The Body Politic
by Laura Shaine Cunningham
The mood of pre-dinner optimism had not yet dissipated; the soup still simmered on the stove, and one place remained empty at the table. “We have a mystery guest, a volunteer who needs a place to stay until the election.” I set down an extra bowl and two glasses, one for water, the other for wine.
It was the first cold night of early autumn, and the fire was lit and crackling. Steam scented with spices, dill from the soup, cinnamon from the cake, fogged the old glass windows and we inhaled the aromas with our hopes. The guests, a long-married couple and their friend, a woman film director, provided a special wine and a domestic caviar. They were so committed to the candidate’s campaign, they had held a fundraiser, and even changed their primary address from the city to upstate to vote for him. I had volunteered my guesthouse and cooked for hours in anticipation. The dinner menu was half in jest—“soul food’—chicken soup and homemade apple dumplings.
The volunteer was expected to arrive any moment, but the minutes turned to hours and by nine o’clock he had not appeared. He called twice to say he was still canvassing; he had a deep voice, and an intriguing name. Matthias Whyte. “Whyte as in the question why?” he said, “Not the color white,” and then he spelled it out “W-H-Y-T-E.”
I had already conjured Matthias Whyte: Tall, around my age, lean, rather handsome with a few silver threads in his dark blond hair and trimmed beard; he was dressed in faded jeans and an old tweed jacket. He wore hiking boots and carried a clipboard. Although he was as yet unseen and I wasn’t ‘looking,’ as they say (I had been content to live as a single woman since my contested divorce), I admit I was attracted to him.
“He’ll be here soon…” I told my friends. “Matthias Whyte.” I liked saying his name and imagining him filling the empty seat, joining us in conversation to support the candidate.
I had answered an urgent call in the neighborhood online paper, cozily named “Nextdoor Neighbors.com” to help the Joseph E. Lando campaign. In response, an email had come from a volunteer with the bland name of John James, who asked. “How many volunteers can you house?” then “Long or short-term?”
I hedged: ‘‘One to three. Let’s say short-term for starters and see how it goes.”
I could easily house one to three volunteers. Maybe more if the truth were told. My house was formerly an inn, dating back to 1849 when it was a popular stagecoach stop on the Old Mine Road.
The bedrooms were papered with English florals: wild rose, hydrangea, and calla lily. I found the guest accommodations enticing and was sometimes seduced into a spontaneous nap on the largest bed, with its custom mattress, handmade in Sweden.
The hitch was that the guesthouse was attached to the main house, with exterior and interior access—outside, there was a door on the back porch; inside, there was entry downstairs through my kitchen pantry, and upstairs, even more eccentrically through a linen closet. Capacious as both houses were, the privacy of each was somewhat compromised and I was sometimes aware of guests moving about, and I wondered how much they could hear of my own conversation and activities? The best guest room, with the Swedish mattress, was back to back with my own bedroom, and secured by only a hook and eye latch on a long-unused door.
When that guest section was empty, I could never quite put the unused rooms out of my mind and guilt circulated through the vacant chambers on a draft of social conscience—now I was glad I could donate the house to a good cause. In a pinch, I could put up four volunteers, six if they were couples or people willing to share beds.
It was almost midnight when I next heard from the volunteer, this time: a text. Matthias Whyte: “Is it alright if I arrive soon?”
“It’s fine,” I answered, still committed to the cause.
It was late for my dinner guests though and they rose to leave. “We will have to meet Matthias Whyte another time,” the husband said.
No sooner had they pulled out of my half-mile driveway, which a century ago had been the access for horse-drawn carriages, when I heard a punctured muffler, blasting rude retorts. Then two firm knocks at the front door.
I opened the door to admit—not quite admit, for he seemed wedged in the door frame: The giant form of Matthias Whyte, who, in an instant, slew my imagined Matthias Whyte. He stood at least 6’8” and weighed an approximate 400 pounds. Almost as alarming as his bulk was his attire: Bermuda shorts and tee shirt with a medical logo for a diuretic. A massive stomach overhung his Bermuda shorts almost to the double-flesh folds above his knees. He wore sneakers, unlaced, that were bent back on the heels. Despite the cold, he was sweating.
The chill wind seemed to blow him inside and we stood for a moment in my open country kitchen before the flaming colonial hearth.
“I’m Matthias Whyte.” His eyes, almost obscured by his drooping eyelids, fastened at once on the empty table place setting, where I had set a large bone china soup bowl.
I was saying, “I still have some food, if you are hungry?” as Matthias Whyte took his seat. In a numbed state, I ladled the soup into his bowl. He spooned up the soup, then picked up the bowl, drew it to his mouth and drained it with a great slurp.
