A Marriage Made at Woodstock (4 page)

“Mrs. Paroni shouldn't even
smell
bacon,” Frederick said.

“Didn't you tell her that it's loaded with stalactites and something else?” He had to smile at this. He did find them charming—let Chandra call him sexist—women who simply needed nothing more than for him to explain them out of some quandary.

“
Nitrates
and
nitrites
,” he said. “To say nothing of the fat and cholesterol.”

“I don't worry about fat,” Doris Bowen said as Frederick produced his courtesy check-cashing card, and then dropped his receipt into one of the sacks. No, she probably didn't. Fat was most likely that which one liposuctions away at the wave of a red fingertip.

Loading his groceries into his Chevy station wagon, Frederick couldn't help but look up, through the big plate window which advertised Van Camp's pork and beans, to see that Doris Bowen was casting blond, shivery looks out into the parking lot. He considered lingering a bit, taking his time in placing the grocery sacks on the backseat, but then he saw Mrs. Paroni on her way out with a bag boy. He quickly slammed the Chevy's back door and then climbed beneath the wheel.

On the drive home Frederick remembered the soft white mounds of Doris Bowen's breasts, rolling like little hills inside her halter top. The firm, impertinent breasts of the rich. Silicone breasts.
Silicon
chips!
He wondered instantly who handled the accounting for Arthur Bowen Developers, Inc. It wasn't as if Frederick didn't find Doris Bowen attractive. He had always been intrigued by women who were so openly sensuous. That was his sixties upbringing. But in the eighties, something incredible had happened. Personal computers hit the market, and it was as if Frederick had been swept away to another planet. As mountains of new material on PCs became available, he had plowed through them with infinite patience. He came to know, and then to love, the magical device. It had been a long time since his emotions had been so stirred, and the enigmatic machine, as if sensing his passion, slowly unveiled its secrets to him. This new obsession filled the lonely gaps, made up for the peace marches he had gradually dropped away from, the world problems he had come to leave to those who felt they had world answers.

There was another side effect as well. The computer gave Frederick the opportunity to make a living in his own home, of being his own boss, of keeping his own hours. As Stone Accounting & Consultation grew, Frederick began to relax. The smoky ideals of the sixties faded into the bright genius of the computer chip. His old self dwindled as his bank account increased. There was no doubt about it: the establishment had finally made Frederick Stone an offer he couldn't refuse. He had sold out. At least according to Chandra he had. But through it all Frederick and Chandra had remained together. The shades of their hair may have changed in sync, but the color of their convictions had not. It was a good thing, too, Frederick had reminded himself many times during their long marriage. After all,
computers
were putting food into their refrigerator, even if milk-fed veal wasn't among it.

