MARK HOLDEN
 

RED QUEEN

      And many a fish, leaping up through the waves, breaking 
      the cold ripples shivering dark will dart and bolt
      Lycaon’s glistening fat!            

                                                          — The Iliad  
           

Steven Finch ties flies.  He wraps hackles over ribbing and bucktail, cuts symmetrical wings using balance and touch, and ties the whip finish on up-eyed and down-eyed hooks.  He makes the Royal Coachmans, Gray Ghosts, and Bloody Butchers that hang from their barbed points on the bookcase, desk-- everywhere in his bedroom.  He copies the patterns illustrated in The Flytier’s Manual by Mike Dawes and, although Steven’s flies might not be perfect, they’re passably good for an eleven-year-old—a pencil-necked beanpole with no fat and no muscles either.  When I look in from the hallway, my only kid is keenly focused on a tiny hook.

“Dad?  Go away,” he says, with squirrel fur in his left hand, thread in his right, twisting it round and round the shank.  Outside his window in the Adirondacks of New York, wind-driven oak leaves flutter past like a flock of drunken sparrows.  Rain and drizzle drip from the glass.  A leaf slaps up against the pane and sticks.

Steven scissors and snips.  Bits of tinsel and chenille fall to the floor like confetti.  He doesn’t care.  His ears poke out from a scruffy nest of hair and catch the light from a bookshelf lamp.  His busy fingers put the scissors down and reach for thread.        

Lately he has begun making streamers with names like Alexandra, Dog Nobbler, and Sweeney Todd.  He follows the directions in the manual, and if he needs something special that he does not already have, like magenta daylight florescent wool, he will badger me to drive him down to Gordon’s Marine and Fishing Supplies so he can buy it. 

Gordon stands mute behind a glass-topped counter.  He is about sixty, dying of cancer, and has had his larynx removed along with most of his jaw and tongue.  We can often smell a distinctly foul odor on entering the shop, like cabbage fart or dead woodchuck.  A mint, or maybe two, popped in the hole below his nose might help.  He can’t eat, speak, or spit; his wife hooks him up to an I.V. for meals.  If either of us is careless enough to rest our hands or elbows on the counter, Gordon will tap the cash register to get our attention, then point to a sign behind him on the wall:  Please do not lean on counter glass.  He’s a stickler about this and will also slide a scribbled note in front of unwary new customers:  This glass costs $200 to replace. You got that kind of money in your pocket?  

He watches Steven browse and select materials off the peg-board displays.  If other kids come in while we are there, he is more likely to shift his gaze to them, thinking that Steven is less likely to steal than they, believing that boys are more tempted by the glitter and flash of a Daredevil spoon or a Mepp’s spinner than by feathers, fur, or colored thread.

The transaction is made in silence.  Steven plops down two cellophane packets of golden pheasant feathers and one of magenta wool on the counter.  He has roughly added things up in his head.  Today he drops a crumpled five and two ones down on the glass.  He looks Gordon straight in the eye, which is not an easy thing to do. Gordon nods and wipes the horrible hole below his nose with hanky.  He takes the money and removes two quarters and a nickel from the cash register.  He slides them over to Steven, who scoops them up and shoves them into his pocket.  Then he takes his feathers and wool, which Gordon has placed in a little plastic sandwich bag, and waves goodbye.  In the presence of Gordon, it’s hard not to feel good about being healthy.  Later, we celebrate our own ability to eat when we stop for a Nutty Buddy on the way home.

       * * *

Sometimes I think Steven should loosen up: use a feather he has for another he does not--a red hackle for a black--but he hates doing that, and won’t do it unless he has to, unless I am unwilling to take him to Gordon’s.  Then he might use pink for purple, but makes it clear that if the mutant fly won’t catch fish, it’s not his fault, but mine--the dastardly dad who will not drive.  My suggestion that his own creations and color choices might be an improvement over the original patterns only annoy Steven and his allegiance to Mike Dawes, his hero.

“Trust yourself,” I say.  “Can’t you?”

Steven flips through fishing supply catalogues and dreams of someday owning a Loomis or a Fenwick fly rod.  On weekends, he flops on the couch with a Pepsi and watches the Outdoor Life Network--a channel with shows about hunting and fishing.  On one program, big-bellied sportsmen fish for bass from expensively equipped boats with cushioned swivel seats, bait wells, outriggers, and fishfinders--or cast for tarpon or bonefish in the saltwater flats of Islamorada.

His stepfather, Dr. Robert Nichols, a college professor of philosophy, introduced him to the art of flytying.  Robert is an expert, having tied his own flies for many years.  He is, most members of Trout Unlimited say, a good guy and great fisherman.  (He catches all his fish on flies: trout, salmon, muskies, even bowfin and carp--and drives to work--when he doesn’t bike--in an old Dodge pickup with a canoe on top.)   He also makes a distinction between rod and pole.   They are not, as Steven is quick to remind me, the same. 

“Dad,” he says.  “It’s a rod.  Fishing rod.”

