” Bewildered, he tried to reassure her. He told her he was right there and he wasn’t going anywhere, and he told her that her daughter was right upstairs. He pointed to the ceiling, with its wedding-cake plaster, its hanging chandelier like a hundred dead eyes. “I know, I know,” she had said, breathless with unhappiness, gripping her stomach through the cotton of her summer nightgown. “It won’t go away,” she said.

But tonight Kate sits, her shoulders still, seemingly serene. She has draped her coat over her lap, and her feet are tucked under her. No, Paul thinks, I won’t disturb her. He lies there quietly, eyes open. The light from the street reflects on the ceiling, from corner to corner, a stem of brightness with the refracted shine of headlights floating within it like blips on a radar screen. He closes his eyes, and when he awakens again the curtains are outlined by the trembling brightness of the day. Kate has taken him in her mouth and he feels himself swelling in the warmth of her. It is her pleasure to have him while he sleeps, and to maintain the illusion he keeps his eyes closed. She straddles him, he glides in easily, and she very slowly, and as quietly as possible, moves like an inchworm toward her pleasure which, though invisible, is the most real thing to her right now. Paul opens his eyes just enough to get a glimpse of her through the mesh of his lashes. He loves her expression during sex, open and undefended, with a creaturely purity and singularity of purpose. Her hands are on either side of his pillow. Warm breath pours from her open mouth, and stifled sounds of arousal rattle in her throat. How can she imagine that he is sleeping through all this lovely commotion? Yet he behaves as if he is dead to the world, and neither of them will ever make mention of it. He thinks for a moment about all that must go unsaid—for one, it makes him feel ever so slightly belittled when Kate goes on about his physical beauty, partly because he believes her to be more intelligent than he is, and he has heard it so many times from so many others that those particular words have lost their intended meaning to him, and, for another, he would never tell Kate that she is not the first woman to take her pleasure in him while he slept; it would not only make her jealous but it might diminish her sense of transgression.

Maybe that’s the secret of love, sometimes it carries you, and other times it’s your turn and you’ve got to carry it.

CHAPTER THREE

It is unnerving to wake up in the hotel bed, and to look at the dark red numbers of the digital bedside clock and see it is almost noon. Paul raises himself on one elbow, surveys the dim emptiness of the room. He struggles to remember why he is here, why he is alone, and then remembers that Kate has gone back upstate and he has business to take care of here in the city. He tips the hotel’s clock over on its side so he can no longer see its digital display, which he feels is a violation of timekeeping’s intrinsic beauty, in which the round face and the sweeping hand reminds us that we are on a planet moving through space. He can’t remember the last time he’s slept until noon—as a teenager?—and waking so late in the day fills him with unease. Midnight to seven are his preferred hours of sleep. Being in bed while nearly everyone else is awake and productive makes Paul think of his mother, who slept ten to twelve hours a day and who, when awake, moved with agonizing slowness, groggily dragging sleep behind her like the hem of a muddy gown.

Kate has left him a note propped against the vase filled with tulips that her publisher had sent to the room. The tulips are months out of season and some unnatural shade of orange, bright as candy. The vase itself is on the little faux secretary that annoyed him last night. Without Kate’s presence Paul is able to fully exercise his crotchety scorn for certain aspects of modern life. It is not only that he hates the shoddy and the false, but he experiences commercial incursions into the natural order as a contagion.

Dear You, Good luck on your stuff today. See you this afternoon and hurry hurry hurry. Also don’t forget to order yourself a big fat breakfast and charge it to the room. And don’t forget parking’s already paid for. Kisses, hugs, unmentionable etceteras…

Still naked, Paul idly plucks a corner of the table, where the glue holding the mahogany veneer to the particleboard tabletop has dried and become useless. Once the veneer has come loose, he cannot resist peeling it back even further, and before he entirely realizes what he is doing, he has removed several inches of veneer. “Uh-oh,” he says, and tries to smooth it down again, but it has risen into a dark, brittle curl, and after once more attempting to correct or at least conceal the damage, he dismisses it with a shrug, and orders breakfast from room service, which comes to thirty dollars, and when the man wheels the breakfast in on a linen-covered cart, Paul writes in a fifty percent tip, generosity coming easily with someone else’s money.

He has two stops to make in the city and both are about money. The first stop is the more unpleasant of the two: he must see a client who has owed him eight thousand dollars for more than a year. The errand begins auspiciously. The drive from the hotel to 77th Street goes smoothly, with the traffic heavy but fluid. Adding further to the positive portents is finding a parking spot practically right in front of the building, a spot that, just as Paul drives up, is being vacated by another workman’s truck. Up on Fifth Avenue, most of the cars are sleek, black, and expensive, and the contractors and deliverymen in their utilitarian vehicles feel a kinship with one another. They are part of the city’s secret life, visible only to each other, the custodians of pipes and plumbing fixtures and floors and carpets, locks and doors, and plate glass, plaster, and paint. As Paul pulls into the space, he gives a friendly wave to the departing driver—a painter, judging by the spattered cap—who gives him a comradely thumbs-up.

