“This the place you grew up?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Faaan-ceee!”
“Modestly,” I said.
“Come with an equally modest trust fund?”
“Yes.”
Tony put the picture back. “Well you’re very mum tonight. How long are you planning to hold that grudge?”
I was going to object, but then I said, “Until I know precisely what’s going on.”
Tony did not laugh. “What suits you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, see? Despite appearances, I’m not the cagey one around here.”
“Well, you’re the one who knows where I live.”
“As of last week,” he shot back. “Listen. You want something, Sir Gawain, just ask. This is America, land of stake out your lot before someone else does. Land of the squeaky wheel.”
“Ask and ye shall receive?”
“May. May receive.” Tony leaned on a windowsill now. Directly behind him, Mal’s lights went on.
Tony told me that he liked house-sitting not as the means of deception I apparently imagined but for the simple reason that his apartment was very small, essentially a darkroom at the top of six flights in Hell’s Kitchen. Not a place to visit, and if he was there, he rarely answered the phone. He’d be there to work or sleep or to pick up messages from the phone he rarely answered.
We saw each other every week or two, always when Tony chose to call. I did not like calling him, because I could see him, all too easily, standing beside the phone with his lopsided smile, listening to my voice spool through his machine. I paid for our dinners, and he led us to clubs, where we roamed and watched. We’d end up at my flat. I relaxed enough to let him make me laugh. On an afternoon when I closed the shop for inventory, he came by with a portfolio of pictures he had made on his recent trip to Paris. They were large black-and-white close-ups of ancient stonework complicated by suggestive but indecipherable shadows. The shadows might have been natural or contrived. When I asked questions, he refused to explain a thing. “Don’t act like a tourist,” he said. “Just look.”
I did not love the pictures, but they fascinated me. Or I told myself they did. I bought four and kept them in a cupboard for months, conveniently forgetting to have them framed.
NOW
THIS
IS DISTURBINGLY AMERICAN,
spending so much time in cars, I think. As if they’re a refuge, a burrow.
I have been sitting for several minutes in the car park of the clinic. I haven’t been here in three or four years, and the place has been enlarged and spruced up. I pretend to myself, pathetically, that that’s why I’m still sitting here. I’m admiring it all: new sign, new extension (a charming cottagey barn), and window boxes of morning glories—Lil’s touch, of course—just beginning to tuck themselves in for the rest of the day. The hard rain of the night before has stopped, but thin gray clouds, like smoke, still sprint across the sky.
I’d thought that if I got here early, I’d have them to myself, that we’d be on neutral ground (for me), away from prying ears (well who could blame those ears, any ears, in this titillating, vaguely seedy situation?). But there are two cars beside David’s pickup, as well as another pickup with a small horse trailer in tow.
I actually consider driving back to Tealing. I sigh and step out of the car.
It’s clear the action is in the charming barn. I hear a startled whinny, the protest of hooves on cement. I hear my brother’s voice, reassuring the animal it’s in sympathetic hands. He sounds like a voice-over in an ad for life insurance. When I reach the open doors, a middle-aged man and a teenage girl look my way. The man nods to greet me. They are watching as David and Lil subdue a small fat pony (the small ones bite quickest and hardest, Mum used to warn us). The pony is cross-tied in the barn’s central open space, and Lil stands at the head, stroking its neck while keeping its mouth reined in. Repeatedly, it jerks its nose toward the ceiling, flaring its rosy nostrils. “Easy, boy, gentle boy, calm boy, there’s a lad,” she murmurs over and over. Gradually, its protests dwindle.
“All right then, the drug is going to work,” says David, who’s half-crouched beside the pony, holding a flexed foreleg against his thighs. “There you go, right on schedule,” he says as the pony’s head begins to droop in Lil’s arms. “All right then, Nero, a little tailoring and you’ll be good as new. The cut is deep but fairly clean.” He looks up at the man (nearly as small and plump as the pony) and says, “I do wish you’d called, so I’d come to you. It’s dodgy transporting a horse with a wound, even superficial.” He’s spotted me, behind the pony’s owners. He looks at me briefly—on the word
dodgy,
I swear—then back at the plump man.
“Twas airly I found him, and I thought we could git ’im in before I could ring you. Ye’ll sew him up good, will ye?” says the man.
