“Jimmy gets back next week. Eric.”
“Next week?”
“Think I tell you everything?”
“Well, next week. Then that’s a different story.”
“It’s different, all right. It’s really different.” Quiet, a great muffled quiet. At length: “But I might stay with her a little. If he gets held back. They’re always getting held back. When I talked to him he said he might be extended, actually.”
“You talked to him? When did you talk to him?”
“Really. What’s this Patty person like?”
“If he’s out in Pak on patrol how did he call?”
“She’s not a church lady, is she?”
“Older, and very kindly. And yes, I know her from church. She’ll make you meals.”
“As long as she doesn’t make me pray.”
“She won’t make you pray. She won’t make you do anything.”
“Just so I don’t have to stay with you.”
Part Three
Twenty-Nine
IN COLLEGE, ALISON had been a history/theater double major. These subjects, she felt, comported well with her dream of law. And she’d been the star in a number of musicals, which Eric could still sing, as Alison had so often in good humor sung around her Boston apartment, even acted them for him, the very best of her in the very best moods, often leading to lovemaking, not that that was all he thought about. In Woodchurch, she’d joined the Woodchurch Players and transformed the company, so everyone said, infectious energy and big-city talent, but probably primarily her sly ability to influence Crystal Crudhump, who was the founder, director, and chief benefactor of the Players, a quivering and imperious woman in her late seventies, now dead, famous for thick eye makeup and horrible taste in general and unfortunate casting, also shameless nepotism, the same handful of crotchety thespians in every production, year after year.
But Lady Crudhump, as she was called, had had to give over the role of Marion in The Music Man, because Alison could more or less sing and was actually the right age and was finally available, her promotion in Boston having collapsed. And as the theater pendulum swung, perennial leading man and big-hearted pragmatist (not to mention retired druggist) Chip Dennis had suggested in the very first rehearsal that Alison help them find a new Harold Hill, as it was time Carl took over the role of River City mayor Shinn from Bernard Lott, who’d fallen in the lobby of the Woodchurch Retirement Commons and broken his hip.
Eric was no singer, but he was used to standing up in front of people and talking. And so night after night for two months of rehearsals and in practice sessions at home and finally in six sold-out performances, he seduced Madame Librarian, and night after night she fell in love with him, even knowing better, singing everyone into tears.
Their kiss onstage grew steamier performance by performance, until the last night, when the audience actually cheered. “Goodnight, my someone,” Alison would sing in the months after that, calling him up the half stair to their bedroom. “Seventy-six trombones,” he’d sing, which was the counterpoint.
Their harmony often wavered, but they’d never been closer.
Thirty
THERE WAS THE matter of egress, which was heightened by the matter of his morning dump, and Danielle’s, too, speaking of intimacy. The front wall of the place was bulging inward, straining, the sunshine on the snow apparently lubricating and quickening things. The snow that had come in the door was ice hard, nothing he could dig through, not with a garden hoe. He’d built up the fire with the last sticks of their wood. Nothing good to report. Just that he hadn’t fucked anybody in the night, congratulations.
In the shed, yet another wave of anger, he examined the peak of the home-built roof, climbed up on the thick old workbench, knocked on the gable wall, tapped a screwdriver into the widest space available between the misshapen old sheathing boards, hammered it through tarpaper and then cedar shingles and made a small window to brilliant sunlight. He poked the point of the rusted keyhole saw into the opening he’d made and hacked away—difficult at first with only three or four inches of blade getting through, but gradually easier, cut a circle large enough for a person to crawl through, blessed sunlight as the first piece of board fell out, excellent bright sunlight glinting off an ocean of snow barely six inches below his vantage point, which was a good six or seven feet off the floor of the cabin, which was again three or four feet off the exposed bedrock. Ten or more feet of snow?
Impossible.
“I like the way you can do things,” Danielle said behind him.
He jumped. But recovered with a scowl, gazed down upon her from his workbench aerie, said, “Well, sometimes you need to do things, I guess.”
She was in the robe, and he could practically see the Jimmy tattoo, as if he were a kitchen match, and it was an unlit fuse: Jimmy Tremonton LaRoque, that elegant script, a first-class ink job. Her hair, all clean, stood up in a frizz, no great improvement but at least not a pestilence. She said, “Jimmy would have already, like, kicked his way out through the roof.”
“Well, fuck Jimmy,” Eric said quickly. He tapped the wall at breast height, well over her head. “The snow’s up to right here.”
