“Aren’t you going to be in it, Walter?”
“Sure, but it can’t hurt. Just so you’ll know you can always drop out of sight when you want to.” Walter hands me the key. I have no idea why Walter would think I’d ever need to drop out of sight.
“That’s nice of you,” I put the key in my pocket and give Walter a good-natured smile meant to make him leave.
“Frank,” Walter says. Then without my expecting it or being able to duck or run, Walter grabs my cheek and kisses me! And I am struck dumb. Though not for long. I shove him backwards and in one spasm of wretchedness shout, “Quit it, Walter, I don’t want to be kissed!”
Walter blushes red as Christmas and looks dazed. “Sure, sure,” he says. I know I have missed Walter’s point here, but I have not missed my own point, not on your life. I would kiss a camel rather than have Walter kiss me on the cheek again. He does not get to first base with me, no matter how much he feels at home.
Walter stands blinking behind his tortoise-shells. “We lose control by degrees, don’t we, Frank?”
“Go home, Walter.” I’m peevish now.
“Maybe I can, Frank. Thanks to you.” Walter smiles his somber war-vet’s smile and walks out the door.
In a moment I hear his car start. From the window I see the headlights on the street and the car — it is an MG — buzz sadly away. Walter gives me two quick honks and disappears around the curve. I am sure he will call when he gets home; he is that kind of High school Harry. And as 1 settle onto the couch as I used to in the old days when X was gone, fully clothed, a Gokey catalog for reading, I unplug my phone — a small, silent concession to the way lived life works. Don’t call, my silent message says, I’ll be sleeping. Dreaming sweet dreams. Don’t call. Friendship is a lie of life. Don’t call.
In the first six months after Ralph died, while I was in the deepest depths of my worst dreaminess, I began to order as many catalogs into the house as I could. At least forty, I’m sure, came every three months. I would, finally, have to throw a box away to let the others in. X didn’t seem to mind and, in fact, eventually became as interested as I was, so that quite a few of the catalogs came targeted for her. During that time — it was summer — we spent at least one evening a week couched in the sun room or sitting in the breakfast nook leafing through the colorful pages, making Magic Marker checks for the things we wanted, dogearing pages, filling out order blanks with our Bankcard numbers (most of which we never mailed) and jotting down important toll-free numbers for when we might want to call.
I had animal-call catalogs, which brought a recording of a dying baby rabbit. Dog-collar catalogs. Catalogs for canvas luggage that would stand up to Africa. Catalogs for expeditions to foreign lands with single women. Catalogs for all manner of outerwear for every possible occasion, in every climate. I had rare-book catalogs, record catalogs, exotic hand-tool catalogs, lawn-ornament catalogs from Italy, flower-seed catalogs, gun catalogs, sexual-implement catalogs, catalogs for hammocks, weathervanes, barbecue accessories, exotic animals, spurtles, slug catchers. I had all the catalogs you could have, and if I found out about another one I’d write or call up and ask for it.
X and I came to believe, for a time, that satisfying all our purchasing needs from catalogs was the very way of life that suited us and our circumstances; that we were the kind of people for whom catalog-buying was better than going out into the world and wasting time in shopping malls, or going to New York, or even going out into the shady business streets of Haddam to find what we needed. A lot of people we ktiew in town did the very same thing and believed that was where the best and most unusual merchandise came from. You can see the UPS truck on our street every day still, leaving off hammocks and smokers and God knows what all — packs of barbecue mitts and pirate chest mailboxes and entire gazebos.
For me, though, there was something other than the mere ease of purchase in all this, in the hours spent going through pages seeking the most virtuous screwdriver or the beer bottle cap rehabilitator obtainable nowhere else but from a PO box in Nebraska. It was that the life portrayed in these catalogs seemed irresistible. Something about my frame of mind made me love the abundance of the purely ordinary and pseudo-exotic (which always turns out ordinary if you go the distance and place your order). I loved the idea of merchandise, and I loved those ordinary good American faces pictured there, people wearing their asbestos welding aprons, holding their cane fishing rods, checking their generators with their new screwdriver lights, wearing their saddle oxfords, their same wool nighties, month after month, season after season. In me it fostered an odd assurance that some things outside my life were okay still; that the same men and women standing by the familiar brick fireplaces, or by the same comfortable canopy beds, holding these same shotguns or blow poles or boot warmers or boxes of kindling sticks could see a good day before their eyes right into perpetuity. Things were knowable, safe-and-sound. Everybody with exactly what they need or could get. A perfect illustration of how the literal can become the mildly mysterious.
More than once on a given night when X and I sat with nothing to say to each other (though we weren’t angry or disaffected), it proved just the thing to enter that glimpsed but perfectly commonplace life — where all that mattered was that you had that hounds-tooth sport coat by Halloween or owned the finest doormat money could buy, or that all your friends recognized “Jacques,” your Brittany, from a long distance away at night, and could call him by the name stitched on his collar and save him from the log truck bearing down on him just over the rise.
We all take our solace where we can. And there seemed like a life — though we couldn’t just send to Vermont or Wisconsin or Seattle for it, but a life just the same — that was better than dreaminess and silence in a big old house where unprovoked death had taken its sad toll.
All of which passed in time, as I got more interested in women and X did whatever she did to accommodate her loss. Months later, when I had departed home to teach at Berkshire College, I found myself alone one night in the little dance professor’s house the college rented for me at the low end of the campus near the Tuwoosic River, doing what I did in those first couple of weeks to the exclusion of practically everything else — poring over a catalog. (The faculty lounge was full of them, leading me to be sure I was not alone.) In this instance I was going through the supplement of a pricey hunting outfitter based in West Ovid, New Hampshire, at the foot of the White Mountains, barely eighty miles from where I sat at that moment. Up the hillside that night, a group of students was holding a sing-along (I was meant to be in attendance), and a cool, crisp burnt-apple smell swam with the New England air and flooded my open window, making the possibility of going as remote as Neptune. I was deep in size comparisons of Swiss wicker-and-leather picnic baskets, and just flipping back toward clearance items on the black-and-white insert pages, my thoughts on a fumble-free flashlight, ankle warmers for the chilly nights ahead, a predator-pruf feeder, when suddenly what do I see but a familiar set of eyes.
After how many years? The narrow, half-squinty, mirthful sparkle I had seen a hundred times over — though only the eyes were visible behind a black silk balaclava worn by a woman modeling a pair of silk underwear from Formosa.
Off in the darkening surround, the sounds of “Scarborough Fair” drifted into the purple hills, and the smell of elm and apple wood floated lushly through my open window, but I couldn’t care less.
I flipped forward and back. And suddenly here was Mindy Levinson on almost every page: with long brown hair and a tentative smile, a Swedish Angora jacket over her shoulder (not looking the least bit Jewish); farther back, standing by a red Vermont barn, wearing a Harris Tweed casual jacket and appearing proud and arrogant; just inside the cover in an Austrian hat, but seeming repentant of some untold misdeed; elsewhere toward the back, ensconced in a comfy New Hampshire kitchen, starting a fire with a brass spark-igniter made in the shape of a duck’s head. And later still, coralling a bunch of munchkin kids all wearing rabbit’s fur puppet hats.