The kids I grew up with who lived on Summer Street--a road diving down to the Mill River and Puffer’s Pond dam and Pete’s Package Store where my father bought cigarettes and beer--would never say rod, and I say pole from sheer force of memory, of fishing with the Timkowitz brothers-- Jimmy and Bobby--and Victor Kudrieko, the four of us dwarfed by the dam and deafened by the roar of water, casting foolishly into the tumult, snagging each other’s line, feeling the cold, stinging spray on our faces--the spring water so pungent with life we could taste it through our nostrils.  

“The first pole Jimmy Timkowitz had,” I say, “was a maple sapling.”

“I’ve heard this,” Steven says.

“Did I tell you how he stripped the bark and tapered it...”

“Yeah.”

“...and bummed a length of monofilament off me?”

“You had a new Mitchell spinning reel,” Steven says.  “You gave him some line  and he tied it to his pole.”  Steven rolls his eyes.

“That’s right.”

“And he caught an eighteen-inch rainbow.”  

“That’s exactly right,” I say.  “And on the next cast, hooked his brother in the bum.” 

Steven shakes his head.  He tolerates my stories; now and then I say something comical or irreverent enough to make him grin.  Like most kids his age, he tunes out if a story gets too serious.  I have plenty of those for him when he gets older.  Someday I’d like to tell him about his grandmother, my mother Amelia, whose family lived in Turners Falls, Massachusetts.  Poor and without plumbing, they had an outhouse in the backyard and a coal stove in their kitchen.  In the winter of 1923, my mother jumped out of bed and ran to the stove.  Held her dress up to the heat before she slipped it on over her head.    When I was your age, my mother would say, to begin a story.  Once she told me how she’d smuggled bread home from the Farren Memorial Hospital.  Her mother sent her over to help the nuns in the kitchen, and one of them routinely stuffed a loaf of bread under her coat before sending her home.  Steaming hot, sometimes with raisins.  Don’t let mother superior see it, the generous nun had told Amelia.  She’d kill us both.

I’ll tell stories like that, about little girls and bread, when Steven is older.  Now I think he’d rather hear about two-headed cows or penis-boned whales.     

My father is another story, which I am not sure I will ever know how to tell.  Steven’s grandfather Homer Finch worked for himself--he owned a Lumber & Sash shop--and on Fridays stopped at Mike’s Westview for a couple drinks before coming home.  Long after midnight and guided by instinct, he bobbed and weaved like a boxer up the street.  That is, a boxer about to hit the canvas after too many blows to the head.   Somehow he found his way to the door.  Then he made it through the kitchen and into the living room where he collapsed in his chair.  He was often covered by a powdery coat of sawdust--like sugar on a doughnut--from the day’s work.  His eyeglasses slipped off his nose, ended up in his lap.  Often his last conscious act of the evening was lighting a cigarette.  He smoked Kents.  The cigarette invariably dropped from his fingers and onto the oak floor as he passed out.  Still burning, it left a black scar that could not be removed.  My mother seethed the next morning:  How could you?  She plunked a coffee cup down on the table emphatically, like a bomb.  Did you want to burn the house down? With all of us asleep upstairs?

He did not.  He’d built our house.  He loved us.  He hadn’t meant to drink so much--Shorty Tudryn had offered him a shot of schnapps (peppermint schnapps, the kind he liked)--he hadn’t meant to fall asleep.  Life was playing a trick on him.  He tried to stop drinking after I was born, and ten years later he almost had it licked.

I was fascinated by the burn marks, fuzzy-edged and black, which reminded me of  tent caterpillars, but unlike insects, they could not be picked up or swept away.  My mother didn’t dare flop a rug over them for fear of making a greater fire hazard.  Those black marks lived beside my father’s chair, in plain sight, a visible reminder to us all of his addiction.    

He died at sixty-one.  He had cancer first discovered in his kidney, so he had a surgeon go in and pluck it out.  From that point on, things got worse.  If he caught me looking closely into his eyes, he would tell me a joke or make me get him a glass of water.  He got sicker and weaker until the morning he told my mother that he was through taking morphine.  “I don’t need that anymore,” he said. “I’m all done.”  My mother helped him to the bathroom where he coughed and vomited in the toilet, then she helped him back to bed.  She came out crying from the bedroom, scowled at me for observing her distress, then went downstairs and started calling her sisters.  Five minutes later the tears were gone, and she tenderly ran her fingers through my hair.  “Go in there,” she said.  “Say goodbye.”  

My bedroom was next to my parents’.  At night, a month or two before he died, I would hear my father moaning in his sleep.  It was the saddest sound I ever heard, like a trapped dog howling from a hole.  I could hear my mother try to comfort him or shush him.  My heart ached for them and for myself.  In the morning I listened for him to rise.  The bedsprings would creak, he would sigh deeply, then strike a match and light up.  The morning I didn’t hear that match, I knew we were in trouble.

My mother lived another twenty-four years.  She never remarried, and died at eighty-one when Steven was three.  My sister Susan found her dead in her chair with knitting needles and blue yarn in her lap.  She had knitted constantly.  Her yarn held things together.  Wedged down between the cushion and the armrest, among the dust and cat hair, was a pattern for a kid’s sweater.

