The three interlopers had spaced themselves out on the driveway circle. Deirdre, putting her curlers back in place, was standing over by the euonymus bush, its brown chewed patches waist-high. Phil was sizing her up, wondering when to attempt a rapprochement. Spin was all business, standing just off the granite porch step; I handed him the money. The sepia bills looked worthless, with their rather supercilious engraved visage. Spin glanced at the welders but did not count them; he tucked the lot into his side coat pocket, taking care to smooth the pocket flap. He was jumping the season with a light checked sports jacket and dove-gray pegged slacks. He debonairly sniffed the air. “Next time we see you,” he promised, “the grass will be green.”
Phil pleaded with the back of Deirdre’s head, “You get good value, honest. Without us you’re totally vulnerable up here.”
She refused to turn or say a word. I glanced at the two strong-arm men and shrugged apologetically.
“Want a receipt, Mr. Turnbull?” Spin asked me.
“I trust you,” I said. “Take care.”
“Explain to your little lady,” Phil told me, “that the world’s changed. It ain’t what it used to be.”
“She knows it,” I said, feeling hostile now myself. It’s one thing to be held up, another to be forced to give your approval. It’s true, if they were not “protecting” me, somebody else would be. I actually have a pretty good life, compared with most of the people on this planet, in these sunset years of mine.
The sea earlier this March morning wore a look you never see in winter-a lakelike calm, a powdery blue so pale it was scarcely blue, with stripes of a darker, stirred-up color that might have marked the passage of a lobster boat an hour before. The daylilies, in a rock-rimmed bed on the right side of the driveway as I walk down it, are up an inch or two, and the bulb plants on the sunny side of the white garage show thrusting shoots as close together as comb teeth. An occasional boat-motor, not sail-appears on the water, and in the woods there is a stir of trespassers-teenagers on dirt bikes, sub-teens sneaking smokes.
Last night, stepping out into the misty chill darkness in a failed attempt to see a comet that has lately been much in the Globe, I was hit by a true scent of spring-the caustic and repellent yet not totally unpleasant stink of a skunk. One never sees them, except as a mangled mess of black and white fur on the road. But the odor of their existences suddenly reaches us, even through the steel walls of a speeding car, alerting us to the hidden strata of animal existence, whose creatures move through coded masses of scent, through invisible clouds of information.
A curious dream last night, whose details fall from me even as I write. Gloria and I were leaving Boston after some event, some little concert or worthy talk, probably at the Tavern Club or her club, called, in honor of Caesar’s wife, the Calpurnia. The city, torn up by the Big Dig, could be exited only at “the top”-a narrow place of high traffic like the Mystic River Bridge. We were on foot, she leading. The mouth of a downward tunnel-an oneiric echo of the one under the old Charlestown circle, or the one named after a legendary baseball player-loomed confusingly, like the ambiguous exits off of Memorial Drive that suddenly shoot a car over the river or into Kendall Square. She led me to the right, along a concrete walk that stayed level-one of those ill-marked gritty passageways that skirt great new constructions. Except that it seemed to proceed along the edge of buildings that fell away beside me, on the right, dizzyingly. Gloria moved along, with that brisk impatience and obliviousness of the comfortably born, and I timorously followed along the obscure path, which bent now and then as if tracing the ramparts of ancient city buildings: the analog perhaps is with those medieval pedestrian ways around Court Square, in the shadow of the ancient gray City Hall, now a Chinese-war memorial.
Gloria did not acknowledge the screaming depths of vertical façade and jutting cornice beneath us, nor did I speak of them: I wrestled with my terror in silence. Then we came, among the building-tops, to a place where there was a gap- a dream image, perhaps, of the Mystic River-and I froze, too panicked to step across. But then somehow she doubled back and deftly traversed the perilous gulf with me and we were together on the opposite side. It was like a flickering at the climax of a silent movie, this transposition to the safe, the northern, side of Boston.
I awoke and it was not Gloria beside me but Deirdre, her lithe and lightly sweating body emitting a faintly harsh, metallic scent, her face tucked into the crooks of her slender brown arms, which were folded around her head with a silken relaxation as she slept the heedless, unshatterable sleep of the young. Perdita, the first woman I slept with on a contractual basis, used to awake, no matter how late we had come to bed, around dawn. To the sounds of her stirring about in the bedroom and then in the kitchen below, I would fall asleep again, as if to the sounds of my mother’s morning housework back in Hammond Falls. Like the sun and moon, I as a young husband realized, men and women set and rise on independent schedules.
In the many years of my commuting, from 1977 on, there were two memorable tragedies on the Mystic River Bridge. Just before dawn one morning an overloaded truck swerved out of control and hit a bridge support with such force that the upper deck collapsed, crushing the driver and stymieing the early commuter traffic, which had to halt at a precipice not unlike that in my dream; the bridge was closed for at least a year. Then, years later, a husband who had almost persuaded the public and the police that an unknown black man had shot to death his pregnant wife when their automobile strayed into Roxbury parked in the middle of the bridge and leaped to his death as the truth began to emerge: he had done the deed, long premeditated in a brain overheated by an infatuation with a younger, non-pregnant woman. To deflect attention from himself he had fired a bullet into his own abdomen, perhaps more painfully than he had intended. His suicide note admitted nothing and was full of self-pity. The incident made us New Englanders all wonder, Inside every husband is there a wife-killer?
Deirdre keeps a very messy house. The laundry accumulates in the hamper, the dishes in the sink. She even leaves banana peels and eggshells and crusts of toast rotting within the Disposall, when it is but a few seconds’ satisfying occupation to switch it on, under running water, and listen to it grind such garbage away. Before she moved in with me, I had her enlist in NarcAnon, and she was initially enthusiastic and resolute, but I sense backsliding lately. Unaccountable fits of euphoria, with manically sexy and animated behavior, are followed by spells of withdrawn hostility. She is like a kite whose string is still held in my hands but whose distant paper shape I can see fluttering and dipping out of control.
The other night she wet the bed. I was astonished: I awoke at the sting of the warm liquid seeping through my pajamas, and when I wakened her-she was sleeping naked- and roused her to what she had done, she didn’t seem to comprehend. She fumbled with me at tearing off the wet bedding, laying a dry towel over the damp place on the mattress, and remaking the bed with a fresh sheet, but seemed still asleep, locked into some drugged continuing dream of her own. In the morning I couldn’t get her to talk about it, and indeed I didn’t press her too hard: it was embarrassing to me, too.
Some kids-I presume they were kids-smashed a window and broke into the barn. I’m not sure of everything they stole: Two bicycles, at least, that had belonged to Henry and Roger. An inflatable raft, not much of a success, for use in the pond, when Henry was still a little boy, and lonely on our hill, his brother and sister already away at prep school; I remember how he tried to make pets of the pair of ducks that nested near the pond every spring. They produced a chain of fuzzy ducklings that, one per day, would be pulled under by the snapping turtle that lived in the bottom ooze. Also missing were a number of the Mickey Mouse blocks- they have some collectible value now-from my old toy basket, that weathered brittle bushel basket from the apple country of the Berkshires. And a porcelain-base lamp and a folded linen tablecloth that I seemed to remember from my previous, depressing visit to this storage area, which had claustrophobically reminded me of the cellar of the house I once shared with Perdita, several worlds ago. Perhaps I had not fled her but that basement, where I couldn’t bear to hammer together a dollhouse for a girl who would soon outgrow it and add it to the world’s wasteland of discarded toys.