As if I could not deviate from my planned remarks, I began a conversation about the candidate. Did the campaign canvassing seem to be going well? I asked. I was thinking—who would let him in, massive and dressed as he was, on this chilly night? How could the candidate accept this unprepossessing man as a representative?
“It’s going to be tough,” he said, swallowing an apple dumpling whole.
“I’ll show you where you’ll be. It’s a separate house, really, with its own entrance. The Wi-Fi is a bit in and out and for some reason the television hasn’t been working…”
“I can watch on my laptop,” he said.
After he ate, we went outside and with a flashlight; I led him round back to the guesthouse porch and exterior entry. “There’s a swimming pool behind the porch, it’s covered for winter, but the cover could fall in if you stepped on it by accident…” I pictured Matthias Whyte crashing through the vinyl cover and vanishing into the winterized depths, drowning in anti-freeze-treated turquoise water, undiscovered in his chlorinated grave until next summer.
Willing myself to banish this image, I tried to sound welcoming. “I’ve set coffee and fresh eggs for your breakfast in the kitchen. The beds are all made up, and there are extra down comforters in the linen closet.” I didn’t venture upstairs but pointed him toward the narrow staircase, wondering if he’d get stuck in it on his ascent.
“Take your pick of the bedrooms,” I called after him. “And get your rest. Joseph E. Lando will need all the votes you can get him.”
That night, I lay sleepless. Around 3 am, I thought I heard breathing on the other side of the wall, then footsteps, but soon they ceased. In the morning, I heard his car pull out and breathed a sigh of relief at the roar of the exhaust.
I did not usually check the guesthouse while people were staying, but some instinct compelled me to enter downstairs through the pantry. I called out a warning “Matthias?” But all was empty and silent save for the ticking of an antique wall clock.
I caught my breath when I saw it, yet somehow, I was not surprised, as if I expected to see the human-height sized tower of DVDs: “Meet Erica Lovelace”, all double XX-rated; the top DVD offered an image of two nude women pretzeled into a coital embrace. The next was labelled “amputees.”
Oh my God, I thought. What do I do?
I went upstairs to check the bedrooms and in the one that had the Swedish mattress, I found, on the unmade bed, laid out in a neat row what appeared to be either stainless steel instruments of torture or culinary tools to crack open lobster backs and claws.
Maybe this man was not a volunteer but some homeless scammer, or degenerate creep, seeking a free accommodation who had signed onto NextDoorNeighbors.com? And after all, I had been told that many intelligent, decent, wonderful men liked porn, so maybe, distasteful as this was to me; perhaps this was just a way for a tired volunteer to unwind? Maybe he was preparing for takeout lobsters or crab legs? Or—was he a contemporary Jack the Ripper?
I waited an hour and called the candidate’s headquarters. The phone picked up, and a man answered: “Matthias Whyte.”
I pressed the ‘end call’ button on my cellphone.
Had he seen the caller id? Was he really Matthias Whyte? The voice had not sounded nearly as mellifluous.
At this point I resorted to one of those online verification services, all named for traits that were in doubt: TruthSeeker, HonestSearch, and LoyaltyVerification.com. Their websites offered photos of earnest-looking bespectacled girls intent on checking out suspicious characters. As a bonus, most sites offered Sex Offenders near You listings.
I must admit this was not the first time I had used such services. As a young single woman who lived alone in a remote old house, I had routinely checked out the hired hands I had to employ. Invariably, they did not quite clear the investigations. My current handyman, Rusty Quick, had turned up with a previous address of Gowanda Prison and I had hired him anyway. The reality in my area was that men available for such work usually had some questionable items on their report, or were outright sociopaths, if not thieves or psychotics. Anyone who wasn’t was probably expensive. The most likely appearing candidates had bad reviews on Yelp.
I had reviewed Rusty Quick’s history—five DWIs but no violent crime and decided to go with my own instincts that he liked his liquor, actually only beer, 12-packs a day but was not a menace. He was an extraordinary carpenter and man of all trades; in a series of I have to say heroic efforts, he had repaired my leaking roof, jacked up my sagging support beams, insulated my frigid cellar and blocked the entry for serial teams of woodchucks gnawing and reproducing under my house. He was so impressive, I slipped into his identification of parts of my house as extensions of myself and had not, as had been my custom, corrected the grammar: “Not my rotting beams, the rotting beams of this house…”At $20 an hour, he was a miraculous find and I was not about to let Rusty go, because of a few odd remarks. Rusty was a muscular orange-haired man, with unusually long arms and somewhat short legs, or maybe they just looked short because of his long arms—his fingers seemed to almost graze the ground, giving him a somewhat simian look. Actually, when he bent over at his labors and the tops of his pink buttocks protruded, the resemblance to an orangutan was unmistakable.
