Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  ‘What do you want to teach?’ asked Michael. Would it be English, or Social Studies or, God forbid, religious studies?

  ‘I want to teach little ones,’ she said. ‘First grade, second grade; that kind of age. That’s what I’d be best at, I think.’

  And he realized that, focused as he was on degrees and qualifications, he’d assumed she’d want to teach high school or even junior college. He was learning how little he knew about children and was astonished by her patience with Sally, who was tricky – strong-willed and precociously defiant. He liked how Cassie handled her; she managed to convey an unconditional love with a firmness that kept Sally from exploiting that love.

  Sensing his new excitement at finally getting out of the office, Cassie asked him all about his work, and one Sunday he drove her out from Austin into the Hill Country, where he had planned to show her one or two of the bridge sites. But she insisted on seeing all five of them, peppering him with questions about pre-stressed concrete, about the difference between tension and compression, and about that first abiding question that had drawn him to engineering: How does it manage to stay up? At one site, she’d looked puzzled and, when he asked why, she’d pointed to the large concrete Butler’s Tray they were erecting and the small stream it spanned – one of the lesser tributaries of the Pedernales. ‘Why so much bridge for so little water?’ she’d asked.

  And he’d explained it was flood country, where water would course through the low swales and gulleys at almost unbelievable speed. ‘In the last flood,’ he added, ‘that little crick gained five feet in height and spread three times its width in just eight hours.’

  ‘Crick?’ she said mockingly. ‘Bet they don’t use that word in New York.’

  He smiled but went on, gripped by the image of what the bridge had to be prepared for. ‘Someone at work saw the same thing wipe out a bridge in Alaska. That was glacier, what they call a GLOF, but the effect’s the same: the power of the water is incredible, it just scours all the retaining sides and sweeps it right away. And then you get translatory waves.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘The speed of the flow gets so great that it translates into a wave it makes itself. It’s like a mini tidal wave.’ He suddenly remembered Streatley, standing at the bar of a saloon near Grand Central, describing one he’d seen in Colorado: ‘There’d been fourteen inches of rain in three days and I was standing on the riverbank, watching the water race by, when some old boy from the crew showed up and shouted at me to get my ass out of there. I couldn’t see what the problem was but I figured I’d humour him so I retreated to higher ground. Five minutes later this enormous wave about five feet high shoots by, covering the entire river and all of the bank where I’d been standing. If I hadn’t moved I’d be swimming still – or more likely, not swimming, if you catch my “drift”. So after that I was happy to let that old boy tell me what to do.’

  Cassie was looking at him curiously. ‘Have you ever seen one?’ she asked.

  He shook his head. ‘You have to remember where I’ve been working. They don’t have many translatory waves in midtown Manhattan.’

  She would not sleep with him, which frustrated Michael in a physical sense, but did not otherwise worry him. For it gave a weight to what they were doing – no one could call their relationship an adulterous affair when adultery was not part of the equation – which sleeping together might have undermined. That, at any rate, is what he told himself, hoping it didn’t mean that she cared less than he did. And then at the end of their fifth assignation, as they kissed each other goodbye outside her aunt’s house, Cassie lingered longer than usual.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, worried something was wrong.

  ‘I just wish I was seeing you tomorrow. And the next day. And the day after that. I miss you all week long.’

  ‘So what do you want to do about that?’ he asked, trying to sound calmer than he felt.

  ‘What do you think?’ she bandied back.

  ‘I asked first,’ he said with a brittle laugh.

  ‘I want to do what you want to do,’ she said, and before he could protest that she was ducking his question again she added meaningfully, ‘that is, if you want to do it.’

  He looked at her, still hesitant to make the first real declaration. Cassie said, ‘You’re making me shy. I wish you’d say something.’

