G.H.
Their days rejoined at Pepperomia’s, a neighborhood Italian restaurant. Sarah was also late, but her present mood, even as Matthew’s, seemed much improved, They ordered their sandwiches amidst her recounting of her morning’s accomplishment. Instead of following her narrative, however, Matthew followed with his knife the marble pattern of the plastic table top, guiding the knife edge along a galaxy of swirls that spun toward the narrow trench of an ancient cigarette burn; he murmured and nodded and couldn’t wait till she finished speaking.
“Don’t you want to know what I was doing this morning?” Asked with the impatience, the delight of an astronomer reporting on a new sight somewhere in the heavens–a discovery whose importance is unquestioned, whose meaning is unclear.
“Of course. Sorry. Where’d you go?”
”The library.”
“The library, huh? Why the library?”
Matthew methodically set his sandwich in its basket, and then with his fingers made a mask around his eyes. No, Sarah’s shaking of the head replied, I don’t get it. Her back stiffened, as if a hot trickle of fear were dribbling down her back as she watched him.
He gave up. “Our buddy? The masked intruder?”
She looked quickly at him, then away. “Oh. Why? They get in a new copy of ‘The Homeowner ‘s Guide to Raccoon Eviction?’” She studied her sandwich as if it were the subject of an important exam.
“I forgot to ask for that one. Matthew slid to the edge of his chair, leaned toward her as if toward an enthusiasm that matched his own. “I though I’d sort of get to know the enemy, Sar. Find out what its habits are and all that stuff. Really peculiar little animals–did you know they’re related to bears? And they’re amazingly agile, like cats, the way they can get into places you wouldn’t think they’re small enough to get into. Farmers hate ’em because they’ll eat the eggs, the chickens, the corn, anything.”
She was nodding her head too rapidly to signify mere conversational agreement. “Really interesting, sweetie, really interesting. But I thought you wanted to find out how to make it leave, not write a dissertation on it. I mean,” she said, raising her eyes to his, her voice sliding higher, “it’s still keeping you up at night, isn’t it?”
He bent his head to an angle of rigid nonresponse, began rearranging the messy contents of his sandwich.
“Isn’t it?” she demanded again, but her voice was softer. He met her eyes only briefly.
“Look, it’s very nice to know all that stuff, but unless you just want to sell the house to get away from the noise, maybe we should find out what’s going on, get some more practical info.”
Their lunch as a vision of red: red plastic baskets lined with white waxy paper already sodden with the tomato-stained grease that had oozed from their sandwiches. Matthew observed that she had set her eggplant grinder back into its plastic cradle, having given the sandwich only the most cursory of attentions. He reached over to hold her hand. “I’ll research it a little more tonight.”
“Matty, for God’s sake you don’t need to do more research.”
“Well, what d’you want me to do, buy a gun and go in there and shoot it?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, we don’t have to do anything like that. I’m sure there are fifty different ways to chase it out of there.” She paused to aim her reproach: “You never called the Humane Society or animal control or whatever, did you?”
He scrubbed red drippings from his hands, threw the soiled paper napkin in his basket. “Listen, this hasn’t bothered you yet, has it? Okay, then, it’s my problem and I’ll take care of it. I just wanted to know what this thing is, I had to find out about it before I could do anything about it.”
The hot trickle of fear running down her back, for the last few minutes, had become a steady, scalding rivulet. “This is getting a little weird, you know? She rolled her napkin into a tight ball and looked down at it for a moment, as if it held some answer, then straightened up and tried to smile at him. “Sweetheart, this raccoon has been in our house what—six days now? And it’s not going away and we’re not doing anything to make it go away, and meanwhile you’re getting a little iffy from not sleeping. So I think we should just go ahead and call somebody and find out what to do, and do it. I know you’ve been so busy with work but—why don’t I just call now?” And as she spoke she was reaching into her purse for her phone. Because really this is as much my responsibility as yours, right? Not,” she stipulated, looking down at her phone, “that it’s such a big deal. I mean, this isn’t some legendary monster that can’t be vanquished unless you learn the secret spell or find the magic sword. Or something. lt’s only a little raccoon.” Matthew saw the face of her phone gleam with the dangerous sheen of a weapon.
