Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll (33 page)

Well, well. If my first, fast reaction was a tight-lipped whistle of outrage too high-pitched for human ears, my second was much more discreet, since I saw he had come out of Aldo's room. David saw him a moment later than I did and so missed which door had shut. "What the hell are you doing in the house?" he demanded. And the gardener swaggered up to us as if he were walking through a locker room with a towel at his hips. He wore a pair of dirty white overalls and seedy engineer's boots. He put his face close to David's and answered tightly.

"I still don't work for you," he said, "so fuck off." Then he went down the stairs. He hadn't so much as looked at me. He had caught on that he wasn't my type, so he had adopted a policy of cutting me. He made a big show of going about his pruning or his digging if he happened to meet me in the yard. He was, as I was fond of telling David, a real creep.

"He came out of Aldo's room," I said suggestively.

"Come on," David said, and he flew down the hall before I could stop him.
His
first thought must have been that the gardener was picking pockets, and he expected to find the drawers spilled and the closets ransacked. I knew better, that Aldo and the gardener must have been fucking, and I figured it was none of our business. I didn't know what Aldo was into. I didn't want to burst in on him while he was putting away his toys.

But he was sitting in his easy chair reading the real-estate section of the LA
Times
when David threw open the door and we both tumbled in. Someone in Beverly Hills sent him the
Times
every day, which meant he read it three days late. But he said it was better than nothing, by which he meant the New York
Times
and the Boston
Globe.

"Am I late for something?" he asked, looking up.

"We just saw the gardener sneak out of here," David said, and I could see that what had dawned on me about the fucking had just dawned on him.

"Sneak?" Aldo asked delightedly. "That's just his Portuguese blood, David dear. It comes from thousands of years of skulking about in fishing boats. I gather that it takes thousands of years to produce that physique as well. All I can say is, it was worth the wait."

"But I bet you'll sleep safer at night, knowing our security unit is so alert," I said as I boxed David's ears and grabbed him around the neck to pull him out of the room. "Come on, Inspector. This case is closed."

"Wait," Aldo said. "It's darling of you both to look after me. Tell me what you think of this: I'm taking John out to the Coast with me."

"Who's John?" I asked.

"The gardener."

"Oh. How nice," I said. Was I supposed to say congratulations? I still held David's head pinned under my arm, and I let him squirm loose. He peered over my shoulder at Aldo and plunged on, not leaving well enough alone even now.

"Are you and he a thing?"

"Goodness no, David. That type is just a cowboy in LA. You buy them by the dozen. It's a
gardener
I need."

"I never thought of him actually gardening," I said. "Is he any good?" I couldn't believe we were going to talk about this. What I meant was that his gardening seemed like strictly stage business, the excuse that put him in our path day after day. I couldn't imagine him in connection with flowers. In my mind he was connected with sex, and not the flowery kind.

"He's fabulous," Aldo said.

"And he's going to go with you, just like that?" David asked. David had never done love for money, and he adored the details of how it was done. He wasn't sure yet that this wasn't a hustling arrangement.

"Well," Aldo answered, "I said to him: 'Look, how long is this job going to last? She's an old lady. Big gardens are passé in the East.' And then I offered him twice what she pays."

"Do you get all your help this way?" I asked.

"But my dear, you can't trust the agencies. In Beverly Hills, we always steal them from each other, and it all evens out in the end. My first acquisition was Madeleine's driver. He's a hundred and ten, and he grew up on Pierce-Arrows. I'd
die
without him."

"Will you pay the gardener extra to do indoor work?" David asked.

"In my old brass bed? No, I never fuck with the servants. I pay considerably more for that sort of service, and it doesn't get in the way of the food getting cooked or the grass cut. If you fuck the servants, they take it out of your breakfast. Now don't go. I want to talk to you."

David sat down on the end of the bed, facing Aldo, and I did my usual trick of standing at the window, here an open casement facing north to the marshes. I still gravitated to windows as if I needed as much light as I could get. At least I no longer did it in order to protect my rear flank and have an easy escape.

