Running the Bulls Read online

  Jeff thought for a minute, then smiled.

  “I’ve got just the thing,” he said. “Follow me.”

  Jeff Henson took Howard around to the back, past more modern cars, most likely ones traded in, like the Probe was about to be. They stopped before a 1962 Aston Martin DB, a black convertible, a stunning sight. In the summer sunshine it shone like a chunk of smooth ebony. Howard whistled.

  “Remember the old James Bond movies?” Jeff asked, and Howard nodded. Who could forget those cameo roles played out by the little sports car, back when 007 was having problems of his own, with spies as well as with women? Howard nearly swooned. What a car, looking more as if an Italian had designed it rather than a Scottish chap, broad at the shoulders, narrow at the waist, perfectly fit at the rear.

  “They’re coming back big time,” said Jeff. “But the new models, the DB7, cost a pretty penny, over a hundred and thirty thousand dollars, and only about two hundred of them out there for sale. But this one, this one’s got personality.”

  Howard had paced the circumference of the car and now he stood looking at its grille, which stared back with a kind of tight smirk. He imagined himself flying, wind in his hair, shards of his old life strewn along the highway behind him. It was a Hemingway kind of car.

  “I want it,” said Howard.

  ***

  Howard pulled the Aston Martin into John’s empty drive and just sat there, drinking in the smell of the leather, the contour of the seat beneath his ass cheeks. He had left the top down as he flew out of Jeff’s parking lot, and now strands of his hair were mussed. But Howard didn’t mind. He simply patted them back down as best he could and reminded himself to start carrying a brush in the glove compartment. No problema. He felt as if he’d always driven the Aston Martin, Pussy Galore clinging for dear life in the passenger seat as he took a turn at ninety miles an hour and lived to tell of it. With just such a scene in mind, he leaned back against the upholstery and closed his eyes. Feeling the heavy pull of his lids, he tried to remember how long it had been since he’d had a decent sleep. But he knew, didn’t he? It had been three small days ago. And here he was, about to become divorced, driving around in a 1962 Aston Martin convertible, just a month and a week away from skillfully dodging the bulls at Pamplona. John could bitch all he liked, but Howard had already phoned Bixley Travel Agency and bought a round-trip ticket to Spain. Considering the dangerous task that lay ahead, he hoped he would actually be able to use the return portion of the ticket. He was assured that his travel packet would contain all the essentials. Rental car information. Maps. Hotel confirmation. Suggested dining spots. The works. Apparently, running the bulls was more complicated than getting a divorce. But everything was fast these days. Howard remembered Johnny Carson, someone he missed almost as much as he missed Ellen, talking about drive-through funeral services in California. “Honk if you think he’s in heaven,” Johnny had advised. Howard wondered if Ben Collins had had such a service. He could imagine himself as a drive-through mourner at Ben’s funeral, at the wheel of the Aston Martin DB, honking a few times, spitting a few angry pebbles out behind his tires. Ben Collins was dead. Funny thing. Howard wondered if Ben knew the pain he was causing, so many years after the action, causing pain even after his disappearance from the earth. Would he care, if he did know? Was pain a man-made notion that required a physical body? Howard had never embraced the hereafter, not like Ellen did. He tended to look upon himself and his fellow man as, well, walking fertilizer, until the fertilizer would be put to good use one day, deep in the earth, nourishing the roots of a tree or a field of wild mustard. Considering his own mortality, Howard fell sound asleep.

  He woke to honking and opened his eyes to find John’s big hog of a station wagon bearing down on him, overshadowing the little convertible. John got out from behind the wheel, Eliot bounding from the passenger seat with his schoolbag.

  “Wow, Grandpa!” Eliot was saying, as Howard sat up behind the wheel and smoothed his thin hair back in place. “Neat car!”

  Eliot opened the passenger door and piled in, bouncing happily in the seat. John approached slowly on the driver’s side, his eyes taking in every inch of the car.

  “You’re too old to be middle-age crazy,” John told Howard.

