by Maile Meloy
Aaron groaned, and tried to sit up. He felt warm wetness near his eye, and took off his glove to feel a gash on his forehead that must have been from the edge of a ski, though how and whose, he wasn’t sure.
“Why didn’t you move?” he asked his brother.
“I didn’t have time,” George said. “You could have died, hitting a tree.”
“I could have died hitting you.”
“That’s my fault?”
“I have to get to a lower elevation,” Aaron said. “The altitude.”
“Were you puking?”
“No.”
“I saw you.”
Aaron looked down the hill. He could see the lodge in the distance, the parking lot full of tiny cars. It was such a long way. “I have to get my ski,” he said.
They tried to stand, and Aaron put his hand on his brother’s shoulder for support. George snarled at him like a wounded dog, and pushed his hand away. “It hurts,” he said.
Aaron reached to investigate the pain in George’s shoulder—it was what he did all day—and George knocked his arm away with a hard blow, and then they were grappling, oddly, clumsily: one of them on two skis with one good arm, and the other on one ski with one glove, weak with nausea. But they were fighting, finally, and it was an odd relief. George shoved an open, gloved hand into Aaron’s face, the cold leather squishing his nose. Aaron grabbed George’s hair with his bare fingers. They teetered and swayed on the skis, scrabbling for purchase on each other’s slippery coats, trying to stay upright and also shove at each other. George connected once with Aaron’s ribs, without leverage, and they almost went over, then compensated as if they were dancing: slapstick fools. They slid sideways down the hill a few feet, plowing snow. George tried to push him away, but Aaron got an arm around his brother’s legs, and they fell in a heap. George, protecting his shoulder, nearly crushed Aaron’s windpipe with his elbow.
They lay panting and coughing in the snow. Aaron waited for the icy flush of adrenaline to fade, and remembered the time he had been assigned to keep an eye on George, who was still in diapers, in the front yard. Aaron was no more than seven, absorbed with the fort he was building, and his little brother had wandered off and fallen into a ditch with some water in the bottom of it. Aaron was sent to bed without dinner when a muddy George was recovered, and their father didn’t speak to him for days. He regretted the punishment, but he had also been disappointed in a way he couldn’t have articulated then, that the problem of his brother hadn’t solved itself.
IN THE BIG comfortable new lodge—a hideous pimple on the nose of the mountain, according to George—there was a massive stone fireplace surrounded by couches and chairs. On the walls were heavily framed oil paintings of western scenes: cowboys and Indians on the Plains. Bea sat on the upholstered arm of one of the chairs, looking concerned and exasperated. She’d bought a can of recreational oxygen for Aaron in the lodge’s gift shop: not an old man’s green tank but a sporty blue cylinder, like a can of shaving cream. He was bruised and sprained and had three stitches in his forehead, but he felt beautifully high on the oxygen in the deep, soft couch, and his headache was gone. The young doctor who stitched him up told him he could have broken his neck in that fall. He could have died, or spent his life in a wheelchair, and he should stick to slopes he could ski. Aaron accepted the insult and the medical condescension with equanimity. He was intensely happy to be alive and whole. Beneath all his bruises there was the good, honest muscle soreness of skiing, and beneath his wife’s consternation was love, and worry. He might even love his brother in a mood like this, and he looked at George with curiosity, to see if he did.
His brother lay sideways on the other couch, with his head in Jonna’s lap and his feet on the cushions. He had cadged a Vicodin somewhere, which he couldn’t possibly need for his shoulder. He had a torn labrum, probably, and it would need surgery, but it was easily fixable.
“I can’t believe you took him outside the ropes,” Bea said.
“He wanted to go!” George said. “You heard him begging me at lunch. You can’t tell him no.”
“He looks like he’s been in a prizefight.”
“I’ll be all right tomorrow,” Aaron said. “Back on the slopes.”
“You’ll be lucky if you can walk tomorrow,” Bea said.
