Real Life (12 page)

“Where did you get a nephew?” he asked her. They were eating at a French restaurant on Newbury Street. They always ate there; Gregory was a creature of habit. They were munching on bread and drinking wine, waiting for their meal; already Gregory had crumbs in his beard.

“He's my brother's boy.”

“I didn't know you had a brother.”

“He's been dead for years,” Dorrie said. “He was a junkie. He died in jail.” It sometimes gave her a sick thrill to say this—to spark people's interest with it, as if her wild brother were some buried aspect of herself, some banked-down fire that might still flare in her soul.

“Jesus, Dorrie,” Gregory said. It never failed; in some perverse way, she gained status because of Phineas.

“He shot up with some contaminated heroin, and he did it with a dirty needle.” She sipped the wine he poured for her. “Not a very pleasant death.”

“Your parents—”

“They always expected it. Something.”
Phineas
, she thought, with the familiar catch in her stomach.

“What about his wife?”

“They never got married. They lived together for a while and had Hugo. She was killed while Phinny was in jail, by a dealer. She owed him money.”

He stared at her. “I almost hate to ask you what your nephew is like, with a background like that.”

“He's fourteen now and, surprisingly enough, he seems to be a good kid.” She thought for a minute. “In fact, he's a very sweet boy, Gregory. And he drives me right up the wall.”

Gregory had a short, yelping laugh, a dog's laugh. “I can't help thinking of the aunts in P. G. Wodehouse. Bertie Wooster's Aunt Agatha, who chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth.”

“And then there's Hugo's Aunt Dorrie, who refuses to buy a TV.”

“Sadistic bitch,” said Gregory.

He asked her, after a bottle of wine and two cognacs, to come back to his hotel with him. He asked her every year, and this time she nearly said yes; he was kind and he liked her and he wasn't so ugly in the candlelight. “We could just sit up and giggle all night, if you wanted to,” he said. “We could take some wine with us.”

“I can't, Gregory,” she said—glad, really, that she had an excuse to resort to. If she spent the night with Gregory—then what? In the morning, when the wine had worn off, she would lie in bed beside him and find him pathetic, forget he was a dear friend and a fine potter and a good man and see only that he was overweight and old-maidish and had crumbs on his beard, and he would go, inevitably, out of her life—for the sake of a little dismal cheer, a little ego boost. “I'm staying with Rachel, and I told her I would be back.”

“Tomorrow night?”

“She's roped me into a dinner party. I'm sorry, Gregory.”

Gregory nodded, understanding; he understood everything, she could see that, and she leaned across the table and kissed him on the cheek.

The show went well. She sold things, she picked up some new markets, and she got two big commissions that would take her through the rest of the year. She was interviewed for
Ceramic Arts Quarterly
. She saw old friends, people she met once or twice a year at shows like this one: her old crony from New Haven, Emma Northrup, newly divorced, wearing a T-shirt that said
I'M AN EARTH MOTHER;
Emma's ex-husband, Chris, who told Dorrie how when their marriage began to go bad Emma had been making little sculptures of pocket-books with teeth, inside of which there were tiny women in dresses, wringing their hands and crying; her friend Claudia from California, who had been telling Dorrie for years that she should give up mugs and pots for art.

“I'm no artist,” she told Claudia. “I just like to make things out of clay.”

“Bosh,” Claudia said. “No one could produce such beautiful shapes and designs and not be an artist. You just don't let yourself go, Dorrie.”

Dorrie thought of Teddy, who used to say, “You're nothing but a machine—a mug machine. What kind of life is that?”

“It's a living,” she had answered. How could she explain how much more it was, that she not only didn't mind turning out the same forms day after day but actually liked it? It sounded so dull, and there was Teddy's square, tanned face, his bright brown eyes and bristly moustache, reproaching her, refusing to love a machine. But the security of it, the absolute mastery—cup after cup, bowl after bowl, identical, complete, beautiful, perfect: that was what she liked. And the fact that a machine could think, could listen to music, could look out her window at the sun slanting off the water.

“You could work on an assembly line someplace and probably make more money,” Teddy said. “If that's the kind of thing you want to fritter away your life with. At least you'd have a union.”

