Sherbrookes: Possession / Sherbrookes / Stillness (American Literature Series) (40 page)

STILLNESS

PART I

I

His dream is incomplete, and he knows this even as he loses it. They are riding gondolas in a cold wind. His skis feel cumbersome. These pines are snow-white pillows he will have to rearrange. The alarm means travel, always, like a wake-up call; Andrew switches it off. The room is dark. He lies in his king-size bed, on the diagonal. The drapes are floor-to-ceiling, though last night Eloise had asked, “Why call them that? They start six inches from the floor and they certainly don’t reach the ceiling. And anyhow they drop, they drape—that means they should be called ceiling-to-floor.”

“Don’t be so literal,” he’d said.

“Why not? What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s pretentious. The cognoscenti’s game of innocence.”

“Talk about pretentious . . .”

“What time did you say you were leaving?” Andrew had opened the hall closet. “I’ve got to get up early. Thanks for coming by.”

He dials the weather number: WE 6-1212. A male voice wishes him good morning: it is minus six degrees. There is light to moderate snow falling as of six o’clock; the snow will taper off to flurries by midafternoon. The wind is north-northeast in Central Park.

His sheets have a diamond pattern; the blanket is Hudson Bay Blue. The mattress pad is electric and keeps him sufficiently warm. He wears a silk kimono stitched with crescent moons. The bathroom door has full-length mirrors on each side. He will have to call his office, canceling the lunch date; he tries to remember with whom he’s supposed to be eating, and where.

Andrew Kincannon is fifty-six years old. Lately he finds himself forgetting details like who’s where for lunch. It’s not that he misses appointments or that anybody notices—or, if they should happen to notice, would they call him to account. He is not forgetful. It’s just that he can’t bring himself to feel it matters much: Kincannon Associates would get along without him, and probably as well without him these next months. There are fifteen people in the office he could send instead.

Andrew turns on the shower and smiles. Waiting for the water to adjust, shedding his kimono, he imagines sending all fifteen to La Grenouille. They’d jockey for position near the guest. Who is it anyhow, he tries to remember, then does: that reggae singer’s manager. He shrugs, yawns, tastes his tongue. Maybe Kennedy’s shut down; maybe the man from Jamaica’s scared to go out in a storm.

He touches his toes. He likes his spray hot, strong. Some of his best thinking has been done in showers. He used to tell his clients this, announcing that he’s changed their strategy the way a Speakman Anystream can change from mist to faucet strength, although it’s always water, always Speakman Anystream, so what we’re going to do, love, is try a different mix. But he does not want to concentrate—and concentrates, therefore, on soap.

Soap too is various. Some prefer rich lather; others prefer soap scented or with the promise of medicinal benefits: as “natural” as plausible or as artificial. Benita, his first wife, liked Camay soap not because of its ingredientsor shape, but because she liked the raised medallion and attempted to keep it intact. For weeks Andrew would notice the way the soap shrank—as if she used only its edges, or the portrait’s underside. He prefers Roger & Gallet. He shampoos his hair, then rinses.

This also fails. He’s fully awake now and cannot keep from thinking of the day and trip to come. He tries to remember Benita’s phone number, and her cousin’s middle name; he tries to remember their hotel in Barbados in 1959, then the name of the reggae man’s manager’s son. He succeeds: 222-3732, Alison, Sam Lord’s Castle before the renovation, Bill. Still, he must drive to Vermont.

Stepping out of the shower, toweling down briskly, he decides that he is grateful for the storm; it will be something to concentrate on. He selects a tape of Sylvia Marlowe playing Couperin; the harpsichord’s clear regularity enables him to pack.

The call surprised him yesterday. He’d answered the phone the way he often did, half hearing, checking the notepad for calls. Suzy bunched his message slips according to three categories: Urgent, Urgent Urgent, and Call Back. He was checking through that last list when the home phone rang.

“Hello? Is this Andrew Kincannon?”

“It is.”

“Hello. I tried your office.”

“But you got me here instead.”

“This is Ian Sherbrooke,” Ian said.