       * * *

A winter storm blew in the day I drove across the ferry to Vermont, then south to Massachusetts, for the funeral.  Claire and I were still married then, and she stayed home to take care of Steven who was sick with the flu.  It was a relief to be alone and to think about my mother.  I took the thruway past Randolph and Bethel.  Gusty winds buffeted the car--a Toyota Corolla--and snow pelted the windshield.  Several drivers had already slid off the road or into the median strip and were waiting for a cop or a tow truck.  I eased off the gas to keep control.  At White River Junction, where I get off 89 to get on 91, I tucked myself in behind a sand and plow truck with a flashing orange light atop its cab, and let my grief rise and fall behind that flickering beacon of safety.

       * * *

I quit my crummy job teaching English at a community college soon after I’d married Claire.  I tagged along with her as she chased a career:  first to Philadelphia for a two-year appointment where she taught philosophy and struggled to finish her Ph.D.-- then to upstate New York in the Adirondacks.

I’d stayed home after Steven was born.  I didn’t mind letting Claire try to get what she said she wanted.  I didn’t think she minded either.  I thought it was all all right.    But Claire began to feel as if someone had played a joke on her, someone like me.  As if I’d pushed her onto a carousel from which there was no good place to hop off.  Always land at work.  Every Monday morning, swinging her briefcase like a pendulum, or maybe an ax, Claire left the house while I spooned peaches into Steven’s toothless mouth, who gaped like a starving starling until he was full. 

I’d liked staying home with Steven.  Best time of my life, caring for the little bird,  although his mouth without teeth made him more like a carp. When he was just a few days old, I put him in a blanket-lined cardboard box and put him in the sun by the sliding glass door of our dining room.  I watched over him like a mother hen; paid attention to his every chirp and tweet.  Read Bill Peet stories.  Showed him the watercolor illustrations of Chris Demarest.  Lots of robin’s egg blues, rosebeak reds. We watched Disney’s Dumbo and the cigar-smoking crows to be in the company of birds. 

At night I bathed him and put him to bed while his mother, more and more frequently, went out for the evening--to see her horse, boarded twenty miles south of us--or to have a drink with Ellen, one of her horsy friends, or, near the end, to meet a lover.

She’d started coming home later and later.  Smelled like cigarettes and beer when she crawled into bed.  One morning a man called asking for Claire.  I went to get her. Afterwards, I asked her who it was.  My boyfriend, she said. I told him not to call the house. 

She’d met him in a smoke-filled bar of hunters, loggers, and prison guards: the High Falls Lounge, a real classy joint.  Romeo worked at the Dannemora prison.  Not as a guard, but in the kitchen as a cook.  She didn’t like him for long, but he wouldn’t go away.  He enrolled at the college and signed up for her course in logic.  She called security and had him escorted from the classroom.  

I couldn’t believe the competition.  Egg fryer for felons. Potato peeler.  Scrubber of pots.  But Claire couldn’t bear it if I touched her, even gently; my hand on her shoulder made her shiver.  I’d felt it in my fingertips, which I withdrew as she fussed in the kitchen, as she scrubbed the gooey yolk off my plate.      

We’d talked about what we wanted and what we didn’t have.  Claire used words like connection, passion, sharing....  Soon it became clear to me that her decision to abandon our marriage had been made even before her affair with Mr. Potato Head--baker of beans and prison wieners--so I stopped listening. The last word I heard her say was money.  I think the word before that was sexand. 

I wondered, who gets the dog?  Our three-legged retriever.  Lovable brown-eyed Molly.   

“I don’t love you, Ben,” she’d said.

“You don’t?” I’d said.

“And you don’t love me.”

Claire had been brave and reckless, like kids before they know about manual labor or sexually transmitted diseases. Give them a jackhammer and herpes, they grow up fast.  Maybe I’d been jealous of her ambitions.  Her amphibious double life from land and back to water, like a toad.  A few months after our separation I’d admitted to myself that I admired her moxie.  I’d realized she was right--I didn’t love her, and she knew it before I did.  She was smarter than I was.  She was a college professor.  But, I got to keep the dog.       

Still, I told myself.  Still.  I would have behaved differently.  I would have been faithful.  I, Mr. Benjamin Finch, would have kept my penis in my pants; would not have unzipped my fly for casual sex with a stranger.  I would have tried to patch us up, as if  lusty and ambiguous feelings were as simple to fix as holes in a leaky boat. 

In 1989, when Claire’s two-year appointment at Villanova was ending, she flew north, to upstate New York, to interview for another teaching job.  Robert Nichols met her at the Burlington Airport, then they together drove across the flat causeway between the mainland and the Champlain Islands, past open water with blue herons in the shallows and black-feathered cormorants, like ninja birds, silently stretching their oily wings.   Nichols drove Claire to the Grand Isle Ferry Dock and Restaurant perched beside wind-twisted cedars above the rugged shoreline rocks.  If they had had enough time before the next ferry, they could have hopped out to buy a burger and french fries with the skins on, or an ice cream cone.   I often wondered, after we had moved there, if Robert had run in for some of those fries and slipped a couple into Claire’s mouth.

