Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  ‘Just until school’s out.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘That’s almost three months.’

  He shrugged. ‘I know. It won’t seem that long once it’s over.’ What the fuck does that mean?

  ‘But I’ll miss you,’ she protested.

  ‘I’ll miss you too, Cassie. But I think it’s for the best.’

  ‘I need time to take this in.’ She looked vacantly at the mug. ‘Tell me, are you planning to see somebody else while you take this “break”?’ There was now some edge to her voice.

  ‘That’s not the idea.’

  Her father called out for her. ‘Cassie, may I see you please?’

  ‘You haven’t really answered the question,’ she said as she stood up and went out of the room. He waited until she came back in about five minutes, but she said he had better go, as she would be some time still with her father. He said he’d phone her in the week. When he kissed her goodbye she suddenly hugged him fiercely, then turned and went to the parson’s room.

  3

  HER LETTER CAME that Wednesday, and proved a relief.

  Dear Michael,

  I have been thinking about our conversation (and thinking of little else!) and am still not sure what to make of it. I know your life is different now, and I have never wanted to get in the way of what you wanted.

  But maybe I have been. And maybe you do need the time by yourself to feel you are getting the most out of U of M.

  See? – I don’t know what to say. I think it’s probably best if I wait to hear from you. Which you know I hope I will.

  All my love

  Cassie

  He felt only mildly guilty about this, since he saw their separation as temporary. Sophie was a senior, and he had never kidded himself that their relationship would last beyond the end of the semester. She was going east after graduation, possibly to study psychology at NYU, or to work in television if she could find a way in. And to some extent, what he’d told Cassie had been true. He was exhausted by the weekly trip, then once in Stillriver didn’t usually get to see that much of her anyway, and found it very difficult to study at home, since Gary always played music and always played it loud. If only Cassie would get herself to Ann Arbor, he decided, all would be well.

  Now he could concentrate on his work, and he did, doing well in all his courses, exceptionally well in the second-semester course on civil engineering. At Sophie’s urging he took a history of architecture course, a basic survey he enjoyed up to a point. He liked its historical sweep, moving from a semi-troglodyte dwelling to the work of Robert Gehry in the confines of an undergraduate term, but the focus was relentlessly aesthetic, and he found himself wanting to linger over the mechanics of what he was being asked to appreciate in purely visual terms. Materials fascinated him, and for his term paper he wrote on the usurpation of brick by steel in the development of early skyscrapers, finding himself perversely taking the side of brick. Steel had suddenly allowed a surge skyward, but he found a grace in the modest twenty-storey vertical limit that was lost when height became the dominating aspiration.

  He sensed a disappointment on Sophie’s part about his persisting interest in the composition of the building blocks themselves rather than in debates about, say, the durability of postmodernism. For the first time he felt an effort had been made, so subtle as perhaps to be unconscious on her part, to shape him. There was never an open argument, but rather an unprecedented if slight tension, an undeclared skirmish of wills. This had never happened with Cassie; their disagreements had always been out in the open.

  They went to Indianapolis again and he began to see how far Sophie, too, had travelled from her roots, because for all his money Herb Jansen was a rough diamond, or, as Sophie herself remarked, a rough owner of diamonds. Michael found that once he appreciated this he liked the man much more, yet Sophie seemed slightly irritated by how well he now got on with her father. This time Sophie went to bed while he sat up listening to her father’s stories. Herb had worked in the Army Corps of Engineers in his twenties, on rebuilding projects in post-War Germany, which had left him with an admiration for the Germans, then stirring economically for the first time since the War. ‘You have to see Europe,’ Herb insisted. ‘Wherever you end up, you have to see Europe.’

  The small prickles with Sophie didn’t have much effect on his enjoyment of the time he spent with her. Physically, he still could never get enough of her, and their other activities together (she was developing a near-obsession with foreign films; when he felt peculiar at the start of a movie one night, he realized it was because it was the first one in weeks he’d seen without subtitles) continued to give him a sense of an expanding world, even if it was he and not the world that was growing. He was determined to enjoy this last term with her as fully as possible, and though aware of his own duplicity nonetheless continued to think how much he had to tell Cassie about, how much new he would have to share with her. So he was stunned when, after a supper of takeaway Chinese food and most of a six-pack in Sophie’s apartment, about three weeks after Cassie’s letter had arrived, Sophie announced that she wanted to sleep alone that night.

