“How about off duty?”
“A total player before I got hold of him. Pretty short for a dude, like my height, and stocky, 210 pounds and just one big muscle. He cried the morning of his deployment. His hands are like this big, Eric.” Really big. “And that’s not the only thing!” Even bigger.
“But really.”
“He’s jealous. He’s a country boy. You flinched! But I’m serious. He’s like one big hard dick. Jealous. Very jealous. You flinched again! He’s from up there, you know. Presque Isle. His family is Frenchie. His mom still speaks Québécois. They go out to cheap restaurants and eat fucking poutine. Poutine is disgusting. Like French fries with cheese and gravy, what? He will squeeze your head like a pimple till it pops when he catches you.”
“Catches me what?”
“That pizza, mister, that was super. And that was a great bottle of wine. He would kill you for the greatness of the wine alone!”
“We’ll be friends, he and I.”
Danielle shook her head: No you won’t.
Twelve
SO, DURING THAT visit to her parents, he’d bought Alison a ring, using his new American Express Gold card, which they apparently offered to all employees at law firms, his first plastic. And it wasn’t a real diamond but a cubic zirconium, cut big and with a bluish cast, gorgeous, and under two hundred dollars, still a bite at the time. That way they could get a huge stone, get a gasp out of Alison’s mom. Her dad was furious that Eric hadn’t asked him first. And though it was all couched as a joke, Eric and Alison found themselves mooning at the seal pier and making out on the beach along with the teenagers (blue balls, the works) and sneaking back and forth up and down the deck till dawn, all contention gone, all irritation aimed at the old man: they were engaged.
At length, Danielle said, “I grew up Jersey shore. My father was a fireman, actually—now he’s Homeland Security. He will help Jimmy kill you. His brother is a dentist. Just look at my teeth.”
He looked at her teeth, which though bared rather angrily were ultrawhite, very straight, maybe a size too small. She said, “Jim’s father isn’t Homeland Security, you can be sure of that—he calls Homeland Security the Obama Squad. He’s more like End-Times Jesus Survival Militia. He’s a darkling, put it that way. I don’t know what he does exactly. Jim doesn’t even know. Or maybe he does. They sell stuff. Jim grew up in a yard sale, basically. His mother is this little rock-hard gargoyle lady. She won’t smile around me cuz her teeth are bad. I mean really fucking bad. She won’t even laugh. She works at like the chicken-processing plant. You can say the funniest thing and she’s just like. Talks with her hand in front of her mouth and swears between her chicken-fat fingers, cunt.”
“And you were living with them?”
“Flinch.”
“Your teeth are terrific.”
“Weren’t you going to tell me a story?”
“Where’s he stationed? Jimmy.”
“No, really—you.” Pink strap, black strap, like ribbons across both shoulders. “I want to hear about one of these abuse cases. The guys you represent.”
“Or do those strike units just wander around?”
“Top secret. Afghanistan, supposedly, but he’s in Pak.”
“Pakistan?”
“Quiet, dude, fuck. Nancy Pelosi’ll drone us. Now you, you talk.”
“Um. Domestic abuse cases. Okay. They are usually quite hostile, though I represent them. One guy urinated on my shoes in the conference room at County. Took me a minute to get what was going on. Suddenly my feet were hot and wet.”
“I’ve had dates like that!”
Eric laughed, and she laughed, too, progress for their friendship. He said, “There were women, as well. One, she’d dropped a cinderblock out the window onto her husband’s head. Coma.”
“Who keeps cinderblocks upstairs?”
“I guess it was shelving. With boards. Which they’d already knocked over. Fish tank and all.”
“She went to prison?”
“He woke up and recovered. I got her put in a program for six months—rankled her that he just got off free, when he was in the wrong, whatever the argument was they were having, something about who had drunk all the Drano.”
“Dude, no.”
“No, I’m kidding. But whatever it was, the cinderblock was just deserts, in her opinion. And then they got back together.”
