Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll

To Roger

Liking that world where

The children eat, and grow giant and good,

I swear as I've often sworn:
''I'll
never forget

What it's like, when
I've
grown up."

R
ANDALL
J
ARRELL

"The Lost World"

WHEN MRS. CARROLL DIED
, at seven-thirty, my friend David was lying naked in the tower bedroom, watching the gardener put on his shirt. He nearly said something flattering about the boy's tan, as if it might stop him from getting dressed again so fast. David could lie there until dark, he thought, and watch the muscles play on the gardener's back, while Mrs. Carroll, wild for her nightly egg, went slowly mad with hunger. But he bit his tongue and didn't say it, having thought better of getting too personal with the gardener days before.

"John," he said, because he thought he ought to say
something,
"why don't you take the morning off tomorrow?"

The gardener turned and faced him as he rolled up the sleeves of his work shirt.

"Why?"

"Because you've stayed so late. It must be after seven."

"Are you my boss?"

"Well, no," David said, sorry he'd gotten started in this.

"So don't tell me when to work. I finish up at five. What I do after that is my own business."

And he sauntered out of the room, making so much racket as he thumped down the stairs in his gardener's boots that David decided he must have stirred Mrs. Carroll out of her nap and started her hungering. David propped himself up on his elbows. From where he lay, he could look out the tower windows in every direction. To the east, the marshes, the beach, the sea, and then Africa (though Mrs. Carroll's property presumably
stopped
somewhere as well, at one edge or another). To the west, Mrs. Carroll's forest, a range of wooded hills, on the lowland verge of which was throned the house, close on the marsh and the dunes. The woods went west for a couple of miles, darkening and thickening, until they seized at the borders of Mrs. Carroll's dairy farm. The cows that trooped and huddled there did not seem to know that the sea was so near. Nor did the milkmen, who drove out to the farm every day from as far away as Boston and suited up in white duds and drove off in white trucks. The sea was a secret in Mrs. Carroll's domain.

But the view, it seemed, had lost its shine. Though at last he was not horny, David was cruelly bored. He had been with Mrs. Carroll since the beginning of May, and it had taken him the five weeks since then to defuse the nervous collapse he had been convinced he was coming down with. He had stayed busy from the moment he arrived, finding a hundred things to do around the house. Mrs. Carroll, it appeared from the beginning, would not require half enough of his time. So he polished the dullest silver and rearranged the Fitzhugh cups and Rose Medallion bowls in the china closet. He alphabetized the north wall of the library. With two quarts of lemon oil, he polished the bowling alley on the upper floor of the carriagehouse. But it was inescapable, he thought as he got dressed himself. He was bored, and, what was worse, he had just bedded the only available man in the county, only to discover it wasn't going to be a regular thing. The dark and sullen gardener was a wonder in bed, but David knew from the pressure of his hands and the pace of his coming that he wasn't on the lookout for something steady. And David
always
was.

I don't remember how it came about that David told me all of this. Because of Mrs. Carroll's dying when she did, because we all got so caught up in it, I never gave a thought about what David must have felt
before.
It happened that Mrs. Carroll's death set the summer in motion. When David told me the story of the gardener, all I could think of was Mrs. Carroll herself, still lost in reverie in her overstuffed bedroom, still at the center.

"They never fall in love," I said to David about the boy. "They're in love with their roses."

"Do you think so, Rick?" David said. "I just decided he wasn't gay."

"If he wasn't gay, why did he go to bed with you?"

"I don't know. Maybe to make sure he was straight."

I looked at David then and found I was frantic to be thirty again—was anyone ever so young?—and I didn't like to envy him. It must have been after the first of July, because he reached over and undid a button on my shirt. We were on the grass, and there was a row of tangerine poppies, open wide, all around the sundial. It was the poppies, in fact, that brought the gardener up.

"He's a kid," David said, finishing the gardener off. The gardener was twenty-six or twenty-eight, so that in one way it didn't make any sense. But David felt a good deal older because he thought he was so wise. He thought so because he had slept around a lot.

