Scott Spencer

by Man in the Woods (v5)

  Bernard and Kate are on the patio, reading the Sunday papers, while Annabelle rests on the sofa, gathering her strength before the ride home. Sonny Briggs’s wife, Chantal, arrives, dressed as if for a beauty contest at a county fair, in cut-off jeans and the tails of her checkered shirt tied off at the navel, wearing high-heeled sandals and plenty of lipstick. For moral support, she has arrived with her friend Wendy Moots, who has two coincidental connections to the people already gathered at Kate’s house—she is a nurse at Windsor County, working the same floor that Annabelle was on after the accident, and she is the sister of Liza Moots, the housekeeper-astrologist-potter whose paralyzing fear of dogs Paul and Shep have helped her to conquer. Chantal seems uncertain as to what attitude to strike in the odd situation in which she finds herself, and her demeanor veers unpredictably from iciness to abashment. She asks where she might find her husband, giving the word a weightiness it can barely support, and then she goes upstairs to the guest room where Sonny sleeps. Wendy Moots, in the meanwhile, is treating Shep, about whom she has apparently heard a great deal, as if he were a long-lost relative or perhaps a celebrity. “It’s you, I can’t believe it’s you,” she says, squatting down on her powerful haunches and getting face to face with the dog, who seems to have perked up considerably, stimulated by the promising rush of human activity.

  As the afternoon arrives, they are all eleven of them seated at a long table on the patio in the full, glorious sunlight with the deep, spicy smell of someone’s newly mowed field perfuming the light breeze and no sounds except those of human voices and the mysterious telegraphy of the few birds and squirrels who continue to forage despite the midday heat. Paul has chosen a dozen Brandywine tomatoes from the little garden he maintains behind his workshop, along with several stalks of purple basil, and he’s made a salad of it with the mozzarella Hunter DeMille had in his car along with his other groceries—the cheese has practically liquefied in the heat but its near ruination has brought out its hidden milky and nutty flavors, and in combination with the moist, warm tomatoes and the wild astringency of the basil, olive oil, salt, pepper, and a few chopped cloves of garlic, the salad is devoured by everyone with exclamations of amazement.

  A languid sort of merriness prevails as the meal is consumed in the August heat. Toasts are proposed to summer and to the tomatoes and Sonny stands with tears streaming down his face and raises his cup of sparkling water and makes a toast to Chantal, who looks at her husband with adoration and the supreme human kindness of forgiveness. All through the lunch, Paul and Kate exchange helpless but happy looks, and Paul tries to communicate with his eyes alone that he is anxious to return to the conversation they were having before their Sunday took its unexpected turn.

  But that time doesn’t come until nearly evening, with the sky still blue but seeming to wither and the heat suddenly inescapable. Their visitors have at long last left and Kate has taken a nap, falling into unconsciousness as if she has spent the afternoon drinking wine. Paul and Ruby have put the dishes in the dishwasher and done their usual half-assed job of straightening up, and now they sit on the sofa in the front of the house while Ruby reads aloud from the newest installment of the Harry Potter saga, and Paul does his best to stay engaged. Somewhere along the way, Paul succumbs to Shep’s imploring stare and pats the cushion, inviting Shep to sit next to him. As he drifts in and out of listening to Ruby, Paul is overcome by a wave of melancholy. Someday, he thinks, this will all be gone. Ruby’s childhood, for all its troubles, seems so delicate and fleeting, and that will be gone, as will the velvet nights of August and the summer itself. This house that he has arrived in as if purely by chance—what law of the universe will keep him here? These bricks, the wood, the glass in the windows, the smell of the air, the deep, snoozing breaths of the great brown dog, the love he has been given, everything feels impermanent, and everything is impermanent. It is the mute, sorrowing knowledge of summer’s end, the knowledge that comes when you are listening to the guileless piping of a child’s voice, the knowledge of a man who knows that everything changes without warning, a man who sometimes looks at his own hands and shudders at the sight of them.

  It is dark by eight-thirty. The coyotes, who normally don’t begin their revels until midnight, are already yipping and yodeling and howling. The owls are hooting and the bullfrogs have begun their chorus of moans. The cicadas have arrived and their innumerable cries fill the air like a vast electrical disturbance. Ruby falls asleep on the sofa and Paul carries her up to her bed. When he comes down, Kate is in front of the empty hearth, wrapped in a blanket, her hair chaotic from what must have been a fitful nap.

  “You’re up,” Paul says.

  “You should have wakened me. I slept for two and a half hours.”

  “You must have needed it.”

  Kate pats the sofa, hoping that Paul will sit next to her, and the force of her hand launches a small cloud of dog hairs left by Shep earlier in the evening. “Goddamit,” she says.

  When Paul has gotten close, she presses herself against him, wraps her arms around him. “Brrr.”

  “It’s actually a little warm,” Paul says.

  “Does it seem ridiculous, me going on that TV show?”

  “No. I don’t even know what you’re worrying about. You’re good at your job. You’re good at everything.”

  “I’m just tired of being this person. The person who has all the answers. Ms. Grace and Spirituality. I’m sort of sick of it, to tell you the truth.”

