Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (18 page)

"It isn't just the
weather"
David said pettishly. "It's a theory I'm coming up with about how you're born with specific climate needs. It's genetic or something."

"You're way ahead of your time, David. Most of us are still struggling with astrology."

"Nietzsche," he said, rolling out the name like a college kid, "says we all have to Mediterraneanize ourselves."

"Where does he say that?"

"I don't know. Someone told it to me on the beach in Miami."

"I don't think Nietzsche was talking about Miami. Or the beach." I squinted over at him, but he lay face up without moving, a slice of cucumber on either eyelid. Another of Aldo's sun tips. "I think the weather is just an excuse. It's something people talk about when the television isn't on."

"The thing is, Rick," he said, leveling his voice, "whenever you ask me what have I done since I left you, I know you're really asking why did I leave."

"I am?"

"Yes. And I know you don't believe me that I left because of the weather, but I did. When I finally decided, I didn't even think about you."

I sat up and faced away from the sun and out to the sea through the dark green railing. Is
that
what we're talking about, I thought. How bizarre of him, to suppose it would comfort me to learn that I didn't come into it at all when he ran from me. He was right about one thing, though. All I cared about now was why he went, because I didn't want it to happen again. I would let the past be all my fault if only he could convince me exactly what it was, so I could change it.

"No," I said, "I don't believe you."

"That's why I'm
telling
you. When you hear the whole theory, you'll understand." Then, without a pause, because gay men sitting in the sun never talk about anything for long, he said: "We have to buy some stuff for our lips. Aldo says it's lip cancer that everyone gets in Palm Springs. Skin cancer is just a scare."

"David, if we're going to talk, do you think you could take the garnish off your eyes?"

He peeled off the cucumbers and looked up at me, squinting only a little in the sun, as if nothing in him, not even his naked eyes, shrank from it. I didn't mind our changing subjects. And really, I had lied about the weather. There wasn't anything we didn't have to talk about.

"Aldo was telling me about the Shalimar gardens," he said. "He says the air is so wet it's like swimming, but nobody minds because they wear silk. Maybe that's where I should live."

"It doesn't matter where you live. Tell me about Neil Macdonald."

It is difficult for me now, as summer draws to a close, to recapture the scatter-shot quality of mid-July, but I swear that every conversation David and I fell into went all over the place. It is more difficult still to describe the mood I was in. They were two weeks of shipboard romance that had the advantage of not confining us to a ship's artificial routines. It was instinctive in me to cast about for a way not to lose him again, and the process brought me inevitably back to the past and its question of what went wrong. But I say shipboard romance because something in me knew it was doomed. It would end when we had arrived at our destination, wherever it was. That is how I assumed we were defining the freedom which let us be lovers again. No rules meant no future. And so we were very free to talk. There was no reason not to say everything, since we would soon enough be on our way. My mood was such that the more I talked, the more I thought I would get somewhere when the lull of July was over and we had split. I wasn't going back to Boston, no matter what.

I sound so sure. But the tone in which I harbor no illusions is just my Sam Spade act. Since I walked into it this time with my eyes wide open, I had to tell myself it wasn't going to last. More important, I had to promise not to get hurt when it happened. It was a mood that hit me like the memory of an errand I hadn't done, where I might have to lie to gain time. It shivered through me that day on the roof terrace when David said, "I know you're really asking why did I leave." Don't count on anything, I said to myself.

I am reluctant, I see, to say that I was happy as well. Because the gods are perverse, I don't favor talking and knocking on wood at the same time. It gets their attention. And I think that if I just say I was happy and leave it at that, I will look slow-witted and unsubtle. I will seem to deserve the complexity that rains down on me for being so simple. I am afraid, if I say it, that people will ask me why and I won't know. But all right, I was happy. I was a lover again, for one thing. I woke up in the morning twitching with desire. David and I climbed all over each other, still only half-awake, as if this morning passion were another level of our dreams. By nightfall on a given day we spoke about love as if we knew the whole truth about it at last. And we did not get locked into roles. His first entrance into me cracked like a gunshot, but the pain was dazed by a wave of pleasure. From that moment, the baton passed back and forth between us like relay runners on a racecourse, and we were the equal lovers we wanted to be.

