The Handyman

When I was 15 I realized for the first time that every woman in my town had a vagina: I had a girlfriend of my own, the first girl I got naked, and while horsing around I'd inadvertently done something that made her sigh in a way that changed everything. It meant I had become more than a dog rubbing up against a tree. It meant all the women in town could be made to sigh, and thus the town—where each morning the men gathered like ravens on the train platform, waiting for the 7:15 into the city, leaving the women needy and alone—could be mine. The teachers, the shop owners, the aerobics instructors, the moms. Oh, especially the moms, holed up in the kitchen or alone in the rec room, working out to Jane Fonda (this was the 1980s). Under each dress and pantsuit, under each pair of jogging shorts, jeans and clam diggers, the same secret machinery. Over time I lost this knowledge. I forgot it the way craftsmen in the Dark Ages forgot how to grind glass. My world became a rocky place, and I was too dumb to know it.

In the years that followed I broke up with my girlfriend, dated another, broke up with her, went to college, traveled, visited some interesting countries, got a job in New York, got married, drank too much at my own wedding and had a child—all this done in a half-conscious state, sleepwalking through a world lit with sex. But my friend Luke? Well, Luke is a wonder because Luke never forgets anything. In fact, there was a brief window, after college began and before shame set in, during which Luke made a career of secret knowledge. Over a period of four years, starting when he was 19, Luke, whom I'd met and befriended in college, slept with 13 women in his hometown. Many of these women were married, many of them old enough to be his mother (most of them were mothers). That is, my friend lived the fantasy. Or as the kid himself used to say, "Oh no, Mrs. Robinson. I think you're the most attractive of all my parents' friends."

The summer after freshman year—that was the first time. Luke was working for a contractor, putting down new wood floors in an old house by the beach. Luke was a rarity—a genuinely middle-class kid in a town where the residents described themselves obnoxiously as upper-middle-class. The rest of us were getting drunk that summer or sleeping it off. But Luke needed money. His father had died, his sister was older, his mother was a nurse in a charity hospital. He had to work his way through college. At the end of each workday he was dog tired, his arms glazed with polyurethane. His boss was the sort of man who fell under the generic heading Vietnam Guy—a crop-haired, sinewy man in his mid-40s, always in fatigues, always with that look in his eyes. A character Dennis Hopper would have played. You try not to make sudden moves around such a guy. His adrenaline gets up, he thinks you're Charlie, he gets a hand around your neck, and it's over.

In July Vietnam Guy sent Luke to work alone at an empty house near the forest preserve, going room to room, ripping out drywall and finishing floors. Vietnam Guy was married to a skinny-hipped, big-chested, big-haired woman who was sexy in a truck-stop sort of way. She used to float, going from work site to work site, making sure the boys were on the stick. Luke hardly noticed her at first, but soon she was showing up at his site every day, commenting, helping move a box, sharing a cigarette. She followed him from room to room. She would flop herself down on a beanbag chair in a kid's room and talk about UFOs, or she would stretch out on a king-size bed in a master bedroom, quizzing him about spontaneous human combustion (how a person, out of the blue and for no apparent reason, can burst into flames—a popular topic of conversation in the 1980s, possibly owing to Michael Jackson's Pepsi-commercial disaster).

At 19 Luke was the kind of handsome that falls just short of too pretty. He had dirty-blond hair and green eyes and features as perfect as those of old Speed Racer. He was the sort of kid who lives all summer at the beach, waiflike but strong. He reminded me of one of the pretty boys in a Tennessee Williams play—always played by a bush-league Brando—whom you know the brutes will ugly up in act three.

It took Luke a long time even to notice Vietnam Guy's wife. He was like a tired traveler driving right past the neon sign flashing Vacancy. (With a little real-world wisdom, think of all the taboo sex you could've had at 19!) Then one day, after hours on his knees pounding away at a hallway floor that kept buckling, Luke was feeling hot and stripped off his shirt—you can almost hear the bass guitar start to pound—and as he did so he looked over his shoulder at Vietnam Guy's wife: She was stretched out on a bed, shoulders back, hips up. This struck Luke as an invitation. She looked crazily sexy, and the danger of it, the thought of Vietnam Guy emerging from a murky pool with a bowie knife in his teeth, well, that just tore it.

Luke said to her, "You know, it's really true. If you lock two people in a room long enough, they will have sex." When he turned away from her—to grab a tool, so to speak—she was on him.

