I awoke conscious that it really was cold in the house, and I pulled on some sweats and slippers. In the living room, the door was open, although just a crack, and there was no snow. I pushed it shut, shivering, went to the thermostat and cranked up the heat. Only then did it occur to me how quiet everything was. Just the sound of the furnace cranking on and warmed air breathing up out of the vents.
I didn't need to check his room. I put on jeans and boots and a parka and hat and gloves, got a flashlight, and walked down to the water's edge. There's a little worn path that leads there, and at the end of it I nearly stumbled over a pair of high-top sneakers. Playing the light out onto the ice, I saw a shape about forty yards upriver, where Clay appeared to be lying flat on his back.
I tested the ice with one foot before stepping onto it, even though it was frozen hard enough to support an eighteen-wheeler. Then I walked out to him. He'd put on the skates again, apparently outside, which seemed miraculous, given how cold it was. Yet somehow he'd gotten them laced and tied. He was bare chested—his shirt and undershirt lay on the ice a few feet away, and his rib cage stood out prominently, descending fast to an almost nonexistent stomach that ended where his too-large khakis began. I learned later that one of the final sensations a person freezing to death feels is intense heat. It's so uncomfortable that you are likely to tear off all your clothes to try and get cool—this is one of the reasons that homeless people found dead of exposure are often assumed to also have been victims of sex crimes. But even without that knowledge, it didn't seem so odd to see Clay that way, arms and legs extended, almost like a person making a snow angel. His eyes were closed as if he were asleep, and an unlit cigarette jutted up casually from between his lips. The ice nearby was all marked up from where he'd wobbled around on those things, those skates of my son's.
I went inside to call Louise, late as it was.
Imaginary Tucson
Joe can see it all in his head. At the president's reception in Byron, New York, there is caviar in silver dishes, expensive wine served by waiters in black tie. In a corner of the room, by an enormous window that overlooks the postcard-perfect, sloping front lawn of the college, its bright green tongue leading the eye to a horizon of gold-and-red-stained trees, Kate entertains three or four handsome young professors. She is tall, blonde, Nordic-looking, and her figure is shown off nicely by a simple black dress with a low neckline, but there is something else about her that has made her the center of all this attention. A sensuality, a promise of trouble and fun in her green eyes. She clearly knows about sex. Not in the way that other women in academia seem to know about it, as something they enjoy but also feel responsible for analyzing and deconstructing according to whatever approaches to meaning they considered in their dissertations. With Kate, there would be no apologies, just uninhibited pleasure. There is a man, of course—she's made that clear—but there's always a man. From their positions on the walls, past presidents and trustees gaze out enviously from their portraits, flat now as treasury notes. Voices rise and fall with clever remarks; fat shrimp glisten pink on snowy beds of crushed ice.
When Kate thinks of Tucson, she sees the swimming pool outside of the apartment complex where Joe is subletting, the weather blindingly sunny, with undergrad girls walking around in microbikinis. Long waisted, dark skinned, smelling of coconut oil and taco sauce, they have come over after class to measure out the rest of the afternoon one margarita at a time. Reclining in a plastic chaise longue is Kate's boyfriend, an expert on Denis Johnson and Cormac McCarthy and Leonard Gardner, muscly, tough-guy writers, out of one of whose books he might himself have easily tumbled. They love his Brooklyn accent, his sleepy, deep-set eyes, the slightly off-kilter look of his nose so that no matter which way you are looking at him, you still want to adjust your view. In between his East Coast origins and here lies some murkiness the girls don't really care about. Graduate school in the Midwest, a girlfriend who is also a visiting professor someplace. Someplace else. And now, Joe is going to play his guitar for them, as he often does out there by the pool, tanned and shirtless. He is so much more interesting than boys their own ages. He knows things—about music and books and history and culture—and speaks of them with authority, always in that nasal accent. He's going to play a surfer tune—have any of them ever heard of The Ventures?—and they will get up one by one in their tiny excuses for swimsuits and begin to dance, their thin bodies casting rhythmic shadows over the blue pool.