“Okay.” She was scrolling through her phone. I’ll try a couple of places while you pay.” She looked up at him. “Maybe I’ll call that nature center, Roaring Brook, first. It might be a good place to start.” Her hand was raising the phone.
He grabbed her wrist. “No.” His grip was neither violent nor terribly tight, but he did not let go. “No. I’m going to take care of it myself, okay? Just let me do it my own way.” His face was blanched and hard, immobile as a plaster casting, his eyes fixed on her face. She shivered as if through an unseen gap something had made its way into this place, this time, and spread about a chill. She jerked her head in response to a sound—on the wall a poster, whitewashed houses above Costa Smerelda—flapped as someone opened the door, then she shook off his hand as if it were a house fly.
“Fine. Suit yourself. You want to make some big Norse saga out of this, it’s okay with me. The stupid raccoon doesn’t keep me awake all night.” She walked out the door without looking back to see if he were following her.
They drove most of the way to the Vinca’s country club in silence until Matthew, by way of making amends, started talking about their tennis partners. Sarah granted him, at first, only piqued responses, but he could see that she was reluctant to prolong their quarrel, so that by the time they entered the barren, immaculate cage of the courts, Matthew and Sarah were hand in hand and deep in speculation about whether Marjorie’s latest teacher might have effected some improvement in Marjorie’s game.
The answer was no. Marjorie, as small and glossy as Herbert, and as tenacious and energetic a player, was, even after this latest and most expensive course of tutelage, unable to control the ball. As in their three previous matches, Herbert’s bouncy agility could not, unaided, carry the day and, as they had before, Matthew and Sarah won in straight sets. As they had before, the Vincas pressed Matthew and Sarah to return with them to their house for a drink; this time, Matthew and Sarah accepted the invitation. Perhaps because of the weight of social and business obligation, or perhaps because the burden of being alone together seemed weightier still. Their stubby green car trailed at perplexed distance the Vincas’ sleek silver one, as it shot through the lushly colored suburban hills. Sarah prophesied in tones of dismal confidence that they’d get lost on their way back home.
Once arrived at Herbert’s, they followed him into a deeply brown, heavily furnished den, where Sarah and Matthew were instructed into the billowing folds of a leather couch of buslike proportions and grace. Herbert began tending bar; Marjorie had vanished, at some point in the procession, to check on the health and whereabouts of her two teen-aged sons, her three dogs, and her mother’s helper, a sinuous young woman named Lila Wolff.
In the interval of Marjorie’s absence, Herbert stoppered Matthew and Sarah’s hands with drinks, and then released from his sound system a wild torrent of bathos; bracing himself against the mahogany bar, he blared over the music his hopes of making yet another fortune with Kestrel’s Eyrie. Matthew’s attention to this was only marginally required, and the livelier segment of his intellect, in a battle against sleep, engaged itself in a merciless critique of Herbert’s grandiose modern house. Sarah’s inattention to her host was accompanied by a knotting and unknotting of fingers, a writhing turmoil of flesh that was, perhaps, representative of her state of mind.
And somehow Marjorie and the dogs are in the room, have been for some time, and more liquor poured, and Herbert drinking quickly, steadily, and the music weeping loudly now, and Herbert’s voice rushing recklessly before it. Radiant Marjorie. Dogs barking. Everything confused and loud, even Marjorie’s sparkling silence, even Matthew’s laugh that comes from high in his throat and indicates he isn’t listening.
As Herbert rapidly becomes ever more drunk and gloriously repetitive, his verbal tide now in a loving wash over the strand of his life’s successes—business deals struck money made sons born bets won vacations Cote d’Azur cars bought fabulous purebred Rottweilers fabulous–flooding unbroken over Marjorie’s shimmering silence, over Matthew and Sarah’s politely bobbing inattention, until such time as Herbert drops to all fours and begins to bay and snap in imitation of his favorite dog treeing cats.
Something in Herbert’s bare-toothed, mock and throaty menace abruptly rousing Matthew.
