A Marriage Made at Woodstock (8 page)

Back in the lighted office, Frederick slumped into his own specially ordered computer chair. For a few minutes he stared at the face of his monitor, now his only true friend. Then he turned on the switch of his surge protector and smiled as the beast burst to life. He went quickly to his menu and selected Correspondence.
My
dearest
Chandra
, he typed out in white letters on the blue screen. He sat waiting for the appropriate words to hit him. He had written her many letters in college. He had plagiarized Pound, O'Neil, Eliot, Fitzgerald, other men who'd had the lion's share of crazy women. But now, after two decades of marriage, he sensed he would have to say something by
Frederick
Stone
if he was to get Chandra's attention. He stared at the blank screen before him, blue as a swath of sky, and waited. After a few minutes he went back to the keyboard. He deleted the
My
and
est.
Chandra would declare them sexist. He then inserted a capital
D
.
Dear
Chandra
. He examined the salutation. Should he delete the
dear
? That was the wonderful thing about being computerized, something he might mention to his brother, in case Herbert felt the need to send a monosyllabic note to any of the kindergartners he'd been dating. Frederick had slaved long and hard on those college love letters, churning them out at his old IBM Selectric, retyping due to numerous mistakes. Now, with a myriad of downloadable fonts, his laser printer could spit out any type style from Baskerville Italic to Swiss Condensed. He could plead for Chandra to return to him in letters three-fourths of an inch tall, or with words small enough to look like gnats scuttling across the screen. And mistakes? What were mistakes with spell-check right there to come in like some good, motherly soul and clean up after him? Who even needed the blasted dictionary when the thesaurus key stood at the ready? Mistakes were nothing—as he'd tried so valiantly to tell his opinionated big brother—when one was
computerized
. Frederick only wished this was something he could apply to his marriage. Maybe the Backspace key should have been used more often, the Control key less. Or perhaps he could have paid more attention to Home, Style, and particularly Save. Maybe there had even been a subtle directive in Merge Codes, had he known how to see it. It sounded very Woodstockian, after all. He sat there wordless, unable to summon up a single thought. The blinking cursor seemed to be asking,
What
now? What now? What now?
His eyes filled with warm tears because all Frederick Stone could see, on the face of his beloved keyboard, were the words
Escape
,
Exit
, and
End
.

Why am I losing sleep over you?

Reliving precious moments we knew?

So many days have gone by

Still I'm so lonely and I

Guess there's just no getting over you.

—Gary Puckett & the Union Gap

For the first few days—four of them, to be exact—Frederick Stone kept busy at his computer, reconciling the latest bank statements of his largest clients and doing the weekly payrolls. Several times, on each of those days, he found himself staring into the green leaves of the cherry tree outside his window, forgetting what he was doing, forgetting where he was, forgetting even
who
he was. Then, as if a breeze had blown through his mind, as well as through the black cherry, he'd remember the nasty details. His wife of twenty-plus years—a sound investment in marriage these days—had left him. And he didn't know where she was. He had called her two days earlier, dialing the sickly digits of the number she'd left behind—it belonged to Amy Lentz—and had received a sound dressing-down rather than a plea to take her back. He'd had a little speech memorized for the latter possible event, some platitudes about forgiving and forgetting. He had nothing at all to say in response to the dressing-down.

“You gave this number to Joyce!” she had scolded him. “And then you went ahead and told my mother,
my
mother, when I'd asked you to let
me
tell her. Isn't anything sacred to you, Freddy?”

“It just sort of slipped out,” Frederick had lied. He'd wanted to mention that lots of things were sacred to him, plenty of things, a goddamn cornucopia of stuff, but he couldn't think of anything specific. Other than her. Other than his work. Those were pretty sacred things, weren't they?

“Try to understand what I'm going to tell you,” she'd said then. “I just can't live with you anymore.
Capisce
?”

Frederick watched the branches of the cherry tree dip and bob. It was a windy time of year in more ways than one. He had intended all along to summon up a good defensive front, and that's why he had said to Chandra, “You had no right to leave this house.” Now even the cherry tree seemed to realize his folly. One didn't tell Chandra Kimball-Stone what her rights were or weren't. Rights were things Chandra counted at night when she couldn't sleep, instead of sheep.

“Don't call me again,” she'd told him. “I'll see that the rest of my things are out within the month.”

“You'd better!” He hadn't intended to shout, but that's just what he did. “And you'd better keep
Robbie
away from this house!”

That's when she hung up on him. Several times he had come close to phoning her back so that he might apologize, perhaps ask if they could sit over coffee in some quiet café, maybe one of those apple strudel places she loved, a place where copies of Impressionist paintings hung on the walls, where one had to walk through strings of plastic beads to find the john. Maybe at that same place with the potted ferns where she'd been spending so much time with Robbie. Panama Red's. But by the time he'd gotten to the part about Robbie, he'd be too angry to call. Besides, he felt confident that she'd be calling him soon. Chandra depended on him more than she realized. He and his hair—now 1.4 millimeters longer than when she left—would await this realization.

