The Man of the House Read online

  When I got upstairs, Marcus was standing at the stove in a pair of madras designer boxer shorts and beat-up tennis shoes. Marcus was not athletic; the fact that he wore out tennis shoes with such regularity only fueled my suspicion that he spent an inordinate amount of time wandering the streets of Cambridge when he claimed to be in the library researching his thesis. He was constantly broke, but he had an amazingly large and eclectic underwear wardrobe, because not one of his girlfriends had ever given him anything other than intimate apparel as a gift. I considered telling him I had a letter from Louise and then thought better of it. Marcus couldn’t understand how I’d remained friends with Louise when he had not. It made perfect sense to me, since she and I had been friends from the start, while she and Marcus had been lovers, a more tenuous and opportunistic connection, and one which rarely endures.

  I lowered one of the matchstick blinds to filter out the sunlight and dropped onto the nubby orange sofa we’d placed against one wall of the enormous L-shaped kitchen in an attempt to fill space.

  “Not good for the springs,” Marcus said. He was pouring water over the coffee grounds, slowly and methodically. Coffee was the mainstay of Marcus’s diet, and he’d turned the production of it into a fetish.

  “They’re shot anyway,” I said. “We should go out and buy a new one.”

  “We should,” he said, without conviction. “I was thinking that the other day. We should get a new thing for the living room, too.”

  “Good idea,” I said.

  What “thing” for the living room he was talking about I couldn’t imagine. There was no possibility of our buying a sofa or a table or any “thing” for any room in the house, because we operated on the assumption that our arrangement was temporary. The arrangement of two romantically uninvolved men living together is always considered temporary, unless they’re brothers, in which case it’s assumed they’re insane and the arrangement is therefore permanent. There was something so embarrassingly intimate about the two of us doing housecleaning as a team that walking into a department store together and arguing over upholstery was clearly out of the question. So we stuck with the sofa we had, which we’d found on the sidewalk. My guess was the previous owner had been a junkie.

  I’ll get one humiliating fact out of the way now and confess that once, many years earlier when I first met him. I’d been infatuated with Marcus, knowing very well that he was diligently heterosexual. He had those dashing looks, and the faint traces of a Southern accent around the edges of his vowels, and a quiet, seductive manner that made you think he was keeping some great secret you just had to find out. Fortunately, the infatuation had faded. You can’t sustain a sexual attraction over the course of a long friendship any more than you can sustain a long friendship without some flicker of sexual attraction. In any case, it was a relief to me now that when I looked at Marcus, I could appreciate how stunning his looks were and still feel an element of revulsion at the thought of going to bed with him.

  I draped my legs over the arm of the sofa—a knotty-pine appendage with cigarette burns—and studied the envelope from my sister, daring myself to open it.

  “Do you think Donald wears a wig?” I asked.

  Marcus looked up from his coffee production. “Donald’s hair isn’t something I’ve given a lot of thought to.”

  “No,” I said. “I haven’t given it much thought, either.”

  Marcus poured himself a cup of coffee and casually said, “Why? Do you think it’s a wig?”

  “Who knows? It could be anything up there.”

  “The color’s a little odd, isn’t it?”

  “Pink,” I said, warming up. “And sometimes it seems to change shades right in front of your eyes. Have you noticed that?”

  Marcus shook his head. He sat down at the kitchen table, wound his legs together, picked up his coffee cup, and sipped with the slow, subdued pleasure of an addict. To his credit, Marcus had developed his addiction to caffeine long before it became a fashionable, socially acceptable substitute for nicotine addiction. Now that secondhand-smoke activists had diverted attention from real health hazards, such as auto emissions and ozone depletion, it was no longer possible to stop the world for ten minutes by lighting a cigarette in public. Coffee, a more dangerous and malodorous drug, had stepped in to fill the void.

