A Marriage Made at Woodstock (30 page)

“Freddy,” she said. He saw her swallow, saw her eyes flutter as she raised a hand to her mouth. There hadn't been many times in his life when he'd seen her speechless. And as for him, wouldn't it have been great if he had taken advantage of the moment, had tilted his head in some John Wayne gesture?
Howdy, pilgrim
, he might've said. He could have let the poet in him rise up, and finally, for the ultimate occasion.
And
speaking
of
pilgrims, I was one who loved the pilgrim soul in you.
But he did none of that.

“Chandra,” he said. His blood vessels enlarged in what would be the greatest blush of his life. Blood raced throughout his veins, tingling, spreading intense warmth.

“You're
working
here?” she asked. The man regarded him with what Frederick recognized as a territorial gaze, a tacit threat.
She's mine
, his eyes said. And then he understood.

“Oh, so
you're
Frederick,” he said. He held out a hand to be shook. “I thought you were an accountant.”

“I thought so, too,” Chandra said. Her lips barely moved. He knew she was as surprised by this meeting as he was.

“We'll have an improved selection by next week,” Frederick said, ignoring the hand that was still waiting. “Chile, Australia, Germany. Much improved.” Then he walked on to the back of the store and through the door leading to the small office. Closing it behind him, he leaned against the wall, eyes shut, heart thumping. When he finally emerged, five minutes later, they were gone.
Put
it
out
of
its
misery.

For the next twenty minutes he rang up sales and then stared out the storefront window. He was a robot, one that had dreamed of seeing his wife with a new man. And then the telephone resonated throughout the small store. It was Chandra, calling him there at Cain's Corner Grocery, calling to apologize for the embarrassing moment. It was good of her, gigantic of her, colossal even, it really was. And it wasn't as if she'd done something wrong by shopping for wine.

“Ted is someone I met last month,” she said. “He works for the EPA.” Where else?

“He seems like a nice guy,” said Frederick. What could he say? It was the truth. The son of a bitch, the bastard, the odious prick did seem like a decent fellow. And he had such thick hair, the kind that wouldn't recede even if it was attached to pulleys.

“Are you going to be okay, Freddy?” she asked. He thought about that. She had left him in June. She had moved her stuff out of their home. She had avoided him as though he were covered with buboes. She had given out a wrong address so that he couldn't find her. She had hung the phone up on him, and, ultimately, she had divorced him. Now, here in September, here just days before the autumnal equinox would bring a night that would be as long as the day—his longest night to suffer through yet—she wondered if he was
okay
. And she had had the nerve, all these years, to accuse
him
of excessive pride?

“Of course, I'll be okay,” Frederick said. He hoped his light tone assured her that he was deliriously happy. And he went on to remind her that the wine selection would grow in leaps and bounds and not to be a stranger to Cain's Corner Grocery just because her ex-husband was employed there.
HA! HA!
He laughed the laugh he'd given the skeleton, on the chart back in Mr. Bator's biology class. Then he hung up the phone and went to pieces.

For almost twenty-four hours he shook. Mr. Cain, taking pity on the mess his employee was in, had sent him home immediately. Once there, Frederick took to his bed. Covered in blankets, he shivered all night and into the dawn, until the heat of his morning shower beat some sense into him. He shook
physically
,
uncontrollably
, as though love were some awful malaria, a parasite in the bloodstream, a thing to be gotten over after excessive chills, a high fever, a bit of vomiting. But he had stepped from the warm shower, his feet cold upon the tiles of the bathroom floor, and he had known, finally, that it was over. It was
over
.

At first, he was struck with the knowledge of time wasted, all those letters he had written her, and the letters he had read in return, her fragile name scrawled on the upper corner of the envelope. He considered the minutes he had lost to standing before Hallmark displays, agonizing over the right card for Christmas, her birthday, a get-well message. The hours squandered in picking out the perfect gift. He considered all the family gatherings he had been forced to sit through,
her
family gatherings. He thought of mornings across the breakfast table when they had discussed plans to travel in their old age, nights in bed before sleep when the discussion turned to the proper course each should take if the other were to die first. He thought of all those stolen words that had spilled foolishly from his mouth. This waste of a perfectly good life was his first thought, those twenty-some years frittered away.

