“So where’s the water coming from?”
“That would be the question.”
Claire considered. “That side of the house is always muddy when it rains.”
“Maybe it’s runoff from the roof. I’ll see what I can see tomorrow. By the way,” he said as he sat down, “there isn’t power to the cabin, is there?”
“No, why?”
“When I was feeling around out there, I got a shock. I wondered if there could be a buried line.”
Claire shook her head. “I don’t think so. The house line comes in on the other side, from that pole in the allée. It must be five hundred yards from there.”
Ran considered. “Maybe I just scared myself.”
“Look at me.”
Feeling this parental tête-à-tête had gone on long enough, Charlie put his bowl of macaroni on his head.
“Nice chapeau,” said Ransom, feeling some paternal comment was required.
Encouraged, Charlie strafed the china in the corner cupboard, twelves of this and that, an hour’s cleanup for a second and a half. Another volley hit the chandelier and plopped back down like muddy rain. With a big, pleased, slightly nervous grin, he looked around, assessing impact. Knowing better than to laugh, Hope polled Mom and Dad with a jewelly gaze that said, Bring on the dancing bears!
“So, Monster Man, that all you got?” said Ran.
They howled like happy hell on that, like happy hell broke loose. Charlie took his bowl and tossed that, too.
Claire’s chair skidded with the sound of a bad traffic accident. “Okay, buster! That’s it for you! Upstairs in the bath!”
“I’ve got him.” Swigging Pinot Noir and taking one quick bite of steak, Ran tossed the squealing miscreant across his shoulder like a twenty-five-pound sack of Idahos and headed up the servant stairs.
As the tub filled, Ran undressed his son and, with a finger-sized black comb, raked melted cheese and white sauce from his hair. Charlie took advantage of a lull and bolted down the hall. From twenty feet away, he looked back with that gleeful, defiant, anxious grin that seemed to say, You can’t catch me (but please try).
“You’d better get your little ass right back here, Hoss,” said Ransom, with an ominously Mel-like note, as the fun wore thin.
Charlie, in response, raised his arms, cocked one knee like an impertinent dauphin, and burst into a stomping, penis-flapping version of the Highland fling, cantering down the hall in one direction and then, widder-shins, back again. From the landing, Claire looked at Ran, and Ran looked back. Astounded and indignant, they both blinked and burst out laughing the way they hadn’t laughed that day and probably that year.
In the rocker, though, the little animal stilled, and as Ran read, he could see the pink curve of tongue working the plastic nipple from beneath the way no adult remembers how. With his buttery pomade, he looked choirboy trig and innocent, and under the smell of residual cheddar, under the watermelon of his no-tears shampoo, there was something that reminded Ransom of the smell of jute that, along with sweat and gasoline, was always in his father’s clothes and which, in spite of everything, he’d loved.
When Ran finally put him in the crib, Charlie said, “Stay, Doddy, stay,” so plaintively that Ran turned off the light and sat back down.
“Doddy?”
“What, buddy?”
“Doddy?”
“I’m right here, sweet boy.”
“Doddy?”
“Close your eyes now.”
“Shadlow, Doddy…”
“It’s just the bedpost.”
“Doddy?”
“Shh.”
“Doddy?”
“Charlie, damn it, go to sleep!”
Forty minutes later, he made good his escape.
Claire was in the bathroom, washing up.
“Jesus.”
She mugged in the mirror, knowing all about it.
“How do you deal with two?”
She shrugged. “One minute it’s five o’clock, the next I know it’s nine and they’re both in their own beds in their own rooms and neither one is dead, and how they got there—poof!—before I’m five steps down the hall, it flies out of my head.”
“How is it I don’t remember any of this?”
“Post-traumatic stress, babe.”
She’d hung her coveralls on the door and had on just her sleeveless linen blouse and underpants—new ones, Ransom noticed, hot pink briefs the color of her nails, with darker fuchsia trim. “Nice undies.”
With a droll look, she put a cotton ball on a bottle of green witch hazel and shook like Lady Luck about to roll the dice. The room filled with sweet astringency.
“You excited about teaching?”
“More nervous.” She began to swab her face. “A lot of this stuff I haven’t thought about since Juilliard. I mean, four-part tonal writing? I barely—and I mean barely—remember what it is.”
“They’re lucky to have you, Claire,” he said. “You’ve got ten times more real-world experience than anybody in that dump. To say nothing of talent.”
She glanced at him uncertainly. “Yeah, well, thanks, I guess. Harlow’s not a dump, though, Ran. It’s really not.”
There was just one way the conversation could go now.
“So, how’s Cell Phone?” Ran’s attempt to make this sound offhand came off like skywriting four-story capitals in multicolored smoke.
Claire’s reflection frowned at him, and then her face. “For starters, no one calls him Cell Phone anymore.”
“I guess it’s not in keeping with his newfound dignity as dean.” Ran’s single bite of steak—or something—threatened to repeat.
She turned. “It’s been seventeen years, Ran….”
“Eighteen,” he corrected. “Not that anybody’s counting.”
“Eighteen years,” she said, building up a head of steam. “After Marcel left…”
“Marcel?”
“After he left RHB, he toured with Olatunji. He was the principal percussionist with the fucking Boston Philharmonic. His dignity isn’t ‘newfound,’ and it doesn’t stand or fall by you.”
“You remember, though, don’t you?” Ransom said. “That first one he got at Crazy Eddie’s back when even the roadies had no idea what a mobile was? I think it was some sort of prototype. It weighed about six pounds and came with its own vinyl tote…more like a holster for a ray gun?” He laughed with happy malice. “The only place he could make calls was from the observation deck of the Empire State on a clear day when the wind was blowing from the south-southeast?”
