My progress over the first couple of weeks was considerably greater than Howard’s was. He’d come into the store a few times to ask questions or meet with the store’s accountant, but he had yet to bring any potential buyers. When I asked Howard how long he thought the process would take, he was noncommittal, saying that, while small retailers were always interested in Amber, they weren’t necessarily interested in the kind of store my father had. This was a burdensome observation. An extended sale process meant that I had committed to spending much more time in Amber than I had intended. And all of it in a mind-numbing work environment, a frustrating home situation, and a social circle where I was on a first name basis with only the woman who made my coffee and the guy who poured my drinks.
I needed an escape of at least a temporary kind. It was a Monday, I knew things would be quiet in the store, and I knew that Tyler was more than capable of dealing with anything that came up. I got in my car and headed over the Pine River Bridge. From
there, I simply drove. North on Route 9 and then north again on 91. I had no idea where I was going and I was convinced that it didn’t matter. In fact, I thought that the simple unpredictability of the day would prove to be refreshing in and of itself. I had an R.E.M. album on the iPod and when “Everybody Hurts” came on, I was nearly giddy to hear the original version and not the version that played regularly on the store radio.
After about an hour, I exited to get some coffee and to go to the bathroom at a diner just off the road. While there, I decided to pull out my atlas to see what lay ahead in this direction. As I followed the map up into Massachusetts, my eyes shifted to the left and landed on Lenox. I could get there in a little more than an hour by switching over to the Massachusetts Turnpike. Iris had said she wanted to stay in touch. This seemed like an excellent way to find out if she meant it. I switched my iPod to The Bravery and jumped back onto the highway, taking the surprisingly good coffee and a homemade cranberry muffin along with me.
Lenox was in many ways what Amber wanted to be when it grew up. One of the largest towns in the Berkshire Hills, it was the home to dozens of craft shops, boutiques, restaurants, specialty stores, and inns, and drew a huge summertime tourist business from numerous superior performing arts venues, the most famous of which was the Tanglewood Amphitheater. It combined urban sensibility vacationing at its country home with Colonial history. And while it thrived during the summer, it was now very much alive twelve months a year. I’d made a late fall trip
there just six months earlier with a woman I dated for a short while. I wonder what I would have done if I’d run into Iris then.
A Broadway character actor and one of her former professors at Yale founded the Lenox Ensemble in 1987. In their early years, they did repertory versions of the works of Williams, Albee, and Wilson, among others, and in recent years had concentrated on staging younger playwrights who they believed were doing important work. Last summer they had produced their first commissioned play and were committed to doing two of these every year in the future. I learned all of this from a flyer I found at an inn where I stopped to get some information. I knew how to get to Lenox, but I had no idea how to find where Iris worked.
The Ensemble’s offices were located in a modest farmhouse about two miles from downtown. The theater itself was in a converted barn a couple hundred yards away. Inside the house was a series of desks where a handful of people in their early twenties made phone calls, typed on computers, and sorted through papers. There were offices to the left and to the back of this. As I entered, Iris came out of one of these talking heatedly with a man who was easily nine inches taller and twenty years older than she was. It had something to do with a problem with scenery and it wasn’t clear whether they were on opposite sides of the argument or at various stages of extreme on the same side. At one point, Iris looked over and threw me a surprised glance before going back to her discussion.
A guy at a computer asked if he could help me and
I sat in a chair to wait things out. When Iris finished her exchange, she went back into her office and, for a moment, I thought she was either going to ignore me or had forgotten I was there. But then she walked out in my direction, looking considerably more relaxed than she had only moments before.
“You might be the last person I expected to see here,” she said, kissing me on the cheek.
“I was in the neighborhood.”
“Do you define the entirety of New England as your neighborhood?”
“I needed to get the hell out of Amber.”
She looked at me, confused. “What were you doing in Amber?”
“A question I ask myself several times a day, starting from the moment I wake up. Some stuff has happened. Want to hear about it?”
