Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (21 page)

"Does it make you wonder what the truth really is?"

"No. I know what the truth is. This little scene with the mirrors may have happened, Hick. She may have done it night after night and modeled everything in my closet. But it isn't the truth about her and me."

"The truth is
everything
about a person, isn't it?" God help me, I sound so sententious. Why, I wondered, are we even having this conversation? I didn't care about this. I didn't trust an abstract opinion, I realized, as far as I could throw a piano.

"Of course not," she said. She was looking down now into the water David had dived into. She seemed in a way to have forgotten the diary itself and to be going back over her own memories.
She
didn't sound sententious. "A love affair only has time for certain things. It doesn't include what you hide in the bathroom."

"Where does the rest go?" We were not getting high marks in logic, I realized, but it seemed worth it to go along for the ride. "All the secrets and the guilty dreams, I mean."

"You save them for before and after your love affairs. Maybe nobody can get it right when they write it down. I could wallpaper that whole house with the crap people wrote about me. But Beth knew me better. I'm
sure."

"Are you going to try to get it right in your book?" I asked, bringing it up to tease her.

"I'll get
me
right," she said. "I'll probably make a mess of everyone else. Do you want to be in it?"

What a question. But before I could think of a clever, clever thing to say that would keep me from having to answer it, she spoke again.

"Don't move," she said quietly, staring into the water. I was looking at her, and I froze. "Behind me, on the ridge."

I looked up, and it was gone. But I caught the afterimage of a deer, like the glow in the dark after someone has turned out the light. I knew as soon as I saw it that the flag had been dropped to signal the passing of midsummer. A moment of delight thrilled in me, and in a moment it was followed by dread, the same flash of opposites that I get when I'm making love. It is not as if the leaves suddenly yellowed or the wind went cold. Still sunny, still warm, the day circled the clear water of the pool in full green light. But I became aware of the summer air as limited, bounded on either end by—not winter exactly, but more like a diminishing of detail, a drawing back of life to two dimensions. I didn't know which two, but one was time. How much time have I let go by, I thought, without knowing it? I felt a surge of conviction that nothing stands still, not the deer, not the peak of the heat, and certainly not us. If it had been anything but a deer that came and went, I might have given it the benefit of the doubt.

So we had shared a secret of sorts, Madeleine and I, though she only saw it reflected in the pool and I saw the wind that it left behind as it sprang away. But it had the effect of stopping us from talking any more about The Truth and The Past. Madeleine is, she would be the first to admit, such a civilized creature. One can only imagine the most domesticated animals in her vicinity, a pair of chow dogs underfoot, say, in a bedroom full of ancient painted panels and difficult plants. One would have to go further and say that Madeleine couldn't keep animals or greenery at all because they can't take care of themselves. The deer may have fled at the sight of Madeleine, then, because of the aura that clung to her of European squares and Italian gardens. But to me the both of them seemed more alike than they must have seemed to each other, exotic and calm and lordly. Five years before, I would have thought the deer was fleeing
me.
But they move so fast, they seem to move mostly for motion's own sake.

In my heart, I have let the old Sea Island deer go, and I did the same thing now. I didn't smother the image by trying to hold it close, something I always used to do. We hurried home in silence, and the secret made me happy, even though I knew the summer was going to make its way downhill. I was not as surprised as everyone else that things turned upside down again. I wouldn't say that I was braced for disaster. The nimbus of late summer glowing on the land didn't ruin my time with David, either. Rather, it seemed to make me squander more at every mating. Those few days following the sighting of the deer were perhaps the most utterly blue in the sky and the sea. I didn't feel sorry for myself. What happens happens. But I did begin to grieve about all of us together, the whole haphazard summer group of us, since I knew we would have to be dispersing soon.

It was after the twentieth of July, and we were having lobsters for dinner. Before Aldo came, we had made do with the little market in town where Mrs. Carroll had ordered her food because they delivered. David would call in a grocery list, and the panel truck would pull up a few hours later. The grocery boy, who was as sexy as the gardener though not as sinister, handed over a carton of food to David or me and traded pleasantries about the ocean. He was a weekend sailor, and he spoke with a certain dumb and simple rapture about his boat. Like all slow-witted people with a passion, he spoke in a language that seemed half religious, half erotic. He drove David crazy. I had a wonderful time when I talked to him, philosophizing with him about the tides and storms and wrecks and runnings aground.

But Aldo had insisted that we were eating like little old ladies, and he had gone off in his car and found a fish market on a crowded harbor to the north of us. So now we had blue-fish and scrod, steamed clams and fresh scallops and oyster stew. Late in the day, Aldo drove away to examine the day's catch while Madeleine and I were off walking. Today he had gone all out and bought lobsters, though they cost about as much a pound as Iranian caviar. He found, far back in the china closet, a set of crazy red plates in a shellfish motif. He fitted us out with giant bibs and nutcrackers. He even convinced Phidias to join us, so we were five at the kitchen table. We worked at our lobsters and made a nice mess.

"We look like the elves in Santa's toyshop," Aldo said.

"I don't really like difficult food," Madeleine said, handing a claw to David to crack for her. "I adore the lobster salad at the Hotel Pierre, but I've never felt the need to know the source."

"There won't
be
lobsters on this coast in fifteen years," Phidias said. "All the beds are going empty."

"It used to give me hives when I was a child," I said.

"But it was all in your head, right?" David said, smiling at me lasciviously.

"It itched all over."

"Did you know that some people are allergic to other people?" Aldo asked. "They wheeze and get all stuffed up and itch and everything."

"It's all in their heads," David said.

"Pardon us, Doctor Freud," Aldo said in a vamp's voice. Then he turned to me. "Maybe you were allergic to yourself."

"No, that's me," Madeleine said. "Write a book about yourself sometime and see how sick of you you get."