Claire came in with a tray of white porcelain cups. Her smooth face was freckled from the day in the sun, her hair freshly braided, and she had changed into jeans and a blue fleece pullover. She was the best thing Aaron had done. “I had them spike the coffee,” she said.
“Sweet Claire,” George said. “Heart of my heart.”
“Whiskey, caffeine, and Vicodin?” Bea asked.
“It won’t kill me,” George said.
And it was true, nothing would. The knowledge broke over Aaron in a wave, through his oxygenated good mood. They were bound like two dogs with their tails tied together, unable to move without having some opposite effect on the other, unable to live a single restful minute without feeling the inevitable tug. George would be courting Claire from his nursing home, lobbing insults at Aaron from cover, inhabiting his dreams. Right now he was sipping his spiked coffee complacently, while Jonna stroked his hair.
“Tomorrow I’m going to be the Fire,” George said to Claire. “And chase you around the lodge.”
Claire rolled her eyes and smiled at her uncle, a smile that gave Aaron a twinge of jealousy. She took the tray back to the bar—responsible girl. Surely she was using birth control with the premed boy. Aaron didn’t want to know what kind, just as he didn’t want to think about the images George had put into his head. He felt the hot coffee and whiskey make their way down to his stomach before the double warmth was more generally absorbed. Bea wasn’t going to stroke Aaron’s hair; she wasn’t even going to sit next to him.
On the other couch, George had his eyes closed in Jonna’s lap and his coffee cup on his chest. “We should do this next year,” he said. “We should do this every year.”
IT WAS SNOWING ALREADY, in late September: a freakish, early snow that came after days of crisp and sunny fall weather. The other resident physicians at the hospital, the ones who had been in Montana two and three years, or all their lives, told Naomi this was nothing. “Wait till it snows in August,” they said. It was a Sunday, and Naomi had the day off, and she was sitting in the clean, bright kitchen of her friend Alice’s renovated Victorian, while Alice cried at the kitchen table. Alice was lanky and boyish and had always seemed supremely resilient, but now she was splotchy with tears and her nose was running.
“But how do you know?” Naomi asked.
“I just do,” Alice said. She blew her nose in a tissue. “I can feel it. His mind is somewhere else.”
“Maybe it’s just work. We’re all tired.”
Alice shook her head. “It’s not that,” she said. “He loves the hospital. Do you want tea or something?”
She got up to put the kettle on, and Naomi didn’t protest. The cupboards were painted white, and the open shelves held blue and green dishes. A window over the sink looked out on the snow. Naomi and her husband were renting, and neither of them had the time or the inclination for decorating—they still had cardboard moving boxes as end tables—but Alice had left some kind of design job behind in Los Angeles, and she clearly had skills.
“This kitchen is so pretty,” Naomi said.
“I know,” Alice said, and she made a little wailing noise. “I love this house. We were going to live here for the rest of our lives. I’m sorry to dump all this on you. It was nice of you to come.”
“But maybe it isn’t anything. Maybe you will live here forever.”
“No,” Alice said.
“Do you have proof ?”
Alice shook her head. “But I never see him, and when I do he doesn’t touch me. I told him last weekend that I knew something was up. I really thought he was going to confess, and tell me who she was, and then we could work through it. But he didn’t. I’m pregnant
, I should tell you that. We weren’t going to say anything yet.”
Naomi knocked over a saltshaker on the kitchen table. She tried to conceal her surprise by sweeping together the loose grains.
“Left shoulder,” Alice said.
“What?”
“Throw the salt over,” Alice said. “For luck.”
Naomi dropped the grains down her back. “You’re pregnant?” she asked, trying to make the question friendly.
Alice nodded. “It took me a while to realize,” she said. “I was so distracted.”
“Do you want a baby?” Naomi asked. No baby would make things much easier. She couldn’t come out and say it, but it was true.
“I want a husband,” Alice said. “And then a baby. Together. You have no idea what he’s like.”
“I know a little.”