I can’t blame Claire for her infidelity.  In Philly, I passed up the chance to work in the English department at Villanova.  I played basketball with the men’s faculty twice a week at lunchtime.  The chair of the department played with rubber knee braces, and I often guarded him.  It was easy; he couldn’t get off his toes.  He admired my defense, read my weak unpublished fiction, and said it made him think of Joyce.  He meant his wife Joyce.   Want a job? he said.  One year, full-time appointment.   Full time?  I thought.  Job?  No thanks.  I had other plans; I wanted to be a wood sculptor.  I stayed home instead in our rented cottage house and spent hours in the basement--sanding, carving, chipping away at blocks of black walnut, cherry, and tulip poplar.  I found this wood in a stump dump near our home, adjacent to a small park where a tree removal service discarded all of their limbs and debris.  Entire trees--logs, twisted roots, branches--were piled on top of one another to rot away beside the leaves and cut grass that the town’s road crew dumped there beside them.  Along with the occasional carcass of deer, dog, or bug-eyed cat.  The tree guys gave me dirty looks when they saw me struggle with a log of black walnut like a madman dragging a treasure chest with nothing in it.          

“Wood sculptor?” Claire said.  “Since when?”

"Since I found that dump,” I said. “Since last week.”

I was good; I had natural talent.  I bought a mallet and set of chisels, a disc sander and saw.  I bought course rasps and fine rifflers.  Later, strolling down the Main Line, I’d walked into a gallery.  Spoke to the owner—a tall woman with grape lipstick, blond hair pulled back tautly, smooth and hard and glossy, like a turtle shell, and body parts pointing north and south, wavering like a compass needle.  Tight black dress holding everything under control.   

“Hi,” I said.  “Beautiful.” 

“Thank you,” she said.  “It’s all original art.  I don’t sell prints.”

“Great,” I said.  “That’s great.  I happen to make original art.  I make fish.”

“I’m sure they’re lovely,” she said.

“No, take a look,” I said.  Held out my portfolio of pictures.

“O,” she said.  “O.  These are really nice.  They really are.”  Her purple lips looked like bruised meat.  They scared me.

“Will you buy them?” I said.

“O no.  I don’t buy anything.  But, if you’d like, you can try to sell them on consignment.”

“Sure,” I said.  “That’d be great.”

       * * *

I made schools of polished cherry fish swirling around stumps, tung-oiled shorebirds perched on driftwood.  I bought a black beret so people would take me seriously.  Jauntily cocked it over my ear.  Festooned it with feathers. And lost it when lowering my head over bridge railing to watch pigeons play.  I sold three pieces the first year.  After Turtle Head took her forty percent and I subtracted the cost of my tools, I had enough left over to buy a box of oatmeal.  

At last, I was an artist.  Between inspirational moments, I played basketball and scavenged in the stump dump.  I bought the tree guys a six-pack now and then. They were nice guys.  Drank with them at lunchtime and shared my ham and swiss.  They started saving the best pieces for me, put them aside in a special spot.  It was a good life--making wooden fish and shooting hoops--much better than teaching English to the dispossessed.  But Claire wanted me to want something else.  I knew she did.  She wanted both of us to be professors.  She wanted me to wear corduroys and vests from The Territory Ahead.  Yet she herself preferred to talk about horses rather than philosophy,  and was more at  ease shoveling manure and urine-drenched wood chips than in discussing Aristotle.  At dinner with colleagues and their spouses, she wilted in her seat when Martin Clark--a porky, pink-cheeked opera buff--started talking about Wagner, and Tamas Brohinski raised a glass of wine, spilling a bit on the tablecloth (upsetting  Martin’s wife Jessica), and challenged anyone to clearly define the real meaning of tragedy in the classic sense.

Tragedy, I thought to myself, is defined by actions which prevent a secondary  action to act on the primary action, thereby through inhibition perverting the secondary action from achieving its initial purpose, and resulting in a displacement of energy (physical or emotional)  proportional to the initial expenditure of energy (emotional or physical) of the secondary action to act on the first action.  In other words, no matter how casually I appeared to be watching Jessica wipe the tablecloth with her wet napkin, I could not avoid looking down the front of her dress where, in lacy white cups, bulbous breasts bobbed. 

Please, I saw in Claire’s eyes.  Don’t judge these people.  I tried not to, but with  two blowholes spouting off about Wagner and tragedy, it was hard to respect the quality of their intellect in the face of Jessica’s eloquent titties, wobbling with an authority no German could match.  Still, I tried to be nice.  Hand Jessica another napkin which I first wet in water glass.  Try not to let swelling member interfere with good judgment....  Claire needed to be comfortable in their presence; she needed to belong, at least by the measure of proximity, in the club.  I understood that.  So let the bullshit flow until we all turn blue.  Smile and politely nod.  I played basketball with some of these men at lunchtime, but on the court, a good jump shot silenced the intelligentsia, and Wagner never came up.