  They hear Shep’s claws as he walks down the stairs. With Ruby asleep he has been released and now he clicks into the front room and makes eye contact with neither of them, as if there is some chance he won’t be noticed, and slowly lies down on the hooked rug.

  “Maybe you’re tired,” Paul says. “You work all the time.”

  “Maybe.” She leans forward, peers at the dog. “He does seem a little under the weather.”

  “Yeah. I think Annabelle was right. I’m going to take him to Julian tomorrow.”

  Julian? Is that a place? And then she remembers: Julian Atkins, the vet.

  “I know this sounds a little crazy,” Paul says.

  “Feel free. This is the house that craziness built.”

  “I don’t believe God is going to let anything too bad happen to Shep.”

  “I don’t know what to think,” Kate says.

  “I just think,” Paul says, “that whatever happened, you know, back then, me finding him and taking him away from that man, it was all just somehow meant to be. And now this silence, this long big nothing that followed it?” His voice drops to a whisper and he moves his lips closer to her. “It just seems that as far as the universe is concerned, what I did was basically okay. And I’ll tell you another thing. I’m so glad we went back there that time. Now at least I know that he’s still not just lying there waiting for someone to find him. Now it’s really between me and God.”

  “Paul,” Kate says, moving away, just to turn and look at him. “I got a FedEx the other day from my agent, and inside it was a huge check. Royalties for my book.”

  “Great. I actually gave away a bunch of money today. It seems sort of fitting.”

  Kate blinks, deciding not to make any inquiries about this. “It was for about a million dollars.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “And there’s at least one more coming that will be at least that much, or maybe more. And the way I figure it if I do this little TV show there will be another big check after that. I really think I need to maximize this thing. Just keep it going while it’s going because I’ll tell you this—I am never going to write another book like this again. I’m not going to keep going with Heartland and I’m not doing any more appearances. I’ve reached the end.”

  “I don’t blame you. It’s exhausting.”

  “It’s more than that. I don’t even want to say. But I’m going to let it run its course and then there’s something I want to do.”

  “You’re amazing.”


  “I want to take all the money, every penny of it, and I want to sell the house—this area is hopping and I’m sure I can get a lot of dough for it—and I want us to move.”

  “Move? Where would we go?”

  “I don’t know. I was thinking about Greece. I don’t mean now. Maybe in six months? After that the book will stop selling anyhow, that’s how books are.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Or Italy. Someplace beautiful. What you do, you can do anywhere. Same with me. And it’s not as if Ruby is exactly thriving here. She can have one of those international childhoods. And we’ll have enough money, we won’t have to worry. We can be these very cool and mysterious expatriates no one can quite figure out. We’ll walk into our favorite little seaside café and people will say I wonder what their story is. It’ll be good. And we’ll have each other. If you are half as into me as I am into you that will be more than enough. I could light up a city with how much I love you. We’ll be fine.”

  “I’m fine here. Anywhere with you.” He feels the sting of tears. Who knew such a love was possible?

  “You know where I would love to go? Mykonos. My ex and I were on our terrible little honeymoon, skipping around Greece as if we were on a scavenger hunt looking for happiness. Everything was off, every museum was closed, every meal was a disaster, Joe sprained his ankle in Crete, I was stung by a bee right above my eye and my eye was as closed as the museums—but Mykonos was magical. I’ve always wanted to return.”

  “It’s beautiful there,” Paul says. “I once stayed in this amazing house surrounded by palm trees. We cooked octopus on an open fire.”

  “You were there? Cooking octopi? Sounds romantic in a sort of grotesque way. Who were you with?”

  “It was a while ago,” Paul says. “But Kate? I’m not going to let you tear down your whole life.”

  “I’m scared all the time, Paul.”

  “You don’t need to be.”

  “Paul! There’s no magic spell. There’s no karma, there’s no making a special deal between you and fate, there’s nothing but what happened and what might happen next and I think we need to get out of the way. We need to be away. We need to be out of here. Things can happen, things we can’t foresee. God, maybe six months is too long to wait. Maybe we can get out of here in four. You might say something to someone, or I might. Just by accident. And Ruby. Fuck! You can see what this is doing to her. She knows something’s wrong. And I do, too. We’re too close to where it happened. What if something happens to you? What if you’re taken away? I’m scared.”

  She’s allowed her voice to rise, and hearing it startles her into silence. Instinctively, she claps her hand over her mouth. “You see what I mean?” She whispers the question, and even in the darkness that has gathered Paul can see her eyes are wide with fright.

  The September sky seems uncommonly blue and a bit farther from the earth than any sky Paul remembers seeing ever before, as if the old sky has been torn away like wrapping paper to reveal a sky beyond that, a sky that in the bright blue daylight is luminous and uncreased.

