She awoke to something like the sound of a kitty cat going through a brush chipper, a shrieking and clattering that alarmed her so frightfully at first that she leaped up, seized the fireplace poker from its stand, and took a defensive posture behind the chaise lounge in the corner of her bedroom. She half expected to be assaulted any second by some heinous, giant devil bat of the kind one sees on the cover of supermarket tabloids, but then the noise became the tearful shouts of a young woman pounding and kicking a door and rattling the doorknob.
“Open up this minute you fucking cowards!” she shrieked.
Maggie now recognized the distorted voice as Alison’s. She ventured out into the hallway. At the far end, Alison pounded on the door to the Shaker bedroom with the flat of her hand. Her voice achieved a note in an upper register so piercing that Maggie worried about the valuable glass ewer in a niche beside the stairwell.
“I know you’re in there,” Alison shrieked.
Maggie hurried down to her and tried to calm her, but Alison more or less batted her way out of the attempted embrace.
“He’s been fucking her for weeks!” Alison shrieked.
“Who has?”
“Your asshole son!”
“Hooper?”
“Is there another one?”
Suddenly the door was thrown open and Alison, off-balance as she swatted at it, nearly crumpled onto Lindy, who stood there in her flannel robe looking dazed and hurt.
“You wicked slut!” Alison growled. “Cradle robber.”
“Is he really in there?” Maggie asked her old friend.
“This is so unfair,” Lindy said, her mouth twitching at the corners like a dam cracking before a reservoir of emotion. “I can’t believe you’d think—”
“Hooper!” Alison wailed.
A figure larger than Lindy stirred behind her in the darkness. Then he came forward, a handsome Latin-looking young man in boxer shorts, with hooded eyes, a tattoo of a snarling black cat on his left shoulder, a gold chain featuring a small gold skull pendant with ruby eyes, and luxuriant black hair, which was just now being gathered into a queue with a rubber band. He was very handsome, Maggie could not help but observe. Model handsome. And obviously a lot younger than Lindy. Perhaps half her age. Maggie frankly didn’t know what to feel, except a kind of peculiar wary admiration.
“You’re not Hooper,” Alison said, suddenly conversational.
“I yam Javier,” the young man said, scratching his ripply abdominals.
“Satisfied?” Lindy glanced first at Alison and then at Maggie with the glow of a true martyr. Her eyes brimmed with tears as she gently closed the door in their faces. Blubbering was audible within.
“I’m so humiliated,” Alison said. Maggie tried to gather the distraught girl into her arms, but she slipped away and hurried down the hallway to the stairs. Maggie followed her as far as the balustrade. She imagined Alison and Hooper locked in conjugal combat in the orchard cottage like grown people, a spectacle that made her instantly ill. It wasn’t until she returned to her own bedroom that she realized Hooper couldn’t be in the cottage—why else had Alison been in the big house looking for him? Yet his Saab was there in the driveway. Where was Hooper? Life was getting so horribly complicated, it was worse than nauseating.
In a little while a car came up the driveway. Maggie flew to the window wondering, What now? Roving plunderers? Serial killers from Norwalk? Her world seemed to be under an alien invasion. It turned out to be a Danbury Red Top cab. A shadowy female figure hurried past the yew hedges burdened with duffel bags and clutches. Alison! She was leaving! The driver got out and helped her load the trunk and then they were off. So, Maggie thought, massaging her throbbing temples, Hooper had gone and wrecked his first serious relationship. Attempting to picture his face, she came up with something that was more Kenneth than Hooper, and it shocked her. She suddenly wanted a drink. On her way to the kitchen to fetch a glass of sherry, she noticed a dim light flickering under the door of the bath beside the North Woods guest room. She padded past the Shaker bedroom, from which could be heard the grunts and creaking springs of ardor as Lindy went at it with her new paramour. What was life coming to on Kettle Hill Farm? A few short months ago it had seemed all stuffed turkeys and crafts, wholesome things, parties and dinners with dear friends and notables, brilliant conversations, lovely days in a garden not run riot, stability, fruitfulness, order, bounty … ugh! She shuddered recalling the moment that Laura Wilkie flitted from the fateful powder room on Christmas Eve, shattering her world like a blown-glass Christmas tree ornament.