Frederick pressed his forehead against the window. The trouble with waiting was that he had to wait alone. He had never been good at being alone. Back in his college days he had even allowed a young man with asthma and acne to move in as his roommate, rather than enjoy a quiet day alone, void of wheezing and scratching. Now the alternative to going solo in the Victorian house on Ellsboro Street was sitting at the China Boat restaurant and watching Herbert Stone tear into a duck, mandarin style. Frederick had read that there were nine classes of mandarins under the old Chinese Empire, distinguishable only by the jeweled button worn on their caps. But no one ever mixed mandarins up at the China Boat in Portland, Maine, although the menu boasted everything from mandarin buffalo wings to mandarin nachos. And none of the regulars at the China Boat appeared to be Chinese, not even the staff. The clientele ranged from fishermen to college students to over-forty baby boomers. And there seemed to be an endless supply of dead ducks down there. In the four days that his wife had been gone, Frederick had patronized the China Boat twice, for dinner and drinks with Herbert. And he had seen two such ducks expired upon plates, with slices of orange peeling nearby. He had seen those ducks disappear into Herbert Stone's belly.

What he was beginning to feel now, on this fourth day, was the first true stabs of loneliness, of what his life might be like as a single man. Surely, he was not destined to become another Herbert Stone, a thing to be pitied, a veterinarian eating ducks, eating potential patients, for Christ's sake. No,
he
would
not
. Frederick shook his head in defiance—a hint to The Girls—and then tapped his fingers against the glass. He would work, that's what he would do. Maybe the Puritans had been onto something with their notion of mind-breaking labor. Maybe it hadn't been about salvation after all, but about not being lonely.

He spent the evening of the fourth day of Chandra's departure working on a cash-flow analysis for Dee Dee's Flower Emporium. Dee Dee was seeking a ten-thousand-dollar bank loan that would enable her to expand the flower shop. After running amortizations on loans of varying lengths of time, Frederick decided he would suggest she go with a two-year loan. Her payment would be steep, but according to her cash flow, she could handle it. And she would pay far less interest than if she settled for a longer-term loan. When he stopped to eat a sandwich, he was surprised to see that it was almost eleven p.m. No wonder he was exhausted. So he'd gone up to their king-size bed, the Cadillac of marriage vehicles. Why Chandra had insisted on buying such a yacht of a bed had always intrigued him. But somewhere around three o'clock in the morning, his eyes still on the green puddle of light thrown off by the alarm clock, it had come to him: She could keep herself at bay in such an ocean of bed. She could set up housekeeping on one corner of the Posturepedic abyss and he would never even know it. That's when he had panicked and dialed the number on the green Post-it, only to be told by a voice so impersonal it would make the Stone family aunts all sound like Mary Poppins, that Chandra was no longer living at the Lentz residence.

“I'm sorry I woke you, Amy,” Frederick said. He hung up and considered waiting for her to fall back asleep, then phoning again.
Sorry, Amy, but did you say Chandra moved out?

Weary of staring at the clock, he went downstairs with a pillow and blanket to his tiny office. If this schedule kept up, he would be dysfunctional in a month. That was the catchword of the decade, wasn't it? Dysfunctional mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, sisters, brothers, no one above suspicion. There were even dysfunctional pets who paid weekly visits to psychiatrists. What chance did Frederick Stone have in such a maniacal world? After all, he was only suffering from a case of hubris.

Back on the settee, he fluffed his pillow and arranged his blanket about his feet. He waited for that wash of drowsiness that would indicate sleep was finally on its way, but it never came. Here, then, was the synopsis of his life, the battered CliffNotes of his existence: a middle-aged man with hair threatening to recede at any moment, sitting wide-eyed and cramped on a narrow settee at four o'clock in the morning. So what do proud men do at times like this? He considered suicide in the Japanese sense, as a means of saving face. After all, he now felt embarrassed that he had admitted his marital troubles to the likes of Joyce, Lillian, and Herbert. Even the mailman was asking intrusive questions, not to mention the incorrigible Walter Muller from next door. Perhaps his only recourse
was
to do himself in. He could slice his wrists with Chandra's pruning shears, still hanging in the garage. Let her wade about in the ocean of guilt
that
would surely create. But then, the shears were so rusty and corroded he'd probably have to endure not only a tetanus shot, but Herbert shuttling him down to the emergency clinic in the monstrous Chrysler. The ax? He did own an ax, one he had bought to render firewood into kindling during the cold ocean winters.
The
mattock
was
a
primary
agricultural
tool
for
Neolithic
and
ancient
peoples
around
the
world
, he heard Mr. Bator whisper. Frederick suddenly remembered that he had gotten that answer wrong, one day in class. When called upon, he had blurted, “A mattock is hair hanging from the back legs of a horse.” Ever appreciative of foibles, the class had erupted into laughter. Remembering, Frederick felt his face redden, as it had that day so many years ago. But Mr. Bator had come to his rescue. “You're thinking of a fetlock, Mr. Stone.” Bless him. He'd been a compassionate man. What had ever happened to Mr. Bator? And where could Frederick find a mattock in order to at least maim himself? Probably at Home Depot. His head nodding forward, his knees pulled upward to accommodate himself on the settee, Frederick remembered Mr. Bator's kind, fatherly voice, his round red cheeks and full head of hair. Only then was he able to sleep.