“But you only see him when he’s happy at work, or being social at parties,” Alice said. “Then he talks. He can talk about anything, and people just sit and listen. You’ve seen it.”
“I’ve been one of them.”
“He missed his calling, don’t you think? He should have founded a cult. A big house full of barefoot girls sitting cross-legged at his feet. He could go around healing everyone. The laying on of hands. That would make him so happy. Instead he just has me, so he resents me and goes silent. Or he jokes and deflects everything.”
“I’m sure that will change.”
The electric kettle had boiled and turned itself off, and sat quietly steaming. Alice stared at the porcelain cups on the open shelves, as if they might hold some answer in their pattern of arrangement, then pulled two of them down. She moved easily in her body, and didn’t slump like some tall girls; she stood straight and unapologetic. Her hair was short, and right now it looked slept on. “Black tea?” she asked. “Or I have green and peppermint.”
“Black is fine.”
“Is there anyone—” Alice began, as if casually. “Any of the residents who you think he might—I’m sorry. I shouldn’t bring you into this. But you see him more than I do, almost.”
“He’s a very dedicated doctor.”
“Yeah, because his patients all beam at him, and hang on every word.” Alice put the tea bags in the cups and poured the water. “Have you noticed the way he keeps his voice really low, sort of half-throttle, especially when he’s talking to women? His father does it, too. It’s to show they’re not trying to be brilliant, never trying. They’re reining their natural brilliance in, so it doesn’t overwhelm us all.”
“You don’t seem to like him very much,” Naomi said.
“I don’t, when he’s fucking someone else!”
“You don’t know that.”
“You take milk, right?” Alice went to the refrigerator.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I thought he was a genius when I married him,” Alice said, pouring milk in the tea. “I thought he was a god. I never questioned anything he did. I did everything he ever wanted me to do, everything I ever thought he wanted me to do. I was his slave, because he was a god, and I was just a girl who’d stepped in the way of his godly attention. That he was, you know, married, to someone else, and had a baby—that just seemed like a technicality. We were so in love that nothing else mattered. You don’t take sugar.”
“No.”
She brought the tea to the table and Naomi accepted it in silence, thinking about the cup, white porcelain, his coffee.
“The whole soul mates idea,” Alice said bitterly, “is really most useful when you’re stealing someone’s husband. It’s not so good when someone might be stealing yours.” She paused, looking out the window. “If I knew who it was, I would get down on my knees and I would beg her to go away, just go away and leave my family alone.”
“Assuming that she exists,” Naomi said. She wished she hadn’t come. She hadn’t been able to think of an excuse when Alice called, except general exhaustion, which didn’t count. And then there was the perverse desire to know what Alice would say.
“For a while I thought it was one of the nurses,” Alice said. “Little Mandy. But I don’t think it is now.”
“Mandy’s engaged.”
“So? He’s married.” She paused in thought. “But he would think it was an outdated cliché. Doctors don’t really go for nurses anymore. It used to be a way to marry up in the world, for nurses and secretaries. But now doctors go for doctors, lawyers for lawyers. So maybe it’s another resident.”
“I think you’re imagining this.”
“I wouldn’t imagine it if it didn’t seem true,” Alice said. “Do you think Max is cheating on you?”
Naomi hesitated. She had told her husband that she was leaving him, with the understanding that Alice would simultaneously—or at least soon—be told the same thing. It had been a difficult week. “No,” she said.
“Because he’s not cheating,” Alice said. “You see, I’m not insane, or stupid. Besides, you’re beautiful, and you’re a doctor, for God’s sake, and you aren’t pregnant and sick every morning.”
“I’m sure he loves you.”
“We were so happy,” Alice said. “I gave up my job and my friends and my whole life to move with him here, and I didn’t care. It was such a perfect residency, in such a cool place, and the houses were so cheap—we could never have bought this house in L.A. I loved being a doctor’s wife in a place that needs doctors, and I was going to have his brilliant, beautiful baby. I was so happy to do all of that, so blissed out on it all. And now it’s fucked.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do,” she said. “He’s never used this kitchen. He learned how to cook as a kid because his family had a bad cook, and he used to show off for me. So I made him this kitchen, and got the right burners, the right hood—and he doesn’t cook anymore.”