She knocked on the door to the bathroom. There was a muffled groan, male, she thought. Hooper? Who else but?
“Hooper,” she whispered. “It’s Mom.”
He responded with another, weaker groan, resonant of illness and tragedy. At once she entered the unlocked room to find Hooper supine in the tub with a candle flickering on the edge of the sink and a nearly empty Scotch bottle bobbing in the water between his surprisingly hairy legs.
“You’re drunk!” she said.
“You’re crazy,” he muttered.
“You’re absolutely pickled!”
“Yeah, well, t’morrow I’ll be sober an’ you’ll still be crazy,” he maundered and then hooted at his own joke.
Maggie shrieked more than once. There was clattering in the room next door, and shortly Lindy and Javier appeared in the doorway.
“It’s okay, we’re here, okay?” Lindy said, trying to assume command, though clearly horrified herself.
“Do joo know thees man?” Javier asked cocking a thumb at the tub.
“Of course I do. He’s my son,” Maggie said, trying to control the hysteria that struggled in her like a monster.
“Hey, lookit. Iss my ol’ Aunt Lindy,” Hooper said, his head lolling against the tiles. “See ya gotta new boyfriend. Wassyer name, boyfriend?”
“I yam Javier.”
“Put’er there, man.” Hooper held his hand out limply as though to slap five. In the flickering candlelight, a set of scratches was visible on his wrist. They were seeping rather than bleeding, but now the monster burst out of Maggie and she wailed uncontrollably. The commotion only put Hooper to sleep. His arm slid back into the tepid water leaving smoky wisps of blood suspended in the water, while the years seemed to drain from his face as the small muscles relaxed. Despite a mat of chest hair, he looked like a ten-year-old boy again.
“Maggie, just calm down,” Lindy said. “Get him out of the tub, Javi.”
“He tried to kill himself!” Maggie wailed.
“They’re just scratches.”
“Because of you!”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You’ve been fucking my son!”
“How could I be fucking Hooper when I’ve been fucking Javier?”
Meanwhile, Javier had extracted Hooper from the tub and had him over one of his exceedingly broad Toltec shoulders like a sack of masa harina. Lindy directed him into the North Woods room where Hooper was deposited on the massive peeled-log bed. Maggie immediately saw to the wounds on his wrists, which, it was now rather obvious, looked as though they had been inflicted by a slightly annoyed tabby cat. Bandages were clearly unnecessary but she tied a couple of cotton guest towels around them so he wouldn’t stain the 520-threads-per-inch percale sheets. She hoped that he would not throw up on them, either.
“Thank you for helping, Javier,” she said politely, taking in the tattoo and the skull pendant. Back in college, she recalled, Lindy had been more disposed to men in Brooks Brothers button-downs.
“No problem,” he said diffidently and went back to bed.
“I wasn’t doing what you think,” Lindy whispered moments later in the hallway as they prepared to retire to their rooms. “Really, Maggie. The idea. Disgusting.”
“Where did you find this new guy?”
“Javier? He … he was waiting to see Doctor Klein.”
“He goes to your shrink?”
“Well, yes. Obviously.”
“That doesn’t sound very macho.”
“What a racist thing to say, Maggie!”
“Excuse me. He just doesn’t seem the type to visit a shrink.”
“Because he’s Hispanic, right? This is a new low for you.”
“A new low?” Maggie echoed back emptily.
“Yeah. Who just flew back from a fling in Venice with a guy young enough to be her own child?”
“It’s not the same, Lindy, and you know it.”
“Because he was British, I suppose, and a big fucking rock star, right?”
Maggie felt ashamed and exhausted and utterly disarmed.
“I think all this New England country-living bullshit is melting your brain,” Lindy said bitterly and left Maggie alone in the hallway, shivering.