The Good Life
Authors: Erin McGraw
Copyright © 2004 by Erin McGraw
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All rights reserved
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For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
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ISBN
-13: 978-0-618-38627-7
ISBN
-10: 0-618-38627-0
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
McGraw, Erin, date.
The good life : stories / Erin McGraw.
p. cm.
“A Mariner Original.”
Contents: The beautiful Tennessee waltzâA whole new manâAx of the ApostlesâAppearance of scandalâArubaâLucky devilâDaily affirmationsâCitizen of ViennaâThe best friendâThe penance practicumâOne for my baby.
ISBN
0-618-38627-0
I. Title.
PS
3563.
C
3674
G
66 2004
813'.54âdc22 2003056892
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e
ISBN
978-0-547-52505-1
v2.1114
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FOR ANDREW
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It ever was, and is, and shall be,
ever-living fire, in measures being
kindled and in measures going out.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTSâ
HERACLITUS
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“Ax of the Apostles” originally appeared in
STORY
, “Appearance of Scandal” in
Daedalus
, “The Beautiful Tennessee Waltz” in
Boulevard
, “Aruba” in
Shenandoah
, “Daily Affirmations” in the
Georgia Review
, “The Best Friend” in
Image
, “Lucky Devil” in
Witness
, “The Penance Practicum” in the
Kenyon Review
, and “Citizen of Vienna” in the
Southern Review
.
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Thanks are due to several friends who offered help and wisdom with these stories, especially Murray Bodo, Michelle Herman, Tim Parrish, and Lois Rosenthal. My gratitude to all of you.
My agent, Gail Hochman, and my editor, Heidi Pitlor, extended kindness, good sense, and enormous good taste, and I am happily in their debt.
To my husband, Andrew, I owe more thanks than I can ever give. Though I can try.
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T
HE DAY AFTER
Alice and Dik's second wedding anniversary, Alice called to tell me how they had celebrated: cross-legged at sunset, hand in hand, chanting melodies that Dik had composed. I loved Alice, but this was rich, and I called my friend Martin as soon as she hung up. “Hoo
-ooh
. Hoo-
ooh
,” I chanted for him. “It's the cosmic wind that holds us all together.”
“Don't winds blow people apart?”
“Alice and Dik? Not far enough.”
He fell silent, and I understood that I had violated one of Martin's unstated rules, a code of acceptable discourse that changed with his moods. I spent half of our conversations scrambling to figure out what was currently permissible. “
Hoo-
ooh,” he finally intoned.
“You're not doing it right,” I said, relieved. “Pay attention. This is Dik's gift to the universe.”
“Dik has a wide heart,” Martin said, quoting Alice.
“He brings joy. He restores balance,” I said, riffing.
Neither of us could stand Dik, and we worried about his sway over Alice, but he provided first-rate conversational fodder. With savage mimicry, Martin was now recalling Dik's discussion of the crucial, too-often-neglected role of ritual in daily life. Dik lit candles every night to usher in the darkness and chanted every morning to usher it back out again. In a moment I would bring up how he had gone from “Richard” to “Dick” to “Dik” as a way of honoring his desire for simplicity. Martin would remind me of the tray heaped with mulch that Dik had placed before a pine tree in his front yard to apologize for the travesty of Christmas. “You don't need to be so ugly about it,” Alice had told Martin helplessly when he and I came over with holiday brandy. Martin was elaborately bowing to the tree.
“Did Dik give you a present?” Martin said, straightening up.
“He doesn't believe in presents.” Catching Martin's look, she said with exquisite wryness, “Being together is a gift.”
“Martin's a traditionalist,” I'd murmured to her after he charged off the patio. “He believes in presents that come in boxes you can unwrap.”
“The kind you can return and exchange. Just ask his ex-wife,” Alice said, in a flash of her old, sharp self, which heartened me, though I wouldn't share the moment with Martin.
He was combustible on almost any topic, but he was incendiary about marriage. His ex, Charlotte, had left him four years before, and though we all thought he should be getting over her, he still brooded and drank, revisiting every humiliation. Sometimes he broke plates. She had left him not just for another man, but for a man and his horse, her riding teacher across the bay, in Oakland. “Stallions, probably. Certain jokes present themselves,” Martin said when he broke the news. “Please don't tell them.”
“I don't see any jokes,” I said.
“Does he wear spurs, do you think? Can you hear those little metal teeth jingling when he walks from room to room?”
“You're only hurting yourself.”
“I hope he wears them to bed,” he said.
Martin's wife had insisted on a court hearing, where she testified in a whisper about manipulativeness and mental cruelty, but in the end the fair-minded judge weighed her boisterously successful catering company against Martin's several unacquired screenplays and awarded Martin alimony. “At least there's that,” I
said when we left the courthouse, Martin's jaw still locked. Since then, if I happened to be around when the check arrived, he would hold the envelope in front of me. “At least there's this,” he'd say.
