Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  Sarah slept badly, and complained early in the morning about the noise – true enough, the Bogle boys had partied until late at night, as if in her honour, then left for work at dawn with a poor man’s symphony of slammed car doors and noisy exhausts. After breakfast his father drove her out to Sheringham’s to buy corn – Michael begged off, since the last person he wanted to see in the presence of his wife was Cassie’s best friend, Nancy Sheringham.

  When they came back Sarah asked to walk around town, and they set off down Calvin Street, heading towards Main Street and the Dairy Queen. Two blocks on, Sarah stopped at the corner and pointed. ‘Is that the church you went to down there?’ He nodded. ‘Let’s go by it,’ she said, and he could think of no plausible reason to say no.

  They walked slowly down Henniker Street, as a breeze gently stirred the maple leaves of the dense network of branches that formed a canopy over the street. ‘You’re quiet today,’ said Sarah. ‘In fact you’ve been quiet the whole trip.’

  ‘It feels funny being back,’ he said.

  ‘Memories. Always tricky,’ she said quietly. ‘What was the name of that girl you used to go out with here?’

  ‘Cassie,’ he said, feeling the blood rise in his face. Sarah was watching him carefully, which made his blushing worse. ‘Cassie Gilbert.’

  ‘Did she live in town?’

  He stopped in the street, midway between the church and the parson’s house. ‘She lived right there,’ he said, and turned and looked at Cassie’s old house. It had been freshly painted, and green shutters had been added to the downstairs windows. In the sunlight, it looked trim and picture-perfect.

  ‘You never told me she lived in Texas.’

  ‘You didn’t ask,’ he said, wondering how she knew this. Maybe Nancy Sheringham told her just now. No, she wouldn’t have betrayed him, however indirectly, not after giving him Cassie’s phone number in Texas so many months before. Maybe it had been his father. But why would he have mentioned Cassie?

  She took a deep breath. ‘Did you see her in Texas, then?’

  ‘Sure. Why not? She’s married.’

  ‘So are you for what that’s worth. You know, sometimes I’ve wondered whether you aren’t still in love with her.’

  ‘Have you now?’ he said, keeping his eyes on the street.

  ‘Are you?’

  He looked across at the Episcopal Church. ‘I suppose I am a little.’

  ‘Did you sleep with her in Texas?’

  ‘No,’ he said glumly.

  ‘No?’ she asked incredulously. ‘I’m supposed to believe that. Why on earth didn’t you?’

  He felt stung by the superior look on her face. On this one occasion, when he wished they could draw close to each other, his wife seemed a million miles away. Conscious that his words might bring about the end of his marriage, he said, ‘Because I couldn’t.’

  To his surprise she gave a cheerful burst of laughter. ‘At least you’re honest,’ she said. ‘I can’t say the same myself.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said, and found her looking at him knowingly, almost provocatively. ‘Are you having a thing with somebody?’

  She smiled, and it was a proud smile, of a lover perfectly happy to be discovered, such was her satisfaction in her illicit alliance. ‘I don’t know if you’d call it a thing,’ she said carefully, and turned away sideways from him.

  ‘What should I call it then?’ he asked. Her coyness was infuriating. He grabbed her by the near shoulder. ‘Goddamnit, answer me.’

  ‘Why should I?’ she said angrily, and wrenched away from him. ‘You’ve already supplied enough answers for both of us. But no, I haven’t been to bed with Oakley Hale, and not because he said no. I could have.’

  Suddenly his jealousy evaporated like a puffball exploded by a gust of wind. She could have given up any name – there was nothing especially ridiculous about Oakley Hale – and he would have had the same reaction, since his jealousy was so thin and pro forma that it could not survive the actual materialization of a rival. Relief flooded in, and he just kept himself from laughing. ‘Maybe you should have,’ he said.

  ‘What, slept with Oakley? Thanks a lot. Nice to know you care.’

  She was looking across the street at the Episcopal Church. A car drove by and somebody waved – he didn’t recognize them. An old acquaintance, or a tourist being folksy-friendly.

  ‘Actually, I don’t think you do care,’ said Sarah levelly. ‘But I tell you this: if we’re going to stay married then I don’t want you to see that woman again. Ever. And I want you to quit travelling.’

