The Black Brook Page 8

  “I don’t start with the corners,” said Diana. “I know you do, but that’s not my style.”

  “My wife’s name is Mary.”

  “You should bring her to see us. I don’t know anyone in the country.” She stood and walked to the window. “The other night I heard the strangest noise in the trees. It must have been two or three in the morning.”

  “What kind of noise?”

  “Full of despair,” she said. “I think it may have been a raccoon.” She turned to Paul and smiled. “But what does this have to do with your marriage? Nothing.”

  They went out to the hallway and climbed the stairs to the cold and raftered attic.

  Diana’s hand rested on a rocking chair with a cluster of dark grapes carved into the headpiece. “This belonged to my parents,” she said. “The story goes that my mother’s father carried this chair from Arcadia on his back. I’ve given something to all of you kids when you got married. Fred got a gate-leg table, Carmen got a hutch, and Lily got a footstool.”

  Mary and Paul could put up with the mild complaints of the dentist on the first floor about the drips from their shower, but then a neighbor moved in next door who said their phone rang too loudly, who banged with authoritarian vigor on the walls when they moved around their apartment at night, and who left notes on their door such as this one: “My boyfriend and I are professionals and we have to be in Boston every morning at eight o’dock on the nose with no excuses asked and none given and thus you can plainly see for yourself that . . .” and so on, in self-righteous backslanting handwriting. While Mary and Paul had a good time thinking up sarcastic replies to their neighbor’s rambling notes, they wondered if it was time to buy a house. Clovis, Luken & Pitch had started giving Paul profit sharing, which arrived monthly in a brown envelope with cash inside. Jack Chance would give Paul the envelope and tell him not to count the money because it was bad luck.

  At this time high interest rates plagued the country, allowing Mary and Paul to invest the profit sharing in certificates of deposit with rates between eighteen and twenty-one percent per year, and so when they found a small yellow house with red trim that they liked on Neptune Street in Providence, they were able to make a down payment. Carlo the Pliers did not cosign the mortgage, but he sent a letter of recommendation to the bank.

  The house needed work, and they hired a college student who knew carpentry, charged a reasonable hourly rate, and had a girlfriend, Marcy, he could hire as his assistant. The student’s name was Steve, and he had a habit of describing any smooth surface as “smooth as a bed sheet,” and while Paul and Mary considered this a little odd, they did not give it much thought until they returned to the house one afternoon to find Steve and Marcy asleep in the sheets of their bed. So they let the carpenters go and finished the work themselves. They scraped, steamed, caulked, and painted. Once they rolled primer on the walls of a room without opening the windows, and soon they were intoxicated and singing along with a radio so loudly that when they went outside to clear their heads, a man filling the oil tank of the house next door said, “I like that singing.” Then they drove to the hardware store for an edger they needed and saw a dog trotting along the sidewalk with what appeared to be a woman’s underpants in its mouth. At the hardware store they walked mystified among aisles of gleaming tools.

  They did not have much furniture beyond the rocking chair, the cracked round table, two other chairs, and a wrought-iron floor lamp, and so they put the lamp by the windows in the living room and positioned chairs around it so that they could sit in the evening and read. Leaves pressed into the lampshade varied the light that fell on their books and magazines. At first they would trade passages back and forth from whatever they were reading He spent weeks, for example, studying a book called Corporate Suretyship by G. W. Crist, Jr. (“The very foundation of society and of business is faith. Were it not for mutual confidence, for the demonstrable justification of our belief that things are as represented to us, that we may impose trust in the vast majority of our fellow men, all would be chaos . . .”), but after several months in the new house they did not read to each other as much.

  Like many young couples in cities, they had few friends. They had gone out with Jack and Felicia Chance once, to a bar called Steeple Street, but Paul mentioned some news item he had read concerning religious people, and he made the mistake of calling them fanatics, and after the story was over, Chance said, “Actually, Paul, when it comes to Christ, I guess we are fanatics. Yeah, I guess that’s probably what we are too.”

