A Gesture Life Page 13

  But I do not. I just sit quietly in the glove-leather seat and watch as the traffic light turns from red to green, and she lets up on the clutch to sling us forward off the line, and we are running, following Route 3A again as the stores and filling stations and kiosks gradually thin out, the horizon coming visible, the golden, burnished woods rushing back, dense and stately in their towering solicitude as we reach the kempt, rolling country of Bedley Run.

  Renny Banerjee, perhaps inspired, too, by the glittering canopy, is talking now about this town of ours. We’re gliding on the narrow two-lane road toward the old part of the village, the edifices of the dark brick town fire station and the turreted stone post office (once a mill) nobly guarding the entrance. But he’s going on somewhat bittersweetly, not at all in a way meant to perturb Liv, who everyone knows is the first champion of this place. It seems he’s had a few displeasing experiences around town in the last few weeks, despite the fact that he’s lived here for nearly ten years.

  “I don’t know what it is,” he says, pulling himself forward between our seats in front, “but I’ve been getting the most annoying comments lately, around the village. I’m confused. It seems everyone has completely forgotten who I am.”

  “Everyone but me,” Liv sighs.

  Renny squeezes her shoulder appreciatively. “Really, though. Have you noticed anything odd, Doc?”

  “Not myself. At least I don’t think so.”

  “I guess not, for someone like you. You’re beloved. But I have. Even at Murasan’s. Not-quite-funny jokes.”

  “What do you expect at that awful smoke shop?” Liv cries out. “They’re a bunch of mean old geezers. Sorry, Doc, but it’s true.”

  “I suppose they can be a little acid,” I answer. I myself had been cutting back on my visits to the shop in recent months, as I’d decided to curtail my pipe smoking to one bowl a week instead of my longtime three or four; but also, I’ve been finding that the conversation there, which is usually entertaining and vigorous, has been somewhat sodden of late, as the fellows have been preoccupied with perceived “changes” in the character of the town and area, changes that Renny has obviously been compelled to address.

  “Last week I’m there to buy cigarettes, just an in-and-out, and old Harris, who’s sitting in his usual spot in the corner, says something about the millions of new smokers in the Third World. I turned around and he just waited. I asked him if he was talking to me and he said he was interested to know what I thought about the situation. I told him I had no opinion and got my change and was about to leave when he said, ‘People don’t even care about their own anymore.’ Then the next day I’m walking by the duck pond in the park when I approach these two mothers with their strollers. One tries to hide, whispering something, and they quickly turn away like I’m about to mug them or steal their babies. Suddenly I don’t know what the hell’s going on around here. I mean, hey, I want to know, since when did I become the randy interloper?”

  “It’s because you’re darker during the summer,” Liv says matter-of-factly, evidently bringing up an old topic of discussion. She turns to me, smiling. “It’s a fact.”

  “This is different, Liv,” Renny insists. “And for the record, Liv darling, I’m always this dark. You should know. But it never mattered much before. Now people like Harris and Givens are talking about the ‘direction’ of the town. How the shop owners aren’t like they used to be, your average middle-class Italian and Irish folk. I guess except for you, Doc.”

  “I guess so, yes.”

  “Don’t get me wrong. I haven’t really heard a bigoted word from anybody. Just ‘observations.’ There’s every sort of merchant in town, the Viet people who bought the cleaner’s, the French-speaking black couple at the old candy store.”

  “So what?” Liv exclaims. “People aren’t allowed to talk about who runs the businesses in their own town? What’s next, Renny? Will I not be able to even say you’re Indian anymore? Or that Doc Hata is a noble Japanese?”

  “Of course not,” Renny answers. “But why this should somehow be of the most interest, I don’t know. Most people could say anything they want in this regard, and I wouldn’t blink. You know that’s always been my view. But it seems to me the mood has changed around here. I don’t know if it’s this recession and that people are feeling insecure and threatened. Bedley Run was never an over-friendly place, but at least it wasn’t completely unwelcoming. Now I’m not sure. The worst part is that I’m beginning to think I should have realized this long ago, and that I’ve been living for years inside an ugly cloud.”

  “You can be so dramatic, Renny!” Liv says, guiding us into the old village proper, the shops and boutiques lined up in a comely bend of a row, one of those fine doors once mine. “Two little incidents in the same week and all of history has changed. So am I included in all this business, too, retroactively?”

  “Of course not. I’m talking about something different. Try to tell her, Doc. I know you’ve always been happy here but at least you can partly understand what I’m describing, yes?”

  “I believe I do,” I say to them, though unsure of why, and now sensing, too, how physically close we three are, even in the open car. We finally pass Sunny Medical Supply on the other side of the street, its window hazy and unlighted, with nary a glint of activity. “It’s true that at times I have felt somewhat uneasy in certain situations, though probably it was not anyone’s fault but my own. You may not agree with this, Renny, but I’ve always believed that the predominant burden is mine, if it is a question of feeling at home in a place. Why should it be another’s? How can it? So I do what is necessary in being complimentary, as a citizen and colleague and partner. This is almost never too onerous. If people say things, I try not to listen. In the end, I have learned I must make whatever peace and solace of my own.”