Who stands and says, “Oh, my God, Herb, that reminds me. Our neighbor’s coming over for dinner tonight—old lady, friend of Sarah’s.” He looks urgingly at Sarah, who also stands. “She keeps a thousand cats,” Matthew continues rapidly, earnestly, like a man trying to talk his way out of a traffic ticket, “you just reminded me. Anyway, thanks for everything, Herb, we’ve really gotta be going—I’m cooking tonight.”
“Don’t mention it, not at all,” Herbert says as Marjorie helps him rise from the loam-toned rug and all make their way to the door, “Not at all. Cooking, are you? You’re cooking? Marge, d’you hear that, Matt here is cookin’. A modern marriage, no less, a nodern larriage!”
Male and female, moans and giggles drift down from the upper reaches of the house.
Marjorie’s smile becomes so all embracing as to suggest imminent beatification, her eyes refusing all but the worldly trouble of a flaw in her manicure, at which her fingers nervously pick, and she recedes from the doorstep farewells to send a cry toward whatever heaven exists somewhere at the top of the stairs.
“Ms. Wolff,” she calls in a voice bright but perilously thin and creaky, as if weakened with rust. ”Ms. Wolff?” To no reply, she tries again, in that voice that has a rusted toy’s insistent gaiety, still, and hope, “Ms. Wolff? Are the boys disturbing you, Ms. Wolff? Maybe we should start dinner now, Ms. Wolff, what d’you think?”
Rustlings, laughter, soft closing of a door, a sultry female voice. “Be right down, Marge.”
And Herbert meanwhile saying, “Good, then, I’ll plan on meeting you and Tim at the Eyrie this Friday, Matthew? Excellent, this Friday, the Eyrie. Excellent. Good. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.” And Herbert’s drunken hand patting Sarah’s shoulder, slipping down to squeeze her buttocks. She angles away, saying nothing: Herbert is so weighted with bourbon, he can barely stand upright alone.
Then bumping down the back roads toward town. A silence, into which Sarah finally says, ‘Tm going to talk to Rosita on Monday. I wonder if it isn’t bothering them, some of them, that Gardiner recommended me to Poundstone to do the illustrations. That somebody else didn’t get to do it. I got so upset with you today–maybe I’m really upset about other stuff, like at work. In the department. I feel like people are saying stuff about me in some language I don’t know. But why? I studied with these people. I’ve worked with them for a year—it feels like they’re, I don’t know, like they’re my enemies.”·
“Look, Poundstone was a friend of Gardiner’s—no one in that department would’ve risked working with a friend of his. You know every single little one of them couldn’t wait to spit on Gardiner’s grave, and he would’ve done a happy fandango on theirs if he’d had the chance. Why would they mind?” He had the window down and his left hand out, free for the moment of the task of steering the car. His voice brushed as lightly, restlessly over her worries as the wind rushed across his hand.
“Who knows? They might still resent that I got it. Or something. Something funny’s going on there.” Matthew saw her staring through the darkness at the hillsides speckled with unfamiliar houses, as if in one of them rested the one who could answer her question. She sighed. “Anyway, thanks for getting us out of there. You sure did it quick enough—you jumped up like Herbie’d dumped a bucket of water on your head.”
Tighter curves and bends in the road, headlights on the trunks of trees. Matthew brought his left hand back to the steering wheel, frowned.
“Talk about drunk,” Sarah was saying. “Let’s never go over there again, okay?” She shifted in her seat, as if Herbert’s fat, kneading fingers were about to assault her again. “I don’t mind playing tennis with them once in a while, but if Herbert’s going to–going to do dog imitations every time he has a few, 1 don’t think I can take it.”
Mournful music, a man growling beneath a hollow tree, growling and snapping, drowning his adversary in the nearest stream—Concentrate. Steer the car, just watch the road.
“—Especially when he gets drunk so fast. Probably so he doesn ‘t have to deal with what’s going on upstairs.”
What’s going on upstairs, Noise, Darkness, Easy to get lost here, lose the road, Follow, uphill then down, follow the scudding leaves of autumn, abroad in autumn looking for shelter, close the window, hum of tires on narrow road, throaty hum, range of noises from soft purr to throaty growl. Uphill upstairs
Connect. “What d’you mean, what’s going on upstairs?”
