The New Yorker Stories (85 page)

He turned on the fan and curled onto the bed, and when he awoke it was evening, and he was in a cold sweat. Sounds he’d been making had awoken him, and he struggled up so suddenly from a dream that he knocked his arm against the light. It was a dream, it had been a dream, but it had been so shockingly real. He went into the bathroom and splashed water on his face, but the water only intensified his already palpable dread. He all but ran down the stairs and across the lawn to the graveyard. He had dreamed that Audrey was buried there. Just hours earlier he’d seen that the ground was undisturbed, yet he had gone to sleep and smelled the newly dug soil, felt its graininess beneath his fingernails, stared wide-eyed at the fallen gravestones.

His horrific vision—the only one he’d ever had—turned out to have some validity, though it was wrong in the specifics. There was no sign of digging, but there were scratch marks in the soil, and the smallest of the gravestones was leaning toward the ground. But no: the ground had not been dug in. In the center of the plot—he could not stop a wry smile: dead center—was a pile of dog shit, immense in size. A mound of it. Napoleon! Some of Cahill’s earlier handiwork had been toppled yet again, and he realized with embarrassment that his efforts had been slapdash.

He went back to the house and found Roadie standing in the hallway inside the screen door, holding his cap in one hand and a clipboard in the other. “Roadie,” Cahill said.

“Yes, sir,” Roadie said, replacing his cap on his head. It said “
SHERYL CROW
.”

Cahill blurted, “Neighbor’s dog just took a huge crap in my backyard. Really annoying.”

“Dog’s gotta do what a dog’s gotta do,” Roadie said.

“Right,” he said.

Roadie cleared his voice. “Doc, I’ve talked to two people I respect, who’ve advised two different approaches to your porch situation. One thinks sliding thermal doors, and, for my personal opinion, it’s more money but that’s what I’d be inclined to go with.”

“Then that sounds fine with me, Roadie,” Cahill said.

“Approach No. 2, Doc, for full disclosure, this comes from Hank, down at Elbriddle’s. He thinks . . .”

He let Roadie drone on. As a younger man, he might have studied the figures longer, asked more questions, but if it was Roadie’s opinion that the first option was the best, he was inclined to go along.

“Awful about your friend,” Roadie said suddenly, with no segue. “My wife said, ‘Don’t you be bringing that up, it’s none of your business, and how do you think the doctor feels? Don’t tell me that no-good didn’t hoodwink him, because the doctor wouldn’t have a tenant but what he thought he was an honorable man—’ ”

Roadie stopped, seeing that Cahill was numbed by this sudden outpouring. Roadie cleared his throat again—a nervous habit. He said, “Men like that ain’t much liked by other men. Way I’ve always heard it, you’d get more sympathy from the jailbirds if you killed your mother than if you’ve fooled with a child. I’ve got Hannahlee and Junior, as you know. Any pervert touched a hair on their head, I’d be on ’em in one second flat. How do you suppose a guy like that seemed so regular?”

Silence. Finally, Cahill spoke. “Roadie,” he said, “do you think I should undertake such a project at all, given my age? Do you think I’ll last the winter to enjoy it?”

Roadie’s tongue darted over his lips. “Well, Doc, you’d know the answer better than me. You in bad health?”

“No,” Cahill said.

“Well, I ain’t here to build if you think your money should best be used elsewhere, but a closed-in porch with a real one down at the end? That’s something I’d spring for if I had the money.”

For Roadie, this was tactful—turning the subject from death to money. Roadie made a fist and pounded a black ant racing across the table. “Something my wife said, she said, ‘Roadie, you go over there and express some human kindness to the doctor. That’s a man’s done a lot for a lot of people, and, if he had a moment of misjudgment, you tell me who hasn’t.’ She says, ‘Come to think of it, I guess time’s proven me a fool for marrying somebody like you, needs this much instruction before he goes to see somebody who lost his wife and his friend!’ ”

“She thinks herself a fool for marrying you?” Cahill said.

“You met Gloria Sue. Turns out she married me thinking I was going to build the Taj Mahal, or something. Where’d she get that? Nothing I ever told her.”

“Do you love her?” Cahill said.