“Okay, that’s pretty good. But I want a story with, like, trouble.”
He said, “Hmm. A cinderblock isn’t trouble?”
“I mean where you almost die after a client bashes you and ties you up and puts you in the trunk of his car but then you come back from the very precipice of death to fashion a device that helps you escape, and so on and so forth, et cetera.”
They drank their wine. Danielle put a log in the stove, a single stick of kindling to help it burn. This brought the light up several notches quickly. She drew her chair in closer to the fire (the cabin suddenly full of air, the wind roaring outside, all those thuds on the face of the house), which meant closer to him. He saw how much she wanted his company, any company. She was drinking this conversation like she drank the wine, biting it like she bit the pizza. Soon she’d be slicing into him, and it wouldn’t be pretty.
He said, “My wife is a lawyer, too.”
“Your ex-wife, you mean.”
“My not-quite ex. Or my maybe not-ever-going-to-be ex.”
Danielle went all Disney princess: “These gorgeous pizza dinners. Which hardly seem fair on your part, dollink, all that expensive cheese, so romantic. And the candles, golly-gee. And the Frenchie wine. She doesn’t have a chance, this princess-bride of yours!”
“She worked in the state attorney general’s office. So I would travel down to Augusta sometimes. . . .”
“No, not sometimes, you’d go on a regular basis. Like every Friday.”
“Every Wednesday, in fact.”
“Not that your predictability matters, mister.”
“You asked for a story.”
“With trouble in it, don’t forget. I don’t want to be the only one.”
“Well, so, on one of those Wednesdays I was coming down the long hallway in the state building and far at the other end of it she was there talking to William ‘Bix’ Brighton, Republican state senator from Jackman, long married, long in the tooth, and just the angle of their necks and just the tension in her posture, the way they were leaning, the air between them: I knew.”
“A Republican.” She took his glass brusquely, filled it to the rim with wine, splashed it back at him.
He sipped defensively. “Don’t taunt.”
“Well, I know what’s next. At dinner you didn’t say a thing, and later you fucked her for the first time in like forever.”
He flinched. But it was true.
“And it was like nothing you ever.”
“She hadn’t kissed me in a long time, not like that.”
“Not ever, mister. She’d never kissed you like that.”
“She was kissing him, you’re saying?”
“And of course kissing wasn’t all. She did things you’d only dreamed of.”
“Not so much. Not with me. But there was something about it.”
Danielle thought about that for a while, seemed almost to drift away. A pop in the fire brought her back, or anyway, she spoke as if she’d never left: “And then everything continued on as ever.”
“As ever?” As ever. “So much that I started to doubt my intuition.”
“Until.”
“Until all offhand she announces one fine summer morning that Bix and his wife have invited us to their camp for a week coming up, the same week, as it happens, that Alison knows very well I’m going to be in New York City, can’t back out. At first I’m equanimous about it. Faint frisson of mistrust, maybe. But then. It’s eating at me. Doesn’t feel right. The way she told me about it, first thing in the morning like that. The new bathing suit. The new haircut.”
“The bikini wax.”
>
He put his glass down. “Jesus,” he said. The woman was clairvoyant.
“You saw her in the shower.”
Quite true, sadly. “So. As if in innocence I call the senator’s wife to thank her for the invitation and express my regret that I’m not going to be able to join them at their lake house for a week.”
“And of course . . .”
“Of course she knows nothing about the week at their lake house. She’s perfectly calm, however, just declares there’s been some mistake. He’s neglected to tell her, is all. But you can hear it’s happened to her before. And after a few days Alison tells me she’s decided she just doesn’t feel like going for the week up there and will cancel. But it’s got into her head, she says, to go somewhere, so she’s thinking of going up to Montreal for the week, just to look around, you know, just on her own. So the next Wednesday I go down early to Augusta and straight to the senator’s office, which he shares with two other senators, by the way, and he’s not there, no one there. So I go to her office, hellos to all the ladies working, you know, increasingly bewildered—I’ve once again convinced myself I’m wrong.”
