Born Slippy Read online

  Yours, etc., George Heald

  Frank thought, OK, first, that explains Henry James’s inability to get to his verb, and second, were all those imbecilic idioms some attempt at jocularity?

  The mother’s letter was both less Byzantine and less successful at being careful.

  Dear Franky (if I might),

  I know our dear friend Catherine has mentioned her “nephew” Dmitry will be looking for some suitable employment while across the pond, and if in fact it all works out to your benefit, I wanted to thank you in advance for your kind thoughtfulness. I think he would be of some help to you. For some years now there has been no telling when he might actually arrive anywhere — the lads will have their head! — but he probably will show himself sometime in May if he isn’t derailed en route. I hope it isn’t terribly cheeky of me to hope to someday return the consideration…

  That implied Frank might someday come to England, which had never occurred to him. He found it reassuring when she suggested that this Dmitry likely wouldn’t show up and decided not to worry about it. While Frank was reading, Trog was declaiming against some indignity foisted upon him by the local authorities, and he listened half-heartedly. Trog’s old stories — about wandering around Morocco in the 1970s, getting chased by international police and rival hashish runners — were fabulous, but his current litany of complaints less so. The rants sometimes formed an oddly soothing background noise, though, like muzak, filling gaps in whatever actual conversation was happening.

  “So you like these people?” Frank asked.

  “Yeah, why not?” Trog said. “Known them forever.”

  “And you know the kid?”

  “Nah, but he doesn’t work out, you let him go.” He looked with disgust at the cutesy well-house, and then up at the out-of-towners’ manse. “These fucking new people and their bullshit.”

  “Work’s work,” Frank said.

  That had been the last he’d thought about the nephew.

  “Well!” Dmitry said, with a clownish wink, as Jillian’s truck pulled away. “She seems like quite a lot of fun!” Henry James aside — yeah, Frank knew he was born in New York, but he was a Brit in every other way — and maybe a half-dozen other novelists, Frank wasn’t a fan of the English. Aristocrats. Snobs. Not that he’d met that many of them. “Nostromo,” Dmitry said, reading the cover of the paperback on the desk-saw. “What does tromo mean?”

  “Have you read Joseph Conrad?”

  “Not that I know of,” he said.

  Although Frank couldn’t say why, he found this mildly reassuring. And Dmitry had found his way to the middle of nowhere, Connecticut, which meant he had some resourcefulness and clearly wanted the job. Maybe he wasn’t as flaky as his mother’s note suggested. Besides, Frank needed the help and wasn’t allergic to wiseasses.

  Dmitry looked down at his index finger and picked at a hangnail. “I may as well tell you, Franky,” he said, still with the grin, looking back up. “I’m going to need your help.”

  “Not Franky, Frank. I know, you want a job.”

  “Yes, but more than that. I want to learn as much about Ameriker” — Frank started to think he might be exaggerating his accent at times, but maybe not — “as I can while I’m here, so I’ll need you to catch me up on the local customs and mores or I’ll never learn, all the flora and fauna and folklore and legends and whatnot — you say whatnot here, right?”

  “Have you ever swung a hammer?” Frank asked.

  “No, I’m forced to admit that I have not, Franky, although I have swung other things.”

  “Frank.”

  The sun was getting low.

  “Frank?”

  “Yes, not Franky, Frank.”

  “I’m sorry, Frank, but really, think about it: me mum and dad, me auntie and uncle, and their kids, and your Tracy: everyone calls you Franky. I feel like I know you as Franky.”

  So Dmitry knew Tracy, Frank thought. Of course he did. It was a tiny town up there.

  His ex lived in the house they had rented, up in the hills a few miles from the Vermont border, the house she lived in when they met. She had a baby and a toddler then, and was twenty-six to Frank’s nineteen, so she struck him as impossibly mature, totally out of his league, a woman to his boy. In retrospect, he found it almost criminal, like those female high-school teachers who sleep with their students — the young guy doesn’t stand a chance. Not that he complained. He was the first to admit that he was absolutely fucking in love. At twenty-six, she was all mystery and oracle and wisdom, and meeting her gave him an immediate incurable longing. That never changed. The craving started and never stopped. Maybe, he thought, he should read some more Jung, and let him explain it, because she did represent some eternal female principle to him, as if she lived at an unbridgeable mythic distance from his own tortured, puny psyche. Hence the longing.