  “But is this a situation that’s okay with you, Doc?”

  Liv throws up her hands at this, the leather-wound steering wheel for a lengthy moment subtly playing on its own. “Sure it is! Come on, Renny, can we please move on now to other topics?”

  “This one is interesting enough.”

  “Okay then. Fine. Let’s look at the Doctor’s situation. He’s not in too rough a shape, having lived in this town. Bedley Run, after all, is not Selma. He’s recently had some trouble, but that was just a little fire. Otherwise, he lives in a gorgeous house in the most prestigious neighborhood, and he’s enjoying the high golden hour of a well-deserved retirement, for having been a business and civic elder and leader. This from anybody’s view. I could argue that in fact, Doc Hata is Bedley Run. He is what this place is about. Not the doctors and investment bankers and corporate lawyers who have ample cash and want sudden privacy and the airs that go with it. Though they’re my clients and I love them, I have to say they mostly have it wrong and Doc Hata has it right. You come to a place like this, Renny; you don’t make it yours with money or change it by the virtuous coffee color of your skin or do anything but welcomingly submit and you’re happy to do so. Because look. Take one look at this street. The tumbled sidewalk and shabby-chic shops. It’s all simple and beautiful and proportional. It has just the right amount of history, which, for the record, is welcoming and not. It’s the place you want to arrive at, forever and ever.”

  “I once thought forever,” Renny says tightly. “That’s what I thought, and it was probably because you said it just like that.”

  “Everything is still the same,” she answers him, curling her hand back to cup his cheek. “It will always be the same, if I have anything to do with it.”

  We glide to the end of Church Street, going past the yarn shop and the bead and millinery store and the cleaner’s Renny mentioned, whose Vietnamese owners I met only recently when I went around soliciting donations for the local boys’ and girls’ soccer league, which I have long and enthusiastically supported. The couple at the cleaner’s didn’t seem to understand, staring at me stonily and wondering why I would be requesting such a thing, to giv
e me money for others’ children to play. I did not attempt to explain how this could benefit them in the end, as I believed it had benefited me and my business, at least in feeling and reputation. The man and his wife, their faces shiny from working the clothes press and extractor, did not say no or ask me to leave; they did not reply much at all, and we three stood there in the heavy, almost tropical, starch-laden air of the shop, waiting for something to happen.

  On Mountview Street the trees are just of that color and scale Liv is talking about, and though it has been but a few days, the pleasing bulk and hang of the limbs makes me homesick for what lies in wait over the first rise of the street, and I feel doubly sorry for my carelessness in overstoking the fire. Liv is perfectly right in describing to Renny what store of happy goods I possess, my house and property being the crown pieces. And though it does occur to me as somewhat unfortunate that this should be so strictly true, I cannot help but feel blessed that I have as much as I do, even if it is in the form of box hedge and brick and paving stone. There is, I think, a most simple majesty in this, that in regarding one’s own house or car or boat one can discover the discretionary pleasures of ownership—not at all conspicuous or competitive—and thus have another way of seeing the shape of one’s life, how it has transformed and, with any luck, multiplied and grown. And as we approach I can already see the red maple I planted in the front yard the first days I lived in the house, a mere sapling that has widened and vaulted up to be much larger than it should be, its surprising increase mirroring, I suppose, everything else I’ve invested in the last thirty years—the values of the property itself, the blue-chip stocks I bought intermittently, the store and building I sold to the Hickeys, whatever I put time or money into ballooning inexorably, magically, to great reward. It seems I have always been fortunate to be in a certain provident time and place, which must be my sole skill, and worth, and luck.

  Liv slips the Saab gently into the driveway, and Renny lifts himself from the backseat before I can open the passenger door. He’ll bring the bags and flowers, Liv announces, and the two of us will go directly inside. She wants me to see the work they’ve done, she can’t wait to see what I think.

  The keys (hers?) are in the door and she swings it open with ceremony. The lights are all on and there are flowers in the foyer and kitchen and on the hall table. There is music playing, an étude of Chopin from one of the many classical records Sunny left behind, its sober phrases leading me to the family room, the site of the trouble. I see there is a neat stack of split wood in the vacuumed and polished hearth, and that the Berber carpet is new and the same top brand as what was there before the accident, the curtains also having been replaced, as has the singed wall board above the mantel. The whole room has been repainted in the exact shade of pastel moss green Mary Burns once chose for me from a special home decorator’s palette book, the window mullions, too, damp-dusted and sparkling, and the tile floors sheened. Everything appears fresh and vibrant but unmistakably familiar, of certain and actual living.

  Which strangely haunts, because as Liv Crawford guides me through the rooms pointing out the distinguishing features of the renovations, I have the peculiar sensation that this inspection and showing is somehow postmortem, that I am already dead and a memory and I am walking the hallways of another man’s estate, leaning into rooms to sniff what lingering notes of his person may remain, the tang of after-shave or slivers of soap, the old wool of his coats and leather shoes, the dust and spice of the cupboards. And I notice, too, the spareness of the rooms aside from the major furnishings, the few photographs showing him among groups of five or six in business attire or settings, and none including anyone who looks like him, distantly or otherwise.