  He thought of New York just then, of the apartment he had come to loathe, of the office and its claustrophobic effect on him. An image of Sarah came into his head, neat in weekend clothes of pink Lacoste shirt and a khaki skirt with a trendy belt, standing on the deck of her parents’ summer house in Cape Cod. He didn’t feel any anger or resentment towards his wife, but he didn’t feel any warmth either. All along, there had been a certain coldness between them, one which may have suited their purposes in the past but did no longer. As he looked at the warm, talkative and confiding woman before him, he could not imagine being able to live that New York life again.

  A worried look was beginning to emerge in Cassie’s eyes, and her teeth were clenching her lower lip as she watched him thinking. He mimicked her, chomping down on his own lower lip, and they both laughed as he put his arms out and held her by her shoulders. ‘I want to do it,’ he said in a light whisper.

  And her eyes widened, and grew slightly teary as she nodded and said, ‘I do too.’

  Slowly they began to plan – how he would separate from Sarah, she from Ronald, and then live together. His assumption was that he would continue to be outsourced by Streatley, and in the first instance Cassie and Sally would join him in accommodation near his project, possibly in western Montana, if Streatley could fix things, until he found a settled job some place they both wanted to live.

  As the job outside Austin neared completion, he found Cassie increasingly tense, at first, he thought, because she was half-afraid he might disappear again. But then he realized it was another kind of anxiety altogether, and he could only conclude that she was nervous about the next step – the one each would have to take on his or her own – of telling Ronald she was leaving him.

  On their last night together, a warm spring night in May, he booked the same room in the Pedernales Hotel, and they had steaks and salad from room service, and most of two bottles of California Cabernet. She had been working her aunt’s vegetable patch, and wore blue shorts and a simple white blouse that showed off her new tan. She’d bought a mobile phone, and they arranged when he would call her next from New York, and discussed how best to have her join him in six weeks’ time in Montana.

  After dinner he turned the radio on low to a classical station, and as he lay down on the bed she kicked her sandals off and sat down beside him, slowly rubbing his back. He thought fleetingly of Sophie Jansen, but then sat up and leaned over towards Cassie. He kissed her softly, and was surprised at how readily she opened her mouth, sliding her tongue forward, slithering in against his. This time, when he drew her down onto the bed, she didn’t resist, and they lay sidewise, arms around each other. They kissed, and he turned her so she lay on her back, while he leaned over her. He kept kissing her but slowly moved his hand down to her shorts, working her zipper down, then unbuttoning them until he could move his hand in and lay it gently on the soft bulge of her panties.

  Her breath quickened, and she drew her mouth away. ‘We shouldn’t,’ she said, but then let him kiss her some more as he rubbed his hand slowly against her. When he drew her panties down with his thumb, she stirred, and made to draw her mouth away from his again, but didn’t. Reaching down he found her slick with wetness, and he moved his index finger until he found the small wet button of her and gently stroked it. She brought her own hand down and lightly grabbed him through his trousers, then closed her eyes as he took his own hand away and slowly pushed her shorts and underwear down to her knees, then began to unbutton her blouse.

  As she unzipped him he stopped kissing her for a moment, and took his shirt off, then pulled her clothes down from her knees over her bare feet
, pushing them off the bed onto the floor.

  Cassie put a wrist over her eyes. ‘If you think I’m going to say no now, don’t worry, I’m not.’ He smiled as she opened her eyes, looking at him seriously. He stared back as he finished unbuttoning her blouse, then, as Cassie sat up and took it off, he reached over for the half-full wine glass on the bedside table. He offered the glass to her but she shook her head and he drained it instead.

  He felt distinctly high from the wine now, and dizzy when he stood up and pulled back the bedclothes on his side. Cassie matched him, and they met naked under the covers in the middle. She took the lead now, kissing him firmly and insistently, touching him with her hand while he licked her breast. Then she moved her mouth away, put her head down on the pillow, and looking away from him she said quietly, ‘I never did stop loving you.’

  Emotion seemed to sweep over him like a wave swamping a still pool. It was so powerful a feeling that he felt his sexual excitement diminish, then go away altogether, and he went completely limp in Cassie’s hand.