“I mean Lila and the boys, dummy, didn’t you notice? The noise upstairs? I think Marge must know about Lila and the boys, I can’t imagine why she doesn’t just fire her,”
Simple problem, simple solution, Away from curved roads, hollow trees toward stronger lights, vigilant troops of houses, straighter ranks of streets, Almost home, almost home safe in the well-lit rows, Everything as it was. Reaching out to hold the firmness of her knee, “Maybe it isn’t so simple, Sar, Maybe Marge can’t fire her, maybe old Herb won’t let her,”
Sarah responded with a hand lightly stroking his, as if mopping up an overflow of imagination, “My God, you think, Herbert and the boys are sharing Lila?” She paused, “Maybe,” And then she laughed, “Well, if it’s true, it just goes to show you never know what goes on in other people’s houses,”
”Nope,” he said, “you never do.”
Perhaps because of the darkness, or a certain amount of fatigue, or perhaps distraction, there was a moment as he opened the door when he thought he saw on the chair in the front hall the figure of an old man slumped inside a too large raincoat. No. Only some clothes Sarah had thrown there, to bring to the dry cleaner’s shop.
Sarah walked past him and into the kitchen. “Boy, do I ever not feel like cooking. What do you think? Burgers and a salad? Honey?”
“—in a minute. I, I’m just going to put some stuff away.” He carried the clothes back upstairs, and as he entered the bedroom heard the raccoon movi ng uneasily, persistently, in the crawl space. He made no move to open the crawl space door; instead, he sat down on the edge of the bed and, holding tightly to the bundle of Sarah’s clothes, only listened. When he finally rose to go downstairs his arms were stiff from clinging to the bundle.
Nothing he’d learned as he sat the library that morning indicated a best course of action, so that later that night when he woke to the sound of his key fumbling in the lock, the sound of the door scraping open, the sound, the sound from the dream that wasn’t a dream that the sound didn’t come from—when he woke up to the sound of the raccoon that was also the sound of his dream, he could think of nothing else to do but what he’d done before.
He brought it food. He decided, as he unlocked the crawl space door, to keep it open, to see the animal, make some sort of contact with it. But after a few minutes of crouching near the bowls, peering into that dim wedge of space that gave out no sign of the animal except the merest flicker of movement behind the broken vase, he gave this up. What would it accomplish? He didn’t want the damned thing for a pet, for God’s sake. He stood in the dark room, feeling exhausted and helpless. No point in returning to bed, only to listen: he had to think of something to do. Go down to the kitchen and get a glass of milk, quieter there, think there.
And the kitchen was quieter, if not still; even here he could hear the animal moving in the crawl space, could hear nothing else.
Well, what do you want me to do, buy a gun and go up there and shoot it?
Don’t be ridiculous. That’s awful.
Of course it was awful. Civilized people don’t do things like that. An animal, for God’s sake, a living thing. Yeah, so were roaches and tomatoes. Nobody thinks twice about poisoning roaches, nobody thinks it’s inhumane to slice a tomato, law of nature, eat and be eaten. Valuable flesh, edible pelt—no, valuable pelt, the website said, edible flesh.
Matthew drank his milk, rubbed his eyes. No one’s talking about that, for God’s sake, just getting it out of there, making it leave. Practical information, she’s right, need some practical information. Meanwhile, what? Sit here all night?
He placed his empty glass in the sink. He could think of no place else in the house he wanted to go. He left the kitchen, was halfway up the stairs when he realized how much louder the noise was here. And so he turned around, headed back down. Saw the old man slumped on the front hall chair.
It was his grandfather.
It was not his grandfather. There was nothing there. Nothing, dammit. Enough of this, get out of here.
And ran the rest of the way downstairs to grab his jacket and take a walk, before realizing he wasn’t dressed—in disgust and fury slammed the jacket onto the chair beside the front hall closet and returned upstairs for pants and sweatshirt, socks and running shoes.
And came back only minutes later, was midway down the stairs adjusting the neck of his sweatshirt. Saw the old man drooping in the front hall chair— It’s your goddamn jacket, dammit, jacket, not—
He was down the stairs with jacket in hand and out the door running hard.
