A Marriage Made at Woodstock (13 page)

“Now then,” said Lillian. She seemed relieved to be unburdened of Joe's message as she scoured the menu. But none of the items appeared to meet with her approval. Considering the scowl on her face, she might have been selecting her own coffin. Frederick waited patiently until, finally, he pointed out that the steamed vegetables were always very good and that one could usually count on the soup du jour at Panama Red's.

“I've been having lunch here for a week,” he said.

“Oh, you poor thing,” said Lillian. “How sad. And Joe says that you're a cold fish.” Frederick stared at Lillian's vermilion lips and wondered which fish Joe had envisioned him to be. Concerning Chandra's nuclear family, carp was taken.

“Tell Joe I said hello,” said Frederick.

“They don't even serve
fish
, do they?” Lillian asked, turning to the menu's last page. “Fish don't feel pain, do they? And no chicken? Joe warned me about this when I told him where we'd be having lunch. Joe says that even vegetarians aren't what they used to be.”

“The macaroni and soy cheese is good,” Frederick said. A visual image of Joe swept through his mind, the belly looming above the lumps of charcoal briquettes, a can of lighter fluid in one hand like some awful kind of Molotov cocktail. Frederick imagined the lighter fluid exploding in a brilliant flash, taking Joe's cigar-smoking hand and wrist with it. God, but he had always disliked—no,
loathed
—the little bastard. He was not Chandra's father, anyway.

“Maybe the spinach and tofu salad will do,” said Lillian, resigned. “Bill always used to tell Lorraine that she was eating rabbit food. Remember?” Frederick nodded. Chandra's father had been comedian-in-residence at the American Legion Hall. “Bill loved his sirloins,” Lillian added. Frederick nodded again. He and Chandra had been married just a year before the cholesterol backed so far up in Bill's clogged arteries that not even a Roto-Rooter could get through. Bill should have paid a bit more attention to rabbit food. But Chandra's father had still been several pegs higher up the coat rack than was Joe. And Frederick Stone saw Bill Kimball's dying young as a paltry excuse to get away from the crazy woman he had married on some furlough back to the States during a slack moment in World War II. He had most likely been three sheets to the wind. But Lillian had told the story of first meeting “the most handsome man to ever wear a uniform,” over so many holiday toddies that Frederick could damn near see the stripes. And Bill's rank had mysteriously risen after he passed on to some greater platoon in the sky. “He's gone from a sergeant to a colonel in just two eggnogs,” Frederick had whispered to Chandra one particularly dismal Christmas.

“I'll have the pita, sprout, and soy cheese sandwich,” he told the waiter. He was pleased that not a single geisha was in sight. The waiters and waitresses at Panama Red's seemed content to be American.

“Ooh.” Lillian shivered. “Is that as horrid as it sounds?” Instead of answering, Frederick stared at the flimsy women in the Impressionist prints that crowded the walls of Panama Red's, ghosts of women, their eyes and mouths and noses just pats of paint. Untouchable women, these wisps of smoke beneath diaphanous gowns. He was just wondering if it was possible to excuse himself from lunch, to make reference to an impatient client, an unreasonable workload, when Lillian picked up her sensible purse.

“I've got something for you,” she said. She undid the clasp and rummaged inside before she produced a folded piece of paper. “Joe thinks I'm a fool, but I know my daughter better than he does. And Joyce tells me that you're
on
the
verge
.”

Frederick accepted the piece of paper warily, although he sensed a gift in it. A rush of appreciation swept over him, gratitude for purses that still looked as if Donna Reed owned them, respect for someone who remembered Portland as a littler, quieter town. He even felt a great love for the cracks on Lillian's face, those fissures of pancake makeup, a thankfulness for her little tan gloves, her talcum powder smell, the smear of vermilion lipstick on her white linen napkin. He appreciated these things because he had never known them from his own mother. He unfolded the paper. It was in Chandra's quick, off-to-some-protest scrawl. It was an address, 257 Bobbin Road. He knew instantly where it was. Bobbin Road was almost within walking distance of their house on Ellsboro Street!
When
the
red, red Toyota comes bob, bob, bobbin' along.
He reached for his mother-in-law's hand and held it. He felt the skin move, loose above its lattice of bones.

“Tell her anything,” Lillian said. Her face seemed to rise like a pale moon above the glass of Chardonnay. “Just don't tell her where you got it.”

“I won't,” Frederick promised.

