WEARING RUBBER BOOTS, Barry Paul and Dean walked through a field on Preston Sayles’s property, their strides tangled, stringy, snapping. They were making their way back to the house. They’d just come out of the woods, and their flushed temples and pallid forearms were spangled with bright scratches and black specs. Boulders trucked in from a road-building project had been heaped picturesquely in the field. Dean leapt up on the largest one. He tottered.
Barry uncinched the long gauntlets of yellow gloves. Careful of the invisible poison, he plucked them off. He rubbed the stubble of his scalp.
From the boulder, Dean explained, “Just wanted to see if Preston’s car was in.”
“Too early.”
“I know, but—” Dean was touchy with Barry, trying to be friends in a different way than in their schoolboy past. He enjoyed towering over Barry on the boulder. He also felt stupid, like he’d been trying to cut ahead of Barry in line all day. Not that Barry did anything but shrug affably. Even clearing brush in the woods. Dean had inserted himself in a task he’d left undone for months just because Barry was going to do it. And the bragging way he told Barry about his little intimacies with Preston felt desperate. Still, he couldn’t stop. He’d been talking about the time Preston ran for Congress.
“So anyway, they videotaped him bullshitting with Ford, so they could make a TV commercial. He has a copy still, but he won’t let anybody see it. He told me it’s too embarrassing. He talked the whole time, and Ford just sits there nodding—uh-huh, uh-huh—and maybe once he says, You’re completely right about that, Preston.”
Barry smiled, wondering if Ford had really sounded so stupid and if the job of president could really be so humiliating. “Why didn’t he try again after he lost?”
“Claims he didn’t like it. I think it might be that he liked screwing around too much. It would have been too dicey, too many skeletons in the closet. Never tell Bea, obviously. But it’s pretty well known what he’s like.”
“Didn’t seem to hurt Clinton that much.”
“This was the old days. And, incidentally, he hates Clinton, and I think that’s partly why. No, everybody wanted him to be a candidate when he was young. He told me they even took him to the White House once when Nixon was president. They go into the Oval Office, and he actually has the balls to ask if he can sit in the president’s chair. Nixon wasn’t there or anything. You got to get him to tell you. It’s fucking hysterical.” Dean took off his own gloves. He had allergies and tried blowing his nose but only got a nostril to burble thickly. His wire rims were smeared with sweat. His old scars itched. When Barry started walking again, he jumped down from the boulder and fell in with him.
Up by the sprawling house, the sunlight looked thick enough to fall in cords like honey. The trees around the house—golden already—shifted in a rogue gust of wind making Barry think, girls under a shower. Though they didn’t see her at first, Bea’s raucously friendly voice came from somewhere, “Pretty warm for October! You boys must be burning up” There she was, in a full-length aqua housedress. She was filling birdfeeders. A great plastic bag was at her feet, and a tin scoop shone in her hand.
It didn’t register with either boy how peculiar the aqua outfit was for Garden Club Bea. Rather suddenly she’d given up her dainty sapphire guard rings and tiny gold sand dollar earrings. Since Addie Mueller had come to the chapel Bea had started opting for hunks of jade and amber and a big Celtic gold cross. The menopausal shift to clunky jewelry and garish colors, as mysterious as finding religion, had happened quickly in her case. Some of the new jewels tumbled into the gold-embroidered décolleté of her screaming housedress. If the boys didn’t notice her clothes, they did notice that Bea was more harshly friendly than ever, even for a golfer. Her neat gray hair was coming apart. “Aren’t you nice! Aren’t you nice!” she railed. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
Dean rushed to speak first. “There’s still a lot down there, Bea. It’ll take two more days, maybe.”
Something about his authoritative tone made Bea give him a brief stare that looked like it might turn into laughter.
Barry enthused, “We found this one incredibly huge one. Hundred years old maybe. Like a tree trunk.” He made a ring with his hands.
