The Development Page 8

  This last is a family tease of a couple years' standing. Ashleigh Barnes was in fact born left-handed, as was Judy's mother, but the nickname dates from her ever more emphatic liberalism since her fifth- and sixth-form years at Fenton. It's a tendency that her younger sister has lately been manifesting as well, although apart from their mother and a few of Judy's colleagues, the school, it's faculty, and it's students' families are predominantly center-right Republicans.

  Her problem, Ashleigh guesses with a sigh, is that she just doesn't like fat cats.

  "Mindy Matthews fat?" Tiffany pretends to protest. "She's downright anorexic! Speaking of which," she adds to her father, "at least one person sure got hurt when Saint Mark changed horses: Sharon Matthews." Mindy's predecessor.

  Judy looks to her husband with a smile and raised eyebrows, as if to ask, How d'you answer that one? But Joe merely shrugs and says, "With the alimony payments she's getting for the rest of her life, that woman can cry all the way to the bank. So let's enjoy our dinner now, okay?"

  His wife sees their daughters give each other their we-give-up look. She does likewise, for the present, and the family returns to enjoying, or at least making the best of, one another's company.

  Later that evening, Ashleigh drives back to campus in her hand-me-down Honda Civic, Tiffany busies herself in her room with homework and computer, Judy takes a preliminary whack at the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle before prepping her Monday lesson plans, Joe scans that newspaper's business section while pondering what Mark Matthews told him that morning en route back from Baltimore in Mark's new Lexus (Mark and his secretary in the front seat, Joe and Jeannine Weston in the rear) and that he hasn't gotten around yet to sharing with Judy—and the new downstairs neighbors' little Yorkshire terrier starts the infernal yip-yipping again that's been driving them batty ever since the Creightons moved into 412 a month ago. They're a pleasant enough younger couple, he an assistant manager at the Stratford GM dealership, she a part-time dietitian at Avon Health Center and busy mother of their four-year-old son. But the kid is noisy and the dog noisier—a far cry from the unit's previous owners!—and although the Creightons respond good-naturedly to the Barneses' tactful complaints, promising to see what if anything they can do about the problem ("You know how it is with kids and pets!"), it gets no better.

  He slaps the newspaper down in his lap. "We've got to get out of this fucking place, hon."

  "I'm ready." For rich as it is with five years' worth of family memories—the girls' adolescence, their parents' new jobs—the coach home has never really been big enough. No home-office space; no TV/family room separate from the living room; a dining area scarcely large enough to seat six. No guest room even with Ashleigh in the dorm; no real backyard of their own for gardening and barbecuing and such. But the place has, as they'd predicted, substantially appreciated in value, and although any alternative housing will have done likewise, by Joe's reckoning they're "positioned," as he puts it, to move on and up. What Judy would go for is one of the better Oyster Cove villas, a side-by-side duplex instead of over-and-under: three bedrooms, of which one could be her study/workroom and another a combination guest room/den once Tiffany's of to college; a separate family room with adjacent workshop and utility room; and their own small backyard for cookouts, deck lounging, and as much or little gardening as they care to bother with. But what Joe has in mind lately is more ambitious: to buy and renovate one of those older detached houses in Rockfish Reach. A dining room big enough for entertaining friends and colleagues in style, as well as Ash and Tiff and their friends; a real yard and patio; maybe a pool and some kind of outboard runabout to keep at their own private dock. And they should finally cough up the money to join the Heron Bay Club on a golf membership and take up the game, without which one is definitely out of the social scene (so Mark told him, among other things, in the car that morning).

  Judy's flabbergasted. "Are you kidding? A twelve-thousand-buck initiation fee plus, what, two-hundred-a-month dues? Plus a house to renovate and two college tuitions coming up, dot dot dot question mark?" It's a thing she does now and then.

  "Leave that to me, hon," her husband suggests, in a tone she's been hearing him use lately. "I've learned a thing or two from Master Mark about estate building." Among other things, he silently adds and she silently worries—not without cause, although "Tennis, maybe, but count me out on the golf" is all she says aloud. "Not this schoolmarm's style."

  Amiably, not to alarm her, "Folks can change their style, you know," he says—and then shares with her part of what's been distracting him all day, since Mark announced it on the drive home. Jim Lucas, one of the firm's founding partners, intends to retire as of the fiscal year's end. Mark Matthews will be replacing him as senior partner and codirector of the company's home office (he and Mindy are buying a condo on the city's Inner Harbor to supplement their Spartina Pointe weekend-and-vacation spread). "And Saint Mark's successor as chief of our Stratford office will be ... guess who? Whoops, sorry there, Teach: Guess whom."