“Yes, I think I would,” she said, smiling. She looked at her watch. “I have a nightmare day. I don’t know how much you heard of that conversation, but one of the set designers has had a creative crisis. We think it has something to do with the woman he started dating last month. Our first performance is in three weeks and we’re just this side of royally screwed.”
“In other words, I should have called first.”
“Something like that. But I’d really like to talk to you. Can you hang around until dinnertime? I can suggest some things to do.”
“I think I can take care of myself. What time should I come back?”
She looked at her watch and then back toward her office. “7:00?”
I wondered if I should simply get in my car and head back toward Connecticut. She was obviously very busy. But having made this move, I didn’t want to get just three distracted minutes with her.
“I’ll meet you back here then.”
“Great.” She kissed me on the cheek again. “I’m sorry, but I really have to run.”
Using up five hours was not in any way difficult. I had my copy of
Rabbit Is Rich
and settled in to read for a while at a downtown café. Afterward, I browsed through the various shops, spending more than an hour at a used-and-rare CD store. I came away with a replacement copy of a Richard Shindell album I’d lost in one of my moves and bootlegs of Dave Matthews, Phish, and Umprhey’s McGee. A little later, I walked into a store called Paperworks. It was a stationery, card, and gift store, but unlike my father’s in so many ways. You could buy a spiral notebook there if you wanted, but you could also buy hand-marbled paper. You could get a Hallmark card if that’s where your head was, but many of the cards were from much smaller suppliers, including an entire four-foot display from a local artist who printed them himself. And the gift items included kaleidoscopes from San Francisco, pottery from Tuscany, and maplewood cooking utensils from Vermont. There was plenty of mass-produced stuff here, but also many things for sale that I hadn’t seen anywhere else. I wondered if the new owner of Amber Cards, Gifts, and Stationery would be this creative, and even thought for a second about asking the owner of Paperworks if he had any interest in a Connecticut location.
As the afternoon continued, I decided to take a walk away from downtown. The houses started modestly and then grew larger with more spacious lawns as I got farther from the commercial area. For some time now, I’d enjoyed wandering through unfamiliar neighborhoods. I usually drove, but I actually preferred to walk. I liked to imagine what life was like inside these houses, and when I was walking, the stray overheard voice or barking of a dog would take my imagination in unexpected directions. I passed one house where a preadolescent boy wearing a Boston Red Sox T-shirt was tossing pitches to a backstop, narrating the game action as he did so. Of course it was the World Series and of course he was winning. In my mind, the boy would go in to dinner in an hour or so and, while his parents discussed zoning issues, the day’s business, or perhaps an upcoming performance from the Lenox Ensemble, he would eat his pasta quietly, reveling in that day’s accomplishments.
I walked for nearly an hour and then went back to my car. On the way, I picked up a bottle of water at a convenience store and I sat in the car, sipping, listening to Richard Shindell, and wondering what I would do with the time that remained before I could see Iris again. Completely unbidden, I leaned my head against the side window and dozed off.
I got back to the farmhouse a little after 7:00. It was considerably quieter now and dimly lit. The guy who had greeted me when I arrived earlier that day was still seated at his computer.
“You’re looking for Iris, right?”
“Yes, I am.”
“She said you’d get here around now. The latest in our never-ending series of crises came up but she said she’d try to get back as close to seven as she could. Said you could wait in her office.”
I thanked him and went to Iris’ office, which was lit only by a table lamp. She had a poster of B.B. King on one wall and of Twyla Tharp on another. Just to the right of her desk was a photograph of an abandoned country road in a handmade frame. In spite of first Iris and now the guy at the computer telling me that her day – in fact, all of her days – had been hectic, there was little sign of commotion on her desk. There were probably hundreds of pieces of paper there, but they were all neatly arranged and seemed eminently accessible. A bookshelf against the far wall held a wide array of titles from a history of the Berkshires to one with local codes and ordinances to several business and accounting books to the collected works of Tennessee Williams to novels by Janet Evanovich, Barbara Kingsolver, and Saul Bellow.
