Northwest Corner

by John Burnham Schwartz

  “I guess you received the papers?”

  “They’ll be at your lawyer’s by the end of the week,” Norris responds, his words clipped.

  “Thank you.” She pauses, searching for an invisible plane of dignity on which to stand, not finding it. “I’m sorry about all this, Norris. But I’m glad to see you’ve found somebody nice to be with.”

  “Wanda and I found each other,” Norris replies a bit too firmly.

  Ruth is silent. She can feel the cool poultry insides of the pie through the aluminum plate and, ridiculously, her mouth begins to water. Had she known she was going to run into Norris she would have put off buying the pie until later, in fact would have skipped the fair altogether. No turkey pie, however perfect, can be worth this scene.

  “I know about Sam leaving school,” Norris says. And having delivered himself of his most dramatic line he rests, looking at her significantly, knowing he has her full attention now. But even his indignation, it strikes her, is like an old tire leaking air.

  “Who told you?”

  “Who is not important,” uttered as though nothing in New England could be more so. “I happen to know someone at the university.”

  “Don’t people have anything better to talk about than other people’s kids?”

  “Sam’s my stepson and you should’ve told me.”

  “That would have been awkward.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I’ve been a little preoccupied, as you can imagine.”

  “I think he needs me, Ruthie. He sounds pretty confused, all right, just bolting school like that for no reason.”

  “Maybe he has his reasons.”

  “I want your permission to call and invite him to stay with me and Wanda.”

  She stares at him, honestly dumbfounded. “But Norris, Sam doesn’t like you.”

  “That’s exactly the kind of thing you would say. Look, I’m sorry you’re sick, Ruth, but you really need to deal with the anger.”

  “I’m not angry with you. And my health has nothing to do with this. My doctor says my odds are terrific.”

  “I happen to know your doctor—Cusack at Yale–New Haven? Played golf with him last year.”

  “Stay out of my business, Norris. Jesus, one of these days I’m going to move out of this fishbowl into the biggest city I can find.”

  She’s allowed herself to overheat, is speaking too loudly. Glancing out from under the burdensome limbs into the searing sunlight, she sees a few people turn their heads to avoid getting caught spying. Lucinda Jarvis, for one, will sell no more turkey pies until this puppet show is over.

  “I need to get home, Norris.”

  “Will you at least tell Sam to call me? Tell him I’m here if he needs me. Tell him that.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  High on a limb overhead a squirrel jitters, pursuing its squirrel life, and a cracked branch falls through the leaf-dark air and lands inches from Norris’s left foot. He flinches at the sound, then colors for having flinched.

  Striding on trembling legs back across the green to where she’s parked, her chin forced up, carrying that golden pie like a reward for being good, she is radioactive, her own little Chernobyl. People staring at her through their sunglasses.

  But who, she desperately needs to know, will be there in the end to see her over to the other side?

  She drives away wiping tears, unable to imagine dinner.

  DWIGHT

  THE WORKDAY PASSES. During my lunch break Sandra comes up and asks if she can talk to me alone. We go back to the mechanicals room, where she tells me that she doesn’t care if he’s, like, her cousin or whatever, she’s sick to here of Evander stealing shit out of the store and selling it to kids behind the high school, and she isn’t going to put up with it no more, okay? I calm her down and send her back to the registers with an order to keep it buttoned. Privately I check the books against our inventory, which confirms her account. Then there’s nothing to do but wait for Tony to come back from lunch.

  He doesn’t accept the facts at first—“Family stealing from family? Fuck yourself, Dwight, okay!”—and comes awfully close to outright calling me a liar. My blood is up and we might be heading for trouble, but then Sandra barges into the office calling her cousin a motherfucking bodega thief (Evander, as usual, isn’t around, having never shown up for work), and because she’s family, and speaks with the imaginative conviction of a street poet, her uncle believes her. Tony says tightly that he’ll deal with it himself, okay—family to family—and for the time being that’s that.

