The Widower's Tale (22 page)

"What a saga, you must be saying, right?" Turo had concluded, draining his coffee with a flourish and smiling like a man who'd won a prize. "Son of mail-order bride did good, huh?"

After their sophomore year, while Robert worked in Maine, Turo had spent the summer in Manila, living with his mother and working for an American businessman who exported rattan furniture to European resorts. For three months, Robert had pictured his friend relaxing every evening on a high porch, a true veranda, surrounded by rattling palms, swooping parrots, the air electric with insects. Costa Rica: that's what he was picturing.

They'd e-mailed back and forth, but Turo said little about his job. He wrote about politics--American, the Hillary-Obama stuff--and sports. (Could they nail tickets at Fenway? Wasn't there some influential family friend in Matlock who had a corporate box?) Nothing about school or girls; nothing about his mom or how weird it was to be halfway across the world. Maybe, for Turo, it wasn't weird. Robert's fairy-tale images of his friend, his privileged life abroad, never morphed into anything fixed or real. And Robert didn't push it, the stuff he wished he understood better. Because he did know this: adamantly, defensively even, Turo saw himself as American. "I love my mom," he once said, "but in terms of who or what I am, I might as well be an orphan. In a good way, an unencumbered way, don't get me wrong. No pity. No way." At such moments, so beguilingly, pugnaciously sure of himself, Turo flashed a smile that could have powered a small city.

That was the smile with which he greeted Robert the evening after the insane outing to Ledgely. Through a long day's agony of scientific drudgery, of prepping slides and peering through a microscope, of struggling mightily just to focus, Robert had suffered flashbacks of the dark woods, the steaming pool, the dead squirrel bobbing in the water. They had only deepened his anger and bewilderment at Turo--though maybe they'd also kept him awake.

Yet all his resolve to blow Turo's ego out of the water simply crumbled when he entered their apartment and felt his roommate's charismatic glee. Without a word, he let Turo trade him a glass of purple wine for his backpack, then lead him, brotherly hand on shoulder, to the kitchen. The table was set for two. Candles flanked a pot of auburn chrysanthemums wrapped in orange foil.

"What, is this a date?" said Robert. He had a sudden vision of Turo engineering a reconciliation with Clara. Would she jump out of the bathroom now, surprise him with apologetic kisses? He'd left his phone in his room that morning, refusing to deal with her panic. His own panic, over the surreal night before, was plenty. So now, if she were to emerge (he glanced at the door to the pantry), would that be better or worse than the face-off with Turo that he'd been rehearsing as he pushed his way against the wind across the Common and up Mass. Ave., weighed down by chemistry tomes.

"A culinary peace offering, friend," said Turo. "Off with that coat."

Robert set down the wine, took off his coat, and went to the bathroom to wash his hands and muster his will. Maybe this wasn't a date, but it was clearly a seduction. Was that Astrud Gilberto?

He sat on the side of the tub and said to the towel rack, "Jesus. Astrud Gilberto." His brain was so fried that he felt like, if he didn't state the realities here, literally announce them one by one, they just might turn out to be illusions. But he couldn't beg off.

So he entered the kitchen on the offensive. He picked up his wineglass, took a dramatic slug--Dutch courage, right? why Dutch, for God's sake?--and said, "Dead squirrels, Turo? Dead squirrels? WTF, man, are we back in junior high? What next, you plan to fill a hangar at Logan with fart cushions and Limburger cheese?"

"Sit," said Turo, unfazed, "and we'll talk."

Robert sat. Turo stood over a dish, hot from the oven. It smelled incredible. Somewhere along the colorful paths of his youth, Turo had learned to cook. Really cook. Robert had assumed that the impromptu gatherings their room had attracted throughout their year in Kirkland House would turn into kickass dinner parties once they had their own kitchen. But Turo claimed he no longer had time to hang around so much. No more long coffee jags at the Gato, pool games in common rooms, tossing or kicking balls by the river--at least not with Turo.