  Marcus’s mother was of Dutch ancestry, and his father was from rural Virginia. He had the dramatic, rough-cut features of a peasant from a Brueghel canvas combined with the blond lankiness of an American Gothic. His face was sunken and sallow in the most flattering ways possible, with the high forehead of an intellectual and the full lips and protuberant ears of a sensualist. Something for everyone, in other words, providing you didn’t dig too deep.

  “I don’t want to talk about Donald’s hair, Clyde. I had a tough night last night. Just when I thought things were going smoothly enough with Nancy to finally let me concentrate on the thesis. Where were you, anyway?”

  “Movies,” I said. A lie, but my disorganized attempts at having a sex life were my own business. I’d spent a portion of the night with Bernie, a waiter and Gordon look-alike who sometimes called me when his lover was out of town. “What happened?”

  “Nancy left me. She said I wasn’t giving her enough emotional support.” He looked up at me—mournful, sincere, a pout on his big, lovely lips. He had thin, dirty-blond hair that he kept at shoulder length. A hank of it swung down to cover half his face, and he pushed it back behind one of his teacup-handle ears. “Would you please tell me what the hell that’s supposed to mean? Emotional support?”

  “You’re asking the wrong person,” I said. “What do I know?”

  What I knew was this: in the two years we’d been sharing the apartment, there had been at least five of these brief, passionate affairs, usually with young graduate students Marcus met in the Harvard libraries. He seemed to attract inexperienced scholars who were still judging books by their covers and were taken in by the deep-set eyes and the hollow cheeks—as I’d been, and as Louise Morris had been, too. A few months down the road they’d leave, making similar charges about Marcus’s inability to give himself to them. They missed entirely the significant point, which was that he had given as much of himself as there was to give.

  I dreaded each new relationship, knowing that sooner or later I’d end up sitting around the depressing little maple table in the vast, depressing kitchen, listening to how detached Marcus was (something I already knew) and being asked if I, in-house expert on the subject, thought Marcus was really attracted to men (something I doubted, although he clearly didn’t mind being attractive to men). Inexplicably, most of these women were involved in the field of Gay Studies, an academic pursuit that baffled me. I always asked polite questions about their work, hoping for gossip on the sex lives of literary or historical figures, and was invariably treated instead to a lecture on power dynamics, images of sadomasochism and bondage, and gender identification in the novels of George Meredith and Jane Austen, or even, God forbid, in Beowulf—all delivered in a language that sounded only vaguely like English.

  “I’m beginning to lose hope,” Marcus said, his coffee cup perched at his lips.

  “Don’t do that,” I said. “You’re too young to lose hope.” In fact, as Marcus rapidly approached forty, he was statistically the right age to lose hope.

  It’s unfair but true that it’s fundamentally impossible to have much sympathy for handsome men.

  I tossed Marcus Agnes’s letter. “From my sister,” I said. It was too early to read it myself. I loved Agnes, but communicating with her sometimes caused me to sink into a swamp of guilt and sadness that cost me an entire day. As for whatever it was she had to say about our father, well, the only two options were bad news and worse news, and since I wasn’t on mood-stabilizing drugs, I didn’t feel like hearing either. I sometimes thought about trying mood-stabilizing drugs, but unfortunately I’m of the generation that only feels comfortable swallowing organic vitamins or street drugs.


  “Agnes!” Marcus said, brightening and tearing open the letter. “I haven’t seen that poor kid in months.”

  As long as a woman wasn’t a serious candidate for romance—if, for example, she was almost his age or not enrolled at Harvard—Marcus was so emotionally available and supportive, he could have hung out a shingle. And there was no mistaking the fact that Agnes was not a serious candidate for romance.

  The envelope from Louise contained a short note scrawled on a piece of motel stationery.

  Dear Clyde, Greetings from, let’s see, where are we? The car has a problem I couldn’t fix, so we’re stuck here for a few days. (Actually, I could have fixed it, but I didn’t have the spare parts on board.) Ben’s been using his free time researching flea collars. Know anything about dogs?

