“You sound like Winnie the fucking Pooh,” she said gently, resting her cheek on his shoulder.
“Black widow,” he said.
“That’s better.” She bit him once more, maybe a little hard, patted his chest, reached suddenly to grab his erection, which was straining, moment of no return, moment that best intentions fled. “Mm,” she said.
“No,” he said. He had a responsibility.
“Just checking,” she said, giving a hard squeeze. Then she let go, patted his belly, stroked his chest, kissed that shoulder once more. “You’re nice,” she said. “And you are very strong.”
“Not really,” he said.
She bit him hard. But she was done, whatever her project was. She bit him once again, more gently, then kissed him tenderly, kissed that shoulder sweetly, kissed it again and again, leaving it wet, finally turned away from him. Shortly her breath came even, came slowly, came deep, a secret reserve. Carefully he turned and watched her in the faint light, the light of the fading fire, made out the barest lineaments of her face, something important there, he felt, something deep, too, the wind crashing outside, something he couldn’t quite fathom, something terrifying, as in, tie yourself to the mast, the wind mounting higher, relief at a narrow escape—that was part of it, too. He couldn’t look away. The way she had contained him, the way she had parried him, the arc she had made of the afternoon and the evening, all designed, he felt now, felt the strength of her, the hidden power of her, the thing visible in her face, where in the grocery store and just after he’d only seen weakness, a reflection he now realized, her way of showing him himself, the loose roofing or siding or whatever it was clattering, all of it a kind of tide washing over him, that he was nothing, and fear, and sleep.
Part Two
Sixteen
IN HIGH SCHOOL, back in Indianapolis where his parents still lived, there’d been kids in couples all around, but Eric was part of a bigger unit, a tight circle of friends, almost a group romance, in that the crowd identity seemed to preclude any coupling. Jane “the Brain” Gilmore was his crush, but Jane was in love with nutty Randy DiBiase, great guy, and Randy (like everyone else in the universe) was hot for Leslie Armour, but Leslie, poor kid (she’d later die in a car wreck), only had eyes for Trip Morton, who, it went entirely unsaid and unremarked by anyone till at least a decade later (though it was obvious even then) was hot for Eric. This circle kept things tight and let no new faces in and went to movies en masse and to the proms and socials in ever-changing pairs and even lingered in basement playrooms all but making out as they circled around each other clear to graduation.
And that might have been it for high school romance, but the summer after junior year, Eric’s parents, Glad and Bob, visited Antarctica on an extended research trip (they were both climatologists). His choice from all the pamphlets they’d provided was tall-ship camp, a two-month program sailing out of England. Shipboard, he’d met Iskra, who was the daughter of a Russian diplomat in the British Mission and hadn’t a trace of American inhibition around the subject of sex. She liked him and claimed him and insisted on walks whenever they hit shore and on the third of these adventures he just took her face in his hands and kissed her (she’d been talking obscenely about various types of body kisses), just enough of a laugh beforehand that he could claim it was a joke if she weren’t interested. But she was interested, all right. They’d made love on a carpet of pine needles behind a Mediterranean graveyard, his first time. Which she had no problem detecting. A great teaser, Iskra. A great lover, too, vast fund of experience. That was seven great weeks of immersive learning, all right. She didn’t write to him from the embassy, despite ardent promises, and his three letters to her came back undeliverable: sadness.
And hunger, sexual. He didn’t have a proper girlfriend till college, and that was Cindy Izquierdo, who was Catholic and Mexican American with the strictest parents Eric had ever heard of and had her own very strict ideas about the proper progression of physical love, which found its finish line in marriage. She was a monstrous kisser, however, willing to smooch four and five hours at a stretch, the two of them talking into one another’s mouths, entire conversations about far-reaching subjects lip-to-lip and with a trick or two tucked in her bonnet to keep her honor while honoring his ardor, and good at arriving, as she called it. Did he love her? He hadn’t thought so—at least not in the way she meant—didn’t think so while their romance was going on, a full year at the University of Chicago, though he occasionally said so, as it lubricated her desire. He didn’t think so till sometime about three weeks after he broke it off, eliciting buckets of her tears, passionate girl. And then when she took up with his roommate, Brian Flynn, he really thought so. He still thought so, thought about Cindy often. She’d worn a gold chain around her ample hips; you only got to see it rarely.