  “Guess you can say I blossomed since retirement,” Howard offered, remembering poor Billy Mathews. He grinned up at John. Eliot had found the button to the glove compartment and was now searching among the papers in there.

  “Grandpa, take me for a ride,” Eliot begged. “Is it okay, Dad?”

  “It’s up to Grandpa,” said John. “If he has no other pressing engagements.”

  “No,” said Howard, “nothing pressing. Oh, I have to pick up my airline ticket to Spain, but I got plenty of time to do that.”

  John shook his head, a gesture of surrender. He gave the Aston Martin one more full look before going back to the station wagon, which he pulled up to the curb in front of the house, freeing Howard’s path. Then, briefcase under his arm, John headed for his front door.

  “Sure you don’t want to come?” Howard said to John’s retreating back. “We can stuff you in here somewhere.” Howard ground the gear into reverse. It would take some getting used to, the manual shifting. The last car he owned that wasn’t automatic was the Thunderbird he had bought back in college.

  “I’m sure,” said John. “Besides, you need room for Ms. Galore.”

  “Hasta la vista!” Howard told his son. He released the clutch and the little convertible lurched backward out of the driveway.

  “Bye, Dad!” Eliot shouted. John waved without looking up.

  “Don’t let Grandpa do anything else stupid,” he warned Eliot.

  Then, with some more grinding, and after finally getting the gears shifted into first, Howard and his grandson sped away into the wind.

  Deceit

  “Listen, Jake,” he leaned forward on the bar. “Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it?”

  —Robert Cohn, to Jake Barnes, The Sun Also Rises

  On Saturday, knowing that Ellen had not yet received the marital dissolution papers from Mike Harris, Howard almost phoned and asked if he could come home. There was something about a Saturday that pushed him toward nostalgia. In the summers, true, Ellen usually pestered him to mow the lawn, clean the garage, turn off the golf tournament, read a book, trim the hedge, wash the outside windows, walk with her along the Bixley River. And in the winters she pestered him to shovel the walk, fill the bird feeders, turn off the basketball game, read a book, bring in another armload of firewood, order firewood, split firewood into kindling, put up the Christmas lights, take down the Christmas lights. Saturdays were never easy, not with Ellen, but nonetheless they had marked Howard’s years as a domestic male like notches on the barrel of a gun. And the truth was that for the two hours the basketball game was running, or the four hours a golf tournament took to unfold, Ellen only occasionally popped into the living room to beseech him to “do something constructive.” As if watching Greg Norman hit a three-hundred-yard drive or Michael Jordan fly like a goddamn bird through the air wasn’t constructive. “Yeah, yeah,” Howard would mutter, “in a minute.” And then Ellen would be gone and his mind would be back on the game, as if she had never spoken to him at all. And that had been the secret—don’t take Ellen’s nagging personally—that had held his marriage together so nicely for four decades. Saturdays had been splendid, memorable days at the house on Patterson Street, when Howard wasn’t actually out playing golf, or fly-fishing, or canoeing the Bixley River, which was what he planned to do with Eliot that very day. He had promised the boy. But Eliot was now at a friend’s house, enjoying a surprise birthday party that only the moms had known about until an hour before party time. Apparently, little kids and retired cuckolds couldn’t be trusted with such big secrets.

  On the first Saturda
y of Howard’s estrangement, with a fierce loneliness pulling at his gut, he decided to do something wholly uncharacteristic, a way to mark the beginnings of his new life. So, humming a little Sinatra as he worked, he loaded his laundry into a wicker basket that Patty had left sitting in an upstairs bathroom. Then he hoisted the basket up onto his shoulder and carried it down to the laundry room, where, in a reasonably short period of time, he turned everything in it a light shade of pink. He stood looking down in horror at his favorite white golf shirt, his favorite khaki slacks, pink socks, even pink underwear.

