Villages Page 4

  Still, without being selfish she could not have given him what he so much desired at the time they met: a new center for his life. Spotting self-love in the other had been their point de départ. His first wife had been relatively selfless, as if her self were something she had absent-mindedly left in another room, like a pair of reading glasses.

  Julia may have wandered outdoors, in her flip-flops. She loves the outdoors, site of weather and of traffic. In summer she wanders into her garden, beginning to pull weeds, in her nightie; its hem becomes soaked with dew, her flip-flops get muddy. He has to go downstairs in his pajamas to win a response. He even paddles out in his bare feet onto the asphalt driveway, not hot enough to burn in the early morning. During two decades of residence here, in this or that small emergency (a car door left ajar and the inner lights devouring battery juice, or a newspaper carelessly thrown into bushes as the delivery man careened around the circle in the pre-dawn dark, or a watering hose absent-mindedly left running when they went to bed, its sound audible in their bedroom like a murmuring heart), Owen has trod barefoot on the macadam in a range of weathers, even in some fresh inches of snow, and found that for a few steps almost anything could be borne, snow and heat imparting to dulled, shoe-bound nerves an invigorating elemental shock.

  He wants to share a dream with her. He often wakes with such a desire, though Julia long ago established a considerable lack of interest in his nocturnal brain activity. It is important to strike in the first waking minutes, before the dream’s delicate structure is crushed under humdrum reality’s weight.

  Last night he dreamed that, standing on the lawn on the sea side of their white house, he saw her go off, in her black BMW, on one of her innumerable errands or escapes to Boston. He saw her car, as shiny as patent leather, rush by and, immediately after it, his shabby maroon Mitsubishi follow, driven not by him but by Julia again, her pale profile preoccupied. His first wife, Phyllis, had also held her head in this tense, eye-catching way when behind the wheel—tipped slightly back as if in anticipation of the engine’s exploding.

  In his dream he saw nothing peculiar in the duplicated Julias, but felt something headlong and dangerous in her speed. Slow down, darling, slow down. Now several cars were coming up the driveway, which is too narrow for automobiles to pass. To cope with this difficulty, the men driving the cars conducted unprecedented maneuvers—one Volkswagen Bug, that fabled, notoriously unsafe ’sixties vehicle of counterculture rebellion and conspicuous thrift, backed right down off the driveway onto a grassy ramp that Owen had never noticed before. Another vehicle pulled a clattering trailer; he realized that these men were his weekly lawn crew. But it wasn’t as simple as that; when he came back into the house, a family of three Chinese, identically blobby, like inflated dolls or swollen gray ticks, were sitting in his living room, silent but expectant. They, and the lawn crew—morbidly tan men who smoke cigarettes while they noisily ride their mowers around and around, missing many corners and scalping many a high spot—appeared to assume, wrongly, that in Julia’s absence (she has gone to Boston, in duplicate) he will know what to do, what courtesies to extend, what orders to give. He was the owner, the host, the proprietor, the boss—a role he has never quite grown into. Born young, he has stayed young: a charmed life has kept him so. Nonplussed, he woke up.

  He wants to describe all this to Julia, to make her laugh. He wants to discuss with her the dream’s possible connections to real life. A few years ago, they visited China for three weeks—another senility-fending maneuver. All the couples they know in Haskells Crossing take trips, in the quick-closing window between retirement and death. Like children trading bubble-gum cards they swap the names of restaurants and hotels, museums, and temples that must not be missed, local guides who must be sought out and consulted. The whole globe has been colonized by Haskells Crossing and its companion community, Haven-by-the-Sea, sending out pilgrims who tread the same paths, in one another’s footsteps, eating in the same restaurants, using the same guides, even encountering the same memorably persistent souvenir-saleswomen in the shadow of the Great Wall. Also, Owen’s career in computers has given him many Asian-American colleagues, some of them as opaquely expectant and uncoöperative as the figures in his dream. Come to think of it, on a business trip to Chicago last winter he and Julia saw, in the Art Institute, an enigmatic installation of identically smiling, gray spray-painted, pajama-clad artificial Chinamen standing around the marble railings of the majestic central staircase.