Once he is inside the lobby the signs and portents become less promising. The doorman on duty acts as if he were guarding the American embassy in some hostile nation, treating Paul as if he were tracking dog excrement across the colorful compass-point tile work of the lobby. When Paul is allowed to enter the elevator that will take him up to see Gerald Lundeen, the elevator operator, a small man with wisps of white hair, repeats several times: “So you’re going to see Lundeen,” as if there were something inherently dubious in the enterprise.

Lundeen has been avoiding Paul for months and today he looks as if he has just pulled himself out of his sickbed. His pewter hair is unwashed and mussed, his glasses have thumbprints on the lenses, his long, bare feet seem not to be getting enough blood and are the color of talcum powder. He wears a paisley silk robe over what looks like nothing. His chest hair is moist with perspiration and two fingers on his left hand are splinted and taped together. He reminds Paul of his own father as he careened through his last months on earth, though Paul’s father’s life had followed a more ominous trajectory, from a secure position in a community college to a brief stint with a third-tier advertising agency to a job in a frame shop on lower Lexington Avenue, all with a great deal of rage and alcohol along the way, so that his death, though premature, was not entirely surprising.

Whatever difficulties Lundeen may be experiencing, there is still enough money in his accounts to afford living in this nine-room apartment on Fifth Avenue. He has agreed to meet Paul to discuss their money matters dating back to a few months ago, when he told Paul that he had mailed him a check, which never arrived. Lundeen had seemed mystified at the time, and said he would make a stop payment, after which he would send Paul a replacement check. Paul waited several weeks and when he called Lundeen to ask again about the money, his calls went unanswered.

Now, at last, Lundeen has agreed to meet. He offers Paul a seat in an original Queen Anne chair, upholstered in custard-yellow damask, and seats himself in a high-backed leather chair behind his desk, which is awash with folders and brochures having to do with the Lundeen family business, which is the manufacture and sale of massage tables.

“So how have you been, Paul?” Lundeen asks, as if this were a social visit.

“Things are okay,” Paul says. “How about you?”

Lundeen smiles, cocks his head. “Couldn’t be worse.” Noticing his chest is exposed, he closes his robe more carefully. “The wonderful world of divorce.”

“Well I’m really sorry to hear that,” Paul says. Lundeen’s eyes flick avidly, and Paul wonders if he has somehow implied that Lundeen now has the right not to pay his bills, and so he adds, “These things happen.”

Lundeen folds his hands together and taps them vigorously against his chin. “My finances are in chaos right now, Paul,” he says. “I’ve had to freeze accounts to keep Renee from making off with everything I’ve worked for. And…well it’s complicated and I won’t bore you with all the grisly financial details. Not really your thing anyhow, is it?”

“It’s…it’s a lot of money,” Paul says.

“Is it?” Lundeen asks, and then, catching himself, he says, “Of course it is. I realize that. And you worked, Paul. I know that. And the work you did was beautiful. It’s like art, Paul, it really is. I can’t tell you how many people have commented upon it. I’m sure some of them have already called you and asked you to do work for them. Am I right about that? So at least I’ve been helpful in that way.”

“The thing about the money, Gerald,” Paul says, “is that some of it’s for my work and some of it’s for materials.”

“I know,” Lundeen says. “You think I don’t know? You think I don’t go to bed every blessed night and think about the money I owe?”

Paul clears his throat. He knows it makes him sound uncertain, but if he doesn’t cough he won’t be able to speak. “So what are we doing here, Gerald? Can you give me some time frame?” Paul feels odd saying
time frame
, it is completely alien to him and it feels as if he were suddenly dropping in a French phrase that was somehow apt, the way one of his clients likes to say
incroyable
when something Paul has made strikes her fancy.

“What I think we’re talking about here,” Lundeen says, “is a month, at most. But honestly?” He waits for Paul to nod, as if it takes an agreement between the two of them for him to state the simple, unvarnished truth. “Honestly speaking, it’s not really in my hands. It’s all lawyers and assorted sharks. These people, these absolute fuckers.” Lundeen’s eyes redden, as if he might cry.

Paul feels suddenly lost and hopeless. What more can he say to this man in order to get the money owed to him? He already feels as if he has compromised and sullied himself by coming here. He has made his wishes clear and he has shown his face to Lundeen. The rest will have to work itself out in its own way, at its own time. Paul runs his hands over the etched mahogany arms of the Queen Anne and rises. “All right,” he says. “I’ve got to get going.”

