The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [275]
Coping Stones
Cahill—Dr. Cahill to those who knew him in his small town in Maine—had decided that his screened porch should be relocated. Wouldn’t it be better to winterize the current porch, adding a door at the far end which would lead to a new, smaller porch, perpendicular to the original? That way, he could walk out of the kitchen in the winter with his cup of freshly brewed coffee and his vitamin drink (those mornings when he went to the trouble to make it) and enjoy the late-blooming flowers on an enclosed, heated porch. In the summer, he could set up a makeshift desk—probably just the card table—and not have to worry that rain would ruin his paperwork. There was so much paperwork! His wife, Barbara, used to manage most of it, but she’d been dead for more than eight years, and, except for what his accountant did and the occasional question he asked his tenant, Matt, he dealt with it all himself now, and not a bit of it had anything to do with medicine.
Matt lived in Cahill’s renovated barn. Thirty-two years old, he had already suffered a divorce (at twenty-four) and the death of his second wife, who’d been knocked out of her kayak by a low-hanging branch and drowned, in Canada. Several times during the past year, Cahill had noticed Matt coming home with a woman, but he’d also noticed that the woman—or women—almost always left the same night. Once, he had been lured into playing a game of croquet with Matt and a woman named Leora, but usually he avoided contact when Matt had company; he felt that Matt became sour and withdrawn when women were around, as if he were still suffering through adolescence. But Matt—Matt was his preoccupation. Cahill had the sense to extend fewer dinner invitations to his tenant and friend than he wanted to, because the man needed his freedom. If Barbara were alive, and if Matt’s wife had not died, Matt would no doubt have been living somewhere else, and Cahill would have had more interesting things to think about. It was just that his world had shrunk since he’d retired.
Right now, Cahill was talking to a man Matt had nicknamed You Know What I Mean, a tall, perpetually windblown-looking carpenter whom Cahill had recently advised to have what he felt sure was a skin cancer removed from the side of his nose. His real name was Roadie Petruski, and, as Roadie tried to smooth down his electrified hair, Cahill listened to his beliefs concerning pressure-treated wood: “You know yourself, Doc, these things leach into the environment. Before you know it, your lungs are Swiss cheese, you know what I mean? This genetically engineered corn, the Europeans don’t want nothing to do with it. But us? We always got optimism. You probably read about rat kidneys shutting down when they was fed the stuff ? I read it in one of those doctor’s-office magazines—meaning no disrespect. My advice is always to seal up pressure-treated boards with the best sealant available, and even then you don’t want to walk on it without shoes, you know what I mean?”
“Whatever you think best in terms of flooring, Roadie,” Cahill said.
“Not up to me! Always up to the customer!”
“Well, I certainly agree with what you’ve informed me of, so let us proceed as you suggest.”
“That’s the thing, Doc. That’s the direction you want to go.”
In the distance, a cardinal twittered on a tree branch. If Cahill had had his binoculars, he would have raised them—he loved cardinals—but they were on the back porch. The same back porch that was going to be transformed into a heated room off the kitchen. Matt must be at home, Cahill thought: he could faintly hear Mick Jagger singing. The bird, too, must have heard the music, because it swooped away, dipping down for just a second to check out the goings-on on the porch.
A man he and Matt had dubbed You Got No Choice had visited a few days earlier. He’d come from town hall to inform Cahill that a wall on his property was in need of maintenance, and that, as the owner of the property on which the wall stood, surrounding a four-headstone cemetery