Claudia said, “You should come and see what we're doing out on the coast. Visit some of the studios out there. You'd learn a lot, Dorrie. You easterners are so timid!” Dorrie looked at Claudia's work: flat brownish porcelain flowers that looked dead and were surprisingly heavy to pick up. She saw that they were backed with metal: paperweights? She chided herself:
objets
. “Maybe you need therapy,” Claudia said. “I'm doing group out in L.A.—for potters and woodworkers only. It's really helped me get free from all the old constrictions—the hang-up of functionalism.”

“I'll think about it,” Dorrie said. “But probably not very hard.”

She was glad, at the end of each day, to get back to Rachel's. Rachel lived in a small, clean Back Bay apartment that she used to share with William, a place that had the distinction of being the scene of one of the Boston Strangler's crimes. It was very bare; after William left her, Rachel had cleared out all traces of his presence, including furniture they had bought, books he had liked, even the dishes they had eaten off together. There were still empty spots that Rachel hadn't refilled, and the small rooms echoed. “I really should get married again,” Rachel had said once to Dorrie. “My life is like this apartment; I can't seem to fill it up by myself.” Dorrie thought of her own house: crammed to the rafters. Did that mean her life was full? Despite appearances?

On the second night, when Dorrie arrived, Rachel was rushing around her tiny kitchen, simultaneously lining a large glass bowl with lettuce leaves, chopping nuts in the food processor, and drinking gin. She was wearing a low-cut black dress and a calico apron.

“How was the show?” Rachel shouted at her over the noise of the Cuisinart.

“Great,” Dorrie shouted back. “Profitable! But an alarming number of my colleagues seem to have gone off the deep end.”

“What?” yelled Rachel. She turned off the machine.

“I said, why did I let you talk me into this damned dinner party?”

“Cheer up, it'll be fun.” Rachel raised her glass, clanking ice cubes. “Remember fun?”

“No,” Dorrie said.

“Well, have a drink, then. Take a bath. Put on your dancing shoes. You know, your hair really looks nice, Dorrie.”

“Thanks.”

She went into the bathroom, ran water in the tub, and looked in the mirror. She'd had her hair trimmed at Laurelle's House of Beauty. Feathered, Laurelle called it. The ugly duckling, Dorrie thought. She pulled at the wispy ends. Her mother used to say, “Cleopatra wasn't beautiful, she just had a good personality.” Why do I remember these things? Dorrie lay back in the tub, perfectly still so that the water was a flat sheen, marbled with Rachel's bath oil. “When you're grown up and married, Dorrie, with children of your own—” Her mother must have started a million sentences that way. Grown up wasn't enough; there had to be marriage too, and children. As if they'd provide some kind of answer. She looked at her long toes sticking up under the spout. This little piggy went to market, she thought. Et cetera. Children. Well, maybe they did provide an answer. She and Phineas: had they constituted an answer for their parents? The thought was unimaginable. They'd been nothing but wrong answers, the two of them—like something gone bad early in an equation, so that the solution came out absurd, contrary to logic. And yet her parents had seemed to be people with answers. She wondered, not for the first time, how much of it had been feigned—that confidence and optimism. How much of it had been cultivated, like an ornamental hedge. And she thought—again not for the first time—that she had probably been an even greater disappointment to her parents than Phineas. At least Phineas had had a child. She doubted, though—sitting up, scattering oily drops, reaching for the soap—that Phinny had ever found any answers. Had Phineas even known there were questions?

Rachel called from the kitchen, “Dorrie? Are you almost ready? Come out here and have a drink with me. People will start coming any minute.”

She soaped energetically. She would stop thinking about Phinny, stop brooding, stop asking herself what she was doing here, anyway, sitting in this tub scrubbing her elbows in preparation for an evening she would no doubt remember all her life with humiliation. “How do I look?” “You look intelligent.” She thought, If you could end your existence, this minute, in this tub, by saying a magic word—just extinguish yourself with a shazam—would you do it? Not quite, she thought. But if it would whisk her away, out of Rachel's bathroom and back to her house, her deck, where she could be sitting, this minute, fighting off mosquitoes and watching Hugo row down the pond, and back, and down again … yes, that. Anything but this (drying off with Rachel's plush new towel), anything but this evening, these people, this misplaced effort (zipping up her dress, applying the Moonglow eye shadow and Peachflower blusher Laurelle had talked her into, fastening gold rings in her ears), this strange man who was destined, whoever he was, to make her unhappy.
Shazam
, she thought.
Shazam
!