“And, Freddy?”

“Yes, Lillian?”

“Get a haircut, dear.”

• • •

Herbert Stone called three times that evening, leaving informative messages, but Frederick didn't to pick up the telephone. He even thought that he heard a car spin up rocks in the drive and wondered if Herbert was cruising the street, casing the joint, catching his brother in the act of not answering. Each time the phone rang, he had tiptoed to the top of the stairs, in case it was Chandra, and then back again to bed when he heard Herbert's voice. On each message Frederick could hear the excited din of the China Boat taking place over his brother's shoulder. Once, a wall of noise had risen up behind Herbert's voice. It was most likely a group of diners filing in through the foyer, but Frederick imagined ships plowing through the waters of the Malay Archipelago, laded with spices for southern Cathay. What had one of Chandra's seminars been, just the year before? “How Spices and Herbs Shaped the Course of History: Why Republicans Need More Red Pepper.”

“Freddy, this place is crawling with nubility,” Herbert said the last time he called. “The female-to-male ratio is better down here tonight than it is at a NOW meeting.” But Frederick had no heart for crowds and voices and music just then. He had gone, instead, to lie down on the huge bed he and Chandra had bought for their life together, their marriage bed. And from that position he continued to watch the wavering light from the traffic on Ellsboro Street. Where was she right now? Was she over on Bobbin Road, curled in someone else's arms? He had driven by three times since his lunch with Lillian, and not once had he seen the Toyota in the driveway. There had been a maroon Camaro, which had caused instant pangs of jealousy—he would be ulcer-ridden before it was over—and a sheepish-looking station wagon. But there had been no sign of her little red car.

It was ten thirty before he flicked on the bedside lamp and sat up. He found his tennis shoes with their nonleather bindings and slipped into them. The jingling car keys in his hand reminded him of wind chimes, and he thought of their first apartment, the one advertised as having a view of Casco Bay. “You need to stand on this chair,” Chandra had said, “and hold on to the curtain rod like this, and crane your neck. See! There's the water!”

The yellow house at 257 Bobbin Road was quiet. A small light on a lamppost lit up the neatly trimmed hedge, the red maple, the decorative rocks lining the walkway. Frederick had turned off the car's engine and found the button for the driver's window. It whirred down. He sat there near the curb, his blue car transformed to purple beneath the streetlight. He sat listening just in case, just maybe, he might hear her rhythmic breathing, might catch those tiny sighs she made in her sleep, if only he listened hard enough. And maybe he could smell her sweet breath, could at least breathe in the same air that she was breathing over there on Bobbin Road. Inhaling. Exhaling. All the tiny blood vessels in her lungs taking up the oxygen, then passing the carbon dioxide out of her blood on the exhale. She had fallen asleep without his help. Without
him
, period.
She's breathing twelve to fifteen times per minute now that she's asleep
, he heard Mr. Bator say. He wished that he was sitting once again in Mr. Bator's biology class, the old floor register rattling away at the back of the room, the colorful charts of muscles and internal organs decorating the walls, wind and rain whipping about the corners of the school building. He had felt very safe there, in those long-ago classes, content to study about human beings while Mr. Bator's fatherly drone beat its words against the clank of the register.
The
most
striking
difference
between
homo
sapiens
and
other
animals
is
his
ability
to
make
use
of
symbols
such
as
language
and
writing.
What would he say to Chandra if she appeared instantly in an upper window, a gothic patina of light illuminating her like some Virgin Mary in those churchly paintings? What would he write to her, now that he was a vagabond, a bachelor bard, a traveling minstrel from another street? Would he compose Petrarchan sonnets, all addressed
to
Laura, 257 Bobbin Road
? But no matter. Language and writing had been taken from him when she moved away to a place where she would not have to read or hear what he had to say. And now, instead of her sweet breathing, all Frederick Stone heard was a radio playing softly in another house, and occasional laughter seeping from a television set. Canned laughter. Something Frederick wished was on the market. He would put it, in alphabetical order, on his grocery list. And the only smells that permeated the night around 257 Bobbin Road was from the McDonald's one street over. This would not be a welcomed aroma to Chandra Kimball-Stone, and maybe that's why the windows of the house seemed so trussed up. “The United States has lost two-thirds of its topsoil, and eighty-five percent of this loss is because of livestock agriculture,” he had heard her say at the seminar she gave on vegetarianism. “Sixty million people in the world wouldn't starve to death each year if livestock didn't eat eighty percent of the corn grown in this country! Don't you even care as Christians? Don't you even care that eating meat is killing you?”