This meal was a seduction all right: a spicy squash strudel with quinoa and jicama salad, spinach sauteed with garlic and lemon.

"Here's what you need to know," Turo said when he finally sat down. "My life is completely serious now. I think yours could be, too. I'm not saying ditch your studies, man, although"--he paused to laugh--"in a way it wouldn't matter. Believe me. You can make a joke of what we're doing. The newspapers try, though would they bother to cover our actions if they didn't know we're dead on target? Forget the meek stuff. Recycling's great, group showering, local eating, yeah yeah, all good. But it's not dramatic enough to make a dent."

"Okay," said Robert, "I get it, but what's wrong with working from inside out, the bottom up? Did you hear about the organic lawn care they're starting on campus? 'Start small and grow it'--isn't that what you've always said?"

Turo shrugged. "I've outgrown small."

Robert watched Turo eat, his slim dark face flattered by the candlelight. If Robert were a girl, he'd have fallen hard for the guy long ago. Had he, in a warped way, chosen Turo over Clara? Or maybe he'd outgrown something, too: the playfulness of easier passions. Maybe he longed to trade up for something hard core, like Hemingway and all those ordinary guys who ran off to fight in that Spanish war.

For dessert, Turo set two plates on the table: two perfect creamy flans, each shaped like a miniature fez, surrounded by a pool of amber syrup. "My mother taught me this," he said. He lit a match and, one plate at a time, set the liquid gold on fire. The heat smelled richly, briefly, of sun-baked oranges. "Now eat," he said when the flames died down.

7

Celestino took a long shower, devoting extra care to the soil beneath his nails, the dust around his ears, the sweat trapped in the creases at the base of his throat. His hair seemed to be graying quickly now, and the skin beneath his jaw, sunburnt too many times, was beginning to resemble the hide of an iguana. The shower in his tiny bathroom was made of flimsy tin; toward the bottom, a hole had rusted through, long before he was the tenant. In summer, mildew gathered like moss around the gap. By late fall, because the bathroom was unheated, a cold draft poured through onto his ankles. No roaches, though; in New York, he'd never lived in a place without bugs.

When he stepped out, he could see his breath. The steam had retreated to the ceiling, where it hovered like a miniature cloud.

He dressed fast, in jeans and a plaid wool shirt he saved for special occasions--of which there were next to none. Make that none.

To Celestino's surprise, Robert seemed to know Lothian well. Well enough to suggest they meet at a place not far from where he lived. Celestino had passed the Big Oven many times; it served pizza that was cooked in a much bigger version of the oven in which his mother had baked tortillas and roasted chicken when he was a boy. People stood outside the window just to watch the cooks with their long wooden paddles, as if they were watching a play. Looking at the menu, you could see that people paid extra to have their pizza cooked like this.

The air was cold enough for snow, yet so far the snow had held off. And so far, he had escaped leaf detail. The blowing, gathering, raking, and shredding of leaves was much of Loud's business now. In Matlock, so thick with woods, the trees old and massive, leaves blew down in blizzards even if the snow did not.

Loud had given Celestino the job of staking and wrapping, one by one, the hundreds of roses and shrubs in the walled garden behind Matlock's oldest church. Celestino had helped care for this place in the summer. According to Loud, people paid a lot of money to be married there. The garden was shaped like a funnel, four terraces descending toward a ring of slender pillars and a fountain. In the center of the fountain, a naked woman made of marble poured water from an urn. A bronze plaque outside the wall told passers-by that this garden, called Rose Retreat, was a hundred and fifty years old. It had been abandoned, grown over with weeds, for nearly half of that time. Only a few years ago had Matlock's history-minded citizens cleaned it up and replanted it just the way it had been designed. It made Celestino think of the dig, wonder if the garden had been buried under the earth. Had archaeologists worked here? The smooth skin of the marble woman bore the ghostly tracings of ivy. She had been wrapped tight in those vines, both smothered and protected. Her features had worn to a blurry version of whatever beauty she'd once possessed.

