Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll by Paul Monette

caper. I didn't want to explore that paradox too closely, for fear that the answer was Madeleine's own, that I wanted the pain back. But now that I thought of it, I just wanted to do something, to do something. I don't work, and I don't see people much, and I don't have the patience to sit down with a book. I don't even go to the movies anymore. I just run a lot of little errands. I sat in the car, going home, a thousand years after Madeleine had warned me about the pain, and yelled at her about fraud and shallow graves. She hit the dashboard with her fist and told me I talked like a skinny Anglican spinster. She had said from the porch, "Let's do it." Okay, I must have thought, as long as there is something for me to do. And not just taking care of them. I would do that anyway. But as I shouted about the law and made prophecies, I realized I was going to ride shotgun in this caper. The devil's advocate or, since I had been living clean, the angels'. "Wait a minute," someone ought to say, "while we think this over." And they wait because he forces them to, and he does use the time to think, and at last he can tell them what it all means.
    Madeleine put in a call first to Aldo, her money manager in Beverly Hills. She had found a quiet place for the summer, she told him, and asked him to pack her a couple of suitcases and air-freight them east. "You hate quiet places," he said, but she ignored him and started her list. She rattled it off like a pilot talking to mission control. Madeleine admits that her mind is a memory bank of the clothes she has worn, both those she has owned and those she has only worn in passing, in films. They say that Isadora Duncan, writing her memoirs, wrote in a large hand on scraps of paper that were thrown about the room as she reached for a fresh sheet. Every few days, a secretary picked them all up and put them in order. If Madeleine were to write hers, the pages would be stacked and pinned like sales slips, all method and no madness. These memoirs of hers would read like the paragraphs about the bride's clothes in wedding announcements. She paced about my living room, the phone in one hand and the receiver cradled between her shoulder and her tilted head. They would have given her a job buying and selling on the commodities market.
    "Now listen, Aldo," she said, "for the Geoffrey Beene I have to have the gold chain with the sapphire clasp. That's in the safe. And my gray sunglasses. In the top left drawer of the vanity. Then a scarf. Send a lot of scarves in the coral range. No reds. I don't have any shoes that are right. Go to Gucci and charge me some boots. Ask for Helene, and tell her they're for the Geoffrey Beene. She'll know."
    I had never met Aldo, and I was not clear about how busy a millionaire in the computer software business was. I had always assumed that he did a little work on Madeleine's taxes and spent some time on the phone every now and then, ironing out the terms of a concert contract. It was a very different thing entirely to think that she could order him about like the upstairs maid. In the past, when I had asked her for details about her financial wiz, she dismissed the question with "Aldo? Aldo's just an old queen who's been looking all his life for a pet movie star. It's considered a very respectable relationship in LA. I couldn't go on without him." Now, as I listened to her pack a suitcase over the telephone, I thought: Madeleine, don't you dare take advantage of him. Or me, I added, glowering to myself. Fortunately for us all, I thought grandly, I am coming down to Mrs. Carroll's to raise these questions of ethics. I pictured us walking in pairs like the monks in an abbey, the air heady with ripening as the scent wafted in out of the orchards. And we would idle the afternoon away in a field above the sea while we did a Plato dialogue.
    I didn't hear the end of Madeleine's call. As I looked around at the disarray of my apartment, I found myself saying goodbye. I'm not