Frederick smiled, remembering her intensity, her passion. He had never been able to explain to Chandra that most people live a life detached from nature, detached from the cruel realities of
where
things
come
from
. And they were mindless of any distant
human
suffering. “How do you think Hitler got all those Germans, lots of nice folks, to look the other way?” he had argued with her. And yet she'd called
him
a blind man. He remembered the day she had accosted two college girls who had joined her on a Save the Rain Forest march. She caught them having a Big Mac break on a park bench. “Many of those cattle were fattened in South America,” Chandra told them. “Maybe you don't care about the animal, but every quarter-pound fast-food burger that comes from one of those cows destroys fifty-five square feet of rain forest.” One of the girls had promptly put her burger down. The other had remained with her hand defiantly in the air, Big Mac attached. “So?” this one had asked. “SO GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY SAVE THE RAIN FOREST MARCH!” Chandra had shouted.

Frederick buzzed his window up and started the car. He drove away from the yellow house before flipping on his headlights. In the rearview mirror he watched the tiny beacon on the lamppost grow smaller, and then, like a lantern hung from some western outpost of the last century, like his comfortable marriage of twenty years, it disappeared entirely.

At ten o'clock on Thursday morning, Doris gave him precise directions to the Bowen home, thirty minutes from Portland. Frederick thought about the upcoming lunch as he rinsed the Gillette Sensor and put it back into his shaving kit. Arthur Bowen was not in town, but he and Doris were to have a casual lunch and discuss business. Or had she said, “We'll get down to business”? He imagined the two of them on the floor of Arthur's study, on all fours, taking care of business.

“‘Taking care of business,'” he sang. Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Nineteen seventy-four. “All right, BTO!” He bobbed his head to his own music, just as he'd seen the young studs do on MTV, and then attempted some moonwalk dance steps, shuffling his feet beneath him. Watching himself in the mirror, he was reminded of an older man trying to put out a fire on shag carpet, a trick he had perfected back in those days when marijuana seeds often fell from the tips of burning joints. He felt the cursed blush threaten to cover his face. What would Chandra say if she saw him now? He would be as crazy as Herbert before this was over.

He began his daily assessment by running his fingers through his hair in slow, even strokes. The gray hairs looked permanent, but he would be lucky if he had any hairs left at all before this latest symphony gone awry, this
Vicissitude
in
C
Minor
, was over. He had taken the time to add to his computer calendar of important dates:
June
23, 1992. Chandra Kimball-Stone has been gone for three weeks and a day. Hair graying moderately. Wrinkles still uncertain.
He had seen Geraldo Rivera on national TV, just that morning, have some fatty tissue extracted from his buttock so that the doctor could insert it into the furrows between Geraldo's eyes. Herbert had phoned later and asked, “Did you see Geraldo get a brain transplant?” But the procedure was the most modern and natural of face-lifts, according to the doctor, better than silicone, collagen, or Retin-A, and Frederick had watched with deep interest. Joan Rivers had held up a sheet so that Geraldo could drop his pants. She had giggled a lot but resisted peeking behind the curtain. Geraldo had very little fat on his body, but would have to find some somewhere since his forehead would need two more injections of ass fat.

Frederick leaned forward into the mirror for a more precise wrinkle inspection.

“Hello there, Doris,” he said. He smiled at his reflection, seductively he hoped. But then he noticed that small crow's-feet had appeared around his eyes. He must remember not to smile. She would think him a humorless bastard, but he would
appear
young
. And he would find a doctor in Portland, Maine, qualified enough to transport parts of one's ass to one's face. He swished a mouthful of Listerine about for a few seconds and then spit it out. It tasted like shit, but the ubiquitous folks at
Consumer
Reports
had promised that Listerine had a proven plaque-fighting formula. The last thing Frederick needed as he approached middle age and, perhaps, single status was a mouthful of gingivitis.