“Bewildered,” Danielle said rapt.
“And Alison’s not there. Ginnie the receptionist says there’s been a case that morning and Alison is due back from Portland any moment. I’m abashed. So much so that I decide to leave altogether, come back when I’m supposed to, and go down to the parking lot to wait.”
“You have a nice voice, yo,” Danielle said abruptly, her face bright. “You have a very nice voice, when you forget to be saving my life. What is a ‘frisson’?”
“Just a hint of something. Enough to make you shiver.”
She shivered. “How about ‘equanimous’?”
“Even tempered, calm, accepting.”
“Not really you.”
“Hey.”
She gave him the ghostly stare, said, “But a nice big word to hide behind.”
The wind had stopped. The sudden quiet was a roar of its own. The fire dulled a little, absent the constant blast of fresh oxygen. The room grew perceptibly warmer. “No one’s hiding.”
“And you say you were aboshed.” Mocking him.
“I’ll try to forget I’m saving your life.”
“No, mister, that part’s over. Now I’m saving yours. Remember?”
His voice was nice, she’d said. He was good with juries, judges, too. You didn’t fight them, you leaned into them, like leaning into a turn on a bicycle down a sandy hill, one foot out, just in case. He said, “There’s a big park on the Kennebec River below the capitol. The ice going by us right now will end up down there in a day or so. I had an hour to kill after my mistake and I was full of emotion, of shame in fact, and remorse. It was a fine day, though, and all the negativity kind of lifted. I like the trees there—they’ve planted them strategically and there are all these varieties and they’ve grown without competition and each species takes on its perfect form, especially this one particular spruce tree, one I’d often admired from the road, this absolutely perfect huge cone of spiraled bluey branches, and the kids have made something of a fort underneath where the limbs spread across the ground and back in there under the branches there was this commotion, people trying to get dressed . . .”
“Your wife and the senator!”
Saving his life.
Thirteen
ONCE ERIC AND Alison were engaged, and once they were back in her little apartment in Beacon Hill, no more Pacific breezes, no more kinky trysts over the heads of her parents, the discussion turned to where they’d live. Alison had battled the fierce sexism of her office in Boston, the genteel old partners treating her like a secretary, the sleek new partners undercutting her at every turn, knives out always, but she was in possession of a sword, as it turned out, maybe a battle-axe—that level of skills, unmatched weapons—and was damn good with them, positioned herself to become the first female partner in the firm, and the first female partner in the constellation of old practices at the heart of legal Beantown. Which gave her no joy—the men would not change just because she was there, and there were any number of firms all around the city where she wouldn’t have had to fight so hard, women having won so many battles already. Her father, humorless as always and full of advice, said she had a Rosa Parks complex, dour admonishment.
Eric had always been aimed at private practice and small-town law and after his hitch in the U.S. Navy conducted a methodical search of the villages of northern New England, making a list of ten that were underserved and settling on Woodchurch impulsively when he saw the county courthouse, which was tiny and yet stately and occupied the very center of town as if it were a brick church, and even sported a bell tower, the bell visible from all around town, copper-oxide green and uncracked, perfection of form, a gift of the French in commemoration of this or that Woodchurch hero on the occasion of the town’s incorporation in 1799, history that interested Eric. Within two weeks he’d found his house, shockingly affordable, and within two more he was moving in, the parlor as his office, shingle on the walk out to the mailbox, all but a scene from his fantasies. His Navy service brought an immediate raft of clients, the powers and movers of the town, who would eventually drift away from him as they sniffed out his liberal views. Which views hardly mattered when it came to deeds and wills, the bulk of his early work, along with a divorce or two, but seemed to block the environmental mitigation work he’d counted on, the chance to affect corporate and private policy as actually practiced (often in the face of the law) in this crucial corner of the working forest.
