Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll Read Free

Macdonald that he instinctively fled to Boston, as if he were creeping home. Leaving Boston had been his watershed move, and yet he always swore he only left because of the weather. That is what he said in the beachy watering holes he landed in during those five years. Winter in Boston was ten months long, he would say, and spring and fall were parlor tricks. But when Neil threw him over for a toothy Cuban tennis pro, the white, whining Florida heat began to make him throw up. He took to going out only at dusk. Boston, with its tulip trees and fruit blooms aching for the first warm day, promised to be sober and pure. Better to weep for his lost youth, he thought, than for the likes of Neil Macdonald.
    His real mistake was thinking his life was a story. When he told me about him and Neil or him and the gardener, he introduced them as the supporting cast in an ongoing drama, like a TV series with guest stars. One of David's stories had ended just before he went to Miami, when he lived in the Hollywood Roosevelt with the writer. I heard about it when he called me from the LA airport, about to flee to Florida. But it was already behind him. He'd started a fresh page.
    "Why Florida?" I asked him.
    "The Pacific is too cold to swim in," he said. "The surf is too rough." And he wasn't sorry about the experience, because he had asked all the questions about television that he had been saving up.
    So it is all something of a story. I have decided it is none of my business. To think your life is a story may be just the right illusion. What was more important was this: in all this talk of leaving Boston and coming back, he made no mention of me. He was talking fast, as if I might not notice. I noticed.
    As soon as he walked off the plane in Boston, he said, he knew he had misinformed himself. The first bite of the wind brought back every sullen winter day he'd ever spent here. He walked through slush to a taxi stand, his bare toes frozen to his sandals. He had figured to stay at the Y and not make contact with anyone he knew for several days, not until he had a job and an apartment, neither of which he was going to be fussy about. But the weather rooted in his guts so fast that he decided he had to have a drink. He gave the driver the name of a gay bar on the west end of Beacon Hill. "Having a drink" was one way of putting it, but he really wanted what he always wanted when it snowed. He didn't care if anyone recognized him or not. And then, when several people did, wondering where he had been all this time, he cared too much. He had been wrong, he saw, to think his five years away had been a lifetime. They barely noticed he had been missing, and they knew he'd come back. It was just a half hour, but already he felt like he'd never been gone. Then he went home with a man who had a tattoo of Santa Claus on his right forearm.
    The next morning, he saw that his tan had begun to shred off like eraser shavings. The tattooed man had gone to work and didn't care if David stayed. So he slept until noon, full of shrill morning dreams about Neil. Then he stood in the kitchen window, naked, and stared out at the gray sky and the ankle-deep snow. He picked up the Globe. He read the classifieds and found the same jobs listed that he couldn't get in Florida. Until he came to Mrs. Carroll, whose ad had a purple ring to it and seemed like a misplaced personal.
     
YOUNG MAN WANTED as live-in companion for an old lady who doesn't want to be bothered. Come and go as you please. Indiscretions and irregularities acceptable.
     
    With a telephone number that turned out to connect him with Mrs. Carroll's lawyer, a Mr. Farley, who felt compelled to provide the job description with the rigors and good breeding the advertisement lacked. David agreed to everything. He knew the name of the town she lived in meant shorefront and what he called "megabucks," and that seemed the safest method of reentry after two years in a condo in Miami Beach. At least it was the