“You look wonderful in white, Doris,” he tried again. “A genuine Ophelia. Now can we discuss the possibilities of my handling your husband's accounts?” Too fast and glib. And maybe even too sexist. What was happening to him? There had been a time—
hadn't there?
—when he had been suave and sophisticated, relaxed with who he was. He had recited Ezra Pound to Chandra that first night at Woodstock. But back then he had been in a state of acceptance about himself, his relationship to his fellow man, his fragile place in a changing universe. Or, on second thought, maybe he'd simply been
twenty-one
. Whatever the hell it was, it was gone. He felt silly now when he walked into stores with more than one teenaged clerk behind the counter. If they giggled even to each other, he peered over his shoulder, adjusted his clothing, and felt generally anachronistic. He rarely knew what was in style anymore. Nor did he care. He had grown old enough to see skinny ties come back in style again, this time on rock stars instead of on greasers. So how could he place any significance in what fashion designers conned the consumer into purchasing? That was the first syllable of
consumer
, after all. And even tie-dye was back, that god-awful eyesore his own generation had invented, probably when two potheads got in a fight over the food coloring. Each time he saw some old hippie wearing it, or some young anti-Yuppie, the only thought that kept coursing through his mind was,
What
could
we
have
been
thinking?
No wonder everyone he knew back then, including himself, rarely took off their shades. And it wasn't ready to go away gracefully, this notion of the sixties. Sotheby's had recently auctioned off an orange vest belonging to Jimi Hendrix for
$19,800
! And now some secondhand stores were even prompting folks to
buy
those old outfits, the bell-bottomed pants, the Made in India shirts with the groovy sleeves, the beads, the headbands, the sandals made of water buffalo that have died naturally. Frederick Stone had grown aged enough to see his former wardrobe displayed on store mannequins, could meet pants he once owned coming down the street, the new tenant a young man who had only
read
about Watergate. He thought of Chandra's flowing cotton skirt, the one she loved to march in because it was so
red
, being bought up by Valerie or Sarah, who had never heard of the secret bombings of Cambodia, who sipped Dirty Mothers, who thought Tiananmen Square was the crowded dance floor at the China Boat. He had met Chandra at Woodstock, and now Woodstock was a
goddamn
movie
, like
Singing
in
the
Rain
and
From
Here
to
Eternity
and
On
the
Waterfront
. Jesus.

He decided to dress as casually as possible and, by doing so, project the “I don't give a shit” mode of fashion, a notion difficult to parade in the materialistic eighties and nineties.

“So whaddya think about this
Iron John
philosophy, Doris?” Frederick asked the mirror. He stepped back two steps and crossed his arms. The word
swagger
came into his mind. “A little too primal for you, Doris? Come on, let's tap-dance on the table. Let's shout haikus down the commode. Let's bake some marijuana brownies and pass them out to all those Right-to-Lifers.”

He patted a bit of aftershave about his face and wondered if Geraldo's own face was stinging, not to mention his ass. It wasn't just women anymore who sliced and carved and pumped and stitched their bodies in order to feel better about themselves. Geraldo said it himself, on national television, so that there could be no doubt. “I'm a jock,” Geraldo confessed. “I thought face-lifts were for sissies.” Well, they weren't, not anymore. Face-lifts were for everybody.

• • •

The drive up to the house seemed endless. He passed what appeared to be small groves of fruit trees, apple, and maybe some plum. He crested the hill and leveled into a driveway filled with small circular flower gardens. Enormous pots bulging with blooms rimmed the drive. The front of the house was all immense, tall windows. The rest of it expanded backward, beyond more trees and arbors and what looked like a terraced pool within a stone archway. He had imagined liveried servants swarming the grounds, a veritable barricade to which he must explain his presence, but no one was about. Two cats slept in the shade of a flowerpot filled with something purple. He could hear the sounds of birds rise up from somewhere beyond the terraced pool, not the usual birdsongs and notes he might hear while walking, but
exotic
sounds. He pulled up in front of the house and got out of his car. He left the key in the ignition in case some valet bounded out to park it elsewhere.

When he pushed the brass doorbell, he heard instant music rise up inside the house, a jangling of notes and chords, more like the horrendous stuff blaring from the Ellsboro Street ice-cream truck than what he would expect from the Bowen residence. A woman with a face incapable of smiling opened the door. Frederick assumed she was either the housekeeper or Grant Wood's model for the farmwife in
American Gothic
. He had been about to say, “Mrs. Bowen is expecting me,” but she hadn't bothered to wonder who was expecting him or why. She beckoned for him to follow, then led him through a hallway that was heavily mirrored. Light bounced from all angles as they walked. The sections of walls that were not mirrored seemed to be alternately covered with quilted satin and realistic paintings of plants, so real that Frederick had to look again. Hanging plants; tall, narrow potted plants; little plants in dishes. None of them real. What was that “fool the eye” school of painting called? Oh yes, trompe l'oeil. Frederick had read that some Greek guy had even painted grapes so real that birds tried to eat them. But he had never understood the concept. Why fool the birds? And couldn't the Bowens afford
real
indoor plants?

