The Widower's Tale (30 page)

"Do you remember my mentioning this incredibly strong--talented guy who helped build the tree house? Turns out he's our neighbor!" Ira explained.

Anthony shook Celestino's hand. "Pleasure."

As Ira hung Celestino's coat in the closet, he noticed that the lining was torn in several places. He had a strange, squeamish sensation as he heard Anthony offer this man a cappuccino and then, as he probed the groceries, ask Ira, "Did you get Scotch or Novy? Oh look--nuts to last me all winter long! No foraging in the bushes this year!"

Celestino stood by the counter drinking from his tiny cup with care.

"Please say you'll stay for a bagel," said Ira.

Celestino smiled that smile again: was it shy, or simply aloof, maybe even contemptuous? "If you have enough, thank you."

Ira set the table for three while Anthony cut bagels in half and asked Celestino to tell him about the tree house.

"You've seen photos," said Ira. "For heaven's sake, it has to be the most photographed tree house on the planet."

Anthony shot him a furtive, halting look. Oh--the opening to small talk. The setting your guest at ease with the topic you hold in common. By example, Anthony was constantly reminding Ira about the art of conversing with
adults
. Adults who didn't spend the majority of their time with four-year-olds.

"Juice?" Ira reached for the cupboard that held the glasses. He could have offered a mimosa, but this seemed too much somehow.
What
, chided Inner Ira,
you don't offer champagne to a guy who works as an itinerant gardener? What does
that
say about you, sweetheart?

But who said the guy was itinerant? He'd been working next door to Elves & Fairies as long as Ira had been around. Maybe
Ira
would become the itinerant worker, moving from job to job.

To make a place for the glasses on the counter, Ira moved the
Globe
. The front page showcased a color photo of a huge suburban house. Another story on the real estate market? He looked closer. The photograph had been taken from an aerial perspective. Across the vast lawn stretched an equally vast shape--a footprint. The footprint ... sparkled. Ira picked up the paper and held it toward the light. He read the caption. The footprint had been constructed with hundreds upon hundreds of glass bottles.
Prankster DOGS return to Ledgely
, read the caption, directing readers to a story deep inside the paper.

"How do they know it's not art?" he mused aloud.

Anthony and Celestino, whose conversation had not taken fire, turned to Ira. He held up the paper.

"Those people are getting tedious," Anthony said.

"No lack of imagination, though. In fact," said Ira, "they'd make great preschool teachers. I mean, wow, this took a lot of focus and creativity."

"Which is leading to the waste of more investigative man-hours than you will ever know. A K A, our tax dollars. This is actually no laughing matter."

"At least they haven't hit Lothian."

"Lothian, my dear, is not the home of people like that guy"--he pointed at the paper--"who happens to be the CEO of the biggest beer distillery in New England."

Ira glanced at Celestino. He was watching them. He had finished his cappuccino. When their eyes met, Ira looked away and blushed.

"Sit. Sit!" he said, carrying the basket of bagels to the table.

Once they were seated, Anthony began to pass the various plates: bagels, salmon, sliced pineapple, tomato, cheeses. "So from what I hear," he said, "you get to see all the best gardens of Matlock."

Ira couldn't have thought of a more tactful way to ask about Celestino's work. Sometimes Anthony really did trump him in manners as well as intellect.

"Yes." Celestino looked as if he wanted to say more, but he didn't.

"You work for that guy with the red trucks all over town?" asked Ira.

"Thomas Loud."

"I hear he has quite the monopoly."

Celestino was eating. He did not nod or indicate that he agreed with this. When he'd finished chewing, he said, "He works hard. He makes us work hard, too. With some men like him, there is work in only the warm seasons. He keeps a lot of workers all year round."

"So it's a trade-off," said Ira. "Work all year but work your butts off."

For the first time, Celestino laughed. "You have it."

Ira began to understand that Celestino might not be legal. There had been two families at The Very Beginning whose immigration status was, as Betty had put it, "in the gray area." She'd been apprehensive when the annual inspections took place, the checking of children's birth certificates and medical records.

Did Celestino have to worry whether any new people he met might denounce him in some fashion?

Now he was talking about the possibility of studying to be an arborist.

Anthony was the one who asked him questions: polite, never prying. It struck Ira, watching Celestino relax, just a little, that for all the things he shared with Anthony, he was unlikely ever to watch his lover do what he did best: make a case in court. For a brief time, Ira had been addicted to that Boston-based TV show
The Practice
. He loved the opening and closing arguments in court. Anthony (often prowling through the apartment as he worked on legal challenges all his own) would pass through the living room and snort at whatever scene was unfolding. "Ain't fiction grand," he might say, or, addressing the lead actor, "Dylan McDorable, exonerate that dude!"

Celestino left within the hour, thanking them warmly. Ira protested that it was his place to say thank you; he'd have had a premature heart attack carrying those groceries if Celestino hadn't happened along.

As soon as Ira heard the downstairs door close, he said to Anthony, "You're a million times better at talking to people than I am."

"What do you mean?"

"I have all these hang-ups about people, ideas based on who I expect them to be."

"We all do, darling. I just deal with more strangers than you do. More surprises, many of them rude. You work in a family, a family that's meant to be nice and cozy. I work in a social wasteland, an emotional war zone."

That they did such different work was sometimes a blessing, sometimes a source of friction. Ira worried when they talked too much about their jobs.

Their friends Mark and Charles, mavericks who'd been determined to have children since their twenties (and had managed to make it happen with some costly, byzantine arrangement involving sperm shipped on dry ice, donor eggs, a surrogate mom, and legal papers up the wazoo), had told them that one of the best things about raising a family was how it took your focus off work.