  Owen imagines Julia laughing with him as he tests these possible connections to the imaginary Oriental visitors, who had been so self-contained, so non-nonplussably pleased in the Mackenzies’ living room, which had been reconfigured into a largely empty room with a sloping floor. Was the slope an oneiric reference to slant eyes, or to the slanting floor of the Scheherazade back in Willow, where he had watched many a Charlie Chan movie?

  He wants to share this dream especially because it was, under its discontinuities, somehow all about Julia. His desire that she not come to ruin in the driveway; his heart leaping in fear that she might slip on wet leaves and fatally crash. So many of his dreams are not about her, drawing heavily, as on the raft of the mattress they drift together through their private universes, upon a fraught territory left behind twenty-five years ago—the domestic confusions and commensurate griefs in the town of Middle Falls, Connecticut, where Phyllis had played, with a dramatically understated affect, the role of his wife. Often in his dreams the wife-figure is ambiguous, misty-faced, and could be either woman. Phyllis, a stately dirty-blonde, had been taller, retaining from her student days a certain bohemian insouciance, and Julia, a compact, long-lashed brunette, with controlled passages of frosting in her sleek coiffure, is snappier in her dress and in her way of moving: but both acquire in his dreams a recessive, generic wifeliness.

  Falls. Fragility. If an intruding stranger or psychiatrist asked him why he loved Julia so, Owen might have dredged up an erotic memory generated, a few years ago, in the convalescent aftermath of her breaking her leg—one bone in her ankle and another in her foot—while hurrying to pass him on the back stairs. He had felt her, like a pursuing predator, breathing impatiently behind him; then he heard the sharp monosyllable “Oh!” as she flipped into the air, having slipped on the narrowest part of the triangular, carpeted treads in her new, smooth-soled Belgians. She flew through the air for a second, hurtling past him in the foreshortened manner of an angel plunging earthward with its announcement, and then she landed on the hall carpet, lying there motionless. He hurried to her with a thudding chest. A sudden disaster on life’s stage: what was his role? Julia softly pronounced, while her second husband knelt anxiously above her, “I heard two breaks. Pop-pop.” This strict accountancy in the very pit of emergency was just like her: efficient, no-nonsense. As she lay there, showing her hushed profile, and he knelt helpless beside her, swallowing the sudden enormity of this domestic event, she asked, “Could you take off my sweater? Gently.” She added, “I’m hot. I think I might faint.”

  “What shall we do?” he asked her.

  She was silent, as if she had fainted.

  In charge by default, he told her, “We’ve got to get you to the hospital. Can you hop, holding on to my shoulder?” They made it to the car, to the emergency room of the local hospital, where a crude cast was fashioned, and the next day to Massachusetts General Hospital, an hour away in Boston.

  For the month afterwards, they did not make love, though he demonstrated love, in his own eyes, by bringing her meals he prepared, by learning to do the laundry and the cooking, and by playing backgammon and watching public television with her at night. After the month, they agreed they should try sex again, though she would have to lie safely still beneath him, and he must be careful of her mending bones. At Mass. General she had been prescribed not a plaster cast but, in the latest therapeutic fashion, a plastic boot—space-tech in feeling, overlapping blue and gray with a ridged sole curved like a chair rocker. It could be br
iefly removed but had to stay on during something as strenuous as fucking. He tried to hover above her, on his elbows and knees, sparing her as much of his weight as he could, and to his grateful amazement felt her rise to him, in her excitement, quicker than usual; she ground her pubic bone against his decisively and they came together—gemlike dragonflies coupling in air. Breathless afterwards, Julia stared up at him from the pillow with that cloudy face of satisfied desire which puts a man, briefly, right with the universe, all debts honored, all worries unmasked as negligible.