  There was nothing he could do to revive it. Cassie tried, with her hands first, then, mounting him, with the wetness between her legs. She kissed him as she tried, and stroked him, but the harder she tried the less he felt close even to a half-mast state of arousal, and as his own frustration grew and he felt the wine’s effect inducing a torpor, he grew further away from being able to make love to her.

  Cassie laughed, making light of it, but he felt ashamed, and kept apologizing, despite her saying that it didn’t matter. He drank another glass of wine as they talked some more and then tried, fruitlessly, again, and he found himself lying on his stomach babbling gently, I’m so sorry, Cassie. I’m so sorry, and she was saying, Sh-sh-sh, and stroking his arm as he fell asleep.

  And when he woke with the covers off in the middle of the night, the room pitch black and quiet except for the low hum of the air conditioning, he found himself feeling cool and alert and almost brutally, rod-like erect. But when he reached for Cassie he found her pillow empty. Why did she go? he thought, and then he felt her hair brush lightly against his stomach and suddenly felt himself taken there, barely lipped as he was drawn into her mouth and the soft flickering of her tongue.

  He reached to bring her up to him but she pushed his arms back and moved her head up and down, gently tonguing him and holding him with her hand at his base, which was wet and slick with her saliva, and as she kept up the gentle, insistent movement of her tongue he suddenly surged and came, then stopped moving altogether and stretched his limbs out, completely spent.

  She got up and went to the bathroom, closing the door behind her before turning on the light, which showed in a pencil line of yellow underneath the door. When she came out again into the dark room, he listened as she began to put her clothes on.

  ‘Cassie?’

  ‘You go to sleep,’ she said in a whisper, and he heard her step into her shorts and button her blouse, then snap her sandals on standing up.

  ‘But Cassie—’ he began.

  ‘I have to go,’ she said, and sat down in the dark beside him, stroking his hair with a hand he could not see. ‘I can’t show up at Aunt Judy’s at breakfast time.’

  ‘I’ll call you about Montana,’ he said, feeling drowsiness set in again.

  ‘I know,’ she said quietly. ‘You sleep now.’

  ‘I love you, Cassie.’

  ‘And I love you, Michael. More than the moon and the stars.’

  The letter arrived at work and caught him completely by surprise, five minutes before he was due to sit down with Streatley and find out when he was going to Montana. Sarah didn’t know he would be away again, but he felt no dread about the prospect of telling her, since she had not seemed especially pleased to see him when he’d flown back from Austin ten days before. She was engrossed with her work, staying late at the office on several nights to work on a new account who, she said, was proving difficult to please. At the weekend they had seen a movie and had dinner with Oakley Hale and his latest girlfriend, then gone home, where they’d got in bed with the TV on and made love, without much passion on either side, he felt, but without any repeat of his difficulties with Cassie.

  He had called Cassie as arranged on her mobile, but the first time she couldn’t talk because Sally was crying, and the next few times he tried her mobile was switched off. He had planned to call her that very morning, but then he saw the familiar handwriting on the letter.

  Dear Michael,

  You need to know that I will not be coming to Montana. Don’t even think that it’s because I don’t want to – it’s because I can’t. And I can’t see you any more.

  I wasn’t sure that night in Austin, but I am now. I’m pregnant again. I can’t explain it to you except to say I did not have a choice.

  Yes, I have thought about a termination, but I can’t bring myself to do it – it’s always seemed like murder to me. And it would only be for my sake and not the child’s. That would ruin us in time.

  This is the hardest letter I have ever had to write. I seem to cause nothing but hurt to you and I can only say how much I am hurting too. Please believe me when I say I love you, and I always will. And for ever know that’s true.

  Cassie

  At first he could not believe it. When he had lost her before there had been at least the promise of a new world in New York. It was a false promise and life had for so long seemed to be closing in around him in a suffocating, numbing cloud, until he had found Cassie again, found fresh air and seen light, out there and available. And now he feared that the hope that had returned to him was extinguished.