The sun coming in his porthole lit the little room, lit her face as their predicament settled upon her. Just something about the way she set her jaw, freshly mad at him. How did the hormones work coming from the female to the male, if human interaction were purely chemical? Well, it was not purely chemical. Eric had never felt such an access of emotion, especially not for someone like her, someone so troubled. An access of irritation, too. Her irises looked black, no pupils, like bullet holes, but shining with intelligence and indignation. How could the unique soft shape of a nose cause such flummoxed rescission, bury his resolution?
Businesslike, he said, “I just thought we needed an exit. So I’m going to try to make one. We need to get outside and see what’s going on out there in front, and then we need to go.”
“Actually. Eric. I’m pretty excited to be by myself again. I’m staying. And you can’t stop me. It’s my life. It’s my decision.”
“I’m sorry, but no. Not going to happen.”
“Don’t talk about Jim. Don’t say, ‘Fuck Jimmy.’ Don’t ever say anything bad about Jimmy LaRoque. Jimmy Tremonton LaRoque.”
“You’d need cord after cord of firewood. You’d need water, too. I’ll walk you out and you can go up to Presque Isle and stay with Jim’s family, just as he wants. That’s what’s best.”
“Oh, okay, mister. That’s what’s best? You maybe go where you wish, maybe up to Jimmy’s family, dickhead, but don’t tell me where to go, and don’t tell me what Jimmy wants, all right? I’m not one of your fucking clients.”
“But Jim is. Guys like Jim. Danielle. Dickhead, yourself. They often are my clients. Okay? I don’t want to be hunted down and greased by some caveman.”
“Greased? You want to get greased? You think Jimmy doesn’t sign his work? Jimmy signs his work. And me, I see your plan.”
“What plan? You never planned anything in your life.”
She shrieked. Shrill, unexpected, very loud. She shrieked and turned and swept in her robe into the main cabin, jammed the simple door shut behind her, locked it emphatically—the old wood piece that served as a latch sliding into place. He laughed, not unaffected. Clearly she expected drama in return, the door kicked in, some big-time shouting and general knocking about, then ravishment. Jimmy signs his work! What a fucking bitch. Eric turned back to his task with new urgency. Stupid fucking girl. And now he had to go, he really had to shit. The problem with climbing out the little porthole he had made would be climbing back in. You’d fall probably quite a few of the ten feet into the soft snow, and then what? He patted his pockets for his phone, Christ. What time was it? More quickly, and heart pounding as in court before oral arguments—that fucking girl, who wasn’t even a girl—he cut his way down the joins of the two boards all the way to his ruined loafers, not very difficult, then acro
ss the grain just above the workbench top, exhausting with the little saw and bent so low. Alison wasn’t one to slam doors and throw latches. She was merely one to quietly articulate a complaint (her bad behavior reconceived as yours) and then step out for some air. Often for days. He got down from the bench, kept sawing, a better position. He’d already said too much about Alison to Danielle. He’d already crossed every line. He shouldn’t fool himself. Intimacy was intimacy. The old tears sprang to his eyes and the old sinking in his breast overtook him, the Alison feeling (“There were bells / on the hills / but I never heard them ringing . . .”). He fought it, got to work, life or death, how about that, ungrateful Danielle girl-woman bitch.
Cautiously he eased the boards down like an inward-falling drawbridge, snow softly rushing through, no violence, just powdered sugar sifting nicely over the workbench and to the floor around his feet, cold and fresh-smelling. He wished for snowshoes, then had a brainstorm, retrieved the wide old pair of water skis with their rubber foot harnesses already adjusted big. He broke the skegs off the bottom with a hammer, easy enough, lined the skis up on the workbench, climbed up there himself, found he could slip his loafers into the feet nicely, too loose, so duct-tape the whole mess right to your ankles and shins over your pants, several wraps (plenty of tape), then a few extra to keep the snow out of your shoes. The sun out there was warm, but the breeze, damn, the breeze was sharp like broken glass.
Cautiously, using the hoe as an awkward ski pole, shoulder suddenly sore again, he glided off the workbench in the water skis and out through his makeshift door, patting and sliding as he went to harden a path out. First step into the drift and the day, and everything held. Next step and the next, and then he was moving, making a path he could just see out of, the top of the snow neck-high but very soft and light, classic powder, strata of other types of snow beneath, all those changing temperatures, all that wind. He moved through the drifts batting with his hands and slithering the heavy skis, made his way to the front of the cabin, which was unrecognizable, completely buried in snow and tree parts, the two great pines close against the house, one on top of the other, two or more of the huge hemlocks snapped off and crushed beneath, so much snow and so many broken branches that someone just arriving would not have been able to see a cabin at all, only a slight depression where the force of the snow had caved in the front door, pine branches bent hard against the façade of the building. The precipitous terrain above had been cleared of everything for hundreds of yards, stripped bare by the force of thousands of tons of unstable drifts falling. There’d be no getting to the outhouse! If the outhouse were even still there, doubtful. The pressure on the cabin had to be enormous, and as the snow on the other side heated in the afternoon sun, the pressures would keep changing: the building could easily be off its piers by nightfall. They’d been lucky to make it this far. No one could stay here, no matter how stubborn, not another hour. To leave was the only plan, to leave together, whether Danielle and her sweetly delicate fuck-me tattoo liked it or not.