His second thought was that it would have to begin all over again with someone new, the cards, the gifts, the mornings and nights in bed. He would have to try it again unless he was to live the rest of his life alone. But how could he unpack his old self, dig his zest for life out of the attic, where the rest of his idle youth had been boxed up and stored? And even though he was now utterly subservient to the Three Chairpersons of the Board, the Fabulous Fate Sisters, how could he trust them to treat him fairly a second time around?

At six o'clock that evening Herbert phoned. He and Maggie would be having dinner at eight. Would Frederick care to join them? Frederick was pleased to discover that he felt only gratification in hearing that Herbert and Maggie would be dining together yet again. He was thankful to learn that jealousy, even envy, were not among his emotions. Good for them. And good for him, too.

“Maggie's got a friend, Glenna, who's dying to meet you,” Herbert added. “So what do you say to dinner at DiMaggio's? They serve Long Island duckling in a nice little port. Besides, it's the perfect place for the over-forty crowd.” Frederick smiled. Perfect place, his foot. The last thing Herbert Stone needed in the first stages of his reconciliation was to run into hordes of young women such as Valerie and Sarah, all beseeching him to buy them Dirty Mothers, or Sex on the Beaches, or Screaming Orgasms.

“Why not the China Boat?” Frederick asked. He was pleased that he could still detach himself from his own personal grief in order to badger Herbert. His sense of humor would save him. It would buoy him up over the waves of remorse that were beating him against the rocks.

“To tell the truth,” said Herbert, lying, “I'm a little tired of the atmosphere at the China Boat. So what about it? You up to meeting Maggie's friend?”

“Maybe another time, Herb,” said Frederick. How could he explain that he needed to live alone first before he looked for another relationship? After all, it wasn't like buying a car, or a house, or even a computer. It took time. He was no different from the women he'd been listening to on talk shows, women who want to get to know themselves as adults, to live solo before they hook their lives up again to another human being. That's just how Frederick felt. He had been passed from Thelma Stone to Chandra Kimball in one fell swoop, as though they were exchanging cake recipes—and may the Fates forgive him the sexist metaphor.

“You're going to go out and wander lonely as a cloud, something stupid like that, aren't you?” Herbert asked.

“Something like that,” said Frederick. His big brother knew him well.

“You've read too much poetry, Freddy,” Herbert said. “Besides, what did Blake know about clouds?”

“It was Wordsworth,” Frederick said, as Herbert hung up the phone.

• • •

All his life Frederick Stone had believed that everything he did could be chalked up to experience. No action would be wasted, for it would be an education in itself. This philosophy in mind, he considered, briefly, a career as
The
Failed
Man
. He, too, could make his rounds of the talk-show circuit. Oprah, in her infinite wisdom, would discourage an all-female audience from spitting on him. “Let's learn from this creature,” she would beseech the enraged crowd. They would pass him about. He would go bleeding, his entrails growing shorter and shorter as pieces were ripped away, from Oprah to Sally Jessy to Dr. Ruth, and finally to an interview with Barbara Walters. In the end, no woman would want him again. Perhaps he could go on the road with a seedy circus to turn up at county fairs. For a modest fee, women could hurl softballs at the mechanism that would plunge him into a barrel of cold water. COME DUNK THE ASSHOLE, the sign above his head would read. Small children would wear T-shirts bearing his face, covered by a huge black X.
The
Failed
Man.
Eventually, the hottest comic actor in Hollywood would star in a movie about his life.