Claire got the job in New York--before receiving her doctorate, before defending her thesis, with virtually no scrutiny, without having to teach a class.  I don’t know how that worked.  Wear silk skirt that stretches smoothly across the bum, become president of the college.  We moved at the end of the summer.  Robert Nichols invited us to dinner at his home.  He introduced us to his wife Rebecca and their two teenaged daughters.  The three of them mocked him at dinner, making fun of his yellow polo shirt and most recent haircut. “Your head looks like a peach,” one daughter said.   

Rebecca spoke compulsively, effusively, passionately--about goldfish and guppies, shotguns and buckshot.  Seems she was a grouse hunter.  A partridge popper.  She couldn’t shut up.  No one could shut her up.  She laughed heartily and snorted through her nose. Life was a riot.  Har-har.  Snort.   I was embarrassed for her and  exhausted by her.  Robert started poking at his fish, then he reached down to scratch Ziggy--their beastly fat beagle begging for food.

“I baked the salmon in a paper bag,” Rebecca said.  “You need to keep it moist, don’t you?  Or it tastes like sawdust.  Snort. Har-har.  I think this is the first salmon Robert’s caught this fall, isn’t it, Robby?  I think it is.  We love salmon, absolutely love it, but you know, there’s so much of everything in the lake--mercury and bicycles and shopping carts--you can’t eat too many fish.  Rob?  Honey?  Make Ziggy go away!”

Robert Nichols bonked his beagle gently on the nose.  “Go on, now,” he said.   Ziggy stayed.  Robert could not get his dog to leave the table, but he could fish.  Nichols could make a perfect cast.  On the river, he waded out over slippery, algae-coated rocks.  He examined emerging aquatic insects--stonefly nymphs or mayflies--and tried to match them with an imitation, with a fly that would fool a fish.  Then he’d flick the rod with his wrist, moving the line in ever larger arcs over his head, back and forth, and drop the fly in a slow unfolding coil.  He was a fisherman, not a dog trainer.  His pig-faced beagle wouldn’t budge.

At the dinner table, he tilted his head like a mannequin looking curiously at real people. “More salmon, Ben?”

“No thanks,” I said. “Watching my mercury.”  Nobody laughed.

“Claire?  How about you?”

“Please,” Claire said.  “It’s delicious.”  I wanted to take back the Mercury joke, but it was too late.  

Days later, I drove by his house on my way to have the oil changed in our car.    Robert was leaving early for work: professor on a bike, smoking a pipe, book bag over his shoulder. You’d have to work hard to look more--I don’t know--satisfied. The maple leaves were turning red and yellow and falling, and Robert like a gleeful child weaved around them on the sidewalk.  I hoped he’d catch a slippery one under the back wheel, toss him ass over brisket.  Maybe even tumble into traffic, get dinged by a garbage truck.  

That is what I’d hoped, but things turned out differently.  At least now there are no horses in my life, no greasy saddle stinking up the house.  No Nazi riding boots to trip over in the kitchen.  When we had been married, I let Claire drive down to the horse barn by herself, even when she invited me to tag along and promised a bite to eat along the way.  I couldn’t do it.  Not for a hot dog and a chocolate shake.   I don’t like horses.  They are giant, expensive, shitting machines.  All head and anus. Women love them, don’t ask me why.  I didn’t care about watching Claire ride around in a circle on one, bouncing up and down.  I didn’t care very much about what she did at the college, either.  I never understood it. 

After our separation, and after Robert dumped Rebecca to have a chance with Claire (who was hoping Robert didn’t know about her fling with the prison chef’s helper, assistant cabbage cutter and maker of coleslaw), I bought an old Ford van and drove around the northeast and tried to sell my sculpture at craft shows and art fairs.  On one trip, the van broke down on my way home from the Finger Lakes.  Bastard who sold me this junk.  I had ten dollars in my pocket.  I stopped at a small garage in the boondocks, and the lone mechanic working on Sunday replaced my radiator hose.  I thanked him and asked him if he’d take one of my carvings as payment.  I held my breath.  He didn’t say no.  I showed him what I had and he picked out a shorebird made of butternut: a non-specific, stylized bird. (Stylized was my euphemism for big mistake.)  This bird might  have been a sandpiper.  The mechanic seemed to like it, stylized or not--more than the throng of people did who passed by my booth in Canandaigua.  He said it was better than money.  Good, I thought, because I don’t have any.  I don’t know if he really meant it, but I appreciated his help and offered him another bird.  “Here,” I said.  “Kind of like a woodpecker.”

“That’s okay, Mister,” he said.

“Go on,” I said. “Call it a sapsucker.”

“Okay, he said. “Thanks.”
 
I left as quickly as I could.  Didn’t want to see bird’s head fall off or leg detach from the bottom.   

I was going broke, so I gave up art and road trips and, after ruling out a job as vice president of stationary at Wal-Mart, went back to teaching English composition as an adjunct instructor.  Be precise, I told my students.  Every word matters.  One student raised her hand: If you get what I mean, is that okay?  I said, Is it okay with you if I don’t?  That got them thinking a little. Some of them snickered, and others sat there like tired cows.  Relax, I said.  If I get what you mean, we’ll have a party.   I felt sorry for the cows.  I felt sorry for the others.  Cheer up, I thought. Life’s not so bad.   