  The workday passes. That is all I know. As to family, what do I really understand? My son doesn’t see fit to call the cell number I gave him, and hasn’t given me his, so I’m left to fester. At some point I cave and call my house in search of him, where I hear my own voice on the answering machine, a dislocating, even depressing, experience under the best of circumstances, and quickly hang up.

  SAM

  HE’S IN THE GUEST ROOM doing lat sets with his father’s dumbbells when his cellphone vibrates that he has a message. He goes to voice mail.

  “Sam, it’s Jake. You need to get your ass back here. That guy you hit in the bar—Bellic? I just heard he’s been moved back to the ICU. I don’t know why, but he’s not getting better. Listen, you better get back here, or you’re going to be seriously fucked.”

  Sam listens to Jake’s message a second time. Then he erases his friend’s voice. Closing the phone, he sets it on the weight bench.

  His face is dripping. The tendons in his wrists are trembling strangely.

  He gets up and walks through his father’s house to the kitchen. He pulls a beer from the fridge and twists off the cap and drinks until the bottle is empty.

  It is late afternoon in California. In Connecticut, he thinks, the sun will be going down.

  He turns and vomits into the stainless-steel sink.

  PENNY

  HER WARDROBE ISN’T EXPANSIVE ENOUGH that it should take her this long to get dressed for a date with a man whose personal style, based on her four months of fairly close but intermittent observation, could best be described as “casual amateur athletic.” And yet, after twenty minutes and three full outfit changes, her bed strewn with decided noes and possible yeses (the sequin shimmy thing just now demoted because she is not, and never has been, a twenty-year-old country-and-western singer from the Blue Ridge Mountains who looks great in cowboy hats), she’s still at it, sideways to the full-length mirror that she can see from her closet only with the bathroom door all the way open, a hangered dress pressed over her bra and panties and a pair of low-heeled sandals not quite doing the trick. These accoutrements, too, soon tossed on the bed, leaving her mostly naked before the ruthless glass, with nowhere to hide from the truth of her post-forty body: disturbing lines turning her neck into a segmented rather than a fluid object, the soft oblongs of flesh above her hips beginning to do double duty, during her baths, as personal flotation devices, and her legs, which might once have inspired a sonnet or two, now looking weirdly Japanese (too much tennis!), hardly worth a haiku from a visiting Buddhist scholar.

  Ali, wearing iPod earbuds and sexy Lolita overalls, appears behind her in the looking glass: some sort of visual genetic extrapolation, it seems to her mother, here run cruelly amok.

  Penny hesitates, steeling herself. “Any advice?”

  Frowning at the inconvenience of being asked a live interactive question, the girl extracts the earbuds. “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Mom, we have totally different styles, you know?”

  “This is an emergency, Ali. I’m having some kind of sartorial-aesthetic breakdown.”

  The girl is silent, sizing her up. Finally, a nod: “I’d go sleeveless.”

  Penny is horrified. “Sleeveless?”

  “You have really sexy arms, Mom.”

  “I do?”

  “Yeah, and a skirt, nothing lower than the knee—you’ve got those killer legs. And he
els, duh.”

  Ali replaces the earbuds and goes out. Penny stands staring after her.

  DWIGHT

  SAM ISN’T THERE when I return home around six. And he’s still gone while I shower and shave and put the coals to heat in the grill out back. There’s no sign of him while I dress in clean chinos and a white button-down shirt and drink a first beer and salt the steaks I picked up at Vons, and slice some beefsteak tomatoes and stick a couple of baking spuds in the oven at 400 degrees. Then it’s five past seven and my doorbell chimes and I think it might be him but it isn’t, it’s Penny, in a sleeveless top, knee-length skirt, and open-toed sandals, with her hair pulled back tight as a pearl diver’s from her face and her nails unpainted. She strikes me at that moment, in a place beyond speech, as the ideal respite from the guilty, hopeful, almost unbearable pressure that my son’s reappearance has brought to my carefully tamped-down California existence, and my sudden physical need for her is overpowering, virtually narcotic. I kiss her long and hard in the doorway and, a minute later, in my bedroom while undressing her, having lost all track of everything else.