"Books aren't expressive enough," Aldo said. "I think I would like to choreograph a dance about myself. A three-act ballet."

"What
you
ought to be," Phidias told him, "is a TV show."

Considering how we loved, we should have been wildly jealous of one another, and we weren't. Somehow we had skipped that phase. Potshots and flesh wounds, yes. Aldo and Phidias still hadn't done time together alone in the same room, and they tended to express a kind of disbelief in each other. David and I did a thirties number sometimes, wisecracking and fast-talking much as Madeleine and Phidias had on the day they met again. Madeleine railed at us all for what we lacked in experience. "Is it because you're men or because you're younger than I that you don't know the difference between getting what you want and wanting what you get?" was a typical speech, and Aldo would beg her, "Stop with the Ethel Barrymore, Madeleine. You are not in church." But there was no discernible heavy artillery on the field. We managed at dinner to keep in motion the guts of the boardinghouse supper and the cachet of the captain's table. For once, perhaps, we were not worried about love. We were so different from one another that none of us posed a threat.

"What
about
the book?" Phidias asked.

"I've done twelve pages about my first year in LA."

"That should work out to about a libel suit per page," I said, swirling a forkful of meat around in a bowl of drawn butter and feeling fine.

"Don't worry, dear," Aldo said. "We'll put the advance in escrow in case any aging stars want to sue her."

"No no, Aldo," Madeleine protested, "it's just the opposite. I'm so upbeat I could scream. I make Hollywood sound positively rosy. That can't be how it was."

"Wasn't it supposed to be the fall of the Roman Empire?" asked David, his eyes agleam. You could tell he would have had a lovely time in Rome. "Bathtub gin and heroin and wanton chorus girls and strip poker and riding crops—"

"No David, that was Berlin," Madeleine said. "But I never went out. All those dry hills got on my nerves for a long time. And nobody invited me to parties because I couldn't speak English. Or because I was queer," she added in a sleepy voice.

"Chapter one, Madeleine in exile," I said.

"People had faces then, didn't they?" Phidias asked, and it surprised me, as if it never occurred to me that he went to the movies. Later, I thought it surprised me because it was such a gay line.

"Who said that?" Madeleine demanded.

"Gloria Swanson," said David, ever the earnest archivist.

"Oh, her.
Sunset Boulevard.
I turned down that picture, you know."

"That's what they all say, Madeleine," Aldo said.

And then the doorbell rang. It had only rung once before, when Farley came, and so we all knew what it was except Aldo. "What's that?" he asked, and we answered in a lopsided chorus, "The doorbell." I looked around the table. We all wore expressions that, to differing degrees, seemed to say, "Who can that be?" We looked for a moment like the strangers gathered in a waiting room. The pause was only a second or two, but the talk stopped, and so did the clinking of lobster shells. Phidias broke the silence and said it was one of his sons, which made sense since none of them would have had the temerity to walk right in. He stood up and took off his lobster bib and stopped at the sink to wash before going off to the front door. Hurry, I thought, because what if something's wrong. David and Aldo began to eat again, all unconcerned. Madeleine caught my eye across the table and silently questioned me. What did I think it was? she seemed to ask, but almost playfully, as if we needed a good surprise about now.

"Is it hard to write?" David asked.

"No," she said, "but it's hard to care."

"Bullshit, Madeleine," Aldo said. "What you don't like about it is that you can't pay yourself compliments."

And the three of them were off again while I strained to hear what was going on at the front door. But in vain. There would have had to be screaming for me to hear it so far away. Something like "Fire!" or "Help!" would have carried, but apparently it was none of those. I couldn't at the moment think of a crisis in the milk business that it might be. And of course it was hard to take it seriously that it might be a disaster, because it was Friday night, we were all together, and the enemy was variously on Block Island and in Chesapeake Bay and North Africa.

"Shh," I said. I could hear Phidias coming through the dining room, and then the door swung open. From the look on his face, it was bad but not catastrophic.

"It's Tony," he said.

I knew that's what he was going to say.

"He's in North Africa," I said.

O
H NO HE WASN'T
. He had come home. And in the ensuing confusion, there really wasn't time to get into the fine points of why his plans had changed. Phidias told Madeleine to go up the kitchen stairs and lock herself in Mrs. Carroll's room, and she made him promise to stall off a visit until the following morning. Tony was going to expect to stay in his old room, Phidias said, and that, David and I knew, meant we had to vacate the tower. Aldo cleared off Madeleine's place at the table, but there really wasn't time for us to disappear or negotiate a story that explained who we all were. Phidias said that, as soon as he got his things out of his car, Tony would be on his way in here for a drink. So he drinks, I thought. There was nothing for us to do but sit there and pick through the remains of our lobsters and try to look properly sheepish and brazen by turns. As if we had been caught by the master with our servants' boots on top of his desk while we tried a pipeful of his tweedy tobacco.

As Madeleine opened the maid's door to go up the back stairs, she turned around to give an exit line. As it happened, only I was watching her because Phidias was giving orders, and David and Aldo were bustling to get them done. She spoke in that whisper she could aim like a laser, and no one else heard her as she spoke across the kitchen to me.

"The plot thickens, eh?"

She closed the door behind her, and her footsteps sounded on the steep stairs. She had gotten her way after all, and she loved it. As to the plot thickening, I grinned at the thought that some movie lines were so surreal they had probably never made it into movies. When I think back on it, I see it was the first time all summer that I didn't take my psychic pulse and note what I was feeling. The first time in years, really. As I considered quickly the range of things that could happen in the next day or so, I found myself full of scenes and not full of me. I gauged the other three men in the room as I would have measured my infield in the ninth inning. Or no: as I would have squinted from one to another of the men in my gang before a holdup in broad daylight.