Andrew stopped crossing names out. He capped his Montblanc pen again. “Hello.”

“Maggie gave me the number,” her son said. “Or, at any rate, I took it.”

Andrew lit a cigarette.

“Don’t blame your secretary,” Ian said. “I told her it was serious, an emergency even—but she wouldn’t give out the number. Your unlisted number, I mean. I got it from my mother.”

“All right.”

“I’m calling . . .” Then he paused. “She doesn’t know I’m calling. Understand?”

Andrew nodded. “It’s been a long time.”

“That’s why I’m calling. I thought we could change it.” His voice was low-pitched, his elocution excellent—an actor, Andrew remembered. “Or you could, anyhow.”

“Where are you calling from?”

“Home. Vermont. From the carriage barn, actually, so Maggie can’t listen.”

Andrew struck a second match. He held it to the cigarette. “What’s wrong?”

“You ought to come on up.”

Ian would be thirty, Andrew thought; it had been a dozen years since they last met. He had seen Ian’s mother since then, but always in private—and the last time he had spied on her she did not know he watched. “Why?”

“It took till yesterday until she told me it was you.”

He put his thumb on the crossed rackets. They were embossed on the cigarette box lid.

“That’s how I knew she’d let me call. Three,
four
years,” said Ian. “Have you known about it all this time?”

Andrew made a movement of impatience. It was as if he’d come into a play mid-act, with the exposition over. “Why call me now?” he asked.

“Tomorrow is tour day. That way you could wander through the house. You could just simply show up, and we’d have to let you in.”

“You’re losing me.”

“I’m sorry. Of course.” There was the crackle of static, and Ian’s voice increased. “You don’t know I’ve been living here. You didn’t know that, did you?”

“No.”

“Well, the Big House is partway a museum now. I have to open it every second Thursday of the month. I’ll explain it to you when you come. But we could get you in.”

The cigarette box was silver. He’d taken second place in the mixed doubles tournament. At match point he’d missed an overhead; Andrew put pressure on his thumb, then lifted it. “Thanks.”

“It isn’t the reason I’m calling.”

“Listen.” He let irritation surface. “I’m a personal manager, right? And an old friend of the family, if that’s what you want me to say. But I don’t handle mystery writers. Just tell me what you’re after.”

In the ensuing silence he had a picture suddenly of Ian as Maggie’s look-alike—hand poised beside the wall phone, knuckles white where they clenched the receiver. “Right.” The voice went flat. “A funny thing happened to you on your way to work tomorrow.”

“What?”

“You didn’t get there.”

“No? Give me one good reason.”

“Two.”

Andrew controlled himself. He counted five, then told himself to hang up. He told himself this call was a mistake from the beginning; he needed a drink. Then he chose to have some sympathy, to be more welcoming to someone who did after all have a claim on his attention. He started to say, “I’m sorry . . .” when the stranger in a carriage barn changed the conversation utterly.

“Two reasons,” Ian said. “If you’re still listening. Because the mother of your child is going crazy. Come.”

Dressed now, he opens the drapes. There is no snow falling, but his balcony is lined with snow—three inches like white foam atop the railing. It will not clear. The sky is gray and cloudless, with a density that augurs permanence. He had dialed Maggie’s number the minute Ian hung up. The line had been busy, however, and Andrew heard the buzzing with relief. He poured himself a full glass of Wild Turkey; he would not have known what to say. It had been early evening, and he watched the first flakes, calculating: four years since they last met. Her husband, Judah, had recently died. Andrew could not understand why Maggie planned to remain in Vermont, she’d come to Manhattan that week to pack up her apartment. He protested when she left the final time.

“I don’t understand,” he had said. “Why should you go back up there?”

“It’s home.”

“Not now. It doesn’t have to be.”

“It does.”

“But I’m not married,” Andrew said.

“Not this week, maybe. I give you a month.”

“Marry me.”

They had been lovers for years, faithful to their shared ongoing infidelity. She took his hand, half smiling. “I’m
supposed
to be the other woman. Right?”

“Wrong.”