Roadie looked up, surprised. “Well, I don’t know,” he said slowly.

“I stopped loving my wife,” Cahill said. “First, I thought I was just overloaded with all her minor annoyances—snoring, refusing to take her diabetes medicine, the way she ignored the phone every time it rang. Half the time it turned out to be her sister.”

Roadie looked sideways, kicking some grass off his boot. “That right?” he said. He took a deep breath. “Well, these plans here, Doc—you want to give me a deposit, I’ll run down and get some things Monday morning?”

“No,” Cahill said. He waited for Roadie’s face to register surprise, which it did immediately. “But I will,” he said, “because it seems like closing in the porch is betting against death. Today I feel like that would be a good idea.”

“You do?” Roadie said nervously.

Cahill clasped his hands. “Roadie,” he said, “how often do men speak frankly? I think some of the things we’ve just been talking about . . . We’ve spoken frankly to each other.”

Roadie nodded silently.

“One more thing,” Cahill said. “I’ve never been a mystical person, but things change as you age. You’ll find that out. Some things—people, even—disappear, then something else comes in to replace them.” Cahill paused. “Life is like having a garden, Roadie, because inevitably the time comes when the deer eat everything, or you don’t mulch and the soil gets exhausted. Right away, the weeds are in there. So I suppose what I’m getting at is that, well, tending your garden seems to me now like a young man’s game. When you don’t have the inclination or the energy or the . . . optimism to tend it anymore, the weeds rush in.” He looked Roadie square in the eyes. He barely knew what he had said himself. He said, “The moment you stop loving something, the moment you’re inattentive, the wrong things and the wrong people take over.”

“That’s one of the best ways of puttin’ it I ever heard,” Roadie said. “I’ll go back to talk to Gloria Sue, try to tell her what we discussed. There’s no way I’m gonna be able to put it like you did, though.”

“Express it in your own way,” Cahill said. “It seems to me you love her if you’re going home to talk to her.”

He went to the beach, a place he’d gone only once or twice, quite early in the season, and unfolded a chair and looked at the water.

He’d never called the police in response to the flyer. He’d never spoken a word to Breezy about what the dog had done in the graveyard. He tried to think philosophically: Audrey and Matt had been involved in whatever way they’d chosen—two losers, in any case, who were no good for each other; the dog was just a dog. People projected onto dogs, so they found themselves surprised when dogs acted like dogs instead of people.

What did not change? Change was part of the natural process.

Coming to terms with what Matt had done, though, was difficult. It wasn’t a matter of Matt’s having been like his son, as Audrey had suggested, but, rather, that Matt seemed at times like a source of . . . what? Guidance? Ironic, thinking of what Matt might have guided him toward. But of course parents didn’t tell their secrets to their children, just as the children withheld theirs from their parents.

“I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it!” little Joyce had cried, hand stained red, lipsticked J’s all over the bathroom mirror, the bath tiles, even the toilet lid.

“You never really got involved,” his wife had said, when she was still able to discuss his shortcomings. “If you don’t get involved, you don’t have to take responsibility. That was the way you always operated as a parent. As if you were the éminence grise, as if your family was just too much pressure. The aloof doctor.”

The sadness of family life. The erosion of love until only a little rim was left, and that, too, eventually crumbled.
Rationalization:
he had been no worse a father than many. No worse than a mediocre husband. That old saying about not being able to pick your family until you married and had your own . . . People rarely remarked upon the fact that time passed, and you kept picking friends who were closer to you than family members; dogs you’d come to prefer to people. The next “family” in the line of succession could be a goldfish in a bowl, he supposed.

In front of him, a little boy in a wetsuit played with a fishing rod that dangled no lure, casting it all wrong, the way he’d learned to throw a softball. His mother and father sat on a blanket, their attention focused on each other.

As the sky turned that indescribable silvery tone it often attained in late summer in Maine, Cahill rubbed his face and was surprised that his skin was still hot from the sun. A real Mainer would have worn his baseball cap. He slid a bit lower in his chair, and some time later was startled awake by squawking gulls. The charcoal-gray sky was flatlining a thin horizontal line of pale pink; the breeze had a bite to it. The couple and their child had gone, a bucket with a broken handle and a pile of shells left behind. He stood and folded the chair, scooping up his shoes with his other hand.