As it got close to 7:30, I thought once again about heading back toward Amber. I was going to get home very late and I was sure that Iris would appreciate not having to entertain me after all these difficult hours at work. I decided to give it another fifteen minutes and then, when that passed, decided to give it fifteen minutes more.
I was flipping through the book of ordinances when she came in a little before 8:00.
“Thinking about running for city council?” she said.
“Nah, purely pleasure. This book is un-put-down-able.”
She kissed me on the cheek and then walked behind her desk, looking through a stack of messages as she spoke.
“I’m really sorry I’m so late. I thought I’d be back here before you returned, but my hand-holding mission turned into a full-blown therapy session.”
“If you want to call tonight off, I’m totally okay with that.”
“No, jeez, after making you wait all this time? To tell you the truth, I’m looking forward to the diversion. If you hadn’t shown up, I’d have just wound up staying here all night obsessing about everything that’s going to go wrong in the next two weeks.”
She walked behind her office door, retrieved a sweater, and put it on.
“Let’s go,” she said.
“You’re positive?”
“Extremely positive.”
We drove in separate cars to Stockbridge for sushi. As I looked at the menu, it dawned on me that these kinds of Japanese restaurants had become as comforting and familiar to my generation as roadside diners had been to previous ones. You could travel all over the country and find the same dishes as you found in The Plum Tree in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The quality might vary, the preparations might even range slightly, but you could essentially order before you walked in the door.
“So did you have fun playing hooky today?” Iris said.
“More than I even thought I would. To tell you the truth, I had sort of forgotten that I was playing hooky.”
“You’ll have to show me how to do that. Now explain to me what the hell you’re still doing in Amber. You haven’t decided to move back there, have you?”
“Are you kidding? I think that’s grounds for institutionalization in certain states. No, the thing with my father turned out to be worse than expected. He had another heart attack. He’s got a good chance of being okay, but he can’t work in the store anymore.”
She wrinkled her nose. “That must be tough for him.”
“As indicated by his expression, his demeanor, and the way the belt of his robe drags behind him if he ever decides to get up and walk.”
Iris shook her head. “I would think it would be hard. I mean he’s gotta be worrying about his health and he’s definitely gotta be upset about losing his career.”
“I know. And I do feel for him when I’m not annoyed at how defeated he seems and how much of a crimp he’s put in my plans.”
“You mean the reason you’re still in Amber?”
“Yeah, that. He asked me to take over the store for him.”
Iris’ eyes doubled in size. “You didn’t – ”
“No! Please. But I told him I’d take care of things until he found a buyer. The way commercial real estate flips around on Russet Avenue, I figured I wasn’t committing to very much. But the market for stationery stores seems a little depressed at the moment.”
“So you’re feeling just a tiny bit tied down?”
“Just a tiny bit.”
Iris sipped some green tea and seemed to give my plight serious consideration. After a moment, she looked back up at me and held my eyes for a beat. As she did, I realized that I didn’t want to spend our time together complaining. I hadn’t made the long drive to bitch.
“I can handle it,” I said.
She took another sip and put the tea mug down. “Of course you can.”
While we ate, we talked about the production that the Ensemble was working on and the various ways in which Iris contributed to it. As always seemed to be the case with small creative groups, Iris’ functions varied on an almost daily basis. While her primary responsibilities were managing staff, freelancers, and finances, at any given moment she could find herself giving an interview to a local paper, running lines with one of the actors, or offering the artistic director an opinion on productions under consideration. Though she did a fair amount of eye rolling and sarcastic muttering while she talked about the Ensemble, it was abundantly clear that she was engaged in her work. She didn’t hold hands, perform counseling sessions, and stay in the office until midnight because someone had to. She did it because she knew it would help.