And then of course there was Alison, who’d bit him exactly once on the chin.
He couldn’t think of a way around pulling snow into the house with the hoe he’d found in the shed, so that’s what he did, pulled snow straight into the cabin, trying his best to keep it neat, piled snow on the wooden floor and then more and more on the rug. The shoulder was very stiff. He had to make his way out, and he had to convince Danielle to leave, too. He’d had cozy feelings for her as he woke, and cozy wasn’t good.
Danielle, dirtier than ever, was busy at the stove pouring water from one vessel to another and finally to the teapot. She shifted from foot to foot in her big wool socks, built up the fire. Their two mugs were on the counter still, stained burgundy from the box wine, which is how Eric’s brain felt. She wore her cap and the same old clothes, those thick socks, posture slumped artfully, or so he now thought. She’d awakened before him and descended alone, had been grumbling and cursing to herself since, not so much as a glance in his direction when he finally climbed down, though spears flew and he felt them in his chest and neck, heavy hand-carved things with legends written up and down the shafts. Her kiss was on his shoulder like a burn, her bites like the letters of a secret alphabet. And something coursed through him, an elixir still potent, labeled with runes. Danielle muttered, more curses.
She’d get over it. He shuffled in his own thin socks to the stove beside her, warmed his hands a minute, stole her empty coffee cup, dipped a cup of warm water from one of the pans on the stove, drank it, dipped another, drank that.
“Don’t hog it, yo,” she said.
“We can melt snow.”
“Okay, melt snow. Like, before you leave, okay?”
Her kisses, if they played in her mind, played on a different channel. He said, “Let me have a look and see what kind of odds we have here. Of getting out, I mean.”
“You have all day—you can make it easily. Don’t you see? You actually have to go.”
“We burned a lot more wood than I would have thought,” he said.
“We’re still burning wood, yo,” she said. “And you can find more of that, too. And then leave.”
“I’m for leaving, don’t worry. But I can’t leave you here alone.”
She glowered, fumed, attacked a box of Pop-Tarts, tore it nearly in half getting to the subpackaging inside, used her teeth to free two of the things, slabs of dense-looking cake infused with a jellylike substance and slathered in icing. She slapped them on the stovetop to warm. Yo. Give her some space. Try to maneuver near the Advil.
The big window over the river was barely a window anymore, frosted like a Pop-Tart and draped heavily with snow, just a whale’s eye left open in the middle to peer through, a sobering view. The snow out there was deep, very deep, a heavy drift wave like the purest sand dune mounded clear up over the windowsill, eight or nine feet deep off the ledge, maybe more, no color anywhere, only white and black and every shade of gray between. And the snow was still falling, still driving, in fact, still cascading from the roof, the river black just below and carrying rafts of snow and tremendous pans of ice and drinking every flake that hit it unto trillions, rising, rising. Eric
rubbed the frost of his breath from the limitless porthole and, gazing long, admired the birches bowed in fair arcs on the far bank, balsam firs like court ladies in tiered dresses, green emerging only darkly from the strange humps where whole jungles of alder ought to be.
The Pop-Tarts didn’t smell bad. They didn’t smell bad at all.
He boldly found the Advil, took a couple, minimal sip of water from his hand as she watched critically, then skated back to the task at the door, a solid half hour with hoe and crowbar and storied shoulder to carve out a passage he could climb through, not a shovel in the place, a four-foot-thick wall of snow that must have fallen off the high-pitched roof. When he got through to the air outside, he admired his work a moment, like looking through a wind tunnel. He found the rain boots and tugged them on, bumped past her for her coat.
“I have to shit, yo,” she said miserably.