My office was one floor below the philosophy department, and occasionally I would unexpectedly meet Robert and Claire in the stairwell.

       * * *

I live now with Elaine Moss Burhman--former college beauty queen, former wife of a cardiologist, still stunningly beautiful at fifty-two.  She was a world-class athlete in badminton: won the U.S. singles title in ‘75 with her wicked serve and smash, and can now outplay women half her age in tennis and ice hockey.  She is strong, fast, and tenacious.  She’s a finisher. A believer.  One night in a bar in Boston, she destroyed Pistol Pete Maravitch at ping-pong.

Elaine is also a painter.  She paints trees using acrylics, oils, or watercolors while listening to opera music--especially Wagner.  Especially Tristan und Isolde.  (It is hard for me not to think of Martin Clark when I hear it.  It’s hard for me not to think of Jessica.)   Elaine paints standing up; she cranks up the music.  She steps back from her work, moves across the room, then peers at her painting like a hawk searching the ground for a beady-eyed mouse.  She sizes things up; her eyes narrow; she moves back up to the canvas.  She delicately dips her sable-hair brush in a daub of glimmering green.    

Her trees touch each other.  Their branches curve and intertwine like nerve ganglia.  The trunks themselves are massive and muscular: ripply, scaly, variegated.  Elaine makes paint the emotional landscape of her heart and creates with color a transmutation of her own thin and revealing skin.  Which is blue-veined and opalescent.  And like velvet the higher up you go between the thighs. 

She expresses her love with the same contradictory elements of skill and doubt as that which she applies to painting.  She is tender, deep, and calculating--trusts nothing to chance.  Men dream and drool, love her work because it is abstractly sexual.       

Elaine’s two children--no longer children, but young adults in their twenties--are  spoiled brats.  They are frequently given lots of money because they keep spending it.   Her son Joshua is a drinker, attends college in Florida, and shares a small house with Nathan Newell--another young buck whose mother sends rent money from West Palm Beach.  Nathan and Josh like to drink Coronas, get laid, and watch giant-screen TV.   Josh’s cardiologist father--Doc Burhman, Yale graduate and former hockey All-American--provides him with rent and tuition, a Nissan Pathfinder, and pocket money for golf.  Lately Josh has been saying that school really sucks, and that he’d rather play guitar than attend class.  Joshua is actually pretty good.  Likes to pretend he’s Stevie Ray Vaughn.  Puts guitar over his head and plays with elbows sticking out, east and west if temporarily facing north.  He also does a funny impersonation of an Adirondack hillbilly, which might get a good laugh in a southern redneck bar.  Or maybe not.          

Her daughter Melissa, struggling to live in New York City, is bi-polar.  She is part polar bear and part koala bear: sometimes cuddly and soft, other times predatory and carnivorous. The carnivore in her would like to kill the sweet bear, but fortunately for both Melissa and those around her, they have fought each other to a draw.  

Melissa has recently been fired from a waitressing job.  She thought she’d like it; she thought she’d make a lot of money, but they fired her.  Wasn’t friendly enough.  Not friendly?  Not friendly?  I’ll show those motherfuckers.  She mopes around her apartment, wishes for a boyfriend.  She calls her father for money and then bums out.  I hate myself I hate myself.  It doesn’t occur to her to move out of the richest, cruelest city in the world and live like the common lot.  (To live like me, for instance.)   She calls her mother and cries.  She wants to be prettier and happier and have more friends and money.  (Hey, I think, me too.)  She wishes she inherited her mother’s head-turning tight ass and perky breasts.  Yet Melissa herself is tall and leggy, with calves which flex nicely on the tennis court. On the street, she is cool and tough and Amazonian in military style black boots.  She has nice teeth, hidden too often behind pouted lips.  If she would only stand up straight, pull her neck up above her shoulders, and imitate the Cheshire cat instead of the hyena.  

Melissa is also a painter, but prefers--unlike her mother--the landscapes of the city to those of the woods.  Her work is interesting, edgy, and often colorful--not dark and dreary--sometimes with startling lines of highway yellow breaking through a blazing  background, careening off the canvas.  Watch out, everybody.   Life, she says, is like one big, bad accident. 

She can depart from that life at the drop of a hat.  See you later, gotta go. Then by degrees she is either sex-crazed, famished, paranoid, superior, arrogant, contemptuous, heroic, tragic, or ruthless.  After manic bouts of shopping and burning through money, after sucking on Camel Lites and slamming back gin and tonics, she teeters, totters, and crashes--lonely, pitiful, ashamed--nice knowing you, whoever I was....  

Although she is a grown woman of twenty-four, her father calls her Bobadoo.  He buys her guppies for her aquarium.  He takes her to nice restaurants.  He bought her a computer, an eight-hundred-dollar digital camera, a Jetta Volkswagon.  He helps her.    He tells her he loves her.  I wish he loved me.  I could use a new truck, or a pair of merino wool slippers.  Maybe giving money is an act of love.  Still, Melissa is unable to bring herself to spill her guts to him.  Burhman will answer his pager as quickly as possible when she calls, but it’s not always soon enough.  He has hospital rounds to make, conferences to attend about the latest advancements, the latest wonder drug, and these conferences require him to travel, sometimes on a chartered jet to the Bahamas, where, if he has an extra minute, he’ll go windsailing.  To glide like a flying fish past  women hanging topless onto their own sails.  Hello there. Yahoo! I’m a cardiologist.   