My husband, Jeff, said that Martin was feeling sorry for himself, as of course he was. But Jeff didn't understand how thoroughly Martin had been blind-sided. He had loved his marriage vows. A cynical man, he nevertheless had faith in marriageâfor its difficulty, he said. For the pure challenge. For the action of getting up every morning and recommitting to a promise made one or twenty or fifty years before. He made marriage sound like a prison sentence, but I knew what he was driving at and admired his standards. He and I believed in marriage. We just didn't believe in Alice and Dik's marriage.
“It's not up to you to believe in it,” Jeff said the night I demonstrated the anniversary chant, throwing in some arm motions to amuse him. “She's your friend. Be happy for her.”
“Secretly she's miserable. She only thinks she's happy.”
“I'm sure she's delighted to have you around to point out her errors in perception.” Jeff had put on a clipped accent, cribbed from 1960s movie thrillers. In college he had majored in film studies, although he worked as a loan officer now, “supporting my dainty wife.” He used to use the phrase all the time. He said, “Tell me again why Alice puts up with you.”
“We're her best friends. Worrying about her is our job. Do you remember that she used to eat hamburgers? I've never seen Dik give up anything for her.”
“Maybe she likes having somebody tell her how to live. A lot of people do.”
“One of these days she's going to wake up and grope around, wondering where her personality went,” I said, quoting Martin.
“She won't need to grope long. You'll be right there to tell her,” Jeff said.
I picked up sleek gray Toulouse, our cat, who was slithering figure eights around my ankles. “I'm not bent on her and Dik's destruction, okay? In case you're interested, Martin and I talked today about giving them an anniversary party.”
Jeff had been shredding carrots for a salad. He stopped mid-grate. “Okay, I'm nervous.”
“She likes parties. At least she used to. And Martin can stand around and talk, which he'd be doing anyway.”
“Does he talk about us?” His voice sounded comfortable. On the other hand, he was mangling the carrot against the grater.
“Not to me.”
“Why not?”
I pulled down Toulouse, who was trying to sit on my head. “You and I are like one of those ice-skating couples. When he jumps, she jumps. When she spins, he spins. There's nothing to talk about with us. We don't even have to look at each other to know when to start skating backwards.”
He shook his head, a smile crimping his lips. “You're good, Lisha.”
“We're good together.” Some thick emotion swelled between us, and I talked into it. “Martin thinks the second anniversary is a watershed. People can get to the first one on the wave of sheer newnessânew relatives, new tax forms, all those new appliances. By the second year, though, you start watching yourself change. You see the new grooves and calluses in your brain from rubbing every day against this other person. You realize you've signed on for the duration. Martin calls it the Panic Anniversary.”
“I don't remember panicking,” Jeff said.
“You, my darling, are blessed with a lack of imagination.”
He tried to scowl, an expression his even, pale features could never pull off. “So what are you going to do for this party? Provide topographical maps of Alice's and Dik's brains?”
“Champagne. Cake.”
“I'll toast the happy couple. Am I invited?”
“It's at our house,” I said, kissed him on the ear, and took off to call Martin.
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I had told Jeff the truth. The party Martin and I had in mind was old-fashioned and generous, with mixed drinks and music and dancing. Back when I first met Alice, she went square dancing on Tuesday nights, ballroom dancing Wednesdays. All that had stopped since Dik, and I wanted to give her the chance to strap on her dancing shoes again. Of course, I also looked forward to watching Dik, who moved as if he were assembled out of Tinkertoys, box-step around the room.
Already Dik had told Martin that he couldn't wait. “Dik likes to glide,” Martin reported over breakfast. Martin had a new temp job, taking inventory at a consignment store in San Rafael, so we met at a nearby diner, where we shared the long counter with pensioners and truants. “I thought Dik would want to do interpretive dance to the music of the spheres, but it turns out he loves to waltz. He's at home right now, polishing his Earth shoes.”
“So who are you going to waltz with?” I asked.
“My partner's off dancing with somebody else.”
“It's high time for you to find yourself another partner. Try reading the personals. The Bay Area is loaded with gals ready to take a chance on love.”
“Bully for them.”
“Why do I bother? You're in love already. You're in love with your own misery.” I saw no reason to add that this was Jeff's speech; we'd been talking about Martin the night before. “You're like a dog that's found something disgusting to roll in. You're ecstatic about how awful you can make yourself feel.”
He set his cup down. When he looked at me, his square face was rigid. “You didn't talk this over with Alice, did you?”
“Settle down, Martin.”
“You didn't invent little schemes, audition a lineup of women ready to take a chance on love?” His rough features roughened even more. His eyes went flat and his mouth twisted. Even after years of practice, I flinched from talking to that face and so looked at my plate, its old ceramic worn to gray at the center.
“Think about who you're talking to here, would you? I sat in your living room every night for six months after Charlotte left. I made rice pudding for you. I cleaned your toilet. I
know
you.” I held off the urge to tell him I loved him. Though it was trueâno other friend built up in me such shimmering excitementâthe last time I had told him this he overturned an ashtray in my lap. I said, “These days Alice and I don't see each other all that often. When we get together, we don't talk about you.”
“I don't believe you. I don't know a single topic as riveting as me.”
“Alice has so much to tell me about Dik, and I have so much to tell her about Jeff.”