  “Christ,” Howard said, as he shoved everything into the dryer, certain that immense heat would cause the pink to evaporate. Ellen had always done the laundry. Not that Howard was one of those husbands who insisted on playing the traditional male role to his wife’s female part. Although he was not considered an extravagant cook, an occasional meatloaf that had a certain dignity to it was known to come out of the oven bearing his seal. Granted, this was only when Ellen was out of town or gone for the evening, but it had happened more than a few times in his years of marriage. Not every man could say the same. And Howard sometimes helped with the dinner dishes if Ellen was especially tired. Occasionally, he even went out of his way to make up their bed, if he rose after Ellen on Sundays. And sometimes he visited the big IGA, if Ellen was sick with a cold or something more serious, to pick up potatoes or a loaf of Italian bread from the deli. A couple of times he had even gone inside a convenience store to buy Ellen a big blue box of Kotex, right in front of the salesclerk and other shoppers. No, Howard was quite sure that it couldn’t be said he was a husband of the Eisenhower era. He had slipped those surly bonds of his 1950s upbringing to become a thoroughly modern man. Once, he had even wept while watching an old black-and-white war movie on television. But, nonetheless, he didn’t do laundry. Not even during that week when Ellen had been galloping around Buffalo with Ben Collins. He and the kids had piled their dirty clothes into hampers and baskets, onto closet floors and available chairs, letting it grow to mountain size for Ellen to tend to when she returned. Howard was glad now that he hadn’t done the laundry that week, and that’s what he was thinking as he loaded the machine with lighter clothes. He remembered to put all whites together, a knowledge he had gleaned from detergent commercials that had leaked their way into his subliminal mind after years of continual bombardment. But his thoughts were so consumed with Ellen’s deception that he had not seen the red shirt creep into the batch of innocent whites. Even a myopic bull would’ve noticed this red sweatshirt, the one from his retirement party, the one with white lettering: The Best Is Yet to Come. But it was in there all right, turning the water to blood. Thinking of it all now, Howard’s sweatshirt should have declared: Study the Past, If You Would Divine the Future.

  When drying the pink clothing didn’t remove the stain but only seemed to welcome it in further, Howard unloaded everything from the dryer, shoved it all back into the washer, poured several cups of Clorox bleach into the tub, and then set the whole mess churning again.

  “Fire burn and caldron bubble,” he muttered, as he stood watching the water turn the color of a blush wine. He wondered if putting the clothing out in the sun to dry would be better, the solar energy acting as a kind of natural bleach. Or maybe he should have put the bundle out of its misery by shoveling it all into the garbage, burying it like a dog’s treasure in the backyard. He had considered calling Ellen—he had a good excuse, after all, his golfing clothes were among the spoils—but he refrained. Maybe Patty, when she and Eliot came home from the birthday party, would have an idea about what to do. Even theater types needed clean clothing, but theirs was probably all a shade of pink anyway, even the men’s. Or he could ask John when he got home from his Saturday racquetball with the guys from work. From what Howard could tell, John and Patty were hardly ever home together. And if Eliot had a school function, or even a social one such as a birthday party, the question was not, “How do we, his parents, work this into both our schedules?” but “Which one of us is free to take him?” During the few days that Howard had been living in their house, they had not once seated themselves at the dining room table for a sit-down family dinner. He had always assumed that the modern family, what with women now out there in the workplace, was very much like his and Ellen’s family. But Patty seemed more concerned with theater than with laundry. And John knew by heart the phone numbers from every restaurant in Bixley that had a delivery service. Howard now had to admit that maybe his wife had been carrying more of the domestic load than he. Maybe that’s what had kept his own family life rolling along smoothly. He felt a wave of guilt over this, that very emotion Ellen didn’t think men capable of feeling. But then he remembered her deception. Perhaps it was her own guilt that had obliged her to carry that extra load. In an instant Howard rued the day he had ever lifted a finger to make a single meatloaf, much less the half dozen or so he had created in those years of his marriage. He let the lid of the washer slam down on itself.