After their first series of dates he’d brought Alison back to that house, showed off his office, introduced her to Woodchurch. And she’d mocked it, and mocked him: the country barrister, she called him, certainly not her fantasy. But suddenly, now that they were engaged, or at least acting as if they were engaged (that zircon like a searchlight), cramped in her apartment, it gave her great pleasure to think about refusing the chauvinists at her firm when her elevation came, leave them in the lurch, a few public statements to go with the abdication.
That plan was never tested, however, as the partnership wasn’t offered, some young buck five years junior and of brief tenure in the firm leapfrogging ahead of her on the pretext of her first poor annual evaluation ever, bullshit. Disillusioned, disheartened, discombobulated, disempowered, somehow desexed, she came to Maine. Even winning her lawsuit against the crusty old firm didn’t help, famous case or no, and didn’t bring back her ardor. But a new vision did: Eric would be her partner, of Eric she would make a rural star, and then she’d hitch a wild ride, one that would eventually take her back to her rightful place in the city. He saw now.
“You’re an addict,” Danielle said, patting at herself in imitation of his search for his phone. “ ‘Is there a text from Alison?’ ” Scathing imitation, this ghost who’d never met the woman: “ ‘Can’t you just be in the moment?’ ”
“Uncanny.”
“Probably she’s waiting for you at home right now. Big Coach purse, right?”
Right, thick leather with vestigial buckles as adornment. Evenly, he said, “I’d like to hear more about your teaching. Is that how you and Jim met? Teaching?”
“Does she still have her own key?”
“It’s still her house. Or half her house.”
“She just doesn’t come home.”
“You and Jim. You two worked together?”
“Where does she live in Portland? She’s got her own place? Is she working again in Portland?”
“She’s starting her own firm. Or anyway, that’s the plan. She has a condo.”
“Sounds permanent.”
Eric rubbed his shoulder—it really was sore. “Well, won’t matter where she lives. Everything here is statewide.”
Danielle typed at an imaginary cell phone, some kind of urgent message. “Even the marriages!”
Sharper than he meant: “That’s enough.”
“Okay, Counselor.” She pulled
her Rasta cap down harder over her ruined hair, an abused doll. “Why are you so curious about Jim? I’ll tell you about Jim. We had the same placement in what-do-you-call-it—practice. When you’re placed in a school as a student teacher. Before you graduate, you know. Practicum. It’s part of the certification process for teachers in Maine.”
“I thought it was part of the degree program. Isn’t certification later?”
“Whatever.”
“No, not whatever.”
“The state placed me up in Houlton.”
“No, Danielle. You’re placed by your program. And Woodchurch College wouldn’t place anyone in Houlton, would they.”
“You are a dick, you know that?”
“I mean, why would it be something to lie about?”
“Because.”
“Because you weren’t a teacher?”
She crossed her arms across her chest and looked fierce. “I was a teacher,” she said.
“But.”
“But nothing. Just not like Jimmy. I was part of a special program, all right? Is that all right with you? And what do you know about it, anyway? I thought you were a lawyer, not a teacher.”
“Danielle, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to grill you. In small-town law you learn about a lot of things, that’s all.”
“I’m not your client!”
“Don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying.” The tears made tracks then runnels in the dirt and soot on her face. The wind howled again, the stovepipe rattled. She wiped at her face with her hands, then with the hem of her shirt, exposing her belly, gaunt.
Eric wasn’t good at this: “Shh.”
“I was a substitute, okay? Where Jimmy worked, okay? If that’s good enough for you. We actually met at a church thing. And I followed him up there.”
“Okay, I’m sorry.”
“You’re drunk. And you just get more aggressive.”
She was right, he realized. About the being drunk.
But she’d drunk more than he: “Jimmy, he’s really funny. He likes to pull pranks. Once he sent his whole class to the principal’s office, one kid at a time till the whole waiting room was full and Mr. Jenks was like.”
The Remedy for Love Page 7