“I’ve never heard of poison ivy growing like that!” Bea exclaimed. She couldn’t not be as loud and happy-sounding as possible just now. Her oldest son, Philip, had managed a phone call from Nicaragua—long, accusing, irrelevant. Barry and Dean assumed puffy, reddened eyes were ordinary for a woman her age, not a sign of crying.
“The thing was awesome,” Barry smiled at her. “Chthonic!”
“Well! I don’t know how to thank you. For even just starting to get it out of there. No, Dean!” He’d bent forward to help drag the bag of seed to the next group of feeders. She didn’t want his help and stopped him almost crossly.
Philip had said to her, “Now you’re doing it to me. Don’t you see how we, as a class, are cruel, power-mad? The niceness is a blind. The underclass is right. The only thing they don’t get, because they can’t conceive of it, is that we have total conviction. We really do think we’re nice. And you can’t fight faith.” His voice had sounded villainous, no other word, its tone a cross between scalpel and oracle. So what could she—not the most dialectical person in the world—do but snort in contempt and shout, “Goddamn it! Class! What planet are you on, Philip?”
With a cheery “whoof!” she hefted the seed bag and got it propped against the green pole of the next birdfeeder. Its weight caused the squirrel guard to tip. De-draingy-dang-dang. “No, if the girls had ridden over from camp and gotten all poison-ivied on the trails—well, they’d think something awful about us. So thank you, boys! Thank you! Thank you!”
It wasn’t Philip’s cruelty to her. Children often tell you your life was a waste, your marriage a stinker, and me—I’m a ruin, thanks to you. But his terrible suffering! As a woman, Bea couldn’t help but imagine it had its origin in her—at a level deeper than psychiatry is able to articulate. As if he’d come out as animated crystals of uric acid when all she’d meant to do was create life. In the way of God, she’d more than allowed the possibility of sin. Crazily, Philip had gone on: “And this great training in falsehood is exactly why there are so few interesting or accomplished people from privileged backgrounds, in spite of having all the time in the world, and—” She’d had to shrill back at him, “Philip! What on earth are you raving about? Anyone can do anything, if they put their mind to it!”
“It’s actually nice for us the Riding Camp girls use the trails,” Bea told Barry. “Helps keep them open. You should try some time. I bet they’d let you. If you did any riding out west.”
“I can’t afford to right now,” Barry said. “Oh, that reminds me, I have to talk to Preston about something,” he added guilelessly.
Dean nosed in, “Preston isn’t back yet? I guess we saw his car wasn’t in. Actually I’ve got to see him about something, too, at some point.”
“Well! No, Dean. Preston won’t be back till six-thirty or seven. He’s visiting his sister at Hazelwood.” Preston had a much older sister in a nursing home.
Another gust of wind came along. The many blotches of sunlight on the grass around their feet seemed to wobble on stems. The way nature broke in upon their attention, waving its arms, made human affairs seem puny.
With the particular sensitivity of strong emotion repressed, face to face with what she momentarily perceived to be the godless underlying boredom of the world, Bea made an incredible, tight-lipped expression of warrior sternness. At the wind’s second gusting, she used the scoop to hold her gray locks in place. She surveyed the field, the boulders. If God was temporarily absent from the world, she would find Him. She blushed when she noticed Barry’s generous face grinning at her in—she thought—admiration. With her usual fostering sweetness, a small voice, she said, “Well. You’re both—you must be covered with poison ivy. Why don’t you run and change. I’ll tell Preston you want to see him, Barry. You, too, Dean.”
There were two entrances to the garage apartment, the main door from the outside and another from the big four-bay garage. Barry and Dean went in through the garage, pungent of gasoline and mown grass. They left their rubber boots and gloves on the oil-stained concrete floor. Each took a shower, and afterward Dean heard the indecipherable thumps and knockings Barry often made overhead.
The noise came from Barry’s largely made-up version of Tai Chi. With his poor sense of balance, he wasn’t any more adept at this than he had been at skateboarding. But he kept trying, hoping it would help him take off a few pounds and get in touch with his body. Dressed only in red sweats, one foot in the air, his hands met in prayer over the dimples of a young man’s slight paunch, and his expression was sublimely peaceful. Until he tottered and the raised foot thudded down. He ignored the squawk of the phone from the floor below and began again.
