by Anita Shreve
He needed a break, however. He had to move away from the writing for a few minutes or an hour and do something else. A drink might be just the thing. He must remember his sport coat. The tavern, despite its fire, or perhaps because of the fire and its resulting drafts, was always frigid.
He left his room and descended to the ground floor in the elevator. He moved through a crowd of conventioneers checking into the inn on a Sunday evening, their workweek about to begin in the morning in the Hildene Room (large mahogany conference table, open fire, Windsor chairs, fresh raspberry and peach muffins that Mike knew from experience were terrific). Mike idly calculated the average weight gain of a typical five-day stay at the inn and estimated it at somewhere between three and five pounds, though shopping clearly burned off calories, as did exercising at the inn’s small weight room, a place he tended to avoid since he wasn’t comfortable exposing his half-naked body to strangers (a holdover from his headmaster days, when it was a form of academic suicide to appear in the weight room at Avery). Mike preferred to walk to keep his weight at a steady 178.
The temperature outside, he had heard as he’d moved through the corridor, was seven degrees Fahrenheit, but the windchill, rumor also had it (and Mike could almost sense the shuddery gusts in the hallway), was making it feel like seven below. He thought he would have his first drink in the lounge by the fire and near the Christmas tree, set up even before Mike had arrived at the inn, but when he entered the lounge, he saw a man in a wheelchair pulled up close to the fire. Mike nodded in greeting and, though he had been planning all along to sit by the fire, moved instead to a cozy niche of upholstered sofas and chairs. He then immediately felt bad about that decision, since the man in the wheelchair was doubtless lonely and might like to chat. But Mike thought that if he were to backtrack and sit by the fire and make small talk, it would be perfectly clear to the man that he was doing this only out of pity or, to give him some credit, kindness, which Mike guessed the lonely man (or perhaps he wasn’t lonely and simply wanted to escape his wife for a half hour) could do without.
The lounge had many nooks and crannies such as the one in which Mike was sitting. Until recently, these had been largely uninhabited, allowing Mike to use the lounge as a sort of adjunct living room or library. Perusing the many books on the shelves one day, he had made a bet with himself that none would be titles he would want to read — he won that handily — or that even a moderately learned man such as he would have heard of (lost that one when he came to a copy of The Last of the Mohicans). Lately, however, the lounge had been becoming busier as the Christmas holiday approached. Typically, Mike might see husbands there or children (or husbands with children) who had been banished from their rooms to amuse themselves while wives and mothers got dressed. Mike had noted that young couples, wishing to experience every aspect of the inn, made a point of visiting each room and sitting for a time. Mike didn’t know if he would still be at the inn by Christmas, when he imagined the lounge would be mobbed. It occurred to him then that he had better ask at the front desk, because it was entirely possible that all the rooms had been booked for what he couldn’t help but think of, from years of habit, as the “Christmas break.” Since he had no other place to go at Christmas, except to his rented studio in New York City and to his former brother-in-law’s for dinner, and since he further didn’t know if he would be finished with his writing project (his current rate of production was proving remarkably slow), he decided, with just the faintest ping of alarm, that he had better check with the front desk as to how long he would be able to stay in his current room.
Until that night in September two years ago, when Meg surprised him in the kitchen with the announcement that she wanted a child, his wife had seemed aggressively not to want children. While Mike sometimes had yearnings and knew that they were sitting on a gold mine of potential babysitting, he was growing increasingly aware that even very lovely children quickly morphed into disturbing teenagers. He thought he probably knew adolescents as well as any woman or man who worked in a school setting did; that is to say, he knew them not from the point of view of a parent who loved them unconditionally but from the point of view of a somewhat judgmental, if hopeful, outsider. Thus, he was prone to notice the darker side of adolescents: the insane risks they took; the experimentation with all forms of behavior, including the obsequious and the downright cruel; a pathological procrastination that often resulted in a need for excessive sleep; a sensibility dictated by rampant hormones; and a tendency to extremes in personal hygiene (impressively long, uncut toenails on the boys; girls who changed their outfits three times a day, not including sports uniforms). On balance, Mike thought he probably had a somewhat jaundiced opinion of teenagers that made him hesitant about having his own. He supposed that it was possible Meg now had a child; when they separated, she’d still have been forty-three. They’d had little contact except through legal representatives since shortly after the scandal. Without children, Christmas, which in the beginning of their marriage had felt deeply romantic, had largely lost its luster for both of them and was mainly anticipated for the two-week respite it gave them from six hundred teenagers.
