Get that God-forsaken creature off the net,” Frank Widdicombe called from the baseline. The tennis ball he had just tossed into the air plummeted to the green hard court, then bounced unattended as he stepped forward with a frown. He fixed upon a black-capped chickadee that sat, preening, atop the net; it looked as though it thought that slack rail of white plastic a private beach, and the court a stretch of sea on the shore of which it could take its avian leisure as it pleased. The nerve, the nerve!
Just beyond this shameless display of animal privilege, at the other end of the court, stood Bradford Dearborne, his sunned, sweaty face tense with concern. He waved his arms, hoping the winged innocent would scoot away before exciting the full brunt of Frank’s wrath. Yet while we may open on this little drama as though on the brink of some meaningful, murderous turn in a tragic play, it was not the first time that Bradford had waved his arms in such a way—to no avail—only to find that the wrath in question, as much as he had feared it, amounted, in the end, to nothing very noteworthy.
The bird cocked its head to and fro. It hopped along the line of its new perch. It whistled a simple, three-note song, one that sounded to Frank like “Hey, sweetie!” All in all, he found that a bit too impudent for a bird intent on delaying his tennis victory.
“Shoo!” cried Bradford. “Shoo!”
“Son of a bitch,” said Frank. Bradford moved to chase the bird off, but his opponent proved swifter: Frank charged ahead, his racquet raised above him like the battle-axe of some Viking berserker; the bird, suddenly hip to the barbarian siege taking place, darted over to the doubles alley with what its attacker took to be an air of outrage. Outraged in turn, Frank chopped the top of the net with his racquet repeatedly, glaring. “Get lost, freeloader!”
“Christ, Frank,” said Bradford. “It’s only a cute little thing.” He watched the chickadee caper down the sidelines. Having popped a Klonopin that morning to quell his anxiety over playing tennis with Frank—whose flawless strokes and footwork still crackled with the white-hot fire of the private tennis club where Bradford’s father had taken lessons with the man years before—he felt a certain drowsy sympathy for this bird and crouched down on his haunches in the closest thing to an expression of solidarity he could manage. In the end, it was this loving interspecies gesture that drove the chickadee to fly from the court once and for all, the dark of it slicing through the air and into the nearby woods.
“Good work, champ,” said Frank. “You killed him with kindness. Now—we ready?” He took a new ball from his pocket and bounced it, walking back to the baseline. “Forty-love.” He noted Bradford’s defensive position, vaguely appreciative that, even in retirement, he could still intimidate a young adversary. “Match point.”
Bradford followed the drift of the ball tossed skyward, Frank’s hand frozen in the motion of its release; at the ball’s suspended peak, Frank’s body, coiled and crouched like a loaded spring, launched into action—propelled from the ground, he torqued his trunk, snapped his wrist, and grunted loudly, seeming not to give a thought to any of this as he served an ace in one fluid, merciless motion.
“Yes!” Frank cried, pumping his fist and bounding up to the net. Bradford strolled forward to shake his hand. “Good game,” said Frank. “Maybe tomorrow we can work on those lazy feet of yours.”
“They’re my Achilles’ heel,” said Bradford.
Frank stretched his arms above his head, gripping his racquet at both ends. Darkness gathered at the armpits and chest of his shirt; rivulets of sweat ran from his greying temples. “Well, you should be happy you have legs at all, Bradford,” he said. “I remember this one time, courtside, I was going on and on, griping about how god-awful I had played in the first round of a club tournament, and this friend of mine, Mark, who was temporarily in a wheelchair at the time—your dad knows him; Irish guy; did you know that people in wheelchairs play tennis? It’s true, they have their own league—just smiled as I stood there talking about myself, and when I was done, he looked me up and down and said, ‘Well, at least you can use your legs, you whiny fucking cunt.’ Can you believe that?”
Bradford rooted around in his tennis bag. “I’d be curious to see wheelchair tennis.”
“It’s interesting,” said Frank. “You roll around. The ball can bounce twice. But listen—there’s a lesson here, Bradford. Mark was trying to tell me that even when this and that isn’t going well, you have to take joy in the . . . fucking . . . little things. Little things, you know, like legs. The basics—food, shelter, legs. You’re alive, Bradford! That you can feel anything at all is a fucking miracle!”
“I suppose so,” said Bradford. “Unless, well.” He paused, thinking to himself, “Is there no word for the opposite of a miracle?”
“Anyway, can you guess what happened then?”
Bradford said he could not. Perhaps he could have, but he felt that by guessing he might somehow implicate himself in the what that had happened then, which was sure to have been something altogether offensive.
“I looked at him and said, ‘You know what, you asshole? You’re right,’ and then I started skipping and jumping off the court, hooting and hollering like a Looney Tune.”
Frank laughed heartily and scratched his prim little mustache. Seeing that Bradford’s mouth hung open in horror, he said, “Oh, come on. He practically asked me to. We had that funny kind of relationship. You know, talking shit. He cursed me out with a vengeance after that—words I’d never even heard before. We’re still in touch. And he got me back later by introducing me to Carol.”
“Well, that’s funny,” said Bradford. He finally managed to fish the translucent orange cylinder of a prescription bottle out of his bag. He shook one tablet into his palm and swallowed it with a swig of water. Now, with the mention of Carol Widdicombe, his thoughts turned to her able assistant, Michelle. “Do you think everyone’s up and about by now?”
“I try not to think about things like that,” said Frank. He crouched down on the concrete and kicked his legs out behind him, getting into push-up position. “Only fools think, Bradford. Wise men reflect.” He lowered himself to the ground and, holding himself there, added, “And at this point, if I’m not a fucking wise man, I don’t know who is!”
Bradford chuckled at this, feeling it to be in better taste, at least, than the mark anecdote. He then began the short walk back to the house, his legs—though he was glad to have them—sore and shaky from defeat.
Although the invigorating aroma of coffee greeted Bradford as he passed through the hall, it was with trembling hands that our would-be Casanova entered the breakfast nook of Willowbrook, the brick-red house with white trim recently purchased by Mrs. Carol Widdicombe of San Francisco. Bradford had showered, his face was shaved clean, and he was dressed in an elegant ensemble from his preferred purveyor of preppy threads, Chamberlain & Sons. His compulsive thirst for beverages with invigorating aromas presently took a backseat to the all-consuming dread he felt at having to ask his father for a large sum of money later that day. His father the coffee mogul, the coffee king, with all his money earned selling the very brew Bradford was about to sit down and sip. While the Klonopin worked to calm his mind like maids making the beds in a recently trashed hotel room, dread refused to budge, settling in among the mess of tennis humiliations, requests for cash, and—oh, yes!—thoughts of Michelle Briggs, object of his as-yet unrequited, heavily medicated affection.
Frank came storming by just then. He punched Bradford in the arm and shouted, “I’ve still got it, Dearborne! I’ve still got it!”
“That you do,” said Bradford.
“Fuck if I’m not a wise old man.” He skipped up the stairs to go shower.
Bradford sidled up to the sideboard in search of a snack to calm himself. A Danish Bodum of frothing black coffee stood next to a large ring of pastry topped with slivered almonds and stuffed with apricots, and some summer figs arranged on blue-and-white plates. Mrs. Widdicombe herself sat across the room, perched on the edge of an Edwardian Louis Quinze–style chair that had been reupholstered in hot-pink moiré. Her slender, disheveled son, Christopher, home for the summer after a year studying abroad in Italy (a period during which he had apparently shunned Old World tourism in favor of documenting that country’s fragrant garbage crisis in watercolors, and had suffered some kind of heartbreak at the hands of a “withered Albanian bellhop—ah, my Kreshnik!”), curled up on an antique sofa, meeting the lovely landscape outside the window with a heavy-lidded stare; he noticed Bradford and raised his eyebrows in silent greeting. “Heya,” said Bradford, and then he smiled at Michelle, who, in her capacity as the Widdicombes’ personal assistant, was far too busy scribbling her instructions for the day into an agenda to notice him. A hired hand stood on a stepladder trying to position an abstract painting created by Carol’s dear friend Gracie Sloane.
Carol was addressing all those present, a flurry of talk.
“It’s still crooked—look at the sconces, dear, and just tilt it slightly. Christopher needs to be dropped off at the library by noon. Christopher, I assume you’ll be home for dinner—we’re having salmon. Good morning, Bradford—you look nice. Speaking of which, stop by the auto shop and see what’s taking them so long with the car—it was only a small accident. Nobody died, for heaven’s sake.”
“A part of me died,” said Christopher. He covered his face with his hands. “My sense of enchantment died. What little left of it there was!”
“Disenchantment builds character,” Carol snapped.
“You want me to do that? Go to the auto shop?” said Bradford, serving himself two pieces of pastry.
“No, no, Michelle can take care of it, you’re just here to relax, Bradford, and to write your movie thing—that’s perfect, you can go now—thank God that’s taken care of; Gracie arrives tonight, and I had forgotten completely to hang up her wonderfully creative painting. Don’t you just love gifts? Although I quite like it hanging there now, with that owl perched on that . . . totem pole, or whatever that’s supposed to be. Enjoy a krangle, Bradford—Michelle made it. It’s delicious. That is what you call it, right?”
Michelle waggled her pen. “Kringle. It’s a Danish specialty.”
“Well, great,” said Carol. She paused to take a long breath through her nose. Bradford took advantage of the lull in conversation to look at Michelle as she made competent notes in her little book. Could she be writing: 2 p.m: Fall in love with fascinating houseguest? She kept her blond and wavy hair in a simple, shoulder-length style that he liked. Presently she tucked a strand of it behind her ear, the lobe of which was tightly attached rather than free-hanging and, to Bradford, all the more alluring for its compact efficiency. She wore a summery orange dress and a necklace of gleaming, oversized amber beads. Oh, to be that heavy rope of beads, hanging sloth-like from her neck! He was a burdensome sloth, she a swan, yet somehow they would find love. The fact that he was working on a frightening screenplay went some way, he felt, toward persuading her to pay attention to him. Yes, he would one day soon touch the pale skin that seemed to radiate with a halo that might either be something sacred or a pharmaceutical side effect.
He realized that she had been speaking to him.
“Are you still with us, Bradford?”
“Oh,” he said. “Sorry—having a little daydream.”
“How perfectly daydreamy.” Michelle smiled, a twinkle in her eye. “You look super put-together, as usual. What’s the occasion?”
“Money,” said Bradford, thinking of his father. “And it won’t come easy.” He bit into a piece of kringle. “This is delicious. Really good.”
“Thank you. A friend in Denmark gave me the recipe.”
Bradford chewed and stared at her. As he turned the shadowy fragment “a friend in Denmark” this way and that in his head, he felt his jaw stiffen with jealousy.
Carol, who had evidently recovered from the strain of her earlier directorial monologue, turned to him as though recalling an urgent matter and said, “How was Frank today?”
“Good, good.” Bradford shifted in his seat, reckoning with a wave of nausea. His tongue weighed heavy as he spoke, and his mouth watered. “I mean, he wouldn’t let me get a single point in. He approached the net a lot.” He decided not to tell them about the chickadee incident, as Carol loved birds. “He’s still got it, as he says.”
“I think she means his mood, Bradford,” said Michelle.
“His ‘state of mind,’ ” added Christopher, making air quotes. He spoke these words as though to have a mind at all constituted an ironic state of affairs.
“Oh, right,” said Bradford. He swayed; his queasiness, he feared, was growing more conspicuous to the rest of them by the second. “Right. He’s still got that, too.”
“Yes, his mood,” said Carol. She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You know, he’s been very upset since his trip got canceled. God knows we would have been happy to get him out of our hair for a while.”
“Mm, right,” said Bradford. “France.”
Carol frowned. “Yes, that’s it. France. Only, that’s not it, if you catch my drift.” She paused to adjust the position of a John Singer Sargent book sitting on a side table—the rippled dust jacket showed a dark-haired darling tucked into a floral teacup of a chair, her gauzy dress giftwrapped at the waist by a long, pale pink bow—and then, sighing, she added, “Frank is depressed.”
Michelle scoffed. Her hands flew to her hips, and the bronze bangles around her wrists clinked together softly. “What? Not Frank. He can’t be. He’s too fit to be depressed. All that exercise! It seems, well, chemically impossible. All those endorphins, Carol.”
Carol shook her head. “But he is,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”
Christopher turned away from his pained windowpane reverie, adding, “Well, I can’t say I blame him. This country, this empire, this era—it’s hopeless.” He sank deeper into his corner of the couch with a pout. “And what’s worse: this island! The very thought of it . . . oh, now I’m depressed. This island—this island, Mother! Why? It’s beautiful, yes, but—oh, God. It’s like living in a Thomas Kinkade painting!” The question of the island—why?—was rhetorical. Christopher threw an arm over his forehead as though dying of a fever; he began to mutter to himself in Italian.
“Is that how they teach you to talk about your mother country at RISD?” said Carol. Christopher merely snorted and cried, “I hate all countries, Mother!”
“Well, okay,” said Bradford, trying, in his drugged muddle, to reason out the mood of the elder Widdicombe. “Maybe he’s a bit bummed out about his vaycay. They go every year, don’t they? He wanted to see his friends and everything, drink wine in the country . . . you know, in the country and everything . . . that’s understandable. I would be sad, too. So sad . . .” For a second, he wondered if he was, in fact, sad. He couldn’t tell, although he was beginning to feel a bit dizzy.
“No, Bradford,” said Carol. “No.” His answer had failed to acknowledge what she felt to be the true gravity of the situation. She looked around the room, afraid her husband might pop up unannounced. “Not just sad, Bradford—Frank doesn’t know it yet, but he’s clinically depressed.” She was speaking in a hush now, and she was twisting her wedding band. “I did some research, and he shows all of the signs.”
“What signs?” said Michelle.
“Psychomotor agitation.” Carol pronounced these words in triumphant staccato, as though revealing a great discovery to a panel of scientific colleagues. “And he wakes up too early. He’s unpredictable and sad, and it’s affecting all of us.”
Before Bradford or Michelle could protest further, they heard Frank himself descending the stairs. He was whistling a merry, three-note tune somewhat similar to the call of that chickadee.
“I’m not fooled by a little cheerful whistling,” Carol whispered, leaning back into her chair. “Not one bit.”
Frank’s birdsong stopped short as, stepping into the nook, he stubbed his toe against the leg of a tasseled ottoman. “Motherfucker!” he shouted. “God damn it. Ow! I’m tired of these fancy footrests—lying around all over the place! Christ!”
“Frank!” cried Carol. “Please, we have guests. And maybe that will teach you to walk around without house shoes or even slippers, like some feral animal.”
