Still Life with Bread Crumbs (15 page)

And then she had heard about the apartment maintenance, and the nursing home fees, and her week of peace was done. Like those things that have frightened you that are written on your body, struggling in deep water or falling off a high ladder, she now realized that she would never be able to look at her bank statement again without that cold feeling in her chest, an accelerated heartbeat. Years ago some young woman in a blue blazer at her branch had asked if she wanted overdraft coverage, and without thinking she had said, “Why not?” Not long ago she had remembered she had it, and felt exultant for a moment, and then crushed that being able to write checks with no money could be cause for celebration.

“Did you get a deer?” she asked Jim Bates, trying to put money out of her head.

“I got two,” he said. “A buck and a doe. A ten-point buck. That’s a male deer with ten points on his antlers.”

“I had figured that out from context. That’s an awful lot of venison for one person.”

“I’ve got as much for you as your freezer will hold.”

“I wasn’t hinting at that.”

“I know. But I give a lot of it away. I’ve got some nice tenderloins for you, and some chops. And ground venison makes a great chili if you know how to cook.”

“I know how to cook.”

“There you go.”

“I’ve acquired a dog,” she said quietly.

“Did you go to the shelter,” Jim Bates asked, “or did you get some fancy breed of dog? I like a Labrador, myself, but even some of those wind up in the shelter. Otherwise you have to pay upwards of a thousand dollars for a Lab puppy.”

“He’s definitely not a purebred dog,” she said.

“Just wondering. I figure most of the people you know have purebred dogs of one kind or another.”

For a moment she imagined the cockapoos, dachshunds, and shih tzus of Central Park stumbling through the forest, dried leaves caught in their silky hair, the Yorkshire terriers yapping as they turned in panicked circles: Help! Help! I’ve just come from the groomer! She tried to hold back a laugh and it emerged as something between a sneeze and a snort.

“Okay, forget it. It’s just the way I think of city people with dogs. Plus you’re famous. I looked you up. Three million hits.”

“Three million,” she repeated.

“That’s pretty famous.”

“I was well-known at one time. I wouldn’t say famous. I certainly wouldn’t say it any longer. It’s difficult to describe. First you have one sort of life and then you have another. I’m sorry, that must sound odd.”

“No it doesn’t. That’s what happens to everybody. You want a cruller?”

Each appreciated this about the other: that they set themselves exclusively to a given task. Photography. Roofing. Bird-watching.
Eating. They did not talk while they ate. She ate one cruller, he two. They drank coffee. Neither one was uncomfortable with silence. Jim Bates didn’t find this especially notable. Rebecca, having spent her life in New York City, where to sit in the back of a cab without hearing a long list of grievances from either a new immigrant who felt discriminated against or a veteran New Yorker who hated new immigrants, did.

After he’d wiped his fingers on a napkin, Jim said, “Twenty years ago I was in the service in South Carolina. I was married to a girl named Laura.” He smiled. “She had blond hair and when she left the room, if I was looking, she’d do this wiggle thing with her butt.”

Rebecca had another sip of coffee. She could see her, Laura, wiggling. She could see her wearing blue shorts and a striped tank top. Blondes always wore blue. Rebecca never did.

“Then my father fell off a roof. It was the last thing in the world you’d expect. He’d been running around roofs since he was thirteen, you know. Then this one day he just slid down, fell flat, and died on the spot. I don’t know, maybe he didn’t fall off the roof. One of the ambulance corps guys said maybe he had a heart attack, or a stroke, and then fell off. Whatever. He died, so I came home. My mother was already gone by then. She got breast cancer. She was the seventh-grade teacher at the middle school. There were a thousand people in the street when she got buried. I don’t remember it much, but I remember all those people. She was a good seventh-grade teacher. She was my seventh-grade teacher. That was weird. ‘Mr. Bates, can you come up to the board and do problem number three,’ that kind of stuff.”

“That must have been difficult,” Rebecca said.

“I kind of loved it, to tell you the truth. Mr. Bates, and then I’d get home and turn back into Jimmy.”

“You loved her.”