  ‘Any reason why?’ he asked, since neither schoolwork nor exhaustion had ever prompted his removal before.

  ‘You know,’ she said, leaning over and putting a hand on his knee, ‘in two months time I’ll be leaving.’

  ‘I know that.’ He felt better with her hand on his knee, but she removed it and sat back.

  ‘It’s been so much fun I don’t think either of us is looking forward to its ending. And I hate goodbyes.’

  ‘Well, we don’t have to say goodbye yet.’

  She ignored this. ‘You know, all that teary stuff and “promise you’ll write” and “I’ll always love you”. Ugh,’ she said with a small shudder.

  When he didn’t speak she continued. ‘So I’ve come to the conclusion that it would be easier for both of us if we decided to stop early.’

  ‘Really? You mean now?’

  She nodded. ‘Why wait? Let’s take our medicine and get it over with.’

  ‘But will I see you?’

  ‘Of course you will. That’s the whole point. This way we’ll be friends while we get used to not being lovers.’

  And truth was, he did see her almost as much as before for a time, though within two weeks he realized that he rarely saw her alone any more, and that she treated him now in much the same fashion as she had always treated his housemates – friendly, even sassy, but very much as one of the boys, with an absolute understanding that sleeping with her was out of the question. And he remembered their conversation over the plastic plates of fried rice, egg rolls, and Chinese spare ribs, and shook his head in wonderment at how smoothly, cordially and effortlessly she had dumped him in the space of a minute and a half.

  He felt more stupid than hurt. To his surprise, his housemates stayed friendly, for with the loss of his stunning bedmate he had expected relegation to his earlier low status. They made no cruel jokes about Sophie’s abandonment of him, indeed seemed happy to welcome him into their own informal club which, it turned out, they jokingly called PFSJ – the Pining Friends of Sophie Jansen. He usually spent weekend nights with them in the local student bars, or else studied in his room and listened to music. He missed Sophie, though more, he was slightly ashamed to realize, for their rich sexual life together and the new experiences she had underwritten than for her company.

  He immersed himself in his work, especially in a term project for engineering, hypothetically redesigning the Mackinaw Bridge as a steel truss job, working for the first time to assess caisson construction under several hundred feet of water. His engineering professor had him to dinner at his house with his wife and children, and went out of his way to encourage him – to Michael’s immense, private excitement, the professor got him access to the department’s Cray supercomputer. In four and a half minutes Michael had calculations made that would have taken three weeks on one of the department’s lumbering microcomp
uters.

  It was, curiously, in those four-and-a-half minutes as he waited for the Cray to finish that he discovered something was missing – someone, actually. It wasn’t Stillriver, for his hometown was rapidly receding from his day-to-day thoughts, and it certainly wasn’t family (he only rarely phoned his father) and it wasn’t the drugstore: he’d work the summer for Alvin, but increasingly Michael saw himself as an aspiring engineer rather than as the future owner of a pharmacy.

  No, it was Cassie he missed, though he had trouble admitting this even to himself. He was the one, after all, who’d insisted on a ‘break’, and if he were to visit earlier than he’d told her he would, Cassie might not think he was returning with his tail between his legs, but he would. There would be plenty of time in summer, he tried to tell himself, to make amends with Cassie and start again. But then he woke up in his Ann Arbor room early one Thursday morning in May, with an image in his mind of Cassie, wearing her down vest, striding forward and suddenly laughing with her flashing smile at something he had said. And he thought, lying in bed alone, I could love her anywhere. And that night he returned to Stillriver, where he ate supper in the kitchen with his father and Gary, helped with the dishes, then tried to reach Cassie on the phone. The parson answered and said that she was out, then would not be drawn on when she would be back. So Michael went upstairs to read, feeling as if he were fourteen again and his mother had just died.

