3 Abbott and the Terrible Persistence of Romantic Thought
Yesterday morning, compelled as if by some binding treaty or biological imperative or perhaps The Farmer’s Almanac, many of the men in Abbott’s neighborhood rose early to clean their gutters. Abbott, more vulnerable to this kind of suburban pressure than he’d care to admit, today borrows a ladder and climbs it roofward during the hottest part of the day. The rain gutter is an apt synecdoche of domestic existence: From the ground it appears practical, functional, well conceived. But when you stand on a borrowed ladder and peer into it, you realize what a gutter is. A gutter is a flimsy trough of sludge, secured by rusty hardware. Rainwater is not so much channeled and diverted as collected and absorbed. All along the front of his house Abbott is alternately repulsed and terrified. He is afraid of falling off the ladder and sustaining compound fracture or death. The warning is right there on the top step, accompanied by a picture of a tumbling man who also appears to be on fire. Abbott knows that one instant everything is OK and then the next instant everything is not. He knows that it’s always the husbands of pregnant women who get buried by sinkholes or lashed by falling power lines. But he continues scooping the muck into a black garbage bag, and by the time he reaches the gutter along the back of his house, his dread and aversion have abated, and his eye and mind begin to wander. He sees that the roof over his family room runs flat until it hits the roof over his garage, where it rises at a soft angle for three feet or so before peaking and dropping steeply down the other side. Abbott, now accustomed to the ladder and his repetitive gutter-cleaning movements thereon, knows that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who would climb onto the flat roof one lovely summer night with a blanket and a bug-repelling candle and a bottle of cheap wine in order to recline against the gentle slope of the garage roof and gaze up at the vastness with a wine-bent conception of the sublime so limited as to be soothing, and those who would not. Of the latter type, Abbott knows that there are two subtypes: those who would not, beyond adolescence, even think to climb onto the roof with a frayed backpack one lovely summer evening, and those who would envision it deeply and repetitively, but never, ever do it. Abbott belongs to this wretched latter subtype, the worst possible. All that vestigial poetic yearning, useless and malignant. Abbott’s wife, inside the house, comes to the kitchen window below the section of the gutter that Abbott is cleaning. Her face in the window is level with his thighs, and so naturally he imagines her sucking his penis and swallowing his semen. “Are they bad?” she asks. “The gutters?” “Yeah.” “They’re not that bad,” he says, lying for no reason at all. She says, “The baby is really kicking today.”
4 Abbott Celebrates the Birth of His Nation
Abbott knows what’s going on out there. Blankets on lawns, scared birds circling the dark, the smell of burnt meat, sulfur. Somewhere a minivan in neutral is gliding silently toward the pond. Abbott is unpatriotic, unwashed. He pours another drink, kills a mosquito, sedates his dog with laced cheddar. He can hear, in the distance, the Sousa and bottle rockets. He reads Billy Budd, Sailor for the first time in seventeen years. He had forgotten how sad it is, or more likely he had never quite known.
5 In Which the Celebration Continues Deep into the Night
Poor welkin-eyed Billy, devoid of sinister dexterity. The days can be long without it, Abbott knows. He’s lying in bed beside his wife, who is almost certainly awake. These two heads on pillows, maybe three feet apart. Budd’s tragic impressment by the Royal Navy has Abbott remembering the day, nearly thirty years ago, when he learned about military conscription. His father had made some casual remark about his exemption from the draft, young Abbott had asked for a clarification of terms, and his parents, still married then, had explained. What a concept. What a blow to moral intuition. (This was roughly six months before the intuition-razing twelve-hour television miniseries Roots.) Abbott can recall the backyard patio, the dandelions, the squat tin shed flexing in the heat. He received his parents’ warm but dubious assurance that he would never be conscripted and then went upstairs and closed his door. Thirty years ago in a backyard. Abbott, lying now in bed, has an idea. He might put his forehead right against hers if she’ll turn around. The firecrackers still cracking out there, the sedated dog snoring at the foot of the bed. “Hey,” he whispers, turning on his side to face his wife’s shape.