But to go back to the night the summer began in earnest: David came down the tower stairs two at a time, calling out as he passed her door on the second floor, "I'll be there in a minute, Mrs. Carroll." In the kitchen he had to turn the lights on, and he guessed it was later than he thought. He was glad the daylight lingered high up in the tower. He had already set out the linen and the heavy service on the bed tray. From the refrigerator he took a tomato he had stuffed with chicken salad and laid it on a bed of lettuce. A sliced egg. A glass of Pinot Chardonnay. A finger bowl. Mrs. Carroll was not given to toast and tea. At eighty-two, she was down to one glass of wine a day and a single cigarette, but she enjoyed them extravagantly. Even David, who had never smoked, would take a Gitane when she offered him one. And they would sit there in the smoke and get stoned as the night fell.

Properly decked out, the tray weighed about fifteen pounds. David staggered across the kitchen and through the swing door, reeling under the weight of it. Damn the gardener, he thought. David had been slow and subtle about seducing him, arranging to bump into him when they came around corners, setting up a chance to talk in the potting shed, say, or out by the hedges. David loved the courting dance. He spaced the ceremony out over several days, so that he watched it happen when it dawned on the gardener what David was getting at. David was ready at just that stroke of the late afternoon to drop to his knees and undo the gardener's pants. And so they went on up to the tower. Now David thought he would have made a pass the very first day if he had known they would stop at two hours' coupling.

Not that David had wanted anything permanent, he was quick to assure me. He was afraid he didn't have the strength to get serious. Or he didn't believe in it anymore. Like all fanatics and the more professional lovers, David was always changing and refining his beliefs. He suffered as well from sudden conversions.

"And it wasn't just him," David said. "He reminded me of someone I always thought I should have slept with."

"Go ahead," I said, though I was tensed to hear only one thing now, what it must have been like to come upon the dead woman with no warning. But everything about David entails a story, and he seemed to feel that he couldn't get to the body in the four-poster before he had gotten it exactly right about the gardener. David always tells too much of a story. It is as if the accretion of detail itself will settle the problem of motive. He likes to feel that he is held in the grip of his life, and not the other way around.

The gardener, John, reminded David of a brief and long-gone man he had never gone far enough with—the elevator operator in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on the six-to-two shift. David used to stare at him from behind as they went up and down eight floors. David had gotten himself entangled with a television writer who had lived on the eighth floor since 1961, who looked like he had never left his room in all that time and who said he
lived
in New York, whether anyone asked or not. David hung around for about three weeks, and he would size up this lean and smoky elevator type on his way down to the lobby for cigarettes. He would lean against something or other, a stucco palm, and light a cigarette and stare at the man as he stood at ease, waiting for a fare. In his brown and orange, lightly braided uniform, he looked half like an organ-grinder's monkey and half like a colonel in a banana republic.

This had gone on for days and days, and David was fairly sure that the elevator man had lost his heart to him; but he didn't know what to suggest. This was not like a taxicab, after all, which you could pull in under a viaduct for ten or fifteen minutes in the backseat, the meter still running. The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel would miss an elevator that took a fifteen-minute break. And yet that is what the elevator man must have been suggesting. It was a Tuesday night, about eleven o'clock, and David had been walking in the Hollywood hills with his hands in his pockets, feeling the weight of the fifties he thought he would never shake. He gave the colonel a surly look as he got into the elevator.

"Eight," he said, for about the thousandth time.

They started up. David slouched at the back of the car. After three or four floors or so, the elevator man flexed his shoulders against his monkey jacket and turned around. Staring back at David for the first time, he reached up and flicked the
STOP
switch. It was just the two of them now. He unzipped his fly and reached into his pants while David waited politely, settling in for a mad heat, his eyes narrowing. And then out of the uniform came this tiny button of a cock, about the size of the first joint of David's thumb. The elevator man grinned and kind of held it out, although of course it wouldn't come out very far and was as soft as a gumdrop. David shook his head no and stared as well as he could into the middle distance while the elevator man got dressed and got them going again.

He felt terrible. He knew he would have jumped at it if it had been as big as the uniform and the punky style had led him to believe. He didn't like to lead people on and then not deliver, and he thought he should try to say something nice so as to end things nicely. Except not
too
nice, or else he would be leading him on again. And here they were, at the eighth floor already. David passed out of the elevator and turned.