  She would not answer the phone – not her mobile, not the home line he tried during the day. Once, in desperation, he even phoned in the evening, but when the gruff voice of Ronald came down the line, he hung up. He tried calling her from work, and secretly from the apartment. He could not concentrate on anything except trying to reach Cassie to find out what had happened.

  For her explanation was so simple that he could not accept it. Why can’t she get rid of it? he asked himself at first, but gradually saw that she would never do that – not out of any theological conviction, or any Right to Life fervour, but simply because that was the gentle way she was.

  But then he thought, So what if she’s pregnant? I don’t care. She can leave him just the same. I’ll raise his children. The parson managed to die, he thought, couldn’t Ronald extend me the same courtesy? He could not understand how Cassie could stay with Ronald, not if she loved Michael as she said she did. Had Michael done something wrong? Why had he failed to make love to her? Had he put her off through his impotence? Even in his anguish he could see the ridiculousness of his frantic search for explanation, and soon his complete bafflement turned to anger. Cassie has nothing to feel guilty about towards Ronald. She should feel guilty about me. She’s left me in the lurch. Lurch? He felt he was on the edge of an abyss.

  Why had she slept with Ronald? Why hadn’t she been more careful? What did she mean, I did not have a choice? He had a thousand other questions, too, and the more he obsessed the more he spun a fantastic web of invented situations, betrayals, downright lies. Nothing would blow away this web except talking with her. And she wouldn’t answer the phone.

  He went so far as to contemplate flying to Texas to confront her, and he might have, had he not had to go to Michigan, to a wedding in Charlevoix of a girlfriend of Sarah. The woman was marrying the son of wealthy people who summered in northern Michigan, so he and Sarah had long before decided to spend a night first in Stillriver, where Michael had not been since before his own marriage, and where Sarah had never been at all.

  It was not a happy visit. Sarah seemed inclined to find fault from their arrival; she saw nothing in the town she liked, or when she did, it was compared disadvantageously to what she’d seen before back east – the beach had fairly nice sand, almost like Cape Cod; Main Street seemed a little drab; there was a sail boat in the marina almost like the ketch we saw last su
mmer in Maine.

  Even his father’s house, with its high gable and looming wooden beauty, was spoiled for Sarah by the smallness of its lot. This isn’t New Canaan, he wanted to say, where a citizen’s standing seemed measurable by the square footage of his lawn, but when he tried to explain to Sarah how the town had been built – how important neighbours had been; how unnecessary a big yard was when just outside the town limits the wilderness began and there was all the space you’d ever need or want – he could see she had switched off.

  Gary, long out of high school and working for a fruit middleman, had lasted ten minutes in Sarah’s sports-clothed presence, then made his excuses and gone out for the evening. His father had been polite, and made them dinner, but conversation was awkward and after some wine Sarah seemed bored. ‘It’s a very pretty town,’ she declared, ‘but very white.’ They were all three sitting outside on the patio with their coffee after dinner.

  Henry shrugged his shoulders. ‘There was a black family.’

  ‘Was?’ she said teasingly.

  Henry smiled. ‘They died,’ he said, and she laughed. ‘There used to be Indians, but they haven’t lived here for a hundred years – they were driven into the Back Country, but have pretty much died out. There are a lot of Hispanics. It used to be entirely migrant; they’d pick asparagus in spring, go work in the west for summer, then come back for apples in fall. Now a lot of them live here year-round. Why do you ask?’ he said to Sarah, though in fact there hadn’t been a question.

  ‘I was just curious,’ she said brightly, and when they finished their coffee they all went to bed early.

  His father hadn’t put them in the master bedroom, saying a little gruffly, ‘I thought you might prefer your old room,’ where he and Gary had put another twin bed in for their stay. Michael was relieved not to sleep in what had been his parents’ room.