Joe's tiny apartment, sublet from a French professor who is on leave this year, is full of pictures of other, nicer places: Hawaii, where she has a condo, St. Tropez, Nice. The across-the-hall neighbors run a nonstop party, and clanking, muffler-deprived cars pull up in the parking lot outside at all hours of the day and night, spilling out young Mexican men with cases of Budweiser. Between 10:00 A.M. and 6:00 P.M., it is too hot to be outside, period. He has tried to use the pool, but it felt like swimming in warm spit. The desert landscape here in the north of the city has been overlain by apartment complexes and the huge cement buildings of chain stores.In between the lonely roads that connect these pockets of commerce, saguaro and cholla and agave and palo verde cook bravely. Sometimes, driving down to school, ignoring the smell of the waste treatment plant, he feels he's living inside a particularly spare Dr. Seuss illustration.
Kate's students wear dirty college-logo caps, and stare at her in class silently, defiantly. They have not done their homework—they have never done their homework. They deserve As because that's what their parents are paying for, and sure, if this were Dartmouth, they'd be working, but it isn't, it's the eighteenth-rated small liberal arts college in the country, respectable, but a perennial second choice and safety school. What does she want? They are, most of them, taking Latin because there is a newly instituted language requirement, and with Latin, you don't have to learn to speak. That's who she's got, the ones who don't want to speak.
The sky here (Leatherstocking country!) is the color of dishwater and has been for over a week. There is nothing to do. Nothing. The liquor store in the village boasts a complete selection of flavored schnapps, including "Oreo 'n' Cream," as well as a long row of Bully Hill Wines. The grocery store carries only iceberg lettuce, tight, cold balls of it, shrink-wrapped and shining. In bed at night, the sole inhabitant of the huge house they rented sight unseen, her nose is constantly cold. Winds from the valley sweep up the hill and batter and shake the windows, some of which turn out to be held together by a careful application of cellophane tape. One of the toilets is broken. The house came with an assortment of Post-it notes warning about chairs not to sit on and lamps that don't work. She keeps the clunky, black cordless phone—his from before they met—by her on the nightstand and sometimes even brings it with her in under the covers. She spends much of her at-home time not calling him. But then she'll forget, like the other morning when there was a deer outside the kitchen window, and she wanted him to know, only it was 4:30 A.M. in Arizona, and the man who answered wasn't her boyfriend, but rather a second-rate actor with a slow delivery who barely even knew his lines.
The first night of his visit, they make love standing up by the bedroom window, which looks out over the shadowy lacrosse field.
"Think anyone saw?" he asks, after.
"Are you kidding?" she says. "It will be a topic at the next faculty meeting."
Lying in bed beside her, he thinks of his room in Tucson, of the framed print of a hula dancer he can see from this very same position. It seems odd to be looking, now, at the outlines of an antique dresser. Kate kisses his chest and snuggles, then suddenly panics for a moment because she doesn't know where the phone is, and begins to track backward in her mind to the last time she used it. She remembers where she left it—the kitchen—at exactly the same moment she realizes it doesn't matter.
"I looked through the job list," she says. "There's something for you in Bemidji."
"Bemidji?" he says. "What the heck is Bemidji?"
"It's a place. You could get y
our ice fishing on. You could buy a truck with four-wheel drive."
"You want me to apply for this?"
"Of course," she says, not knowing if she does or doesn't. Lately, she doesn't believe half the things she hears herself say. Yesterday, she shouted at a kid, telling him that Billy Joel could wipe the floor with Dave Matthews any day of the week. "Wipe the floor"—she'd actually said that. She barely knows who Dave Matthews is. They were supposed to be translating Cicero. "You might as well."
"I have another year, if I want it. And they might do a search. And you hate the cold."
"They won't hire you. They never do. They always hire the other guy, the one they don't know. That's how it works."