  This is my very house, my Mountview house in Bedley Run, understated and grand and unsolicitous of anything but the most honorable regard, and despite how magnificently Liv Crawford has directed its exacting restoration, I cannot escape feeling a mere proximateness to all its exhibits and effects, this oddly unsatisfying museum that she has come to curate for this visitation and the many that will someday follow. I cannot blame her, for there is nothing to assign blame about. It is the case that I have not been a man who has cultivated the relations that would make such a homecoming full and sanguine and joyous, and if anything occurs to me it is deep-felt gratitude to Liv Crawford and to Renny Banerjee as well, not only for the work and the ride home and the help with my things, but for the simple fact that they are present, walking the floors, pulling knobs, speaking and moving and filling the house with the most pleasing, ordinary reports.

  Anyone, too, can glimpse through the wide doorway how they are lingering over each other in the kitchen, leaning up against the island counter from either side, and though Liv keeps asking to heat up the casserole dish of chicken cacciatore that she’s brought for me, I insist that I can do it myself, so they might feel free to leave and go out together and do whatever they may. Liv and Renny are in their early forties, neither having ever married, and though they’re certainly attractive people, it could also be said that they are approaching a critical time of middle age, when they should make clear decisions about their living situations. Whether they continue to live alone or not isn’t my interest, as I don’t have purpose or reason to hold a general opinion, but I do believe that they should choose one path without reserve and stay to it until the end.

  I think the source of my trouble with Mary Burns—or her trouble with me—is that although I had decided to be a lifelong bachelor, I kept finding myself straying in both thought and deed, even so much as wondering aloud to her one night if she should sell her house down the street and move her things into mine. We were sitting intimately in the family room, enjoying, in fact, a fire and our customary pot of tea. When I spoke the words she had to stop sipping and put down her mug. Her usually placid expression broke open first in shock and then pleased wonder, and I knew I had slipped most horribly. In the ensuing quiet I already sensed that cold pitch of gravity and dissolve, as though something was dying in a corner of the room, invisibly and wordlessly. I didn’t actually retract my suggestion, then or in the following days, nor did I repeat it, simply hoping instead for a gradual expiration. Of course, the whole thing did expire, and without further discussion, and almost exactly in the manner one would have wished.

  “Hey, Doc,” Liv calls out, in an airy voice provisional and solicitous, “I finally remembered something I meant to ask you about.”

  I enter the kitchen again from the family room. Renny is making ready to leave, putting his wallet and keys back into his pockets, while Liv is lifting the white casserole dish into the wall oven. The cacciatore (from Di Nicola’s Deli) will be my dinner, along with a demi-bottle of Valpolicella and chocolate-dipped hazelnut biscotti, wrapped in picnic cloth and tucked by Liv into a wicker basket. I don’t normally drink red wine, but tonight I am feeling particularly curious and unfamiliar to myself, and all I can do is try to recall if I even have a corkscrew somewhere in this house, left over from long past evenings of mirth and company.

  “I’ve always meant to ask you, Doc, about the piano in the family room. I had a man look at it to make sure it was all right. It’s a beautiful piano. I see it every time I pop in but I’m always going on about something else. It’s fairly old, isn’t it? I mean almost antique.”

  “Yes. I bought it a few years after I bought the house. It was used, about thirty years then, so now it may qualify as an antique piece.”

  “I should have figured that you played.”

  “I don’t.”

  “But I’ve heard you play, haven’t I, Doc? The last time we were all at Renny’s condo, before Christmas a couple years ago, you played a song on his upright.”

  “Perhaps fooling around, but not playing.”

  “You were playing! You played, and we sang. “Good King Wenceslaus,” wasn’t it? You’re a natural entertainer. I remember you added all these wonderful notes. Everyone wanted you to go on, but you were too modest.”


  “I don’t remember playing. I haven’t played at all.”

  “You had a bit of the punch that night, friend,” Renny says. “We all did.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Someone may have had to drive you home.”

  “It’s hard to believe.”

  Renny says to me, “I wasn’t all there myself. Neither was Liv, if I’m right about anything. She was calling herself Party Girl that night.”

  “And you were Party Boy,” Liv fake-scolds him, as it seems certain things are coming back into remembrance. “But anyway, you were great, Doc. You just sat down without a word and started playing. That was the first night we ever met, and when you told me where you lived, I pictured the house right away, the beautiful Tudor with the slate pool. I knew we’d be friends. I knew we’d all be friends.”

  “Okay, Livvy, let the Doc settle in now,” says Renny firmly, turning to pat me on the shoulder. He does it with great kindness, enough to make me feel a tinge paternal. “You must be happy to be home. I’m glad you are. If you need anything, you be sure to call. I left my number on the refrigerator. I’m sure you have Liv’s. Really, call about anything.”

  “I had them put up new smoke detectors, upstairs and down,” Liv breaks in. “They’re hard-wired so you don’t have to worry about batteries going dead. The flue was cleaned, too. It’s all ready to go. It’s a big, old-fashioned hearth and you can build a big fire in there.”