  Remember when I said I would never come east again? Well, guess what? Never turned out to be not so long as I thought. I suppose it never is. I got a grant from a prominent academic institution in Cambridge that’s generous to women, and here we come. Don’t worry, I’ve lined up a sublet. I should have contacted you sooner, but things got hectic. I’ll sign off as soon as you tell me Ben and I are going to love living there and everything’s going to be wonderful. Oh, don’t bother—I wouldn’t believe you if you did. Complications abound. I’ll tell you when I see you.

  Yr frnd, Louise Morris

  It was a pretty dull letter, by Louise’s standards. She was a writer, a novelist, and occasionally her letters had a stylized quality that made me suspect she might be trying out on me material she planned to use later in her fiction. I would have objected, but the letters were usually entertaining. Besides, I’d assumed that the most intimate part of our friendship was long over, and I was perfectly content to accept my demotion from confidant to audience.

  In any case, I was pleased to hear that Louise was coming to Cambridge. Visits from old friends have a way of cheering me up, especially if the old friends don’t need a place to stay and they bring with them the promise of drama I can become involved in at a safe distance.

  For the past twelve years, Louise had been leading a peripatetic life, drifting up and down the West Coast with her son, Benjamin, picking up teaching jobs and freelance writing assignments and, from time to time, restaurant work. I’d read all three of her novels, of course, but I’d been so busy trying to read between the lines for information about her life and some veiled portrayal of me, I’d had a hard time following their plots. Actually, they were pretty plotless, and I couldn’t help but think that, enviable as it was, her meandering life must be, too. She was a respected writer, the type whose name sounds vaguely familiar to most readerly individuals, even if they’ve never gone so far as to actually read one of her books. At one time, I’d had aspirations in a literary direction myself, so I derived vicarious pleasure from the publication of her work. And because the books sold modestly, I didn’t have to get caught up in the petty resentment and envy that a truly major success would have provoked.

  I’d last seen Louise six years earlier, when she was living in San Francisco and Benjamin was a charming little neurotic who never cracked a smile. He was one of those bright, unsentimental kids who can break your heart with their eagerness to appear adult and make you believe they’re on top of the chaos of their lives. It was only the second time I’d seen her since we’d graduated from college. Mostly, we kept in touch through postcards, sporadic bursts of letters, and late-night phone calls, although the calls had ceased since she’d given up drinking a few years earlier.

  “That Agnes.” Marcus sighed. “We really should visit her.”

  In the excitement over Louise’s letter, I’d forgotten all about my sister. I’d been trying to forget all about my sister for quite a few years now but had never succeeded in doing so for more than a few hours at a time.

  “She says you never return her calls. She says she thinks your father’s getting worse. And you’re not being helpful with the cookbook. What cookbook’s that?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Marcus looked at me with his big-eared, wounded expression that said: I’m white, middle-class, overeducated, and devastatingly handsome. Pity me! It always got to me.

  “The cookbook is a metaphor,” I told him.

  “Ah,” he said, and nodded. Whenever I came to a dead end with Marcus, I threw in the word “metaphor.” Marcus was very susceptible to metaphors or even the mention of metaphors. I was more susceptible to similes, which perhaps says something about the difference in our personalities, although I’m not sure what.