"Then I'll move here."
"And do what?"
"Work in a bookstore."
"We don't have a bookstore. We have a cheese shop. You could work there. I stopped in the other day. They have four kinds of cheddar. It's like a Monty Python skit."
"I'll adjunct," he says. "Write my book. Start a band. Lighten up, will you?"
"Lighten up?" she says. "It's cold here, too. There are mice in the kitchen. There's a creep at the pool who wears a Speedo and times his laps to mine—he's married to a woman in English who looks like a stork. Do you understand? I'm afraid I'm going to take root here, like some lost seed. I'm afraid the next twenty years are going to sandbag me and I'll suddenly be her, just a character attached to this place, someone the students trade stories and speculate about over beers when they are on vacation in Positano."
"You think they'll hire you permanently?"
"I don't know. Maybe. You're missing the point."
Joe gives her a hug. "We have to be flexible," he says. "We're lucky we have jobs. All in all, things are going pretty well." Of the many girlfriends he's had over the years, Kate, whom he met two years ago in Iowa City when she nearly ran over him on her bicycle, is by far the most interesting; it has occurred to him that she should probably be on medication. Except then she might not be who she is, and what would be the point of that? The official story is that they now live together, here in Byron, even if he also has a place in Tucson. Temporary jobs require temporary homes.
"They are?" she says. "They're going well?" She's surprised by the sound of her own voice.He finds it vaguely exciting that someone has been sneaking peeks at her underwater. He wraps his arms around her and kisses her ear, which he knows usually gets her going. It's practically an on-off switch.
She visits him next, a few weeks later, just before Thanksgiving, for which he'll be coming east. Instead of giggling sophomores poolside, she finds Joe hacking and running a low fever that won't go away. Still, he's game to show her around, and they hike to Finger Rock and drive out to the Desert Museum to see the hummingbirds, and she tries to be amusing and happy, but the color of his eyes is an alarming, wet pink, and he seems half-dead.
"Valley fever," he says, over chimichangas and margaritas in a popular, run-down Mexican restaurant in south Tucson, its outside walls decorated with hubcaps. "The doctor claims it has something to do with birds. The good thing is, you can only get it once. I'm all set for desert living from here on."
She stares at her silverware, none of which matches, and all of which seems to have come from Goodwill. She can't tell if this is quaint and authentic, or just someone's idea of quaint and authentic. His hair is getting overlong, and his skin has a greenish cast to it, in spite of all the sun he's been getting.
"Why are we together?" she asks. "Please tell me. Because I worry about it all the time."
"I don't know."
"You don't know? Do you think that's what I want to hear?"
He touches her hand. "Telegamy, remember?" This is a word he learned from her, one she may have invented. Things don't seem so bad if you have a name for them. His illness, for instance, which had him so down until he learned what it was called. To lay some groundwork in case he should get hired here permanently, he's already mentioned his "brilliant classicist" partner to at least three colleagues, one of whom turned out to be a senile professor emeritus—religion—who later tried to take his wallet. He had to physically push the man away.
"You like this. Displacement, setting up shop in a hostile, spiky environment." She's feeling it coming on again, the dark, nervous wash of energy that makes her misbehave, that makes her into, as her mother has always been so fond of pronouncing, "her own worst enemy." "And you know what?" she says. "It's not telegamy. Not really. Because if it were, we'd be married. Monogamy, polygamy, telegamy."
"You want me to marry you?" he asks.
"Oh, Jesus Christ. No. Absolutely not. I'm not ready for that. Nothing of the kind. I'd just like to try being in the same place for a while."
"Because I would."
"You would?" She looks down at her plate, at the shredded lettuce alongside the mangled remains of her meal. Her period is way overdue, she's been feeling strange, her breasts are sensitive. Last week, she bought a home testing kit, but it's back in upstate New York, still in its box. "You would?" she repeats. "That's nice of you."