"I have two things on my mind," he said, stuffing the newspaper down into the chair beside him. He glanced at the table next to his chair, on which were gathered a box of cookies, a quart bottle of Tab, and several packets of gum, and he seemed to waver about offering us something. He wanted to, but there wasn't anything good enough for guests, so he let it go and went on. "One is that I have to leave."

"You mean, leave here?" I asked, feeling a little foolish because I sounded like Heidi.

"I've stayed too long as it is, Rick. My telephone bill would pay off the national debt if I didn't get to write it off my taxes. My friends all think I'm at a fat farm, no matter what I tell them, so they're going to expect me thin. I will be utterly humiliated."

"When?" David asked.

"In a few days. Frankly, I'm so sick of fish I could shit. I'm going to go home and eat beef forever, like a good American."

"We'll starve without you," I said, to tease him. "I thought we were one for all and all for one."

"Which brings me to the
other
thing on my mind," he said, as if there were scarcely room for two. "What are you going to do at the end of the summer?" He looked from one to the other of us expectantly.

"Beats me," David said and then turned to me. "
You
tell him," he said, wondering what I would come up with.

"We'll decide that then," I said, curbing my impulse to float away out the window and be done with decisions.

"You could come west," Aldo said. "I mean, I don't want to be a spoilsport, but in a couple of months it's going to look like Hudson's Bay out there."

I darted my eyes out the open window once and, because the sun cast the sea into sapphire, refused to believe him. It was warm enough now for me to swim as long as I wanted, no matter what Mrs. Carroll said. I felt closer to the sea just then than I did to either David or Aldo, and I saw how the feeling sprang up because I feared their control. I may not ever know, I thought, why this wave of suspicion comes over me that I don't know who I am. I think everyone is going to take advantage of my momentary lapse of self and enslave me forever in who they think I am. Then the other side hit me. I
threw off
people who left me free, who had no version of me at all—they were the population of my bedroom for fifteen years, the men in jeans and flannel shirts who came for the one night only. Go after the contrasts, I said to myself. Don't say it will still be summer when you know it won't. If you don't remember who you are, play for a while with the opposite.

I knew then, I think, that the specter of control had nothing to do with them. It was my own shadow on the windowpane. I had always made the Chinese boxes I got locked in, and when I had no one around to blame, I accused the passing of time. In Aldo's room it was going on noon, and time was suddenly as actual to me as the window. I mean it was open.

"Am I talking out of turn?" Aldo asked, and when there was no answer from David, I turned back from the view and saw the question was meant for me. I had reached for a split-second look toward the sea, and I had gone into a little trance. David and Aldo didn't know where I was, and they waited for me to say.

"The end of the summer is not taboo," I said, to reassure us all. "What do you have in mind for us, Aldo? Do you need more cheap New England labor?"

"No," he grinned, "but you can stay with me while you look around."

"What would we be looking around for?" I asked David.

"Work, I guess," he said. "What would we do with the Chevy?"

"Drive it?" I just threw these answers out, but they sounded all right to me. It was like running on the beach in the fog: you can't see a foot in front of you, but on the other hand there isn't anything there to bump into.

"What about Boston?" David asked.

"What about it?" I said. "I've got everything with me." I hadn't actually
told
David that Boston was over with, but he must have known.

"That Chevy will be worth a pile on the Coast," Aldo remarked. "It's so kinky."

David looked over at me, and we both shrugged as if to say, "Why not?" Because it didn't hurt the way my decisions always used to, I would be hard put to call it a decision. It was just the way things happened.

We had never made any plans to do anything on a particular day before, so we were lucky to have the sun. It was the day before Aldo was leaving, and instead of dinner around the table, we had made up a sunset picnic and taken it down to the beach. We filled a wicker hamper with the best of everything, the china and crystal and linen, and we kept Aldo out of the kitchen and made him pack his suitcases while we cooked up the dinner and cooled it off. Cold chicken and potato salad and pickled eggplant, and Madeleine baked cream of tartar biscuits for strawberry shortcake. Phidias brought up champagne from the cellar. We didn't pretend to be doing other than what we did. This was the picnic that was stolen from us when we were children, by rain or measles or the disinclination of our long-lost families.

