David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

Cal opened the sliding door and they walked out onto the deck: good, okay, a still-green meadow sloping down to the blue lake. On the far shore, a red, yellow and orange forest, and slim white birch trunks in among the evergreens. Behind all this, an isosceles mountain. “Check it out,” he said. “An Adirondack.”

“What do you think happened to him?” she said.

“To?”

“Didn’t you see his ear?”

“Oh. Can’t imagine. Listen, I think I left the wherewithal in the car. Why don’t you start getting us settled in. This place needs the woman’s touch.”

“As soon as I unpack,” she said, “I’ll go out and pick a frisson of hysteria.”

—

Cal got behind the wheel, shut the door and took out his phone. It said Searching …then locked in. He looked out the windshield at this tree, then that tree, then that tree: Which one was the signal tower in disguise? He tried the apartment, got the machine, tried the cell.

“God, it took you forever,” Fran said. “What’s it like?”

“Oh, you know. Oxonian. Faux Oxonian.”

“Did Il Pesce show up?” Stanley Fish was supposed to be on one of the panels.

“Haven’t seen him yet. People are still getting here.”

“He always makes me think of Cammy’s fish.” Cal had given her that mounted fish toy that writhes and sings “Take Me to the River.” A terrible lesson: never get high to go Christmas shopping. “God, speaking of which,” she said, “we’re right in front of Citarella? And I’m looking at this very dead and unhappy sea bass.”

“Ah. So is Cammy with you?”

“Yes, everything’s under control. Would you like to speak to her? She’s clamoring.”

Cammy’s voice: “I am not, I’m just—Daddy? Hi. We’re going to watch Amadeus again.”

“Ah,” he said. At least it had better music than Shakespeare in Love . “That should be fun. And Mommy’s okay?”

Margaret rapped a knuckle on the glass.

“Jumping Jesus,” he said. “Sorry, sweet, something just…” He held up his index finger. “No problems, right? I know you can’t really talk.”

“I don’t think so. But are you coming back tomorrow?” Margaret hefted a breast.

“Monday, actually,” he said. He did a Groucho Marx with his eyes at Margaret. “Listen, I should get going. You have my cell, so if you need me for any reason . Anyway. Enjoy that movie. May I have Mommy back for a second?”

“So,” Fran said, “are you reassured?”

“About?”

“Oh, please.”

“I’m not re assured, no,” he said. “This is just—you know, a weekend like all weekends.” Well, Hector and Antoine both knew to hold any packages for Fran until he was home, and they’d told the new guy who was on midnight to eight. “You guys take care of each other okay? I’d better go justify God’s ways to man.”

He pushed End and opened the door.

“Listen,” Margaret said, “my cell’s not working and I was supposed to call Morgan at, like, two o’clock.”

“God, covering your ass,” he said. “The curse of Adam.” He handed her the phone, reached across, opened the glove compartment and took out the cigarette case. “I’ve been obsessing about that. Like they’ve figured out that they’re naked, but they’re so new at it that they can’t just act like it’s okay. And God is totally fucking with them.” He pointed a finger that trembled in wrath. “ ‘And who tooooold you you were naked, hmm?’ ”

“Why are you obsessing about that ?” Margaret said.

“Trying to reread Milton,” he said. “For this alleged piece. Which reminds me—I found out the story behind the ear.”

“Really.” She snapped the phone shut. “Do tell.”

“Seems our friend used to run this honeymoon resort in the Poconos, and he was a bit of a Norman Bates? So when God found out that he was bugging the rooms—”

“Oh, fuck you, Cal.”

“He sent His fire down from heaven—”

“Not funny.”

“Ah,” he said. “If her readers could hear her now.”

—

In graduate school, Cal had played with a band called the Desecrators, whose specialty was covering Dylan songs and changing the pronouns. They’d begin sets with “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (“Take this badge off of him / He can’t use it anymore”) and close with “He and He.” Fran had majored in piano, though she’d soon given up on a concert career. She was amazed that Cal could just play with nothing written down; he was amazed that a real person could sit at a piano and out would come, say, a Chopin nocturne. He taught her to play eight-ball and to walk on the street with a can of beer in a paper bag, and he put her onto Dawn Powell years before Tim Page made a big deal out of it. He used to know Tim Page, actually, through a painter friend. And he gave her coke for the first time. The coke turned out to be not such a good idea.

When he finally got Fran to marry him, he quit the Ph.D. program and stopped playing music, like some Jane Austen lady who’d hooked a husband and no longer needed her accomplishments. He sold his guitars to come up with the two months plus a month’s security plus the fee on a three-bedroom at West End and 102nd. She got pregnant, sort of not accidentally, and they tossed a coin for whose study would be the baby’s room; she won, but gave it up anyway. Her piano students and the occasional accompanist gig hadn’t been bringing in much; he was writing a column he called Manufacturing Contempt for a weekly that people picked up for the listings and escort-service ads, plus stuff on the side for The Georgia Review . His template was Edmund Wilson. When Cammy was three, the weekly hired him as an editor, just in time for him to use his benefits for Fran’s first rehab. Now he’d taken over as number two at this online magazine, which had begun to break even; he could also write as little or as much as he wanted for a buck a word on top of his salary. He’d just bought a painting from the painter friend. His template now was James Wolcott. He could twist the knife, there was that to be said.

—

They took off their clothes, got under the covers and started a fresh joint. It was low-rent to relight a roach, like a cartoon bum smoking a cigarette butt impaled on a pin. Fran’s deal as opposed to Margaret’s was not to show her body unless they were quote being sexual: that was hotter in the long run, though this with Margaret was also hotter. The inside of Fran’s cunt was slickly muscular, Margaret’s more mooshy—even rubbered up, you could feel it—though you’d expect the opposite, for some reason he couldn’t articulate. Fran came louder, but Margaret more, with these fluttering contractions up inside. When he judged that she’d come enough, he started up the hill himself, got snagged thinking about the Hill Difficulty in The Pilgrim’s Progress , then broke through into the world of light.

After a long enough time for it not to seem coldhearted, he rolled away, slid the condom off and wrapped it in bedside Kleenex. Then back shoulder to shoulder, thinking up the first thing to say. Any first thing said must of necessity be stupid, yet sooner or later one or the other of them would have to break the silence. Would it not be Christ-like to take the stupidity upon himself?

“So would you have contempt for me,” he said, “if this turned out to make me a better husband?”

“ What? ” she said. “Oh.” She rolled onto her side, away from him. “Sorry, I’d been forgetting the context. Do you want your Zagat rating? Morgan’s in better shape than you, but you’re a little better as a fuck. More calculating, you know? Like trying to figure me out. It makes you seem mean.”