Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll by Paul Monette Page A

coming back, I thought, half in panic, half shooting the moon. I don't know where I'm going after Mrs. Carroll's, but it won't be here. I didn't breathe a word of this to Madeleine, hoping it would go away. We packed our bags and went to sleep. Madeleine slept in my room, and I lay awake on the swaybacked blue-velvet sofa and tried to guess what was wrong with me. I felt like Huck Finn, rough-and-tumble, and I knew as sure as I was lying there that it would pass in a day or two. I would be sliding down the banister or chasing David on the shore when, pow! , I would have the existential equivalent of a cardiac arrest. So turn back. That is what the prudent, big-eyed animals say in fairy tales, and the hero pats their heads and passes on. The last thing I thought before I went to sleep was: What am I going to do with my plants?
    I took them. And my tank of tarnished fish, who tenaciously lived on, despite my indifference. There were three of them, and they were seven years old, which probably adds up to untold decades on the fish scale. David had brought them home one winsome afternoon and called them Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The fourth one died shortly after he left, perhaps out of grief. I didn't know which one it was when I flushed him down the toilet, though David always averred he could tell them apart. I called the three survivors Blind, Deaf, and Dumb.
    There wasn't much else I needed that I couldn't fit into a duffel bag and a wicker picnic hamper. I had never owned a suitcase since I had left my father's house. I think I always expected to flee Boston, and I always wanted to be free to take with me nothing more than the clothes I wore. A suitcase, by tying me down to changes of underwear and a coat and tie, disturbed my sexy picture of Rick on the road, out to make his fortune. Well, it is an academic question, since I never did go until now, and now I was taking a earful of goldfish and asparagus fern. But it goes to show you that you might as well scrap all the resolutions you make in your twenties. "I refuse to own a suitcase because it will order me around" is a dumb idea. Once, on an evening train to New York, I jerked off a bodybuilder I met when we tried to pass each other in the aisle. We sat in the back of the coach with a raincoat draped over our laps. Later he told me he was a nurse in a geriatrics ward. He was really rather delicate, like other muscle queens I've known, and he told me he was going no further than his sixtieth birthday. That, he figured, was his body's limit. He had gotten a doctor friend to agree to put a bubble of air into his blood and "needle him out," as he put it. But I know he won't do it. Things sound so noble when you're young and morbid.
    I stayed in an antic mood, my pulses racing, as we made our second trip out of Boston. When Madeleine told me that Aldo had decided to bring the suitcases himself and take a vacation too, I was too far gone to be able to stop him.
    "Why didn't you tell me as soon as you hung up the phone?"
    "Because you seemed to be having a vision," she said. "I didn't want to spoil it."
    "But Madeleine, where is this going to stop? You know, you can't invite the Variety critic to watch this performance."
    "I have to have Aldo around. I'm glad he suggested it. Besides, you ought to meet him. He's so gay he'll make you blush. It's very bracing."
    We had expected him for days. I had a horror, as I sat today on the porch steps looking out to sea, that he was going to breeze in on the heels of Mr. Farley. And he would barge in and storm her bedroom just as Madeleine's hand had taken up the pen and started to sign. But otherwise, I was afflicted with considerably fewer horrors than gripped me on a regular cloudy day in Boston. Madeleine and I had had an edgy talk here and there, as we had on Tuesday in the hall, but they always ended in sunlight. Phidias and I were still sizing each other up and spoke in shorthand. Mostly, I was on my own and free to wander.