Downstairs, still in his towel, Dean eyed the caller ID before seizing the phone. “Lloyd, you fuckhead!” he answered amiably. “How we doing?”
Lloyd ran their little insurance business, aspired to be a Republican party flack in Trenton and affected to skip greetings. “Ask me if I care if that Swiss Re holier-than-thou motherfucker thought I was an asshole running around after little jackshit insurance commissions! I sold a fucking three-million-dollar policy to the old guy in Brick. How you doing? You talk with Prez-man over there yet?”
“Not yet. I can’t bring it up yet. Because of the car still. I’ve got to let it cool off some more.”
“For fuck’s sake. Man. That was months, months, fucking months ago. What are you doing for me? Either get me Sayles or get me some other fucking leads over there. Shit.” Not sounding overly upset, he rang off after adding, “Gotta go.”
Dean’s hand covered a gold-toned plastic figure of an archer—more Robin Hood than bow hunter—third place. An erection started to tent the kilted terrycloth of his towel, and he reached under and toyed with it idly for a moment. Still holding the phone, he thumbed his girlfriend Pia’s number. As it rang, he slipped his hand under his armpit, drew it out and felt the new sweat on his fingertips, almost as evanescent as alcohol.
“Nah. Nah, I got to go out with Lloyd tonight. He just called,” Dean said to Pia. She had mixed feelings about Lloyd. She once called him a no-goodnik. Dean offered, “You want me to blow him off?”
“No,” Pia sighed. “What’s that noise?”
“Barry beating off upstairs.”
“Ha ha. No way. Why don’t you go into business with him instead of Lloyd?”
After getting off the phone, Dean turned, wondering if he felt like cleaning up the place, and caught sight of himself in the mirror. Although he affected to downplay his good looks with glasses, he was vain, vain in a miserly way. He dropped the towel and turned so he could see his butt in the mirror. After masturbating perfunctorily in the bathroom, he threw on a T-shirt and shorts and pounded on the wall at the foot of the stairs. When Barry answered, Dean called up, “Wondering if you wanted to watch some TV is all. See the debate later, maybe. Not that anybody cares. I have to go out with Pia after.”
They’d hardly said a word in the woods, and they hardly said a word now. Both of them sprawled on the couch in the sub-aqueous dimness of Dean’s room. Ghost armies of empty beer bottles lined the counters and sills. On a laminate coffee table were a beat-up copy of Foreign Affairs, a plastic bottle cap used as the ashtray for a single half-smoked joint, and more beer bottles.
Elbows flapping, Dean rubbed his eyes. He scratched his ankle with both hands. After he made a series of throaty snuffles, he told Barry he hated nature and wanted to move back to the city with Pia. Barry, who hadn’t spent much time down here, was eyeing a rubber plant in the corner of the room. The plant’s leaves had all been hacked off and a machete was stuck in the soil of the pot. “That’s anxiety,” Dean explained to him. “That’s my psychiatrist. Preston and Bea gave it to me at some point. But I’m not good with plants. Fuck me if this is a cold and not allergies.”
He got a bottle of DayQuil from the bathroom and started taking tiny, pursed-mouth sips straight from the bottle, between bigger sips of beer. He kept mistakenly grabbing an empty bottle from the coffee table. He rolled it out of the way under the couch and reached for the right one, heavy, cool, sweating. They were glued to the evening news, but they didn’t seem to be watching.
Without taking his eyes off the screen, Dean asked, “You’re going to ask Prez for little extra—” His hand gestured cash.
“That obvious?” Barry laughed.
“No. But maybe you want to talk to Bea. She decides a lot of that. A lot of their money comes from her family. I know she’s a pain to talk to.”
“You think so?”