  ‘Maybe we should move.’

  ‘Move? Where to? Stillriver?’ She looked at him incredulously. ‘You do what you want. But I’m staying in New York.’

  He didn’t know if his marriage was going to survive, but he found it hard to care, so hurt was he by Cassie’s letter and her continuing refusal to talk to him. And when she finally picked up the phone with a caution he could almost feel, three weeks after he had returned with Sarah to New York, she sounded flat, distant, uncaring.

  She wouldn’t enter into any conversation about why she had changed her mind – ‘You got my letter, that’s as clear as I can be’ – and in his torment he was reduced to begging her to see him again. She said no, and when he called again, and then again, she continued to say no.

  He turned down the Montana posting, simply not having the emotional strength to cope with a major project, and also rejected Streatley’s offer of a cable span job in southern Colorado. At home, Sarah was working even longer hours, or seeing Oakley Hale at night – he didn’t really care enough to find out which was the case. They passed each other at odd hours in the apartment like distant roommates, each intent on their own single life; they shared a bed, but went to it, and rose from it, at different times.

  And then, as his mixture of anger, sense of betrayal, and simple heartache seemed about to burst, Cassie announced she was coming east. An elderly cousin had died in Philadelphia, and she could arrange things so she flew back to Texas through New York. There wouldn’t be much time, she said; possibly only an hour or two, but he booked a motel room anyway, adjacent to the airport, virtually in the shadow of its runways.

  It was a depressing place, three stories of yellowing brick and plastic panels painted bright, uncheery colours, with smoked glass in the window frames. His room was over the parking lot, and he waited by the window, watching the unrelenting line of aircraft taking off in the distance, each one pushing black smoke out of its jet burners as it lifted off the runway, each one shimmering in the unseasonable heat of a warm October day.

  She was almost an hour late, and came into the room in a rush, wearing a dress the colour of charcoal, fresh from the Philadelphia funeral. ‘I’m so sorry Michael, but the plane got delayed, so I haven’t got much time. I can’t miss the flight home.’

  He nodded, imagining the reception from Ronald if she did. ‘You want a drink?’ he asked, but she shook her head. ‘Something to eat?’

  ‘I’ll get something on the plane.’

  She sat in the one armchair by the window and he sat down on the bed. ‘Cassie,’ he said unsteadily, ‘I’ve missed you so much.’

  She nodded pleasantly, as if he were an older relative praising her performance in school. ‘I’ve missed you, too,’ she said, sounding friendly but oddly formal. He wanted to say, Cassie, it’s me. You don’t have to talk like that. It’s me.

  ‘When’s the baby due?’

  ‘I’m just at twenty weeks. Pretty soon they won’t let me fly.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad to get in under the line,’ he said sharply.

  She looked at him anxiously. ‘Michael,’ she said, but he wouldn’t look at her. He heard her sigh. ‘I shouldn’t have come. This is just painful.’

  ‘Painful?’ He gave a small groan. ‘Pain is not seeing you. Pain is your not wanting to see me. That’s painful.’

  ‘I told you, it’s not that I don’t want to see you. It’s just th
at it’s best for us both.’

  ‘How can that be? I love you and you love me.’

  ‘There’s another life for me to worry about now, Michael. I can’t do that to him.’

  ‘Who, Ronald? After all he’s done to you.’

  ‘I meant the baby.’

  ‘How do you know it’s a boy?’

  ‘From the scan. Ronald wanted to know.’

  I bet he did, thought Michael bitterly, remembering how much Cassie said Ronald had wanted a boy the first time round. He said to Cassie, ‘I don’t care what sex it is or who the father is. I just want to be with you.’ He heard how strained his voice had become.

  ‘Maybe you don’t care, but Ronald does.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Ronald thought at first this baby was yours.’

  ‘What?’

  She looked away, towards the window and its hazy view of LaGuardia’s runway. ‘When I got pregnant he asked me if the baby was his. I said of course. He asked if I’d been seeing anybody else; in fact he asked specifically if I’d been seeing you.’

  ‘Why would he think it was me? As far as he knows, we haven’t seen each other in eight years.’

  ‘He saw Donny when he was back in Stillriver for his mother’s funeral, and Donny told him you were working in Texas. So he put two and two together. And got five, which is typical of Ronald.’