  "Oh, sweetie!" She flings aside her crossword and lays on the congratulatory cries and kisses; calls for Tiffany to come hear Daddy's big news; asks him why in the world he didn't announce it while Ashleigh was there to hear it too; but laughingly agrees with him that the girl will scornfully assign them to the crème de la crème of her hypothetical hundred-person village—and refrains from pointing out to him that the nominative-case "guess who" is in fact correct, the pronoun being the transposed subject of the verb "will be" rather than the object of "guess." No champagne in the house to toast his promotion with; they'll get some and raise a glass to him when Ashleigh's next with them. And in their new house, maybe he can have the wine cellar he's always yearned for! Meanwhile ...

  "Congratulations, Dad!" cheers Tiffany, piling onto his lap to kiss him. And when Mom and Dad retire not long afterward to their bedroom for the night, Judy gives her crotch a good washcloth-wipe after peeing, to freshen it in case he goes down there in the course of celebratory sex. Since the commencement of her early menopause, she's been bothered by occasional yeast infections, with accompanying vaginal discharge and sometimes downright painful intercourse—not that they go at it as often or as athletically as in years past.

  But this night they do, sans soixante-neuf and such but vigorously a tergo and, to her mild surprise, in the dark. Normally they leave Joe's nightstand light dimmed during lovemaking, to facilitate his finding, opening, and applying their personal lubricant and to enjoy the sight of each other's so familiar naked bodies. Tonight, however, it's only after he clicks of the light and snuggles up to say goodnight (also to her surprise) that Joe seems to change his mind. He places his right hand on his partial erection and raises himself on one elbow to lift her short nightie, kiss her navel and nipples, and begin fingering her vulva—all the while scolding himself for imagining a certain younger, leaner body responding to his caresses. In the car that afternoon, when Mark broke the big news of his own and Joe's promotions, Jeannine Weston had squealed with excitement, flung her arms around her boss (those fine breasts of hers pressing into his right upper arm), and planted a loud wet kiss on his cheek. Alice Benning, Mark's secretary since Mindy's promotion to wifehood, had then declared to all hands that she'd asked Jeannine earlier whether she'd be interested in shifting to Baltimore to become the hot-stuff new front-desk receptionist for Lucas & Jones, LLC, and that the girl had replied, "As long as Joe Barnes wants me, I'm his." "Tattletale!" Jeannine had mock-scolded the older woman, and squeezed her chief's right hand in both of hers and leaned her head fondly on his shoulder. Mark, winking broadly at the couple in his rearview mirror, had teased, "Don't forget Rule Number One, Joe," and when Jeannine asked what that might be, Alice turned in her seat to whisper loudly, "It's Hands off the help— a good rule to live by, says I." So "Shoo, girl!" Joe had duly then bade his young assistant with a broad wink of his own—and to his startlement, in the spirit of their sport, she had slid laughing over to her side of the s
eat, crossed one arm over those breasts, and with her other hand cupped her crotch as if protectively. It is those body parts that Joe Barnes helplessly finds himself pic turing now, and that tight little butt of hers, bare and upraised for him to clutch in both hands while he thrusts and thrusts and thrusts and ahhh! ... collapses atop his accommodating spouse in contrite exhilaration.

  Now: This teardown story could proceed from here in any of several pretty obvious directions, e.g.: (1) Joe Barnes "comes to his senses," his love for Judy and the family reaffirmed by that short-lived guilty temptation. While his office relationship with Jean-nine Weston retains an element of jocular flirtation, no adultery follows. A year later the young woman is reoffered that receptionist post in the Baltimore office, and this time she takes it. Her replacement in Stratford is a married woman slightly older than Joe: amiable and competent, but not the stuff of lecherous fantasies. Alternatively, (2) somewhat to his own appall, Joe does indeed succumb to temptation and "humps the help," either in what used to be Mark Matthews's office but is now his or in some motel far enough from town for anonymity. The imaginable consequences range from (a) Next to None (adultery goes undiscovered; both parties, ashamed, decide not to repeat it; Jeannine meets and soon after marries a young professor at Stratford College who eventually moves to a better-paying academic post in Indiana), to (b) Considerable (Joe confesses to Judy and asks for divorce with generous settlement. She brokenheartedly agrees to what she condemns as a "marital teardown." Joe and Jeannine then wed and do a modified Mark-and-Mindy, renovating a large house in Rockfish Reach. The girls, both in college by that time, are shocked, embarrassed, and angry, but in time come more or less to terms with the family's disruption. Judy remarries—an estate lawyer from her southern Maryland hometown—and all parties get on with their lives' next chapter, neither unscarred nor, on balance, unhappy), to (c) Disastrous (Judy discovers the affair, goes ballistic, sues for divorce, and bars Joe from the house. Their daughters turn against him for life. The small-town scandal obliges Jeannine to quit her job and Joe to shift, under a cloud, to Lucas & Jones's far-western-Maryland office. "What'd I tell you?" Mark scolds triumphantly. Judy stays on at her Fenton post and in the Blue Crab Bight coach house, where the downstairs dog yips maddeningly on to the tale's last page and beyond).