  After my mother’s sudden death a couple of years earlier, Agnes and I had found among her papers a shoe box filled with odd, handwritten recipes she’d dreamed up in the last year of her life. Agnes was trying to organize them, in the hopes of having them published. I’d read several of the recipes and saw them as testaments to how overworked and uneasy our mother had been at the end, and possibly how emotionally unstable. What other explanation was there for “Tuna Cookies,” “No-Bake Meatloaf,” and “Wonder Cake,” a bizarre concoction made from chocolate syrup and slices of white bread flattened with a frying pan? I had an abundance of memories of my mother, with her unfortunate but appealing I Suffer, Therefore I Am philosophy and her I, Doormat demeanor. She was small in stature, soft-spoken, had a perpetually crestfallen expression that Agnes had inherited, and dark, nearsighted eyes she’d passed on to me. Not counting cafeteria workers, she was the last woman in America to wear hair nets on a daily basis, delicate little things that came in plastic envelopes and, before she stretched them over her thin hair, looked like dust bunnies. She was Italian, second-generation but still with a flair for grand gestures and big, emotional outbursts that I saw as a confused blend of opera, papal edicts, and devotion to those gorgeous Italian saints, bloodied and beatific. More or less everything made her weep: commercials, greeting cards, thunderstorms, all music—from the most sacred to the most insipidly profane. But her emotional extremes had been diluted over time by my father’s icy evasiveness, her disappointment over the bitter failure of Agnes’s marriage, and the strain of trying to accept me with compassion and understanding. In her last years, floods of tears and religiosity had given way to the bland suburbanization that makes clean laundry a moral imperative. She started shopping through the mail, cooking out of cans, and watching Mass on TV with the washing machine churning in the background. She clung to the Catholic sense of doom and punishment while she lost her belief in redemption. At least, that’s how I interpreted it. She’d been a mild, uncomplaining, and unfulfilled woman, and I’d loved her enormously. A few minutes after every phone conversation I’d ever had with her, she’d called back to add some irrelevant bit of news, as if she just couldn’t stand the finality of hanging up. It plagued me to think how miserable she must be with the finality of death.

  To my knowledge, she hadn’t even been sick when my father called me at seven o’clock one morning in the middle of a howling blizzard and ordered me to get a haircut.

  “Haircut?” I’d croaked. “What do you mean?” I assumed it had something to do with the snow, although I couldn’t imagine what.

  “Haircut! Never heard of it?”

  “But why?”

  “Because your mother died in her sleep last night,” he said, “and I want you to look respectable at her funeral.”

  My mother’s recipes alluded to big family gatherings with grandchildren, nieces, nephews, in-laws, and all kinds of relatives she lacked or had no contact with. I sometimes thought of them as messages from beyond the grave. I’d read a number of them, hoping they might contain clues about a secret illness or otherwise explain her death, but I’d only found evidence of her frail state of mind.

  She had only one sibling, a bachelor brother named Raymond. Raymond lived in an apartment no one in the family had ever visited in Revere, a run-down beach town north of Boston. Raymond himself was pretty run down, one of those Italian guys who, because they’re emaciated, are often told they l
ook like the young Frank Sinatra. Raymond’s life, like the lives of male librarians and priests, was regarded with respect and suspicion, as if there were something noble but pathetic about his existence, better left described in big, broad, blurry generalities.

  Uncle Raymond showed up at my mother’s funeral, wraithlike and hacking, dressed in a suit that didn’t fit, his skin scrubbed raw as if he wasn’t used to bathing. He sat next to me on a funeral-home folding chair and, between coughing fits, pointed to my father and said: “He’s what killed her.”

  Given the strained relationship I had with my father, it was tempting to believe this was true, but I don’t think it was. I doubt it had been a particularly happy marriage—I’d never seen either of them laugh or even smile in the other’s presence—but over the years they’d eased into a state of morbid dependency and resignation, like two people clinging to each other on the tilting deck of a sinking ship. Worse things than antipathy have been confused with love. As far as I know, there were no incidents of significant violence, death threats, or suicide attempts in nearly forty years of marriage.

  I’d loved my mother deeply, and when she died, I was desperately sad. But because there wasn’t anything unresolved between us, it had been easy to let go of her. It’s the nightmare you wake up in the middle of that haunts you throughout the day. Now my thoughts about her were dominated by images of her small body frantically trying to make a stab at immortality by compiling her recipes, those weird combinations of pulverized crackers and condensed soup and salad dressing put to uses that approached science fiction.