“For me anyway. I think she likes you. The thing is, I’ve got to try to sell Preston a big policy. A nice piece of property. But if we both go after him at the same time… Also it might not be such a good time for Prez. There’s this huge lawsuit at Flexalt—and his sister—that costs a lot keeping his sister in that place.”
“They’re pretty rich,” Barry observed, not petulantly.
“In a way. In a way, though, rich people don’t think about it like that. They have all those kids, the house. What do you need more money for?”
“It’s sort of to do with my dad.”
“Shit. Right.”
“Yeah, I keep having to ask my mom and dad for money they can’t spare.”
“Right. It sucks. How’s he doing?”
“Not great. They’re always finding more—you know—cancer.”
Dean seemed to concentrate on the TV news for a while. He didn’t have any comforting vocabulary. With an adolescent show of tough honesty, he observed, “Your dad always seemed—kind of a sad guy.” Glancing at Barry, he saw that wasn’t a good line. He started over. “For money, there’s a couple of things you might try, though. Like you could ask your dad if he has a life insurance policy lying around. A lot of guys like him probably would.”
“I don’t know.” Barry shrugged.
“The thing is, you can sell it. Like other people will invest in it. It got popular when all those guys were dying of AIDS and needed money. People would sort of bet the guy was going to die in a year or two. They’d pay like ninety cents on the dollar for the policy. Then when the guy did die, the people who bought it would get the whole dollar. It was good for the AIDS guy, too, because he got all this money to spend before he kicked. That could be your dad’s situation. I don’t know for sure, because I don’t know all the details of his—or even if he has—”
“That’s so sick,” Barry said. He didn’t sound appalled or outraged, more fascinated. “I think he does have a policy, though. My mom may have said something.”
Sounding more crafty than even-handed, Dean frowned at the TV. “On the other hand, it might be less of a good thing for you in the long run. If you and your mom were beneficiaries, say, when he died you wouldn’t get the payoff. So it might be less good in a—you know—in a selfish sense. Up to you whether you want to get into it.”
“I don’t know if it would matter to me. To my mom maybe.”
“Or you could try for the real jackpot.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, that would be sue what’s-her-name—Ms. B. The one you fucked.”
Barry could tell Dean was, at least a little bit, serious, but he chuckled, and soon they both laughed. With a fanfare of tympani, the TV flashed back to a news anchor strolling through the as yet empty presidential debate set.
Dean made as if to drop the subject of money. He impatiently left before the debates even started, however, lying that he was off to see Pia as he’d lied to her that he was off to see Lloyd. He was headed to Asbury Park aiming for one of his compulsive fuck-boy pick-ups. On his way out he reminded Barry, “Seriously, about that insurance thing. If you ever decide. My man Lloyd does it all the time. He’s got these little tricks. You could talk to him. Also think about this—maybe you could help me out with selling Prez on a policy. He loves you. If you took the commission, or most of it, that would be some money for you, too. We should talk about it. You’d be a good salesman.”
After Hazelwood, Preston drove to the Clipper Room at the Radisson for a drink. From there he drove home on instruments, not trusting himself. He kept his Lexus speedometer needle from budging a millimeter. The dotted yellow line appeared to rise through the bottom of the car. Into him, he imagined. It flickered in his heart. He zippered together patches of woodland, horse farms, tracts of expensive houses. Whenever he pulled up at a stop sign, a heavenly silence descended on the crossroads. He could hear a single leaf skitter across the road. Drunkenness was a way of looking at things like any other. Through it, he was becoming a little hopeful.
A car with a ski rack followed him somnolently. He made the last turn, catching the berm. He straightened the car with a jerk as he would a suit jacket. The Lexus interior exploded with light. Heart racing, Preston thought reproachfully, “Now that’s dangerous.”
Lurid red, white, and blue swirled over his hands, his cheeks, the dashboard, clinging and flowing like oil. It hurt his eyes to glance directly at the flashing ski rack in the rear view mirror. He judged his pulling over a model of the art under the circumstances.