  Paul is scheduled to meet with a couple new to Leyden, a man named Wolf Damberg, who is a private dealer in Renaissance art, and his boyfriend Leonard Harris, who was a violinist for the New York Philharmonic until an early onset of arthritis ended his career. Damberg and Harris have recently purchased Rose Hall, a small cottage locally famous for its spectacular plantings—over eighty varieties of rose, some in colors almost unheard of in roses: shades of brown and blue. The house, however, holds moisture in its old timbers and the humidity is creating havoc with Damberg’s cache of ancient drawings and paintings. The two men want to turn their home’s largest room into a temperature-and humidity-controlled archive, in which Damberg’s stock will be safe. They want the walls paneled in oak, they want the ceiling lowered, and they want wide, deep archival drawers in which the hundreds of valuable works of art can be stored indefinitely without risk of discoloration, fading, or curling. Paul has sent Evangeline to Rose Hall to go over the plans for the upcoming project, along with a basket of pale orange French tomatoes, picking the last off his best plant, hoping to convey that his absence from today’s meeting does not suggest a lack of interest.

  Now, alone in the workshop, he looks down at Shep and tries to remember if he gave the dog an antibiotic tablet at the morning meal. “Hey, Shep,” he says, “no kidding around this time. Did you get your pill at breakfast?” The dog, who Paul often thinks is his closest confidant, even though they do not speak the same language, wags his tail energetically. Paul has come to realize this wagging is not necessarily a sign of happiness. More often it means Shep is confused and does not know what is expected of him. If the wagging means anything that could be put into simple English it is a request for clarification. “Come here,” and when the dog is next to him Paul lifts his muzzle and sniffs at his mouth—sometimes there’s a rank reverb of the pill on the dog’s breath. But all he can smell is kibble and tongue. Shep, having no idea why Paul is sniffing him, places his forepaws on Paul’s shoe tops, and when Paul lifts his shirt and covers the dog’s head Shep stiffens his legs and presses his profile onto his belly.

  With Shep contentedly breathing beneath his shirt, Paul looks around at all that he will leave behind him in a few months—this perfect work space, this silvery light he has come to know so well, the exact unevenness of the floor, board after board of precious woods, the tools swapped for, worked for, and purchased over two decades, the peeling frames and mullions, the old glass, the hooks and hinges, bin pulls and latches of another time, another world. It’s overwhelming to think of the work involved in bringing any of it with him, and he thinks the easiest thing to do is to transfer it all to Evangeline. She can pay for it whenever she’s got the business running smoothly again.

  He uncovers Shep’s head and the dog looks up at him with a kind of wild goofiness and prods him with his snout, perhaps asking for more time under the shirt. “I don’t believe you had your pill this morning,” Paul says.

  Paul walks with Shep into the house, passing Kate’s writing studio on the way. Two weeks ago, the crew who was here to tape Kate’s segment on First Thing Sunday Morning knocked down the rock border Paul himself once built along the edges of the driveway, and he reminds himself to repair the damage, though knowing he and Kate and Ruby are not long for this place saps his will to keep up with the repairs. Every time Shep passes the wrecked spots on the driveway he sniffs at the ground and the dislodged stones with almost absurd avidity, as if they contained the answer to some great mystery. When the crew was here, he was in turn ill-tempered and gregarious, and though Paul tried to keep the dog out of the way, Shep several times bounded into the shot with his signature seesaw motion.

  “No, that’s fine, we like the dog,” the assistant director had called to Paul, as he pulled Shep out of the way.

  Parallel now with Kate’s windows, Paul keeps his head down so she will know he isn’t going to disturb her while she’s at work; he sees her, glancingly, pacing back and forth; the whoosh of the oscillating fan lifts her hair when she crosses its path. She holds the phone to her ear, but he can’t tell if she’s talking or listening. Since last Sunday’s appearance on TV, Kate has been on the phone for hours—with her agent, with her publisher, with her growing list of foreign publishers, with the agency that books her appearances, and with those reporters not too proud to pursue a story begun by another journalist.

  The house remains cool in the summer if they keep the shades and curtains drawn, but neither Paul nor Kate has the heart for it in these fleeting days before the autumn chill and so it feels close everywhere in the house, especially in the kitchen. Paul lodges a doxycycline pill in a small chunk of brie and tosses it to Shep, who swallows it instantly, his tail slapping a tom-tom beat of approval on the warm wooden floor. Rather than closing the refrigerator, Paul looks for things he might make for lunch and in short order he has made what might be the last tomato and basil salad of the year, an
d cut up some apples he got from the Martin orchard, which is between Kate’s house and town, and which specializes in disappearing varieties and has some early ripening Boikens and Henry Clays. Paul arranges the apples on the platter and pours some balsamic vinegar on his hands and flicks the vinegar onto the apples, freckling them with it. Finally, he squeezes some lemons into a pitcher and puts in a little bit of cane syrup and a bottle of sparkling water and a few mint leaves and stirs it all together.

  At lunch, Paul and Kate talk about the dietary recommendations that Ruby’s therapist, Dr. Montgomery, has made—as little sugar as possible, avoid packaged foods with their high-fructose corn syrup, dyes, and preservatives, no caffeine.

  “It makes sense,” Paul says. “Everything in nature reacts to what it ingests. Birds, bees, trees. You can tell the state of the soil by looking at the leaves of the trees, their bark.”

  “First of all: caffeine? What does Dr. Montgomery think? We’re sending Ruby to school with a cappuccino?”