"Neil worked in a bar when I met him," David said tentatively, not sure what I was after. "He had a string of sugar daddies starting when he was eighteen, but they always threw him out because he got into trouble."

"What kind of trouble?"

"Street trash. He brought home people who mugged him and robbed his daddies' apartments. They don't like it when their
Chinese
bronzes are ripped
off
,
no matter how pretty you are. Why do you want to know about this?"

I stood up and stretched. I felt a buzz in my head from so much sun, and I wanted to swim. I had no clothes on, and it occurs to me now that I took off my clothes in mid-July at the slightest provocation. David was wearing a pair of black racing trunks. He could have gone naked on the roof terrace too, but then he wouldn't have had a white line to measure his tan by.

"I don't. I want to know about the
two
of you."

"Oh that," he said, flipping over onto his stomach, to even out the color. "I was in love with him because he was a bastard. I tried to take care of him, and he treated me like shit. So what's new?"

"Was he good in bed?"

"You mean, is that why I put up with him? No. As a matter of fact, he couldn't get it up most of the time. I think I stayed because it was like a job. Do you know that I've never had a job longer than a year?"

"I've never had a job at all," I said.

"You don't need one. You have money. I
mean
it, Rick. I've never had Blue Cross, and I'm not on a pension plan or anything, and I have about a hundred dollars in the bank in Florida."

He was suddenly tense, but I don't think he even knew himself what he was trying to say. I realized that I couldn't give him a word of advice about the business of being secure. Partly, I think, he was articulating the panicky moment in gay life when you see that you have given over your youth to the body and that the body is going to be less and less a negotiable asset. David had always worked until he had enough money to get by or move on. It used to make him feel terrific. His string of one-horse jobs gave him the air of a man who could go on indefinitely being part troubleshooter and part Peter Pan. And though he loved Gucci shoes and Turnbull & Asser shirts when he got them, in fact he seemed to get by on a change of Levi's and T-shirts and tennis shoes. He went on as if I had spoken aloud, the pout still rising in his voice.

"Everything I own fits in two suitcases. I don't even have a TV. I bet even hobos have TVs."

"Some people would say you're lucky."

"Some people," he said, turning onto his back again and reaching for his cucumbers, "are full of shit. Some people do it with chickens."

We talked all over the place in those two weeks, coming back by turns to things we couldn't solve by talking. We made glancing blows at bewildering issues and then abandoned them in a sentence or two, and yet I think we came nearer to telling the truth than we did in the old days, when we worked by overkill and beat things into the ground. During all that time, I don't remember a single day when it rained. My memory of midsummer is lush with noon colors and the peak of the sun. But it is not as if I had nothing else on my mind. I was determined to undermine Madeleine's children's hour, and I began by grilling Phidias. I assumed he would be on my side. Knowing Mrs. Carroll's children as well as he did, he would be more convincing to Madeleine that it wouldn't work. But he seemed not to take it in. Watching for him from the tower, I went down one morning and intercepted him as he walked down the road from the dairy to make his daily inspection of the house. I remember we stood talking under an apple tree, because I kept looking up to see how far along the apples were.

"I don't think we have to worry about it," he said. "Did you put those canvas chairs out on the lawn like I told you to?"

"She can't pull it off, Phidias. People
know
what their mother looks like."

"I don't know who put them in the cellar, but whoever it was doesn't know mildew," he said, radiating the assurance of a man who knew mildew and therefore much more. "You don't understand, Rick.
Christmas
is when they come here to do their business."

"But Farley's going to call them."

He sighed. The self-evident nature of things inhabited his unworried face like a summer home. I saw now that he was going to tell me what he knew. I had already decided that he kept things from us only because he thought we had already figured them out. I tried to let him know as artfully as I could where in the story I got lost. It was best to have it out front that I for one didn't know mildew.

