Into Woods Read online

  On a Saturday, brioche day, I went down to Cerqueux and tried to make up with the baker, explained that I hadn’t meant to insult him, that it was only my lousy French.

  “So,” he said, “You prefer the bread from Tigné?”

  Jules and I went to Saumur for the fourteenth of July. Several thousand people had gathered on the banks of the Loire and on the medieval bridge that spanned it. At something imprecisely near eleven o’clock all the town lights went off, everything, a blackout, all the streetlights, all the restaurant neon, all the auto lights, all the lights in homes. Jules and I sat quietly on the southern bank of the Loire in blackness. For five minutes all was hushed and dark, just the river coursing past, deep and quiet. Then a rocket went up, just one, a stream of orange sparks, then a silent explosion and a sparkling like sunlight on water. More fireworks went up, one or two at a time for an hour. The rockets rose progressively higher as the show continued until finally a bright orange stream went high enough that its flower burst directly over the castle as the full moon rose behind.

  Louis the Elder took me for an evening tour of his vines. He was worried why Juliet wasn’t home, didn’t think that an evening model session at the atelier was an adequate story. He kept shrugging, sweetly, concerned for me, and pointed out the vines that he owned, those that his son owned, those that his evil neighbor owned. “These with the thick stalks were planted by my father just before the war. These over here I planted just after. One can see that mine are superior. My father–that old dog whom no one remembers kindly—was the first to graft American vines onto French roots, at least here in Trémont. This prevented the spread of disease. Those over there, 1965. Quite strong, as one can see. The white powder is for mildew. They say the powder won’t kill a person, but I don’t believe that!” To give me the words for graft and mildew he repeated them over and over, pointing at the graft lumps at the bases of his vines, sniffing with his nose at imagined mildew. He meant for me to understand every word he said, made me rephrase everything to prove I had it right. “These vines are getting too old, here, but the wine is my favorite, so I save this section for myself. It’s ideal growing weather here, all of the year round, but the soil is terrible. Thou hast seen the fools trying to grow com? Louis Petit tried it two years. Phut. With all his machines. And he buys more and more land, more and more grapes, more and more tanks to store wine so he may sell when the price is high. More and more and more! Bigger and bigger and bigger! What is wrong with stability? Constancy? Satisfaction? It’s as if he’s trying to be an American, always growing, growing till he’s too big and falls from the weight!”

  We walked down the rows of grapes, turning from one arbor to the next, until we had turned so many times I became confused. I was surprised when I saw the barn and realized we were nearly back at the farmstead. Louis put his thumb hopefully to his lips, his pinky in the air. I nodded, followed him to the caveau. We filled our glasses from one of Louis Petit’s 1000-liter tanks and drained off two glasses of wine each, then three. “To my son, the ungrateful prick, and to my bad marriage and to his.”

  We drank. Louis waxed misty. “There were snakes in Anjou when I was a boy. Big snakes as thick as thy penis. Salut! But people didn’t like the snakes, and now they are killed and gone. Nothing is wild here. Everything is planted. Everything managed. A deer walks by like a pet, and is shot in his season. A rabbit is the son of the son of an escaped meal! The fish in the pond? I put them there. The fish in the Loire? The government puts them there. Only the storms are wild anymore! Only the hailstones! Only the wind, drying everything!” He drank. “To thy new little baby. Thou must name him French!" He said French in English, the only word of English I ever heard him use. “May there be snakes everywhere he travels, and may strong winds knock him down, again and again, again and again!”

  Our honeymoon proceeded. No day was much different from another. The church bells tolled at the same hours, the weather was hot and clear with a strong western breeze. The sun set in our bathroom windows at ten, the nights were cool and long. The boys came out of their house at eight and got on their tractors and trundled away; Louis Petit came out at nine, stared over at me, got in his little truck and drove off; Charlotte hung the wash; little Hubert raced through the garden, scared to death I’d say hello. And Grandmère came and picked tomatoes, or weeded, or sprayed water with the hose; Grandpère came and asked me to join him for a taste of wine. I walked the farm some afternoons, or swam in the pond, or rode Antony’s bicycle, searching the countryside for Roman ruins.