  It might have been the boot. In their first winters in this underheated wooden house, built a century ago as a summer home, it excited them both if she left on her woolly socks. They made her somehow more naked and not less. Husband and wife disagreed politically and suffered a frequent misalignment of prejudices, but an alignment in their nervous systems made up for it. She came from coastal Connecticut and had had “advantages.” She used to drive an MG convertible to private day school, through a succession of leafy villages, across a succession of iron bridges. Her school had no basketball or football team; the main sports were tennis, golf, and equestrian competition, including polo. Julia pretended to disbelieve that these had not been offered at Willow High, and that his idea of a happy, fulfilled summer had been walking down through his back yard, past the grape arbor with its buzzing Japanese-beetle traps, past his grandfather’s asbestos-shingled chicken house, and cutting across a cornfield to a playground, where it sat on a kind of artificial mesa beside the town baseball field, and killing time all day with a pack of other brown-legged waifs. Summer camp had lain beyond the family financial horizon, and the thought, for squeamish, timid, hydrophobic Owen, of living in a cabin with other boys and canoeing in a deadly black cold lake was in any case terrifying. The whole rugged, self-testing world of the rich, born to command and rule, was fortunately beyond him.

  He was afraid of the water, of heights, of spiders, of the dark, of choking, of tough boys, of batsy things. At a travelling fair he had once been placed, rather roughly, by an overworked young attendant, on a smelly spotted pony and had felt impossibly high off the ground, worse than when mounted on his father’s shoulders, because the animal under him felt less intelligent and more skittish—as scared, almost, as Owen himself. When Julia, at their local golf, tennis, and equestrian club, swings herself up on the stirrup and becomes, in her scarlet coat and round black riding helmet, a horsewoman ten feet high, he is moved to more sincere awe than when, sixty years before, he had looked up, hand on his heart, at the flag Miss Mull each morning raised at the Willow playground. On its creaking pulley it would be hauled up through the nine o’clock sun and couldn’t be long looked at, since the the fiery body left a pulsing purple spot on his retina that he feared would some day blind him. Computer screens often leave a similar pulsing afterimage, but he still sees. Seventy, he still sees, walks on his own legs, and, except when Julia calls to him from too distant a room, hears well enough. More reckless males his age have been deafened by gunfire, lamed by contact sports. His natural caution, overriding the desire to be a test pilot, has paid off.

  Considering his many qualms and the cloistered household his four guardians struggled to maintain around him, the wonder is that he has managed in life as well as he has. His only-child capacity for self-amusement, his patience in solving problems that he set for himself, or that he and Buddy Rourke devised together, stood him in good stead in the burgeoning computer industry; but even on the social level he is not quite inept. His manner is shy but seductive. The villages he has lived in have been sites of instruction.

  In Willow, by the inarguable providence of the state, he had daily escaped his house to attend the schools, whose grades up to junior high were taught almost entirely by motherly, mildly challenging women, and to walk the sidewalks with the twittering, teasing pack of girls, who could tell (not just Ginger Bitting but Barbara Emerich, with her cornsilk braids and one gray front tooth which showed when she smiled, and lithe, dark, grave-eyed Grace Bickta) that he adored them. Little Owen was malleable, gullible. He believed everything he was told and took comfort, abnormally much, from the town’s presiding public presences—the schoolteachers, and the highway crew, who from their tarry truck threw down cinders in winter and smoking gravel in the summer, and the three town cops, one short, one fat, and one with a rumored drinking problem. He took comfort from the little old lady, her glasses on a cord around her goitrous neck, who accepted their monthly electric bill at her barred window in Borough Hall, and the mailman, Mr. Bingham, who with the heroism of the well-publicized postal-service slogan heroically plodded his way up and down Mifflin Avenue twice a day, leaning at an angle away from the weight of his leather pouch, in which Mickey Mouse comic books and secret decoding rings and signed photographs of movie stars would sometimes come to Owen. If his diffuse childhood happiness could be distilled into one moment, it would be the day of a snowstorm, in the vicinity of Christmas—mid-afternoon, the outdoors already darkened under the cloud cover, tinsel and dried needles falling off the holiday evergreen in the front parlor onto the miniature landscape below, which he and his mother had concocted: cotton and flakes of Lux for snow, toothpicks stuck into bits of green-painted sponge for trees, and for habitations fragile store-bought papier-mâché houses gathered around the speckled mirror of a pond. Around the oval three-rail track ran his little blue Lionel train with its obedient speed shifts and translucent smell of lubricating oil. Suddenly—a noise that electrified Owen—the clacking letter slot announced that Mr. Bingham had trudged through the blizzard and, for the second time that day, delivered the mail. That mailmen walked and trolley cars clanged through the storm seemed to confirm the Hollywood, comic-strip version of American reality: we were as safe, and as lovingly regarded from on high, as the tiny, unaging figures in a shaken snow globe.