He drove home, appreciating what a pretty town this was, how the residents kept their houses in such good repair. Back home, he stashed the chair in the garage, where the garter snake who’d lived there contentedly for years slithered away behind piles of tied-up newspapers. His wife’s plastic planters dangled from a beam, the few dried stems that remained deteriorating into dust. As he started up the walkway, he saw something suddenly dart past a bush at the side of the house, startling him so that he teetered for balance on the edge of the bricks. It was Napoleon, panting, big ears flapping.

“You listen here,” he said to the dog, grabbing his collar. “You desecrated a graveyard, you—” He stopped, automatically rephrasing, in case he might not be understood. “You shit in the graveyard and knocked down the new wall!” he yelled. “You come with me.”

He was dragging the dog across the lawn, though the animal dug down, clawing as if to score music, trying to stop the forward rush. The dog yelped as Cahill dragged him all the way to the wall, which was now even more caved in, though thankfully there was no more shit inside the enclosure. “Bad dog! Bad dog!” he said, jerking the collar. The dog risked further pain to turn his neck to look up at him, and what Cahill saw was fear. Fear and incomprehension. The sad squeaky sound went infinitely sharp, and Cahill realized he’d been intending to push the dog’s nose against a pile of shit that was not his. It had been left by a much larger animal. Of course it had. Look at the size of the dog, and look at the pile of shit.

Instantly, he loosened his hold on the collar but stopped short of releasing it entirely, because of course the dog—any sane creature—would immediately run away.

“I’m sorry,” he said, bending and putting his lips close to the dog’s head, the smell of grass and dog mixed with a hint of . . . could it be lavender? “I’m sorry,” he said staunchly, as if someone might overhear. Then, leaning in even closer, he risked letting go of the collar, whispering, “I misunderstood.”

The Confidence Decoy

F
rancis would be driving his Lexus back from Maine. His wife, Bernadine, had left early that morning, taking their cat, Simple Man, home to Connecticut with her. Their son, Sheldon, had promised to be home to help out when the moving truck arrived, but that was before he’d got a phone call from his girlfriend, saying that she would be flying into J.F.K. that afternoon. So he was gone—when was Sheldon not outta there?—though the moving men were perfectly capable of unloading furniture without anyone’s help. What had Bernadine imagined—that Sheldon would have ideas about decorating, about what should go where?

Francis’s aunt had died, and, since he was one of only two surviving relatives and the other, Uncle Lewis, was in an assisted-living facility in California, the emptying of her summer house had fallen to Francis. Uncle Lewis had asked for the pie safe and for the bench in the entryway, nothing else, maybe an Oriental rug, if the colors were still good and it wasn’t very big. Francis had rolled up the small Tabriz, which he tied with string and put in the bottom of the pie safe.

A few days earlier, Sheldon had taken his father aside to ask his advice: should he become engaged to his girlfriend now, or get the first year, or even the first two years, of law school behind him first? Sheldon and Lucy had already discussed marriage, and she seemed in no hurry, but he hadn’t liked her going off to teach English in Japan with no engagement ring on her finger. Francis thought Lucy a nice young woman, pretty, neither shy nor aggressive, but, really, despite the many occasions on which they’d interacted, he could not get much of a sense of her. She’d twice been involved in car accidents in the past year, both times when she was driving, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything—three times would have been more definitive. The biggest clue Francis had got about Lucy had come one morning after she’d spent the night, when she’d come down to breakfast late, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and trailing her underpants in one leg of the jeans. Bernadine had whispered to her, and Lucy had turned bright-red and snatched up the underpants, stuffing them down the front of her jeans. She’d had no sense of humor about it at all. Well, he couldn’t imagine having come downstairs at the Streetmans’ (what would it be—forty-some years ago?) after sleeping with Bern, because no such thing would ever have happened. They would have had him arrested. But this was a different age, and he had no objection to Lucy’s sleeping with Sheldon in their house. They put their cups and saucers in the sink, and were extremely quiet. The TV in Sheldon’s bedroom never went on, as Bern had pointed out.