  He was washing both his car and his father’s when he heard a vehicle stop. ‘What are you doing here?’ It was Donny’s face poking out of the pickup’s window.

  ‘I should ask you the same thing.’ Donny’s semester wasn’t over either.

  ‘Nancy’s mom’s birthday. We’re having a dinner tomorrow night. I know you’d be welcome.’

  He shook his head. ‘Thanks, but I can’t. I’m hoping to see Cassie.’

  ‘Cassie? I thought you broke up.’

  ‘Who told you that? We were just taking some time off.’

  ‘Is that what she thinks?’

  ‘I sure hope so.’

  Donny frowned, which Michael didn’t like.

  ‘What’s wrong with that anyway? Is there a problem?’

  Donny put his hand on top of the steering wheel and looked abstractedly out into space. ‘That depends.’

  ‘On what? You know something I don’t?’

  ‘Oh Lordy,’ said Donny, as if some small family scandal, long thought buried, had inconveniently resurfaced. He wiggled his fingers on the steering wheel. ‘You might as well know that her old admirer is back.’

  He didn’t need clarification. ‘Since when?’

  ‘Just after Easter.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Beats me, bud. I know they’ve seen each other, but don’t ask me what that means.’ He squirmed slightly, then sat up straight and looked directly at Michael. ‘Truly, I don’t know. But I’d be surprised if there were much more to it than going to the movies once in a while.’

  ‘So what’s the problem then?’ said Michael, though he felt distinctly unrelieved. ‘I can’t get mad if she goes to the movies with somebody when I’m stuck down in Ann Arbor.’

  ‘I know you won’t get mad, and Cassie won’t get mad, and that’s all reasonable and fine. But the problem is Ronald. Mex told me he’s crazy about Cassie. He said Ronald came back from Texas as soon as he heard you two had split up.’

  ‘But we haven’t split up,’ Michael protested. ‘So who told him that?’

  ‘Mex, I guess. It wasn’t exactly a secret. You weren’t coming back weekends any more and Cassie kept bursting into tears in public. So Ronald quit his job and came back – didn’t even work his notice. Mex said it’s all Ronald seems to think about, how to show Cassie he’s not some animal, how to impress her with his gentle qualities. Mex said—’

  ‘Enough of what Mex said. What’s your point?’

  Donny nodded, as if understanding Michael’s impatience, but then said, ‘So maybe you’ll get mad at me instead, is that it? Because I hate to tell you, but Mex told me that Ronald said if you so much as take a sniff within a hundred yards of Cassie he’s going to pound you into mush so fine a dog could only find it by its nose.’

  Michael shrugged, more to steady his nerves than to make a display of nonchalance. He struggled to keep a quaver out of his voice as he spoke: ‘I’d have thought it was up to Cassie as to who she wants to see. Especially if they’ve just been going to a movie or two.’

  ‘Fuck.’ Donny hit the steering wheel with a closed fist.

  ‘Why are you swearing at me?’

  Donny put his head in his open, other hand, like Rodin’s Thinker transplanted to the Midwest. ‘I’m not swearing at you,’ he said, his voice muffled by his outstretched fingers. He lifted his head up and looked at Michael with an expression of almost amiable resignation. ‘It’s just I knew you’d say something like that.’ He reached forward and put the truck into gear. ‘Be careful, all right?’

  On the phone Cassie’s tone was unaccommodating and aloof, but she agreed to meet him the following day. Feeling uncertain, he went for a drive in order to be alone, intending to visit the Half, until he saw the vanilla pickup truck do a U-turn and follow him, openly but a good quarter-mile back, out Park Street and across old 31.

  He told himself not to be paranoid, but he didn’t like the idea of an encounter with Ronald in those remoter parts of the county, where a population density of roughly two citizens per square mile meant that if you needed help, there wasn’t much available. So he swung back west towards the lake and drove into Fennville, skirting the fair grounds, and driving out on the strip that was rapidly developing as an offshoot of the interstate’s traffic. A Travel Lodge, two new gas stations, a Dunkin’ Donuts, pizza takeaway, and a retail outlet for Clarks shoes. There were strict speed controls here and very little traffic: it wasn’t hard to see the pickup four or five hundred yards behind him.