Frank limped into the room, his owlish, salt-and-pepper eyebrows pulled together in anger. He surveyed the present company. “Guests? Michelle works for us. Hardly a day goes by she doesn’t hear me say fuck a hundred times. Bradford did his fair share of swearing on the tennis courts this morning as I was serving his ass to him on a silver salver, and Widdicombe fils over there, he can’t even hear me ’cause he’s staring out the window and dreaming of some old dwarf in Italy.”
Christopher whipped around to glare at his father. “I’d like to hear you say that to Kreshnik’s face!”
“You won’t be bringing that old Albanian around here,” said Mr. Widdicombe. “You’re going to marry a nice American boy.”
“God, I hate Americans!” said Christopher. “I’m going to join a terrorist cell.”
“I think that’s just your thirst for adventure speaking,” said Mrs. Widdicombe. “Why don’t you marry someone with EU citizenship?”
“I’ll start my own terrorism cell,” said Christopher. “With my own kind of terrorism.”
“Well, fuck, I’m all for entrepreneurship,” said Frank, leaning over to kiss his wife on the cheek. “That’s the most American idea of all!” Carol gave him an impatient look as he retreated to the breakfast spread. She had hoped that her husband’s problem with foul language would disappear over time, retreating along with his hairline, but it seemed to have reemerged with a vengeance the last couple of weeks. What’s more, he had started dressing down—he wore, now, a raggedy red tee-shirt and a pair of ripped jeans from the cuffs of which poked his short, bare feet. Yes, she had always loved his smooth, toylike feet, but even still, she had hoped that the influence of the young and dashing Bradford, who made up for his carefree loafing with his charm and wardrobe, might rub off on him. (“Isn’t that Bradford a snappy dresser?” she sometimes hinted. “I remember when you used to dress that way.”) Yet last week they had convinced him to wear a dinner jacket and tie for a night out at the Osprey Lounge in Seattle, and he had resembled nothing so much as a convict gussied up for an important court date. The Honorable Judge Mrs. Widdicombe had, ultimately, deemed his inability to “look right” in a suit further evidence of his failure to repent for the crime of a mounting—and very serious—midlife depression, a fate for which she held him entirely responsible. He simply refused to cheer up, she thought, when it was well within his power to do so. That reminded her: “Frank, have you finished reading the book I gave you?”
“Book?” said Frank, taking his coffee standing up, curling and uncurling his toes against an intricately patterned crimson rug from Isfahan. To his family he seemed to be a man more and more on the go these days, unable to sit still, often distracted. Carol made a mental note to do some internet research into adult attention deficit disorder; she secretly relished the possibility of a compound diagnosis. “Oh, Gracie’s book. I skimmed through it. Something about the child-self and snapping yourself with a rubber band until you feel happy.”
Carol groaned as though physically wounded, clutching at Michelle’s knee with her bony hand. “You must not’ve read very closely,” she said. “Because it is much more profound than that. Oh, well. I just thought it might be nice if you did, so that you could tell Gracie how much you liked it.”
“I don’t have to read it to do that,” said Frank. “And what makes you think I would like it in the first place?” The work in question was called The Golden Road and had been authored by their latest incoming houseguest, that wild-haired maven of New Age self-help, Gracie Sloane. Carol had met her years earlier at a seminar held in San Francisco about recognizing and dismantling negative thought patterns. A “remedial creativity specialist with twenty years of experience,” she appeared on the back cover of the book (the front cover being dominated by a brass-toned landscape painting with a road winding through what could only be described as amber waves of grain) wearing a look of lynx-eyed concern for the reader, her fiery locks tousled and mad, as though the effort of becoming enlightened in the particular pop-psychological fashion of the time had left her disheveled, almost postcoital. She looked as though she had not only been improved by creative, positive thinking, but ravished by it.
The book did include a repetitious, hypnotic chapter about something Gracie Sloane called “void-states,” titled “When I’m in the Void.” The line that Frank remembered best from this read:
When I’m in the void, I feel clarity of purpose.
He had found unnerving the suggestion that a clear sense of purpose eluded those outside the void—it seemed very counterintuitive—and had dealt with the subsequent gnaw of anxiety by getting out of bed to weep before the television in the middle of the night, watching a long on-screen tennis rally through a blurry scrim of tears. By morning he decided he must keep such meltdown-provoking literature as far from his person as possible and had thrown The Golden Road in the garbage.
“Clearly, Mr. Widdicombe is in one of his difficult moods today,” said Carol, turning to Michelle and then to Bradford, to all appearances expecting them to do something about it.
“What’s difficult is for me to catch a break around here,” said Frank.
“Oh, cheer up, Frank,” said Carol. “We’re surrounded by wonderful people and beautiful things.”
“Pardon me a moment,” said Bradford, who had fallen silent in observation of the crude, Rite of Spring–like dance being performed in his stomach by two Klonopin, two pieces of kringle, some coffee, and a handful of figs. Overcome with nausea, he exited the nook with a polite smile and a nod. He could then be heard lurching irregularly, bumping into things as he attempted to hurry down the hall.
“What’s his problem?” said Christopher.
“Drugs,” said Frank with a grunt. He sat down and flapped open a copy of The Bainbridge Review, the local island newspaper. The paper bent in the middle of the page, and he spent a moment wrestling with it noisily. The others watched him, anticipating a violent fit of profanity. When he managed to fold the thin piece of newsprint to his liking, he punctuated this achievement with a victorious nasal blast of air. One long hair, which stuck out from his left nostril, quivered as he did so; it caught the eye of Michelle, who, both fascinated by the Widdicombes and slightly bored, began to consider how and when she might extract it. She reminded herself to do something about it later and then excused herself, eager to check in on Bradford.
She found him leaning against a china cabinet in the hall, his head lolling.
“Brad!” she said, seizing his arm. “Are you all right?”
Bradford looked into her eyes, which he found to be a radiant, otherworldly blue, and said, “Your eyes!”
“What about them?” Michelle looked around for a mirror. Then Bradford, at once troubled by stomach pain and unable to contain his passion any longer, said, “Listen—how would you like to go over to Lynwood Theater tonight and see a movie with me?”
Michelle, flattered and not a little bit giddy at the prospect—she had suffered one pleasant distraction from her mystifying role as house-helper after another since Bradford had arrived a week ago; there he would be, sauntering in from a tennis match, white shorts showing off the athletic curve of his hamstring; and then there he would be again, nearly bumping into her as he rounded a corner, hurriedly apologizing and lifting one side of his mouth in helpless, crooked flirtation—made a show of reviewing her schedule, so as not to appear too eager. It was just this firm, practical streak, she knew, that endeared her to most everyone in the house. Truth be told, it endeared her to herself. How admirably grounded she was. “Hmm, you know, I do have a lot going on today. Carol is starting a major decorating overhaul, and stressing out about Gracie showing up in the middle of it—”
“Oh, dear.”
“—but there is that documentary that just came out, about that town in Japan where they kill and eat all the dolphins. I’ve been wanting to see that. If we catch an evening show—”
“Oh, God.” Bradford held his hand up to Michelle and swayed. His face paled. “I’m sorry, can you . . . oh, I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Come here,” said Michelle. She grabbed his arm, put her hand on the small of his back, and rushed him into the nearest bathroom.
“Easy,” said Bradford. He steadied himself against the sink. The tiled granite floor gleamed under light shafts cutting through the shuttered windows. He knelt before the Japanese toilet, saw the reflection of his own handsome face waver in the water of the bowl, and said, quickly, “My tie—Michelle, hold back my tie.”
Michelle reached around and, grabbing the strip of polka-dotted navy silk in question, lifted it up behind his neck. The position struck her as strange and punitive, bullying even, and for a moment she grappled with the surprising temptation to pull the tie back even harder and choke him. She remembered her mother once saying to her, “When you meet a man who every now and then you feel like killing for no reason—well, honey, that’s when you’ll know you’re in love.”
“Shouldn’t you loosen it?” Michelle asked Bradford.
“I just bought it,” said Bradford, who then proceeded to be sick.
Michelle turned away. “Poor thing,” she said, rubbing her free hand over his back. “It wasn’t the kringle, was it? God, I hope it’s only you that gets sick. No offense.”
Bradford enjoyed the feeling of Michelle’s hand on his back. He lingered there perhaps a few moments longer than strictly necessary, spitting into the toilet a few times, then moved over to the sink, rinsing out his mouth with water and mouthwash. “It wasn’t that,” he concluded. “That was delicious, really. I’m just nervous about my father later. We don’t quite see eye-to-eye, you know. So it’s all just . . . psychosomatic? Psycho-so-matic, Michelle.”
He splashed water on his face. Then, after patting himself dry with a fluffy towel, he noticed her amused attentiveness, her folded arms. Perhaps she thought this entire episode had been some strange and elaborate courtship ritual he had trotted out for her sake. “But you still want to see the dolphin movie, right?” she said.
“Oh, yes,” he said, straightening his tie with a grin. “Most dolphinately.”
Back in the nook, Frank had started pulling down his upper lip in such a way as to seize individual mustache hairs with his teeth. Having done so, he would pluck them out one at a time, wincing, and then spit them quietly from the side of his mouth as he scanned the newspaper. He had neglected to trim his mustache since the day he was supposed to have boarded a flight to Paris two weeks earlier, and somehow this habit helped alleviate the sense of injustice he felt at the cancellation of his annual trip to France, which, he would be the first to admit, was having a disproportionate effect on his will to live.
“Did you see this?” he said, slapping the paper with the back of his hand. “A local farmer reports—I kid you not—that one of his chickens laid an egg that had another egg inside of it. A fucking egg within an egg. There’s even a diagram here.” Then, after a short burst of laughter, he shook his head and added, in an almost hysterical warble, “What does that even mean?” He gave the newspaper a violent shake, as though by doing so he might force an answer from it. “Well, I guess that’s just what passes for news in this town. Never mind war, famine, politics—my goddamn chicken laid an egg in an egg! Alert the press, call the—”
“Oh! Frank!” interrupted Carol, leaning on the edge of her chair, seized by what appeared to be a fit of inspiration. “Chickens! Wouldn’t that be great?”
Frank lowered his paper. “Wouldn’t what be great?”
“You know,” said Carol, her hands flying to the sides of her temples as though a mystical vision now possessed her. She spoke quickly, her eyes closed: “A few chickens running around in the backyard, pecking at things and clucking away like little darlings. We could even eat their eggs.” Carol envisioned their new island home as a rustic country retreat. She had “set an intention” to keep the house open to visitors all summer and hoped to cultivate an atmosphere of unencumbered pastoral innocence on the property. “A sense of community,” she liked to say. “Yes, yes—that’s what we need. That’s what we should be creating.” Chickens and vegetable gardens fit into this vision nicely (as did a visit from Leanne Pendergast, whom she hoped would, after feasting her eyes on Carol’s coup de décor, be inspired to photograph her home for Inside Places, her favorite interiors magazine), but clinical depression, pharmaceutical nausea, and adult attention deficit disorder did not. People were not supposed to show signs of urban or even suburban psychological disorders at the country estate. Carol hoped, in fact, that the introduction of certain elements like hens clucking around the grounds and wild strawberry plants growing along the edge of the patio, would, for the most part, negate the more troubling aspects of the human psyche—most of all her husband’s.
“Chickens,” she concluded.
“Chickens,” muttered Frank. Though the man challenged his wife on many fronts, he knew better than to attempt to interfere with the creation of her own henpecked corner of Pacific Northwestern paradise. He understood all too well that no matter what he said, he would come home one day soon to find a flock of hens mincing around their backyard, clucking away like little darlings.
“Just make sure you get a rooster, too,” he said. “I hear they’re wild about each other.”
Christopher, who had been sitting in gloomy silence, wondering when he might sneak off somewhere to smoke a cigarette—a habit he had picked up abroad, unbeknownst to his parents—cleared his throat, sat up straight, and held an index finger aloft.
“Chickens are filthy creatures,” he said. Frank and Carol exchanged looks, both of them noting a familiar tone in their son’s voice—a tone that alerted them to yet another strong and developed opinion on a subject of unexpected expertise. When, they both wondered, had he found the time to research and draw conclusions about chickens? But it had always been this way with Christopher. As a young boy, he had been morbidly obsessed with disease, coercing playmates to spend the day dying with him (of scarlet fever, of tuberculosis, of leprosy—how he had loved to play “leper colony”!), begging his father to make “Quarantine” signs for him as he rattled off symptoms, timetables, and possible treatments. They had looked upon this virtuosity with hopefulness, imagining that he might eventually go into medicine, only to have their dreams of doctor parentage dashed when an adolescent curiosity about the word homogenized on the side of a jug of a milk prompted him to spend an entire year struggling, with the help of many library books, to understand the relatively simple process of homogenization “on an intimate level” (and, lest they hold out any hope for a strictly scientific aptitude, he put this particular interest to bed by producing a series of abstract, white-on-white watercolors “about milk, memory, and knowledge”). Countless other laser-fine obsessions had followed as his teenage years unfolded, his bedroom filling with the evidence of God-knew-what new idée fixe: intricately marked-up maps of foreign cities like Mexico City and Prague, printouts about waste management in Iceland, criminological surveys of urban Brazil. In high school he had baffled the entire teaching staff and administration by neglecting all other subjects in favor of highly specialized readings in high school administration; at one conference with the Widdicombes, a concerned teacher complained that while Christopher appeared to know enough about the way schools worked to manage the entire operation, he showed no actual interest in his own grades. Neither it seemed did the Rhode Island School of Design, which enthusiastically accepted him on the basis of a series of watercolors “inspired by the seven members of the San Francisco Unified School District’s Board of Education.” And so, while he still occasionally mystified his parents, they had also grown used to being mystified by him—even delighted by it—and had more or less come to accept that their only son would one day be remembered as a homosexual watercolorist who happened to know everything about the history of airports. Now, on the subject of chickens, he added, “They’ll eat anything—including one another’s own excrement.”
“Thank you for sharing,” said Frank, nodding to his son.
“Oh, what do you know about chickens?” protested Carol.
Christopher looked at her, stunned. “Everything.”
“I mean really know,” she said.
“I do know I couldn’t stand to even be near one,” said Christopher. “They’re vile, just vile. Their dirty feathers, their filthy talons—yuck! I feel sick simply thinking about them.”
“Well, all right then, Einstein,” said Carol. “You’re entitled to your opinion, but if you ask me, chickens are gentle, and intelligent, and affordable. Chickens wouldn’t harm a fly.”
“They’re also complete sex maniacs,” said Christopher.
“Language, please, Christopher,” said Carol.