If anything, Rusty was almost too helpful, popping up unannounced when he was in the area; he often volunteered to come to my aid, no matter what. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you, Miss D.” That was what he always called me, “Miss D.” although no one else did.
Over the past five years, I had warmed to Rusty, and knew I could rely on him no matter how daunting the task: On the past Christmas Eve, he had pulled out the underground well pump in minus 10’ weather, and emerged smiling, showing the gaps in his front teeth. “No problem, Miss D, Merry Christmas!”
I rewarded Rusty with the occasional Bouef Bourguignon and leftover slices of apple tartines. I slipped into reheating dinners for him, as he often worked in the late hours and must have been hungry. To be polite, I sat with him and sometimes talked politics. I even suggested Rusty vote for the Congressional candidate, but he had lowered his gaze and whispered, “I can never vote you know, Miss D. Convicted felon.”
It was the only time Rusty ever referred to his status, other than a remarkable exception when he demonstrated how he had thrown off three other convicts who had tried to assault him in Gowanda. He enacted this story on the day he was repairing my flat roof in 102-degree weather and I had suggested a cold lemonade break on the shaded screen porch. As he quaffed the lemonade, homemade with an extra slice of lemon and a sprig of fresh-cut mint, Rusty related what I have to say was a riveting account of how he had avoided extended sentencing by refusing to surrender his still bloodied shirt which he later presented as evidence that the prison had denied him medical care despite a screwdriver wedged between his ribs. All charges were dismissed.
As he related this story, Rusty underwent a metamorphosis—showing me how he had thrown off his three assailants. He crouched low on my porch boards, which he had recently repainted, and his forehead receded as his thick neck came forward and his teeth and hands appeared to enlarge. He executed three martial arts moves, grunting on each…. Much as I liked and valued Rusty Quick, his transformation somewhat alarmed me, and I went back into the house for more ice, and upon my return, maintained what I hoped was a nonjudgmental silence.
I renewed my account with VirtueSearch and was rewarded with a promotional discount and a criminal record for Matthias Whyte. I heard my own gasp as his long list of arrests was revealed. The crimes themselves were listed only by code numbers. The resolutions were on a two-year delay; I tried to research the codes but drew a blank.
What had Matthias Whyte, if he was Matthias Whyte, done that was still pending resolution, and concealed by codes?
I asked the only expert I knew: Rusty Quick.
Rusty had been concerned about my septic tank and dropped by to check on a faint but unpleasant odor that was emanating from the square patch just below the side porch. On that spot, the grass was high and lush despite the drought conditions that had blanched the rest of the lawns.
I had called a few septic services and was alarmed by their rates. They started talking about digging up leeching fields. Rusty offered to investigate the problem himself.
“Oh, you don’t have to…” I waved my hand toward the pit.
Within minutes, Rusty was digging around the septic tank, and had uncovered a border ditch a good five feet deep. When I looked out the window, all I could see was the top of Rusty’s head, his orange crewcut. Soon he called out for me to look at his discovery.
As a cold rain began to fall, dreading what I would see, I stood over him by the side of the ditch. Rusty looked up at me from below… “Good news, Miss D! It’s not the septic or your leeching field—it’s just a broken old ceramic pipe, and I can fix it, Miss D.”
Only three hours, and $60 later, all was repaired but the rain began to beat down hard, and thunder rumbled…In the distance, lightning zigzagged. The sky turned fuchsia then a bruised gray, and the trees began to thrash in an El Greco frenzy. The temperature plummeted and the raindrops froze in mid-air, transformed into snow crystals. Yet the tropical sounds of thunder amplified, and I wondered if this was the freakish phenomenon known as a snunderstorm?
I insisted Rusty come inside; He was biting into a baguette when we both heard the volunteer’s car sputtering exhaust as it made its way down the driveway. Although he could have driven to the back, Matthias Whyte parked in the front and we could both see him emerge from his tiny VW vintage bug and lumber through the rain. The sky was darkening, and the only illumination was from the lightning which revealed flashes of the giant form of Matthias Whyte, still clad in the same medical tee-shirt, now dampened to accentuate his male ‘breasts’, gynecomastia I think it’s called, that bobbled as he ran for the guesthouse door.
Rusty Quick’s eyes narrowed as they always did when he saw a strange man on my property. Under the circumstances, I had to explain to Rusty that the man was a volunteer I was housing but added that now I was uncertain how long the volunteer would be staying. I mentioned the criminal record, the codes and asked Rusty what that might mean?
“Pretty serious, Miss D,” was his answer.