  Mary got involved in a project to put computers to classroom use, and although there were problems — in the time it took to make a picture or article appear on the computer screen, a student might have looked the information up in an encyclopedia, taken notes, and made a little clay sculpture in art class — she liked the work and it made her enjoy more than ever the evenings when they could sit by the leaf-shaded lamp and read. Sometimes they played backgammon, but Mary did not share Paul’s fascination for the odds, and she got tired of his constant hints on what her next move should be.

  One night the phone rang. Carlo Record happened to be in the neighborhood with Miriam Lentine, Bobby, and ­Bobby’s girlfriend, Karen, and they wanted to bring some food over from the new Cambodian place in town. It would be a housewarming

  “What do they want to do that for?” Mary asked Paul after he had hung up.

  “Oh Christ, I don’t know,” said Paul. He had been working hard, and the last thing he wanted was company.

  They hurried into the kitchen and stared at the lime-green counters as if trays of food and drink would materialize on them at any moment.

  “Well, they can come over if they want, but we have nothing to drink,” said Mary

  “I’d better run out to the store.”

  Mary opened the refrigerator and leaned into it. “No drinks, no crackers, and no cheese. And I’m afraid that’s how it’s going to be.”

  “I’m running out now,” said Paul. He sat down on a kitchen chair to put his shoes on. “I have no idea. Carlo said a house-warming. Don’t ask me what it’s all about.”

  “I don’t like this,” she said. “Work is work, and this I do not like.”

  “I’ll be back.”

  Paul drove to the liquor store, where he bought a jug of red wine with a glass finger handle near the spout. “Taste this, Paul,” said Roger Oberon, the man who owned the liquor store. He held a water glass with orange liquid in the bottom. “It’s some new vodka that’s supposed to be flavored with cantaloupe.”

  Paul drank the vodka. “I’m not getting any cantaloupe out of that,” he said.

  “That’s interesting, I didn’t either.”

  “I have to run. A client of mine is dropping by on zero notice.”

  “Sometimes people call me on Sunday. I tell them, You know I can’t open on Sunday even if I wanted to. Sure you can, they say. Give us a six-pack.”

  “This is Carlo Record.”

  “Well. He had my uncle’s leg broken, you know.”

  “Why?”

  Roger shook his head sadly. “My uncle was a piano teacher on Golden Hill in Central Falls, and the word came down that all the music teachers would have to pay up protection money from now on. Well, my uncle was a pretty feisty guy, and he said it wasn’t fair because he worked out of his house and the rule had always been that if you worked out of your house, you didn’t have to pay any protection money. This was, as I say, on Golden Hill, and music was very popular in that whole neighborhood, and my uncle I guess became a sort of test case. If he didn’t pay, then nobody would have to pay. So anyway, they broke his leg.”

  “You would think his hands.”

  “That’s what everybody says.”

  “Did he go to the police?”

  “No, the hospital. Then he started paying. It wasn’t even that muc
h but just the principle of it.”

  Paul drove back to Neptune Street, where Carlo’s black Crown Victoria sat in front of the house. Neptune was a narrow street, and whoever was driving the Crown Vic had pulled the passenger-side tires up on the grass to give other cars room to squeeze past. Paul drove into the driveway and walked across the yard. It was early summer. He could hear frogs and the thumping of a car stereo. Figures moved past the windows of the house, and even though he wished the Records had not showed up, he felt proud as he went inside. In the living room, Bobby’s girlfriend was on the floor, going through their LPs.

  “You have one good album,” she said. “Janet Jackson. The rest you could throw away. Johnny Mathis! Hey, Bobby, didn’t Johnny Mathis used to be on the Dean Martin show or something?”

  “I don’t think he was a regular,” said Bobby. He sat by the leaf-shade lamp looking at the back cover of the book Paul had been reading. It concerned the latest theories on photon behavior, and Paul did not understand it, but he would sit in the bathtub reading it, and he had come to think of the sound of water running into the bathtub as the sound of his brain trying to understand what photons were and what they did.