“But it’s true,” he said. “On some farms there are, like, ten to twenty females for every male.”
“That’s called polygamous,” said Frank. “Like the Mormons. And it’s wrong.”
Christopher shrugged. “Right or wrong, I’ll bet the roosters like it,” he said.
Frank allowed himself a laugh.
“Well,” said Carol, exasperated, “I hardly think it’s fair to judge chickens by our own inexorable moral standards. I just think it would be fun to have them around. This family, I’ve decided, needs start having more fun. Isn’t that what life’s all about?”
Christopher sighed. “I hate talking about fun,” he said. “And I hate the very idea of fun. Talking about fun, and the idea of fun, are no fun at all.”
“From what I’ve come to understand,” continued Carol, “we’ve all been put on this planet to have as much fun as possible.”
“Sounds like you’ve been reading too much Gracie Sloane,” said Christopher. “Where is she, anyway?”
“She’s in the void,” said Frank. “Having fun there, too, I’ll bet.”
“Very funny, Frank,” said Carol. “She’ll be here tonight. She’s flying in from Boston.”
A far-off look came into Christopher’s eyes. “I wonder what terminal her flight left from.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Carol. “But we should all be very nice to her, because she’s in town to work on her new book and has an important speaking engagement, too. Apparently, there’s a big sort of New Age expo coming to town.”
“I love expositions,” said Christopher.
Frank gripped his newspaper, looking alarmed. Before he could flee the room, his wife, as he had feared, said, “We should all go! You know, you could all learn a thing or two from Gracie. She’s very enlightened.”
This dangerous idea, “enlightenment,” loomed, threatening, like the ghost of an unpleasant event shared by the family, something nobody wanted to think about or discuss. Judging from the effect this utterance had, enlightenment might have been a family member who had died too young and whose memory was still too painful to talk about; the male Widdicombes began to stir, to rise from their antique seats in a round, murmuring pleasantries about how they had better go get ready for the day, as though the day were a kind of military attack for which they needed to prepare. And was that so far off the mark? After all, time’s numberless army stood at the all-too-pregnable gates of their lives ready to maraud, to burn down the ramshackle structures of order they had erected to protect themselves from its onslaught. Only movement, mental and physical, could fortify these fragile outposts of routine: Christopher headed for his room, saying, “I bet she flew United. I bet it was Terminal B . . .” Frank said, “What is wrong with that boy?” and then walked off grumbling something about chickens in the void. It was at this moment that Michelle returned to the breakfast nook to collect her agenda. She found Carol relaxing, for a moment only, against the hot-pink moiré of her treasured chair.
“Do you see what I mean?” Carol shook her head at Michelle. “Frank is most definitely depressed!”
Michelle nodded, penciling her movie date with Bradford into her little book. “You might be right. Maybe Gracie can help?”
“That’s part of the plan, dear,” said Carol, her voice a near-whisper. She took a theatrical sip of coffee from her china demitasse. “But you know what they say . . .”
“ ‘Life is suffering?’ ” said Michelle.
Carol clutched the arm of her chair. “For heaven’s sake, Michelle, no,” she said. “Who would say such a thing?”
“I think Buddhists.”
“How morbid,” said Carol. “No, no. They say, ‘It takes a village,’ or something nice like that.”
“Oh, that’s right,” said Michelle. She snapped shut her agenda and smiled. “That does sound a little better.”
Frank sat in his office behind a wide, uncluttered oak desk, squeezing a blue rubber stress ball. His coiled forearm muscles pulsed as he did so, sinewy and cord-like from decades of vigorous sport.
“Motherfucker,” he muttered, swiveling in an expensive ergonomic chair. Outside his window, the crescent of Douglas firs that secluded their luxurious home swayed in the summer breeze; the water of the bay sparkled with light. Frank extracted a few mustache hairs with his teeth, letting the play of sunshine on that watery body soothe him into a state of deep reflection.
Semiretirement had been a fucking nightmare so far, he thought. It had not suited him at all: he had always been a body in motion that tended to stay in motion, an achiever achieving if not to the highest degree then at least to an upper-middle one. For decades he had devoted his efforts to sweaty self-improvement, guiding multiple generations of San Francisco glitterati toward socially strategic tennis competency. Such a surfeit of good old-fashioned fighting energy had he that in Christopher’s eerie toddler years, he had juggled not only work at the club, enthused fatherhood, and a stretch of husbandly duty marked by both buoyant libido and domestic attentiveness, but the earning of an advanced degree in sports psychology. Even with all of that, he had remained almost disturbingly (to Carol) energized and impetuous. Like his blessed Pops Widdicombe before him, Frank hummed with such an irrepressible vigor as to make any idleness not only cause for alarm, but more or less impossible—sickness, for instance, was almost unheard of in a Widdicombe, and when the occasional bug did come around to fell some male of that warrior clan, the fighter inevitably saw his forced convalescence not as an opportunity to rest, but to review and update his ten-year, five-year, and one-year plans. Part and parcel of their able-bodied appeal, this burning life force was also a family curse: a Widdicombe stopped to rest only in death, as Frank’s father had—and his father’s father before that—when visited by a massive heart attack in his still quite lively eighties.
And now he, Frank Widdicombe, was expected to potter around their mansion like a mellow old patriarch, to be cheerful, interested in chickens and “fun.” To make matters worse, he was beginning to think his wife had invited Gracie Sloane to their house in the hope that she would call upon her punishing New Age worldview to hang a wreath on this hell of inactivity—to persuade him to “chill out” (how often he had heard that ridiculous demand!), to deck the halls of this forced holiday with whatever boughs of childish nonsense she came bearing.
Well, Frank Widdicombe had already had an annual heart-attack-preventing holiday in place, and it had been canceled for the first time in a long time. He looked back at the screen of his laptop and read over the email he was composing to his old buddy Channing Goodman:
Dear Mr. Goodman, Faggot-at-Large,
I’m writing to wish your she-cow of a niece and her idiot husband all the best on their nuptials. Why, why? Why did you have to offer up the Auvergne house for the honeymoon? Couldn’t they have honeymooned in a cow pasture somewhere, among their own kind? We should all be getting pleasantly buzzed thousands of miles away from our families right now. Speaking of which, I’m copying your partner on this email. In light of this unprecedented act of assassination between intimates, I hereby hope that every state in the Union outlaws gay marriage for all of time. Hope you’re having a nice time on the Cape.
He stopped, and, having blown off a little steam, saved the email as a draft. He and Channing Goodman had known one another since their Stanford days; they enjoyed a kind of free and easygoing conversational trade that allowed Frank to call his old friend a faggot on occasion and for his old friend to call him, in return, a “bedroom community breeder.” All in good fun. However, Frank had long since learned, after reading a biography of Abraham Lincoln, that the wisest men of courage and leadership slept on any letter composed in extreme emotion, often finding it to lack a certain stoic, presidential quality the morning after.
They had been making the trip every year for nearly a decade: a small group of college friends (majors in psychology mostly, many of them gone on to take various positions in that prestigious, head-shrinking field), they would come together to spend several weeks at Channing and his partner’s country home in Auvergne, France. There, the men of psychology drank cognac produced in the department of Charente, fine wines from all over the damn place, and herbaceous green liqueurs mixed up by industrious monastics in French mountain ranges. They drank and complained about their wives (and their “life partners,” their “lovers,” their “husbands”), about their children, about how so-called success had failed to bring them the unshakable happiness they had longed for as students of the mind, body, and spirit. Since many of them were publishing in order not to perish (academic papers, popular articles, books; Frank, for his part, had put out a relatively well-regarded pop psychological volume on leadership and self-actualization called Zoning Out), they discussed and debated at great length whatever aspects of the human experience happened to be consuming their interest at the time.
They laughed and sometimes drank too much, said cruel-kind things to one another, and indulged themselves in necessary mental and emotional breakdowns. Some of these ended in physical altercations. It was just how they relaxed. In Mr. Widdicombe’s case, he had, one evening in the year 2006, guzzled red wine until, drunk enough to finally find expression for his grief, he had wandered out of the house and into the night, shouting obscenities over the loss of his father and his “stupid, fucking stupid heart attack!” After he had punched the trunk of an oak and allowed tears to stream down his face for an hour, he had passed out in a nearby field, the stars in the sky above him a nauseating merry-go-round. He had come to around sunrise, exhausted, curled into a ball against the hard ground, his mouth filled with a sour taste, his knuckles covered in dried blood, his teeth—could he have seen them at the time—stained a faint crimson. With his tongue he had felt a gap where one of his incisors had been the night before. A sheep that had strayed from its tribe was standing two yards away, staring at him. Frank had laughed to see it, and the sheep had, in response, turned and strutted away, presumably to find its friends and tell a tale at the man’s expense.
In any case, Frank had come to see this annual trip as necessary to his mental well-being. It cheered him up. Oh, he had seen plenty of therapists; not one of their programs of so-called mental health could achieve the full release of drinking too much with his friends at least once a year, of allowing his deepest insecurities to dissipate in a slurred, Dionysian outpouring before a panel of grizzled peers.
This year Channing had agreed to lend his home for the purpose of his niece’s honeymoon. The freshly minted couple wanted to spend their summer living among the shrubbed hills and crabby country people, sitting on picnic blankets and devouring soft French cheeses, cooing softly and delighting in one another’s charming tics and neuroses. All of the men of psychology had been warned about this unceremonious takeover well in advance, and while Frank had expressed good-natured disappointment at the time (“May your niece sit on poison oak in a mustard field. Love, Frank”), he had never expected it to trouble his spirit so thoroughly. Now that he had been denied the pleasure of prolonged retreat and found himself at the center of an estate bound for strange, utopia-seeking summer visitors, he felt increasingly agitated by every responsibility to his family. They only served to further emphasize the fact that Frank was not in Auvergne like he ought to be. And while he was hard-pressed to think of an alternative that would be as stress-relieving as this canceled trip, which required a minimum of planning and execution on his part, he had been left with the overwhelming compulsion to refresh his senses, to get away from his family lest he wind up tying them all to beautiful chairs and setting fire to Willowbrook.
Michelle had her tasks for the day. This in itself felt like an achievement, since the Widdicombes often operated in a way that she might charitably describe as “nonlinear.” Taking refuge in Carol’s office to collect her thoughts, she sat at the cluttered desk with her laptop and notebook open so that she would look busy if anyone happened to walk past the door. True, it scarcely mattered to them how busy she looked, but it mattered to her—she was never quite sure what to make of her work for this peculiar family, and it centered her to keep various professional-looking apparatus at hand. Pens, notebook, laptop, smartphone. Some days she ended up putting these things to good use; other days, she had come to accept, more or less consisted of her showing up in order to serve as witness to the Widdicombes’ minidramas and well-heeled existential crises. This had confused her at first, for it didn’t seem to her like “work” as she understood it. The size of her paychecks, however, persuaded her otherwise, and she came to embrace her double role as assistant and audience.
She did worry a little that their all-around eccentricity had started to rub off on her. She could even see it in the way she had written down her to-do list that day. Her normally no-nonsense style had started to give way to something that looked more like the inside of a Widdicombe mind:
(live!) chicken inquiry—Bay Hay and Feed
follow-up mechanic wreck
IMPORTANT: online research: paintings of mandrills (a kind of monkey)
wash hybrid
tennis balls, “and not some off-brand kind”
“victuals” (?!) / sundries—see next page
There was something about the way they talked, she thought. Sometimes it seemed as though they spoke their own private family language. Then it would suddenly sound to her like each individual Widdicombe had his or her own private language. Listening to this clash of tongues, to say nothing of trying to maintain a part in it, could lead to giddy laughter and a pleasant kind of delirium, as well as to the distinct feeling that none of the world’s problems would ever be solved.
On top of this, the question of time. The Widdicombes swung between languid relaxation, crazed urgency, and a number of other difficult-to-categorize attitudes toward time in an unpredictable fashion. She recalled a day when Christopher—with whom she felt she was beginning to forge something like a friendship—fell into an inconsolable despair because he missed a matinee screening of what looked like a very bad summer blockbuster called Department of Shadows, even though it was playing every two hours and he appeared to have nothing else to do. “I wanted to see it at three! Three!” More often, though, the whole family proceeded with an elastic attitude toward time, regularly losing track of it, showing up late for appointments or not at all, and drawing her into long conversations—quite a few of which were, as might be guessed, “conversations”—that seemed to unfold endlessly without any particular regard for whether or not she had someplace to be, or something else to do, or an all-too-human need to eat or drink something after hours of talk about the greatest contemporary decorators of the Western world, the majority of whom were apparently Carol’s personal friends.
It was the way some people who had grown used to having money treated time. That was her theory. She remembered beginning to think this as a teenager, when friendships formed through middle and high school activities (French, yearbook, track and field) brought her into contact with families of a higher socioeconomic class than her own. Their children—her friends, for a time—struck her as curiously unbothered by the passage of time, as though the days were mere dollars in an impossibly ample inheritance. Why, she wondered, was she drawn to such people? Why did she so often find herself taking care of people who never deigned to count their hours?
The arrival in the driveway outside of someone in an old yellow truck interrupted her reflections. She wasn’t expecting any workers that day. Carol and Frank sometimes scheduled things without her knowledge, though, and then forgot about them. In one of the back pages of her notebook where she jotted down private observations, she wrote:
What does it mean to forget?
Frank heard a polite knock. He turned his head toward the door; there stood Michelle. Of all the people around him, Frank minded Michelle perhaps the least, though lately it seemed that her presence in his doorway augured bad news. So it seemed today.
“Frank,” she said, “I’m just on my way out, but there’s a man in overalls here to see you.”
Frank said nothing. Narrowing his eyes gave adequate expression to his displeasure.
“I think it’s the person Carol hired to do the garden.”
“Fuck. Why does he want to see me, then?”
“Well, he asked for Carol, but she’s gone out with her bird-watching group.”
At the mention of bird-watching, Mr. Widdicombe grumbled, tightening his grip on the stress ball. He hated Carol’s bird-watching group, although that, at least, stemmed from an irrational feeling about bird-watching in general. To his mind, bird-watching was one step removed from senility and impotence—an erection-threatening pastime—and though his wife had suggested he might enjoy spending some time with her growing circle of island friends and learning about the local wildlife, he told her he would be damned before he picked up a pair of binoculars to try and catch sight of a fucking red-breasted robin in flight. “All birds can go to hell,” he remembered adding. His wife had seemed hurt, as though she herself identified with the birds. Frank made a mental note to tell her that she identified with other things too readily.
“Fine,” he said to Michelle. “I’ll show him to the plot.”