We were spread out on the sand below the house. The sky was still a faded rose, but the night was coming down. Aldo, in a caftan, had compared the Pacific to the Atlantic in a long toast to the sea. Just now he was setting out the dessert on the damask cloth, arranging the strawberries one by one on the biscuits, as if the photographer from
Gourmet
were on his way across the dunes. Then he set to beating the cream with a wire whisk. We had successfully kept him from cooking, but he had placed himself next to the hamper like the captain in a lifeboat. Throughout the meal, he had dispensed the food at his own pace, calling our attention to the proper presentation of each dish. In fact, he had by him a small covered basket of his own, so that when he appeared from among the dunes at sunset, he had told us with a brief curtsy, "Call me the Little Red Riding Caterer." And out of it had come the parsley and paprika and whatever else was needed to tart up our humble fare.

"Why whip cream at all if you're not going to give it guts?" he asked rhetorically of Phidias, who sat next to him. "I think an ounce of Grand Marnier is
crucial
in cream, but I added a little brandy, too, to tone down that orange-lollipop taste. You don't want it tacky."

David was stooping at the water's edge, maybe ten feet away from the picnic. He had been given charge of the half-case of Taittinger's, and he held a bottle in one hand and his tulip glass in the other. All of us were dressed up tonight, but to me David was the most incongruous in fancy clothes because he never wore them. These were probably all he had, a white silk wedding shirt embroidered with flowers and black silk trousers done up in a drawstring. Erotic pajamas. He and I had spent the last few days taking in the idea of LA, and we did it by spending our time in bed and in the sea, talking less and less. If the Chevy broke down in midpassage, he told me, perhaps we would settle down on the prairie for a while. I took him to mean that we didn't want to be too tied to a calendar. The way I was feeling, I would have liked to take the Chevy and go into orbit on automatic pilot, setting up house in transit. So LA was fine, but in our own time. We had to get there first.

Phidias had sited our picnic blankets at the exact spot where the Carrolls used to eat on the beach, and he had told us during dinner about the outings that took place in Tony's youth, with the children attended (and spoon-fed, one assumed) by a nurse, and the cook and butler serving. Since I never got the impression that Beth Carroll was happy pointing the finger at servants, the scene here evoked was rife with tension. It sounded very like
Mr.
Carroll's picnic, proper and sober and dead. Meanwhile, Phidias never talked at all about cows and the dairy business, and if he hadn't appeared every second morning with a crock of milk and a bottle of heavy cream, I would have forgotten about the farm entirely. It was another way in which he wouldn't talk about the present. I didn't, of course, expect him to fill us up with anecdotes about his taciturn wife and the beefy sons, though I had read my share of master-servant stories and had an inkling of the gossip I was missing.

But he wouldn't talk about himself in a day-to-day fashion. He had expressed in my presence exactly one crystal-clear feeling, his rage at Tony in Madeleine's room. He wasn't living wholly in the past, because he still gave us our daily orders for knocking together the house. And I knew he wasn't dumb about who we all were because of our talk about David under the apple tree. David said it was because he was the only straight one among us, an old Greek lover in a houseful of faggots. Not that he did any flinching about any of us being gay. But David said his own close contact with Phidias had ceased when he and I became lovers again. The rhythms were different between gay and straight, David said idiotically, and Phidias proved it by going his own way now that we were three to one, four counting Madeleine. I thought it had more to do with him being a man with things to do. He did them by himself, whatever they were, and they were the inner equivalent of getting the mildew off the lawn chairs, so they didn't occur in the external world. From what I had read of her journals, I guessed Mrs. Carroll had things to do herself. What luck, I told David, that they happened on each other. I was sounding idiotic, he said.