“Nero will be right as rain, you’ve no worries there, but I’d like to discuss the fencing on your farm. I’m accused of newfangled thinking, but I’m no fan of barbed wire, if it can be avoided. Electric’s the thing.” As he speaks, David is already stitching up Nero’s gash. Nero’s head lolls against Lil as she holds him. Now and then, his eyes spring open and he snorts gently, like a sleepy drunk at the wheel of a car.
The girl, who sounds as if she’s been schooled a social class or two beyond her dad, lights into him about how a neighboring farmer gave him the same advice. “In case you haven’t noticed, it’s not the Middle Ages anymore.”
“Lass, ye’ve enlightened your ma and me on this fact I canna say ha many times,” her father says gently.
I’ll just bet she has, I reply in my head. Standing politely away to the side, I take in the daughter’s dark green fingernails, her pierced nostril and eyebrow. Surprisingly, my knee-jerk sympathies lie with the dumpy dad. (Is this an omen? Does the thought of parenthood—custodial or biological—sting?)
Still focused on his handiwork, David says, “Gillian, should we discuss what you’re feeding Nero? He’s grown a bit . . . rotund, shall I say?” He looks up at the girl with a flash of handsome grin and she laughs, charmed. In her gush of a reply, she manages to implicate her dad in this maltreatment as well. Something about the cheap grain he orders for the cows and goats. He does not begin to object.
“Excuse me,” David says to Gillian when she’s finished diverting the blame. “Fenno, would you mind waiting in the surgery? There’s tea on the hot plate. Introduce yourself to Neal.”
Just like that, I’m dismissed. Lillian hasn’t looked at me once.
I have the petulant urge to head back to the car and ditch the buggers, David and Lil, Dumpy Dad, the punker and her pony. Excellent riddance to all. But I let myself into the main clinic, through a perky new Dutch door with polished latches. I’m greeted in stereo by a young man in a white smock hunched over a calculator and a woman with a Siamese cat in her lap. The cat purrs contentedly away. A hypochondriacal cat, I suppose. Clearly not an emergency, and I decide that this will be a test. I will make my decision based on whether the cat gets service first or I do. Because, idiotically, I’m here without having decided on a firm reply to the looming question. I was to decide on my drive north. I was to decide while luxuriously housed on Arran. I was to decide on the aimless journey back. I was to decide in the late, sleepless privacy of my childhood room and, finally, during the early-morning drive I made here an hour ago. Each time I failed.
I take a seat next to the perky Dutch door and, before the cat’s mistress can mention the weather, pick up the nearest magazine, a veterinary journal. Resolutely, I page through inflamed udders and jaundiced livers and suppurating gums just to remain safely inside my shell and marinate in righteous indignation. Neal, incurious about my petless presence, returns to his calculations, rocking witlessly to and fro as he punches in his numbers. (Now
there’s
a contender, I hear my mother whisper tartly in my ear.)
I have actually begun to read about squamous cell carcinoma in short-haired cats when David walks through the Dutch door. Without quite looking at me, he puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes it briefly as he says, “Hello there, Wally, shall we snip those stitches and hustle you back to your place in the sun?” The woman stands, holding Wally in her arms. I can tell from her bright expression that she’s infatuated with my brother, as I suppose all his female clients must be. David strokes Wally (who cringes at his touch), then turns to lead cat and mistress through an inner door. Wally begins to emit a barely audible yowl, like the whine of bad radio reception. My sentiments exactly, I think as David shuts the door behind them.
I stand and fling the magazine onto the table, a parting gesture of disgust witnessed by no one, but then there’s a startling buzz. Neal picks up a phone. “Yes, yes . . . oh yeah?” he says, looking straight at me. He sets down the receiver and says, “You the famous Fenno?”
“Famous?” I say (or snort).
He laughs. “The wild brother from New York City.”
“I’m hardly wild.”
“Well, wild or no, Mrs. McLeod’s waiting for you in the barn.”
I think of Mum, the only Mrs. McLeod I know: waiting for me in the kennel, in the car, downstairs at Tealing, at the airport before she was ill—and now perhaps, if Lucinda’s concept of the universe wins out, waiting for me in life-after-death. Or, if David’s wins out, waiting in a Church of Scotland Hell for the equally damned souls of her lovers (to be followed by me) while Dad inhabits an alpine cloud bank, a literally divine Greek isle. There he roams, eternally and happily pensive, expecting his good son Dennis and his bullishly captivating chum Marjorie Guernsey-Jones. Whether David would make it to Heaven I see as a toss-up, though right now I can’t be objective.
