David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

“Of course.” She put on the turn signal. “So who would have thought. No wonder we get along so well. Both galloping bisexuals.”

“Hardly that,” he said. “Unless you mean off into the sunset.”

She pulled into the parking lot and began prowling for a space. “Now I’m supposed to tell you that you’re not old,” she said. “Aren’t we tired of this dance?” She glanced over at the Staples store. “You know, it used to be that all I had to do was see this place and I’d feel myself blushing.”

“That’s a lovely stage,” he said.

“Stage,” she said. “That’s a lovely word.”

—

Neither Nathan nor Claudia had come to his wedding; he’d thought they’d perhaps have been tempted by an August weekend on the Vineyard. At Martine’s insistence, he invited them for Thanksgiving that year; it was Claudia’s first semester at Bryn Mawr and Nathan’s junior year at UC Santa Cruz. Martine had reserved a fresh-killed turkey and made the dressing with truffles that had just come in at the market on University Avenue. The wine was a Riesling she had discovered at Vin Ordinaire and was now having a vogue among the faculty.

He and Nathan had spent the morning in the woods. Nathan felled five trees with the chainsaw, and they took turns cutting them up and splitting the logs with the maul. As the weak sun rose higher, Nathan took off his denim jacket, then his plaid shirt. He was broad across the chest and shoulders, narrow at the waist and hips; as he raised the maul high and brought it down again and again, sweat darkened his black T-shirt in an inverted triangle between his shoulder blades. It had been clear since Nathan was in seventh grade that he would never go to medical school. Now, as he looked at his son’s strong body, this seemed perfectly right.

Late in the afternoon, the kids came downstairs flushed and redeyed. Nathan, he saw, had not changed out of his blue jeans and sweaty T-shirt; you could smell his rank odor through the scent of roasting turkey. Claudia slouched next to him at the far end of the sofa. Martine opened a second bottle of wine—they’d killed the first before the kids made their appearance—and brought out a tray of roasted chestnuts. She held it out to Claudia, who shook her head. Nathan took a handful and asked if they could see what was on TV. Martine gave him a look that would have quelled one of her students but handed him the clicker and went to take the bird out of the oven. He started going at the shell of a chestnut with his teeth, staring between his knees at a football game. Claudia had got hold of the scalpel they’d used as a letter opener when they were kids and sat slicing parallel cuts into the flesh of a green olive.

Martine came back in with a third bottle of wine. She broke the cork, tried again and finally had to force it down into the bottle with one leg of the nutcracker. “Ten minutes, boys and girls. Claudia? Would you care for more wine?”

“Would I care for it? I mean, what does that even mean ?”

“Somebody’s losing her shit,” Nathan said. “Listen, can me and Claud carve the turkey?”

“I suppose,” Martine said. “I’m a little impaired myself. I’ll show you where we keep the knives.”

“Same place as always, right?” Nathan stood up. “In the knife thing? Come on, Claud. Bring your scalpel. You can give it a hysterectomy.”

They went into the kitchen. Martine said, “I wish I had some.”

“Some what?” he said.

“Couldn’t you smell it on them? Maybe they’d share a little.”

“They’re probably just ill at ease,” he said. “I suspect Nathan has experimented some, as all—”

He heard a putt-putting noise out in the kitchen, guessed what it was and burst through the door to see Nathan wielding the chainsaw and Claudia, index fingers pressed into her ears, laughing. Nathan revved the saw to a deafening snarl, white smoke belched into the room, then the giant turkey twisted on the platter and flew apart, splattering meat and stuffing onto the wall Martine had redone in blue milk paint.

Now the saw was idling again, and Martine was standing in the doorway. She walked over to the counter, set her wineglass down and said, “You know, you’re absolutely fucking right. We should just make this a performance piece.” She picked up a severed drumstick and hurled it at the window, breaking a pane of the original glass whose waves and bubbles Angela had particularly admired. Nathan stared at her, then shut the saw down. “Wait a second, wait a second,” she said. “I’ve still got its dick .” She reached into the garbage and came up with the turkey’s neck, which she’d boiled along with the giblets to make the gravy, squeezed it in her fist and jammed it against the front of her black velveteen slacks. “Get down and suck it,” she said to her husband.

Claudia said, “I’m afraid.” She began to weep. “Daddy?”

Martine let the turkey neck drop and put an arm around her shoulder. The greasy hand left a mark on Claudia’s silk blouse. “Sweetie, we’re all afraid,” she said. “Can we just agree that I’m shit and make this a good day for your father?”

After they’d all pitched in to clean up the mess, they called Domino’s and played Scrabble: Martine and Nathan against him and Claudia. He put on Sketches of Spain , and the others sat on the sofa and smoked some of Nathan’s marijuana. He sat in his leather armchair and put his hand up when the cigarette came around to him, then watched the three of them get quiet. At one point he thought he saw Martine put a hand on Nathan’s thigh, but by then he’d been sipping Cognac for hours.

The next day, he and Martine drove them to the train. They all decided that they must do this again over Christmas. Martine hugged Claudia, whose hands hesitated and then rested on the back of Martine’s coat. But something must have been said on the way to New York. Or perhaps visiting their mother had restored their sense of perspective. At any rate, he next saw Nathan and Claudia only at their college graduations and their weddings, from all of which Martine absented herself.

At Claudia’s wedding, in the cloisters at Bryn Mawr, he saw that Angela had cut her hair and dyed the ends—there was a term for this. She’d gotten a desk job with UNICEF after burning out at Calvary Hospital. They sat with Nathan between them, and he noticed that she wasn’t wearing a ring; Claudia had told him that the marriage to the real-estate broker was in trouble.

He watched Claudia and Giancarlo perform their waltz; the groom was the better dancer, as Fred Astaire was said to be better than Ginger Rogers, though wasn’t there now a revisionist view? He instructed himself to curb his mistrust; it came of having watched all those old movies in which American girls were pestered by European hand-kissers. This Giancarlo seemed solid enough: a visiting professor of economics at Wharton. What he’d wanted with an American college girl, however serious-minded—of course her dress put that on display for all the men to see.

The band struck up “I Won’t Dance,” which argued some wit, he thought. The floor filled up. He held out his hand to Angela and she came to him, a kindness he did not deserve.

“Do you think they’ll be happy?” he said.

“They’re going to live in Rome,” she said. “What’s not to be happy?”

“And how are you ?” He put his right hand on her waist (he could feel a stiff undergarment) and fox-trotted her toward the middle of the floor, the tips of her breasts brushing his jacket front.

“Truth to tell”—she showed teeth in what must have been meant as a smile—“I’m much better alone.”

—

It had been dark for hours when he heard the bell ring down the path. Damn that woman. He was sipping Talisker, for the taste, really, and reading A Dance to the Music of Time . He got up and opened the door: not Karen but Gloria, wearing a backpack and carrying a sausagelike nylon bag. “No,” he said.