It’s the hat, really. Seeing the hat upsets her most. A Russian style “diplomat” hat – like Leonid Brezhnev or Mikhail Gorbachev might have worn. Not Persian lamb, which would have been too prissy, but rather, some, once-upon-a-time, exquisitely soft, fluffy fur — rich molasses brown when she originally bought it for him…years ago…when they were first lovers.
(Interestingly, it had reminded her, back then, of a hat her own father used to wear; her father, who possessed so artistic a flare and such expensive tastes for being a penniless alcoholic.) Now the hat is more of a mottled brown with whitish patches where fur has worn or been torn away or perhaps been dined upon by moths. And it’s wet…laying in a pool of liquid drained off the water heater that’s being replaced. It lies there — like an old, injured animal that has crawled in from outside to die upon her garage floor — surrounded by various wrenches, torches, lengths of copper piping, jars of flux and other tools of the plumbing trade.
She examines the “plumber’s” thin legs projecting out from below a set of shelves, installed by some idiot, which divide the tiny niche now occupied by the new water heater from the rest of the garage. Why on earth, she wonders, would this home’s prior owners have chosen such a cramped, inaccessible space to install a water heater for the coach-house apartment which sits separately behind the main residence? In order to get at the gas connection, one must literally lie underneath shelves surrounded by piles of filthy insulation that have fallen off garage walls over the years as surrounding drywall has rotted away. It’s probably a code violation of some sort, all that loose insulation, and it makes replacement of the water heater a filthy, seemingly impossible job.
“Hand me that mapp torch,” comes the “plumber’s” impatient voice from underneath the shelves. Quickly, obediently, she complies.
“So what do you think?” she ventures timidly, passing the torch downward to him. When he’s working, she knows, it is best not to chatter at him too much, especially when he needs a drink. He can fly off the handle so quickly. Plus it’s hard enough for him to concentrate these days – with or without alcohol.
“Humprh” comes his indistinguishable reply.
His thin legs twist as if in a yoga asana while he tries to reposition himself to better see in his cramped workspace – dark despite a glaring floodlight which has been clamped onto the intrusive shelves. She watches him quietly and cannot help recalling those legs as they were long ago…strong, full, hard, active…poised over her in ramrod straight push-ups.
“You know you have perfect ‘heart’ shaped calf muscles” she had said to him once, before they had really gotten to know each other, while they were both still strangers who just happened to be working out next to each other one day in a small, private health club in a building where she lived and where he had been installing a Jacuzzi for a unit owner who told him he could go lift weights in the building’s private gym during his lunch break.
She was a short, skinny woman back then with a perfectly symmetrical, auburn pageboy that smelled of jasmine. He was an even shorter, refrigerator shaped man with wiry black hair shaved almost bald and bulging calf muscles…an emigre from some central American country from which his family had fled to escape violence. He worked hard to maintain his physical appearance because he felt intimidated by his alien status. He had been so flattered that she noticed his physique that it was probably right then and there he had fallen in love with her – despite the fact that she was ten years older and married to another man…a successful cardiac surgeon.
Everything was so simple back then. Conversations with strangers happened easily. Idle discussions blossomed into friendships and friendships sometimes into something more. It was all very innocent, very natural. They were younger then, attractive and full of hope. They took friendships and good times for granted…took them as their due. No one thought overmuch about the future.
They ended up going out a few times together. For exercise, they said, skating or biking. Bringing along food was an afterthought, a reward for a several hour strenuous work out.
The doctor was an avid golfer and so his wife was left alone a lot. Golfing was not for her. So stupid…she thought…swatting that little ball around in a way that, in her view, actually interfered with enjoying sun, scenery and the rest of the outdoor experience golfers always claimed justified playing the game even if the golf, itself, wasn’t something you particularly enjoyed.
She much preferred letting the Doctor go off with his golfing buddies leaving her to ride her bicycle along the paved lake front pathways watching her companion’s heart-shaped calf muscles pumping his bicycle ahead of her — balancing it, actually, since his arms were usually filled with grocery bags full of steaks, avocados, red peppers, tostadas, and dips along with a few bottles of medium priced red wine and a disposable charcoal grille.
Because they were younger back then, they could drink bottles of wine and still efficiently grill their steaks without burning themselves, despite being a bit tipsy. They could even bike some more, after eating, or sometimes they would skate, in a pleasant haze, without falling down or getting hit by cars. They worked out a lot. Their reflexes were good. They had better than average balance. (She had been a dancer for many years and he was a sort of circus freak type person who would skateboard down steep hills and wide cement banister railings long before doing so became popular sport among much younger people).