  And each evening sweet, complicated Juliet came home from the atelier and we ate—fresh foods plain and exotic from the outdoor market, tomatoes from the garden, bread from the boulanger, wine from Grandpère—then watched the long sunset, slipping late back into our house, which was simple and no castle tower, simple and cool and cozy and our own, lit our candles, closed the French doors and were alone.

  Into Woods

  In a dive near Stockbridge in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, I nearly got clobbered by a big drunk who thought he’d detected an office fairy in the midst of the wild workingman’s bar. He’d heard me talking to Mary Ann, the bartender, and I didn’t talk right, so by way of a joke he said loudly to himself and to a pal and to the bar in general, “Who’s this little fox? From Tanglewood or something?”

  I, too, was drunk and said, “I am a plumber, more or less.” I was thirty years old, was neither little nor a fox, had just come to work on the restoration of an inn, and was the foreman of the crew. More or less. But that seemed like the wrong answer, and too long in any case.

  He snorted and said to everyone, “A more or less plumber,” then appraised me further: “I say a hairdresser.”

  “I say a bank teller,” his pal said.

  I didn’t mind being called a hairdresser, but a bank teller! Oh, I was drunk and so continued the conversation, smiling just enough to take the edge off. “Ah, fuck off.”

  “Cursing!” my tormentor cried, making fun of me. “Do they let you say swears at the girls’ school?”

  “Headmaster,” someone said, nodding.

  “French teacher,” someone else.

  “Guys ...,” Mary Ann said, smelling a rumble.

  “Plumber,” I said.

  “More or less,” someone added.

  “How’d you get your hands so clean?” my tormentor said.

  “Lily water,” someone said, coining a phrase.

  My hands? They hadn’t looked at my hands! I was very drunk, come to think of it, and so took it all good-naturedly, just riding the wave of conversation, knowing I wouldn’t get punched out if I played it right, friendly and sardonic and nasty all at once. “My hands?”

  My chief interlocutor showed me his palms, right in my face. “Work,” he said, meaning that’s where all the calluses and blackened creases and bent fingers and scars and scabs and cracks and general blackness and grime had come from.

  I flipped my palms up too. He took my hands like a palm reader might, like your date in seventh grade might, almost tenderly, and looked closely: calluses and scabs and scars and darkened creases and an uncleanable blackness and grime. Nothing to rival his, but real.

  “Hey,” he said. “Buy you a beer?”

  My dad worked for Mobil Oil, took the train into New York every day early-early, before we five kids were up, got home at six-thirty every evening. We had dinner with him, then maybe some roughhousing before he went to bed at eight-thirty. Most Saturdays, and most Sundays after church, he worked around the house, and I mean he worked.

  And the way to be with him if you wanted to be with him at all was to work beside him. He would put on a flannel shirt and old pants, and we’d paint the house or clean the gutters or mow the lawn or build a new walk or cut trees or turn the garden under or rake the leaves or construct a cold frame or make shelves or shovel snow or wash the driveway (we washed the fucking driveway!) or make a new bedroom or build a stone wall or install dimmers for the den lights o
r move the oil tank for no good reason or wire a 220 plug for the new dryer or put a sink in the basement for Mom or make picture frames or ... Jesus, you name it.

  And my playtime was an imitation of that work. I loved tree forts, had about six around our two acres in Connecticut, one of them a major one, a two-story eyesore on the hill behind the house, built in three trees, triangular in all aspects. (When all her kids were long gone, spread all over the country, my mother had a chainsaw guy cut the whole mess down, trees and all.) I built cities in the sandbox, beautiful cities with sewers and churches and schools and houses and citizens and soldiers and war! And floods! And attacks by giants! I had a toolbox, too, a little red thing with kid-sized tools.