Michelle thought he looked very restless standing there at the window and glowering at the beautiful panoramic view. Though it was hardly her place to inquire into her employer’s emotional state—or wasn’t it?—she felt sorry for Frank. She also still wanted to do something about the rogue nose hair sticking out of his left nostril. She needed to buy herself time, to cultivate an intimate atmosphere.
“Is everything okay, Frank?” she said. Frank looked at her with surprise.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably not.”
“That’s great,” said Michelle, distracted by her hair-related mission.
“It is?” said Frank. “Well, that’s nice to hear for once. You’re the only one who seems to think so in this house. When did it become such a crime to be in a bad mood?”
“You’re telling me.”
Frank softened, feeling his assistant’s gaze shine on him with something like admiration, or at the very least a youthful intensity that could be mistaken for it. He felt compelled to be honest. “Let me just say, Michelle, for your own sake—because I like you, you’re a wonderful assistant—that if I seem angry lately it’s because I should be in France right now, having an entire bottle of wine with lunch.”
Michelle sighed. “Oh, gosh,” she said. “I heard about that. I’m so sorry. I know how you feel—I just love Europe. And Scandinavia. Denmark, especially. If I didn’t love living here so much I would certainly live there.”
Frank looked at her curiously. “Yes, well, best not to dwell on it,” he said. Heading toward the door, he added, with a note of fake glee, “I’d better not keep that green thumb waiting!”
“Right,” said Michelle, clapping her hands together and following him out. The two made their way down the hall, arriving at the racks and pegs in the foyer where they put their shoes and umbrellas and coats. She could not restrain herself any longer.
“Mr. Widdicombe,” she said, her voice stern.
“Yes?”
“I feel it’s my duty as your assistant to inform you of a large nose hair sticking out of your nostril.”
“Oh,” said Mr. Widdicombe. “Really? I’d better find a mirror . . .”
“Just—hold still.” In a moment she would later regret as too impetuous—a moment, we shall come to see, that would also set into motion a series of unpleasant late-night reflections for Frank that we cannot even begin at present to fathom—Michelle reached for his nose, her eyes locked in concentration; Frank flinched as though she meant to strike him; she took hold of the rogue nose hair in one swift movement and, with her index finger and thumb, plucked the offending strand from his nostril. Frank cried out.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She held the white hair up for his inspection, frowning at it as though it represented a gross flaw in the design of civilized life. “I had to.”
“Miss Briggs,” he said, dumbfounded. He brought a hand to his smarting nostril. “Please give me some warning in the future. I have a sensitive nose.”
Michelle laughed, then realized by the grave furrow of his brow that he meant it. “Oh, relax,” she said. “It was just a little nose hair. You look much better now.”
Frank, disoriented by the exchange, touched his nose as they made their way out the front door, pulling his hand away and looking at it as though he expected to see globs of blood or a dribble of brain fluid there. Michelle, meanwhile, walked with her chin high, exalted by a sense of accomplishment. She hurried out to the driveway, leaving Frank to greet the gardener as she got into the Widdicombes’ new hybrid car. It sat next to a dented, mustard-colored Toyota pickup truck that evidently belonged to the hired hand.
The man standing before Frank appeared to be in his midforties. A head taller than him and possessed of a broad, brawny frame, he had a touch of hard-bitten slackness to his face—a certain mild sag about the cheeks, across one of which stretched a long scar; a pucker of aggrieved defeat between his dark, angled eyebrows—that gave his trim beard the look of holding the rest of his features in place, as though they might droop more considerably were he to shave. He adjusted the brim of a worn grey baseball cap as he greeted Frank, who took note of the colorful tattoos peeking from the cuffs of the man’s long-sleeved shirt. “You must be the gardener,” said Frank, thinking that there was something about this guy’s expression that reminded him of a fox who had just snatched and swallowed an egg from the nest of a pink-footed goose.
“That I am,” said the man, extending a rough, calloused mitt. “Marvelous Matthews.”
Frank shook his hand. “I’m sorry, did you say Marvelous?”
“Right,” said the gardener. “That’s my, uh, company name. Marvelous Matthews’s Community Gardens. But all my clients have started calling me Marvelous Matthews. Now my friends do, too. It just kind of stuck.”
“What can I call you?” said Frank.
At that moment Michelle, who had started the car but had not yet driven away, began laying on the horn; the sound grated on Frank—he hated blaring sounds, alarms—and he glared at her. Marvelous laughed anxiously, craning around to look as Michelle climbed out of the car and started calling, “Chris! Christopher!” over the hum of the engine. Frank felt a hand on his back as his son almost ran into him on his way out the door.
“Pardon you,” Frank said.
Christopher dismissed his father’s comment with a wave, and then, catching sight of Marvelous, stopped in his tracks. He cradled his chin in his hand and cocked his head, assessing the gardener with a cool, painterly eye. “Well,” he said, “hello.”
“I’m Marvelous,” said the gardener, extending his rough paw once again.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” said Christopher.
“Move along, Renoir,” said Frank. Feeling a headache coming on, he started rubbing his temples. He despaired at the thought of his son being moved to set up his easel in sight of the bearish new gardener with the weird name and embarking on another baffling series of portraits. Why couldn’t he paint pictures of the harbor? It was one thing to be gay, thought Frank—why did his son have to be an unmarketable watercolorist as well?
“I’m sorry, Marvelous. That was my son,” said Frank. “Or should I say is. He’s in art school.”
“Must be nice,” said Marvelous. Were his voice not so thick and potholed by what Mr. Widdicombe could only assume to be many miles of rough road, it might have betrayed a guarded longing for artistic endeavor. As it was, Mr. Widdicombe felt no need to comment upon whether his son’s ambitions were nice or not; he gazed once again at the gardener’s scar.
“Rake accident.” Marvelous lifted his shoulders. “It’s okay, it’s hard not to notice it.”
“I see. So you stepped on a rake, it popped up and hit you, that kind of thing? Like a cartoon.”
“Not exactly,” said Marvelous, his words fringed with shame. “My ex-girlfriend hit me with it.”
“Really?” Frank eyed him with a suddenly more admiring variety of suspicion. “Fuck.” The profanity issuing from his lips put him in mind of his wife’s ongoing insistence that he make an effort to exercise more tact, and so he decided not to pry, and added, with a sniff, “Well, it suits you. This way, please.”
Frank guided Marvelous along a rock path that led through the landscaped side yard, where spindly Japanese maples, a flowering dogwood, and pale pink rhododendrons presented a colorful scene.
“You have a beautiful place,” said Marvelous. Then, turning to Frank, he startled at the sight of blood trickling from the man’s left nostril.
“Pretty spiffy,” said Frank, surveying the lavish landscape and sniffling. “It was all here when we bought the place. Lord knows I don’t know the first fucking thing about these things. I should learn.”
“Your nose is bleeding.”
Frank touched his nose, drew his hand away, and scoffed at the bright, watery stuff leaking out. Though never one to quail at the sight of a little blood, something about the sight of his own red life force leaking out filled him with dread. A brief spell of dizziness and panic passed through him. He steadied himself, uttering a soft “Ah, shit.”
“Please, take this, I insist,” said Marvelous. He pulled a dark blue handkerchief from his overalls. Frank, in a concession to male fellow-feeling, accepted the proffered rag. “Could be allergies,” said Marvelous. “It’s a sea of pollen out here. New to the neighborhood?”
“To the island, yes.” Frank stanched his bloody nose. “To the area, too. Came up from California.” At the mention of that state, the gardener stiffened a little. Frank knew well enough that the locals had seen their fair share of transplants arrive after making their fortunes in California, and that this gave rise to a waspish regional pride. Like they were about to give the land back to the fucking Suquamish people or something, he thought. A few birds lit out from the brush around them, chattering, chirping, slicing the air. Just then, Frank felt a quiver in his right calf; though he had stretched after his tennis match, a cramp seized him now, shooting down to curl his foot, and he stopped, making a pained face and sucking air through his teeth. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said. As if adding insult to sports injury, a black-capped chickadee resembling the one he had reckoned with on the court that morning alighted upon a dogwood branch right in front of him. “You again!” he barked. “These birds think they’re sooooo cute. Just a cramp,” he added, shaking his leg out as it started to untense.
“Ah, women’s troubles,” said Marvelous. Apparently tickled by his own impertinence, he laughed. Frank gave him a look that at once spoke to the poor quality of the joke and the appreciable risk the gardener had taken in uttering it, and then swatted the chickadee-bearing branch of the dogwood. The bird darted across the way, alighting on another tree.
“Birds like that,” said Frank, “are not a problem in Auvergne.”
“What’s Oh-Vern?” said Marvelous.
Frank sighed. “Auvergne is a region in France. Smack dab in the middle of goddamn France. A few of my friends and I meet there every summer—except this summer—and have a grand old time. Just a bunch of psychological types drinking their cares away. It seems I overestimated their reverence for tradition.”
At the mention of drink, the gardener went quiet. After a pause, Marvelous said, “You’re a psychologist?”
“I have a master’s degree in sports psychology.”
“I see,” said Marvelous.
“I’ve written a book.”
They arrived at a modest garden plot filled with rich, dark soil and boarded in by weathered-looking wood. It stood out as a piece of makeshift inelegance a few yards from their prissy patio. Mr. Widdicombe had built it himself—Carol had wanted to add a touch of rustic charm to their backyard in the form of a small vegetable garden. (“Carrots and cabbages and such,” in her own words.) He had liked that idea and had been happy to let this project distract him for a couple of days.
“Oh, that’s it, then,” said Marvelous, a hint of disappointment in his voice.
“I built it myself.”
“Easy to take care of, anyway. Great exposure.” Marvelous knelt by the planter box and, running his hands through the soil, started in on a spiel. “Well, I think it’s great that you’ve decided to do this. I think you’ll really appreciate what a difference organic vegetables can make in your quality of life.” His ragged voice delivered this line in such a way that not even he seemed convinced of its truth.
“Uh-huh,” said Frank, glancing over at the edge of the woods bordering their property. His ears had perked up at some distant voices, some rustling in the trees. He pressed Marvelous’s handkerchief hard against his nose, then removed it. His nosebleed had stopped.
“And of course,” added Marvelous. “I think the community will truly appreciate what you’re bringing to the table.”
Confused—and, he felt, potentially enraged—Mr. Widdicombe squinted at this overgrown garden gnome of a man that he had, up until that moment, thought might prove friend and ally in a strange land. “What’s that now?” he said. “What community?”
“The community,” said Marvelous, pronouncing the word the as though it were a heavy stone he had been carrying a long time, looking for a place to lay it down. “Part of my program includes community-building and helping my clients to cultivate social capital. There’s an incredible, welcoming community on this island—it exists, if only people would open their eyes and look for it.”
“Oh, fucking hell.”
“One fucking hell of a community.”
“Will you stop saying that? I thought this was just about vegetables. Carrots and cabbages and such.”
“This goes beyond cabbage,” said Marvelous, seeming to search his mind for lines he had not quite memorized. “This isn’t just about the, uh, production of vegetables, but the production of a public who cares about them. And your wife sounded so excited about hosting the Midsummer Feast this year.”
“Dear fucking God.”
“Hey, man,” said Marvelous, holding up both gloved hands in a gesture that might have appeared defensive were it not for a gleam of impatience in the gardener’s eye. “I’m just trying to provide a service.”
Marvelous stood to his full height—which, given the heated tone of the moment, struck Frank as not inconsiderable—and removed his gardening gloves. If the patriarch of Willowbrook could have seen into his gardener’s mind at that moment, he would have perceived a struggle taking place; Marvelous, grasping at one of the techniques he had learned to modulate his flights of fury (in the face of this insult to his fledgling business—a scrappy venture that represented to him a sincere act of contrition, an effort to do good in the world—all that threatened to fly out the window), was doing everything in his power not to do something that might provoke his new client; he longed to spit on the garden plot, to say to this pompous Californian, “What’s the matter? Can’t handle a problem on your own? Can’t even grow your own fucking heirloom lettuces?” Taking a deep, ragged breath through his nose and counting to twelve, Marvelous Matthews managed to ride out the storm for the moment. Finding his most reasonable tone, he said, “It’s just a little party. Nothing too crazy.”
Now, a Widdicombe, be he strapping young cadet or middle-aged man sliding unconvinced into his so-called golden years, can turn the other cheek at many an insignificant slight: accusations of a) prickliness, b) foul-mouthed insensitivity, even c) a certain degree of intellectual ineptitude (the men of the Widdicombe clan, after all, were men of action). However, to snub a Widdicombe’s courage—his vital, fighting spirit in the face of life and its endless, fearsome obstacles—was to slander his essence and his worth in the world. No doubt Marvelous had, on some impishly fraternal, animal level, perceived this in regard to Frank Widdicombe—so Frank thought, anyway—and was restraining himself while he carried on drawing conclusions about Frank that he imagined cast aspersions. Presumptuous, this man; what did he know about the Widdicombes and what they had been through? Nothing. In this way the self-restraint of one provoked the self-restraint of the other, and it was only by the slightest intercession of reason—Frank had a history of imagining slights where there were none, and he knew it—that the man of the house resorted to his preferred cure-all, food and drink, and invited Marvelous to take a seat on the patio while he grabbed some refreshments.
Amid these delicate negotiations the sound of voices and thrashing in the nearby woods grew louder and clearer. Carol soon stepped from the shadows wiping a few brambles and pine needles from her sun dress as she spoke to a small group of people behind her. She brandished a pair of black plastic binoculars. The whole group was in a twittering ecstasy.
“Did you ever see so many birds?” Carol was saying.
“Such a fowl-rich property,” said the tall and sturdy Judith Harrison, a waddle of loose skin working beneath her chin.
“I still think that cormorant was a Pelagic, not a Brandt,” said the balding, pink-faced Jack Pinder, looking at a bird identification book—Birds of Washington—through his glasses. “You can tell a Pelagic from the white rump patch. You see, here, it says ‘the Pelagic, possessed of a white rump patch, is easy to distinguish from the Brandt cormorant, with its whiskery white filoplumes.’ I suppose that was its breeding plumage we saw.”
“Breeding plumage!” said Don Jacobs in disbelief, scratching his beard. “How exciting. Birds on the make, eh?”
“Frank! Yoo-hoo!” Carol called to her husband, leading her party across the lawn. “Yoo-hoo!”
“There she is,” said Frank, stepping through the door onto the patio. In one hand he held two bottles of beer by their necks, in the other a tray of olives, cheeses, and cured meats.
“Mrs. Widdicombe, I presume?” said Marvelous. Having slouched into one of the patio chairs, he now straightened up. He raised a refusing hand at the proffered bottle. “No thanks,” he said. “I’m sober.”