Those were some good times they had. Nor were they disappointed in one another as their relationship eventually progressed into something beyond shared work-outs and afternoon picnics. She had huge breasts for someone so slender and her physical innocence was such as to cause him to wonder if she and her doctor husband had ever even consummated their lengthy marriage. She, in turn, was appreciative of his sincere way of throwing his small, hard body upon her with torch-hot enthusiasm even when she was not at her best. Even when she had not just stepped out of a perfume scented shower into a marabou trimmed peignoir. Even when, and this was amazing to her, she was in a sort of condition that in some cultures would have necessitated her being segregated from the males because it was believed that women at such times were possessed by evil spirits. Such total acceptance seemed to her an unexpected display of warmth and love. Now, in retrospect, however, she had to acknowledge that perhaps the “plumber” had accepted her body like he would have any other work environment – like the washrooms of the local pub where he was frequently called upon to rod out a clogged drain pipe or sewer line. Or maybe it was just the alcohol.
“Hand me the blue-handled wrench” he calls out to her, interrupting her reverie of times past. She hastens across the cement floor searching for a wrench with a blue handle. She has lots of other work she needs to do, but she’s afraid to leave him alone on the job now that the alcohol so dominates him. With all those torches and water valves, there is no telling what damage he might do to himself or her property. Her home is all she has left now of the life she used to live…the person she used to be. She allows herself a moment of intense anger at the alcohol, for what it has done to him, at him for having let it and at herself for…something. What that is, she’s not sure. Then she retrieves the blue handled wrench from the cement floor and trots it over to him.
For her, alcohol had never been anything more than a momentary pleasant interlude. There were times when she went for years without touching a drop. She didn’t have an addictive personality or body chemistry — lucky for her since her father had been a bone fide alcoholic. She could drink when she felt like it and then not drink again for weeks or even months at a time. He, on the other hand, couldn’t control his response to alcohol – although like most alcoholics he tried and tried. His body chemistry and personality were those of a true alcoholic. One sip and he was a goner. He could binge for days at a time until sheer exhaustion brought him to a temporary standstill and he was forced to retire somewhere to sleep it off a bit before waking up to begin the predatory cycle all over again. And so, over time…little by little…the alcohol claimed a greater and greater share of him in much the same way as it had of her father so many years before.
The Doctor, on the other hand, was a social drinker. He could have a cocktail or a couple of glasses of wine with dinner and it never caused him to go off on any kind of binge or to loose his concentration or his steady operating room reflexes. Cool as a cucumber, that one was. Peering out at the world from behind those pale, expressionless, blue eyes, his blond hair cut military short for ease of maintenance and that slightly cynical smile always playing about his lips. He was inscrutable. Mild mannered and unassuming in physical appearance, he favored comfortable beige pants, neutral-tone, flannel shirts and did not believe men should expose their lower limbs in public by wearing shorts or sandals (which to his mind were somehow feminine). Balanced in all of his habits, or so it seemed, nothing much bothered him.
For example, he appeared indifferent to his wife’s relationship with the skateboarding drunk who claimed to be a “plumber.” “Not an ‘official’ plumber, you understand. No union card or anything like that.” But with carpentry, plumbing and such, he was, by his own account, “as good as any of those guys who do it for a living every day.” It was true, actually. He was very good with carpentry and plumbing. Dry-walling too. He could roc walls quickly and efficiently but he could not tape them. He did not have a taper’s fastidiousness. And, Lord knows, you could not turn him loose with a paint brush. He couldn’t paint worth a damn.
Some people wondered why the Doctor was so unperturbed by his wife’s obviously close friendship with “that ‘plumber’ fellow.” Some speculated it was because the Doctor was, himself, so besieged by nurses, lab technicians and other female admirers that he was just sated. Like some ancient lord holding a feast, his largesse extended to allowing a few crumbs to spill before those less fortunate. Then too, the Doctor and his wife had been together since their teenage years, friends observed. By now they were probably past those petty jealousies which characterize new found love. There were even rumors of an “open marriage.” But no one could quite believe that of the Doctor. He was just too conventional.
For her part, however, the Doctor’s wife did believe her husband was pointedly allowing her sufficient space within which to grow — in much the same way she had permitted him various indiscretions throughout their long years together –presuming they somehow compensated him for all those free-wheeling love-ins of the sixties he had missed while they kept each other monogamous company. Her husband’s indifference to her relationship with the “plumber” seemed, to her, to be a manifestation of his sincere love and trust and a testament to his fine, strong character. It was only years later – long after their divorce – that everyone, including the Doctor’s, now, ex-wife, considered another possibility. Perhaps the doctor appeared unconcerned over his wife’s affair with the “plumber” because he really didn’t care — being more concerned over the mechanical issues of strangers hearts, exposed to him daily in the operating room, than with the hidden spiritual heart of the woman with whom he had spent his entire adult life.