The figure on the chair was his grandfather; there was no figure on the chair. Perhaps I should put it another way: that no solid, tangible object then occupied that chair is in some ways irrelevant, as time is unfixed, and as matter contains its own void.
The night was cold, but he was sweating lightly as he ran. Out of shape, bad for your mental health. He began to jog more quickly, rounding a hedge of scraggle-leafed azaleas at the corner of Norwood and some street whose sign was down and that he couldn’t immediately recognize when he heard the buzzing of a small plane and stopped.
Waited.
No impact. No flames, no accident. Everyone safe.
Panting, light-headed with relief and exertion, he resumed his pace and circled through the familiar streets, and so back home.
And he had been prepared, over these hours of this Saturday: the key sliding into the lock was a different key reaching into a different lock, at another time, in another light.
Very early on a December morning, Christmas vacation. He’d gotten a ride home, some guy in his dorm he didn’t know very well. They’d left after a party, driven through the night. He put the key in the lock, expecting that he’d find his grandfather already awake, already in the kitchen making himself a spinach omelette and humming something from Tosca. He opened the door ready to shout hello; he opened the door and found Nathan, in an enormous overcoat, propped crookedly on the chair in the dark front hall.
Matthew shouted No! and the duffel bag fell from his hand, moaned No, and went down on his knees and held the old man’s face, trying to grasp his death.
Nathan emitted a startled snort and a dank whiskeyish belch, and in the instant these fumes reached the heat of Matthew’s anguish and shock they ignited all in a blaze of rage.
That he, however, insisted originated only in the fact of Nathan’s alcoholism—a sad but safer, more spontaneous combustion. And even now, standing in his own house contemplating another, empty chair, Matthew blamed his flame only on those fumes. Nevertheless, precautions were required: he carried the chair out of the hall and set it in a corner of the living room; he went upstairs, and there, defying the sound of the animal, kissed his sleeping wife awake and made love to her.
By the time Sarah met him, Matthew’s only close living relation, beside his brother, Eddie, was his grandfather, Nathan: immigrant, retired grocer, tirelessly determined man. Arrived penniless in the United States, he’d become a modest success here, raising up his head in the damp grey confusion of Ellis Island without a word of English to describe what he felt but deciding there, at that moment, wrapped in a great wonder streaked with confusion and loss, that both this land and its language would be his. He had taught himself the strange new tongue by means of incessant conversation and reading any printed matter that came to hand, translating all things—from newspapers to the labels on wooden boxes of beans—out of fruit-stained copies of Russian-English and Yiddish-English dictionaries. He would, moreover, speak nothing but English to his grandsons when he came to live with them, for by then he had forgotten as much as he could of the languages of his youth (considering them symbols of a distant past to which he had no interest in returning), and had become both deeply patriotic toward his adopted country and vain of his command of English—which he allowed to march, however, only on subjects of the present, or of future times. Nathan, for instance, never referred to his eldest son, Louis, after receiving word of his death in Vietnam. Nor did he speak of his wife, who died some four years later, leaving him his younger son, Paul, and soon, Paul’s wife and then their children.
Quite as talkative and combative as his father, Paul was yet obedient enough to collude with Nathan in smothering the past in a pillow of silence. Pictures were removed from walls, the names of the dead excised from the family vocabulary. In so doing, Nathan paid full tribute to the potency of words, their ability to make the past breathe or cry out in pain—and so he persevered. Like Lot, Nathan set his sturdy body on a course across the desert to the future, and did not look back.
In due course, Paul became a professor of sociology at Trinity College in Hartford, and the father of Matthew and Eddie. Nathan’s love for and pride in his remaining son was loud, unremitting and genuine; Paul’s affection and respect for his ruddy, flamboyant father was as deep in him as bone: they saw one another every two weeks, after Paul moved to Connecticut, and throughout each visit they raged at one another steadily, inventively, and at impressive volume. The texts were various: whether or not Nathan should remarry (Paul thought yes, Nathan no. The same battle was waged over several women ), what kind of new car Paul should buy, how many coins Nathan should press into the grimy palms of his grandsons (Paul’s wife, Anita, an economist, was never consulted). Arguing, arguing, even as Anita shepherded the children out of Nathan’s over-heated house, down the stairs, Matthew could hear the two of them fighting—
No. No, dammit. Just the damn raccoon.
