Cheer Up Mr. Widdicombe Read online

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  We think by feeling. What is there to know?

  —THEODORE ROETHKE, FROM “THE WAKING”

  PART I

  Get that God-forsaken creature off the net,” Frank Widdicombe called from the baseline. The tennis ball he had just tossed into the air plummeted to the green hard court, then bounced unattended as he stepped forward with a frown. He fixed upon a black-capped chickadee that sat, preening, atop the net; it looked as though it thought that slack rail of white plastic a private beach, and the court a stretch of sea on the shore of which it could take its avian leisure as it pleased. The nerve, the nerve!

  Just beyond this shameless display of animal privilege, at the other end of the court, stood Bradford Dearborne, his sunned, sweaty face tense with concern. He waved his arms, hoping the winged innocent would scoot away before exciting the full brunt of Frank’s wrath. Yet while we may open on this little drama as though on the brink of some meaningful, murderous turn in a tragic play, it was not the first time that Bradford had waved his arms in such a way—to no avail—only to find that the wrath in question, as much as he had feared it, amounted, in the end, to nothing very noteworthy.

  The bird cocked its head to and fro. It hopped along the line of its new perch. It whistled a simple, three-note song, one that sounded to Frank like “Hey, sweetie!” All in all, he found that a bit too impudent for a bird intent on delaying his tennis victory.

  “Shoo!” cried Bradford. “Shoo!”

  “Son of a bitch,” said Frank. Bradford moved to chase the bird off, but his opponent proved swifter: Frank charged ahead, his racquet raised above him like the battle-axe of some Viking berserker; the bird, suddenly hip to the barbarian siege taking place, darted over to the doubles alley with what its attacker took to be an air of outrage. Outraged in turn, Frank chopped the top of the net with his racquet repeatedly, glaring. “Get lost, freeloader!”

  “Christ, Frank,” said Bradford. “It’s only a cute little thing.” He watched the chickadee caper down the sidelines. Having popped a Klonopin that morning to quell his anxiety over playing tennis with Frank—whose flawless strokes and footwork still crackled with the white-hot fire of the private tennis club where Bradford’s father had taken lessons with the man years before—he felt a certain drowsy sympathy for this bird and crouched down on his haunches in the closest thing to an expression of solidarity he could manage. In the end, it was this loving interspecies gesture that drove the chickadee to fly from the court once and for all, the dark of it slicing through the air and into the nearby woods.

  “Good work, champ,” said Frank. “You killed him with kindness. Now—we ready?” He took a new ball from his pocket and bounced it, walking back to the baseline. “Forty-love.” He noted Bradford’s defensive position, vaguely appreciative that, even in retirement, he could still intimidate a young adversary. “Match point.”

  Bradford followed the drift of the ball tossed skyward, Frank’s hand frozen in the motion of its release; at the ball’s suspended peak, Frank’s body, coiled and crouched like a loaded spring, launched into action—propelled from the ground, he torqued his trunk, snapped his wrist, and grunted loudly, seeming not to give a thought to any of this as he served an ace in one fluid, merciless motion.

  “Yes!” Frank cried, pumping his fist and bounding up to the net. Bradford strolled forward to shake his hand. “Good game,” said Frank. “Maybe tomorrow we can work on those lazy feet of yours.”

  “They’re my Achilles’ heel,” said Bradford.

  Frank stretched his arms above his head, gripping his racquet at both ends. Darkness gathered at the armpits and chest of his shirt; rivulets of sweat ran from his greying temples. “Well, you should be happy you have legs at all, Bradford,” he said. “I remember this one time, courtside, I was going on and on, griping about how god-awful I had played in the first round of a club tournament, and this friend of mine, Mark, who was temporarily in a wheelchair at the time—your dad knows him; Irish guy; did you know that people in wheelchairs play tennis? It’s true, they have their own league—just smiled as I stood there talking about myself, and when I was done, he looked me up and down and said, ‘Well, at least you can use your legs, you whiny fucking cunt.’ Can you believe that?”