Frederick sat before his computer without turning it on. He felt as though he were an initiate upon the road to some discovery, a journey of the self, a regular Gilgamesh. And he must take the proper gear, the newest software, to aid him on this quest. What would today's Gilgamesh need on his voyage? Without a doubt, Gilgamesh would have a cell phone. The computer stared back at him. Its large black eye, the eye of a cyclops, silent, foreboding, the dark face of God maybe. He couldn't abandon it forever. He couldn't ignore the significance it would play in the future of the world. Computerized man was on the cusp of discoveries that he had only dreamed of in the past. Would Leonardo da Vinci—Herbert's tie person—probably the world's greatest genius, have walked away from the idea of the computer chip? What would the perfect Renaissance man have created, sitting before the latest model of computer? And no doubt about it, Leonardo was of a dual spirit, man and nature coexisting in one body, Chandra's kind of guy. Leonardo had refused to eat meat. “I believe the day will come when we look upon the murder of animals as we look upon the murder of men.” Leonardo had said that, five hundred years ago. Maybe he had learned something, some universal secret, while sketching all those muscles and sinews and tendons of humans
and
animals. Maybe he had seen a connection, a brotherhood, a sameness that most people miss. A beating heart, after all, is a beating heart. And he would be the sort of man to bring the two worlds together, the world of nature and the world of technology. If Leonardo da Vinci were president of the United States—running on an independent ticket, of course—maybe he would pass a law stating that all poets must learn computers. And all businessmen and women would be required to study mythology, poetry, music, art. Because, if the two worlds—Chandra's world and Frederick's world—
didn't
learn to function together, there might be no world left when they flew apart.

“Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.”

—E. E. Cummings

This girl was a child

Existing in a playground of stone.

Then one night her world was changed

Her life and dreams were rearranged

And she would never be the same again.

This girl is a woman now.

—Gary Puckett & the Union Gap

On Saturday afternoon, Eddy Walsh called to say that the bank had approved the loan for his prospective buyers. Within the month, that nice young couple would become the new owners of the lovely Victorian house at the end of the cul-de-sac on Ellsboro Street, the only house left in that neighborhood with the old-fashioned, screened-in front porch. Frederick and Chandra had bought it for seventy-five thousand, fifteen years earlier, because she had fallen in love with just the sight of it. Now, after paying off the remaining mortgage and deducting Eddy's percentage, they would be left with ninety thousand dollars to split, forty-five thousand each. Not a bad investment. Except that, at least to Frederick, there seemed a sadness in the fact that a man from the bank could hand him a slip of paper,
Pay
to
the
order
of
, and it would represent the years of his married life.

After hanging up the phone from giving Eddy the final go-ahead, he filled his cup with fresh coffee and went out to the front porch. It being Saturday, his neighbors were about, raking leaves into piles, stacking firewood in their backyards, putting up the occasional bird feeder, inserting bulbs into the ground for spring blooms. He could see Home Depot marigolds, wilted now in some of the lazier yards up and down the street. A few of the punctual homeowners had already replaced their dead marigolds with fresh Home Depot pansies, perfect colors for fall. Smoke was now corkscrewing out of a chimney here and there, the first fireplace fires of autumn. Even the Mullers had stoked their hearth. Frederick saw a wisp of gray rising into the air over their house, followed by that fresh forest smell of hardwood. No doubt about it, it was another apparent metaphor: autumn was putting summer out of its misery. He wondered if there was a poem in that notion. He could find himself a shoe box lid and jot it down, the way Tom Wingfield did in
The
Glass
Menagerie
. But Frederick had already decided that poetry was not his strength. Just as he was getting rid of the Victorian house, a painful memory of his past, he had decided to abandon his literary dreams as well. He was no poet. He was a man who had once studied English literature but now had a degree in accounting, the possessor of a good business mind. That was all. And it was enough. Besides,
Kenny
Perkins: Tales of a New England Vet
would be published the following year. One author in the family was enough.

It was to be his Saturday off from Cain's Corner Grocery, but now he was walking his usual walk to the store, and dreading his arrival. This was the day he must tell Mr. Cain that he would not be coming back to work. He whistled as he walked, the way he had done as a child on dark nights, frightened to be strolling home from choir practice, frightened of leaves in the wind, noises dribbling from back alleys, shadowy shapes in the graveyard, frightened of his own mortality. Yet what did he have to fear now, in the glorious afternoon sunshine of late September, with that marvel of ocean spilling before him, gulls fluttering above its surface? He had nothing to fear but the rest of his life. He had nothing to fear but that same old mortality.

Mr. Cain was most upset to learn the news.

“You can't be serious,” he protested. But Frederick was as serious as a receding hairline. How could he tell the old man that there was something in Chandra's having found him there behind the cash register, having
exposed
him, as though he were the rotting throb of a bad tooth, that had spoiled the place for him? He hadn't been ready to be rooted out when he was. Now, and again like that bard of yore, he would need to travel on.

“Things were just starting to pick up,” Mr. Cain said. He rubbed dust from a bottle of sweet pickles.