Hugo was spending the weekend at the Garners'.

“It's not that I don't trust him alone,” his aunt had said to them. “It's just that he's still new to the place and I think he'd feel strange by himself over there.” She had looked at Hugo and smiled. The truth was that he had begged her not to leave him there alone—not because he would feel strange but because he saw a golden opportunity to sleep in the Garners' sun room.

“We'd love to have him,” Mrs. Garner said emphatically. Her husband, less emphatically, nodded and said, “Sure—why not?”

It was good enough for Hugo, but Dorrie kept saying, “You're positive? You didn't have any special plans this weekend? If he's going to be in the way just say so”—until Hugo would have felt like an ape being delivered to the wrong zoo if Mrs. Garner hadn't put her arm around his shoulders, squeezed, and said, “We're always glad to see Hugo, Dorrie. It'll be a treat to have him for the weekend.”

After Dorrie left, and after
Upton's Grove
, he was shy and awkward. He wandered around aimlessly outside, waiting for dinner. In the house, he felt in the way—presumptuous, somehow. He sensed the Garners' awareness of him, their special smiles. A fourteen-year-old kid, he could hear them thinking, too nervous, too much of a baby to stay alone. “Let's be extra nice to Hugo,” he muttered aloud to himself, balancing on the end of their dock. “Poor old Hugo, let's make him feel at home.” Across the pond, his aunt's place looked deserted, shadowed by trees—abandoned. For a split second he was homesick for his loft. He had it fixed up now the way he liked. He loved the cool nights up there, the dimness, the strangeness even of the way it sounded: “sleeping in the garage.” He dreamed of bringing girls up there, impressing them with his ingenious window shutters, the shelves he'd made, his
Upton's Grove
statistics.

Dinner was formal, served in the dining room on the good china. The Garners poured themselves red wine, in thin glasses shaped like tulips, and after a minute Mr. Garner poured some for Hugo.

“Oh, Ross, I don't know,” said his wife.

“A little wine won't hurt. If they learn to take a little alcohol at home they won't go out and drink in bars.”

“That's what we learned last year in our Drugs and Alcohol unit at school,” Hugo said. This was a lie, and as soon as he uttered it he had the wild, scary feeling that he would tell more lies as the weekend went on. Immediately, a second one came to mind. “Besides, I always have a little at my aunt's.”

“Well, then,” Mr. Garner said, and another half inch of red wine went into his glass. “Now,” he said, unfolding his napkin. “It's time we really got to know you, Hugo. Aside from your lawn-mowing abilities.”

“And your taste in soap operas,” Mrs. Garner said, smiling her dear-boy smile. He smiled back. He loved Mrs. Garner, he wished she was his grandmother, but his smile was apprehensive. What did they mean, get to know him? He thought back to fairy tales, of old people who win the confidence of children and then wham! into the oven!

“Tell us what you want to be when you grow up, Hugo,” Mrs. Garner said.

Hugo drew a blank. He couldn't remember how he usually answered that question. It was weird enough to contemplate being grown up, much less what he would be when it happened. He frowned down at his food, pretending to think. He wished they would forget about getting to know him, talk about
Upton's Grove
or tell funny stories about their grandchildren. But they waited. I want to head up to Alaska and work on the pipeline, he said to himself. I want to make big bucks and screw lots of women. That was what Shane used to say. Hugo smiled, imagining Shane and Monty sitting here at the Garners' elegant table, and what would happen to the silver knives, the crystal glasses, the bottle of wine.

“I guess I'll probably be a professor like my grandfather,” he said at last. “Only I wouldn't teach English. I guess I'd teach math.”

“Math is your best subject?” Mr. Garner wanted to know. Everything was different with the Garners in the dining room. He wished he could be sprawled out on the sun room couch with Mrs. Garner or out in the yard with Mr. Garner. This was like being on television, being interviewed on some teen talk show. He sighed. “Well, I'm good at some others too, but math is the one I like best.”