The police officer left his lights mutely yipping at the woods. He came up and stood a prudent distance from Preston’s window. Preston smiled. He raised his eyebrows politely. The policeman switched on a flashlight. Sweeping Preston’s lap and the front seat of the car, he slurred, or Preston heard him slur, “See your license, please!” or “Sir! License, please!”
“Of course.” Preston handed it to him, adding, “I haven’t seen you around.”
“Nose her.” The officer walked back to his car. After a long moment he switched off the flashing lights. When he returned, he said, “You live right here.” His shoulders swiveled somewhat, but he continued rereading Preston’s license with the flashlight.
“That’s correct,” Preston said in too pedagogic a tone. “Right there.” He pointed. The moon beat lividly on the roof.
The officer glanced up from the license into Preston’s eyes, a look that would have been bashful were it not so serious. Cautiously, Preston prompted him. “There was a problem?”
“Sort of crossed the line coming out of the turn,” he said. He mumbled, “Missed the road, too.”
“Live here so long, you start driving like you own the road. Which is dangerous,” Preston said contritely. His drunkenness had burned down to a headachy flush by now. He eyed the young man’s mustache, an ideal wave about to break over those silent lips.
“Arrive carefully,” the policeman slurred, handing Preston his license. More likely, “Drive carefully.”
Bea and Eleanor were in the kitchen when Preston came in. Preston gave Bea a rundown on his sister and her friends at Hazelwood, and he mentioned the cop. That got him a look. Bea told him the boys had started clearing brush and poison ivy from the woods. Eleanor was splitting Goldfish crackers with her incisors.
With innocuous-sounding cheerfulness, Bea suddenly exclaimed, “I’m in a mood to shake things up!” Her chin rose as she tried to think of a for-instance. Preston guessed she’d talked to either Philip or Anna. “Finally take care of this window, maybe.” Bea didn’t sound like she thought that was such a fun example of a shake-up. She didn’t even glance at Dean’s arrow’s divot in the tempered glass. She seemed to be trying to think of something better.
“How’s basketball, El-meister?” Preston asked.
“Fine.”
“You want to shake things up, too? With me and your mom?”
“Sure. If we can please have horses, Daddy.” She’d decorated her wrist with a cabochon Goldfish, which she now licked off.
“I’m not taking care of them,” Bea laughed. A touch wildly.
“No, really. I’m serious, you guys. I think it would be totally normal to get a pony.”
Preston bluffed. “You want a penny? Here you go. Let me—” He fished in his pocket.
“Not a penny. A po-o-ony, Daddy!”
“Right here. A shiny new penny!”
“Po-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ony!!”
“What’s that you say? Eh?”
“Preston.” Bea put an end to the teasing.
“She just thinks she ought to want a pony, because that’s what the general theory of little girl-ness says.”
“Preston!” Bea said more sharply than was called for. As if Preston were tempting Eleanor with a cursed apple of knowledge, if a very small one.
Bewildered by the joke, Eleanor also stared at her father, not sure whether she was being made fun of. She insisted, “I do want a pony.”
“Oh, damn,” Bea remarked. “El, will you run out to the garage for some vegetables? Pick whatever you like. Us guys don’t care, do we?” In the unused fourth bay of the garage they kept a freezer full of vegetables and Lean Cuisine packages and a butchered side of beef.
In the silence after Eleanor had gone, Bea and Preston could hear a pissy-sounding talking head from the TV blasting in the library: “Gore saw Clinton as damaged goods, because of the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio. Was it a miscalculation?”
With Eleanor out of the room for a moment, privacy created a slight awkwardness between Bea and her husband. Chin jutting, Bea brushed it aside. “That reminds me. Both Barry and Dean want to talk to you. And I have a feeling both of them—both of them—are going to ask you for money.”
The flat of Preston’s hand came down on the kitchen table. “Look—”
“Hey! Don’t do that to me. I’m just telling you what they said. Well, maybe they didn’t say anything about money, but I’ll bet you...” She trailed off. She muttered, “I really do want to shake things up.”
“Why now?”