  Just slightly above the administrators of local order were the national celebrities. They were, indeed, more accessible and familiar: Jack Benny and Fibber McGee cracking their jokes and suffering their embarrassments in the little Philco right in the piano room, next to the greasy-armed easy chair where Owen ate peanut-butter crackers in a double rapture of laughter and mastication; Tyrone Power, his black eyebrows knitted in a troubled frown, and Joan Crawford, her huge dark lips bravely tremulous and her enlarged eyes each harboring a tear that would fill a bucket, on the screen at the Scheherazade; and the tweedy, pipe-sucking writers and bespectacled lab-coated inventors and slick-haired café-society people present in the shiny magazines, Life and Liberty and Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post, on the upright wooden rack at Eberly’s Drug Store, buyable by any local person with a dime. There was a friendliness, a closeness, in the way this firmament curved over Willow in its valley. The voices of Bing Crosby and Lowell Thomas and Kate Smith carried none of the abrasive demands of real voices—his mother’s, his teachers’, the teasing girls’—and yet these celebrities, to judge from the scripts of the radio comedies, lived lives much like ours, visiting the bank and the dentist. Jack Benny even went next door to borrow a cup of sugar from Ronald Colman. At their continental distance these stars partook of the life lived in Owen’s neighborhood, with its spindly porches and buckling retaining walls. There was no better way to live, no grander, more virtuous country than America, and no homier state than Pennsylvania. God figured at the top, the unthinkable keystone, but at a mercifully great distance, farther away than even Hollywood and Beverly Hills.

  “There you are,” he tells his wife, when he has deciphered “Here” and found her in the flesh—her frosted hair, her blue flip-flops—out on the veranda, reading the New York Times.

  He insists on reading the Boston Globe—another misalignment. “I had the weirdest dream,” he begins. “You were in it twice.”

  “Please, baby,” she says, not turning her head. “Couldn’t you tell me later? I’m trying to understand Enron—the way they did it, siphoning off these fortunes for themselves.”

  “I’ll ha
ve forgotten it later, but never mind,” he says, feeling the splash of imagery in his mind evaporate, sparkling though it was with an elixir of her, of their life together. “Never mind. Tell me what’s on for today.” Today was Saturday, his favorite day as a child, but threateningly formless in his retirement.

  Julia, her eyelashes fluttering in irritation as she stared into the Times version of breathtaking corporate corruption, says, “Nothing until cocktails at the Achesons’.”

  “Oh, God. Do we have to go?”

  “Of course, dear. Miriam is one of my best friends. As Brad is yours.”

  “They’ll be having everybody; we won’t be missed.”

  “Oh yes we will. Why do you put me through this every time? You always enjoy yourself once you’re there. You’re charming, in fact, in that ah-shucks way you have.”

  “I pretend to enjoy myself. I have nothing to say to those people. Nothing.”

  Owen’s lifework has been the creation and vetting of computer software, and now that he has closed his last little office in Boston, a four-man (three-man-and-a-woman) consultancy, he has little to say to anybody. The technology has, by geometric leaps and bounds, left him behind; his dashing algorithms and circuitry-saving forked commands, his IF … THEN … ELSEs and WHILE-loops, have become as homely as patchwork quilts. The chip-power of a thousand-dollar desktop IBM clone dizzies and disgusts him. All those bells and whistles: realistically three-dimensional computer games animated in real time; hard-wired programs for storing and cropping and shading digital photos, for editing digital home videos, for printing in a hundred type fonts; programs for playing music broken into ten thousand digitized tones, for drawing upon the Internet’s endlessly enlarging Library of Babel; programs for fending off viruses and worms and spam and unwanted e-mail correspondence. The dot-com bust has made the whole industry seem disreputable, including those who, like him, got out near the top. Correctly judging the Clinton bubble to be unsustainable, Owen reversed the course of his grandfather’s investments, bought during the ’twenties bubble and wiped out by the Crash of 1929. He has avenged the old man, whom he loved most purely of those he early loved.