A Marriage Made at Woodstock (22 page)

Frederick looked up at her and smiled. Had he moved? He had rushed speeding through a red light. He had driven up and down endless streets. He had dodged Budgie
and
a Conestoga at Joyce's. He'd been to Panama Red's and the China Boat so many times that the man who fills the cigarette machine now knew his name. He had gone barefoot for olives and gin. He had tackled his own nephew from behind a lilac bush. And he had
moved
through space, as time does,
unintelligently
, his arms and legs flailing over on Bobbin Road for just a glimpse of her. Had he even moved? Her Majesty wondered. Yes, by criminy, he had moved a fucking lot.

“Not much,” he answered. McMurtry Landscaping was becoming a blur in front of his eyes. Was he crying? He mustn't cry. He heard her walk away and then the sounds of paper bags being lifted. He imagined that she had just flung her purse strap over her shoulder, as he had seen her do so often. Her footfalls came back down the hall to his office.

“If I leave you my new phone number, will you promise not to give it to Mother or Joyce?” she asked. Frederick could hear what sounded like pity in her voice. He looked up, pretending surprise that she was there.

“Whatever,” he said.

“I especially don't want to hear from Joyce,” Chandra said. “I had lunch with her on Friday and that's enough for a while. You know how annoying she can be.” Frederick reached for his martini and then turned his chair toward her.

“Listen,” he said. “I've been to dinner with Joyce and Reginald and I find them to be outstanding people. I'll be spending more time with them and it makes me uncomfortable for you to talk ill of your sister.” He thought of Joyce patting Robbie's arm at Panama Red's. The nefarious witch! But then he remembered. Joyce was Robbie's mother. She had probably patted his bottom in their early days together. Frederick's emotions were now like a ball of yarn that'd been on the floor with a cat. They were so tangled that he didn't know who to be jealous of anymore, who to hate, who to love. The whole world was beginning to look like one big ambush.

“Joyce and Reginald?” Chandra asked. “
My
sister?”

“She makes a great vegetarian lasagna,” Frederick said. “And Reginald is a superb history teacher. And who can fault Teddy for practicing safe sex? I feel enlightened just to be near them.”

He turned back to his computer. He knew she was staring at him, reading him, divining the truth. She'd done it so many times in twenty-one years that he could feel her eyes on his face. He concentrated on McMurtry Landscaping.

“Really.” Chandra said. It wasn't a question. “Maybe they'll change their minds now that you've assaulted their son.”

Frederick remembered Joyce's angry phone call that morning.
If
you
so
much
as
breathe
upon
a
child
of
mine
again, I'll have you arrested.
He studied the figures before him on the screen. It had been a good month for Frank McMurtry, what with summer firmly ensconced and all.

“I'll leave my number posted to the fridge,” Chandra said finally. “It's unlisted.” She waited. He wondered what she had expected to find. An angry Frederick Stone? A Frederick Stone ready to slit his wrists in an upstairs bathtub, sticky blood all over the tiled floor? A Frederick Stone ready to forgive and forget on any terms? Didn't she realize that there were fissures now in his psyche? Cracks large enough for one to drive through comfortably in a Mack truck? Couldn't she see that he had
grown
?

“Fine,” he said. He heard her footfalls flowing down the hall and into the kitchen. Panic rose in his chest. Again, he had wanted to hold her, to bury his nose into the perfumed smell of her hair, to have her face nestle into his neck. She'd been wearing those faded jeans, what she called her gardening jeans, and the worn flannel shirt she seemed to have been born in. Such familiar things to him, these items of clothing. He had wanted to release the ponytail from its elastic band, unbutton the flannel shirt, and hold her warm breast in his hand.
The
breasts
are
paired
mammary
glands
on
the
front
of
the
chest, composed of fatty tissues and glands.

“Not now, Mr. Bator, for Christ's sake,” Frederick said. “Can't you see what's going on here? Besides, where have you been for four days, when I
really
needed you?” He was ready to promise her anything if she'd come back. But he had seen a show just the day before that had changed his mind: Men Who Chase Women and the Women Who Despise Them for It. Frederick couldn't remember now whose show it had been, only that he had never seen so many sniveling males in his life. Two of them had even sobbed, broken down on national television and begged for their women to return. There wasn't an Iron John among them. Frederick thought of his own desperate attempts to find Chandra. What if he had caught the Toyota that afternoon, just weeks ago? Would he have dropped to his knees amid the seagull shit and pleaded with her to return? How many nights would he have called her if she hadn't moved away from Amy's house, begging her to return? The universe, the fucking cosmos, something must have had a hand in preventing him from reaching her and becoming just another mewling wimp. He gave no credit whatsoever to The Girls, those three feminist bitches who had once been his friends.