  And in one of the eight or nine toolboxes I now affect there is a stubby green screwdriver that I remember clearly as being from that first red toolbox. And a miniature hacksaw (extremely handy) with “Billy” scratched on the handle, something I’d forgotten until one of my colleagues on the Berkshires restoration pointed it out one day, having borrowed the little thing to reach into an impossible space in one of the eaves. Billy. Lily.

  My father called me Willy when we worked and at no other time. His hands were big and rough and wide, blue with bulgy veins. He could have been a workman easy if he wanted, and I knew it and told my friends so.

  In my rich suburban high school in Connecticut we were nearly all of us college track, which meant you could take only two shop classes in your career there.

  First half of freshman year you could elect Industrial Arts, which was an overview: a month of Woods, a month of Metals, a month of Technical Drawing. Second semester, if you still wanted more, you went into Woods I, Metals I, etc. I loved Woods. I loved hanging out with some of the rougher Italian kids, Tony DiCrescenzo and Bobby LaMotta and Tony Famigliani, all of them proud and pleased to be tracked away from college. I wanted to hang out with Tommy Lincoln and Vernon Porter and Roland Fish, the three black kids in my class, all of them quietly (maybe even secretly) tracked away from college. Wood shop was first period, and it was a wild class. Mr. Schtenck, our little alcoholic teacher, made no effort to control us and often left the shop for the entire period to sit in his car.

  The rough kids used the finishing room to smoke pot, the storage room to snort coke. We all made bookshelves and workbenches and record racks and knickknack shelves and lamps and tables and guitar stands and frames for photos of our girls. The year was 1968, so we also made elaborate bongs and stash boxes and chillums and hollowed-out canes and chests with secret drawers. Wood shop (and along with it the very act of working with my hands) took on a counter-cultural glow, the warm aura of sedition, rebellion, independence, grace. Sophomore year I signed up for Woods II, which was the advanced course. My guidance counselor, Miss Sanderson (a nice enough lady, very well-meaning, very empathetic—you could make her cry over your troubles every time if you played your cards right), thought I’d made an error on the electives form. “Only one elective a semester, William. Surely you’d like a writing course! Journalism! Or how about Occult Literature?”

  “Woods II,” I said, flipping my hair. I had to get parental permission to take Woods again and thought a little note with my mother’s neat signature would be easy to snag, but it was not. “Why do you have to reinvent the wheel?” Mom said, one of her phrases, something of a non sequitur in this case, her meaning being someone else will build the furniture. Her next question was, “What kind of kids are in that class?”

  Dumb kids, Mom. Mostly Italian kids and blacks and, of course, Alvin Dubronski (the class moron) and Jack Johnsen (the plumber’s kid!) and me. My dad thought it was fine, especially with the alternative being literature courses where who knew what kind of left-wing occult hippie doubletalk Mrs. Morrisey would tell you!

  So into the wood shop again, every day first period (if I wasn’t late for school; by that time I was hitchhiking to avoid the uncool school bus). I was the only college-track kid taking Woods II, maybe the only college-track kid who had ever taken Woods II, though the other kids got to take it semester after semester. And I got peer-pressured into smoking pot in the finishing room and occasionally even into blowing coke in the storage room, always a sweet, nerve-jangling prelude to another round of boring college-track classes.

  One day when I was in the storage room with my high-pressure peers (and the two smartest kids in Woods II, maybe in school, both destined by their blackness for bad times in Vietnam) Roland and Tommy, fat Tony Famigliani stuck his head in the door: “The Stench is coming!” But Schtenck was already there, standing in the door. I saw my college-track life pass before my eyes.

  “What are you little fuckers doing?”

  “We’re tasting coke, sir,” Tommy said, the idiot, total honesty, as we’d all learned in Boy Scouts.

  Florid Schtenck raised his eyebrows clear off his face, said, “Jesus Christ, boys, put it away—you want to get me canned?”

  He never looked in the storage room again.

