Cutter

Cutter Ben Jones Wood is not enough and stone not enough. The house is trembling always, and everywhere John sees rotting, cracking, paint peeling, pipes leaking. If the decay is not apparent, it is because it is hidden and pernicious. He feels panicked, as if the house might fly apart at any moment—nails shoot from wood, the walls shudder with fatigue and collapse. The friction that holds the nails is a poor and pitiful force with gravity and entropy conspiring against it. John walks through the house touching the walls with his fingertips. Holdfast, he whispers, holdfast. Mary will be returning from the library board meeting soon. He checks that the boys are both asleep. Roger is six and Oliver will be turning eight in a few weeks. Mary has been planning a party for him—knights, costumes, dragons. She has asked John to clear a bower in the woods, a request he has neglected. He and Mary are both scattered in their energies, as if they could mount one half-decent love between them. He hopes they both avoid the children enough to keep this unevenness hidden from them. Mary has been put in charge of the library's evening lecture series; the previous month's was a bit of a disaster. The speaker was a poet, widely known by name but little read. He arrived drunk and read without humor a series of poems about jizz and farting. He breathed ponderously through his nostrils. He offered no reflections when he finished, just snapped his book shut, shouldered his coat, and left. For her the lectures are a vital leavening agent to life so far from the city. They add a civilizing texture without which she would feel that time was moving backward. The women of the board are more focused than Mary on self-betterment. They have traveled little and believe firmly in the idea of progress. They have appointed Mary to find the next speaker with the goal of avoiding the seamy flatness of the jizz poet, 15 Ecotone: reimagining place and, at the same time, drawing more of the men in town to the lecture. The women present it as a matter of broadening the appeal of the series, but each feels silently that they would like their betterment validated by the interest of men. When Mary comes in, John pours her a glass of wine. "They want more men to come," she says. "Do you know any speakers men would be interested in hearing?" John is the editor of a magazine attached to a small art museum; he thinks of his work there as an ongoing attempt to cast light into the darkness, but his job, like everyone else's there, is defined in terms of raising money. The women at the museum all dress in colorful accents and their hair is erratic. They speak urgently about everything, everything is so wonderful, so vital and exhilarating, so breathtakingly unique. Men, generally speaking, hate them all. "What about Hugh MacPhearson?" "He's a bore," says Mary. "And he always makes me feel like he's doing us all such a favor." MacPhearson writes a mystery series set in town. He had three or four mildly successful books, but has since written an additional twenty that clog the shelves in the bookstore. "How about if I make you some dinner?" he says, and retreats to the kitchen. She follows him in and sits silently while he poaches some salmon for her and makes rice and asparagus. She feels spoiled, which she loves, and ticks off for him the board's restrictions for speakers. "No one political. Not too obscure or pretentious. No self-promoters . Someone from outside of Putnam, but not too famous. Dynamic, but not flashy. Engaging without pandering. No 'storytellers.' The board thinks that men like history, or Russians. What would make Hal come out, do you think?" Hal is their neighbor. Hal is so utterly Hal that he is difficult to describe. He is in sales, which he relishes. He favors complexly patterned golf shirts and no-iron khakis with loafers; he never seems to wear the same clothes or shoes, yet always...