Mike changed his mind and decided upon an immediate drink and a meal in the tavern, where he was shown to a small booth with two upholstered wing chairs. A faint smell of potpourri filled the room, while overhead the speakers tinnily pumped out classical music that was not, as far as Mike could discern, Christmas-themed. There were behind him floor-to-ceiling windows that went absolutely to the carpet — to open them, one had to bend down and tug upward — and that were emitting frigid drafts. Mike knew the menu to be simple but reliable: Black Pepper Fettuccine, Angus Cheeseburger, Turkey Sandwich, Squash Soup. There were better restaurants in town, most of which he had tried, but he liked the ease and atmosphere of the tavern, where all the paintings were of cows, perhaps meant to remind one of the Angus Cheeseburger, which he intended to have despite an earlier resolve not to eat red meat. The resolve had been made in a vacuum, since Mike hadn’t seen a doctor in more than two years, not since he stopped visiting Dr. Vaughn, a physician in Avery with a mole on his lip that was impossible to ignore and that made Mike wonder, every time he was in his office, why the man, who presumably had access to good medical care, did not have it removed. Would it take a real gouge out of his lip? Mike pressed his own lips together just thinking of the pain.
When he looked up, he saw, across the room, a woman sitting in her own booth. She was writing addresses on white envelopes, occasionally consulting a small spiral-bound notebook. She wrote, looked at the envelope, switched it for another, and then wrote again. Christmas cards? Mike tried not to stare. She had on a black sweater with sleeves that went to her knuckles, tight jeans, and hiking boots. She was blond — from an expensive bottle, if it was a bottle — and of indeterminate age. Not young, not old, and not middle-aged, either, which demanded, he thought, a short-haired woman with a thickened waist who didn’t wear sweaters with sleeves to the knuckles or jeans that broke neatly over hiking boots. The woman set aside her notebook when the waitress came with her meal. She glanced up and caught Mike looking at her and didn’t smile. He turned away.
He heard a small exclamation then and glanced over and saw that the blond woman had bitten into her own Angus Cheeseburger and that the beef juice — dark pink and translucent — had squirted over the back of her hand and even onto the cuff of her sweater. She laughed at herself and mopped at the spill with her napkin, and when she looked up again — a bit sheepishly this time — she once more caught Mike’s eye. She gave a shallow, rueful smile and then went back to her meal.
It was unlikely, Mike thought, that she was at the inn with a husband, for it was rare for a woman to take an evening meal without a companion. Women seemed perfectly happy to eat breakfast and lunch alone, but seldom did they show up in a tavern without a man.
Mike’s beer and then his own burger arrived, and he ate it with relish — and, yes, the beef juice squirted onto his
thumb so that he had to lick it off. Writing seemed to be having a salutary effect on his appetite, making him extraordinarily hungry at mealtimes, as if he had been overexerting himself physically. When he finished, he thought of ordering another, but he didn’t, as he already felt mild regret over eating the red meat, something he vowed not to repeat for at least the rest of the week. By the time he set his napkin on the table, the tavern was nearly raucous with large groups of coworkers celebrating their annual Christmas parties, the main feature of which seemed to be the quantities of red and white wine happily being consumed. Mike remembered such parties from his days at Hartford and at Avery, events often ending in exceptionally convivial feelings that, sadly, did not last much beyond the New Year.
After his meal, Mike went up to his room to get his gloves and scarf and hat, for he believed the bulletins about the windchill. He would walk for as long as the marble sidewalk went on, then turn up a wide street of large summerhouses, some of which had been winterized. At the top of the hill, he would walk along a more traveled road, one without sidewalks (a feature he considered essential to civilized life, not to mention safer for children; sidewalks in Vermont villages were, in fact, a rarity), and after that, he would cut back down to the main road and follow that until he reached the inn. He once estimated the walk to be nearly three miles long, which was not excessive in the way of exercise, but it seemed to be enough. When motivated, Mike would sometimes sprint up the first hill just to get the heart pumping, something he would not do after a full meal and a beer.
The cold air stung his eyes and nose, making both water, but he had not brought a tissue with him and so gave the appearance of a man in tears. His cheeks stung as well, and he had to turn broadside into some of the gusts. So great was the irritation in his eyes that there were whole stretches during which he couldn’t see well and had to blink often. It was quite a broad avenue, with an assortment of dissimilar, though intriguing, homes on either side, each stately in its own way. They made Mike wonder who inhabited them and how those inhabitants made a living, a question that often perplexed him when he was in Vermont. Some were situated very close to the road so that a step or two inward would bring him flush against a doorway, while others were set back and had long driveways. All were framed by a towering mountain behind them that in summer had a road one could travel by car to reach the summit.
Once again wiping tears from his stinging cheeks, he saw in the light from the lanterns that lined the walk the woman who’d been in the tavern just minutes earlier. She had on a black down coat with fur trim and had mail in her hand. She had wound a scarf around her neck but didn’t have on a hat. He could see her only from the back, though he recognized the jeans and the hiking boots. He picked up his pace, much like a fox might investigate a vixen. He didn’t think of himself as a predator, but he was aware of a male imperative when the face of a female was hidden.
She stopped in front of a mailbox belonging to one of the houses on the street and began to read, as one sometimes does, the addresses on the envelopes to make sure she had gotten them right or perhaps to check that each envelope had been properly stamped. Since there were at least a dozen envelopes, this gave Mike a few seconds to catch up to her. He tried to make the encounter seem casual.
“Oh, hello,” he said, as if he had just noticed her.