When he heard the moving van pull away, followed by the loud muffler on the Toyota, he limped to the window and lifted the curtain just a bit. He wanted to make sure she wouldn't see him. Once, she did turn to look back at the house, sorrowfully, he thought. He watched as the big orange and white van cut the corner, Chandra following close behind. Then he went directly to the kitchen. Lunch must be almost over since he noticed that the martini pitcher was nearly empty. He found the Post-it note with the new phone number on it. He stared at it only briefly, afraid he may memorize it otherwise.

“Don't you dare remember that number, Mr. Bator,” Frederick said. Just days ago, he would have killed for a gift like this, a chain linking him to her, however fragile. More tears weighted his eyes. He must destroy the Post-it quickly. He must think of those times up ahead when he would ache to hear her voice. But he had come to realize that if any reconciliation was possible, she would have to make the first move. Buoyed up with martini courage, he found a book of matches. He struck one and watched as it flared nicely. His eyes still teary—she had looked so damn beautiful—he dipped the corner of the green Post-it to the flame. Fire ate into the paper and Chandra's new number, all seven lovely digits, disappeared in its wake.

• • •

It was almost six o'clock when Frederick realized that he had not bothered to bring in that day's newspaper. He finally found the thing on the corner of lawn near Mrs. Prather's fence. Was the goddamn paperboy myopic as well as uncoordinated? Raggedy Andy could run a more orderly route. He was about to take the paper back into his house when he heard Walter Muller's car turn into the yard next door. If he walked across the lawn now, Walter would undoubtedly see him. Perhaps if he just stood, unmoving and treelike, he would go unnoticed. He froze there, paper under his arm. Walter got out and slammed his car door. He spotted Frederick immediately and waved. Then he inhaled a large breath of air, releasing it dramatically.

“Isn't this a lovely evening, Frederick?” he asked. “This is my favorite time of year. A lovely time to be alive. Just smell the air.” It was as if Walter Mullins were taking part, perpetually, in some god-awful musical.

“Beam him up,
please, Scotty
,” Frederick whispered. He nodded his head at Walter.

“Mrs. Muller and I were talking about you just this morning, Frederick,” Walter said. “Anytime you feel like a home-cooked steak, just tap on the back door.” Jesus. They'd be tying red handkerchiefs to all the bushes on Ellsboro Street before it was over. There'd be a hot meal for an honest man down on his marital luck wherever Frederick turned. And couldn't he use the
front
door?

“I'm a vegetarian,” Frederick said, and heard what might be classified as a
tsk
tsk
in response. He waved auf Wiedersehen at Walter Muller—surely all Mullers were descended from German millers—in what he hoped was a neighborly fashion, although he had no idea what that was. Chandra had always accused him of waving like the Queen of England, with that constrained, anal gesture, the royal hand oscillating robotically above the elbow. Frederick headed back across his lawn, hoping this would end their chat.

“I was telling Mrs. Muller just this morning,” Walter bulldozed on, “that I always saw a light burning in your office when I got up in the mornings. But I don't see it anymore.”

Frederick pretended not to hear this. He was about to step back inside the house, his fingers on the doorknob, when he heard his name called. From out of the shadows of lawn and shrubbery, the outline of a woman emerged, Venus from her clamshell. His heart kicked against his rib cage. It was the female prerogative, according to the old saw, to change her mind. He felt almost giddy, detached, the way he did as a child playing Kick the Can with Richard Hamel and the gang, and the opportunity to kick finally gave itself up to him. Running to the can was a slow-motion job, his arms rising softly into the evening air, falling, his knees lifting, legs thrusting outward. And then, that precious moment when he felt his toe move backward inside his shoe on impact, saw the can rise and spin and shine in the moonlight. A lifetime—he knew this—had just taken place. And it was such a sweet lifetime, this lifetime of victory, that he had often wondered, as he walked home tossing the silver can up into the air over and over again, as though it were a magnificent coin, he wondered how the future could ever top it. Now he knew. This was how. Chandra had come home.

“Frederick? Is that you?” He recognized the voice before he saw the face. “I'm so glad that phone books list addresses,” she said, her words followed by the incessant heels, clicking like a ticker-tape machine up the paved walk. Money walking. Liquid gold.

“Doris Bowen,” Frederick said, and moved aside so that she could glide past.

