The Bucolic Plague

  Garth’s mom swings by with a fresh pitcher. She makes them stronger as the night goes on. Everybody knows this. They’ve been coming to this party for years. This village of misfit toys will get drunker and drunker and drunker, until Doug, seated in his fuzzy pajamas, begins the annual reading of “’Twas the night before Christmas.”

  And afterward, as they do every year, these two gay innkeepers will kick everyone out into the frigid wind of Christmas Eve, waving as everyone stumbles through the village streets, weaving in sync. God help any pregnant virgins wandering around.

  Michelle’s lucky. She only has to walk a few hundred yards to get to her mansion on the hill—where only a few hours from now, she’ll wake with a hangover to host the same exact group of people at her annual Christmas Day brunch, which I’m sort of strangely looking forward to, I realize. Even in my dark, Grinch-like mood, my heart seems to be growing at least a couple of sizes bigger.

  Maybe it’s the ritual of it all. Not knowing what will come of my life in the new year, any certitudes—no matter how fleeting or minor—are welcome.

  Or maybe it’s just the margaritas.

  “Hey, everybody!” Michelle shouts into the night air as everyone stumbles out of Doug and Garth’s house. We can barely see her slight frame in the distance on the darkened tree-lined sidewalk. “Don’t forget tomorrow! I’m making PINK STUFF!”

  According to the thermometer in the truck, the temperature has dropped even further. Back in the Beekman, while I’m brushing my teeth, I notice that frost completely covers the inside of the window panes. After I’ve washed up and decided what would be my warmest sleepwear, I climb into bed where Brent is already lying half asleep. He rolls over, opens his eyes, and laughs. A puff of steam comes out of his mouth.

  “You’re not really going to wear that to sleep in,” he says.

  “Why not? It’ll keep my nose and ears warm.”

  Brent gently traces the eyeholes on my ski mask, and picks his head up to give me a kiss on my barely exposed lips.

  “Merry Christmas,” he says to me for the first time this season before closing his eyes.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “Check out this e-mail,” Brent says to me the morning after Christmas. I’m still a little hungover from Doug and Garth’s party two days ago, and Michelle’s follow-up brunch. It seems like the local strategy for dealing with the long, hard winters is to be blacked out for most of it.

  I shuffle over to his beanbag, wrapped in the comforter from our bed.

  “She’s from the Times?” I ask.

  “That’s what it says.”

  “And she wants to come up here?”

  “December thirtieth.”

  “That’s the day before the damn party.”

  The idea of hosting any guest, let alone a reporter, seems completely unfeasible. We were barely surviving ourselves. All we want to do is open up the Beekman for visitors one last night for the promised New Year’s Eve party, and then pack up to head home. We needed to sit down first thing in the New Year and face the fact that we were income-less. We had some tough decisions to make—not just about the Beekman and our finances, but about ourselves. Us.

  “Should we do it?” Brent asks.

  “Brent, I can’t,” I say. “We brought ourselves to the brink of insanity this year trying to create bright shiny Beekman World. We lost. I don’t want to do it one last time for old times’ sake.”

  “Well, we obviously did a good job if the New York Times noticed us,” Brent says.

  “You did a good job,” I say. “I just complained a lot.”

  “And you were very good at that,” Brent confirms. “But this could be a really big opportunity. Our biggest since the Martha show.”

  “I don’t know, Brent.”

  “Look, it was your idea—”

  I immediately cut him off. I can’t do this again.

  “So help me God, Brent—”

  “No, no, wait a second,” Brent continues. “It was your idea to find a way to live up here full time. And I tried—we tried. We really did. Walking back into this empty house last week felt like the biggest failure of my life. But it wasn’t. My biggest failure was not making you happy.”

  “Come on, Brent. Don’t make it such a big deal.”

  “No, it is,” he went on. “That night when I broke down in the garden? Do you know why? It was because I wanted to make your New Year’s resolution happen for you. I thought I could do it, and I couldn’t. I never fail. You know that.”

  It’s true. Through high school, med school, and business school, Brent has never received a grade lower than 4.0. And he had perfect attendance to boot. “Perfect.” There was that word again.

  “It was my fault too,” I say to Brent. “Mostly my fault. I told you what I wanted, you kept trying, but I couldn’t keep up with you. No one can keep up with you. Then somebody went and broke the whole world and there was nothing either of us could do about that.”

  “This Times piece could be our last chance.”

  “I dunno.”

  “It’s still your resolution. And it’s still the same year.”

  “It’s just that when I said I wanted to live here full time, it was because I wanted to do something real. You know?”

  “I don’t know what you were doing, but I was doing real work.”

  “No, we were creating images—images of the perfect farm, the perfect life, the perfect couple. It wasn’t anything different than I do in advertising…just more of it—and with the added punishment of torn ligaments and sunburn.”

  “That’s just how the world works,” Brent says. He’s genuinely confused about what I’m saying.

  “No, that’s how Martha World works. I wanted to live in Oprah World. The world where you chase your dreams, strip away all the bad energy, get in touch with your real self, and Live Your Best Life.”

  “What if the ‘best you’ is putting a shiny, happy spin on the world.”