AS THE WEATHER WARMED
toward another summer, I seemed to be living a life of chiaroscuro—or scuroscuro: between one kind of darkness and another. On the surface, Tony and I seemed to have an understanding, but I did not honestly know what it comprised. I never did merge our life with the rest of mine, as I had once determined to do. I never even tried. Sometimes Tony would come to a reading. He might stay, for the wine and cheese, and we might leave together once I cleaned up. Ralph would throw me a furtive leer, but he did not pester me for details since he was now busy, at last, with a courtship all his own: an architect from Princeton whose house, on weekends, welcomed even the dogs.
Mal’s health began to slide again, if subtly. In May, along with narcissus and lilacs, the Hungarian dermatologist made his debut. The spots appeared inside Mal’s mouth, and Dr. Susan, as I’d come to think of this all-important but faceless figure, recommended another doctor. This doctor would inject the latest potion of hope directly into the lesions.
After returning from his first visit to the new doctor, Mal rang me and asked for a favor, the first in months. Would I stop by a certain Japanese restaurant and pick up miso soup? At his door, he looked several shades paler than he had a few days before. His voice sounded muffled because he was moving his mouth as little as possible.
Mal set the carton of soup on his kitchen counter. He turned and said very slowly, “I’ve a pact with this devil disease. Get to have the rudest, most damning symptom of all . . . neatly hidden away . . . but twice the pain. Deal of the century.”
Rudest
came out “oodest,”
century
“thensery.” Then he zipped his mouth shut with a finger and led me back to the door.
Abruptly (though this was how most news came from abroad), Dennis called to announce his wedding, less than a month away. I had no idea who the woman could be. They’d met in Paris, he said. She was gorgeous, smart, decisive—and to his delight had decided that he, Dennis, would do. “Do?” I said. “Merely do?” No, no, Dennis assured me, laughing, they were passionately in love. “And will
that
do?” I asked tersely. “Oh Fenny, you’ve lost your sense of humor. Sometimes you know! You just know! Haven’t you ever felt that way?” Of course not, I wanted to snap. Do you see me sending Kodacolor Christmas cards of soul mate plus offspring? But I congratulated him, told him I couldn’t wait to meet her. I did imagine she must be angelic, though I had yet to meet anyone French who possessed that virtue.
Did the wedding have to be rushed? He laughed. “Well yes, rather so—if she’s to fit into her grandmother’s gown, which she’s always wanted to wear.” He laughed some more, laughed as if drugged, and his bride, in my mind, became a good deal less angelic.
“If you can’t make it, I’ll certainly understand,” he said. “And it won’t be a grand business anyway, Mum’s death being so recent.”
It could have been the grandest affair of the century, planned a year in advance, and Dennis would still have forgiven my absence (I don’t think he’d know a grudge if it mugged him). So I was relieved, and not because I didn’t want to be there.
In June Mal stayed home, mostly in bed, for a week. For the first time, I entered his bedroom. Like mine, his back windows overlooked a row of gardens, some slovenly, some tidy, but all in some semblance of bloom. The two long walls leading to the windows were lined with records and books, and across his broad dark sleigh bed lay a quilt which I knew Lucinda must have made, a crazy quilt of velvets, velours, jacquards, and satins—greens, blues, and golds with an occasional sliver of black. “Two decades of party dresses I had to
beg
her to withhold from Goodwill, down on my knees,” said Mal when I asked. “I said, ‘Well if I can’t wear them, Mom, at least let me cocoon inside them.’ And who knew? They might just cure my insomnia. That won my case.”
Mal never let me cook, but I would pick up dinners from the Gondolier’s Pantyhose, Le Codpiece de Santa, and a Chinese restaurant newly christened One Fun Yum. He seemed to have become ravenous. Gone was the ascetic diet, and the cancerous lesions in his mouth, he said, had all but vanished. “More like Cindy Crawford beauty marks, not those Carl Sagan black holes just waiting to suck down my brain.”
But Mal was tired, bone tired. “Literally,” he said. “I can actually feel my femurs from inside out. Sometimes my ribs seem to itch.” The professionally laundered shirts I had picked up the previous week remained in their packages, stacked on their shelf in the cupboard. I did not ask about work, about concerts he must be missing. By the Fourth of July, he felt strong enough to visit friends on Fire Island.