“I’m sorry,” he said in general, though—forced intimacy—the specific problem was the same for him. He tugged on the useless fish-scaling gloves and clomped to the burrow he’d dug and painfully slithered out there into the storm. A long drift of unimaginable dimension had buried the dooryard, buried the funky woodshed up to its high shoulders. Eric found his footing and battled his way forward—snow filling the boots and rising up his pants legs. Even so, it was gorgeous out there, exhilarating, everything flowing and shifting and drowning and blowing, the trees oddly still, plastered down with the early wet snow now frozen hard. The breath froze in his nostrils, too, and new snow filled his hair.
“Okay. I’ve really got to go,” Danielle called, suddenly tumbling out of the tunnel he’d made—nothing of the cabin to be seen. She swam to him through the deep snow, leaned on him abjectly, the smelliest blanket wrapped tight around her, that Rasta cap pulled down over her ears, hands bare.
Eric pushed his way through the snow with her practically riding his back, bashed at the hemlock branches ahead with his hoe but couldn’t get them to drop their snow load, simply dug his way through the fragrant boughs by hand till he and Danielle were able to squeeze into the dark cavern beneath. Under the hemlocks they ducked along beside the thick trunks, an eerie passage on nearly dry ground, she in her socks and big sweater. Eric broke through at the end of the line, dense layer of ice, then hard-packed snow, then deep powder. The outhouse was just where he’d calculated, buried up to the half moon. He pulled snow away with his hoe and kicked it clear with his rain boots till he could push the door open without filling the space in there with snow, not a trace of stink: winter had seen to that.
Danielle burst around him, pushed him out like he was the turd, closed the door in his face, clicked the hook-eye latch in place, as if that were necessary. He slipped back under the hemlocks to get out of the wind. He’d just have to wait his turn, he thought grimly. She’d warm the seat, at least.
Seventeen
DANIELLE MADE COFFEE, a pointedly single cup for herself, stood at the butcher-block table drinking it ghostlike while Eric cleaned up the snow on the floor and rug, shuttled it out the entryway he’d made.
She called, “You should have fucked me while you had the chance.”
A client on the way to federal prison had said something similar once, and meant it the same way, Turk DuFries: “You should have killed me while you had the chance.” Eric clucked, that’s all, irritably scraping at the accumulated ice and testing the door. He scraped more but still couldn’t close it properly, a lot of work to go. He wasn’t doing it for her, not really, but for his own peace of mind. The woman needed egress. It was as simple as a town ordinance. He joined her at the butcher’s block, crossed his arms across his chest, cocked his head, an almost consciously intimidating pose. Someone had to take control.
“You don’t eat Pop-Tarts?” she said.
“You didn’t offer.”
“They’re on the house, dickhead. Don’t wait for me.” She pulled her partly unraveled sweater over her head, knocking off the Rasta cap and getting stuck momentarily in the sleeves such that just her hair stuck through the head hole. Her hair, okay, wow. Danielle was not someone you smooched or got tangled with, no matter what drunken thoughts you might have had in the night. She was looking unhealthy again, some sort of missing light in her eyes and even her skin. “And then you have to go.”
He said, “We both need to get out of here. But, Danielle, the snow’s very deep. The snow’s really deep and neither of us have the right clothing. And it’s still coming down very hard. And if the road’s not plowed there just won’t be anywhere for us to go.”
“It’s a state road. This is Maine. It’s plowed. You take those rain boots and whatever else you need and you start right now and you’ll be home in a couple of hours safe and sound and smug as a cat.”
“You’re leaving someone out.”
“Alison will be there to clean your litter box, don’t worry.”
He rubbed his shoulder. “I was talking about you.”
“I take care of myself. Eric.”
“Danielle. It has nothing to do with your taking care of yourself or not taking care. It’s that no one should be down here in winter without a whole summer of preparation. Certainly not alone. You won’t be fine. Things won’t work out. You’d need fresh water daily. For a whole winter you’d need probably seven or eight cords of seasoned firewood, all cut and split. You might be stuck down here days at a time or even weeks. People die in these situations.”