  Paul introduced himself to Karen.

  “We brought spring rolls,” she said.

  “Karen’s my girlfriend,” said Bobby. He put the book down.

  “Where’s Carlo?” said Paul.

  Karen examined a rich green album by the saxophonist Gato Barbieri. She had a straight red nose and a matter-of-fact set to her lips. “He and Miriam are in the kitchen with your lady.”

  Paul walked through the house carrying the wine in a paper bag. Carlo wore a black turtleneck and a medallion with a transparent stone in the center. The sleeves of his sweater were pushed up, revealing both his good arm and his putty-colored synthetic arm. He rummaged through the cupboard. “I’m going to show you how to make Cambodian food taste better than it does even in Cambodia,” he said. ‘And that is cayenne.”

  “I couldn’t vouch for the freshness of that,” said Mary.

  “Not to worry” said Carlo. He unscrewed the lid of the spice jar and tapped it gently over open white take-out boxes with the wire handles folded down. Then he shook it. “Tell Paul about the housewarming present.”

  “It’s under the stove,” said Miriam Lentine.

  “You didn’t need to do that,” said Paul.

  “Check under the stove,” said Carlo.

  Paul knelt. Six inches separated the bottom of the stove and the floor, and he could see only dust and darkness.

  “It’s a —” said Mary

  “Don’t give it away, honey,” said Miriam.

  “I can’t see anything,” said Paul.

  Carlo stirred the food with a wooden spoon. “Let’s just tell him,” he said. “Here we are, having fun, while Paul crawls on the floor.”

  “It’s a cat,” said Mary. She smiled helplessly. “They brought a cat for us, Paul.”

  “It’s a kitten, really,” said Miriam. “Not even six weeks old. Frankly, it’s early to take it from its mother.”

  Paul stood and brushed off his knees. “Why is it under the stove?”

  Miriam laughed, her arms full of plates. “Running under the stove is what cats do. You have a lot to learn. They’re afraid and so they seek shelter.”

  They ate their food on the cracked table in the dining room. Carlo had added way too much cayenne to everything except the spring rolls, and their faces blanched and perspired.

  “I think you overdid it, little man,” said Miriam.

  Carlo laughed but seemed to be suffering more than anyone. “I like mine spicy,” he said, swiping at his eyes with a black handkerchief.

  “Why did you do this to us, Dad?” said Bobby.

  “Then don’t eat it,” said Carlo.

  “It is too darned hot,” said Karen.

  “Then don’t eat it.”

  Paul took a drink of water and asked where the cat had come from.

  “Miriam and I got it from a place out in Foster,” said Bobby. “We drove out there this afternoon. They had seven crosseyed cats.”

  “It’s because they’re too young,” said Miriam Lentine. “Their eye muscles aren’t developed to where they should be.”

  Later they sat in the living room, where Carlo admired a picture that Mary had painted. It was a daunting copy of a portrait of Charles I by Anthony van Dyck of Antwerp. The heart of the painting seemed to emanate not from the English king but from his horse, bluish white with a bowed head, and from a man in the background who had his hand thrown over the horse’s golden mane.

  “Colorful,” said Carlo. He rocked slowly in the chair with the grapes carved into the frame.

  “And what of your style, Mary?” said Miriam. “Do you have a style of your own?”

  “I really don’t,” said Mary.

  “Sure she does,” said Paul. “Sure you do.”

  “I used to be modest,” said Bobby. “And then I asked myself, Why? What is there to be so modest about?”

  “No reason in the world,” said his father.

  Paul led Mary and their guests to Mary’s studio, a small room across from their bedroom upstairs. The easel stood in the corner and an open paintbox balanced on a wooden stool. The box was made of dark worn wood and contained a palette and brushes and twelve tubes of paint, crushed and rolled up to varying degrees. Paintings of apples covered the walls. Mary had long ago stopped painting towels and now worked exclusively on apples. There were sixty-three paintings on the walls, each on a piece of paper nine inches square. The apples seemed to look down like so many ripe eyes. Paul put his arm around Mary as if to protect her from the others’ judgment.