“Not for long,” said Frank.
Marvelous clarified, gravely, that his sobriety was to remain a permanent state. Frank did his best to make little of the revelation, pausing and giving his new acquaintance what he felt to be an excusably short look of disbelief. Uncertain respect rushed in forthwith to tidy his expression, and he returned with a can of soda. “Much obliged,” said Marvelous.
“Anything for the community,” said Frank.
Carol and her group soon broke in on this tenuous peacetime. She walked up to her husband, squeezing his arm and pressing herself against his body. She was making every effort lately to act cheerier than usual, Frank thought—more enthusiastic, more high-energy. There was something in it that made him want to lay her down and mount her, animal-like, as though her enthusiasm was a mating call, a pent-up excess of primal energy.
“We just witnessed the most darling little goldfinch,” said Carol, excited.
Jack Pinder nodded, still gripping his binoculars with both hands. “Wonderful coloring!” he said.
“We were just getting to know each other,” said Frank. He tipped his beer at the gardener, who had stood from his chair upon the group’s arrival. “This is Marvelous.”
“Well! I’m glad to hear your attitude’s improving, even if your nose is all red and puffy,” said Carol, tickling Frank’s chin. She peeled away from her husband and extended her hand. “I’m Carol. And you are?”
“Marvelous, ma’am. Marvelous Matthews. That’s my business name, but—”
“Oh, God! I forgot you were coming today.” She shook his large, dirty hand. “I’m so sorry. I hope my husband has shown you every hospitality.” She noticed the scar on his cheek, the blades of grass that had somehow gotten into his beard hair. She cast a quick look of inquiry at her husband, then said, “Everybody, this is Marvelous, our new gardener. He’s come to plant some plants and build a community.”
Marvelous smiled and tipped his hat. Nodding at Carol’s dirtied hand, he said, “Sorry about—”
“Oh, nonsense,” said Carol. “Do I look like someone who’s afraid of a little dirt?” She winked at the gardener and laughed. “I’ve spent the whole morning traipsing through the forest!”
Frank scrutinized this exchange and guzzled cool beer. Marvelous, he noted, seemed nervous and apologetic around his wife. Frank still wanted to know what he had meant by the horrible-sounding words social capital, and what happened at a Midsummer Feast. There was something about the latter that sounded a bit pagan to Frank, like he might come home one day to find other garden gnomes and maybe elves or even sylphs prancing through the house in their birthday suits, raiding his wine cellar and rolling around in an orgiastic heap on the lawn. That was the kind of thing one did with friends while in a foreign country, thought Frank, and definitely not with strangers in the town of one’s residence. Now, however, he set these concerns aside; all of a sudden, a light dawned on him as to the versatile uses of social capital. He stood to address the birders. “You all must be thirsty,” he said. “Would anyone like anything?”
The birders turned their heads back and forth, murmuring softly and nodding, indicating a sporting willingness to drink some water.
“I think that sounds lovely, Frank,” said Carol as though daring him. The fact that he had managed to both be a good host and avoid swearing in a single sentence buoyed her spirits, but she still had her doubts. “Just lovely,” she added. “I, for one, am absolutely parched.”
“You got it,” said Frank. He went into the kitchen.
The birders, meanwhile, gathered around the garden plot. They stared with great interest at the fertile soil.
“Mr. Matthews runs the most innovative program,” said Carol, smiling sympathetically at the new gardener; had he fallen prey to one of her depressed husband’s unpredictable outbursts? “He hires out his services to people who have space for a garden but don’t have the time or the notion to take care of it themselves. He’ll set up a garden at your house, and come by every so often to check on the vegetables and things—is that right?”
“Exactly,” said Marvelous. “Just because you don’t want to take care of a garden yourself is no reason not to have one.”
“That sounds great,” said Judith Harrison.
“Isn’t it just fabulous?” said Carol, reaching out and touching her friend’s arm.
“It’s a smart idea,” said Jack Pinder.
“I think it’s just so innovative,” said Carol.
“Thanks,” said Marvelous, who in the wake of his tense moment with Frank was beginning to feel the dark shadow of shame hanging over him. He had lost his temper again, and by throwing open that floodgate had also ushered in the thought that maybe one drink wouldn’t kill him. Anxiety ate at him; he needed to call his sponsor. “I’m just glad to put my God-given green thumb to use,” he said. “I don’t see why the community shouldn’t benefit from my skills, as long as they’re willing to let me sneak around their yards a few days a week.”
Carol and the birders all laughed. The sound of irritated grunts coming through the patio doors, however, cut their laughter short.
“Something’s wrong with the fucking sink,” said Frank, carrying out a tray with four glasses on it. “It won’t run cold. So I had to give you warm water with ice cubes.”
The birders smiled politely, their eyes darting around the yard.
“That’s okay,” said Don Jacobs, taking a glass. “Water’s water—am I right?”
“The ice will cool it down,” said Judith, as though this were a possible outcome which only she, in her helpfulness, could imagine.
“Frank,” said Carol, “your nose is bleeding.” She walked over to him with her own glass and, grabbing Marvelous’s bandana from the table, dipped it in water and began to dab at his nostrils and mustache. He sat down in one of their wrought-iron chairs. “What on earth have you been doing?”
“It’s all this talk of birds,” he said. He twisted away from her ministrations. “They give me a stress headache.”
“You give me a stress headache,” said Carol.
“Michelle ripped out one of my nose hairs earlier.” He snatched the bandana out of her hand.
“What was Michelle doing anywhere near your nose hair?”
“My body hair is my business, Carol.”
“I wish to God that were true.”
Don Jacobs, who had driven the other birders over in his Jeep, said, “Well, we really ought to be going.” He looked up at the cloudless sky. “Connie needs the car later.”
The other birders, given an out, set aside their empty glasses, struggling as a group to take the Widdicombes’ bizarre bickering in stride. They all fidgeted, murmuring and moving to air-kiss Carol, who distributed proper good-byes with perfect grace. Frank gave them a curt wave as he leaned forward, pinching his nose above the nostrils.
“Good to see you all,” he said. “You’re welcome back to watch the birds at any time, as long as you don’t mind your giving me a nosebleed.” The birders laughed at what was, after all, a good-humored tension-breaking on Frank’s part. Carol bid them final farewell with a look that said, “You know how marriage can be—like one long nosebleed that comes out of nowhere.”
Though the streets of downtown Winslow on Bainbridge Island hardly lent themselves to rambling flânerie in the way, say, Florence did, Christopher Widdicombe felt uninhibited by received notions of suitable purpose. Wherefore, after all, suitability? He had spent the morning in the public library leafing through an oversized book on the American realist painter Thomas Eakins, admiring at first that uncompromising document of surgical theater, The Gross Clinic, but finding himself turning back, again and again, to the mesmerizing Self-portrait, until gradually the appeal of the image revealed itself: the force and directness of Thomas Eakins’s gaze impaled him; he felt pierced, discovered, at the Philadelphian master’s mercy, called upon to respond in some immediate way. And because Christopher had not felt the touch of another man since saying so long to Kreshnik, the private stirring felt by our dear watercolorist had found itself addressed manually, behind the walls of the public library’s bathroom stall, the severe bedroom eyes of Mr. Eakins coming to life in the young man’s eager imagination. He had kicked off the afternoon, then, by taking the unsuitable in hand. It was only natural that he should want to smoke a cigarette and go for a stroll.
A filthy habit, smoking. Neither mother nor father would approve. But then, not so many years ago, before he had shipped off to Rhode Island, his father had pulled him aside, and in one of his spontaneous, almost frantic deliveries of elder wisdom, told him that one of the secrets to life was to take joy in the little things—“the foam on a latte, the way the light comes through the window.” Bourgie little things were those, to be sure—it was, too, the best his father could do with a young man who didn’t fit the time-honored sporting Widdicombe mold—but it was in this spirit that he smoked and walked, and watched himself smoking and walking, watched himself watching himself smoke and walk, thinking that as the ember at the end of his cigarette brightened, it burned away, too, at the family tie.
This tie seemed furthermore to fray as he strolled, feeling self-satisfied, down a long, relatively busy street through the town and toward what he presumed would be the harbor. (Something in him vibrated like a dowsing rod: when he walked, he drifted unthinking to the water’s edge always, be it a fountain or a bay. He had heard it said that the sight of the sea was a home for those who felt they didn’t have one.) A cute town, he thought, noting the modest apartment buildings and dentistry offices in a variety of architectural styles, each structure a hopeful certainty made less absolute by its neighbor. Sun-warmed conifers stood dark green between them; new cars gleamed, gliding up and down the street. He dropped his cigarette butt down a rain gutter and took a breath of the clean island air.
He had not gone to Europe, like some of the fetishistic tourists with whom he had crossed paths, to grovel before old beauty. Anyone looking at a photograph of him and Kreshnik sunbathing at one of Florence’s grim, residential public swimming pools could have told you that old beauty had barely crossed his mind. Short and mole-rich and with hawk-like facial features that promised to wizen one day into one hell of a haggard mug, Kreshnik may have been more attractive in his bellhop uniform than he was out of it. Christopher had been enchanted, anyway. He did not need people to appear triumphant over life to feel attracted to them. There was something to be said for a little wear and tear.
Though the likelihood that he would ever see Kreshnik again was slim, Christopher took pains not only to impress upon his parents the threat that he may come to stay with them, but to reminisce about their affair in detail: the romantic day trip to Cinque Terre, that charmed compound of villages on the Riviera where they had planned to sleep together on the beach until an unexpected summer storm drove them to spend the night cowering beneath the awning of some storefront; the nights spent dancing, fucking around in Florentine gay bars with pitch-black back rooms. Christopher alluded to all of this, eager to court disapproval from his family. To his unending frustration, he found them to be not only supportive but proud, perhaps even envious of his freewheeling tomfoolery abroad. Was it so hard, in this day and age, for a young homosexual watercolorist to be disowned by his family? “I wish you were Mormons!” he had yelled after one of these unsuccessful episodes of provocation, storming from the room.
While he freely referenced those spheres of activity which might court castigation, he remained secretive on other, crucial counts. His parents knew nothing about the upstart (but known) gallery in New York that had been representing his work for going on two years now, and which was currently showing his series of paintings about the garbage crisis in Naples. Likewise, that growing number of art aficionados knew nothing of his tolerant family background—how could they, when he had embellished his artist’s biography with tales of torment on the home front, of disgrace and loveless rejection?
He had given an interview to an obscure online arts magazine, Thought Police, detailing the trials of his childhood in flights of off-the-cuff fiction:
Thought Police: You’ve been candid about the ways that your relationship to sexuality has influenced your attitude toward art, and what you have called “a sense of spirituo-sexual revolt” in your paintings.
Christopher Widdicombe: It’s a fiction that the trappings of middle- or upper-middle-class life protect gay people from the spiritual cruelties of a society that will, in my view, never truly accept them. When I came out to my mother, who has tons of gay friends—she works with interiors, for God’s sake—and who had always spoken with compassion and kindness about gay people, she threw a glass of cold milk in my face at the dinner table. She shocked herself, I think—maybe she never imagined herself capable of acting like that. A moment later she began to sob, while I, giddy to see her unmasked in this way, started to laugh uncontrollably. Sometimes before I start a new painting, whatever it is, I like to sit and remember that moment—me laughing like a madman, laughing in the face of the narcissistic heteronormative world, my face stained with its hatred—and then bring that spirit to my work.
He figured that by the time any of these fantasias made it back to his parents, he would have set enough of them in motion, and told enough contradicting tales, that the grand joke of it all would become clear. He would have the upper hand. Perhaps he would one day write a book, he thought, of violently clashing, incompatible autobiographical sketches. Confessions. In the meantime, he still felt compelled to cling to somewhat traditional naturalistic modes of painting. Truth be told, he felt torn: though he hid it as best he could, he felt a sublime connection to history through the great paintings of the European masters and marveled at their obvious technical prowess. Though he worshiped in private, he felt that as an artist he must in public reject to survive.
The water came into view down the hill. Christopher crossed the street at one of the handful of four-way stops in that gingerbread village of a downtown. In the distance the white masts of harbor boats rocked this way and that. He passed the window of a gift shop, where gaudy, bright postcards of a distinctly seaside touristic type assaulted his eyes from behind the glass. As he walked on, however, his grimace gave way to the glow of inspiration. He hastened toward the harbor.
Bradford had a bad feeling from the moment he boarded the ferry to Seattle. And though he had a way of feeling doom to be right around the corner more often than not—even on a fine day like that one, pacing the top deck in the sunshine among the commuters, the lawyers, the squealing and romping little kids, the day-trippers, the teenagers, the architects, the mothers, the rest; even in the gentle whip of wind of the Puget Sound that seemed by its nature to forebode successful journeys and breezy adventures; it was what made him so well suited to one day write this script for a horror film—today that soul-sapping interior darkness felt acute. Such hubris, to possess even a shred of happiness; the prospect of a date with Michelle later that evening filled him with enough joy that to be punished by the gods on some other front struck him as only inevitable. How perfect, then, to be saddled with what was proving to be an intractable and tortured bout of the hiccups. Just when he needed most to appear to his father responsible, collected, a worthy investment, his body betrayed him, making him squeak and bounce every few moments like a little boy. Surely his father, behind that imposing desk, never got the hiccups; what excuse did any (hup) grown man have to go about sounding like a squeeze toy?
He tried to walk it off, he tried to hold his breath for ten, he tried to banish them with ice water, all to no avail. Who was anyone to judge, then, if in his diaphragm-contracting torment he ordered a six-dollar beer from the galley? And then there was that dark little bar he liked so much just down the street from company headquarters; what harm could it do to pop in for one more pint while he waited for his lunch appointment with Daddy, and hope that his hiccups would subside in the meantime?
They did not subside. But alcohol took the edge off, and by the time Bradford took a seat across the desk from his father—who held a finger up as Bradford entered, signaling him to wait as he finished a phone call—he hardly cared that he had the hiccups, and found his father’s frowning at him between businessy utterances of “uh-huh” downright amusing.
“Well, excuse you,” said his father, a handsome, svelte, white-haired man in maturity. Bradford often looked to him not only with rage or admiration but as a promise that he, too, would age well. “Bless you? Excuse you? I don’t know what you’re supposed to say to someone who has the hiccups.”
“Good afternoon will do,” said Bradford.
“Good afternoon to you, then, my son.” Because his father had a way of seeming to register the facts around him only after having verbalized them, he then added, with considerably more relish, deploying also a bloodcurdling nickname, “Ah, Biff, my son, my son! Good to see you. I was telling your mother this morning—she was just getting ready for her cruise to Alaska, you know, with that new younger lady-friend of hers, the folk musician—that you were dropping by today. How are the Widdicombes?”