I immediately called VirtueSearch and vented my frustration to a representative named Josh. Josh’s voice was high and reedy, and I pictured a thin college student, pale with a wispy beard, working part-time to mitigate his huge student loan. There was a long pause before Josh answered, with a catch in his throat “I’ve just been here since the start of summer. I offered to help my Dad, and what I have learned is that often there is no explanation for people’s behavior, Miss…” He addressed me by my ex-husband’s last name, a name I haven’t used in four years, and I felt a tingle of realization: Josh must have researched me.
To calm myself, I did something I knew set a poor precedent—I shared a few beers with Rusty Quick, but they were effective and after he left, I tumbled, still dressed, upon my bed, my shod feet hanging off the mattress as counterweights.
At midnight, I was awakened by muffled sounds coming from the behind the wall. Alarmed, I rose and stumbled to the long-unused connecting door. I could hear breathing, louder this time, and heavy footsteps approaching the seam that divided the two houses. Then the hook and eye latch began to tremble as if someone was fiddling with the lock on the other side.
Knowing the lock was useless; I leaned against the door and felt an opposing pressure. Pushing back with all my strength, I heard my own voice: “Go away.” The door shifted, and a hinge creaked, but the pressure increased, as if someone had thrown his own entire weight against the door. An actual splinter cracked open along the side. I redoubled my efforts, bracing myself with my shoulders and planting my feet.
For several long minutes, nothing changed. We seemed to be opposite and equal forces. At some point, I heard more erratic breathing—a grunt—from the other side—or was it my own gasping for air? The tension went out of the door. Then a shuffle as perhaps Matthias Whyte lumbered away?
Hours later, as I still leaned, stiffened into position against the door, I heard his car, with its muffler roaring, depart. I considered entering the guesthouse to be certain, but I didn’t; I just pushed a bureau against my door, then dove onto the bed and into a dreamless sleep. I awoke to a bright sun. Still wearing the clothes, I wore the previous day, I was surprised to see it was almost noon. I looked out the window and was relieved to see the volunteer’s car was gone.
I dared to move aside the bureau and open the connecting door. Right there on the other side was a small puddle of what was unmistakably urine. Overcoming my revulsion, I followed the dribble trail to the upstairs guest bathroom. I was spot cleaning the floor with a dampened hand towel, when I heard sounds outside and looked out to see the top of Rusty Quick’s head, as he worked down below in the septic ditch. I blotted the hallway floor a final time and returned to my side of the house, relocking the connecting door.
Perhaps Matthias Whyte had simply lost his way to the bathroom, and in his urgency, tried to force my door? No sooner did I have this thought, than my cellphone beeped a message and I looked down and read a text that had come in at two a.m.
:MatthaisWhyte320:Sorry if I disturbed you
I thought I best answer, not to provoke him and texted: “No worries. Good luck with the canvassing. Joe Lando has to win!”
I put on a sweater, made coffee, and carried two cups outside. It was only as I walked to the ditch that I wondered about the change in the sender’s identity: There had been no “320” in his previous communication.
The earth was muddy, but the ditch was almost filled. I leaned over and lowered his cup down to him.
Rusty Quick’s eyes met mine as he said, “It’s all taken care of, Miss D.”
I thanked him and asked what I owed?
“You don’t owe me for today, Miss D. I gave you a few hours.” Rusty rested a moment on the handle of his spade, and then finished smoothing the disturbed earth and repeated “It’s all taken care of…”
A month to the day later, the invitation arrived—not only in email but also by snail mail, nothing fancy or engraved, but a merry-looking yellow postcard: Joseph E. Lando thanks all the volunteers who worked so hard to win this election. Please join Joseph E. Lando, his staff and volunteers at a special victory celebration November 21st at the Courtyard Marriott on Rte. 9W ….
My hands trembled and shook the card as I read the rest—
“…for a wine and artisanal cheese reception.”
Oh my God, I thought, should I go?
The decision was made for me. The dinner party couple, who had been major donors to the campaign, called en route and the wife left a message: “If it’s not too late, we thought we’d pick you up.” As I heard this voicemail, their black Lexus pulled into my driveway.
As we rounded my circular drive, I looked back at the still-disturbed square of wet earth above the septic tank. I wondered if and when it would need to be dug up, again or the leaching fields explored. Maybe not in my lifetime, I thought, with a degree of hope which alarmed me.
Laura Shaine Cunningham has published fiction and nonfiction in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Columbia Journal, the Guardian, the New York Times and many other journals. Her writing has been honored with an NEA Fellowship in Literature and another NEA Fellowship in Theatre, and two NYFA and a Yaddo fellowship. Her stories have been performed and recorded for Selected Shorts Her new memoir will be published next year.
Photo source: Jonathan Cooper/Unsplash
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