Perhaps things could have gone on forever between the three of them: the Doctor operating and golfing, his wife teaching her college anthropology courses, working out and picnicking with her “plumber” who, in turn, might have continued circling around them indefinitely on his skateboards and roller skates (the old-fashioned four-wheeled kind not those in-line ones everyone favors today) a wrench in one hand and an open beer bottle in the other. If only the doctor and his wife had not become parents. But they did.
It was her idea. There were so many unwanted children in the world. They had so much to offer. It seemed only right to take a child and give that child everything…a perfect life. All their years together, the Doctor and his wife had never had children. They couldn’t have said why. There was no physical impediment, not originally. Now they were, well, she was anyway, too old…almost fifty. Talk about having a biological clock with a late alarm. They really didn’t discuss it much. Someone at the school where she taught put her in touch with a lawyer who knew of a young woman who had just delivered a healthy baby boy but was not in “a position to keep him.” The rest was paperwork which another friend of hers, a colleague who taught family law classes at the college, took care of everything for them. One day it was just the two of them doing whatever they felt like from moment to moment and the next – suddenly – they were parents…jointly responsible, for the rest of their lives, for another human life.
The “plumber” took it all in stride. He arrived at their fiftieth floor condominium unit armed with slabs of drywall, nail drivers, electrical conduit (yes, he could do electrical too) and a gigantic, stuffed, pink elephant. Single-handedly he transformed a sizable chunk of their apartment into a pristine nursery. Then he lay down in a corner – dead drunk – and slept it off.
The baby boy, like the “plumber,” had dusky, Spanish skin. In his mind, the “plumber” decided the child was really, somehow, “his” baby and he proceeded to love him as much as he was allowed. Sometimes when the Doctor and his wife went out for an evening of opera, the “plumber” would come to visit “his” baby. Arriving with several new toys, he would drop down onto the floor where he would crawl around playing till the baby, tired and happy, finally fell asleep in his arms. Then he would gently place him in his crib, bid good-by to the baby sitter and head out to one of his favorite bars to get drunker. He, himself, was never left alone with the child because his drinking raised fears of some sort of accident which could possibly occur.
Years passed and the boy thought of the “plumber” as his uncle. “Uncle Ax” he called him because when he was young one of his picture books contained a picture of a tool labeled “ax” which looked like something he had seen his “uncle” wielding around once on the job site back when his parents were renovating a Victorian row-house as their new family residence. Somehow the ax and the uncle got connected in his toddler’s head and hence the name “Uncle Ax” which stuck ever after. Now, years later, the boy’s mother still lived in that house where “Uncle Ax” got his name; even though his father had long since moved away to another house without her.
Good old Uncle Ax…always ready with a joke. He was a guy who could show you how to catch a fish with your bare hands or land a good punch — the kind that might actually knock out a playground bully. Neither of his parents went in for that sort of stuff – although his father did make funny faces sometimes deliberately and his mother occasionally delivered wry observations with a slight smirk meant to signal that her statement was intended to be amusing, never mind that her son never got her jokes.
Uncle Ax always was fun in a simple easy to understand way and he was totally approachable. He was also the one who, for as long as could be remembered, fixed every mechanical problem in his mother’s home. After the divorce, he was happy to fix things at the Doctor’s home too, if asked. Only he rarely was. He never asked for any money in payment for his work and was usually half-drunk when he showed up, tools strapped on his body in an tattered, old leather back pack, and drunker still by the time he finished and left. It was difficult as a child to sort out exactly what relationship existed between his parents and Uncle Ax. The boy knew that Uncle Ax was not his “real” uncle. But then what did that mean? His parents were not exactly his “real” parents either, or so he had been told since he was old enough to understand about adoption. What is a “real” family, anyway, he wondered.