  This is crazy, he told himself. Was he sure it was Ronald behind him? Was he sure it was the same truck he’d first seen as he left Stillriver, twenty minutes before? He couldn’t be positive, and felt momentarily better. But when he took the slip road onto the interstate and accelerated as he joined the highway he was startled to find that the pickup truck gathered speed and followed him.

  Not so funny now, he thought, not at all sure what to do. Then he remembered Kenny Williams’s account of how the year before, driving back from a trip to Grand Haven, he’d outmanoeuvred a couple of drunken, ageing rednecks who’d been following him. The road was virtually deserted, and Michael accelerated for some time until he caught up to the traffic in front of him, then drove at a steady sixty-five behind a Subaru and an enormous eighteen-wheeler. Ronald was now only about a hundred yards behind him. Just before the exit for Three Forks road, Michael passed both vehicles, then tucked in so tightly in front of the eighteen-wheeler that its driver flashed his lights at him. As they neared the exit, Michael suddenly veered off onto it, and turned to watch as the vanilla pickup, by now passing the truck, struggled to slow down and cut over to the exit ramp, but had its way blocked.

  He was following me, he thought. But his elation at his escape was quickly dispelled by the realization that it was a purely temporary victory. With the gloominess of a man whose medical test results have turned out bad, he drove home by back roads, entering Stillriver on the sandy track that came down from the higher land of the Meadows and through the site of the old dump.

  His father looked at him curiously as he came through the kitchen door. ‘You okay?’ he asked, and in his anxiety Michael almost forgot to nod.

  They had arranged to meet at Nelson’s boathouse, and when he climbed the stairs he found Cassie already there, standing against the railings and looking out at Stillriver Lake. It was an acid day in May, clear and sun-filled but with a stinging wind off the big lake that made the air sharp enough for Michael to feel cold, even in a sweatshirt. Cassie looked cold too, and her fingers were pink in the chill.

 
; ‘Hi,’ he said lightly as he came and stood beside her. She turned and looked at him questioningly, and he smiled. She looked back again out over the lake and said nothing.

  Oh no, he thought, and tried to launch into his prepared recital. ‘Cassie,’ he said. ‘I made a mistake.’ But the rehearsed words flew out of his head like a freed bird, and he struggled to put his racing thoughts into a sentence. ‘All I’m asking for is another chance,’ he finally declared.

  ‘How do I know you won’t make another mistake?’ she asked. Her voice was dry.

  ‘You don’t,’ he admitted, and they both fell silent. Across the lake a man came out onto his dock and unhitched a rowboat, clambered in, and began to row slowly across the lake towards them. ‘Except I won’t,’ said Michael at last. ‘I know now what you mean to me. I don’t want to lose that.’

  ‘You know now what I mean to you. It seems you didn’t know before.’

  This was delivered unemotionally. If Cassie had been angry he would have known how to react. He would have set himself the task of appeasing her hurt, certain that her anger was the natural reaction of someone who still loved him. But he couldn’t decipher this flat certainty of tone.

  ‘What does she think?’ asked Cassie.

  ‘There isn’t any she,’ he said, and she gave him such a forceful oh really? look that despite the technical truth of what he was saying, he couldn’t pretend that had always been the case. ‘Not any more,’ he said, sounding feeble even to himself. ‘It’s not an issue.’

  Cassie gave a small groan and looked up at the heavens in mock-despair. ‘Not an issue. You say you’ve made a “mistake”. I ask what’s going to keep you from making another “mistake”. And all you can say is it’s not an “issue”.’ She shook her head. ‘It sounds as if she dumped you, whoever this Sophie woman was, and you think, “That’s okay, I’ll just run back to Cassie.”’

  Donny must have spilled the beans to Nancy after all. ‘That’s not true.’