Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

The sky had turned a deep, dull pewter, and rain fell as I pushed the mower back and forth over the dandelions and puffballs that make up our lawn. Across the road I could hear Mr. George pounding with a hammer, the racket echoing above the river like rifle shots and then fading across the fields. With all the noise I hadn’t heard the car pull in the drive. Meagan and Mr. Boyd came running across the lawn with sections of newspaper held over their heads. Never a thin man, Joe Boyd had gained weight without seeming any fatter, just bulkier and more imperial, and he called my name in his rolling stentorian voice as he struggled across the yard.

“Tony, my boy!” he called, slipping.

I offered my hand to Joe.

“Good to see you,” he said. He held my hand in his grip as he looked around. “So this is it, huh?”

Meagan tugged my sleeve.

“Daddy has some bags in the trunk,” she said. She looked at me, and then out across the road. The rain fell in pellets that bounced and exploded over the asphalt. “God, it’s raining. I wish it wasn’t raining.”

“You’re known for your shitty weather out here,” Mr. Boyd said, “but it keeps everything green, I guess.”

Just then Jimmy and his gang pulled into the gravel drive.

“Hey, monsoon season,” he said, huddling around the woman I presumed was Naga, holding a coat over her and a dark-skinned, squalling baby.

“Jimmy, Jimmy!” Meagan screamed, hugging him, then stepping back. “Let me look,” she said, then collapsed toward him again.

Jimmy was a sweet-looking kid with reddish hair and the sort of sparse moustache I’ve always associated with young guys in the military — just a little disturbance above his lip. He was twenty-five, soon to be twenty-six. Joey, the baby, was wrapped in a bundle of blankets, his bawling face pinched tight. “He’s hungry, “ Jimmy said, taking the baby from Naga. His wife was young, eighteen I guessed, though she might have been younger than that, and her skin was as smooth and brown and lustrous as a chestnut — darker than the average Filipino woman. Her hair was long and coal black. Her lips were wide and kind of flat, purplish in color, with the distant sensual pout of a child still in a daze, just waking from a dream. I won’t try to mimic the way she spoke, but her manner was polite and formal, peppered with odd Americanisms. Throughout the visit she called me Anthony, and when she called Mr. Boyd “Father” it sounded honorific. She didn’t talk much, but she liked to say “honey” a lot, as in “Jimmy, honey” or “Good morning, honey,” so that I wondered if the word “honey” had some twittering musical similarity to a word or sound in Tagalog.

We pushed into the entryway and I gathered an armload of wet coats.

“Jimmy,” Mr. Boyd called.

“Joe,” Jimmy said. “Dad.”

The two men shook hands, and kept shaking them, like strangers with little to say, strangers who cling to each other in an oddly intimate manner, trying to remember an old connection.

Everything lapsed awkwardly into silence.

“This is Naga,” I said. “Jimmy’s wife.”

“And this is Joey,” Jimmy said. “Joe Junior.”

I’m not sure he or anyone else caught his slipup, and I was happy to let it ride, a nervously misplayed note at a recital. Jimmy pulled the blanket away from his son’s face, and our little group huddled closer, gathering in a circle, but it was hard to adore such a disconsolate, wailing baby, and after a moment of embarrassed stammering Jimmy sent Naga off to the kitchen to warm a bottle of formula. The rest of us sat in the living room, and I thought how pleasant it was to hear other voices in the house. So far, it had only been Meagan and I and the mute voices of the past, those little evidences, like the crayon stick figures, that someone had lived here before us. I’d never owned a house and was a little mystified, surprised that anyone could manage. I tended to read these traces of the past as if there were affidavits from the previous owner, affirming, under oath, that he’d actually made it. I found myself listening to these new voices for reassurance, too, and although, at the moment, I couldn’t really hear what anyone was saying, the music of the conversation was more than enough: Mr. Boyd’s booming bass, Meagan’s rising melody, Jimmy’s percussive babbling to the baby, and the din of the rain outside, thrumming against the windows. I offered to light a fire and Meagan said that would be nice. I brought in logs from the tarp-covered rick in back of the house and chopped kindling and got a rip-roaring fire started. “How about music?” I asked. And when no one answered I put on a Brahms sonata that was a little mournful, Germanic and dirgelike. I worried that Mr. Boyd or Jimmy might find my choice pretentious, but as the first heavy strains lifted into the room, it seemed to fit the weather and the fact that I was there, in my own house, with my wife and these guests, sitting before a big fire. The flames licked up into the flue, the logs crackled, the rain fell and tapped against the roof, the cello and piano approached each other tentatively, and I felt warm and enclosed.

“So,” Joe said. “Theater arts?”

“It’s a job for now,” Meagan said.

“You still acting?” Jimmy said, chucking the baby under the chin. He said to Naga, “Meagan’s an actress — or used to be, sounds like.”

“She still is,” I said.

“Those who can’t do, teach,” Jimmy said.

“And those who can’t teach. .,” Joe said.

“Teach gym, ha ha,” Meagan said, playing her part in the routine like a seasoned trouper.

“That’s what they say,” Jimmy said.

Meagan smiled, then frowned, then looked at her brother. “If you’d write to me every once in a while you’d know what’s going on.”

“What do you teach them?” Mr. Boyd said.

“I do write,” Jimmy said. “Just I don’t ever have stamps.”

“The college puts on two big productions a year,” I said.

Mr. Boyd pressed his palms together and then touched the tips of his fingers to his lips.

“I’ll send you stamps,” Meagan said. And then, to her father, she said, “Well, come on, what do you think of the house?”

Joe said, “Nice.”

“It’s really old,” Jimmy said. “Makes me want to hear a ghost story. I’m surprised a couple yuppies like you would buy such a beater.”

“We’ll fix it up,” Meagan said.

“It’s like a pioneer house or something.”

“Slowly.”

“Good luck,” Jimmy said. “I can’t imagine Tony using a hammer.”

“How’s the commercial and film market?” Joe asked.

“I haven’t really looked into it,” Meagan said. “I’m sure its the usual small-market stuff.”

“Auto dealers and carpet sales,” Joe said, “and that kind of thing.”

____

The conversation at dinner had a similar broken flow, full of a casual bickering that, along with the Bordeaux I’d bought for the occasion, gave me a headache. The constant quarreling made every topic seem trivial, and although the Boyd clan, including Meagan, seemed comfortable enough, I found it impossible to orient myself within their universe of disputed claims. By the end of dinner I had no idea what was true or false, important or petty. Fortunately, everyone was tired from their respective trips, and we went to bed early. We got Jimmy and Naga and the baby settled upstairs and then showed Mr. Boyd to our room, which Meagan decided we should relinquish because it had a private bath. Meagan and I slept downstairs.

At some point in the night I became convinced that I’d forgotten to lock the front door and that it had blown open in the wind. I could feel the leak of draft at my ankles like a cold hand. I got up and put on my bathrobe and slippers. The door was open wide. I shut it and went into the kitchen for a glass of water and found Mr. Boyd standing at the sink. The mop bucket sat on the counter and he had fixed himself a cocktail. I think if Meagan had caught him he might have tried to hide the glass, and if Jimmy had found him he would have challenged his son by taking a drink, but with me, and whatever my reactions were, it didn’t seem to matter. It was as if I made no impression. The tumbler of Scotch remained on the counter.