  But when Dmitry brought her up, it pissed him off. He was working long, long hours to pay everyone’s way — paying for the kids, even though they weren’t technically his — since she still didn’t have a job. But when he suggested she might bring the kids down to Connecticut, she reminded him they weren’t his kids. And true, biologically, they were not. But emotionally they were. Lulu was only a month old, Kennedy two when they got together — he was the father they knew. Tracy said it was all in his head, that he barely told them he loved them, that he was emotionally constipated, out of touch, incapable of true bonding. But he couldn’t imagine being any more full of love for them than he already was — he told them in all sorts of ways, and he was convinced that the kids knew it, knew how protective, how possessive, even, he felt toward them. He told them he loved them sometimes too, he did, just didn’t tell them every other minute the way Tracy did, and which he thought was kind of creepy. The image that came back to him, sometimes more than once a day, was a camping trip they all took to a state park on Long Island Sound, sleeping in two cheap little tents, one for him and Tracy and one for Kennedy and Lulu, cooking on a propane stove, the girls running on the beach all day, still in the plastic bucket and shovel years, he and Tracy like a real couple, real parents. If he spent too much time thinking about it, he would weep, but he wasn’t blind. He could see that all along Tracy was looking at him sideways, wondering if she should settle for him, if he was ever going to grow into a man she could really love. He watched her appraise other men, but he refused to dwell on that. He pushed the image of Tracy’s wandering reluctance aside, and remembered the way being with them all lifted his chin, filled his chest, and dampened his eyes. He remembered the pride. Was that real, or was he just pretending to be a father? He liked to think it was real.

  He looked up to find Dmitry observing him, amused about something.

  “So. You’ve never done any construction at all,” Frank said.

  “I’ve constructed plans and I’ve constructed alibis and I’ve constructed criticism, Franky.” He turned serious. “But hey, no, really, my plan is this: I work for you for precisely one month, thirty days straight, ten hours a day, at ten dollars an hour, which will give me three thousand dollars exactly, with which I can buy what we call a land yacht but which you call a motorhome and drive it to California and back, stopping along the way, meeting toothsome girls, having adventures, buying an American baseball jacket, chewing peyote with Indians, executing love affairs with suburban housewives, rustling cattle, cataloguing the aforementioned flora and fauna and whatnot —”

  “Who said anything about ten bucks an hour?”

  “Bucks,” he said, like he loved this word too, feeling it with his lips. “Bucks. Well, me auntie and uncle said so, said that’s what carpenters make here in the good old US of A.”

  “But you’re not a carpenter. Unskilled laborers make five. If you turn out to be useful I can make it six.”

  Dmitry crushed his cigarette butt with his shoe and pulled out another.

  “You’re going to pick up that butt, right?” Frank said. “They take decades to decompose.” He walked back
to the foundation to resume cutting studs. He wanted to get more of the first-floor exterior wall up before it was too dark.

  “Ah, Franky, you see the wages of truthfulness?” Dmitry said, following him. “I should have lied to you. My sterling honesty about my lack of experience has cost me fifty percent of my income.”

  “But if you had said you knew what you were doing, I would have said, OK, go ahead and make me a dozen thirty-nine-inch two-by-six-by-six headers and their jack studs, per plan, and then what would you have done?”

  “Look for a dictionary?” Big grin.

  “So you want to increase your vocabulary for five or not?”

  “Ah, Franky, you like words too. That’s what Tracy said.”

  Sure she did, Frank thought. Dmitry wasn’t helping himself bringing her up — thinking of her made him feel bereft.

  “So you’ve never used a circular saw?”

  “Doesn’t even sound possible,” he said, squinting like a mathematician contemplating a twelfth dimension. “A circular saw. How would you hold it?”