6 The Heating and Cooling Specialist’s Tale
“I come to this guy’s house in the middle of the afternoon, and he’s home. I figure he’s probably a professor. I’m a little early, and he seems kind of startled to see me. He comes to the door holding his daughter.” “How old is she?” “I don’t know, I can’t tell anymore. Two? The guy’s arm is completely covered with butterfly stickers, and he’s wearing all this costume jewelry. Like that kind Sarah used to love. Three or four bracelets and probably ten necklaces this guy’s wearing. His daughter is just in a diaper, and she has magic-marker streaks all over her chest and legs. They’re listening to Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes. You know, I’ve been there, those long days, no big deal, but this guy looks a little sheepish, even after I tell him I have a daughter and try to make funny faces at the girl and all that.” “You scared her, didn’t you?” “She just looked at me. Then the guy shows me into the kitchen, and I see his dog, this big Lab, jammed into a tiny space between the dishwasher and the cabinet, and the dog is trembling and drooling like crazy. Just like Otis used to do when it thundered, except today it was beautiful. And I think maybe he’ll try to explain the dog, but he doesn’t say anything. So I say, ‘Your refrigerator isn’t working?’ And he tells me that it’s just not keeping the food very cold. I open it up, and I look in, and it’s filled with juice and fake meat, so now I know the guy is a professor.” “You look at people’s food?” “Hey, I don’t judge. And the first thing I always check when there’s a problem with a fridge — just in case — is the little temperature dial. You know? Like you turn it one way to make it—” “I know what the dial is.” “And sure enough, I move this huge thing of apple juice and about three gallons of milk to look at the dial, and it’s turned all the way to the warmest setting. So that’s the problem with the fridge. That’s why he called me out there.” “Oh, God.” “I know.” “I think even I would know to check that dial.” “And I know this guy is going to be humiliated about this, so I’m trying to explain the problem while still facing into the refrigerator, and I’m moving very slowly and trying to make it seem like it’s requiring some expertise to, you know, turn the dial to a higher number. And I tell him that’s the first thing he should always check when there’s a problem.” “Were you an ass about it?” “No, not at all. I was serious and professional. This could happen to anyone, and that’s what I told him. I told him I see it every day, which believe me I don’t. And when I finally close the door and turn around, the guy is kind of smiling, but he won’t make eye contact.” “That’s horrible.” “I am taking no pleasure in any of this. And he’s still holding his daughter, and she’s patting his head and saying, ‘Good boy, Dad,’ over and over. Then we just stand there in the kitchen, and it’s awkward. The only noise is the dog, who is trembling so hard in that little nook or whatever that you can hear it. And then I have to tell him it’s forty dollars for the visit. It’s supposed to be sixty — and Ray will give me shit about it — but I just can’t do it to this guy.” “You’re sweet. You are.” “And he says sure, sure, and he writes me a check while holding his daughter, and she’s sticking a dinosaur into his ear and saying, ‘Dino in Dad’s ear.’ And then he hands me the check, and things are still kind of awkward, so I point at Sarah outside in the van in the driveway and tell him I’ve got my girl with me today. And I tell him she’s sixteen and we’re on our way to go upgrade her cell phone. And we both look out the window at her — she’s got her feet up on the dash, and she’s painting her toenails.” “No, she wasn’t.” “Yes, she was too. And she had that bored-looking kind of scowl on her face.” “I know the one.” “And honey, I have no idea why I’m talking so much to this guy. I just want to leave. This is more than I usually say in a week on the job. But then for some reason I tell him what I promised myself I would never say to anyone because I got so sick of hearing it when Sarah was little, but I said it.” “I don’t believe it.” “Yes, I did. I said, ‘Man, enjoy it now because it just goes by so fast.’” “Wow.” “And now I’m mortified, too, and the situation has gotten unbearable. The dog I swear seems like his heart might explode.” “What did he say?” “He didn’t say anything. He kind of laughed, and then I laughed too. Then he shook my hand and took the girl back into the playroom before I even put away the paperwork and got my tools. When I left, he was down on the floor, throwing her way up in the air and catching her.”