“They’re (hup) fine.”
“Nice of them to put you up for a week. Lovely there over on the island. Lovely, lovely, lovely. Getting lots of work done? I remember we used to go to parties there, and we would always be rushing to catch that last ferry back, drunk as skunks. Anyway, I hear the place they have is nice. I’m sure you’ve been eating well—I know Frank loves to feed his friends more than he loves life itself. Which is saying something. Not the greatest place to launch the job hunt, I don’t think, but good to see you among such high achievers. Of course, you know you’re always welcome at the condo, once the renovation’s over . . . God, whenever that will be. The company’s had to put me up in a hotel. Which has its advantages, but . . . so, LA didn’t work out quite as planned?”
Bradford had been sitting by, hiccupping and listening to the usual parental patter, waiting for this. The fact of the matter was that a little over a year earlier, he had come to his father with a proposition of sorts: after being laid off from his job helping to manage donor accounts at the opera (the arts, they were suffering!), he had caught the show business bug. He felt—he knew—he had a screenplay in him (ouch!), and after making a fairly reasonable case for the ways in which residence in Los Angeles could provide him with a creative support network (and a less reasonable but more passionately argued case for having the financial freedom to focus on his new craft alone), persuaded his father to cover expenses for a year while he devoted himself to a suspense-horror script about a bloodthirsty but formless entity that dwelled in the woods of an unnamed town in the Pacific Northwest, seeping into people so that it could control them psychologically. “Just one year, Dad,” Bradford had said at the time. “The world needs new monsters.”
It was under this campaign slogan that our young man spent one full year drunk and high and occasionally writing in Hollywood, till reason told him it might be best for his health to cut his losses and come crawling back home with half a screenplay and an air of confidence (and an invented agent) that would leave his investor none the wiser. If Bradford had faith in anything, it was in his own incredible talent as a liar, and as someone who could appear to be in total control even as his life was falling to pieces. It was in the spirit of this conviction that he scoffed at his father’s suggestion that LA hadn’t worked out “quite as planned.”
“It was a great success,” he said. “The script is close to finished. My agent has the partial now and really (hup) loves it. We both agreed that I should come back here for some final research, to give it more authentic regional spirit—just . . . (hup) atmosphere, you know. This could really (hup) happen—I mean, it’s crazy. It really is happening.”
“You need to do something about those hiccups. So—research? Well, that’s great. I’m proud of you. You’re closing in. My son, a screenwriter! Have you eaten? We should go somewhere nearby and celebrate. I have a little time for lunch.”
While it struck Bradford as potentially strategic to relocate—anything to draw out the occasion, and to put everyone a little more at ease—he sensed from his father’s tone that the jig was already up, and that to suggest to him that this period of “research” required a new phase of funding—three or four months at most, a mere season—would prove fruitless. All Our Fruitless Jigs: A Memoir. Perhaps it should have been some cause for alarm, or for a good hard look at himself, that the risk nevertheless seemed worth it. His hiccups had vanished by the time they reached the bistro, and, emboldened further by a strong stout with his fish and chips, he asked for the money.
“Huh,” said his father after a pause. “Well, it’s good to have you back.” Bradford then received a gaze of such pained tenderness—a look that burrowed and scrutinized, one that left him fearful that some once-buried aspect of his being was fast becoming apparent to the outside world—that he reached in desperation for his beer. “But to hear you ask me that, well, it makes me feel like I’ve made a big mistake.”
“I’ve already told you that you haven’t,” said Bradford, growing offended. “I’m so close. All I need is a little more support, one more push in the eleventh hour.”
“Yes, well. As I’ve already mentioned, I’m very proud of you. I have no doubt you’ll finish your movie. To hear you’re close, that’s thrilling. It really is. But for me to give you more money right now . . .” His father trailed off midsentence, as he sometimes had a habit of doing.
“Would be extremely helpful,” offered Bradford.
His father gave him a pleading look. “Well, I don’t need to spell it out for you. You’re always welcome at the condo.”
Now that the boys were out of her hair (and Carol included her husband in that infantilized platoon; such helpless, fussy boys! Even Christopher, for all his lovable, artsy ethereality, succumbed on occasion to the cussed roughness of that clan), Carol could finally seize a precious stretch of afternoon hours to address her most burning desire: the continuing and total redecoration of Willowbrook. Carol took no offense at the Georgian-style home itself, or at the grounds on which it sat. Two acres of woodsy waterside land offered both privacy and the picturesque: from the Ipe-planked deck and backyard lawn, a sparkling whorl of Manzanita Bay; a kayak slicing through the peaceful waters, pushing off from the dock of some other spectacular home; fat greenery striking a jagged skyline, the uneven prototype for some dogged development to come. Carol had urged Christopher to paint this pretty scene for a week before he at last set up his easel on the deck and, hours later, presented her with an impressionistic collection of foul-colored blobs suggesting malignant disease cells seen through a microscope, an interpretation that sometimes brought tears of gratitude to her eyes when she gazed upon it, framed and hanging in the living room. What a talent he was, and her own son!
In any case, while she loved the landscape, the furnishings that cluttered the interior space when she made her first visit still haunted her. The previous owners had marred the spirit of the place with lifeless Americana—quilted pillows with patchwork pinwheels in a patriotic color scheme, a white dining room table (it made her think of a cafeteria), bookshelves supporting not only trashy novels aplenty but plastic tubs filled with Beanie Babies. Christ! As she had described it with finality to her husband in an argument about the practicalities of a suitable and costly décor overhaul, the hideous scheme that preceded them still cursed the house with an air of “spiritual brittleness”; the ghosts of creaking antique bed frames and star-spangled area rugs demanded that she first burn a bundle of sage and then, rolling up her sleeves, take the steps necessary for a full-fledged decorating exorcism. “We live on a prime piece of property now, Frank,” she had said. “It’s time to start acting like it.”
Acting like it required that she sit on the deck with an iced tea and outbid design-conscious competitors for a shark-toothed bronze mirror frame on eBay. At the insistence of Gracie Sloane, and through the childlike exigencies of that guru’s manual for creative manifesting, The Golden Road, Carol tacked magazine clippings of jaunty striped rugs, thrilling eighteenth-century paintings of mandrills, and all manner of other interiors inspirations, much of them torn from the pages of Inside Places, all of them contributing to her eccentric total vision for Willowbrook. “Source Energy requires imagistic fuel to do the daily work of manifesting,” read one passage of The Golden Road. “It is to this end that we pin our hopes and dreams to our Vision Boards.” The universe, Gracie claimed, would respond in kind. How fortunate, too, that the great, nebulous force in question seemed to reward good taste. Once in its graces, one had only to dream of a shark-toothed bronze mirror frame for it to appear on eBay, a cosmic wink.
Just then, a shape darting across the deck interrupted her online flea marketing. Carol turned her head fast enough to catch the tail end of whatever wild trespasser scampered past her field of vision, through the grass where her quick-to-anger husband had embarrassed her in front of her fellow birders and befriended their new gardener. Narrowing her eyes, she set aside her bids and stepped cautiously onto the lawn. The floppy brim of a straw hat shielded her eyes from the sun’s glare; she brought one shading hand to her brow anyway and looked out in the direction of the vanished thing.
The lawn, grown a few inches higher than pleased her, needed cutting. Perhaps she could enlist Marvelous to mow down these mismatched blades of green and stiffened, sun-bleached weed stalks. Then: Ah! She spied the culprit of her distraction. Tucked into the too-high grasses, several yards away, a pair of white triangles poked up at attention; beneath them, two glassy yellow eyes returned her gaze.
Carol laughed. “Oh, Carol,” she said aloud, wiping her forehead, breathing easier. “Why, it’s nothing but a funny little cat.” The creature raised its head at the sound of her voice, staring at her still, and Carol returned what she felt to be a smile coming from the stray. Its face, in fact, seemed to convey one of the purest looks of mischief she had ever encountered. There was something to the twitch of its fluffy tail that mocked her, too, as if to say, “Why, is this your yard? Don’t mind if I do go bounding about in it without a care in the world.”
“You’re a naughty thing, aren’t you?” said Carol. She crouched, went “tsck-tsck-tsck,” and beckoned it toward her. After a brief assessment of danger, the cat swished through the grass, possessed of what Carol would later describe—when relating the event of this cat’s discovery to Gracie, Michelle, and others—as a “positively royal air,” approaching her for all the world as if she ought to be honored by its presence. At last it came to her at a speedy trot, slowing as it brushed against her leg with a purr.
“Aren’t you a love bug,” said Carol, scratching its neck. No collar. “But you do look well fed. Do you belong to somebody? Do you? Or are you wild? Are you a wild cat?”
By way of response, the cat rolled over onto its back, baring a magnificent white underbelly, putting its pink-padded paws up in a gesture of rapturous surrender, as if to say, “Why, I belong to you, Mrs. Widdicombe!”
Carol broke into a broad smile. This was just the sort of weird and whimsical thing she had envisioned happening at Willowbrook. Pride and triumph swelled her chest; in her hope to make of their new home a summery safe haven for both her family and the arts, had she manifested this sweet varmint’s sudden arrival? Yes—the universe meant to surround her with loving creatures large and small, just as she meant to shine the light of her love on the world around her. When she was through with them, the grounds would teem not only with chickens, but with a whole manifested menagerie of kindly country critters. One need never feel alone at Willowbrook.
And to this end, the cat must stay!
The cat augured abundance. Perhaps, too, this would be a step in the right direction vis-à-vis the project of cheering up her husband. She had read somewhere that people with pets tended to live longer, felt less loneliness, and—something about blood pressure. Yes, animals were good for it, that was it. Good for blood pressure. This playful scamp might be just the thing to help Frank relax. Frank dandling the fluff-ball on his knee, his old high spirits restored. Frank, his blood pressure settling, his troubled mind calming in time for the Midsummer Feast. So he couldn’t go on his precious trip; why dwell on it sans cesse? A cat could solve everything.
“I’m going to give you a fun name and some milk,” she said, walking back to the house. “Don’t go anywhere!”
The cat tilted its head at her with a certain measure of sass, as if to say, “Now, where on God’s green earth would I possibly go?”
While she spent her journey in and out of the house wondering if cats really did drink saucers of milk—after so many years enjoying the high life in San Francisco, decorating restaurants and the homes of well-to-do family friends (and after compromising with Frank, in the era of Christopher’s infancy, vis-à-vis his fear that a cat would climb into their son’s crib and suck the breath out of his tiny lungs), she really knew so little about animals—she chalked that voice of doubt up to the wet blanketry of her Inner Critic, a force she aimed to tame with the help of Gracie’s book. Her Inner Critic, incidentally, spoke in the same harsh, clipped, doomy tones her mother used to use when young Carol had begged her to adopt a cat: “I will not have a hair-shedding gargoyle in my home, scratching up my antiques and sneaking around every damned corner. Neither will I have a cat.” No, they never did get along. Carol forged ahead, returning to her new friend with a blue-and-white china bowl of organic skim milk. (On the chance that it did drink milk, why subject it to an unhealthy diet laden with saturated fats?) The cat grazed Carol’s legs with interest as she stepped out to the edge of the deck.
It lapped up the milk.
“Atta girl,” said Carol. “You are a girl, aren’t you? So pretty. You look like a—” Stroking her new companion’s back, she searched her mind for the right name. What to call this mascot of abundance, this harbinger of joy and regulated blood pressure? “Princess Magdalena,” she said, her tastes for the exotic and the royal dovetailing in one grand gavotte of a word. “You look like a Princess Magdalena.”
Michelle had opted as usual to ride her bicycle to the movie theater. Riding her bicycle everywhere she could just made sense—unless the errand involved, say, picking up a bunch of chickens from the feed store at Rolling Bay, in which case the task called for a truck. Bicycling fell in line with a more Scandinavian, and thus more natural, more healthful way of life. The bicycle, in fact, was one of the least Scandinavian habits she had made an effort to integrate into “American life,” as she called it, after returning from her high school exchange program several years ago. She encouraged a friend on the island to build a sauna that she made use of most every weekend, perspiring as she gasped for breath in the overheated wooden chamber. This ritual she followed with a plunge into the icy waters of the Puget Sound that collared the land. For breakfast she often ate rye bread with cheese or jam, and on some weekends she would bake rundstykker, having discovered that it was fairly easy to whip up a batch of these breakfast buns herself. These indulgences fed her soul, she felt, and helped to ground her in an unpredictable world. In love with this borrowed Scandinavian otherness, Michelle blazed forward in life with the lingering pride of one who, upon their first exposure with a foreign culture, believes they have seen a more brightly shining truth about the world, or have at least discovered a kind of simpatico spackling paste with which to fill in the cracks and holes of their own.
Michelle huffed and puffed and pushed her bicycle pedals, climbing the somewhat punishing hill that stood between her and the Lynwood Theatre. To be sure, a touch of nerves made her heart thump a little harder knowing that a night out with Bradford Dearborne, lovable lout, awaited. Since his arrival at Willowbrook her intrigue had grown day by day: who was this high-strung son of privilege, this unlikely screenwriter, this peppy, prep-damaged vagabond exuding both spirited curiosity and a ne’er-do-well ineptitude? And how did he manage to look so good whether sporting a few days’ worth of golden scruff or shaved to statuesque smoothness? The answer must be, as ever, bone structure. In any case, she forgave his bumbles and his sometimes trancelike awkwardness; he was clearly possessed of a sensitive, creative nature—the kind of innate intelligence that would be given room to breathe and blossom in Scandinavia, but which, surprise, surprise, suffocated in the home of the brave, mercilessly smothered to death under the harsh, relentlessly unartistic pillow of American consumer culture. (A polyester throw pillow from Target, perhaps—one with a gaudy, excessively cheerful pattern.) But never mind that—an adventurous spark such as Bradford’s was not something one could just confiscate and throw away at airport security. True mischief makes its home too deep for the pat down of imperial chaperones.
A decline at last made way for coasting, for a deep breath of triumph and the flow of cool air through her hair. Glorious downhill exhilaration! A twilit tunnel rushed past: large conifers, many houses less resplendent than Willowbrook, wild lawns bordered by even wilder ravines, a plummeting stream that led to who knew where, wildlife rustling in the shrubby pagan interstices. The island hummed with a giddy animism, a sense of life teeming all around her, of sly gods in the rocks, in the pinecones, in the woods.