When their relationship was new, the Doctor’s wife had occasionally wondered what life would be like if she married her “plumber” lover. She tried in vain to imagine her life without the Doctor. Picturing herself and the “plumber” being free to come and go (and make love) like other couples. Yet, underneath it all, she loved the Doctor, respected him and knew she would never willingly leave him. Hers was the life she had chosen and it was unthinkable to her that she might turn her back on that life or on the Doctor merely because of a fleeting image of some parallel reality flashing before her. She was far too serious a woman for that. She also knew, from having had an alcoholic parent, what life was like with people who are addicted. She did not want to live through that all over again. So she stayed in her marriage. And her “plumber” lover made no real effort to force her to leave – although once he did ask her to marry him (the obvious implication being “Divorce the Doctor”). On that occasion, after a painful silence, the “plumber” tried to pass off his earlier remark as a joke — finally admitting to himself how unthinkable a prospect it would have been for either of them to commit exclusively to one another. He did voluntarily promise her he would never leave her and that part was true. He never had – except in the way the alcohol took him away from her, himself and life in general.
In fact, it was the Doctor who finally left. He left his wife when she was sixty five years old and no longer thin or beautiful. Their Victorian row-house, which he gave to her as part of the divorce settlement (in lieu of alimony) was beginning to fall into disrepair by that time and their son was a teenager (disinclined to do much to help out at home). Their son really didn’t understand quite what had happened between his folks but as both parents remained devoted to him, he did not dwell upon it overmuch — preferring, like most young people, to focus, self-centeredly, on his own friends and interests.
It was a quick, painless divorce. In addition to the marital residence, the Doctor generously relinquished most of the marital estate to his wife. He could afford to. By now he was an internationally recognized expert in his field – frequently called upon to consult and interviewed from time to time on television. Even with the flurry of hospital mergers and buy-outs, he still earned a solid, six-figure income – unlike his ex-wife who, after the divorce, lacking tenure, earned less than her former housekeeper. The doctor was soon, to everyone’s surprise, driving around town in a new red BMW convertible with a twenty-something blonde riding shotgun. And while this behavior was the expected cliché for middle aged men, it was unexpected coming from the Doctor. No one had ever realized he had so much as a trivial bone in his body.
Thoughts of these earlier experiences preoccupy the Doctor’s ex-wife as she watches the “plumber” installing her new water heater. His hand is less steady now and she knows the drink has nearly blinded him. Really, it will be a wonder if he completes this installation without blowing them both up. Thank God her son is with his father right now in case that does happen.
“I can’t get the fucking gas to turn on,” he calls out to her angrily, as though this is somehow her fault. Then he starts cursing in a long random string before finally heaving himself heavily out from under the shelves. “I’m done, that’s it,” he complains, pulling himself up to sit on a storage box full of summer garden furniture.
“Let’s try tech support” she suggests gently reaching for the installation materials which came with the new unit and punching in the number of the water heater installation hot line on her mobile phone.
“Is the unit being professionally installed?” is the first question the telephone support technician asks. “Yes” she answers hesitantly. “The same installer who is putting in this one has installed two others in my premises,” she adds truthfully, in a more confident tone — hoping to deflect any unwillingness on the part of tech support to help amateurs.
Finally, after carefully calling out various instructions given to her on the cell phone by the water heater tech-support team, she is able to guide the “plumber” sufficiently so that the installation of the new water heater can be completed. But not before the “plumber” has scorched himself in several places with his torch and sliced a nasty chunk out of his right hand, leaving a trail of shockingly bright, red blood across piles of dirt-blackened insulation.
After they check the coach house apartment above the garage and verify that it now has hot water, the “plumber” regains a bit of his cocky bravado. “They gave me bad flux,” he complains of the plumbing supply house. “And these aren’t my regular tools. I had to borrow some because mine are up North on a work site.” He offers these explanations as though alcohol has not been a factor in the almost aborted installation. The Doctor’s ex-wife is just relieved that now they really are done. Wordlessly she heads back down to the garage with the “plumber” to gather up tools and clean up the mess.
Finally, when she has gotten him into the shower, found him some fresh clothes, washed and bandaged his cut hand, put ointment on his burns, she holds out some money which he, at first, as always, refuses to take until coaxed.
As the “plumber” turns to leave, the Doctor’s ex-wife picks up his Russian diplomat hat intending to dust it off thoroughly before handing it to him. She brushes it briskly with her hands, at first superficially then with her fingers digging deeper and deeper into the damp, matted fir. Suddenly she feels very angry. She squints her eyes shut and keeps digging…harder and harder…trying to force the formerly beautiful fluffy fur to stand back up as it once did. As she works the hat’s fur, disjointed visions of her past life flash through her mind.
Dusting and digging, she deliberately tries to invoke a vision of what her life might be like, right now, if she and the “plumber” had never met…if she was still married to her Doctor ex-husband. Then the “plumber” reaches out his scorched, bandaged hand for his hat and she hands it to him. Try as hard as she might, she realizes, she simply can not picture that other life, any other life at all, other than the one she is living.