A Marriage Made at Woodstock by Cathie Pelletier Page A

plenty of things, a goddamn cornucopia of stuff, but he couldn’t think of anything specific. Other than her. Other than his work. Those were pretty sacred things, weren’t they?
    â€œTry to understand what I’m going to tell you,” she’d said then. “I just can’t live with you anymore. Capisce ?”
    Frederick watched the branches of the cherry tree dip and bob. It was a windy time of year in more ways than one. He had intended all along to summon up a good defensive front, and that’s why he had said to Chandra, “You had no right to leave this house.” Now even the cherry tree seemed to realize his folly. One didn’t tell Chandra Kimball-Stone what her rights were or weren’t. Rights were things Chandra counted at night when she couldn’t sleep, instead of sheep.
    â€œDon’t call me again,” she’d told him. “I’ll see that the rest of my things are out within the month.”
    â€œYou’d better!” He hadn’t intended to shout, but that’s just what he did. “And you’d better keep Robbie away from this house!”
    That’s when she hung up on him. Several times he had come close to phoning her back so that he might apologize, perhaps ask if they could sit over coffee in some quiet café, maybe one of those apple strudel places she loved, a place where copies of Impressionist paintings hung on the walls, where one had to walk through strings of plastic beads to find the john. Maybe at that same place with the potted ferns where she’d been spending so much time with Robbie. Panama Red’s. But by the time he’d gotten to the part about Robbie, he’d be too angry to call. Besides, he felt confident that she’d be calling him soon. Chandra depended on him more than she realized. He and his hair—now 1.4 millimeters longer than when she left—would await this realization.
    Frederick pressed his forehead against the window. The trouble with waiting was that he had to wait alone. He had never been good at being alone. Back in his college days he had even allowed a young man with asthma and acne to move in as his roommate, rather than enjoy a quiet day alone, void of wheezing and scratching. Now the alternative to going solo in the Victorian house on Ellsboro Street was sitting at the China Boat restaurant and watching Herbert Stone tear into a duck, mandarin style. Frederick had read that there were nine classes of mandarins under the old Chinese Empire, distinguishable only by the jeweled button worn on their caps. But no one ever mixed mandarins up at the China Boat in Portland, Maine, although the menu boasted everything from mandarin buffalo wings to mandarin nachos. And none of the regulars at the China Boat appeared to be Chinese, not even the staff. The clientele ranged from fishermen to college students to over-forty baby boomers. And there seemed to be an endless supply of dead ducks down there. In the four days that his wife had been gone, Frederick had patronized the China Boat twice, for dinner and drinks with Herbert. And he had seen two such ducks expired upon plates, with slices of orange peeling nearby. He had seen those ducks disappear into Herbert Stone’s belly.
    What he was beginning to feel now, on this fourth day, was the first true stabs of loneliness, of what his life might be like as a single man. Surely, he was not destined to become another Herbert Stone, a thing to be pitied, a veterinarian eating ducks, eating potential patients, for Christ’s sake. No, he would not . Frederick shook his head in defiance—a hint to The Girls—and then tapped his fingers against the glass. He would work, that’s what he would do. Maybe the Puritans had been onto something with their notion of mind-breaking labor. Maybe it hadn’t been about salvation after all, but about not being lonely.
    He spent the evening of the fourth day of Chandra’s departure