"Putting the garden to bed," as Loud called it, took Celestino nearly a week. And then yesterday morning, assuming that he'd end up on the truck at last, manning the blowers and mulchers--so loud they left your ears ringing for hours--he'd been surprised when his boss met him at the train, alone and on foot.

"Hombre!
Come to the office with me," he said. This was odd. Most of Loud's workers were picked up in Packard at the start of the day, returned there in the evening; no one, to Celestino's knowledge, ever set foot in the office.

It was a single room above the row of shops next to the Matlock train station. An older woman stood up from a desk and beamed at Celestino.

Loud leaned across the desk and kissed her on the cheek. "Meet my mom. The true brains behind the operation."

"The one who knows where everything is, and where he's supposed to be when. That's what he means." She squeezed Celestino's hand with conviction. Like his own mother, she was short and plump.

"Mrs. Loud."

"Happy." She laughed. "My name! Call me Happy."

"This way." Loud beckoned Celestino to the far wall, where he opened a closet. Inside the closet was a huge pegboard covered with clusters of keys, each cluster hanging on a hook above a number.

"Mrs. Bullard--you remember her? Mrs. Havahart-and-Pass-the-Rodents-On? She needs someone to care for her orchids and suck-you-lents while she's in San Francisco for the next few weeks," said Loud. "Her usual sitter's away and she called me to ask for
you, hombre."
He reached for the set of keys over the number 29, then hesitated. "Mother, is Bullard twenty-nine or thirty-nine? I'm losing my mojo."

Loud's mother looked at her computer screen and hit a few keys. "Twenty-nine. Yes indeed."

"She'll show you what's what when you head over there this morning," said Loud as he handed Celestino a ring of keys. "And she thinks you've caught that groundhog, but she's afraid to look at the trap.

"Oh--and the keys come back here each night. Mother is the keeper of the keys--and the codes. Not even the cops are this plugged in. She's like the warden of Matlock, only nobody knows it." They laughed together, mother and son, as if this were a grand joke.

When they stopped laughing, Loud said to Celestino, "The ladies seem to trust you, I've noticed." He shook his head. "Women run the show in this town, so who knows? Maybe you'll steal my business, huh?"

Loud spoke loosely, as if he were still joking around, but his eyes were like the eyes of the stone head that Dr. Lartigue had kept on his desk.

Robert was waiting for him outside the restaurant. He smiled eagerly. "Hey!"

They went to a booth at the back. "Wow, it's noisy," said Robert when they sat down. "I was going to record this, but ..." Out of a backpack, he removed a tape recorder and a thin silver computer.

"You want to record?" said Celestino.

"Are you cool with that? I mean, is that okay with you?"

Celestino paused. Was it okay? Was there any kind of risk? He liked this boy--surprisingly strong for someone so skinny, also surprisingly good with tools and wood. A boy with practical skills in a world of people whose lives seemed absurdly impractical--or enviably so. A boy with the privilege to live in the world of Dr. Lartigue. Robert's company gave Celestino the illusion--he knew it was an illusion, but still it was pleasant--that he was once again within reach of that world.

"Hey, I don't have to record. I can just type. That's cool, right?"

"That's cool, yes," said Celestino, relieved. While Robert fussed with a notebook and opened his computer, Celestino looked around the restaurant. It was made to look primitive on purpose: artificially crooked beams on the ceiling, rough plaster slapped on the walls. Posters of Italy: the Colosseum, a gondolier, a narrow street with walls overtaken by flowering bougainvillea.

As he was taking this in, someone else joined them. Celestino felt a tremor of panic, his legs ready to run, until he saw that it was the other boy, Arturo. Now both of them sat across from him.

"Hola,"
said Arturo. "Sorry I'm late," he said to Robert.

Robert looked at Celestino. "I thought that since you and Turo speak the same language, it would be good if ... I mean, I know you're cool with English, but just in case this makes it easier for us to talk." The boy was terrified of insulting him.