"I don't care how much you love your jobs, I don't care if you're the Dalai Lama
and
the head of the UN," Mark had said. "It's going to get stale, trading tales from the workplace."

"Even diaper talk gets your mind off how much you'd love to poison that secretary who spends half the morning admiring her tacky nails," said Charles, a partner at Anthony's firm.

"To a
point,"
added Mark. "Charles, in case you didn't notice, people are
eating
here." Everyone laughed.

The classroom auction project was so quintessentially Matlock that Ira could hardly keep a straight face when Tristan's mother, the self-appointed Class Parent, explained it to him.

There remained in Matlock one working dairy farm--or, more accurately, a dormant dairy farm had been revived by a couple who made their fortune young, the husband having designed a suite of video games combining medieval warfare with intergalactic travel. He was now retired from the virtual mass-murder business and, with his wife, had rebuilt the derelict house and barn, sent himself to "farm school" in Vermont, and purchased a small herd of picture-perfect, Ben & Jerry's-style Holsteins. They sold their premium products at a handful of boutique grocers, but their true claim to fame was their clandestine supply of raw milk, available to a select group of Matlock families sworn to secrecy (or relative discretion) in exchange for the assurance that their children would have the very best, bacterially robust immune systems imaginable.

There was a waiting list for this coterie, but Kendra's mother had nobly donated her membership to E & F's fund-raising efforts, sending herself back to the bottom of the list. She had procured from Farmer Xbox ten empty glass milk bottles, onto which she and two other crafty moms would decoupage self-portraits painted by the children. These bottles would be placed in a wooden carrying crate to be fashioned by Kendra's dad, a weekend woodworker. This creation, along with the coveted dairy co-op membership, was expected to fetch a price higher even than the quartet of season tickets at Fenway or, possibly, the Fourth of July weekend at a seaside house-for-eight in Chilmark.

The mom committee had just left Ira's classroom after delivering this wonderful news. And in fact, if all the children had to do was create oblong self-portraits suited to fit on an old-fashioned milk bottle (though associations with the milk-carton portraits of the missing gave him a momentary chill), Ira was getting off lucky. Joyce, who taught the Oak Leaves, had been roped into helping make a quilt. Each child's square would be rendered in ikat, a technique that one of the Oak Leaf dads would be teaching the kids. It sounded complex and messy to Ira, who preferred simple art projects like hunting down autumn leaves and collaging them between waxed paper.

These were the projects he had stayed late to trim and pin on the wall that afternoon, following the auction project meeting. After he'd finished, he wandered outside to one of those flawless autumn afternoons when a low sun casts prismatic rays through naked trees. He walked down to the pond and sat on a log that functioned as a rustic bench. As he sat there, he heard noises in the undercarriage of the barn, the floor beneath the nursery school that still served as storage, which Percy Darling now shared with E & F.

He turned to see Arturo, Robert's friend, emerging. They were mutually startled.

"Hola!"
exclaimed Turo. "You're a stealthy one."

"Look who's talking," said Ira.

"Stowing the canoe. End of the boating season."

Ira expected Robert to emerge from the storage space as well, but he didn't.

After a gaping silence, Ira said, "So how's life at Center of the Cosmos U?"

Turo laughed politely. He sat down beside Ira. "The intellectual navel of the world. I sometimes forget to sit back in awe of myself."

"Well, that's a relief."

"And you, how are you faring with your little ones?"

Ira wondered at the boy's formal diction, but he supposed it was a subtle reminder that however fluent he was, English wasn't his first language.

"When I sit here," said Ira, "I think I've arrived prematurely, and undeservedly, in heaven."
Only not so secure
, sniped Inner Ira.
Hardly
.

"A complex heaven, this place," said Turo.

"All lasting pleasures are complex, wouldn't you say?"

This amused Turo. "No, I wouldn't say that, but I'm no philosopher. And what do I know at my age, right?"

Ira felt his butt growing cold on the log. He stood. "Probably more than you realize," he said. "But humility is always the wiser approach." He looked at his watch, though he had nowhere pressing to go. Anthony wouldn't be home for hours. Maybe he'd go the gym, pick up ingredients for crab cakes.

"Say hey to that roommate of yours," said Ira.

"I shall, I shall," said Turo. "See you round, man." He remained seated on the log while Ira returned to his classroom.
Well now
that
was peculiar
, the unwelcome voice in his head declared.

10

Where's the iron maiden, dude!"

"I told you to stay upstairs," said Robert. "You're going to wind up with a colonial nail in your skull."

Turo had followed him into Granddad's cellar. Just as Robert had hoped, snow fell on the last day of classes before the break. How perfect was that? Back in October, searching for a can of stain, he'd seen a stash of skis down here.

Hunched low, they moved carefully through the underbelly of the house, barely more than a cave. The floor was packed dirt, rocks protruding like the spines of primordial subterranean creatures. When Robert was little, he'd peer down the basement stairs in wonder and terror. Like Turo, he'd thought of dungeons: manacled prisoners and colonies of bats.

He switched on the fluorescent strip over a workbench cluttered with tools. At the opposite end of the cellar, chinks of lamplight pierced the floor of the living room, between the old planks not covered by rugs. Granddad had never installed insulation down there--one of too many trivial things, thought Robert, that irritated his mom.

Robert groped behind the wide stone arch that anchored the kitchen hearth. "Jesus." He coughed and spat, brushing at cobwebs now glued to his face. He pulled out two pairs of cross-country skis, one at a time. Hanging on a nail was a plastic shopping bag. Yes: boots.