  Bradford rooted around in his tennis bag. “I’d be curious to see wheelchair tennis.”

  “It’s interesting,” said Frank. “You roll around. The ball can bounce twice. But listen—there’s a lesson here, Bradford. Mark was trying to tell me that even when this and that isn’t going well, you have to take joy in the . . . fucking . . . little things. Little things, you know, like legs. The basics—food, shelter, legs. You’re alive, Bradford! That you can feel anything at all is a fucking miracle!”

  “I suppose so,” said Bradford. “Unless, well.” He paused, thinking to himself, “Is there no word for the opposite of a miracle?”

  “Anyway, can you guess what happened then?”

  Bradford said he could not. Perhaps he could have, but he felt that by guessing he might somehow implicate himself in the what that had happened then, which was sure to have been something altogether offensive.

  “I looked at him and said, ‘You know what, you asshole? You’re right,’ and then I started skipping and jumping off the court, hooting and hollering like a Looney Tune.”

  Frank laughed heartily and scratched his prim little mustache. Seeing that Bradford’s mouth hung open in horror, he said, “Oh, come on. He practically asked me to. We had that funny kind of relationship. You know, talking shit. He cursed me out with a vengeance after that—words I’d never even heard before. We’re still in touch. And he got me back later by introducing me to Carol.”

  “Well, that’s funny,” said Bradford. He finally managed to fish the translucent orange cylinder of a prescription bottle out of his bag. He shook one tablet into his palm and swallowed it with a swig of water. Now, with the mention of Carol Widdicombe, his thoughts turned to her able assistant, Michelle. “Do you think everyone’s up and about by now?”

  “I try not to think about things like that,” said Frank. He crouched down on the concrete and kicked his legs out behind him, getting into push-up position. “Only fools think, Bradford. Wise men reflect.” He lowered himself to the ground and, holding himself there, added, “And at this point, if I’m not a fucking wise man, I don’t know who is!”

  Bradford chuckled at this, feeling it to be in better taste, at least, than the mark anecdote. He then began the short walk back to the house, his legs—though he was glad to have them—sore and shaky from defeat.

  * * *

  Although the invigorating aroma of coffee greeted Bradford as he passed through the hall, it was with trembling hands that our would-be Casanova entered the breakfast nook of Willowbrook, the brick-red house with white trim recently purchased by Mrs. Carol Widdicombe of San Francisco. Bradford had showered, his face was shaved clean, and he was dressed in an elegant ensemble from his preferred purveyor of preppy threads, Chamberlain & Sons. His compulsive thirst for beverages with invigorating aromas presently took a backseat to the all-consuming dread he felt at having to ask his father for a large sum of money later that day. His father the coffee mogul, the coffee king, with all his money earned sell
ing the very brew Bradford was about to sit down and sip. While the Klonopin worked to calm his mind like maids making the beds in a recently trashed hotel room, dread refused to budge, settling in among the mess of tennis humiliations, requests for cash, and—oh, yes!—thoughts of Michelle Briggs, object of his as-yet unrequited, heavily medicated affection.

  Frank came storming by just then. He punched Bradford in the arm and shouted, “I’ve still got it, Dearborne! I’ve still got it!”

  “That you do,” said Bradford.

  “Fuck if I’m not a wise old man.” He skipped up the stairs to go shower.

  Bradford sidled up to the sideboard in search of a snack to calm himself. A Danish Bodum of frothing black coffee stood next to a large ring of pastry topped with slivered almonds and stuffed with apricots, and some summer figs arranged on blue-and-white plates. Mrs. Widdicombe herself sat across the room, perched on the edge of an Edwardian Louis Quinze–style chair that had been reupholstered in hot-pink moiré. Her slender, disheveled son, Christopher, home for the summer after a year studying abroad in Italy (a period during which he had apparently shunned Old World tourism in favor of documenting that country’s fragrant garbage crisis in watercolors, and had suffered some kind of heartbreak at the hands of a “withered Albanian bellhop—ah, my Kreshnik!”), curled up on an antique sofa, meeting the lovely landscape outside the window with a heavy-lidded stare; he noticed Bradford and raised his eyebrows in silent greeting. “Heya,” said Bradford, and then he smiled at Michelle, who, in her capacity as the Widdicombes’ personal assistant, was far too busy scribbling her instructions for the day into an agenda to notice him. A hired hand stood on a stepladder trying to position an abstract painting created by Carol’s dear friend Gracie Sloane.