Naomi had been cooked for, in a motel with a kitchenette, on crappy electric burners. Just eggs, but spectacular eggs, with capers and Raclette. He had fed her yellow forkfuls, hot and salty and runny with melted cheese. He said she had to eat well, if she was going to keep up her schedule and these antics. “He’s so busy,” she said now.
“But cooking was his thing.”
The phone rang, and Alice stood from the table, lifting her hips forward as if her center of gravity had changed, though she wasn’t showing yet. Naomi wondered if she was doing it deliberately, to look like a woman who couldn’t be left.
Alice rubbed her red eyes and peered at the screen on the cordless phone. “It’s him,” she said, and Naomi’s heart skipped. It rang again, and Alice picked up.
“Hi,” she said. “Sure. I’m just here with Naomi.” She made a funny, eye-rolling face at whatever he said. “Why shouldn’t she be? We’re having tea. That’s what women do.” She paused. “No, everything’s fine. I mean, except, you know, that my life is falling apart. I told her a little bit about that. I hope you don’t mind. How was the gym?” There was another pause. “Okay, we’ll see you soon, then.” She put the phone back in the charger. “He’s coming home. Do you think he’s been fucking her?”
“I should go,” Naomi said. The image of the adorable nurse, Mandy, flashed through her mind, but that was ridiculous.
“No, stay,” Alice said, trying to smooth her hair, with no effect. “You’ll be a good buffer. We don’t have any way of not fighting anymore. We used to do this thing—we would dance a little two-step, to make up, any time we had a disagreement. We did it in the grocery store, and at people’s houses. They must have thought it was so obnoxious. But the dancing dissolved the fight, it meant we could never stay mad. I loved him so much.”
“Do you still love him?”
“I do,” she said. “Beyond reason. I even called his ex-wife. Isn’t that pathetic? I wanted to know if he was like this—then.”
“What did she say?”
“She wasn’t very compassionate—I mean, obviously. I don’t know what I was thinking. She asked me if I thought I was so special that I could change him,
and make him faithful. She said she was still breastfeeding their baby when he left her, so she had trouble feeling very sorry for me. And she said he’s a pathological narcissist, and would leave whenever he felt like it. Do you think he’s a pathological narcissist?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“She said at least she had the excuse that she was really young when she met him, and he hadn’t abandoned any wives yet, and she wished me luck.”
Naomi said nothing.
“So, that worked out well,” Alice said. “That was a brilliant phone call to make. I wish I could get her to talk to the new girl.”
There was another pause, and Naomi began to sweat with the idea that Alice was playing a deep game. Alice knew, and had been batting her around like a trapped mouse. “I really should go,” Naomi said.
“No, he likes you,” Alice said. “Please stay. He’ll be friendly and it will help me. It’s such hell when we’re alone. You can tell me what you think.”
“Alice—” she said.
The door in the front hallway opened. “Hello!” he called, and Naomi felt as if a guitar string in her lower abdomen had just been plucked, and left to vibrate, by the sound of his voice. She believed these responses were biological tricks to propagate the species, but that didn’t make them lose their power. She had never felt that way when her husband spoke, though he was a good and decent man.
“Alice,” she said again, but Alice was looking toward the kitchen door, like a faithful retriever with her messy hair and her red nose, waiting for her master to appear.
They heard keys drop on a table in the hall, and then he came to the kitchen doorway in gym clothes with snow in his hair. He was so beautiful, and so spoiled. Alice had a look of pure adoration on her face. Of course she didn’t know. Naomi thought the pounding of her own heart must be visible through her sweater.
“Hello, ladies,” he said. “I won’t kiss you, I’m covered in sweat.”