Frederick made them a pitcher of martinis while Doris walked about in white cotton slacks, a white cotton sweater, and surveyed all the empty spaces that Chandra had left behind. Frederick wasn't comfortable with this inspection of his barracks. He felt as though his entrails had been nailed to each blank wall, each swath of floor that had once known a stick of furniture. And now here was an outsider strutting about as though the living room was an art gallery.

Doris accepted the martini and they arranged themselves on opposite ends of the sofa.

“It was sort of like this with me and Ronny,” she told him, “except I was the one to leave and, well, after all, I left for a multimillionaire. I took nothing with me. Everything I owned was too shabby.” She shook her head in amusement, remembering.

“Do you miss him?” Frederick asked. “Ronny, I mean?” He waited. Somehow, her answer would pertain cosmically to him, to Frederick Stone, to his estranged relationship with Chandra. If Doris missed Ronny, then perhaps Chandra missed Frederick. Do women pine for the men they leave behind? Even the men they despise?

“No,” Doris said, much too quickly. “No, I don't miss him.”

“I mean, like on your birthday,” Frederick said. “Or his birthday. Maybe at Thanksgiving when the whole family gathers. Maybe you miss him when you carve the turkey?”

“No,” she said. “I don't miss him. But I always carved the turkey.”

“Oh, come on,” Frederick urged. “Surely there are times when you hear a song that used to be
your
song, yours and Ronny's, and you miss him a little.” Doris was gracious enough to give the notion even further thought.

“No,” she said. “I can't say that I do.”

“Let's say you're walking along the ocean and you remember how the two of you used to walk there. Or you see the snow falling just so, and you remember your first snowball fight.” He felt his eyes tear up. “Or you smell strawberries on a summer's day and it brings back a scene from twenty years ago, a loving scene, with Ronny in it. Don't tell me that these things happen only in Ingmar Bergman films, Doris. You must miss him
once
in
a
while
.” He tipped his martini and was not surprised at how easily it slid down his throat. Goddamn women. And they were supposed to be the sentimental sex.

Doris leaned over and took his glass. She placed it beside hers on the living room floor. The coffee table, being Chandra's, was no longer there. Then she eased her rear down the length of the sofa until she was sitting next to him.

“Do you know who I think of when I walk along the ocean?” Doris asked. She reached over and undid the top button of his shirt. “I think of you. And do you know who I'd think of if it was snowing?” She undid another button. “I'd think of you.” She worked down to the last button and undid it too. Frederick watched her lips moving, full lips, the pumped-up kind that so many women were buying these days from plastic surgeons. He imagined that, one day, nursing homes in Hollywood would be full of wrinkly women with gigantic lips. Chandra's mouth, however, had been that sweet little oval, the kind one sees painted on porcelain dolls. “And when I smell strawberries,” Doris continued as she eased his arms out of his shirt, “I think of us having sugared ones for breakfast, in a huge canopied bed, with the rain coming down outside, and a fire snapping in the fireplace.” She pulled his T-shirt over his head and tossed it onto the floor. Frederick looked down at his bare white chest. Unlike the hair on his head, the chest hairs weren't plentiful enough to recede. There were still a few straggling about in the gully on his breastplate, discussing whether or not they should spread out. But they'd been talking about doing that since high school, to no success. Doris ran a finger about his left nipple and Frederick felt it harden in a rush of blood. He said good-bye to the Bowen account as her lips descended upon his neck. It was true that he found her attractive and sexy. But with all that money came another dimension that hadn't existed with the other women he slept with, before Chandra. It had not existed even with Chandra. It was that dimension of power, of enormous wealth, of immeasurable clout. Frederick had had a lifetime of women in long faded skirts, women who couldn't wait for their hair to turn gray so that they could show the world how they refuse to dye it, who drove Volkswagens with dented fenders, who stuck candles into empty wine bottles, who used cement blocks to build bookshelves, who always bought ginger root at the market, who kept a box of orange pekoe tea bags in their cupboards and far too much incense on their coffee tables. Before he married, Frederick had awakened in canopied beds where he looked up to see wind chimes circling like doves above him, prints on the walls from Picasso's Blue Period, Goya's Black Period, jeering posters from Joe McCarthy's Red Period, heaps of turquoise jewelry lying on a dresser, a song from
Abbey
Road
on the stereo. “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” He felt Doris urging his hand beneath the cotton sweater and then up to her breast. The breast was sleek, almost slippery, and he imagined that's how store-bought breasts must feel. He tried not to concentrate on the silicone, or the fact that he was holding a handful of the stuff. It wasn't radioactive after all. Ralph Nader would be anti-tits if it was. Doris leaned forward to kiss him and her tongue seemed to explode in his mouth, probing here and there. He canted his head backward, breaking the kiss.