  Carol was addressing all those present, a flurry of talk.

  “It’s still crooked—look at the sconces, dear, and just tilt it slightly. Christopher needs to be dropped off at the library by noon. Christopher, I assume you’ll be home for dinner—we’re having salmon. Good morning, Bradford—you look nice. Speaking of which, stop by the auto shop and see what’s taking them so long with the car—it was only a small accident. Nobody died, for heaven’s sake.”

  “A part of me died,” said Christopher. He covered his face with his hands. “My sense of enchantment died. What little left of it there was!”

  “Disenchantment builds character,” Carol snapped.

  “You want me to do that? Go to the auto shop?” said Bradford, serving himself two pieces of pastry.

  “No, no, Michelle can take care of it, you’re just here to relax, Bradford, and to write your movie thing—that’s perfect, you can go now—thank God that’s taken care of; Gracie arrives tonight, and I had forgotten completely to hang up her wonderfully creative painting. Don’t you just love gifts? Although I quite like it hanging there now, with that owl perched on that . . . totem pole, or whatever that’s supposed to be. Enjoy a krangle, Bradford—Michelle made it. It’s delicious. That is what you call it, right?”

  Michelle waggled her pen. “Kringle. It’s a Danish specialty.”

  “Well, great,” said Carol. She paused to take a long breath through her nose. Bradford took advantage of the lull in conversation to look at Michelle as she made competent notes in her little book. Could she be writing: 2 p.m: Fall in love with fascinating houseguest? She kept her blond and wavy hair in a simple, shoulder-length style that he liked. Presently she tucked a strand of it behind her ear, the lobe of which was tightly attached rather than free-hanging and, to Bradford, all the more alluring for its compact efficiency. She wore a summery orange dress and a necklace of gleaming, oversized amber beads. Oh, to be that heavy rope of beads, hanging sloth-like from her neck! He was a burdensome sloth, she a swan, yet somehow they would find love. The fact that he was working on a frightening screenplay went some way, he felt, toward persuading her to pay attention to him. Yes, he would one day soon touch the pale skin that seemed to radiate with a halo that might either be something sacred or a pharmaceutical side effect.

  He realized that she had been speaking to him.

  “Are you still with us, Bradford?”

  “Oh,” he said. “Sorry—having a little daydream.”

  “How perfectly daydreamy.” Michelle smiled, a twinkle in her eye. “You look super put-together, as usual. What’s the occasion?”

  “Money,” said Bradford, thinking of his father. “And it won’t come easy.” He bit into a piece of kringle. “This is delicious. Really good.”

  “Thank you. A friend in Denmark gave me the recipe.”

  Bradford chewed and stared at her. As he turned the shadowy fragment “a friend in Denmark” this way and that in his head, he felt his jaw stiffen with jealousy.

  Carol, who had evidently recovered from the strain of her earlier directorial monologue, turned to him as though recalling an urgent matter and said, “How was Frank today?”

  “Good, good.” Bradford shifted in his seat, reckoning with a wave of nausea. His tongue weighed heavy as he spoke, and his mouth watered. “I mean, he wouldn’t let me get a single point in. He approached the net a lot.” He decided not to tell them about the chickadee incident, as Carol loved birds. “He’s still got it, as he says.”

  “I think she means his mood, Bradford,” said Michelle.

  “His ‘state of mind,’ ” added Christopher, making air quotes. He spoke these words as though to have a mind at all constituted an ironic state of affairs.

  “Oh, right,” said Bradford. He swayed; his queasiness, he feared, was growing more conspicuous to the rest of them by the second. “Right. He’s still got that, too.”