  “Christ.”

  Frank scoffed, but he found himself feeling warmly toward the kid. He had something — he couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was something, some level of contagious bemusement at the absurdity of it all, maybe, some quiet self-confidence, and his humor worked on Frank, won him over. They agreed on five an hour, six after two weeks if Dmitry worked out. Frank gave him a few pointers and safety tips and set him up trimming joists. He utterly fucked up a few of them, and was slower than a tree sloth, but Frank needed the extra set of hands. For now, it was the best he could do.

  The house in Connecticut was for a nuclear engineer named Paul, who was vaguely related — their fathers were cousins, he gathered — to Frank’s defrocked dentist, a little guy they called Catskills because he had grown up playing saxophone in the resorts every summer. Catskills had a closet at home with a row of tuxedos in plastic bags, lined up like xylophone keys, each one an inch longer than the next, a tux a year from age nine until he was in college, during which span he had gone, as he put it, from being four foot five to five foot four. Catskills was on an extended vacation from dentistry, having abused his script pad a few too many times, and was now just another one of the town’s backwoods drug addicts. His income was augmented by running the odd bale of marijuana across a state line or two. On one of his trips to New Haven he took Frank to see Paul, who needed a contractor to build his new house. Since it was Catskills, Frank assumed the deal was somehow shady, but he liked the idea of getting out of town, of putting a little distance between him and Tracy.

  “Paul’s alright,” Catskills said as they walked up to their door. “But be careful of the wife.” He was the kind of guy, Frank knew, who constantly railed about the women in his life, past and present, so who knew what that meant? He had his own problems with women, or at least with Tracy, but Catskills was off the charts with his constant misogyny. So, grain of salt.

  Paul answered the bell. In his thirties but looking younger, he had the blond, pudgy, All-American look of the young Beach Boys before they met Charlie Manson — round, soft, and pasty. He was too boyish to be handsome and too bland to be cute, with a slightly ferret-like nose and pale eyes a size too small for his face.

  “Hey, Catskills,” he said. “And you must be Franky?”

  “I prefer Frank,” Frank said, and Paul’s crest fell.

  “Sorry,” he said, looking pure contrition.

  “No big deal. I just prefer Frank.” Paul looked immediately grateful, and Frank’s first thought was: jeez, it will be ludicrously easy to guilt-trip this guy.

  “And so, Frank,” he said, unrolling blueprints on his dining room table. “Here are the plans?”

  Was that a question? Frank wondered. He looked them over. They were good drawings. A big house, saltbox shaped, traditional. Nice details.

  “You drew these yourself?” Frank asked.

  “Yes?” he said, tensing up as if he were about to be spanked.

  “Nicely done,” Frank said, and Paul exhaled. “Very professional. Building inspectors love all the different elevations, all the detail insets. Everything above code. Permits should be a breeze.”

  Margie, Paul’s wife, walked in as he was saying this. Paul, nervous, introduced Frank, saying his name and then taking a quick step back, out of firing range. Clearly she owned the place and she owned Paul. In her thirties too, she might have been pretty if it weren’t for her angry jaw and her cruel eyes, whipping around like gale-warning flags at the end of a dock. Her hair was an unexceptional brown but rigorously done, like she had checked it just before she walked in the room. Same with the unremarkable and yet precision-guided make-up, the body neither too thick nor too thin, the clothes that weren’t too sexy, too dowdy, too dull, or too showy. She looked like she had read every women’s magazine and every girl’s manual in the world, eviscerated every wayward instinct, spent exactly the right number of daily minutes on each machine in her gym. All this vigilance and discipline had made her calmly and terminally vicious. One sensed bodies strewn in her wake.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, but she wasn’t, and she said it with a killer’s smile, without actually saying hello. Frank guessed it was because he was in the servant class. “I’m glad you like the plans, but we were hoping you would be able to tell us what was wrong with them. What needs improvement. We know what’s right about them.”

  That stumped him for a minute.