  ‘And what’s he think now?’ asked Michael, though he was too miserable for even the thought of Ronald’s fury to agitate him. He added, ‘It’s not as if it even could be mine. You know that’s not possible.’

  Her mouth managed a wry smile. ‘Give me a little credit. We did have sex education, remember?’

  ‘Well, can’t you tell him we never made love? You don’t have to tell him why we didn’t.’ He began to laugh at the absurdity of it, and said, ‘Better not tell him what really happened.’ He grew sombre again and asked, ‘But why were you sleeping with Ronald anyway?’

  For the first time Cassie grew animated, even fierce. ‘I hadn’t been, damn you. Night after night he asked me to have – relations.’ She laughed bitterly and briefly at the coyness of the word. ‘I always said no. But how could I keep doing that fifty nights running – I did get to forty-seven – without his thinking I was seeing somebody?’

  ‘Who cares what he thought?’

  ‘I did,’ said Cassie, and for a moment Michael thought she was about to cry. He hoped she would, because then he could comfort her, then he could hold her again in his arms. But she stiffened. ‘I cared because I was scared of what he might do to me before I had a chance to get out. And because . . .’ She stopped, then said, ‘So I gave in. I felt I had to. And later, when he asked about you, I told him that if he didn’t believe me, then when the baby’s born we can have a DNA test. That convinced him I was telling the truth, I think.’

  ‘How reassuring,’ he said sarcastically.

  Cassie looked exhausted. When he sighed she smiled at him, but only briefly before looking at her watch. He suddenly realized that in a moment she would be leaving – her smile didn’t mean a thing. ‘Don’t go yet. Please, Cassie. Listen to me – please listen to me.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Michael. I shouldn’t have come. It just makes it worse.’

  ‘You don’t love Ronald, you told me so yourself. You can’t stay with him.’

  ‘I have to, Michael.’ Her voice was dull. ‘The baby’s his.’

  ‘But what about me?’ He was pleading now like a child, but couldn’t help himself. He’d lost his dignity a long time ago, to the same man. ‘How am I supposed to live without you?’

  ‘You have before and you can again,’ she said crisply. She got up and he watched with disbelief as she walked to the door and opened it. In another moment, she was going to be out of his life for ever. ‘Please,’ he pleaded, ‘just stay another five minutes.’

  She turned and looked back at him. He couldn’t tell if there was hurt or concern in her eyes. She seemed to be speaking with enormous self-control. ‘I would if I thought it would do a single bit of good.’

  ‘Oh, Cassie,’ he said, getting up and moving towards her. When he kissed her she kept her lips firmly closed, but then hugged him suddenly with surprising strength. It was a last hug; he could tell that.

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ she whispered. ‘I promise.’

  ‘More than the moon and the stars?’

  She detached herself and wiped her cheek. ‘Goodbye,’ she said, and then was gone.

  *

  It still hurt him, staring down once again at the hansom cabs, ready to see McLaren; hurt him more than the first time he had lost her, for now there was no fear or humiliation, just the ache as he tried to accommodate himself to life without her.

  And without Sarah, who had moved out of the apartment and in with Oakley Hale three weeks after Cassie had said goodbye. ‘I know you’re depressed,’ she had announced, not without kindness, ‘and I’d stay if I thought it would help. But it’s not me that’s hurt you this badly. I have a pretty good idea just who it is. All I can say is, I hope you work it out.’

  And so, as he walked to McLaren’s office to tell him that no, he didn’t want the deputy director’s chair, and yes, he would like the overseas posting please, with the Asian-European business they had merged into, he felt he was starting all over again, looking for the second time in his life for a new place to heal old wounds. Only this time there was no expectation or excitement in his decision; no hope, really, when he looked hard at himself. Still, he thought, at least I won’t have to fire Streatley.

  4

  IT WAS BRIDGES that saved him, he realized, two years after he threw out the anti-depressants that the doctor on Park Avenue had prescribed but he had never taken.