And Burhman has patients--lifelong smokers, hearty gobblers of bacon and eggs.  These fat, old, unlucky people need him too.  Unblock my arteries and give me life, Doc.  Come on, I got insurance.  This busy life of his may be why Melissa, when she becomes a fire-breathing dragon, seeks out the warm and quiet cave of her mother.  Melissa is on several different medications--old standbys like lithium in combination with others like Depacote or Topamax or Remeron, with Clonopin for sleep and Dexedrine for jazz--all swirling about in her body, sucking her dry and burning her up, alternately giving her bouts of diarrhea and constipation and melting her sexual desire. (Like having a bubo on the bunghole.)  Theoretically, these drugs are supposed to help her, in a matter of weeks or months, find balance. 

Meanwhile, we hold our breath.  Melissa flees the city when she panics and returns upstate to Elaine’s home.  She curls up on the couch, watches movie after movie.  She eats. A lot.  She doesn’t talk.  Then she talks.  Fuck that.  Fuck you.  Leave me the fuck alone.  We got any ice cream?  Maybe I have turned off the TV after thinking she had gone to bed.  How could I have done that?  What son of a bitch, what lowly snake, would do that?  Excuse me, Your Royal Highness.  She hides when the Orkin man comes to spray the basement.

Elaine loses sleep over both of her kids, and I lose sleep when she shakes me awake.  She struggles with depression and menopause and residual guilt from her divorce.  Any hints from me or her hang-dog daughter that she may need a little help--in the form of counseling or medication--are dismissed. “No thanks,” she says. “I lived with a doctor for twenty years.  That’s enough help for now.”   

My son’s presence is like a heavy stone to her.  When Steven comes to live with us every other week, Elaine panics.  She runs around the house looking for space, her huge house with four bathrooms that takes two big-breasted Peruvians all day to clean.   The walls close in.  There is no space.  Steven is coming, and there is no space left for her.  He will hog the TV, he will drink her Orange Crush, he will want a friend over to play, and then where will Elaine go?  And why didn’t I think of any of these things before I moved in here with her?  And why don’t I have a solution for this problem, this problem of my child and her space and his time and her time and mine and Melissa’s and manic depression and money and what about the future?  Have I thought about the future?

The future? I think to myself.

Steven and I both get the message.  He is becoming an expert at lying low, at holing up in his room when the volcano rumbles.  He has nicknamed Elaine Popo.   He’s a good kid.  He puts up with a lot of bullshit, with Elaine’s rants and tirades about her ex-husband.  He does this, I think, because, like me, he has grown to love this nutcase.  This maniac. This crazy beauty.  

“Why didn’t he teach Melissa to play golf?” Elaine suddenly demands, thinking of her daughter’s need to connect in some meaningful way to her father.  Steven looks at me, puzzled.  Where is this coming from?  I see in his eyes.  Elaine’s voice rises.   “Does it require a cock and balls?  I don’t think so.” 

I look at Steven and give him the signal: slight lift of the eyebrows, barely perceptible nod.  Every man for himself. 

Elaine feels unloved if I come home late from work or from the supermarket--a reminder of all the times Doc had an emergency (or stopped at the strip club to watch Lulu on the pole), and couldn’t make dinner.  She panics--why haven’t I called?  Don’t I care?  Doesn’t anyone care?  It seems to her that I don’t, no one in the world does, and she is filled with dread, then loathing, and she wants to kill someone.  She wants to kill me.  Sometimes we are both puzzled by our mutual confusion, at our strangeness to each other.  Despite the anger and fighting, we spend a lot of time between each other’s legs.    We call it going to the Y.  Maybe we need it to recover.  When we argue over something I would call a trifle--the placement of a drinking glass in the dishwasher-- Elaine puts up her dukes.   “Don’t you remember what I said?  It’s a small thing.  Glass drinking glasses go in the top rack.  They might break if you put them in the bottom rack, with the plates.  I don’t care where you put the plastic glasses, but if they’re glass, put them in the top rack.”

“Sure.”

“Then you’ll remember?  I don’t understand why it’s so hard for you to remember these things.”

“Drinking glasses go on top, mi Capitan.”

“Yes.  On top, please.  I know it seems stupid to you, but it matters to me.”

“Ok.”

“Ok, what, Benjamin?  That you’ll remember, or that it matters?”

“Both.  I understand that it matters.”

“Why don’t I believe you?”

“You can believe me, senorita.”

“It doesn’t feel like it.  Why doesn’t it feel like it?”

“I don’t know.  I think you need to let go of some things.”

“Let go?  Let go?  What are you saying?”

       * * *

In the week Steven is not with us he lives with his mother and Robert, the man who has taught him that a pole is not a pole and that a rod must be matched with the proper line to make a proper cast.  He bought him a fly rod and reel, and he bought him waders.  He takes him fishing on the Saranac River. 