Thinking about what he's just said, he feels suddenly dizzy. It occurs to him that he has in his defense the fact of his illness, which like drunkenness, or a pair of quotation marks, can serve to distance the apparent meaning of a statement from absolute or empirical truth. Of course, he would marry her. Given the right circumstances, he most certainly would. Maybe someday he will. He finishes his margarita and wonders about ordering them both another.
Thanksgiving is horrible—they spend most of it in the car. His uncle takes everyone out to a diner in New Jersey. This is supposed to be fun. The waitresses wear Pilgrim hats. On the ride back to Byron, she makes him pull over so she can throw up.
"It wasn't that bad," he says.
She thinks about how she didn't take her pills. About how she may have on purpose rolled the dice.
They don't talk about jobs at all.
At the Modern Language Association convention in Chicago, just after Christmas, she does not attend his paper. She couldn't care less about his paper. Joe has claimed not to have any interviews, but she's pretty sure he's cheating on her—not with a woman, but with a city in Minnesota. What she can't figure out is why he's keeping it a secret, inventing reasons he'll be gone for a while ("Coffee with Rob Skelton—you remember Rob . . ."). She's told him nothing. To tell him would be to influence the situation, and she doesn't want to do that. In Star Trek terms, she would be violating the Prime Directive, influencing the flow of history. Joe is a big Star Trek fan.
In the hotel lobby, where it is much more pleasant than the arctic air of room 1607—the heat is out for their entire tower—she watches the academics drift about with their coffees and their brief cases, eyes nervously darting around like those of prey on the veldt. She and Joe didn't even have Christmas this year. Instead, they have this—a convention. Restaurants, drinks (she's limited herself to one), more restaurants—she can barely fit into her good black pants. Tomorrow, they will each return to their respective homes. It worked out cheaper this way, and also, she's got an appointment at a clinic in Utica for Tuesday. She went back and forth on it, cried a little, called her friend Tonya back in Iowa, then chickened out and ended up making the whole conversation be about swimsuits and the impossibility of finding ones that didn't make them look like prudes or "before" advertisements for Weight Watchers. She's not that far gone. There probably isn't even a heartbeat yet. The temperature in Tucson at the moment, she happens to know, is sixty-two degrees. She's been monitoring it daily.
A young woman sits opposite her, pretty and also blonde, but with a face that's a little too pale, lips thin as French beans. She's wearing white hose under her charcoal skirt.
"God, I hate this," she says.
"Up for a job?" asks Kate.
She nods. Her skin is papery, her eyebrows barely there. "This is my third try. I defended two years ago. If I don't get something this year, I figure it's more or less over. I'm sorry, it
's not your problem. But this is torture of a high order."
Kate squints to read the woman's convention badge, which announces that she is Dara Simeon, from Penn State. "Here's my advice, Dara. Pretend you're in court—answer all the questions, smile as much as you can, but don't offer information they don't specifically ask for. And don't say anything about your personal life, all right? You do not have a personal life."
"Thanks," she says, getting up and smoothing her skirt.
"You might want to imply you're sexually available," Kate says. "It couldn't hurt."
In the Hilton lobby, Joe waits for it to be time to ring up to the room and let them know he's here. He likes interviews, likes the feeling of possibility they provide. New people, new places. He's aware that Kate wants nothing more than to settle down and be done with it, and he appreciates that, but he's not sure he's there yet. It's a game they are playing, and he's always been good at games. People often underestimate him, and he likes that about himself. Even on the basketball court, he was always the surprise, the guy who could strip the ball from the opponent when he wasn't expecting it, head down for the easy layup. What she doesn't seem to understand is that he's with her. He is! This is how it works in academia. You sacrifice some things to gain others. If they were starting out as lawyers, they'd be working such long hours they'd never see each other anyway. If he were in the military, she'd have to get by with not seeing him for years at a time. He's tried to get her to see it his way, to understand that they have it better than everyone else. Two campuses, two different sets of friends.
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