• • •

It was the next morning, after a quick breakfast of coffee—nicely ground African and South American beans—that Frederick considered cruising Portland in an attempt to spot the red Toyota, perhaps in the parking lot of some restaurant. Maybe even somewhere on campus at the university. Did Robbie say that he was a student? Portland wasn't New York City, after all. It was just possible that the laws of chance would enable him to find a red car out of hundreds of cars. He would've called upon The Girls for a bit of support, but he wasn't on speaking terms with them, not since they'd spun his damn wheel of fortune at such a dizzying gate. And then, if she thought he was stalking her, Chandra might have him arrested. He trusted nothing and no one, not anymore. Who would bail him out? Frederick would rot in the dungeon rather than allow Herbert Stone to peer through the cell bars and ask, “Did you ever bail
me
out when I was going through
my
divorce? Just answer me that, Freddy.”

So he sat on the screened-in porch with his coffee and watched the children play on Ellsboro Street, remembering the sound of his own roller skates not so many years ago, and on a street not so far away. He wondered how it was that he had moved so quickly from the laughter and tears of childhood to firm middle age. Maybe they should have had a child or two. They had talked of having children, once upon a time, in those early years of their marriage. For a couple of years, when they were approaching their thirties, they had even halfheartedly tried, but something was obviously malfunctioning in one of their bodies because conception simply never happened. After a time, they never spoke of it again, as though voicing it would necessitate tests, personal chats with doctors, extensive book reading, and then, a finger pointing at one or the other as the source of the problem. And so the urge for parenthood had slowly gone away, receded quietly, as snow recedes. Maybe even hair.

Out on the porch, with the sounds of a glorious summer's day unfolding all around him, Frederick thought about the time Chandra had actually become pregnant, very early in their marriage, not from carelessness, but because of statistics. Of every one hundred women who use an intrauterine device, one or two will conceive. Chandra Kimball-Stone was one. He had wanted no part of a child that soon. He was simply not ready, financially or emotionally. They had talked often of backpacking across Europe. How could a child fit into such massive plans? But before he had voiced his concern to Chandra, who was quite pleased with what she considered an act of fate, she had miscarried. In a great wash of irony, the intrauterine device that had failed to protect her from pregnancy had also caused her to abort. It had been called the Copper-7, as though a small mining operation existed in Chandra's womb. But instead of churning out eggs as though they were precious metals, this company was there to toss the eggs out. It had been 1972. Frederick wondered if another woman had been an unlucky statistic that year, and, if so, how she had coped with the problem. There had been other ill-starred circumstances that occurred in 1972. Richard M. Nixon had been voted in a second time as president of the United States. Vietnam was still on fire with American bombs. But what Frederick now remembered most about that year was that it was the time in his life that he had come closest to fatherhood. And whenever he saw the number printed in a newspaper or in a magazine, the first thing that flashed through his mind was the image of red blood smeared across white tissue paper.

Now here he was, old enough to be somebody's grandfather. That was the trouble with life. Just when you got far enough up the hill to catch a clear-eyed look back at the shit pile where you'd been wallowing, just when you knew some stuff, there was no trail to take you back there so that you could repile the shit accordingly. Frederick watched the children skateboarding past the house, the three dogs inspecting one another, sparrows flitting about in the shrubbery, the mailman clanking away at the boxes on his route. From the end of Ellsboro Street he could hear the excitement of the ice-cream truck, its loudspeaker blaring out “Turkey in the Straw.” These were the sights and sounds of life going on in Portland, Maine, on Ellsboro Street, on the planet Earth. And Chandra was right. He was on the outskirts of such life. It had passed him by as though he were a character in some Victorian novel, a poor wretch buried away in debtors' prison because he hadn't paid any dues at all. Well, he would pay more attention to
life
. That was one reason that he had agreed to have dinner with Chandra's sister, and this was a slice of life that Miss Seminars of the Mind herself avoided. Frederick finished his coffee, waved at the children, and considered buying the dogs some chew sticks on his next shopping trip before he was finally able to walk back into a house grown so lonely.