Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll by Paul Monette

Author:Paul Monette [Monette, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Gay, Inheritance and Succession, Los Angeles (Calif.), Motion Picture Actors and Actresses, Older Women, Gay Men, Swindlers and Swindling
ISBN: 9780312015152
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 1987-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

OH NO HE WASN'T. He had come home. And in the ensuing confusion, there really wasn't time to get into the fine points of why his plans had changed. Phidias told Madeleine to go up the kitchen stairs and lock herself in Mrs. Carroll's room, and she made him promise to stall off a visit until the following morning. Tony was going to expect to stay in his old room, Phidias said, and that, David and I knew, meant we had to vacate the tower. Aldo cleared off Madeleine's place at the table, but there really wasn't time for us to disappear or negotiate a story that explained who we all were. Phidias said that, as soon as he got his things out of his car, Tony would be on his way in here for a drink. So he drinks, I thought. There was nothing for us to do but sit there and pick through the remains of our lobsters and try to look properly sheepish and brazen by turns. As if we had been caught by the master with our servants' boots on top of his desk while we tried a pipeful of his tweedy tobacco.

As Madeleine opened the maid's door to go up the back stairs, she turned around to give an exit line. As it happened, only I was watching her because Phidias was giving orders, and David and Aldo were bustling to get them done. She spoke in that whisper she could aim like a laser, and no one else heard her as she spoke across the kitchen to me.

"The plot thickens, eh?"

She closed the door behind her, and her footsteps sounded on the steep stairs. She had gotten her way after all, and she loved it. As to the plot thickening, I grinned at the thought that some movie lines were so surreal they had probably never made it into movies. When I think back on it, I see it was the first time all summer that I didn't take my psychic pulse and note what I was feeling. The first time in years, really. As I considered quickly the range of things that could happen in the next day or so, I found myself full of scenes and not full of me. I gauged the other three men in the room as I would have measured my infield in the ninth inning. Or no: as I would have squinted from one to another of the men in my gang before a holdup in broad daylight.

We still had enough lobster to keep us busy, but no one seemed to know what to say. I did. To make us seem casual and self-possessed, I began to spin a yarn about lobsters, something out of my youth I didn't know I remembered. About a lobsterman who wouldn't eat them, who said they were full of slow poison and caused cancer. I talked to him gravely at the town dock when I was a child. "He must be dead now," I said, but it didn't depress me much.

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