The ground leveled out; Lynwood Center came into view around a bend in the road. A small, quaint commercial complex modeled, it seemed, after a Bavarian fairy-tale village, its dark brown roofs angled to steep peaks like a miniature Alpine mountain range. There sat Bradford on a bench once kelly green and now charmingly chipped, his legs crossed, his hands laced in his lap: a sly god in his own right and the picture of patience. She was surprised he had got there first. But then he made no movement at her wave hello, and upon closer inspection his head lolled between his chest and shoulder, bobbing up now as an arrow of panic shot through his sleep. He was either napping or passed out on the bench, and though she felt this didn’t bode well for the date ahead, it carried somehow an element of flirtation, as though his drowsing was a goofy, amorous gesture made with courtship in mind.
“Bradford,” she said. She shook his shoulder. He blinked a few times, saw her face hovering in front of his, and grumbled with satisfaction.
“Just resting,” he said. “I had such a long day.” He yawned. “Running around here and there. Michelle, I traveled by land, sea, and . . . well, not by air. Not really. Not unless you count being thrown out on your ass by your own father.”
“Uh oh,” she said. The sweet, spoiled smell of stale beer greeted her as she sat down beside him. It gave her pause—did no one around her know when the proper time was for a drink? Then again, there was something real about it, an honesty that flew in the face of the oversanitized self-presentation dominating the culture at large, and it must be noted that, could she have submitted his air to her practical mind for description in that moment, she might have said “there was a whiff of tragedy about him that I found alluring.” Bradford, on the other hand, struggled, as he seemed to do more and more lately, to determine what version or amount of truthful explanation his ragged presence required. Should she know, he thought, that after quelling his morning nerves with pills, and then shaking up his quelled stupor with a flight of espresso shots, and then calming his persistent hiccups with a few beers, he had, between the caffeinated adrenal flood, the depressants, and the frustrating encounter with Daddy, settled into a most unmanageable rage? And that this state had called for a couple more beers during the ferry passage back to the island, not to mention a supplementary Valium? (The scripts all came from a trigger-happy psychiatrist who had listened to him speak at length about feeling “simply abysmal—as in dwelling daily within an abyss of some kind.”) These shipboard treats had tamed his frustration a bit, and they made driving his Volvo to the theater a careening adventure. Here he had drifted off, taking a ten-minute nap while awaiting his date’s arrival. Did she need to know about all that nonsense? No. The hiccupping made for a sufficiently charming and silly anecdote, and he managed to coax a laugh out of her by describing his torment.
“Of course, my hiccups didn’t get me any sympathy with my dad,” said Bradford. “He has so much money. Sure, he helped pay my rent in LA while I was working on my script. But now I’m almost done, and he’s going to back out? It’s insane. It’s rude! And do you know what else? I’m starting to get the idea that he doesn’t really believe I can do it. He doesn’t think I’ll finish—he thinks I’m a fuck-up.” Catching the glimmer of pity in her eye, Bradford felt pity, in turn, that she should allow him to draw her into his orbit. Couldn’t she see that he was a fuck-up, and a fraud? It was his curse to bear that charm came naturally. In spite of any doubts, he made light of his horrid lot, feeling a bit like Rumpelstiltskin: doomed to spin the straw of his misfortune into the gold of first-date enchantment. “Anyway, my family is a bit of a mind-fuck,” he said brightly. “I may just have to ship off to one of those dangerous fishing boats up in Alaska for the rest of the summer—chopping fish heads by day, punching up my script by night. I’ll probably lose a hand on the job, which is something to consider.”
“Do you really think so?” said Michelle, on board with his joking tone. She looked down at his fine, clipped fingernails. “But then how will you play tennis with Frank?”
Bradford put one arm behind his back and leaned forward on the bench. “Well, hopefully it’ll be my left hand. Then I can still play, like this.” Twisting, he mimed one-armed ground strokes. He stopped, considered, frowned. “Serving may prove difficult.”
Michelle neglected to mention other things she imagined may prove difficult with only one hand. “I’m sorry it didn’t go well,” she said. An urge to defend the whims and neuroses of creative types often clouded her pragmatism; her apology—for the denials of Bradford’s father, for the denials of society at large to the creative spirit—rang, she felt, true, and carried with it the sincere desire that anyone with the audacity to “follow their bliss” (it was a sentiment her high school mentor, a statuesque woman and a classics enthusiast, had first expressed to her on the subject of studying abroad in Denmark) ought to be handled with an extra measure of care. While her apology floated in the air, Bradford pulled a small silver flask from the pocket of his shorts and took a nip, then passed it to her. And it was that accommodating aspect just described, along with a romantic sense of wrongdoing, that supported her taking a swig. She then quickly passed the flask to her date, who screwed the cap back on.
“I imagine,” he said, “there are ways around the one-hand thing. Ways to live in an almost normal way. There must have been many advancements in medical technology. I could have a hook or a claw, or even an almost lifelike prosthetic hand.”
Michelle, her chest warmed and sputtering with whiskey, smiled. She felt a longing to grasp the future prosthetic hand in question and press it to her cheek. Instead, giving her voice the soft, curling lilt of flirtation, she said, “I think I would prefer a hook.”
“Yes, well,” he said, “that would have a certain piratical appeal.” He formed his index finger into a hook and scratched at her shoulder with it as he spoke. “Speaking of the high seas, shall we go see some dolphins get killed and eaten?”
Michelle scoffed at his coarse reduction of the feature awaiting them and slapped away his make-believe hook. “We had better, Captain Dearborne. I want to see the previews. I love previews.”
“I always imagined you would.”
“And if you’re really broke . . .”
“Nonsense,” he said, waving his hand in a dismissive gesture. “It wouldn’t be a date if I didn’t buy you a ticket. I like to do things in an old-fashioned way. It’s part of my appeal!”
“Which part?”
Michelle groaned. Bradford went to the theater window, this little witticism still atingle on his lips. “Two adults for Porpoises in Peril, please,” he said. Paying brought home what seemed to be the steadily climbing price of everything in the world, and though he was probably a fool to refuse her charity, he steeled himself. Oh yes, he would buy her candy. He would buy her popcorn, too, if that was what she wanted. He would take in this bleeding-heart documentary, this promise of guilt when the lights came up, and, at some point during the parade of on-screen outrages, attempt to slip his arm around her shoulder, which moved ahead of him now as he held open the door for her. He would try, for the next two hours, to forget about his shameful afternoon, and to let the more general injustice of the world pass before him on the screen, on its way to the Academy Awards. There would be time enough to burden his sweetheart with personal monstrosities. His flask was still half full.
A Widdicombe loves to disagree. A Widdicombe loves to fight. But when the day winds nearer to its end, when sunset fills the dining room with a rosy glow, a Widdicombe loves most of all to eat. Whether the day has been raucous or humdrum or mild, a Widdicombe at table can set aside competitive sport, unwelcome chickens, self-help, “the community,” birding, and all the rest, and can at last break bread in a most convivial fashion with whoever happens to be around. The table served as circle for a sacred rite of forgetting, a warm, miraculous melting away of tensions before a home-cooked meal. Frank loved to cook; so did his wife. Decades ago their relationship had hit its stride in this gluttonous confluence of kitchen enthusiasm. His beef bourguignon, the stuff of legend, had almost on its own lured her from the cold and anemic confines of her parental manse; her passion for fresh, organic produce, while sometimes exhausting to him in its hippy-dippy self-righteousness, still resulted in many a memorable caprese salad and artichoke heart dipped in melted butter. All this, even in its mellowed, so-called midlife form gave the marital bond a sphere in which to flourish more often than not. If Frank felt a kind of confused love-hate at the introduction of a circular green couch with Bundt pan–like central protuberance into the living room (and he did), he also swooned a little when his wife brought home a bag of tender greens from the island farmers market or when she left a brand-new cylinder of unfamiliar sea salt out on the counter—the equivalent of some naughty Victorian flashing her ankle.
Of course, they ate every day, and it wasn’t always paradise. In the simmering heat of disagreement even the earthy fragrance of a morel or the shimmer of cellophane around an aged cheese wedge became merely the ingredients in a larger recipe for insult. But today Frank Widdicombe swelled with pride at the sight of his family gathered ’round the table, even if among that nuclear trio trespassed the curly-headed form of one Gracie Sloane.
“On my flight I sat next to a logging baron,” said Gracie, speaking in a tone that Frank would come to recognize over the course of that summer: folksy and matter-of-fact, her voice impelled those listening to draw near, to hear some kind of parable, some fabular lesson. “We got to talking, and now he had a daughter, name of Annabelle, if I remember correctly—but never mind that. He tells me his little girl’s run off with the circus—well, I know it sounds silly, but she took a summer job in concessions when Cirque du Soleil came to town, fell in love with the head of Food and Beverage, and the next thing he knew, bam, she’s flying after his tushy to Australia. I just pointed my finger at him like so, and I said, hey now, that girl of yours is following her bliss. Don’t you dare wet blanket her. Your daughter’ll learn more about life with that circus than she ever would at some stuffy four-year school—trust me, I went to college, I went into the workaday workforce, and where did all that people-pleasing get me?” Carol poured her a glass of pinot grigio; the author of The Golden Road gave thanks. “Two divorces, carpal tunnel—unrelated, people! Haw-haw—and a lifetime of inner child abuse that I’ve been working to undo ever since. I should’ve joined the circus myself. Well, here’s to Annabelle.” Gracie raised her glass. Carol, Christopher, and Frank all raised theirs, too. They echoed her: “To Annabelle!”
“I don’t know what it is,” Gracie continued. “People like to talk to me.” Frank served her from a large bowl of paella. He had peeled the shrimp she was about to eat, had crushed the bristly threads of saffron that gave the rice its golden hue. He guessed it might have something to do with her kooky personal style, which all but screamed, “Wretched of the earth, come to me!” Tortoiseshell glasses framed avid green eyes. A cascade of copper curls shot through here and there with white fell to her shoulders. And if her flushed cheeks had a certain brass-tacks set about them, they also broadcast an openness to experience that struck him as both admirable and dangerous. She might jump on the back of a stranger’s motorcycle without hesitation—good on her—but might also invite that stranger into their home, taking for granted that anyone who knew her must also possess this zest for the fascinating multitudes. No matter for the moment: a savory waft of garlic and stock reached him, cut and complemented by a sharp undercurrent of lemon juice. Not even Christopher—who, having caught his father’s wary appraisal of their distinguished guest, began to fawn over her with the obvious intention of annoying him—could spoil the triumph of this dish.
“Seattle got its start as a logging settlement,” said his son, sipping wine—when had his son learned to drink wine with such an air of ease? Europe, it must have been Europe—and leaning toward Gracie. “Of course, after that, it became a hotbed of alcohol, gambling, and prostitution—all lifelong interests of mine . . .”
Now Carol interrupted with a comment about their son’s marvelous paintings. The words “inspiringly original subject matter” and “utterly distinct” drifted into his ear, and then Christopher brought a hurried spoonful of paella to his mouth, enduring maternal praise of his watercolor portraits of Polk Street prostitutes. After she had finished, he said, his mouth half full (or was it half empty?), “Oh, did I mention that I went down to the harbor today and did some paintings of the boats?” Carol then waved her hand and added, “You see? We never know what he’s going to do!” in a tone near to distress. She took a long drink from her glass.
“I think it’s spectacular—this family is so creative,” said Gracie. “I can think of no better place to be at this very moment, no better place to hunker down and finish my next book. Meanwhile, Carol turns the house into a gloriously decorated safe-haven for her family and the arts. Meanwhile, Christopher paints his heart out—”
Christopher frowned, looking to his father.
“—and meanwhile, Frank—well, besides this amazing paella—do you have any other projects in the works?”
Many forces came together in an unplanned pause for effect. The dusky gleam from the dining room windows, the impetuous atmosphere of welcome, the ache of that day’s accomplishments. The meal, the wine, the breeze! The strutting Widdicombe pride at having put food on the table; the spectacle of his silly son thinking he could incite disapproval (he and Carol had meant it when, on his coming out, they had both said, almost threateningly, “We love you no matter what”); those two pairs of female eyes coordinated in conspiracy, assessing him for signs of depression, for an answer that eluded disappointing diagnosis; and then—ah!—though France seemed so far away, the encouraging spirit of friendship that had begun to simmer in him, oddly enough, after his encounter with Marvelous Matthews. Giddy with possibility, lost in this rowdy atmosphere of pleasure, Frank heard himself say, speaking as though this riot of elements should be evidence enough of his intentions, “As a matter of fact, I’m writing a sort of philosophical guide to life.”
Chatter ceased. His wife and son, so often smug in the assurance that they saw and knew all sides of his character, met this revelation with open looks of incredulity. Ah ha—he had them now! Gracie, peering over her glasses, saw in him a suddenly sympathetic soul. “Is that so?” she said. “Well! You and me’ve gotta talk.”
The game almost ended there, for while the notion had come to him unbidden, it brought with it little in the way of particulars. A guide to life—for whom? True, he had overplayed his flinging in the trash once and for all that copy of The Golden Road handed to him by his wife; that offending chapter about the vortex had called out to him from the garbage until, insomniac anyway, he had fished the thing back out and spent what was left of the wee hours poring over its contents. Swinging between rejection and admiration, he had snorted at exercises exhorting the reader to collect scraps of whimsy (fabric, shells, tchotchkes, toys) for a “creativity shrine,” but had sat in pensive silence during a chapter on bouncing back from “creativity assassination” that appealed to all his favorite psychological precepts: grit, resilience, stamina, a certain fuck-all flare for going ballistic in the face of resistance. Honest appreciation had soon turned into competitive spirit, and by sunrise, setting aside the book, his thought had been: “Well, for fuck’s sake—I could certainly write a book like that. There’s nothing to it.” He had returned to bed, leaving the idea to ferment. Now, in a moment of repose at the dinner table, it had announced itself, made itself known to all. Perhaps it would be a kind of workbook, he thought. Americans loved to work, especially on themselves.
Fortunately, before further comment on his grand plan became required, attention to new arrivals did: commotion in the foyer, calls of “Hello!” . . . Bradford and Michelle. Looking, he might add, thick as thieves. Well, well—a little youthful romance on the home front? A roosterish if unsteady strut from him, a twinkle in the eye from her? Careful, young lady, he thought.
“People can be so cruel,” said Michelle, following Carol’s gesture to sit with them at the table. She sighed, shook her head, allowed herself to be served a small helping of paella. “Killing dolphins. Eating them. Dolphins, who are so playful and intelligent.”
“Let me guess,” said Gracie. “You just saw Porpoises in Peril?”
“Yes!” said Michelle. “And I am outraged.”