  It is possible to carry on several lives at once, skillfully keeping them from intersecting, and this is something that a certain kind of person, if properly seasoned and trained, can go on doing for quite some time. I have done it myself, though not always on purpose. There’s a kind of ironic innocence involved, and it stems from genuine hope. The hope being that when judgment finally comes, if it does (and I’m not talking about the law here—that already happened—or about God, either), good intentions might actually count for something concrete, or at least there might be an understanding by someone who matters that bad intentions were not originally present, but rather appeared unexpectedly at some horrible juncture, and somehow took root, and only then ruined everything. What I’m getting at here, on a minor level, has to do with Penny showing up in my house this evening and my son not being there, the two of them, like parallel lines, knowing next to nothing about each other, and my continued reticence on the matter. Maybe, having done so much harm in my life and having received in the aftermath of a just punishment some decent luck that I know I haven’t earned, I simply don’t want to make a stupid mistake that will set any of it back, make it disappear. A matter of protective habit, I’ve grown used to saying as little as possible to anyone about my situation, past or future, including and especially the one or two people I hope to be closest to. It’s almost always safer to ask questions than to try to give answers anyway, I’ve found. This is considered good manners, of course, but I also can’t help but recognize it as a cagey, instinctive form of playing not to lose, a strategy that all losers know in their secret hearts, until you wake up one day and realize that you can no longer remember the other kind of playing, because it is gone.

  PENNY

  SHE ARRIVES bearing a bottle of Chardonnay, and this he takes from her hand at the door while kissing her, and it’s only later, after she’s walked out on him midway through the evening and returned home, that she recalls thinking fervently in his arms, her lips locked on his, that should she never see that bottle of wine again and never drink from it, it will be no loss, because she’ll have had her fill anyway.

  And she can be called many things, but not a fabulist; for all of this actually happens. In his bedroom, as sparsely furnished as a frat boy’s fridge, where they somehow land breathless mere seconds after her arrival, he unzips her skirt with one hand while the other, each finger pulsing as if it contains its own heart, breaks the seal of her panties and enters her. A warm-up that just about finishes her off. She literally throws her head back: I laughed, I cried. That’s right. You think when you’re younger that to do this—to fuck when and whom you want—in middle age will somehow be disgraceful, or a waste, not even worth counting in the annual survey, or just another cliché—but, honey, it ain’t necessarily so. She releases him and his penis leaps into both her hands. A big man, which she loves, requiring all of her. Then he’s on top of her, spreading her across the bed, covering every inch of her exposed flesh, burrowing. Not the first time, certainly. But what presses out of him tonight is a surprising kind of need, she senses, hard to explain—as if in his previous life, however it was, he set some of the years aside unlived, put up on a shelf till now, saving or watching or hiding from himself while the real stuff passed him by.

  But this isn’t passing; it’s here, nothing kept in reserve or at bay. The expression of him entirely physical, almost animal, which, after all the talking and talking and talking she’s done and listened to in her days (Christ, the academic declaiming and posing, with so many people she’s never wanted to understand or reach), she receives like a gift, with inordinate pleasure and relief.

  She decides she wants that wine after all. Grapes after sex is poetry, said the Greeks, or can be. Anything can be poetry—isn’t that her mantra in class: Open your senses! Use form and language to investigate every aspect of the human! Don’t be scared to see! Swallow everything! Now, happily fucked and half dressed in her lover’s house, twisting her skirt right way round as she meanders from bedroom to kitchen, one mental eye on that uncooked steak, she thinks she can finally see her own point—

  She stops dead in the living room, and covers her naked breasts with her hands.

  A young man is standing by the front door. He is tall, good-looking, and shabbily dressed. His shock at finding her here appears even greater than her own—he looks angry. His arms and chest are strong, and instinctively she feels afraid of him.