“Okay, Paul, thanks for stopping by.”

Paul furrows his brows.
Thanks for stopping by
makes absolutely no sense, except to strongly imply that Lundeen has barely registered the purpose of the visit. “So will you call me when your finances get straightened out?” he forces himself to ask.

“Of course I will,” Lundeen says.

“One way or another, I’ve got to get paid,” Paul says.

“That’s for sure,” Lundeen says, rising. He comes around the desk and places his hand on Paul’s shoulder, guiding him toward the door, as the mad roar of a vacuum cleaner starts up from somewhere in the front of the apartment. Lundeen glances nervously in the direction of the invisible housekeeper and his steps quicken as he leads Paul to the front door and out into the hall, where, as chance would have it, the elevator man is there with his car empty and the doors wide open.

Paul can feel the day tipping ever more markedly in the wrong direction, and he has a feeling that is like knowing halfway into the cut on a valuable piece of lumber that the blade of the saw has been miscalibrated. His next appointment is twelve blocks north, and after fifteen minutes, he accepts that he is not going to find another free parking spot and leaves his truck in front of a church like a desperate mother abandoning her child. It is a little past one in the afternoon. The wind is damp and cold and the sun seems to give off no more heat than a lightbulb in a refrigerator. As Paul turns onto Fifth Avenue, five squad cars go yelping by, heading south at a furious clip, their blue and red flashers throwing pebbles of light off the lower windows and the seashell exteriors of the grand apartment buildings. The doormen in full livery don’t even show a passing interest.

He has come to look over a job for an actress of whom he has never heard, though Kate tells him she is not only famous but deservedly so. Paul, who never lacks for work, had previously considered this stop mainly a courtesy, but now that it seems he will never see the money Gerald Lundeen owes him he is annoyed with himself for arriving at this second appointment an hour late.

Here, the doorman looks somehow merrier, with his mutton chop sideburns and long blue coat with crimson piping, shiny brass buttons. Paul says the name of the actress and the doorman waves him through, an indication the place must be seething with workmen.

“Ah,” the general contractor says, “my favorite carpenter.” His name is Haydn Goodwin; he is about fifty, tall and heavy, a Welshman with graying curly hair and the joking, confident manner of someone who is immensely strong. Paul worked for Goodwin two years ago, building a sleigh bed for a pop star.

“I want to show you the kitchen,” Goodwin says. They go through the sunken living room, its contents covered by drop cloths. “We’re confining ourselves to the south end of her apartment. That way she can at least have some sort of life, and when everything’s buttoned up we can tackle the north end.” He speaks softly, as if somewhere in this apartment there sleeps a temperamental child who must not be disturbed. Yet in the meanwhile, the sounds of hammers and saws, workingmen in conversation, and the Allman Brothers singing “Whipping Post” make it seem unlikely that anyone within the zip code can sleep or even think clearly.

“She was hoping to be in Rio during construction, but she’s come down with grippe.” Goodwin’s belt is wide and heavy like a razor strop. The pager that hangs from it squawks and he has a terse conversation with someone, which ends with Goodwin saying, “That would be the end of me,” and pushing the off button. “Anyhow,” he says, returning his attention to Paul, “her daughter was supposed to be here to help out. Nothing massive, just some marketing, taking her to appointments, but the daughter is nowhere to be seen, so things have been rather touch-and-go.”

Paul cannot remember ever having seen this guy so on edge, and he feels in himself a growing reluctance to work here. The thought of coming home from his New York errands empty-handed is a little depressing, but Paul has long believed that the secret to a happy life is a willingness to do without, and he is willing to do without the work Goodwin has to offer, or the money it will bring.

He follows along into the kitchen, with its black-and-white tiled floor, modern appliances, and modular built-ins. “She wants a real country kitchen,” Goodwin says. “She has wonderful memories of a place she used to visit in Hillsboro, New Hampshire.”

“This is an Art Deco building, Haydn.”

Goodwin lets out a long, weary sigh, shakes his head. “I know, Paul, I know. But this is what she wants. And you can’t argue with her. I mean you can, but it doesn’t do any good.”

“I don’t know, Haydn. That doesn’t open a door for me. You understand? It sort of closes a door. If she wants an eighteenth-century country kitchen she should live in an old country house.”

“I know, I know.” Goodwin roughly claps his hand on Paul’s shoulder, gives it a jokey, angry squeeze with his powerful, plaster-dusted hand. “I figured you would say that. But I wanted to give it a shot. So let me ask you this, my friend. Do you remember those flat-plane cabinets you made for Jann Wenner? With all that beautiful old cypress? You have more of it squirreled away up there in the country, am I right? A little birdie told me you’ve got four thousand feet of northwest cypress and you once told me yourself you’ve got a massive collection of old bin-pull handles.”