  “No, that’s the advertising me.”

  “And when you were doing drag,” he adds. “Back then you pasted sequins on reality so that everyone would want to party with you, to have what you had, to be sparkly.” He paused. “Face it. Making things sparkly and seductive is what you’re good at.”

  “But I’m tired of that. That’s work. I just want to dig in the dirt.”

  “Look. When William Beekman got tired of being a farmer, do you think that there was some ye olde Oprah telling him to chase his dreams? To ‘be the best Beekman’? No. He was a farmer with eight kids. You can’t feed eight kids on self-help maxims and dreams. Oprah World is just as false and shiny as Martha World.”

  He had a point. I could dig in the dirt all the way to China and I still couldn’t save the farm. We have neighbors on both sides of us digging in the dirt eighteen hours a day trying to make a profitable living from their farms. And they aren’t. We were making more money off of our dwindling soap sales than they were off of their hundreds of acres of land. There’s an old local joke around here: What’s the best way to make a million dollars? Invest three million in a farm.

  Sadly, I’ve learned that farming is probably the least viable way to save a farm. Farming!™, however, just might be our best, last chance. Could I really get it up one more time? Create the sparkliest version of Beekman for our visiting reporter? Could we, Brent and I, present the press-worthy version of ourselves as an endearing couple? Having grown apart for the better part of a year now, could we really be able to fake it well enough?

  I’m entirely conflicted. And a little dizzy. These three weeks of almost near inactivity have lulled my brain into a slushier mess than goat pee in the snow. Since I walked away from my job I hadn’t had a single marketing twitch, not a single spark of sparkle.

  Maybe Brent’s right. If we’re going to save the Beekman, we’re going to have to sell harder and smarter than ever before. It’s obvious that the last thing this 206-year-old farm needed to survive was another farmer—and espec
ially not two gay New York City ones. Maybe what it did need was a good PR agent, a decent ad campaign, and more blinding sparkle than a drag queen under a disco ball.

  I thought I wanted to leave advertising for life at the Beekman. I didn’t realize advertising was how I could save it and, in turn, possibly save myself.

  “Okay,” I tell Brent. “We can invite the reporter.”

  “Really?”

  I take a deep breath and put on my invisible wig and high heels.

  “And let’s not leave a single sequin unpolished.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “Josh?”

  I hadn’t seen the reporter approach. The Albany train station lobby was crowded with people traveling to New York City for New Year’s. The few arrivals from the other direction were easily lost in the crush.

  “Hi!” I say beaming. “Welcome!” To help her find me, and to create just the right impression, I’m wearing my best gentleman farmer costume—neatly pressed jeans, stylishly plaid flannel shirt, and shiny Agway barn-mucking boots. It’s my farm drag.

  I’d agreed to pick the reporter up at the train station by myself. Brent needed to stay behind to let the musicians set up in the wide center hallway and rehearse for tomorrow’s New Year’s Eve concert. The caterers would also be dropping off their tables, along with other people who would be traipsing in and out of the house to set up folding chairs and decorations.

  Having strangers invade the house while entertaining a reporter from the New York Times is neither Brent’s nor my ideal scenario, but since it’s unavoidable we decide to play off the chaos with a certain manufactured insouciance, as if hosting formal holiday concerts for seventy-five people was just another simple fact of country living.

  On the ride back to the Beekman I regale the reporter with stories of how Brent and I stumbled on the Beekman and how we fell under its spell from the first moment we saw it. I tell stories about its long impressive history—the visits from a young James Fennimore Cooper, the savage Indian attacks, and its years as a safe haven for runaway slaves. By the time we reach the Beekman, I’m worried that perhaps I may have colored the picture too brightly, or as we say in advertising, I’d “failed to manage expectations.”

  But as we drive over the hill and the Beekman comes into view, I couldn’t have manufactured a more perfect beauty shot. The gray snow-laden clouds had parted just enough to bathe the mansion in bright late-afternoon winter sunlight. The white clapboards shone even brighter than the snow drifts surrounding the house.

  “Wow, this place really is stunning,” the reporter remarks as we pull into the driveway—freshly plowed by Farmer John. We pull up behind the caterer’s van, which is behind a station wagon, which is behind a pickup truck full of folding chairs.

  “Who are all these people?” the reporter asks.

  “Oh, we’re just having a small get together,” I explain, with just the right soupçon of insouciance. As if cued by a television commercial director, Brent appears on the side porch, also dressed in his best gentleman farmer drag.

  “Hi!” he hollers with his broad TV-appearance grin. “Welcome to the Beekman! Sorry about all the ruckus,” he says, gesturing toward the men carrying folding tables and chairs in through the porch’s side door. I can’t believe he just used the word “ruckus.” If he “reckons” something next, I’m going to have to get him to tone it down a little. “We’re having a little New Year’s Eve concert tomorrow. We’d love it if you could stay.”

  “I’d love to,” the reporter answers as she pulls her overnight bag from the backseat. “But I have to get back into town to finish another story.”

  “That’s a shame,” Brent says. “We were going to open the first bottle of Beekman hard cider at the stroke of midnight.”