"It's this way," he said. "Last year Cicely told Beth it was her last Christmas, so
she
won't come. John is sailing in the Chesapeake, like he does every summer. I don't think either of them would come up here for Beth's
funeral
unless she had the courtesy to die at Christmas. Farley won't be able to find Tony."

"Why?" Tony, I knew, was the nervous one.

"He teaches school, and in the summer he runs away." Somehow he didn't have the same grasp of Tony as he did of the others, and consequently it was more difficult to detest him. I wondered if Mrs. Carroll had made the same distinction. Also, it struck me that Tony was gay, though I didn't know why I thought so. "He sent Beth a card from North Africa just before she died."

"But what happens," I persisted, jittery about the idea as I brushed away the facts, "if he does get through and they do all come?"

"What happens happens," he said, slipping into a farmer's logic as if he were taking a rest. He seemed to have lost interest. He drew a red checked handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped the heat from the back of his neck. "David's a good boy," he added after a moment, but he seemed to expect no reply to the notion. It was a comment that began and ended with his own thoughts, and it appeared to surface as briefly as his mention of the canvas chairs. So I went on.

"Another thing, Phidias. What are we going to do about Mrs. Carroll? She's legally still alive now. How does she die?"

"That's all figured out." He took up his pace along the road toward the house, and I fell in beside him.

"How?"

"I'll take care of it. She disappears at the end of the summer, like she's always said." It was clearly meant as the final word on the matter for the time being. "The reason I mention David is that he wants to go to work. He's good at taking care of people, so I think he'll come up with something, only he's scared. What you have to do," and he slapped the back of my hand with his own as we walked along, "is make sure he doesn't make do with taking care of you."

Everyone, I thought, is going to start getting involved in David and me because we are the lovers, and no one can seem to leave lovers alone. It seems inappropriately Romeo-and-Juliet of me to have responded so defensively, since Phidias and Madeleine and Aldo were not out to part us or poison us or use us. But I did not want to be the object of their enlightenment, no matter how well-meaning they were. I wasn't going to let David get trapped. Phidias seemed not to understand that I had spent a few years looking out for David's best interests. Of course, it could be argued that I had botched the job. But who had given Phidias the cause for concern? If he could come up with the scenario he just came up with, then someone was telling tales out of school about the past. David, I thought. Had David thought I needed taking care of when we were young and foolish? I thought I took care of
him.

"David is free, and so am I," I said tartly.

He shrugged as if to say that freedom might not be the issue. David could
freely
choose me over his future, after all, and still be making a mistake. Well, maybe, but if he were free, then it would be his own bad mistake and not my fault. And besides, he wasn't heading in that direction because this time we were different. I cast a sidelong look at the rumpled farmer who could make me go through such contortions and justifications. He looked like nothing more than a practical man, possessed of a good head for numbers and an intuition about the properties of pipes and wires. Since I believed that men infatuated with method—carpenters and captains and makers of systems—made wonderful lovers and nothing more, I thought over again what it was in Phidias that Mrs. Carroll needed. I could explain them as an affair of passion, the hot-blooded lady in the tower and the big-shouldered farmer, and get them into focus when they were young. I could see them spending money in Paris. Even on this estate they made sense, exchanging significant looks in front of dry-lipped Mr. Carroll. But it was more than that.

Phidias was not just the shell of a heavy lover. I was beginning to see that he was the real moralist among us. He decided what had to be done and did it. A moral act was an act, pure and simple. He never said as much, but then he also seemed to feel that talking too much could rob the act of its moral clarity. I pictured Mrs. Carroll loving him for that, with no bullshit between them. It made me wonder about Madeleine's remark about their destiny. I couldn't believe it when she first said it because it was drowned out by the Hollywood swell of violins. But if destiny did operate in the human air that breezed about us, and if lovers could be touched by it, then perhaps it attached to those few who went ahead and did what they thought had to be done.