• • •

At six o'clock Frederick wasn't troubled about what to fix for dinner. Later on, when he felt hungry, he would make a sandwich. Chandra would be eating with the rest of the boycotters in Augusta. She had already told him that there would be a discussion on factory farming at the Renaissance Teahouse after the boycott, sponsored by a group of concerned college students and professors. He expected it would be late evening before he would hear her cooing to the orange cat out on the front porch, so he mixed himself a drink and stood staring out the window. A warm rainfall was blowing over Ellsboro Street. Frederick watched as the leaves of the wild cherry outside his window siphoned off the raindrops. He wondered with genuine sympathy if the boycott was over. He knew the intent was to picket some restaurant still heartlessly serving milk-fed veal. He hoped that Chandra was dry, wherever she was. He had done a lot of picketing himself, and he knew the rain was a nasty thing. He knew it could turn magnificently lettered signs quickly unreadable. As the cherry tree swayed in the wind, Frederick remembered one of those pickets. It had been during the antiwar marches, in the heart of the Vietnam era. Where, he couldn't remember, only the incessant rain, beating the marchers down, beating them back, the capitalist fists of the rain, and Chandra there beside him, her hair blond with youth, yellow with protest, both of them in the sweetness of their lives. His sign had said WAR IS MURDER, a fine red lettering done by Chandra's own pacifist hand. But the rain had taken the letters and splattered them like blood up and down the poster board. When Frederick looked up at them, they ran before his eyes like the blood of those soldiers, soldiers on
both
sides, like the blood of the Crusades, of all the really expensive, important wars, and all the forgotten wars. He saw on the poster the blood of all humanity in a sea of despair, and he had felt the first of those insights into the truth about the world that would plague him thereafter: that it was all for nothing. If the war were to stop tomorrow, then it was
time
for the war to stop. No matter that a few people voiced their displeasure, no matter how hard a few folks worked to change things, the world would continue at its own pace, and the world news would end up tucked away on reels, in tin cans on the back shelves at CBS and NBC and ABC, as if they were little lives that have already been lived and were no longer useful. It was all for
nothing
, and that's what made him cry that day, in the midst of the downpour, beneath the sign dripping its blood, the day Chandra believed to be his most emotional,
personal
protest of the war. It became a marker from then on. “That was the big march where Freddy cried so hard,” he would hear her say, as if it were a badge of his beliefs, a medal from the battlefronts of the protest years. But Frederick remembered exactly what it was he felt. He hadn't been crying for any soldiers, for any heartless governments, for any civilians being rained down upon with napalm. He was crying for himself, for Frederick Stone, because the beginning of the end of innocence had just occurred.

It was almost ten o'clock before he finally made the sandwich. With Chandra out tilting at the windmills of factory farms, he had used the entire evening to study the manual and install the latest update of his accounting package. Then he backed up the day's work on floppy disks and stored them in the safe. It was well past eleven, a few minutes into
The
Tonight
Show,
when Frederick snapped off the television and went to sleep. It seemed like only seconds later that he awoke to realize Chandra had slid into bed beside him. It seemed like only seconds, but maybe it was many lifetimes, so far apart had they grown in twenty-some years.

• • •

The house was already alive with the bleeps of Frederick's computer when Chandra finally awoke, a bit past noon. Frederick was deep at work, up to his neck in the Boardwalk Café's personal finances. He heard her footfalls above his head as she padded into the hall and down to the bathroom, then back again. He abandoned the dollar signs of Portland's oldest café and went out to the kitchen to pour Chandra her morning coffee. He sniffed it anxiously and then frowned.
He
wouldn't drink it, but then
he
had discerning taste buds.

Upstairs, the bedroom door was open, as it always was. Chandra suffered from a kind of bedroom claustrophobia, contracted no doubt from being locked up in an earlier life of protest. Carry A. Nation, maybe.

“Hey,” said Frederick. “Ready for some coffee?” He put the cup on the bedside table and then opened the blinds. “That's a beautiful day out there you're missing.” Chandra squinted the bright sun out of her eyes. She shook her head.

“I used to believe that a woman chooses a husband to replace her father,” she said. “But you sound more like my mother as time goes on.” She reached for the coffee.

“Speaking of your family,” said Frederick. “There's a little message for you, down in the den.”

“There must be a God,” said Chandra, “or we wouldn't have answering machines. What does she want now?”

“Joyce is threatening to kill poor Teddy,” said Frederick. “The condom thing again.”

“She should feel blessed that the kid is
using
condoms,” said Chandra. “Who cares if he keeps them in his dresser drawer?”

“He keeps the
used
ones in his dresser drawer,” Frederick reminded her. “That means he's bringing concubines home from geometry class while Joyce is at work.”

“Teddy
is
sixteen now,” said Chandra. “Joyce has no damn business snooping in his bedroom.”

“Finding congruent angles and graphing hyperbolas right there in his own bed,” Frederick added. “In Joyce's very house.”

“She's just afraid of missing something.”

“Well, you might call her back,” said Frederick. He was leaning into Chandra's vanity mirror, inspecting the puffiness around his eyes again. He would give it one or two more days before charting it on his computer calendar as permanent damage. “She is your sister, after all.” He began a quiet inspection of the single gray hairs on his head.