I can fish, but I’m not a fisherman.  A pole will never be a rod.  I fish with hooks and worms or with a spinner or a spoon.  I don’t understand the language of tippets, tapered line, or surgeon’s knots.  I grew up spearing suckers in Mitchell’s Brook.
We--the Timkowitz boys, Victor and I--carried them high, impaled alive but dying and thrashing on the barbed prongs of our spears: eggs, milt, and blood spewing out over our savage heads.  We tossed them off in the grass, or at girls who screamed don’t you dare.        In Elaine’s home, when Steven comes to live with us every other week, I try to say kind words about the man--that whoremaster--who undoubtedly doggy humped my wife and lied to Rebecca and who smokes a pipe, whose tobacco is sharp and sweet and whose fragrance lingers in my son’s t-shirts.  

I forgive him.  I can because I have to.  There is no other choice.  Robert is all right.  He’s not a whoremaster.  His tobacco is no half bad. 

       * * *

Sometimes Steven is alone in his room and I forget where he is. Then I hear his footsteps and I look up from reading the newspaper, and he is there.  He holds up the barbed point of a streamer between his thumb and forefinger.  Crimson marabou plumes partially conceal a fuzzy body of red chenille wrapped with twists of silver tinsel.  I imagine a school of baitfish fleeing for their lives, leaping airborne above the water on a moonlit lake, scales glimmering like diamonds....

“I did what you said,” Steven says.

“What did I say?”

“You said I should make my own fly,” he says.  “To trust myself.”  Then he adds, “It’s supposed to fool a pike.”

“I bet it will.  What do you call it?”

“Red Queen,” he says.  “Here. I can make another one.”

“Red Queen—as in Alice in Wonderland?” I say.

Steven drops the fly into my hand. “Maybe,” he says.

“Off with their heads!” I say.

“Dad, stop.  You’re not funny.”

“Okay, okay.”  I try to make up for it. “That’s a good name,” I say. “Thanks.”

He pivots on the balls of his bare feet and vanishes.  He comes and goes like a deer; his appearance is often startling, his departure unnervingly swift.  And as deer seem more than simple four-legged animals, he, too, seems more than just a boy.  Maybe has a bit of goat in him.

Later I step quietly up the stairs after he has gone to bed and enter his room.  He has left his flytying light on and, before I turn it off, I look at the work he has started.   A hook is clamped in the vice.  Bobbin and thread dangle from behind the eye.  He has wrapped the shank with a piece of red chenille. 

I turn off the light and listen for a moment to his breathing.  It comforts me as my own father’s breathing did when I was five or six.  He would come in and lie down beside me and wait for me to fall asleep, then slip out of bed and go back downstairs to watch boxing or a movie on TV.  Maybe Muhammad Ali or The Untouchables.  Before he’d left, I’d listened to his labored breathing, smelled the sting of stale smoke. Or sweet smell of peppermint schnapps.   

I step out quietly from Steven’s room.  Already I have begun to imagine him growing up, of the trouble ahead, of him coming home drunk after a night out with his buddies.  Like his grandfather, who lived life as a series of blackouts before the final black day.  Or of getting a call after midnight:  I’m all right, Dad, but the car’s upside down in a ditch.  Looking back at him from the doorway, I think--trust--and watch the rise and fall of his chest.  

Tomorrow I must take Steven back to the city, back to his mother and Robert.  After I make him his favorite breakfast of scrambled eggs with salsa, I will drive him in and help him carry all his stuff--backpack, extra clothes, flytying kit--into the other house.

       * * *

Sometimes when we enter, as we enter now, Robert is sitting at the kitchen table with the newspaper.  He seems happy, not desperate or lonely, and I envy him.  Not because he’s with Claire, but for the simple things that seem to bring him peace: newspaper, chair, pipe.  Me, I don’t know what I need.  Maybe a peach haircut.

“Bye, Dad,” Steven says.  His head is already conveniently hidden in the kitchen pantry where he is rummaging for potato chips or something good to eat.  I’m glad he has a place to hide.  I’m glad it’s easier for him to look Gordon in the eye than say goodbye to me, but I hope it’s not too hard.   

“Bye,” I say.  As casually as I know how.  Betray nothing.  I pretend I am saying goodbye to a cat or a goldfish. I want to scoop him up and run away, but I know he needs his mother, who, it seems, is not around at the moment.  It is none of my business, but I bet that Claire is riding, cleaning her tack, or shoveling shit from the horse stall.     

Outside, sitting in my van, I can see the two of them--Steven and Robert--through the window at the kitchen table.  They like each other.  They share their love of fishing.  Robert Nichols is not a bad guy....

I reach inside my shirt pocket where I keep Red Queen in a tiny plastic box.  I pop the box open and take out the fly.  I jab the hook into the visor above where I can see it.  It looks good there.  Steven had said it’s supposed to fool a pike. With its bright red feathers and silver tinsel, I am sure a fish will strike, and--in a contortion inspired by a steely barbed point--be gullet hooked and hauled into the air and light.        
 
Introductory quotation from:  Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles.  New York: Penguin Books. 1990. (21. 144-146.)