He picked up the thermos and took a big gulp directly from it, without bothering with the cup lid. Rebecca watched his
throat work, up and down, up and down. “Hell, yes,” he said, wiping his mouth with his hand, like he had to say and do a manly thing to offset the sentiment.

“She loved you.”

“Hell, yes. Well, my mom, you know. It goes with the territory.”

“My mother is not that sort of mother.”

“Got it,” he said. “I had a buddy who had that kind of mother. What about your dad?”

“Better. Good, I suppose. A little odd. Now he’s a little vague.”

“Yeah, I get that. My father wasn’t the sharpest knife, truth be told. I guess she married him because he was big and good-looking, one of those big blond guys, you know.”

Rebecca smiled slightly and cocked her head, and Jim Bates turned bright red. That look was one of the single most flirtatious things she had ever done in all the sixty years of her existence, and she hadn’t even meant to do it.

He flushed so that it looked as though his face had turned into a night-light. Rebecca found herself flushing, too. “What about yours?” he finally asked. “Do they get along? They still married?”

“Oh yes. They are still married. Until death do us part. Their marriage remains a mystery to me. But it was probably mysterious to them as well. Perhaps all marriage is.” Rebecca shrugged. “I don’t have much patience with how we all harp on our families.”

“It’s the most important thing there is,” he said flatly. “There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think of my mother. My dad, too, but different—you know, more business, how he’d handle an overhang, whether he’d do the gutters a different way, that kind of thing. You have brothers? Sisters?”

“Neither.”

“Really?”

“And you?”

“I had a brother named Jack. He died of meningitis when he was seven. He was two years older than me. I have a sister who’s eight years younger. Her name’s Polly.”

“That’s a lovely old-fashioned name.”

“Her real name’s Priscilla. She wasn’t having that, once she got to first grade. She changed it herself. Our mom said she could do it as long as she kept the
P.
I think my mother was worried she’d name herself Nicole or Danielle or something.”

“Do you see her often?”

“Every day.”

Rebecca can imagine Polly Bates without even trying hard, Polly Bates or whatever her name is now because surely she’s married, her light hair a little darker, her pink cheeks a little fuller, two older kids and maybe a toddler keeping her too busy to do more than throw on sweatpants in the morning and pull her hair back into a ponytail. “Here’s Uncle Jim,” she’ll say when he shows up at the end of the workday. “Take them off my hands before I lock them out of the house, Jimmy. Give me five minutes peace.”

“Do you like her?” Rebecca said.

He took another cruller from the bag. Light was creeping through the tree canopy, but it was the flat surly light of an overcast winter day. It seemed to take him a long time to chew. “Yeah,” he finally said. “I do.” He took a deep breath. “She’s had some health issues. Just a whole bunch of stuff, for a long time.” The flushed and harried mother in the sweat suit disappeared; suddenly the children were quieter, more tentative, and she was wearing a head scarf. Breast cancer, Rebecca thought. Men hate to talk about breast cancer. His mother. His sister. She put a hand on his arm without thinking.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and he nodded.

She realized that this was the longest conversation she had had with anyone in quite some time. Perhaps the longest conversation
she had ever had with a man, unless she counted Ben. She had imagined she would have nice long conversations with Peter after they were married, but it had turned out that marriage in the circles in New York in which they traveled consisted of men who pontificated publicly, and the women who let their faces go still while they did so. Maybe that was true of marriage everywhere. Between times, in their own living rooms, the men seemed to be resting for the next round of pontificating and so saved their strength by staying silent.

A bald eagle flew overhead, circled, and landed on a tree nearby. There was a branch from a big evergreen in Rebecca’s way. “That was a bad angle,” she said.

“Yeah, but, come on, great moment, right?” He passed her the thermos. She drank directly from it, too. It seemed rude somehow not to.

“Hey, we’re getting paid to sit here and talk like this,” Jim Bates said. “Don’t people like you usually pay someone else to listen to your troubles?”

“I’ve avoided that particular trap,” said Rebecca.

He smiled. “Atta girl,” he said.

“What happened to Laura?” she said after she took another sip of coffee, not wanting the conversation to end.