“Andrew, this is silly. We wouldn’t know what to do. You forget how often I’ve been hiding in that closet.”

“You could trust me.”

“Yes. As somebody else’s husband. When I was someone else’s wife.”

He studied her. There was a kind of logic in her instinct, always, and he’d known it inappropriate to bother her that week. She was paying off old debts—Judah’s dutiful fond widow, embracing sacrifice. They ate Sara Lee croissants, and Andrew prepared cappuccino in his new machine. Maggie had been radiant that morning: fifty-two years old but looking half her age. Her parting kiss, Andrew remembers, had had the taste of marmalade; she touched him where he’d failed to shave, promising to stay in touch. She would follow Neptune north and see what she could see.

He himself has long been expert at avoidance. If she embraced such behavior, he thought he also could; he’d leave her—them—alone. They had started their affair in 1959. She was taking piano lessons in the city, and he met her in the Russian Tea Room every month for lunch. Maggie had had few illusions. She kept at the piano for the music’s sake, and not because she dreamed of a career. He would order kvass and blini while she ate an omelet and drank tea. She’d talk to him of Judah’s hovering possessiveness, and how from time to time she had to leave the farm.

“Funny, isn’t it,” she’d say. “The air’s so clear up there I need to come south just to breathe.”

Later, when the British coined the word “bird,” he’d called her Judah’s bird who migrated twice a month. “But always heads back to its nest,” Maggie said. “Is that what you’re implying? Like a homing pigeon, correct?”

“Correct.”

“Let’s change the subject,” she said. “How was Barbados? How’s Benita?”

“Fine.” he said. “Still there.”

It is February fifth. He takes the elevator to the basement and walks through to the garage. The attendant has his Volvo ready, and he’s grateful in advance for how it handles snow. Andrew has a country place in Westport, and he’d bought this station wagon the previous fall in order to carry antiques. Dark green in its reflection, he stows his bag and offers Hank a dollar.

“Bad out there,” Hank says. “You heading to Connecticut?”

“Vermont. I’m taking the Taconic.”

“Drive careful, hear?” Hank squints down at him. They discuss the weather, always, and which direction to take. “Road’s slushy is what the radio says. Slick.”

“I will,” says Andrew, and buckles his belt.
The mother of your child
.

He has been married twice but has produced no children. There was a time when this seemed like a problem, and Benita and he had discussed it for years: whether to try, to try harder, to have tests or to adopt. In those years, however, Andrew loved his work. And she had been an only child who found the world too crowded. Those friends who urged them to have children did so with the urgency of self-justification, as if “family” were a gospel that required spreading. If he and Benita had no children, they appeared to say, their own sons and daughters would be threatened; their deliberations over schools and clothes and camp and orthodontia lost all meaning unless shared.

His second wife was a dancer and worried about her career. When she shattered her kneecap skiing, and was forced to quit, she said, “Well, maybe we should have kids now. What else am I good for? What else is there?” Andrew answered, “What else there is, is divorce.” Marian agreed. She had gone skiing against his advice and with the ballet master’s boyfriend. They had married each other on impulse, and when the impulsiveness waned they were strangers who disliked each other. They were divorced in Mexico, on their second anniversary; she told him that the doctor said her knee would heal.

Then his friends’ children grew up. They went to college or dropped out of college or attended law school and medical school and married and had children of their own. At fifty-six, he could well have been a grandfather. He slept with a series of women who could have been his daughter’s age—in a kind of abstract incest, pressing flesh that stayed resilient while his own went slack. Andrew had nephews to visit on Christmas, and that had sufficed.

The FDR Drive has been cleared. He takes the Major Deegan till the turn for the Saw Mill River and the Taconic Parkway; there the snow begins again. He turns on his wipers and the rear-windshield defrost. He listens to the weather forecast and learns that the brunt of the storm is ahead: eighteen inches fell in parts of northern Dutchess County, and a travelers’ warning remains in effect. “Time to dig, kid.” The announcer makes a jingle. “Those who’ve got someplace to go will get there if they take it slow: turn your wheels in the direction of the skid.”