They turned from the hallway into a large room filled with furniture and objects so eclectic that Frederick was certain they'd been collected over many years, from many bustling world cities, from many quaint village shops: a ceramic-tiled coffee table, a painted stool that resembled things medieval, a wine-tasting table, a hexagonal gaming table, Empire chairs, paintings that looked like honest-to-God Constables and Gainsboroughs, and probably were. What appeared to be a hand-forged chandelier dangled overhead. Massive layers of curtains hung from the walls, providing the illusion of more space, as if the Bowen mansion needed such illusions. And there, amid it all, was Doris Bowen. She was seated on an Empire chaise, enjoying the picture window view of a small millpond that sported several black swans. At her feet, a huge Great Dane—a descendant, no doubt, of Cerberus—lay with its massive head on its paws, eyes on the new visitor.

“Frederick,” Doris said, and smiled. “Would you like a drink? Larry will be serving lunch in a few minutes.” Larry? Weren't male servants called Rupert and Holmes or such?

“Martini,” Frederick said, and she rose to fix it herself. The dog turned its enormous head toward her, its eyes glued to her back. Frederick wondered if perhaps it had been a man in another life, a victim of courtly love, now content to lie at the feet of its mistress, waiting for the occasional stroke of a hand, the falling crumb. Doris poured herself a glass of wine.

“Arthur's in New York on business,” she said. “He's really just killing time until he can kill something else, when the Glorious Twelfth arrives.” Frederick raised both eyebrows. “The twelfth of August,” Doris explained, “when grouse season opens in Scotland. It's been a big deal for over a hundred years.” She gave him the martini.

“Interesting,” Frederick said. Had Chandra ever picketed in the glens of Scotland? He could envision her now, in tweeds, thwarting Arthur Bowen's plans
. The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley wi' Chandra Kimball-Stone.
Doris beckoned for him to follow. The Great Dane now lifted its head and watched.

They passed through a doorway with a corduroy valance and entered into a room with many palm trees growing up out of terra-cotta pots. The palms looked to be real.

“As you can see,” Doris said with a swoop of her arm, “hunting is my husband's passion.”

On the walls were the heads of animals Frederick had seen only on
Wild Kingdom
. He recognized an elk, a delicate small-faced deer, a towering moose he hoped wasn't Bullwinkle. He paused before some kind of antelope, grayish-brown, with long, twisted horns. He put a hand up to touch the tip of its soft muzzle.

“Kudu,” Doris told him. “From Africa. Arthur shot it while in pursuit of the Big Five. You know,
elephant
,
lion
,
Cape
buffalo
,
rhino
, and
leopard
.” Frederick tried not to grimace. Good Christ, but Chandra would suffer a stroke to hear such things.

“Kudu, huh?” he heard himself reply.

“Arthur says that hunting keeps many African countries alive financially.” Frederick merely nodded. He knew what Chandra would say to this.
And
Negroes
picking
cotton
kept
the
economy
of
the
South
alive
. “And that's the Cape buffalo over there.” She pointed. Frederick moved on into the room, toward a huge, fierce-looking head. It was black, nearly hairless, with horns joined at the base as though the creature wore a helmet.

“I've never cared much for stuffed animals,” Frederick said. Doris held a cautionary finger up to her lips.

“First mistake,” she said. “And you must remember this if you're to get Arthur's business.
Stuffed
animals are the kind you find on the beds of teenaged girls.
Mounted
animals are what you see before you.”

“Thanks for the lesson,” he said. Chandra would say he was selling out, but Chandra was gone. She had sold out on their marriage, and whether or not he referred to Arthur Bowen's animal corpses as
stuffed
or
mounted
was his own business.

“Freud had it right all along,” said Doris. “You know, that gun-as-penis idea. What you see before you, Frederick dear, are lovers from all over the world. You see animals that have been
mounted
, and we all know what
mounted
means, don't we?” She winked. Frederick shuffled his feet. He tried not to look at the marble eyes of the Cape buffalo, directly above his head. His throat seemed to be constricting.