“She hated the cold,” Jim said. “She moved to Florida.”

When he was a kid his mother told Jim Bates that houses had personalities. It wasn’t necessarily the kind of thing that he would have thought of by himself, but once it had been said it couldn’t be unsaid, or unthought, like realizing someone had nose hair or a slight limp and then seeing it every time you looked at them.

The house they had lived in was a friendly kind of house, a little too close to the road, with a porch running its whole width and a narrow dark blue door at its center. It was short and squat, and somehow that made it nice. It was like a lot of other houses on their road, and for a long time Jim thought of it as basically what all houses were like. Then one day they brought his father lunch at a house where he was doing the roof, and Jim realized that that wasn’t so. That house was a haughty house, with a
stained-glass eyebrow window above the double doors. Maybe it felt haughty to him because he could tell it was old, Victorian, the big rambling high-waisted house of people who could afford someone else to sweep the stairs and vacuum the parlor. Or maybe it was because his mother had packed a picnic lunch and his parents had perched on the back hatch of the station wagon with their ham sandwiches while he and Polly sat on the ground. A woman had come out wearing white gloves with pink flowers on them—gardening gloves, his mother said, which he thought was just about the stupidest thing he’d ever heard—carrying a set of big savage shears. “I didn’t realize this was a family affair,” she’d said with a smile that wasn’t one, and his mother had flushed.

“Ice princess,” his mother had muttered as she pulled away once lunch was done, looking in the rearview mirror.

“I liked her dress,” Polly had whispered. She was four then.

From that day on Jim had really believed that people lived in houses that looked like them. Tad looked like one of the square Cape Cod houses in a patch of lawn on Upper Main, at least when he was in civilian clothes, and it so happened that that was where he lived and always had. Sarah should live in one of those tight little Dutch colonials with the sloping roofs, the ones that looked like their windows were winking at you, but she lived in a nondescript rented A-frame down a pitted gravel drive outside of town. Jim figured she lived in the A-frame because it looked like her husband, who was cheap and poorly made and beneath notice in exactly the way that house was.

“Forty-five dollars,” he’d said, standing in front of Kevin at the gas station, and he could tell by the skittish way Kevin’s eyes moved around that he knew exactly why Jim Bates was standing there with his big scarred palm out right under his nose. Kevin didn’t have the money on him, which later, with a couple of beers in him, he’d convinced himself meant he would never have handed it over.

“You ever sell that woman, or anyone else, cheap fir as good firewood again, and you’ll have to pull a log out of your ass to sit down,” Jim Bates told him. Jim Bates never talked like that. He was famous for having a clean mouth in a dirty-mouth business.

“Screw you,” Kevin said after the truck had already driven away.

Jim had seen houses that were a match for Rebecca only in photographs, the kind of upright, well-proportioned city house of brick or limestone that faced the street, faced right onto it but didn’t give much away. Maybe she lived in a house like that in New York City. The house that she lived in here had no personality because it had never really had time to develop one. A local man had built it as a hunting cabin just after he got mustered out at the end of the Korean War, then decided what he really wanted to do was move south. He’d sold it to a couple who planned to start a camp in the area, but the strain of starting the business split them apart, and he went farther upstate (and started a lamp store) while she stayed for a year and then put the place back on the market.

It wasn’t exactly insulated and it wasn’t at all pretty, so it sat on the market for three years, more or less, and then a pair of young schoolteachers bought it because it was all they could afford. They toughed it out for ten years, but three bad winters in a row drove them into one of those small boxy houses in town, the kind of house that holds the heat in a tight fist. They rented the other place to some colleagues who stayed there two years and then bought forty acres farther out and built a big ranch house with a horse barn, although taking care of horses was a lot more work than they’d figured.

Then a book editor from New York had rented the house for the summer, and then for a year, then two, and finally bought it to use on weekends. When he’d died he left it to his lover, an architect. People said the architect sat on a stump in the woods all day long and sobbed. (It happened that this was true. He had
loved the editor well and truly, although he frequently had sex with others.) So he decided to rent it out, and had, to a series of artists. Rebecca was the most recent short-term tenant.