Free Taking Care of Mrs. Carroll by Paul Monette

lay stretched out on his back, his arms crossed over his face as he rambled on. His shirt had ridden up out of his shorts, and some of his bare stomach was exposed, the navel and the line of hair reaching from it down into his groin. I had let go of my knees and sat next to him more loosely. He and Phidias were defrauding everyone but me, I thought. That left me to take care of them, I suppose. No, I said to myself, you leave it alone. People have to take care of themselves. Anywhere else, I could have made that injunction stick. But I knew that belly better than my own, so all my cautions about people and what they ought to do rolled off me like water. People don't have to do anything, I thought. That they do do anything instead of following rules is why we are here, David and I. There weren't going to be any rules, I knew, as long as we stayed within the borders of Mrs. Carroll's curious country, protected as it was from the world by a line of cows and the lull of pasture. It would all depend on how long we stayed.
    "I guess so," I said. "The house was practically yours for over a month. Then suddenly Phidias asks you to make decisions, as if it really were yours, and you fall apart. You feel like you've run up a bill in a fancy hotel, and you can't pay it."
    He uncovered his eyes and looked at me.
    "It's the way I used to fall in love."
    "Oh? Tell me how." I knew already, but he needed the chance to show me what he could do with the past.
    "After I left you, I used to fall in love every couple of weeks. I'd meet someone in a bar, and they'd be the love of my life the next morning. No one liked it. And whenever anyone stuck around and tried to love me back, I ran away."
    "It's called being gay," I said.
    "Is it what you do?"
    "No. I fall in love every couple of decades. And I don't run away."
    "Like I did from you," he said, a little more impatient than before. "Is everything we say going to end up punishing me for leaving you?"
    "Not everything. But if I were you and I wanted to avoid talking about what happened to us, I wouldn't bring up loving and running away at all. I'd talk about the goddam weather first."
    "But Rick, I'm trying to tell you that I know some things about myself now."
    "Okay." Very, very neutral. Hostile, really.
    "Please don't treat me like the enemy," he said. He leaned up on one elbow and put his other hand on my forearm and squeezed it. I had had my share of that kind of squeezing that afternoon and was beginning to find it patronizing.
    "All right," I said. A wind had come up, and a bank of clouds. The blue of the sea was a shade harder. It would be gray before long.
    "Tell me about Madeleine Cosquer," he said.
    "You talked at lunch as if you were writing the biography. We'll change the subject if you want, but you know more about her than I do."
    "I mean how do you know her?"
    "I met her in France. When I was twenty-eight."
    During this moment we changed positions. I mean that I was lying with my hands behind my head, and David was sitting cross-legged next to me, his elbow propped on his knee. "Tell me about it," he was going to say. Then, for the first time, I would be able to do my one number that didn't have anything to do with him or any other man. I thought so well of my meeting with Madeleine and had gone over it so often in my mind that I'm sure I could have recited it in my sleep. Ever since, in fact, the details have clustered this way and that and then floated up in my dreams. But I had never told it as a story, and now I had the ideal audience. Madeleine, who reminisced with me now and then about the beginning of our friendship, thought my version of it unusually valentined and soft-headed, at least for me. David was going to love it.
    "Tell me about it."
    "I spent that summer in the south of France. I was living on a boat with a thin little man who didn't want anything from me except to make his thin little friends jealous. I used to lie around naked on the deck and read books on