22 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019
like the wind shifting direction. The
making of dinner involved a lot of mut-
tering, and, when my friend sat down
to eat, his chair gave way, causing him
to tumble onto the floor.
I apologized, saying that the chair
was already broken, and Hugh contra-
dicted me: “No, it wasn’t.”
“Why would you say that?” I asked,
after my friend had hobbled home.
“Because it wasn’t broken,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter,” I explained.
“The point was to make him feel less
embarrassed.”
“Too bad,” Hugh said. “I can’t hide
who I am.”
“Well, it’s really important to try,”
I told him. “I mean, like, really, really
important.”
“
L
et me ask you two a question,”
Hugh said to Gretchen and me,
on our first afternoon at the Pink House
in August. He opened the sliding glass
door to the deck and invited us to sit
on the rocking chairs out there. The
nails that held them together had been
weeping rust onto the unpainted wood
for so long that I put a towel down so
as not to stain my white shorts, and got
snapped at for it.
“Now, please.”
I took a seat. “Ready.”
“O.K., do you think those are rick-
ety? That’s what the renter who hated
the paintings called them.”
I settled in and swayed as much going
side to side as I did going back and
forth. “Yes,” I said. “‘Rickety’ is proba-
bly the best word for this, possibly fol-
lowed by ‘kindling.’”
“This one, too,” Gretchen said.
“Well, you’re just spoiled,” Hugh told
us. “There’s nothing at all wrong with
those rocking chairs.” He stormed back
into the house, and I heard the click
that meant he had locked us out.
“Goddammit,” Gretchen said. “My
cigarettes are in there.”
Lisa and Paul and Amy couldn’t
make it to the beach this time. It was
sad being on the island without them,
but at least it left fewer people for Hugh
to crab at. “If you want to raise your
voice to someone, you might consider
the contractors,” I said in the living
room the following morning, looking
next door at our empty driveway, and
not hearing what I heard coming from
other houses: the racket of hammers
and Skilsaws.
“Why don’t you call them?” Hugh
asked. “I filled out all the insurance
forms. I see to all the bills and taxes, so
how about you take care of something
for a change?”
I didn’t respond, but just sighed,
knowing he wasn’t serious. The last thing
Hugh wants is me taking care of some-
thing. I wouldn’t have paid him any
mind, but Gretchen was in the room. I
don’t like seeing my relationship through
her eyes. That said, I do like seeing my
family from Hugh’s vantage point. To
him, we’re like dolls cut from flypaper,
each one of us connected to the other
and dotted with foul little corpses.
“What is with men adjusting their
balls all the time?” Gretchen asked, star-
ing down at her phone.
“Are you talking about someone
specifically?” Hugh asked.
“The guys that I work with,” she said.
“The landscaping crews. They can’t keep
their hands away from their crotches.”
“It could be due to heat rash,” I sug-
gested, adding that touching your balls
in public is now illegal in Italy. “Men
did it to ward off bad luck, apparently.”
“Hmmm,” Gretchen said, turning
back to her phone. “I was in a meeting
a few weeks back, and when I took one
of my shoes off a roach ran out. It must
have been hiding in there when I got
dressed that morning.”
“What does that have to do with
anything?” Hugh asked.
I rolled my eyes. “Does it matter? It’s
always time for a good story.”
“Your family,” he said, like we were
a bad thing.
That afternoon, I watched him swim
out into the ocean. Gretchen and I were
on the beach together, and I remem-
bered a young woman earlier in the
summer who’d had a leg bitten off, as
well as a few fingers. Squinting at the
horizon as Hugh grew smaller and
smaller, I said that if the sharks did get
him I just hoped they’d spare his right
arm. “That way he can still kind of cook,
and access our accounts online.”
It’s hard to imagine Gretchen’s boy-
friend crabbing at anyone. She and Mar-
shall have been together almost as long
as Hugh and I have, and I can’t think
of a gentler guy. The same can be said
of Paul’s wife, Kathy. My brother-in-
law, Bob, might get crotchety every so
often, but when he snaps at Lisa for, say,
balancing a glass of grape juice on the
arm of a white sofa, we usually think,
Well, she kind of deserved it. Amy’s
been single since the mid-nineties, but
I never heard her last boyfriend, a funny
and handsome asthmatic, yell at any-
one, even when he had good reason to.
Gretchen and I had been on the beach
for all of twenty minutes before she did
what she always does, eventually. “I went
online recently and read all sorts of hor-
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