  “All this fruit makes me hungry,” said Karen.

  Miriam gestured toward the windows. “Do you have north light?” she said. “I guess you have to. That’s what I understand.”

  Mary laughed. “I need overalls more than I need north light.”

  Carlo stood in the center of the room and turned slowly. “Something occurs to me,” he said. “I know a man who will buy any paintings of Arab subjects done at the turn of the century. Why don’t you paint him some?”

  “I copy to learn, not to sell,” said Mary

  “Take the night off, Carlo,” said Miriam. “This is a house warming.”

  “She doesn’t have to decide this minute,” said Carlo, and as he spoke a nut and a washer fell from his artificial wrist and rolled under a daybed. “Looks like I’m falling to bits,” he said. “Time to go home.”

  It rained hard that night after everyone on Neptune Street was asleep. Paul woke up and looked at his watch. He heard the soft insistent sound of Mary’s walking around the house in rubber boots. Paul found her by the back window of the kitchen, with the rain driving down through the floodlight outside. Two days before, they had planted six flats of pachysandra in the back yard, and now they could see the unmoored plants floating slowly away. They put on raincoats and went out. The rain beat against their shoulders and ran into their boots as they sloshed around collecting runaway ground cover in buckets. The bathtub seemed the only place to put the rescued plants, and after three or four trips apiece Mary and Paul sat down on the edge of the tub for a breather. Then they heard faint cries from the kitchen, where the cat had finally emerged from under the stove. It was a black and gray tiger with spindly legs and white markings on its feet. Mary gave it a saucer of milk and lined a wicker basket with a blanket, and the cat drank the milk, scratched Mary’s hand, and crawled back under the stove.

  Mary pressed her thumb on the scratch, making blood bead along its length. “Maybe I will do some of those paintings,” she said.

  They lived in the house on Neptune Street for five years, and hardly a month would pass without Paul’s remembering the
pachysandra in the bathtub, which seemed to represent the temporary or reversible quality of many of their efforts.

  They were always looking over their shoulders, and nothing done was done for good. An old couple had owned the house before Paul and Mary, and one of their crime-prevention measures had been to cut all the sash cords, as if a burglar would say, “These windows are too heavy, let’s try some other house.” All the cutting of the sash cords had done was to make the windows impossible to keep open without propping books, cooking tongs, or hedge clippers in the frames, so one day when Paul was feeling constructive he replaced all the sash cords. It was tedious work, threading the cords through the window frames, but when it was done the windows slid up and down in their tracks and stayed wherever they left them. That night, though, one of the windows fell with a noise like a shotgun going off, which sent the cat spinning like lightning through the house. The booming sound did not surprise Paul, somehow; on the edge of dreams he often found himself expecting big night noises. He remembered the thing his mother had heard in the trees down in Verona, and he wondered if he would also hear the cry of the banshee or the disenfranchised raccoon or whatever it was. Paul imagined the solid and cumulative lives of others, plotted lives, lives making some kind of sense, where if you did one thing, then you could reasonably expect another beneficial thing to follow. What he did not realize for a long time was that even people who live their lives as if this were the case could not refer to any proof. It’s just faith, and there’s nothing to be done about it.

  The big noise he must have been waiting for came in the form of violent pounding at three o’clock on the morning of October 11, 1989. Paul vaulted cleanly over Mary and landed on his feet beside the bed. The walls shook but Mary did not wake. Paul grabbed a baseball bat that he had kept handy, leaning against his dresser, and moved slowly to the front door. White waves swept the walls of the front rooms, lighting a clothesline painting, a window, and a line of model horses that seemed ready to bolt from the mantel. Then he opened the door and police swarmed in. They had the baseball bat out of his hands before he even remembered he had it. The cops stomped around the house collecting paintings and brushes.