  “Kee-reist!” Catskills jumped in the breach. “Give him a minute, Margie, damn!” He was working himself up, getting hyper as he sometimes did. One night they had to throw him in the river to keep him from jumping on people.

  Frank looked at the plans again to find a mistake, and ended making something up as Catskills paced. “We could note the glazing on the windows — double, triple, single, whatever. Door thickness. Put in a few more details like that.”

  “Paul?” she said, like Patton.

  “Right?” he said, “will do.”

  “Triple, right?” she said. Frank was pretty sure she knew nothing about glazing, but that she rightly assumed triple was the most expensive option. She was smart, Frank could see — clearly had them all figured out, knew like a high school basketball coach where each strength and weakness was, knew that she would be disappointed in the end by all of them.

  “Right,” Paul said.

  “I’m glad to see the solar worked in,” Frank said. “Do you have to use a state-approved vendor?”

  “Paul?” she demanded. She ingested new information like a snake, taking it in whole.

  Paul looked at Frank. “Yes? Yes.”

  “OK, no problem. You have enough square feet?”

  “We can always add more,” Paul said, glancing at Margie.

  She left the room on that, with a my work is temporarily done here nose in the air. Catskills was smiling broadly, which didn’t make sense at first, until Frank realized that Margie, with her every move, confirmed his worldview about female perfidy.

  Her husband’s jumpy equanimity returned as she disappeared.

  “Sorry about that,” Paul said. “But it’s always best to agree with her? I’ll put the details in about the windows. And the doors?” Frank was having trouble not focusing on the fact that Paul inflected every other sentence as a question. “And I’ll do the solar panel calculations again, easy to do. Anything else?”

  “What’s this beam?” Frank asked, pointing to a side-view of the roof framing.

  “Ah!” He was proud of the beam. “This roof line is so long that no standard rafters could take the snow load. Well, I don’t really know? That’s the way I read the building code. I figured we cut the span in half, support it with this beam?”

  “Why not a supporting wall?”

  Catskills stood up, too jumpy to take this. “OK,” he said. “I’m officially bored enough to blow my brains out. You got a gun here, Paul?”

  Ignored, he announced he was getting beer
s, leaving toward what must have been the kitchen. Paul was explaining his reasoning about support walls and rafter length and room size, and Frank didn’t really pay that much attention. He just appreciated that, unlike most of his clients, Paul knew how things worked. He liked that he was an engineer, that he was doing his homework, and that he would worry about the specs so Frank wouldn’t have to. They agreed about the decision to frame the outer walls with 2x6 to increase the insulation, the use of Tyvek as a moisture barrier — they were having a little love-fest in the language of techno-banalities, and Frank was thrilled that Paul cared about energy efficiency, so he could build something that did as little damage to the environment as possible, even if it was way too big. Catskills came back with three beers, half of his gone already.

  “So you have the money for all this?” Frank asked. Paul wasn’t doing anything on the cheap.

  “The thing is,” he said, excited, “the state of Connecticut is giving me an interest-free construction loan — this program to help poor people own their own homes, building them themselves?”

  “OK,” Frank said. “You don’t seem that poor.” Plus, he thought a few seconds later, you aren’t building your own house. I’m building it for you.

  “You have to excuse Franky,” Catskills said. “He’s got a kind of Tourette’s moralism, but it’s always momentary. Once he gets over it he’s as venal as the rest of us.”

  Paul still looked worried. It seemed to Frank he should be. Catskills made a show of downing his beer.

  “Is it legal?” Frank asked.

  “Yes. I mean I had my lawyer look at all the papers.” Poor people don’t have lawyers to look over their papers, Frank thought, and Paul could see it in his face. So could Catskills.

  “Franky!” he screamed, finishing his beer and slamming his bottle down on the table. “The fuck’s your problem?” he added even louder, like his meth had just kicked in. He hopped up, ran at Frank, and put him in a headlock. He often went berserk in this little-guy way, and now he was hanging off Frank’s head in Paul’s dining room. Fuck’s sake, Frank thought, what were they, thirteen? Instantaneously, like some finely tuned bad behavior seismograph, Margie walked back in.