  And later that year he stumbled and cut his finger off on the band saw. For two weeks then we had a substitute who made us file all our plans and actually checked them, stood beside us as we drilled holes in our wood or turned bowls on the lathes. It seemed an eternity before Schtenck came back and we could finally fill all the bong and hash-pipe and stash-box orders we’d been sitting on. Sedition. The next year I took Woods II again, having secured special permission from the principal to go along with my parents’ special permission and the special permission from Miss Sanderson. Senior year I signed up for the class once more—what the hell—but I don’t think I ever got to school in time to attend.

  Somewhere in there I stopped being a willing volunteer for my father’s list of chores. Now he had to command me to help with his corny weekend projects. I had better things to do, things in the woods with Linda or cruising-in-the-car things with some of the guys in my various garage bands—minor-league dope runs into Greenwich Village or actual gigs in actual bars in Port Chester, where the drinking age was eighteen and we could get away with it.

  At home things were quiet. Except for my long hair, you wouldn’t have noticed that a teen was testing his folks. I was good at talking to my elders, and good at hooking grades without working too hard—college track—and very, very good at staying out of trouble. I was on the student council. I helped with the student newspaper. I went to the homecoming rallies and proms and parades. I memorized the headlight patterns of the town police cars (I still get nervous around those big old Plymouth Furys), could smell a cop from miles away, leagues away, light-years. I had a plan for every eventuality and an escape route from every party.

  Weeknights I’d turn in early, out to my room over the garage, wait for the main house to quiet down, then slip out into the night. I was caught only once, coming home about five in the morning with a friend named Bonita. Someone had called me after I’d left, and Dad couldn’t find me. He was asleep in my bed when Bonita and I walked in. I was grounded, and here was the punishment: I had to spend the next four Saturdays and Sundays helping him build a playroom in the basement, drilling holes in the concrete for hours to anchor the plates for a gypsum board wall, running cable for a hanging light over the bumper-pool table, slamming up paneling, churlishly working side by side with my dad and his distinctive smell, Old Spice mixed with cigarettes and Head & Shoulders and sweat.

  The college track barely got me to college. As part of my desultory rebellion I put off applying until well past all the deadlines, never lying to my folks, never lying to my guidance counselor, but showing all of them the forms ready to go, then just plain old not mailing them. My plan was to play rock and roll and maybe—if necessary—make money working as a carpenter, or maybe drilling holes in concrete, or maybe making furniture or bongs. Then Miss Sanderson got a list of our school’s applicants from one of my supposed top choices, and I wasn’t on it. Crisis! April already, when most kids were hearing from Colby and Yale and Michigan and the University of Hawaii.


  My trusty guidance counselor got on the phone and found some schools that would look at a late application. She was crushed for me, so crushed she spared my parents the full brunt of my dereliction. At hastily arranged late interviews, admissions counselors never failed to ask why I’d taken Woods II six semesters straight. Finally I was accepted by one famously lame school, to which I resigned myself; then, at the last possible minute and by great good fortune, I was put on the waiting list at Ithaca College, where, on August 21, one week before school started, I was admitted into the freshman class.

  I never saw my father at work, and he never talked about his work, which I vaguely knew was Executive and had to do with Mobil Oil and was desky and involved meetings and much world travel and made us pretty rich. And because I’d never seen him at work, my natural adolescent impulse toward emulation had little to go on. What to imitate? How to surpass, destroy? What I saw of my valiant dad was his work around the house, and so, emulation gone awry, I set out to be a better home handyman than he’d ever be, the real thing, even, a tradesman.

  Two dollars and fifty cents an hour was well known as great money, nearly double what I’d made stocking frozen foods at the A&P during high school. Two-fifty an hour was what truck drivers got, longshoremen, a full hundred rasbuck-niks (my father’s word) a week. I dropped out of Ithaca College in my junior year (just when most of my buddies were heading off for a year abroad), went back to Connecticut (not my hometown, God forbid, but one nearby), and went to work for an electrician.