“And they'll continue to do so,” said Frederick. It was a good thing Mr. Cain had not computerized yet, as Frederick had been urging him to do. He would have had to add COMPUTER SKILLS NECESSARY on his HELP WANTED sign, thus narrowing the body of applicants. “But I'm going to keep a close watch on you. You'll be fine.” Didn't Mr. Cain remember that he had walked in just ten minutes after the sign had been posted, his eyes red with grief and his clothes smelling of gin? But people were reluctant to let go of their heroes, and yet heroes had a hard time staying put. That's what sunsets were for.

“It used to be that selling milk, bread, butter, sugar, and some candy was all you needed to do well in the grocery business,” Mr. Cain said. “How am I supposed to know about things made out of sheep shit?” He waved his hand at a package of tofu hot dogs.

“I'll come back to check up on you,” Frederick said. “And now that your grandson will be graduating from college, you'll be in good hands.” He patted Mr. Cain's shoulder. He would miss the old man and his little store. The bell jangled as he opened the door.

“Freddy?” said Mr. Cain. “You need a good haircut, son.”

• • •

It would take him half an hour, but he would walk to Panama Red's. He was meeting Herbert and Maggie there for dinner at seven. They had decided, at Maggie's insistence, to live together this time around, at least for a while, just to see what lessons had been learned. He would miss Herbert's company in the long autumn evenings that lay ahead. But then, that was a part of learning to live alone. And Maggie, he hardly knew Maggie at all. Maybe now he would be given the chance.

The sun had already sunk and now the chill of autumn, the first tremor, had moved in upon Portland. Leaves floated down like brown boats, some knocking against tree trunks, others sailing in the pure blue sea of open air. Men and women were out in their yards finishing up chores. He could hear the excited buzz of their conversations, drifting from lawn to lawn. He thought about his own neighbors back on Ellsboro Street. When he had found a new place and moved away, he would miss the Mullers in a strange kind of way. He wondered if he would ever take part in the notion of
neighbors
again, or if he was destined to become some kind of hermit. Maybe he would end up in a monkish cell, Caedmon's monastery, overlooking the English sea. Or he would become a lighthouse keeper on a tiny island, giving out paternal beams of light, steering ships safely away from the jagged teeth of the rocks. After enough years came and went, the stories of legend would grow up around him. They would keep him alive by telling of ghostly sightings. He would eventually
belong
to the community. Every Halloween folks would swear that a beacon in the old lighthouse had been turned on at the stroke of midnight. “Freddy, the old lighthouse keeper, is searching for lost ships.” There were worse ways to be remembered.

He had curled the newspaper open to the want ads, and as he walked, he read. Not a great deal of opportunity for a well-educated man, not in a state that had recently declared bankruptcy, as Maine had. But he didn't really have to work, at least not for a time. He wasn't a poor man, after all, not really. He had the money from the house, and his share of several thousand more dollars from the joint savings account. And he would inherit fifty percent of his mother's estate. Maybe he would bounce around Europe for a while, spend a summer in Vienna as he'd always planned, walk through the musty reminders of Franz Kafka's old room. You could do things like that when you had money. You could do lots of things. He decided that he would buy Herb and Maggie their dinner. Later, he would drop by the China Boat and toss a free round of drinks down the bar. Maybe he would even invite Hannah, the bartending geisha, out to dinner sometime. They could drink a Dirty Mother or two and talk about the sadness that had engulfed their early lives. This was the stuff great literature was built on, after all. This was the stuff that had brought down both kings and paupers, this talk about families, this longing for love, this battle against mortality. Countries had risen and fallen for less.