“As you should be,” said Gracie, nodding sagely. “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”
“And if you’re not paying attention,” Frank said, “you’re going to fail the big test at the end of the semester.” He dabbed his mouth with a napkin, and then, as though someone had asked him “What test?” he added: “The outrage test.”
“I recently read an Australian study about a wild bottlenose dolphin colony,” said Christopher, “which suggested that who a female dolphin associates with determines how successful she will be as a mother. Good mothers tended to spend time with other good mothers. Less successful mothers were less discriminating about their companions.”
“I’d rather have interesting companions than be a so-called successful mother,” said Carol, laughing and winking at their inscrutable son. Frank topped off both of their glasses with more pinot. He loved it when Christopher got tipsy and tried to work the motherhood angle for disapproval. It never quite worked, owing to Carol’s willingness to completely debase the sanctity of motherhood for what she presumed to be her son’s amusement. Oh, they were having fun, weren’t they? They must have been put on this planet to have as much fun as possible. The two of them could spend entire evenings miscommunicating in this way, dragging motherhood through the mud.
“To interesting companions,” said Bradford, raising a glass he had poured himself. A little wine splashed out. Also, if he thought Frank didn’t catch the look of flirtatious complicity that passed between the young man and Michelle as he did so, he was sorely mistaken.
It was this look, in fact, that he remembered first when he got out of bed later that night, his sleep again interrupted by the tug of anxiety, his mind cataloguing specimens of fresh memory from earlier in the day. In the bathroom, he pushed at his still mildly irritated nostril, leaning into the mirror with bloodshot eyes (one of them a bit swollen, too, it seemed to him—was he allergic to their new life?).
Why was he awake? Part of a more gnawing concern, no doubt: no matter how much vigorous physical activity he indulged in during the day, no matter how many jobs he did around the house, walks he took around the grounds, meals he cooked, or good times he had at the dinner table, nothing quite seemed to nullify the yawning abyss of inactivity—of insignificance!—spreading from the center of this summer retreat. After a full day like today, his vanity and paranoia should not be tormenting him. He should not have time for midnight terror, should not have time for worries about inflamed nose follicles and the fragility of human life.
In the best of health, he could be a model appearing in a fitness magazine for slightly older men. Midlife Fitness, if such a thing existed, although he always shuddered at the word midlife, not because it suggested that half one’s time was up but because it called to mind that chilling phrase “the middle of nowhere.” Here it was, the middle of nowhere, and here he was, angling his head to get a better look up his nostril, the unremarkable redness there surely no cause for alarm, but also providing no answers, no road map for the territory in question. Part of the trouble was that out here—out here in the middle of nowhere, with a limited number of ways to tame the hours—he was beginning to fill that void with questions about his longevity. Time to notice things seemed to raise all those little whispers of physical disintegration he usually had such a talent for ignoring to a more yacketing volume: a pop or a crack from one of his kneecaps, a feeling of inflammation where the jaw met the skull that became more pronounced as the day went on, a racing pulse upon waking if he happened to nod off for a nap some afternoon. Unpleasant to think that his body was very gradually breaking down on him. Worse to realize that, under the proper circumstances, he might not have to notice it so often. He thought too about the vastness of the universe, and then felt like a strange and unaccountable animal. What was he doing here, a tiny creature clinging to the skin of the earth? What was he? Why was he alive?
He was awake now, anyway—why not check his email? When a lack of purpose gaped, a chasm filling up with physical and spiritual worry, the internet was always close at hand to bridge those shrieking depths.
But even the internet provided little comfort right then. Hunched over the bluish rectangular glow in his office, a search for “nose hair injury” returned only crazy-making articles about abscesses in the nose leading to encephalitis—brain swelling! Just swell. No, that wouldn’t do. Two more clicks and a blank word processing file opened. The glaring white stung his eyes; suddenly, he was typing:
The Widdicombe Way—a guide to life.
Who for?
Retired people. People who can’t sleep.
People with not enough work to do (body falling apart).
Lessons from sports psychology and hard-won life wisdom too.
—Take joy in the little things.
Having made this good start, it seemed only natural to email Channing and let him know how things were going. More clicks, more typing:
Well, although it’s a shame about France, I’m making the best of the situation. No thanks to your fucking niece! Har-har. Seriously though, I’ve been wanting to tell you, I started writing a new book. It started as a joke over the dinner table, but now I’m envisioning it as a kind of guide to life—you know, like a workbook, full of activities that help you take joy in the little things. Make the most out of life. Follow your dreams. Keep the fire alive when your friends betray you by letting their country house out to vacuous newlyweds. Worldly wit and whatnot, etc. Healthy, wealthy, and very wise. Early to bed, early to rise. I almost typed “early demise.” Fuck. I’m excited about the project and pleased to have all this free time to work on it. It’s going very well so far. I can’t thank you enough for inspiring me to follow my dreams by not giving me what I wanted.
Yours,
Frank
PS: I might have a new best friend soon. He also happens to be my gardener, which is more than I can say for you.
Finding that this email, like the last one he had composed to Channing, failed to articulate the true depth of his feelings—in fact, it had a surprising air of insecurity; were fears about bodily ruin infecting even the way he composed emails?—he saved it as a draft. Two inadequate messages to his best friend now clogged his Drafts box. Clicking back to the word processing file, he added, beneath the line reading “take joy in the little things,” the following:
—sleep on messages composed in high emotion (Abraham Lincoln)
—examples from history/presidents/etc.
—don’t pull nose hairs (use trimmers) . . . encephalitis
Clicking, typing, clicking, typing: soon our main man Frank Widdicombe had amassed a full three pages of ideas for The Widdicombe Way, of which these lines are only representative samples. How freeing that he could include in this guide to life any single subject that crossed his restless mind! There would be no limits, only Frank Widdicombe, F.W., raw and uncensored, come alive on the page, ready with gruff, no-nonsense advice and activities geared toward the mastery of life.
What a clever man he was: within an hour he had rerouted that paranoid mental energy about the inevitable decay of his earthly vessel into an infinitely more productive channel. Lord only knew how many sleeping selves at that very moment were hungry for just the kind of improvement he had to offer.
And speaking of hunger, a fluffy grey creature taken with it jumped just then from some unseen hiding place and up onto the desk. Frank’s heart leaped; he startled backward, nearly falling from his chair, and shouted, “Jesus fucking Christ!” Kip the cat, unfazed, began to rub its head against the laptop. (Frank, accepting that Carol would call the cat Princess Magdalena but keen to give it a name of his own, had decided to rechristen it Kip, gender be damned.) It then walked across the keyboard, its paws splaying over the jumbled alphabet with flat clacks, adding to that philosophical masterwork-in-progress these words of insight:
klpdymwslom’k
‘um8u9jgf4r5dtdshyujn
“Well,” said Frank, allowing this trespasser purring passage onto his lap, “I could’ve told you that.”
While The Widdicombe Way unfurled thus, one sleeping self in particular stirred at the first sign of sunrise halfway across the island. No animal companions leaped into bed to warm themselves by his blanketed bulk; no other soul moved about the spare studio apartment, grinding coffee beans or coaxing him from Slumberland with the sizzle of fatback. Marvelous Matthews lived alone. A band of light fell across his grizzly face, and there he was: awake. Awake, alone, alone, awake—what was the difference? His paw searched the nightstand for that telltale rectangle, that packet half-dressed in plastic, and soon he lay on his back with the first cigarette of the day fixed between dry lips. The ashtray he rested on the round of his belly. His thumb flicked the flint wheel on a dollar-fifty lighter.
He had always been an early riser. Two hours remained before one of his clients, a harried Seattle lawyer who lived on the waterfront and who, after taking Marvelous’s number from a poster on the bulletin board at the Island Gym (“Organic Vegetable Gardening—Landscape Gardening—Community Building”), had called asking if he could “handle a rock garden.” “Of course,” Marvelous had said. “I do rock gardens all the time.”
He had never done a rock garden. His business, now close to celebrating its one-year anniversary, was largely improvised—what began as a therapeutic, Zennish new leaf, a bit of meddling with plant life meant to keep his hands busy and put a little extra dough in his pocket, had fast revealed a natural talent both for gardening and for business. Too humble at this point to call himself an “entrepreneur” (he had done it before and wound up feeling like an ass), he nonetheless took pride when given the opportunity to tell people he ran his own company. A better answer to the terrible question, “So, what do you do?” than wordlessly brandishing a beer can had been.
Before getting dressed, he sat on the edge of his bed, using the nightstand as a makeshift desk on which to do the daily “freewriting” required of him by The Golden Road, a sixteen-week program of creative recovery recommended to him by a fellow former drunk. “Today marks the beginning of Week 6,” he wrote, “the Week of Growing Awareness. I’m a little tired this morning but am going to spend the day moving rocks . . .” His automatic, uncensored, scrawled reflection tumbled out from there, eventually filling three pages, often returning grouchily to the subject of moving rocks but touching upon other concerns as well: “God, I’m fucking lonely,” read one line; “Maybe this weekend I’ll see that new thriller about the runaway train, Hard Luck Express,” read another. Near the end of this exercise, when he realized only one page remained, he felt suddenly panicked that he hadn’t yet mentioned his visit to Willowbrook. Scratching at his beard, he wrote that Frank Widdicombe seemed like an interesting guy. The line “Could be there’s more than meets the eye there” marked the end of his session, and though he whipped the page over, leaving a blue-lined blank ready for the next day, this idea lingered with him, weaving in and out of his awareness as he showered, dressed, ate a bowl of shredded wheat squares with milk, and climbed into the front seat of his truck, Gretchen. “Come on, Gretch,” he said, patting the dash after he had let the engine warm up for a minute. “Let’s go haul some rocks.”
Already the day promised to punish him with direct sun. Best to start early and quit shortly after lunch, before the heat got unbearable. He was farmer’s tanned enough already, and prolonged heat sometimes made leggy bottles of cold pilsner dance in his head, a chorus line of temptation. With the help of a strong local high school boy he sometimes hired, he had laid down a curving, pebbled path, had planted ferns and fir and spruce shrubs along the edge before blanketing it in reddish brown wood chips days prior. All that remained was to put in a series of wood steps along the path, and then—the worst thing—the bigger rocks. They waited for him on a pallet by the driveway. He took his sweet time with the wood steps, walking around them again and again to confirm proper spacing, assessing the feel of the little landscape he was creating until the task could no longer be reasonably postponed.
He and the boy struggled to scoot the first large boulder onto a dolly, sweating as they tipped the burdened thing and rolled it down the drive. At first he felt some humiliation: he huffed and grunted as the two of them ferried stones along the side of this magnificent waterfront home; he entertained some half-baked but basically uncharitable thoughts about the lawyer and his wanton display of wealth. The thrill of his own strength soon won out, though, and for two hours (longer, probably, than Hard Luck Express) they moved, dumped, and positioned rocks in the lawyer’s imminently complete rock garden, stopping now and then to stand in the shade by his truck and quaff cold water and sodas. He wiped his brow and thought, “As I build this rock garden, I build myself up.” He looked over his handiwork. One roundish rock remained, a ridged and grey-white boulder meant to rest upon the slope of the hill. They loaded it onto the dolly.
Perhaps a man who had done a rock garden before would have approached things a little differently. This theoretical man, surely, would have had other professionals on hand, would not have insisted on doing every damn thing either on his own or with the help of one high school wrestler; and then who knew if there wasn’t some complex theory unknown to Marvelous underlying the placement of rocks. He probably would not have used a dolly, but a stone-boat of some kind. What did he care? He was a self-made man—evidence of the resilient human spirit—and he did things his own way, learning from his failures as he went. His rock garden looked almost as good as the ones he’d seen in pictures. However, it would have looked even better had he and the kid not, at that moment, on the mildly sloping lawn, somehow lost control of the dolly, battling to right the long cart as that final rock, that cherry on top, rolled just enough to tip the balance of the entire operation, and then, outmatching the duo’s considerable combined brawn, slipped from its platform and started rolling down the hill.
Horror gripped Marvelous as the rock tumbled heavily over the trimmed green grass. He ran after it, but what could he do to prevent it from falling over the hill and down onto the steeper waterfront decline? At the edge of the drop he stopped and stared, helpless, as the rock, having gathered speed, launched itself off a short ridge, hurtled through the air, and cannonballed into the water with a loud splash.
His helper turned to him with his jaw hanging open. A storm of swearing followed. Marvelous started to laugh after that, though in a way that he felt probably frightened the boy. “Well,” he said, clapping a hand on his helper’s shoulder, “nobody saw this but us, and nobody got hurt.” In truth, the accident excited him. Now the sun beat down; now the stone was gone; now he stood at the water’s edge, one rock short of a rock garden.
Heat smothered the island that evening. The sun set behind Mount Rainier, enveloping in a haze of orange and pink that craggy stratovolcano (“One of the world’s most dangerous,” as Christopher liked to say), but the stars and moon brought scant relief: Frank and Carol both tossed in their sleep, covered by a single and somehow suffocating sheet; Bradford, alone in the guest room, threw aside his covering in a nocturnal fit, hugging a spare cushion close to his naked body; Christopher, for his part, woke up periodically to flip the pillows at his disposal, looking in vain for one with a cooler surface.
Elsewhere similar woes were underway. Where no air conditioning had been installed, or where it failed, windows remained wide open, inviting the passage of night air and the ambient sounds of rustling, hushing woodland, the persistent lapping of saltwater at the shore, the long yawn of solitary cars passing by on serpentine roads. Along a stretch of southern coast, a heron, lanky and long-winged, its neck crooked and tucked, sailed past a flock of sleeping gulls, following an inlet to a path of marshland. A river otter, meanwhile, propelled itself underwater, its wet whiskers and gleaming eyes popping above the surface every now and then for air; it passed on its route a large stone new to the watery landscape, coiling past this curiosity en route to land. When the creature found a suitable covered path from the shore, it began to wag its dripping way toward a structure up the hill. (At that moment Marvelous, miles away, started awake at the sound of a raccoon rummaging through the garbage cans in the alley outside his apartment window, but he was too tired from his day hauling stones to get up and look. He fell back asleep.) The river otter had good timing: a full-grown opossum had just passed by the site of interest, having investigated the Widdicombes’ yard and found it, perhaps, lacking in the slugs for which that ancient marsupial is said to have a craving. In any case, beneath the deck there was now a vacancy. Had she been possessed of superhuman attention, Gracie Sloane, who sat sleepless at a table on top of that deck, might have sensed a dark shape slinking across the yard and under the Ipe planks. Instead, she turned her gaze from the long reflections of light wiggling over the surface of the bay and looked up at the moon. Then, softly, so as not to wake the Widdicombes—at a polite volume, so that only she could hear—she howled.