She turned, and at once Mike understood his pursuit. The woman — in her face, in her smile perhaps — bore a striking resemblance to Anna. He knew why he had wanted to catch up to this stranger and why, now, he was appalled to have done so.
“I’m sorry,” he stammered.
The woman looked baffled and a bit wary.
“I thought . . . I thought you might be someone else,” he said. “I’m very sorry.”
He turned abruptly and walked in the direction of the inn. His eyes watered furiously, and he could barely see where he was going. He tried to blink the tears away. Of course, he had not thought the woman was someone else; that had been a spur-of-the-moment lie. Mike would never mistake the woman in the down and fur coat for the woman who now sat in the dark in a small house at the bottom of a long hill.
Mike had believed that by writing about the scandal, he could, in some measure, put it behind him. He had thought that if he wrote his pain away — his guilt, his complicity — it would actually go away. But in confronting the woman’s face and the slight fear and curiosity there, he had realized he had no right to wish away any of the guilt or the pain, or even to remember the many moments of pure joy that he and Anna had shared.
He would not write another word. Not a single word. He would, in fact, as soon as he returned to his room, the glass walls having lost their magic and seeming more like a glass booth into which one might put a prisoner, tear up all that he had written.
In the stinging cold, Mike quickened his pace.
Ellen
You sit on the bed, a thin pillow at your back, watching CNN, because not to have the television on, not to have the noise, has become unbearable. There is a pizza box, half full, on the dresser beside the television. You ate two pieces, unexpectedly ravenous. Your son said he had no appetite. You told him he had to eat, so he sat up and folded a greasy slice of pizza and stuck it into his mouth and chewed. You couldn’t see his eyes. You didn’t want to see his eyes.
When the policeman knocked on the door, it was an oddly gentle knock, and you thought it might be the motel owner’s wife, with a spare towel and a wrapped cake of soap in her hands. You opened the door and saw the uniform, and your foot immediately slid along the threshold as if you might bar the door. You put your arms up and held each jamb before you demanded, “What do you want?”
The officer gave his name and asked if Robert Leicht was in the room. You stalled, you asked to see a badge, all the time thinking your son might run away. But where would he have gone? Out the bathroom window?
“Ma’am,” the policeman said, not unkindly.
“It’s OK,” your son said behind you.
Still you would not give, and it was Rob who had to pry you from the door.
When they put your son in cuffs, you put your own hands to your mouth to muffle the scream you knew was coming. You kept your fingers on your son’s shoulder until they made you let go. You stood in the cold and watched the policeman bend your son’s head so that he could sit in the back of the cruiser. You were crying then. Your son looked up at you, and you tried to smile because you could see how frightened he was. You said, “I’ll be right behind you.”
Your hands shook so badly, you could hardly get the car to start. You knew where the police station was, you had seen it dozens of times on your visits to Avery. You arrived in time to watch a man fingerprint your son, and you immediately began to ask about bail. “Where do I go?” you asked. And, “How much?”
They took your son away from you into a room you couldn’t see. You thought, This is real. This is really happening.
After the judge had made his ruling, Rob was finally released into your custody. He wouldn’t let you hug him. His fingers were black with ink.
At midnight, there’s another knock at the door, a fist pounding. You know who it is even before your husband calls your name. The voice is angry and demanding. For a moment, you contemplate stepping outside the door before he can get in. You are suddenly very afraid.
Arthur has come straight from work. He knows about the arrest. You called him from the police station, a cold cup of coffee in your free hand. His tie is loosened, his jacket open. Even though it is January, he never wears an overcoat. You always say to him, What if your car breaks down? But still he doesn’t wear one. It constricts him when he drives, he says.
“Arthur,” you say.
His dark eyes find your son, the boy you made together. They quickly absorb the rest of the room, sizing it up, taking its measure.
“Stand up,” he says to Rob.
With a slow roll, your son sits up and puts his feet on the floor. Eventually, he stands.
&nbs
p; Arthur asks a question you have already asked. “Is it true?”
Rob shuts his eyes. His jaw slides forward a millimeter, enough to let you know he is girding himself.
Your husband steps closer to your son. Arthur’s hands are on his hips, his own jaw jutting forward.
“Is it true?” he asks again.
Instinctively, you put your hands out, wanting to prevent whatever it is that’s coming.
Your son, eyes shut, nods.
Arthur’s hand is so swift, the arc so blunt, you’re not sure what you have just witnessed. Your son’s head snaps back, and he falls onto the bed. You grab your husband’s arm, and you cry, Stop!
With effort, your son sits up. He doesn’t cry or touch his face, and for that you are inexplicably proud of him. Already there is the red imprint of the back of a hand on his jaw. You try to remember if Arthur ever cuffed your son before. You can’t remember.
“What on God’s earth ever made you do such a thing?” your husband demands.
It is an unanswerable question. Or perhaps there is an answer, but Rob will not give it. Not now. Not here. Not to you or your husband.
“Do you have any idea what you have done? What you have thrown away?” Arthur shouts.
Your son knows to the precise milligram the weight of all that he has thrown away. The questions are for the father’s benefit only.