He stopped at the small park overlooking the bay and sat on one of the benches. He knew one thing for sure in regards to his money. He wanted to buy Polly's kids something nice, send it down to Connecticut by UPS. Maybe a collector's doll of some kind for the niece. But he had no idea at all what to buy the nephews, those young men. A baseball bat? A microscope? In a week or two, he would phone them up and talk to them one at a time. He stopped at the little park overlooking Casco Bay to slip the aging pictures from his wallet. The two boys resembled their father, Percy Hillstrip, at least from what Frederick could remember of his brother-in-law. But the little girl looked so much like Polly that he felt sorrow just gazing at the photo, sorrow followed by guilt. Frederick was suddenly aware of a sense of duty to Polly, a sense of retribution brought on by the dream he had dreamed the night of the animal-rights march, that night when she had risen up, flesh and blood, to speak to him. Who else did these children have to tell them things about their mother, to recall the stories of her youth? He would make up what he hadn't bothered to notice about his sister during all those years of growing up together. Here was a way in which he could put his writing talents to some fine work. Polly had been in demand all over Portland by only the best bachelors. She had been so swamped with offers to take her to the senior prom that she had hidden in the attic all day, just to avoid the phone calls. The flowers being delivered nonstop to her door had nearly asphyxiated her. She had been a genius at the piano, mesmerizing relatives and friends with her nimble fingers. She had been beautiful beyond words, her skin like a fine white silk. Pity, the only pictures left behind had shown her as dumpy and plain. But then, she had never been photogenic. And yet, in the midst of all this beauty, this talent, she had chosen wifedom and motherhood, chosen to bear three children rather than play the piano across Europe, or sip Dom Perignon with the jet set. Her children's lives had been precious to her. She had held each of them, at birth, in her hands as gently as if holding snowflakes. And he would tell them that, soon. Maybe at Christmas he would catch a bus down to meet them. He would be Uncle Fred. And they had an Uncle Herbert, an Aunt Maggie. He would build back the pinwheel. Families shouldn't drift apart.

Several herring gulls, thinking he held food in his hands, swooped in at his feet, their loud noises
hiyak
hiyah
jarring him away from thoughts of Polly's children. He put the pictures back into his wallet. They would make such wonderful streamers. He wiped his eyes for they had teared as he remembered Polly. He would take upon himself the lion's share of reparation, which included his father's share. Frederick wished Mr. Bator would say something now. As soon as he was settled, he would hire a private detective to find Mr. Bator. And he would throw a suitcase into the trunk of his car and drive all the way down to Washington, to the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial.
Ten
boys from his senior class, the class of sixty-six. He might even do his own rubbing of Richard Hamel's name. The truth was that he still hated the bastard, even if he
had
died a hero's death. But once a mumblety-peg cheat, always a mumblety-peg cheat. There was nothing wrong in rounding up everyone you had once known, was there? There was nothing wrong with a little safety in numbers.

He heard the Toyota before he saw it, recognized the sputter of the muffler. It pulled into the crushed parking area next to the picnic tables and sat there idling. In the oncoming twilight, with the pole light just beginning to flicker, the car was a reddish-orange. Then the engine died and Frederick heard the door creak open and then shut. Footprints stepped on the crushed rock, coming closer.

“I was going to have that muffler fixed,” Frederick said, without glancing up. “But you left before I could.”

“It's like music to me now,” Chandra say. “I'd miss it.” She sat beside him on the bench. He could smell wood smoke on her sweater and wondered if she had a fireplace in her new home. He knew the real address this time, 7 Wallace Terrace. But he had not bothered to drive by, not once, not even in those long stretches of evening when he sat on the screened-in porch and listened to the heart of Ellsboro Street beating all about him. Their respective lawyers, on the other hand, had been keeping in close touch with each other over the sale of the house.

“How'd you know where to find me?” he asked.

“Well, it began with my driving by the house and seeing the FOR SALE sign gone,” Chandra said. “Then I went on to Cain's Grocery and was told you'd quit your job and gone off walking. I figured you'd take the scenic route.”

“Why were you driving past the house?” Frederick asked. “It's in a cul-de-sac, remember?”

“Nostalgia,” said Chandra. “I loved that house. Moving out wasn't easy.”

“Staying wasn't a picnic,” Frederick said. He looked at her then for the first time. There seemed to be more gray hairs about her temples, or was he merely hoping that she had come out of the storm a bit weathered herself?

“So it sold?” she asked.

“Hasn't your lawyer told you?”

“She's gone away for the weekend with
your
lawyer,” Chandra said. “I think they've fallen in love. He's taking her to Cape Cod.” They sat quietly, thinking about this great irony. When Chandra laughed her lilting laugh, he was able to laugh with her.

“For every action there's a reaction,” said Frederick. “I suppose that goes for divorces, too. You'll need to sign papers so that we can divide up the booty.”