  Michael had started in London, trying to integrate the company there with their new McLaren masters and preparing a thorough survey of all the projects underway in the belt stretching from Europe through the Middle East as far as the Philippines. He lived in a studio apartment in the Barbican which was owned by the company; he could walk to work, and each day he liked to focus on his way there, with an outsider’s eye, on the surprisingly human, unfrightening scale of London. This is a city I could learn to love, he thought, but although he was supposed to ease his way into field work gently, six weeks after Michael arrived a site supervisor in the Philippines had a heart attack and Michael was on a Manila-bound flight forty-eight hours later.

  He lived on the edge of the site, half a mile from the end of the bridge under construction, in a Portakabin lifted up onto breezeblocks. Evenings at this remote and steamy camp were mental torture: he avoided drinking himself insensate since he had to think clearly on the job, but there was little else to divert his attention away from his own unhappiness. Even reading didn’t help since he found it impossible to concentrate. Fortunately, the mornings – from the first post-breakfast move to work – brought relief, as he could at last stop thinking about himself and focus on the job.

  The work went well until an unexpected and unseasonable monsoon hit, with flash flooding that wiped out three hundred feet of causeway on either side of the bridge and six weeks’ worth of work. Two of the local guards hired to protect the site were caught by the flood in grassy lowlands as they drove back from a weekend’s leave in Manila, and drowned. Michael and his number two, a gruff veteran named Jock he didn’t know very well, pulled the bodies out of the car after the waters had receded. One of the dead guards had become wedged between the front and back seats, and it took almost half an hour to extricate him; when at last they got him out Michael looked at a face that seemed eerily peaceful, the skin softened by its immersion in water, and he realized the guard had been little more than a boy, with a few dark hairs on his upper lip the evidence of his efforts to grow a moustache.

  After this Michael and Jock became friends, usually meeting up in the evening for a whisky, or two, or three. Jock had worked on every continent except South America and his company was a wel
come distraction, since he told stories unprompted and Michael could listen for an hour or two without thinking about himself and his own misery.

  After the job ended, he had six more weeks back in England, helping to run the office while awaiting his replacement as manager. During this time he conducted a small affair with a PA, also divorced, who worked on his floor. They told each other very little about their respective pasts, made no plans more foresighted than afternoon arrangements to meet in the evening, and spent most of their time together in bed. Sex remained pleasurable for him, but he no longer found in its physical excitement even a glimmer of the brave new world he had once found in Sophie Jansen.

  He travelled to Scotland for a holiday and met up with Jock and his wife, Annie. They spent five days along the west coast of Scotland, travelling at the driving equivalent of an ambling pace, stopping frequently to look at birds and wild flowers, spending the night in B&Bs and once in a castle hotel. They ate well, drank sparingly, and talked almost exclusively about the wildlife and wild flowers they saw each day. Michael was relieved to find that he could enjoy being in the natural world again. For the first time in years, he lived without any anxiety, since there was nothing he cared enough about to fear losing. Sometimes at night, lying in his bed with the light off, unable to sleep, he saw the calm face of the Filippino guard as in a visitation, and would envy him his apparent peacefulness.

  When he returned to London he discovered that the PA had a new boyfriend, and that Streatley, of all people, had arrived to run the London office. Celebrations seemed in order, and he was lucky to make his flight to Riyadh two days later since, thanks to Streatley’s exuberance in something called the Gaslight Club, Michael had almost spent the day in jail instead. He landed in Saudi Arabia with a hangover (as close to alcohol as he was to come during the two months of his stay), a certificate of baptism, and a security clearance – the chain of bridges he was being paid to assess sat near an American military installation.

  The Saudi job was a highway bridge built in the 1970s which had developed delamination problems, accelerated by salt in the air from the Gulf, which it adjoined. It would be easier to knock it down and build again, but also far more expensive, so Michael spent three weeks devising a program to save the bridge through strategic concrete reinforcements and an epoxy-coated beam, only to realize belatedly that no one wanted to repair it – national pride and the interests of the construction industry demanded that a new and bigger bridge be built. Yet it was in devising his unwanted plan to save the old bridge that Michael discovered his metier. For he learned that he much preferred repairing old bridges to helping build new ones. He became a particular expert on reinforced concrete degradation and its repair, on delamination and spalling, and the effects of corrosion which always weakened, sometimes fatally, the structure of a bridge. He was careful and deliberate in his work, but privately took pride in his ability to take one long look at a bridge and know in most cases just what was wrong and how bad the problem was.