  Upstairs in the bathroom, Howard went in search of John’s aftershave, opening one cabinet door, then another. Patty seemed to own every facial cream and body lotion on the planet, not to mention facial masks, and moisturizers, and cleansers. Avocado. Peach. Cucumber. Lemon. Who the hell invented all those concoctions, much less went out and bought them? When had the family medicine cabinet become a salad bar? All Howard had ever seen Ellen use, for all the years of their marriage, was a simple jar of Pond’s moisturizing cream. He pushed aside a basket of strawberry soaps, and that’s when he saw the single Kotex pad, lying on its back on the bottom of a shelf. He thought again of that day—Christ, it must have been almost thirty years earlier—when he had trudged home from the convenience store with that horrid blue box under his arm. A bedridden Ellen, suffering from severe menstrual cramps, had pestered him to buy it for her until he finally gave in.

  The shaving lotion now forgotten, Howard picked up the pad and held it in his hand, balanced it on his palm. He wondered if it was filled with goose down, light and dreamy as it was. He had forgotten about these little white pillows, a common sight in his bathroom at one time. But then Ellen had gone through menopause, in her late forties, and the pillows had disappeared from Howard’s life. He hadn’t seen one for years, and it saddened him to realize this. It saddened him that his old age, and Ellen’s old age, was now so easily defined. It had been marked with many symbols, many road signs, all warnings they had obviously missed. But perhaps Ellen, waking in the night to yet another hot flash, had known. A hot flash was, after all, a bulletin. Maybe Ellen had known, had been prepared, but why hadn’t nature given Howard Woods a bulletin or two of his own? Why had nature left him to flounder thusly? Sure, he’d read that men go through menopause too, but he had never believed it. Now he knew his own menopause, his own change of life, by another name: retirement. Howard returned the soft white pad back to the shelf where he found it. Then he closed the cabinet door, left the little pillow lying there, something for the ghosts of his old life to rest their heads upon.

  ***

  It was early afternoon when John returned home, his hair still wet from an after-the-game shower, and agreed to a late lunch at some outdoor café with his father. It would be an opportunity for Howard to show off the Aston Martin to his son. It was no F-15, but it could hold its own. Howard suggested the restaurant with the outdoor dining area, Blanchard’s, where they could sit and watch Saturday shoppers strolling along. At first, John wanted to go to Red’s Tavern, but Howard balked.

  “Not on a nice day like this,” he protested. “Look at that sunshine. I didn’t get to canoe today, but at least we can sit outside.”

  John finally agreed and climbed into the passenger seat of the Aston Martin, his long legs folded and his knees rising in front of him as though he were some kind of praying mantis. Howard cut the little car out of the drive, and they headed in the direction of Blanchard’s.

  “Summer’s definitely here,”
said Howard, the wind eating up his words and flowing like a cool stream of water through his thinning hair.

  John just nodded and remained glum.

  “Want me to put up the top?” Howard shouted, and now John shrugged.

  “Naw,” he said. “I just wish we were going to Red’s and not Blanchard’s. Too many of the people I work with hang out there. It’s right next door to Sounder Aeronautics.”

  Howard pulled the little Aston into the parking lot, next to a towering Buick, and killed the engine. He turned to look at John.

  “Good,” Howard said. “It’s about time I met some of your friends. I was thinking the other day, son. You and I really don’t know each other as well as we should. We’ve been living separate lives, me with Ellen, you with Patty and Eliot.”

  “Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be?” John asked. He opened his door and unloaded his long legs.

  “But we should know each other as adults,” Howard kept on. “It’s always a foursome when we get together. This divorce thing may be a blessing in disguise.”

  John simply shook his head at this notion and then followed Howard into the busy restaurant. The hostess seated them outside on the patio and a waitress appeared with menus. They ordered beers, which arrived in frosted mugs that had Blanchards! written all over them in small orange letters.

  “Hard to forget where you are, isn’t it?” asked Howard. He nodded at the lettering. “There are geniuses loose in marketing as I speak.”

  “It probably comes in handy if you’re drunk.” John smiled.

  Howard took in the atmosphere around him, people seated at the patio tables, voices engaged in segments of life, the trees bursting green along the street.

  “This could be one of those Hemingway cafés,” Howard said. “You know, the Napolitain or the café Select. On the Boulevard Montparnasse.”