  My personal inclination (George Newett here, Reader, who's been dreaming up this whole story: Tale Teller Emeritus [but no tale bearer] in Stratford College's Department of English and Creative Writing and, like "Joe and Judy Barnes," resident with my Mrs. in Blue Crab Bight) is to go with (3) None of the Above. This being, after all, a teardown story, I'm deciding to tear the sumbitch down right about here, the way people like "Mark and Mindy Matthews" might decide to tear down not only the Gunstons' "old" ranch house on Spartina Court but also the barely started hacienda grande that they're in the costly process of replacing it with. Mindy, let's say, has been belatedly persuaded by her longtime friend and fellow Stratford alumna Faye Robertson (now on the Fenton Day School faculty, Judy Barnes's colleague and Tiffany's art history teacher) that a mission-style palacio in Spartina Pointe will be as in-your-face and out of place as that neo-Neapolitan palazzo of Tom and Patricia Hardison's in Rock-fish Reach, and that for the sake of Heron Bay Estates' "aesthetic ecology," the Matthewses really ought to have considered a Williamsburg-style manse instead. "Never too late to reconsider," I imagine bold Mindy declaring to her astonished friend with a Just You Watch sort of laugh and then announcing her mind-change to "Saint Mark," who wonders whether he'd better reconsider what he's gotten himself into with this woman. Maybe time for a midstream change of horses on that front too? But he then decides it'd be a better demonstration of upscale panache just to shrug, chuckle, and say, "Whatever milady desireth ..."

  You see how it is with us storytellers—with some of us, anyhow, perhaps especially the Old Fart variety, whereof Yours Truly is a member of some standing. Our problem, see, is that we invent people like the Barneses, do our best to make them reasonably believable and even simpatico, follow the rules of Story by putting them in a high-stakes situation—and then get to feeling more responsibility to them than to you, the reader. "Never too late to reconsider," we end up saying to ourselves like Mindy Matthews, and instead of ending their teardown tale for better or worse (sorry about that, guys), we pull it's narrative plug before somebody gets hurt.

  Here's how:

  The Bard Award

  OF THE MANY TIDAL rivers on Maryland's Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay, most bear Indian names, as does the great Bay itself; names antedating the fateful arrival of white colonists four centuries ago, but filtered through those English ears into their present form and spelling: Pocomoke, Wicomico, Nanticoke, Choptank—and the handsome Matahannock, near whose ever-less-wooded shores I write these lines. A mile wide where it ebbs and flows past our Heron Bay Estates, the Matahannock (like these opening sentences of this would-be story) then winds on and on: another dozen-plus miles upstream, ever narrower and shallower, northeastward through the agribusiness corn and soybean fields and industrial-scale chicken farms of our table-flat Delmarva Peninsula to it's petering out (or in) at it's marshy headwaters somewhere near the Delaware state line, and about the same distance downstream from here, ever wider and somewhat deeper, southwestward past marinas, goose-hunting blinds, crab- and oyster-boat wharves, former steamboat landings, eighteenth-century estates, twenty-first-century mega-mansions, and more and more waterfront developments, until it joins our planet's largest estuarine system, which itself flows from and ebbs into the Atlantic and thence all the other oceans. Although no Heron Bay Estater has yet done so or likely ever will (we being mostly Golden Agers), one could theoretically set out from HBE's Blue Crab Marina Club, sail down the Matahannock, under the Bay Bridge and on south into Virginia waters, then hang a left at Cape Charles and cruise on to the Azores, Cape Town, Tahiti—right round the world!

  The region's counties, on the other hand, like the state they subdivide, have Anglo names—not surprisingly, since they didn't exist as geographical entities until the natives' dispossessors claimed, mapped, and laid them out: Dorchester, Talbot, Avon, Kent—most of them boundaried by the above-mentioned rivers. Ditto those counties' seats and other towns, their American characters quite out of synch with their historic English names. Cambridge and Oxford, for example, on opposite shores of the broad Choptank, are pleasant small towns both, but absent anything remotely like their Brit counterparts' venerable universities.