The raccoon mates in the late winter-early spring of northern climes; some sixty-three days after conceiving, and when the air is balmy, the year green, the female bears her litter into the world. The animals play together for long stretches during their captivity.
Playing and singing, the four of them in the car, Paul and Anita, Eddie and Matthew, balmy air rushing into the car on the way from New York, mixing with their voices to sing rounds of Row, Row, Row your Boat. Gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. Matthew taking the last chorus, piping after the other voices are still, the final Life-is-but-a-dream. In the car, in the car singing, phone ringing, they went in the car—
Enough.
Matthew turned on the light with a shaking hand and groped for the Scientific American, forcing himself to read the article he’d abandoned days ago. Forcing himself to comprehend.
What Matthew forced himself to disapprehend, the fugitive thought he willed to escape was, very simply, this: one autumn evening his parents got into the car and drove away and never returned. An Army friend of Paul’s late brother had offered to fly them down to Washington, where Paul was to read a paper at a conference, and where the friend also had business. The night was calm and clear but something happened and the plane went down and the parents never came back. An accident. That was all they knew.
And that was all: they were to walk on and on, Matthew and Eddie, in the shadow of this great fact looming desolate on the plain of their grandfather’s silence. Nathan had come across the street to spend the weekend with the boys, he was the one who answered the midnight cry of the doorbell. He simply remained in the house with them from then on. They went to no funeral or memorial service. He held them when they cried and rubbed their backs and promised them it would be okay, he would always take care of them. And he did. And that was all.
The deaths became their shared, unmentionable sickness, a virulence that grew in its own unending isolation. And because each of the three knew himself contaminated by it, he forbore, out of love and fear, from the words that might infect the others. Even Eddie understood, learned to keep his distance; his request to move back across the hall into Matthew’s room, once granted, his life went on much as before, save for troubled dreams from which he woke up soaked in urine and shame. Nathan settled into the house as if it were no change in his own life at all, or the merest switching of his bathrobe from one hook to next, and the boys didn’t notice when his afternoon mug of tea was filled instead with schnapps. Nathan changed no established routine of the household.
The pattern of Matthew’ s life suffered only the subtlest of internal changes, hardly detectable at all.
All things considered, the arrangement of the family, thus modified, worked quite well.
Nathan was then a stout and still vigorous man beneath whose loudness of clothing and voice lay immense good sense and quiet concern for the well-being of his grandsons. He did what he could for them, taught them what he thought was right, and acted in accordance with his own beliefs. Thus, he never spoke to his grandsons about missing his own house or his independent life, and managed to prevent them from visiting their mother’s Cleveland relatives because they refused to abide by his injunction of silence regarding his dead son and their own dead daughter, Anita.
Nathan was father to Matthew and Eddie as he had been to his own sons: generous with discipline and criticism, unstinting with praise and affection. Matthew and Eddie made their beds, did their homework. Nathan took them to Yankees games, fascinated them with the great ball of string he’d saved, provided for their futures. He arm-wrestled with them and taught them how to buy fruit, cook good plain meals, play gin rummy. He encouraged them to love learning, exercise their bodies, respect themselves, and reverence what he called ‘The Divine Spark in Every Living Creature, Even Putzes’. A believer who had no use for organized religion, he nevertheless made sure they showed up as usual for instruction at the synagogue, and set for them an example of delight in friends, humor, imagination , and taking care of others. He instructed them in the arts of ironing shirts, driving a car, pitching a ball, opening a savings account, and tallking to the parents of a date. He read to them, listened to them, and knew most of their worries, all their triumphs and friends. His greatest defect as a parent was his refusal to let them mourn or have a history.
Thus the boys grew, like the herbs Nathan kept in glass jars on the kitchen window sill, their fragrant heads casting shadows on his enormous ball of string—like those plants growing only in water, so grew Matthew and Eddie. Flourishing, unanchored.
next, 28 September
previous, 27 September
The Nature of Things 