That was the first time.

The town where all this took place is up the coast of Lake Michigan. It's an affluent suburb on the shore. The lake is beautiful here: the Sahara-like dunes, the boats pushed up onto the sand, the heat lightning and storms of August. It is a town of millionaires. Brokers, investors, doctors, lawyers, developers, tycoons and traders catching the train. All of them leaving those sweet mamas aching at home.

Tompkins, a kid who, at college, tagged after us like a party crasher, had a name for them. He called them yummy mummies. I remember this well: It was a few years after college, and we were visiting Luke, standing around a drugstore, trying all the new gum. Tompkins had just taken out a loan at a bank. Luke told me later that Tompkins took out this loan only so I could see him do it—it was engineered to prove something, although what it proved I still don't know. Afterward we were celebrating with all that gum when a smoking-hot woman went by pushing a baby stroller. Her calves and thighs were so taut they made you think she had given birth on a Nautilus machine. I popped my bubble and said, "What the hell is that?"

Tompkins said, "Yummy mummies. All these towns are freakin' crawling with them."

I hated the term yummy mummy. (I suspect everyone hated it and that it continues to prosper only because it rhymes, the same way "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit" prospered for a time.) But more than hating the term, I hated that this crucial intelligence—that the world was filling with beautiful moms who drifted by on clouds of taboo sex—was revealed to me by Tompkins. He was as crass and overbuilt as San Juan, and this information was holy. The Internet has since niche-marketed porn, so the whole idea of sex with moms—with other people's moms, of course, although Freudians would see it as a who-are-you-fooling stand-in for actual sex with your actual mom—has become less exotic. It's become an industry. In that more innocent time (Joe Piscopo was teaching us to laugh, for God's sake), the idea of fucking someone's mother was still so strange and exotic and powerful and unspoken that it struck the mind in a shower of sparks. It's like what the resistance fighter said about (continued on page 128)Handyman(continued from page 72) occupied France: "Think of it always; speak of it never." I always sensed this power—it lurked behind that terrible word motherfucker. But now, as I watched these women roll through town, the idea revealed itself to me in all its power. Motherfucker. No longer an insult but a way of life. For the first time the high school fantasy was tangible and almost within reach. But of course—as with wet dreams, as with dating twins, as with sex in a hearse—Luke was a pioneer.

•

After we graduated from college Luke returned home. How do you live in a suburban town when you're 23? The rest of us had ventured out into the world, across the country or at the very least across the cities of the Midwest. I had moved to New York City. Luke was living with his mom in the house he'd grown up in, near a church. He worked for a contractor, then became a handyman, the handsome kid in the truck, the townie who could fix anything.

When you are 23 and living in such a town, there are no women your age. They go to college and stay away until they are married and knocked up or already have two or three kids. If you want action, you have to go young (and 17 gets you 20), or you have to go old. When you are the handyman, you have the keys. You are in and out of the house and don't even have to knock. You put up drywall, hang a door, nail in the baseboard and then, as in a porno, say, "Anything else that needs nailing, ma'am?"

It began with trips to the hardware store, which for the handyman is home base in a game of tag. You pick up supplies, look for a new job, hang around. Luke would stop by for paint, nails, whatever. A lonely wife might spot him near the sanders, pick up a caulk gun, test the trigger, start to say something, lose her nerve and walk out. Or else she'd come on with a directness known only to an older woman in need. There was a record store nearby that featured world music. It was failing. The owner was 49. She approached Luke by the drill bits. She said she wanted new shelving in the basement of her store. Could Luke give her an estimate?

Luke met her in the record shop the next day. She flipped the sign to Closed. She turned on weepy music from Peru. She said, "This song makes me cry." She asked if he wanted a margarita. Luke never refused a cocktail.

She said, "Well, let's look at that basement."

Halfway down the steps she asked Luke if he wanted to share a joint. It was creeper weed. You don't feel it, so you smoke more. You still don't feel it, so you smoke more and more and then—ka-bang! When Luke tells this story it's science fiction: the musty basement, the mean effects of the dope, the woman "getting closer, closer, closer, then she's on me, then she's bent over, then she's screaming her head off."

•

In a small town, word gets around. The ladies know where to look. Just like that, it seems a fine idea to wallpaper the nursery. When I talked to Luke about those 13 women—13 women—he said, "All these women were between the ages of 37 and 49."