  Likewise "our" Avon County's Stratford (the gated community of Heron Bay Estates is five miles downriver, but Avon's county seat is our P.O.). A colonial-era customs port on the slightly wider river-stretch where Stratford Creek joins the Matahannock, it's now a comfortable town of six or seven thousand that nowise resembles it's famed English antecedent: not a thatched roof or half-timbered gable-end to be found in our Stratford's red-brick-Georgian historic district. Unlike those Choptank towns afore-noted, however, it does in fact boast a modest institution of higher learning. Stratford College is no Oxford or Cambridge University, but it's a good small liberal-arts college, old by American standards like the town itself. We currently enroll some fifteen hundred students, mainly from our tri-state peninsula, with a double handful from across the Bay and nearby Pennsylvania and half a handful from remoter venues. As might be expected of a Stratford in, if not quite on, an Avon, the college gives particular emphasis and budgetary support to it's Department of English and Creative Writing. Who'll be our Shakespeare?, our student-recruitment ads ask prospective applicants: Maybe you!—adding that many a potential bard not born in Stratford has been reborn in the College's Shakespeare House, headquarters of the writing program, "under the benignly masterful tutelage of experienced author-professors on the faculty and distinguished visitors to the campus." What's more (those ads bait their hook by declaring further), every budding playwright, poet, and prose writer in the program has a shot at winning the College's Shakespeare Prize, awarded annually to the gr
aduating senior with "the most impressive body of literary work composed in his or her courses."

  And this is where Yours Truly comes in, eventually. Stratford's "Bard Award," as everybody on campus calls it, is a hefty prize indeed, endowed some decades ago by a wealthy alumnus who had aspired unsuccessfully to playwriting but later flourished as the CEO of Tidewater Communities, Inc., his family's real-estate development firm. His munificent Shakespeare Fund pays the honoraria and travel expenses of an impressive series of visiting lecturers, maintains Shakespeare House and it's associated quarterly lit mag, The Stratford Review, and annually showers one lucky apprentice writer with a cash award currently twice the size of—get this—the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and PEN's Faulkner Prize combined: the equivalent of at least two years' tuition at the College or the annual salary of one of it's midrange professors! Little wonder that competition is intense among the ten to fifteen seniors who submit portfolios (StratColl .edu is a small operation, remember), and the pressure considerable on the half-dozen of us faculty folk who review and, to the best of our ability, judge them.

  That "us" and "our" ... After thirty-some years of teaching at Stratford, I'm newly retired from academe these days, but I still enjoy hanging out at Shakespeare House with new students and old colleagues (my wife among them, who has a couple of years yet to go before joining me in geezerdom) and serving on the Prize Committee. Mandy and I are a pair of those "experienced author-professors" mentioned in the school's ads, who out of teacherly habit here remind you that Experienced doesn't necessarily mean Good, much less Successful. Not likely you'll have heard of the "fictionist" George Newett or his versifying spouse Amanda Todd, even if you're one of those ever scarcer Americans who still read literature for pleasure (as you must be if you're reading this, if it ever gets published, if it ever gets written). Oh, I scored the occasional short story once upon a time, and Mandy the occasional lyric poem, mainly in serious quarterlies not much more widely read than our Stratford Review: little magazines that we ourselves rarely glance at unless something of ours or our colleagues is in them, which was never often and, in my case anyhow, is now nearly never. The New Yorker? Harper's? Atlantic Monthly? Neither of us ever made it into those prestigious (and better-paying) glossies. I did manage to place a novel forty years ago—not with one of the New York trade houses, alas, but with my midwestern alma mater's university press. On the strength of that modest publication plus three or four lit-mag stories, an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and two years of assistant-professoring at one of our state university's branch campuses, I was hired at Stratford, where then-young Mandy was already an instructor with an M.A. from Johns Hopkins and a comparably promising track record in poetry. A fine place to raise kids, she and I were soon happily agreeing in and out of bed—and so the town and it's surroundings proved to be. Over our wedded decades, however, our separate and never loquacious muses more or less clammed up here in Oyster and Blue Crab Land, as they doubtless would have in any other venue, and we learned to content ourselves with trying to help others do better than their coaches were doing. The circumstance that as of this writing no Stratford alum has managed that not-so-difficult achievement does not prove our pedagogical labors fruitless, at least in our and most of our colleagues' opinion. Our program's graduates are better writers by baccalaureate time than they were at matriculation: more knowledgeable about language, literary forms and genres, and the achievements of three thousand years' worth of their predecessors. If they then become law clerks, businesspeople, schoolteachers, or whatever else, rather than capital-W Writers—well, so did their profs, and we don't consider our careers wasted.