David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

Barbara came by this afternoon—she has a cottage in Katonah—and we sat out on the deck in the sunshine. She told me Rick and Kenny were on the outs again, though of course with those two…Anyhow, Kenny was in Chicago for six months, to put together the Lyric Opera’s production of The Balcony —who knew they’d made that into an opera? Twelfth Night , she said, had gone swimmingly. Rick had camped it up as only Rick could do, faking the parts he was sketchy on, and the audience loved him—not to say they hadn’t loved me. This was when I told her about my little bullshit epiphany in the Frankfurt airport.

“I can’t hear this,” she said. “You’re just feeling sorry for yourself. Use it.”

“Actually, I’m happy to be out of it all.”

She put her glass down. “You are, aren’t you? You prick. I always thought you’d go down with the ship. This isn’t about our little friend, I trust? You have to come to my gentleman’s club. You could still pass for a gentleman if you got your face fixed.”

“Just tell me when,” I said.

I made sure she got out of the driveway all right—we’d both been drinking the summer’s last gin and tonics, and this house sits right on a blind curve—and then walked out the sliding doors to the deck again. The air was getting chilly; going to need that jacket. The sun hung just above the trees, soon to turn the lake and sky orange, soon to be gone. And then the stars. You don’t imagine, do you, that anyone’s watching us, our love scenes and death scenes, and thinking, I see you what you are . But this has nothing to do with anything: I have my clothes to pack for tomorrow, the books I brought, the DVDs, computer, have to clean the bathroom, wash the last dishes, just a million million little things.

Every Christmas Eve, my father used to drive us down to Uncle Wayne and Aunt Phyllis’s house: a two-bedroom box in a subdivision backed up against the Connecticut Turnpike. They didn’t have kids, but they tethered an inflatable snowman in the yard: their cramped living room, with twin plaid recliners, velour couch and a braided rug, smelled of cigarettes and their fat cocker spaniel. I remember asking my mother, as we were loading gifts into the trunk for them and Grandpa Davenport, how come we always had to go there . “I know,” she said, “but it’s only once a year. Be thankful you’re not the Christ Child.” She nodded at the life-sized crèche on our neighbors’ lawn and said, “What a dump.”

Yet here I was at forty-three, divorced and living in Wayne’s house. He’d had to put Phyllis in a home—she no longer recognized him or knew her own name—and he’d driven to Arizona in pursuit of a brassy-haired widow he’d met at Mohegan Sun. “Just pay the lights and the cable and we’re good,” he told me. “Somebody might as well be in there.” So spoke the voice of Christian charity. Surely , I emailed my mother, an unseen hand is at work . She wrote back: God is not mocked , followed by a frowny face.

—

I’d come back to Connecticut just once after college, to stand with my mother and Wayne—Phyllis was already a liability in public—at the veterans’ cemetery in Middletown. My mother sold our house in West Hartford, bought a condo in Santa Barbara and told me she wanted her ashes scattered in the Pacific: better to end up among the sharks and the oil slicks than among the military.

I was a graduate student when Sarah came to Berkeley as an assistant professor, with witch-black hair and Katharine Hepburn cheekbones, and we reinvented the traditional academic scandal; a few of her colleagues even came to our wedding, when she was already pregnant with Seth, the flower of our unprotection. What a bad boy I was, and what a bad girl I made her be. We had a cottage in Oakland, with the old Sears, Roebuck gingerbread; during Seth’s naptime, we’d open our bedroom window to let in the scent of eucalyptus and edify the neighbors. If I’m sentimentalizing those days, bear with me. When Seth was eight, I started taking him to A’s games, and nobody gave us shit for not standing during the national anthem. My thesis (“Cattle Are Actors: Archetype and Artifice in Red River ”) never landed me a job out there—who in the Bay Area didn’t want to teach film?—but I made some money copyediting and reviewed movies for a free weekly, in a column I called Be Generous, Mr. Spade. My takedown of Titanic got more letters than any other piece in 1997.

Still, when Sarah got an offer from Yale, what could I say? They even sweetened the deal with a gig of sorts for me, teaching composition alongside the TAs, and the weekly wanted me to keep sending in reviews. Like the good sport I think I hoped to be, I amused our acquaintances with a theory that New Haven wasn’t actually part of Connecticut, but a free city like Danzig or Trieste—no, better, West Berlin stuck in the middle of East Germany. A realtor showed us a turreted stone palazzo in what might eventually become a safe neighborhood, where we could live like New York Review of Books dissidents under house arrest.

But Sarah had seen enough smashed car windows in Oakland, and those genteel towns up the shoreline called out to her: the Congregational churches, the white-clapboard colonials, the maple trees and, God help us, the occasional American flag. Besides—cue the screechy shower music—Seth was starting high school. She found us a Federal house in Guilford, only a couple of exits from Clinton, where Wayne still lived, with foot-wide honey-colored floorboards. “Just promise me we’ll never own a Volvo,” I said, and we never did.

So how long would you give it? I handed my freshmen bad grades and they handed me bad evaluations, much as the daughters of Eve bruised the Serpent’s head while he bruised their heels. I quit my column after I’d overheard Sarah at a party telling one of her new colleagues that it was “a wonderful outlet for him.” We had her department chair and his partner over, and, many drinks into the evening, I’m afraid I went off on how the money boys had run the fucking school ever since Cotton Mather grabbed his ankles and bent over for old Elihu Yale. When the gents took their leave, Sarah asked me if I’d lost my mind. In fact, I was seeing a shrink by then. You see where this was heading. Picnic-lightning version: TA, Gene Tierney overbite.

Sarah kept the house and the Saab; I kept my old Toyota, took Seth on alternate weekends and wrote her a check every month. She could have made sure my contract didn’t get renewed, but the Gene Tierney episode had given her a taste for the moral high ground, if that’s not too mean to say. Had it not been for Wayne’s kindness (pride, fall) I might have stayed at my weekly rates refuge up near the Wilbur Cross until Seth finished high school. And when Wayne came back…but this is a sentence God alone could finish.

By now you must be wondering about this God talk, so let’s get Him covered. My grandfather—a Swamp-Yankee Nobodaddy who was always roaring Well, by God this and Well, by Jesus that—became convicted, as he put it, of a sense of sin when I was in fourth grade. God must have been lying in wait for him all his life. I remember Thanksgiving dinners when Gramp would rise and freestyle a King Jamesian grace, his palms heavenward. I’d look over at my mother, who would make her thumb the lower jaw of a nattering mouth. My father never saw these transactions: his eyes were closed—in embarrassment, I first assumed. He was a VP at Pratt & Whitney and paid to stash Gramp in a trailer near Wayne and Phyllis. But by God’s grace, he too was convicted of sin—though afterward he still didn’t mind working for a defense contractor—when he was about the age I am now. My mother called it “the Curse of the Davenports.” This was the one thing I couldn’t talk about with my shrink—unlike, say, my sexual imaginings and my issues with women. To his credit, he got the joke when I said my only issue with women had been Seth. But this kindly rationalist wouldn’t have understood my God dread, not that it rose to the level of dread. And enough about that.