“Hubris, Freddy,” said Chandra. “Unadulterated hubris.” He abandoned the gray hairs and the puffiness for a later and more private audit. “Besides, when was the last time you talked to your brother, Herbert? The few times he's managed to catch you on the phone, you told him that Call Waiting had beeped and that you were expecting an important call.”

“How was the boycott?” he asked. Chandra squinted again.

“Where was the damn sun yesterday?”

“Did you get rained on?” He leaned against the doorjamb, his head tilted, listening to the musical language coming up from the computer. He was reorganizing the hard disk in order to speed up the computer's performance. When it finished, he would begin updating his newest client, Patti's Poodle Parlor. He canted his head further, catching the soft ticking music. Chandra stared at him.

“You know, you and that computer are beginning to remind me of something from the
Twilight Zone
. It's unnatural. It's like you speak some occult language to that thing, and it answers you.”

“I believe you're jealous,” said Frederick.

“One day that computer will come up the stairs with a cup of coffee, and you'll have disappeared. Just your shoes and socks left behind in your office.”

“And you'll still be getting your coffee in bed,” he said. “The happy widow. Now tell me about the boycott.”

“If you'll stop holding your head like some hawk, I'll tell you,” said Chandra. She sipped more coffee. “Eighteen people turned up,” she said. “And the excuses from the ones who promised to be there were the same excuses as twenty years ago. You remember those, don't you?”

“Let's see,” he said. “If I remember correctly, that would include sprained ankles, sick children, sudden family deaths, mysterious automobile problems such as car wrecks and flat tires, unexpected business trips, and weren't there two Hare Krishnas who claimed to hyperventilate on the interstate?”

“You can add a new one to the list,” Chandra said. She was sitting up in bed now, examining her toes. “Those new tennis shoes, the ones without the leather tops, have given me blisters.” She pointed at the watery bumps on the tips of both big toes.

“What's the new excuse?” Frederick asked. He reached for her left foot and began to massage it.

“Colleen Pratt called Sukie to report that she had just gotten her hair done that morning,” Chandra said. “Got it done
for
the boycott, mind you, and as it was raining she couldn't bear to see her '
do
spoiled.” Frederick laughed.

“How did she end up in the group in the first place?” he asked. “Doesn't sound like one of the sincere to me.”

“She paid for all our printing costs,” Chandra said. “Her husband owns Down East Printing.” She slid her legs over the side of the bed.

“I wonder who does their accounting,” Frederick said. Chandra stared at him.

“Must you see a potential client everywhere?” she asked.

“Well,” said Frederick, suddenly defensive. “You saw her as printing costs. Why can't I see her as a client?”

“There's a difference, Freddy,” Chandra said. “Just don't ask me to define it.”

“I take it the boycott didn't go well?” He canted his head again, hoping Chandra wouldn't notice. It sounded as if the computer had finished the weekly rearranging of its contents, moving much of the data to areas of its electronic brain that were more quickly accessible. Frederick often wished he could do the same thing to his own brain.

“It went well enough,” Chandra said. She put her cup on the nightstand and got out of bed. She was wearing her flannel pajamas.

“Aren't those hot for this time of year?” Frederick asked.

“I got chilled yesterday,” she said. Their eyes met. He wasn't sure, even after all these alike mornings, if the eyes were asking,
Where
were
you? When I was getting chilled, when I was getting sunburned, when the snow was piling up on my head, when the leaves were orange under my feet, where, pray tell, were you?

“The business is doing so well that I may be able to add on to the den by fall,” he said. “You've been wanting a larger room for your seminars.”

“That would be nice,” she said. She leaned against the wall to execute some stretching exercises, the way runners work their muscles. “We walked for two hours,” she explained when she noticed his look of inquiry. “As I said, the new shoes aren't very good.”