“That’s for me to worry about.”
“But think how I’ll feel if they find you dead down here come spring.”
“Well, how you feel is certainly the most important thing. Eric.”
“You’re deliberately misunderstanding me.”
“Okay. Just have one. Have two. Like you ate all the Advil.” She tore the subpackaging for him and handed over a Pop-Tart, like a small piece of painted plywood, not even sticky. He let it get very hot, almost smoking, picked it off the stove and passed it from hand to hand as it cooled.
Danielle watched with unhidden interest as he took his first bite.
The thing tasted pretty damn good, not what he’d thought, and damn it again if he wasn’t hungry. He made a pleased face, took another bite, and another.
“Just don’t think of all the chemicals,” she said. “And that it’ll be in your gut till you die. Or that you won’t shit for a month. And, of course, that Alison the Good will never talk to you again, this level of sin.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Thanks for feeding me.”
“I’m very nurturing,” she said.
“I actually think so,” he said.
She opened him another Pop-Tart and put it on the stove, stood over it, close to him, tended the thing, nothing more to say. When the Pop-Tart was warm she picked it off the stove and broke pieces from it and fed him solemnly, unreadably. Her fingers touched his lips every bite. But all of her attention was on the food, if that was what to call it, all of her attention on her hands breaking small bites from the Pop-Tart, her eyes watching every crumb.
“It’s salty,” he said. “That’s the main taste underneath the sugar—salt.”
“If you say so, mister.” She dipped him a drink, bottom of the bucket.
“What’s with the mister?”
“I suppose you think I’m mocking your paternalism.”
“You’re thinking of someone else.”
“Mister, I’m thinking of you.”
He was a pro, ignored her professionally: “We need to get you some water. How have you been getting water?”
She retrieved her Rasta cap from under her sweater on the floor, pulled it hard onto her head, made sure every chopped hair was tucked up there. She said, “I haven’t, not really. It used to be easy, just walk down to the river. But it was so hard after the ice last week. Now probably impossible. I’m sorry, Eric. I’m sorry to be so mean. I am not a mean person. I used to be very nice. I went to church with my mother like every week when I was little, and Sunday school, too. I collected m
oney for poor people in like a milk box. Even in high school I did stuff. I volunteered at the hospital. My father set it up. I don’t know why I stopped. Maybe because I liked it. We could melt snow. Like you said. Eric.”
“Melting snow is very slow. Very slow. Danielle.”
“Okay, now you sound like Joan Baez. In a good way, I mean. My grandmother loved Joan Baez.”
“I’m thinking, get down to the river.”
“Still with the folk songs! Anyway. I tried that. Last week after the ice storm. And I even made it halfway back up. But the bucket was so fucking heavy, and I slid on the ice and fell all the way back down and went in. That’s how I hurt my ankle. It’s rocky under there—a lot of rocks. And it was awfully cold. But I never let go of the bucket.”
“You were brave,” Eric said.
“That’s what my father always said. Like if I was just standing in the sun in the yard: ‘You’re so brave.’ ”
“I mean to hold onto that bucket.”
“Instead of saying, like, ‘I love you.’ ”
They considered that a minute, the constant mystery of human interaction.
“But, okay,” she said, “let’s get some water and then you go.”
It wasn’t the moment to argue. He’d keep working on her. He just said, “Mind if I make a cup of coffee for myself first and warm up?”
She pretended to ponder the request deeply, seemed about to deny it, seemed to think better of the negative impulse, said, “You were a perfect gentleman.”
“Joan Baez is Cuban,” he said.
“A perfect, perfect gentleman.”
“Her heritage, I mean.”
“Jim wouldn’t be. A perfect gentleman. I kiss on him, that’s it. Sometimes when I don’t!”
“Well. I’m not Jim.”
“I thought she was from California.”
He touched the box of filters, examined them. “And you’re married and even if you weren’t I’d never take advantage.”
The Remedy for Love Page 9