  They stand staring at each other. Till he wheels round and, grabbing Dwight’s car keys off the table by the door, strides out of the house.

  “Hey!” she calls after him—a coward’s Stop thief!—never moving her feet.

  “Let him go.”

  She turns: Dwight behind her, still naked. Though the expression of the triumphant sex stud he was wearing a few minutes earlier is gone. He is defeated, she sees. He has now the face of the caught-out liar.

  SAM

  HE DRIVES his father’s car in the only direction he can think of in this country not his own, fifteen minutes south. No plans on a Saturday night, no road map, nada. Missing especially at this moment, blindly crossing out of the unincorporated township of Arenas and into the city of Santa Barbara, the green road signs with the little maps outlined in white that mark the Northwest Corner like so many coming-home flags, telling you which town you’ve just left and which you’ve just entered: Salisbury, Box Corner, Canaan, Wyndham Falls, Bow Mills …

  Native tattoos under his skin that he’s never felt compelled to acknowledge till now, probably because he’s never felt so far from home.

  He parks on the main drag, if that’s what it is, not far from the marina. Sounds of voices and music from restaurants and bars down the street, storefronts open to the balmy weather like undefended faces—and so, again, nothing like home. He turns the other way and walks across a thin strip of park toward the piers. High up in the palms a breeze rustles, a whisper too exotic to be true; and ahead, keeping their own rhythm, beneath anchor lights dotting the near horizon like roped constellations, halyards bang with faint urgency against a hundred masts or more.

  All this he can hear, but not believe in. Pictures and sounds will never be enough; he must always come armed with his own theory of emotional relativity, awaiting impossible confirmation. He can’t remember a time, for instance, when it didn’t seem to him, down deep, a factual certainty that his father’s fist once struck his five-year-old face simply because, at a precocious age, for some reason not of his understanding, his face, needing to meet that fist, arranged for it to happen. That he will never be able to prove this does not make it false.

  He walks the piers, one after the other. Some boats are party boats with convivial gatherings on deck, coolers of beer, here and there a blender coughing up daiquiris and margaritas. He is a sentry or night watchman or resident Batman: the drunk look at him soberly as he passes. Other boats are dark. He sta
nds by the dark ones, peering into their lightless cabins, the vessels shifting restlessly on the invisible tide. A hundred feet behind him, above the marine shop, a bar-and-clam shack spills life over the docks, the yellow light catching in acid-colored pools on the oil-slicked surface of the water. It is beautiful, and it makes him close to seasick. He feels the need to sit down. Near the chest-high metal gate that separates the nautical or would-be nautical population from the rest, under a low-wattage municipal light peppered with suicidal moths, he finds a bench partially occupied by an old man in a crushed captain’s hat and dirty Bermuda shorts. The man nods at him blurrily, drinking a pint of something from a brown paper bag. Sam sits down, leaving some space between them. He can smell what’s in the bottle now, or maybe it’s the man’s breath: Jack Daniel’s. With a shot of J.D. this time, he thinks. And Nic Bellic lies slumped on the filthy floor of O’Doul’s; and Nic Bellic rises again like Lazarus or Frankenstein; and Sam watches with lacerating clarity as a gleaming scalpel blade trails a ruby cut line across the fish-white belly of a man named Nic Bellic. And he says good night to his seated American neighbor, the man in the crushed hat, and gets up and walks toward the marine shop, which is closed, and the wooden stairs that lead up to Captain Cook’s, which beckon infinitely. In a minute he will climb those stairs, and take a seat at the bar, where no one will know him and there will be everything visible to remind him of where he’s been.

  DWIGHT

  “IT COMES DOWN TO TRUST,” Penny says, not meeting my eyes as she sets a mug of coffee—my fourth of the morning—in front of me. She’s looking pretty and fit in tennis whites, but otherwise as hard and cool as a Greek statue. I’m seated at what used to be her former husband Darryl’s place at the kitchen counter, precariously perched on a high stool, no more in control of the situation than a man trying to ride an emu.