When I first came to know the adventures of my friend Luke, we had a fight about it. I told him I found the whole thing repulsive. Probably I was jealous. Years had passed, but I still thought he wouldn't want to talk about it, so I broached the subject with extreme care. I called him and eased the conversation toward his wild years. Finally I said, "Do you want to talk about all those odd jobs?"

"Hell yeah," he said. "I've been waiting for you to ask. I'll find a secure line, and let's talk."

He said, "Do you want PG-13, or can you handle X?"

We talked for hours, Luke in his car, weaving in and out of traffic, saying, "What do you mean why did I do it? I was 22" or "It's never a question of feeling used. It's a question of being useful." Me walking my dog in Riverside Park, saying "No way" or "No, sir" or "No fucking way." He told me that most of what he had learned so far in life he learned from having sex with moms. How to be patient, how to ask for what you want, how to be direct, how to look with equanimity upon the process of aging. "Everyone gets fat, and everyone gets old," he told me, "but an older woman, maybe her skin isn't tight like it used to be, but she knows what she needs. And she knows what you need, even if you don't."

He said, "An older woman will dress up—and bring a friend."

He told me about meeting two moms in a suburban bar, a happy-hour sort of place near the soccer fields. By this time Luke was a legend, so the moms—big, full-bodied, broad-waisted moms—started chatting him up. They whispered and laughed (moms don't giggle), then one said, "Lucas, do you want to see the inside of my van?"

So Luke and these two moms got in the back of a Subaru, the soccer fields in sight beyond the shatterproof glass, the kids crawling across the grass like ants. Luke took off his clothes and settled into one of the plush bucket seats and watched: Off came the sensible shoes, off came the rayon dresses, off came the support bras. Because they are always in the supermarket, moms are used to waiting in line. So they took turns. Did it slow. Did it fast. Then one of the moms looked at her watch and said, "My God, the game's been over for 20 minutes."

And just like that, Luke's clothes—not all of them, because he had to walk back into the bar without his pants—were shoved into his hands and he was pushed onto the pavement. The Subaru left a 20-foot trail of rubber as it exited the parking lot.

Luke never felt he was being used, never felt as if he was using. He never felt he was on the verge of disaster or as though he was wasting his time. That's just not how my friend orders his world. Neither did he worry about what he would do with his life. Whatever he was doing was what he was doing with his life. And just then it was moms. It was the nurse who stayed in uniform, the teacher who found a way to use everything in her fridge. "If you have a craving for something weird but have never done it because you were embarrassed or thought it was wrong," said Luke, "just ask an older woman. She'll probably do it for you. An older woman tells you what she wants. She guides you in like she's in the tower and you're in the cockpit."

He was sometimes in a house for hours, moving from background to foreground, working, working, fucking, back to working. The kids and the kids' friends knew him as the cool handyman. He was always on the lookout for husbands or for toddlers, who, no one knows why, like to reach up and grab your joint. "I never got caught," said Luke, "because I was always supposed to be there, because I was the handyman."

In those years I did notice that Luke seemed to have a special ease with older women—to the rest of us they were another species. On á flight we took together I remember Luke chatting up an older woman, with her husband and kids a few rows back—the care he showed her, how when making a point he would touch her leg, then let his hand linger. It seemed to make her so happy, this hand in her lap.

He said, "I had sex with a woman in her minivan as she waited for her kids in front of the school."

He said, "My libido was timed to the hours of the school day."

•

One relationship, Luke told me, stood above the others. He was working in a house by the lake, fixing a porch railing for a couple in their early 40s. He'd forgotten a tool and went to his car to get it. The wife followed him onto the lawn. Imagine her however you want. In my mind she is almost matronly, but those sensible clothes are just a tarp thrown over a body that will not quit. She had all the maternal authority of your best friend's mom. (Now think of your best friend's mom saying, "Remove my panties, Richard.")

She slipped her number into Luke's hand. She said, "Call me."

Luke waited a day, then phoned her when he knew the husband would be at work. He was shocked by the out-in-the-openness of her come-on, which only excited him more. He arranged a meeting out of town.

Luke said, "What about your husband?"

She said, "We have an open marriage."