  “Yes, his mood,” said Carol. She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You know, he’s been very upset since his trip got canceled. God knows we would have been happy to get him out of our hair for a while.”

  “Mm, right,” said Bradford. “France.”

  Carol frowned. “Yes, that’s it. France. Only, that’s not it, if you catch my drift.” She paused to adjust the position of a John Singer Sargent book sitting on a side table—the rippled dust jacket showed a dark-haired darling tucked into a floral teacup of a chair, her gauzy dress giftwrapped at the waist by a long, pale pink bow—and then, sighing, she added, “Frank is depressed.”

  Michelle scoffed. Her hands flew to her hips, and the bronze bangles around her wrists clinked together softly. “What? Not Frank. He can’t be. He’s too fit to be depressed. All that exercise! It seems, well, chemically impossible. All those endorphins, Carol.”

  Carol shook her head. “But he is,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”

  Christopher turned away from his pained windowpane reverie, adding, “Well, I can’t say I blame him. This country, this empire, this era—it’s hopeless.” He sank deeper into his corner of the couch with a pout. “And what’s worse: this island! The very thought of it . . . oh, now I’m depressed. This island—this island, Mother! Why? It’s beautiful, yes, but—oh, God. It’s like living in a Thomas Kinkade painting!” The question of the island—why?—was rhetorical. Christopher threw an arm over his forehead as though dying of a fever; he began to mutter to himself in Italian.

  “Is that how they teach you to talk about your mother country at RISD?” said Carol. Christopher merely snorted and cried, “I hate all countries, Mother!”

  “Well, okay,” said Bradford, trying, in his drugged muddle, to reason out the mood of the elder Widdicombe. “Maybe he’s a bit bummed out about his vaycay. They go every year, don’t they? He wanted to see his friends and everything, drink wine in the country . . . you know, in the country and everything . . . that’s understandable. I would be sad, too. So sad . . .” For a second, he wondered if he was, in fact, sad. He couldn’t tell, although he was beginning to feel a bit dizzy.

  “No, Bradford,” said Carol. “No.” His answer had failed to acknowledge what she felt to be the true gravity of the situation. She looked around the room, afraid her husband
might pop up unannounced. “Not just sad, Bradford—Frank doesn’t know it yet, but he’s clinically depressed.” She was speaking in a hush now, and she was twisting her wedding band. “I did some research, and he shows all of the signs.”

  “What signs?” said Michelle.

  “Psychomotor agitation.” Carol pronounced these words in triumphant staccato, as though revealing a great discovery to a panel of scientific colleagues. “And he wakes up too early. He’s unpredictable and sad, and it’s affecting all of us.”

  Before Bradford or Michelle could protest further, they heard Frank himself descending the stairs. He was whistling a merry, three-note tune somewhat similar to the call of that chickadee.

  “I’m not fooled by a little cheerful whistling,” Carol whispered, leaning back into her chair. “Not one bit.”

  Frank’s birdsong stopped short as, stepping into the nook, he stubbed his toe against the leg of a tasseled ottoman. “Motherfucker!” he shouted. “God damn it. Ow! I’m tired of these fancy footrests—lying around all over the place! Christ!”

  “Frank!” cried Carol. “Please, we have guests. And maybe that will teach you to walk around without house shoes or even slippers, like some feral animal.”

  Frank limped into the room, his owlish, salt-and-pepper eyebrows pulled together in anger. He surveyed the present company. “Guests? Michelle works for us. Hardly a day goes by she doesn’t hear me say fuck a hundred times. Bradford did his fair share of swearing on the tennis courts this morning as I was serving his ass to him on a silver salver, and Widdicombe fils over there, he can’t even hear me ’cause he’s staring out the window and dreaming of some old dwarf in Italy.”

  Christopher whipped around to glare at his father. “I’d like to hear you say that to Kreshnik’s face!”

  “You won’t be bringing that old Albanian around here,” said Mr. Widdicombe. “You’re going to marry a nice American boy.”