The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [285]
Silence. Finally, Cahill spoke. “Roadie,” he said, “do you think I should undertake such a project at all, given my age? Do you think I’ll last the winter to enjoy it?”
Roadie’s tongue darted over his lips. “Well, Doc, you’d know the answer better than me. You in bad health?”
“No,” Cahill said.
“Well, I ain’t here to build if you think your money should best be used elsewhere, but a closed-in porch with a real one down at the end? That’s something I’d spring for if I had the money.”
For Roadie, this was tactful—turning the subject from death to money. Roadie made a fist and pounded a black ant racing across the table. “Something my wife said, she said, ‘Roadie, you go over there and express some human kindness to the doctor. That’s a man’s done a lot for a lot of people, and, if he had a moment of misjudgment, you tell me who hasn’t.’ She says, ‘Come to think of it, I guess time’s proven me a fool for marrying somebody like you, needs this much instruction before he goes to see somebody who lost his wife and his friend!’ ”
“She thinks herself a fool for marrying you?” Cahill said.
“You met Gloria Sue. Turns out she married me thinking I was going to build the Taj Mahal, or something. Where’d she get that? Nothing I ever told her.”
“Do you love her?” Cahill said.
Roadie looked up, surprised. “Well, I don’t know,” he said slowly.
“I stopped loving my wife,” Cahill said. “First, I thought I was just overloaded with all her minor annoyances—snoring, refusing to take her diabetes medicine, the way she ignored the phone every time it rang. Half the time it turned out to be her sister.”
Roadie looked sideways, kicking some grass off his boot. “That right?” he said. He took a deep breath. “Well, these plans here, Doc—you want to give me a deposit, I’ll run down and get some things Monday morning?”
“No,” Cahill said. He waited for Roadie’s face to register surprise, which it did immediately. “But I will,” he said, “because it seems like closing in the porch is betting against death. Today I feel like that would be a good idea.”
“You do?” Roadie said nervously.
Cahill clasped his hands. “Roadie,” he said, “how often do men speak frankly? I think some of the things we’ve just been talking about . . . We’ve spoken frankly to each other.”
Roadie nodded silently.
“One more thing,” Cahill said. “I’ve never been a mystical person, but things change as you age. You’ll find that out. Some things—people, even—disappear, then something else comes in to replace them.” Cahill paused. “Life is like having a garden, Roadie, because inevitably the time comes when the deer eat everything, or you don’t mulch and the soil gets exhausted. Right away, the weeds are in there. So I suppose what I’m getting at is that, well, tending your garden seems to me now like a young man’s game. When you don’t have the inclination or the energy or the . . . optimism to tend it anymore, the weeds rush in.” He looked Roadie square in the eyes. He barely knew what he had said himself. He said, “The moment you stop loving something, the moment you’re inattentive, the wrong things and the wrong people take over.”
“That’s one of the best ways of puttin’ it I ever heard,” Roadie said. “I’ll go back to talk to Gloria Sue, try to tell her what we discussed. There’s no way I’m gonna be able to put it like you did, though.”
“Express it in your own way,” Cahill said. “It seems to me you love her if you’re going home to talk to her.”
He went to the beach, a place he’d gone only once or twice, quite early in the season, and unfolded a chair and looked at the water.
He’d never called the police in response to the flyer. He’d never spoken a word to Breezy about what the dog had done in the graveyard. He tried to think philosophically: Audrey and Matt had been involved in whatever way they’d chosen—two losers, in any case, who were no good for each