It was surprising to find such an exotic species right here behind the shutters. He met her in the parking lot of a hotel, 15 minutes south from the highway. They parked at opposite ends of the lot and ran into each other as if by accident in the lobby. She checked in. Luke waited in the gift shop, looking at candy, trying to read the newspaper headlines. So Robin Yount is retiring? She came in, told him her room number and left. Luke waited five minutes, then headed upstairs. The maid cart was next to the elevator. He stole a few mints. The hallway smelled like the indoor pool—the smell of family vacations. The windows looked out onto chain stores, expressway, parking lot, sky. The woman was waiting under the covers. My God, could anything be more melancholy? The ice machine humming beyond the door, the water-damaged carpet.

Luke said, "She climbed right into me. It was extremely exciting."

They fucked in the afternoon and woke in the half-light of afternoon ending and fucked again, without a word, falling together like pieces of a puzzle, best sex of my friend's life, because of her body and face, also because of her age, because of her authority, because of all that she had lived and learned and suffered, because for a long afternoon it was as if Luke were living someone else's life.

After that Luke continued to come around the house to do odd jobs. One day he was there to fix an awning. He heard footsteps and turned around, and there was the husband. He'd come out to offer Luke a beer.

The two of them stood, silently appraising the half-repaired awning. Luke sipped his beer. The husband said, "I'm going downtown. If you plan to stay, please stay until the morning. My wife gets scared when she's left alone."

On other occasions Luke and the woman decided to check into a hotel in the city. The woman behind the desk ran the wife's credit card and handed it back.

"We already have you checked in, ma'am," she said.

At once the wife realized her husband had checked in with someone else.

Luke saw this woman for almost two years. He traveled with her in the West. They slept together and talked together and snuck out together. In him she saw (maybe) the life she'd had and lost. In her he saw a life he would never have.

I asked Luke if the woman's kids knew him.

He said, "Yes, of course."

I said, "Who did they know you as?"

He said, "The handyman."

•

Word continued to spread. And spread. Work orders came flooding in. Doors were creaking, walls were chipping and in need of paint. In moments of vainglory Luke says, "I was the handyman who could fix people."

He bought an old wood-paneled station wagon—a woody, the kind surfers drove—and tore out the backseat. It had an interior made of sheepskin. You would see it snaking through the suburban streets, rolling past great green lawns, announcing with a rattle that sexual healing was imminent. The woody parked outside a house was cause for gossip—inside, a mother was on the ride of her life.

"It got so that I could not even drive the wagon," Luke told me. "I used to park it in front of my mom's house, then sneak out the back way on my bike. It was like being in high school."

Through handyman eyes, Luke came to see the town in a new way. He was riding his bike in and out of houses, but really it was almost as if he were riding a bike through a forest of vaginas. He could see the lies of the marriages, the sex on display, the world and how it really works. It made him think back to the town he once knew as a kid. It must have always been like this, he thought. There must have always been a handyman. There must be a handyman in every town in the republic. Because a handyman is required. As Sartre wrote about the Jews, if there were no handyman, it would be necessary to invent him. Because the story of any small town is the story of the country, and the story of the country is the story of screwing. And sometimes that story involves screwing a wife or a mother. As we used to say in my college fraternity, "You can't say 'country' without saying 'cunt."

Of course, the people of the town came to know the bike as well. It was everywhere, dashing through the village streets in the late afternoon, just a few moments after school let out, or chugging through the dunes in the dead of night or struggling up a steep hill in the green dawn.

One morning Luke went into an Italian pastry shop, and two old cops set down their mugs and applauded.

•

Whenever I talk to Luke about his time as a handyman, I get to a point when I say, "But what did you learn?"

"That everyone is fucked up," he'll say. "That sex is a narcotic. That the town is old and prosperous but built on sex, and even those matrons in the black-and-white photos at the village hall could be made to moan, because the big twitch is behind everything."

"But how did it end?" I ask.

"There are only two stories known to man," says Luke. "The stranger comes to town; the stranger leaves town."

I remember when he left. He just got into his truck and went south until he ran out of land. He left in such a hurry I often wondered if something bad had happened—had he gotten fed up, or did a husband go after him with a shotgun?

"No, nothing like that," he said. "I just looked at all those houses and all those walls I had painted and all those doors I had hung and all those porches I had built and all those women, and I said to myself, Friend, your work here is done."

When you are the Handyman, you have the keys. You put up drywall, hang a Door, Nail in the Baseboard and then, as in a Porno, Say, "Anything Else that needs Nailing, Ma'am?"

The names and some descriptions in this article have been changed to protect us all from angry husbands.

"An older woman guides you in," Luke said, "like she's in the tower and you're in the cockpit."