  Brent’s so on that he’s not even shivering while standing in the 5-degree weather wearing just his flannel shirt.

  I carry the reporter’s bags up to her room, where Brent has built a roaring fire. Brent’s turned the heat back on for our guest, so the whole house is toasty warm. It’s a welcome relief. I was tired of coming in the house and putting on more layers.

  Everything in the guest room is as spotlessly clean as when I left for the train station, but something seems different. I look around the room as she unzips her bag on the bed. What is it?

  I realize it’s not some thing out of place. It’s a sound. A buzzing.

  The zombie flies.

  They’re back.

  I can see them crawling in the corners of the windows. Where do they come from? They seem to be hatching before my eyes. I look out into the hallway. They’re there too, buzzing around in haphazard circles in every single pane of the huge Palladian window.

  “Why don’t you relax a bit,” I say, with a trifle less insouciance, “and come down and join us for a snack when you’re ready.”

  I race down the stairs. Brent’s already thwacking away with the flyswatter in the kitchen.

  “Where are they all coming from? And why now? This place is fucking haunted,” I say.

  “Maybe it’s the guys moving the equipment? Maybe they’re letting them in?” Brent asks, grasping for an explanation.

  “It’s five degrees outside. There are no flies outside,” I say. “They’re literally coming back from the dead. I know it.”

  One of the guys calls out to see if Brent or I have a free hand. I duck back into the wide center hallway to help. Two men are struggling to unload what looks like a heavy wooden picket fence from a large case.

  “What’s this?” I ask, grabbing an edge.

  “A marimba.”

  “A what?”

  “A marimba.”

  “Oh.”

  Why the hell are they unloading a marimba for a formal New Year’s Eve classical concert? I turn to head into the kitchen to tell Brent about this mistake.

  “Hang on a sec,” one of the men says. “Can you help a quick sec with this one too?” He’s opened the other large black case, which seems to hold a metal picket fence.

  “Another marimba?” I ask, trying to hide my confusion.

  “Oh, no,” the musician says. “This one is a vibraphone.”

  Back in the kitchen, I interrupt Brent from his fly chasing.

  “What the hell are they doing with a marimba and a vibraphone in our front hallway?”

  “It’s for the concert,” Brent says.

  “A marimba/vibraphone concert?! Are you kidding?” I realize that I hadn’t ever actually asked what kind of concert he’d arranged with our neighbor. In my mind I’d pictured a chamber music quartet, quietly playing “Auld Lang Syne” in the hallway while people mingled in formal dress and passed crudités. A concert not unlike one William Beekman would have hosted in the early nineteenth century. I had visions of little Mary Beekman spinning around on her tiptoes, waltzing by herself from room to room, with familiar Mozart and Tchaikovsky tunes making her forget that she’d been dead for over two hundred years. I pictured a lot of things for our final night at the Beekman. None of them included either marimbas or vibraphones.

  “What? What’s wrong with that?” Brent says.

  “Do you even know what a marimba is?” I ask accusingly, even though I hadn’t known exactly what one was until a few minutes ago.

  “Not really,” Brent says. “It’s a jazz something, according to the press release.”

  I pick up the press release lying on the counter that I’d been ignoring for the last two weeks: “The Beekman Mansion hosts a New Year’s Eve concert with a Grammy-winning improvisational jazz marimba/vibrophone duo…”

  “They’re improvisational jazz musicians?!” I say.

  “They’ve won a Grammy,” Brent says sheepishly.

  “But they’re improvisational,” I say. “By definition that means any award they’ve won is because they just got lucky.”

  Suddenly a loud haphazard fury of sounds explodes from the hallway behind us. What I think is the marimba is playing a low bass melody, while what
I think is the vibraphone is filling in any holes with a cacophonous repetitive pinging. It’s a strange combination, unlike anything I’ve ever heard. And since it’s so unlike anything I’ve ever heard, I can’t really tell if I even like it. It sounds like the noise that would happen if the Love Boat ran full speed ahead into the Starship Enterprise.

  It’s so loud that I don’t hear the reporter come up behind me.

  “The music is…interesting,” she shouts. I reach behind her and close the kitchen door so that I can hear her over the music. It’s about as effective as using a rice paper screen to muffle a jackhammer.

  “Yes, isn’t it amazing? They’ve won a Grammy,” I inform her, smiling. “Why don’t you have a seat while I prepare dinner for us?”

  It’s not easy preparing a fresh-from-the-farm meal on the second to the last day of the calendar year. During the last two weeks we’d used up most of what was left in the root cellar for ourselves. Complicating factors, the reporter had informed us that she couldn’t eat red meat for health reasons, which would have been fine a few months ago, when we could’ve slaughtered a chicken. But now the only meat we have left are some various unlabeled frozen packages of Cow.

  “We’ve prepared a traditional winter farmstead meal for you,” Brent explains, carrying a plate of homemade goat cheese that we’d aged in the basement. It was accompanied by freshly baked homemade rosemary crackers. As he sets the plate down, he expertly sweeps a small collection of dead zombie flies into his hand without the reporter noticing…hopefully. The flies are multiplying in the windowsills by the hundreds, as if making up for their absence during the last few weeks.