Her voice rose as if he’d challenged her. “Maybe now’s the time. I’m sorry. I know you’re tired and worried about work. But maybe I’m tired and worried, too. You know, I quit with Dr. Berman. I’m not going to see him anymore.”
“What brought that on? I didn’t even know that was on the table. Why now, Bea? Did you talk with Anna or Philip today?”
“Maybe I did. Philip. Big deal. That has nothing to do with Dr. Berman. I’ve been thinking about that for a long time. Half the fun was having lunch with Cassie Vail every time, and now she can’t because she’s gotten so grand. I don’t mean that the way it sounds. I mean, good for her! She’s busy with her gallery. Doing something.”
“You always said Berman was a big help.”
“Of course he was. But there’re other ways to change—to get out of being so—maybe, I’d like to try going to seminary! Is that so out of left field? Who knows?” She’d gotten a touch shrill. “I’m not at all sure you realize, Preston, how discovering God in my life has been—very important,” she avowed doggedly.
“I know, Bea. Of course, I know,” he said gently.
“I have to say I admire Cassie in so many ways. And Addie Mueller, too. Do you realize, that woman has a chance of becoming a bishop? Not that that’s what it’s all about. But—listen, you and I have worked pretty well together. And I’m glad of it, of course. But—but—” Unable to get something out, she turned accusing in frustration. “What do you mean, we’re messed up? Why don’t you think any of our kids can get along in the world? What about your part in it? Ever think of your responsibility?”
“Bea.”
“I’m serious. I don’t want you teasing El for being a fake little girl or me for being fakely nice or fake whatever else you think I am, when—when maybe that was exactly what you always expected of us!”
“Fake? I don’t get this.”
Bea took a moment, calmed herself and looked at him, now feeling forgiving as well as sweetly estranged from him. “You don’t, of course, Preston. I don’t think you can get it.”
In the dark garage, Eleanor could hear Barry Paul spilling his tools in front of Dean’s TV. He was going to work on his bicycle while he watched the debate. Eleanor kept shuttling a frosty carton of frozen peas between her hands so it wouldn’t burn too much. Keeping to the darkness, she crept, stepping on rubber boots and gloves, until she got a view through the door’s glass window. Barry had inverted his bicycle and was examining the chain for the master link. An American flag rippled on the TV screen. Eleanor could hear a trumpet flourish.
She could see the scar-like white scuffs in Barry’s stubbly scalp, as if he’d been in a war. Why was he a thousand times more appealing than Dean, who was beautiful but not even attractive? She imagined Barry and herself running through a war zone together. Their happiness would be entombed by some disaster. If she survived, she’d cry her life away. Squeezing the softening box of frozen peas, she heard the sound of the collapsing rubble that, perhaps, would kill him. Or her. She felt the arousing glory of it in her gut. She nuzzled an edge of the wet, warming, softened carton of peas between her legs. It took a second, then the cold flashed through her forest green tights and cotton panties and flooded her with tingling from the puckered apex of her thighs to her shoulder blades. It was semi-painful, semi-wonderful, the most romantic wound. She took the package away only when it started dripping. Boldly, she used the box for a sly knock on the window.
She wasn’t sure he heard. She squeezed the black stone he’d given her from its secret pocket behind the waistband of her skirt. She knocked with the stone, and he heard her this time. Plucking at the front of his red sweatpants, he stood. He padded over. By the time he opened the door, she’d run to hide behind her father’s Lexus.
She could see him. He crouched. He reached out into the garage and righted the pairs of rubber boots. He smeared possible poison from them on the thighs of his sweats. He sat on his haunches, smiling gently as if he knew Eleanor was out there in the garage. Still on his haunches, he pretended to be blind, a performance just for her. His hands, streaked with bicycle grease, waved blindly through the doorway. He almost lost his balance and had to grab the doorframe. Still, he played, eyes closed, smiling as his head moved about like a blind worm coming up out
of its hole. It was all a performance for her. “Where was she?” he played. “Where was Eleanor?” She let him hear her giggle once before she ran out of the garage with the peas.