He tramped in a widening, anxious circle, beginning to sweat with the effort, made a little yard in the snow maybe twenty feet in diameter, walls five or so feet high—feeling of an empty swimming pool, amazing—snow probably another five feet underneath, still packing down but likely to harden in the cold as compacted snow always did. He bashed out a side spur, made a deep hole with the hoe, backed out, turned, and backed in again, dropped his trousers, no real choice. Cryogenically preserved shit, great, nothing but snowballs to wipe with, then fill in the hole.
He patted out a lady’s room in the same fashion, then patted his way to the river side of the house—cautiously, slowly, only a few feet between him and the rock face down to the water, that twelve- or fifteen-foot drop cleaned of snow by the sharp river wind. The current coursed black below, choked with snow and utterly inaccessible. He was a guy who prided himself on thinking his way forward through a problem. While meanwhile he was a guy who dealt almost daily with people who hadn’t thought forward, who never thought forward, who were always crushed by the problems that not looking forward had caused.
Another stroke of alarm hit him, left him breathless. Once, crossing a long bridge in Florida, he’d panicked and stopped the car in four lanes of traffic, leapt out. Only Alison’s calm voice had got him back in, cars skidding to stops behind them, horns blaring. She’d got him in and he’d lain on the backseat and calmly she took over the driving. It was a very high, very long bridge, the one into Tampa, and you couldn’t see the supports and somehow that had triggered this thing, could have killed them both. “You’re okay,” Alison had kept saying.
“I’m okay,” he said aloud, looking at snow, nothing but snow.
Heart still pounding but thoughts reined in, he shuffled and stamped his way to where the big front window should be and cleared it off as best he could with the hoe, wary of the load of snow still on that side of the roof, which if it let go might crush him, which if it let go (more like when it let go) would lighten the cabin by thousands of pounds, make it even more vulnerable to the pressures of the snow and trees shoved into its face on the other side. He and Alison had been having an argument. Leading up to the bridge, the terrifying bridge.
His feet were half frozen but he stomped a new little yard in front of the window up to the precipice of the ledge so as to afford some kind of view out, stamped his way under the house a little, enough to see that he was right: the heavy, old-school wooden frame of the place had been pushed to the edges of the cement piers, a solid foot of movement, fewer than three inches to go, a bare toehold. He pulled back out. Looked up as if he knew: Danielle was at the window watching him, the evolution of her mood not discernable. He offered the same gaze, a couple of neutral faces.
The memory of the stab of panic was nearly as potent as the panic itself and echoed the panic on the bridge, and Eric felt suddenly that he had to be inside. He clobbered his way back to the exit he’d made in the shed, found her in there holding a mug of coffee for him.
“Wow,” she said as if she hadn’t just been shrieking at him. She climbed up on the bench and kissed his face and kissed his neck and put the coffee down on a paint shelf behind him and kissed his mouth hard. “You are soaking wet,” she said passionately, “soaking wet and frozen, my god. Are you okay? You look freaked out. And your fucking pants are frozen.”
“I’m sorry I said that about Jim,” he said, tears coming to his eyes. “No more kisses, okay?”
“I’m sorry, too. Grease you. Where the fuck did that come from? Mister, I’m sorry.”
“Just no more.” He cried.
“Please feel better,” Danielle said, patting him, not kissing. “I need you to feel better.”
Thirty-One
TO DRAIN THE slipper tub, handy Eric used the keyhole saw to enlarge a flaw in the floor enough to pass the length of the belay hose through, fifty feet of it. Danielle looked on with interest, a fresh understanding between them. He poured half a pot of the dirty water down the hose, which he capped with his hand very quickly then submerged into the bath, let go. Success: you could hear the water splashing under the house. He kinked the hose, bid Danielle hold the kink, and rushed back outside. The snow he’d packed had hardened per his expectation, and he was able to walk in rain boots around to the river side and duck under the house. He found the hose end and pulled the full length out, shouted for her to let it go, aimed gray water at the top of each of the piers he could reach—four on the river side, a quick five gallons of water each (smell of Breck), with the hope that the ice already forming would act as cement and not lube.
Back inside, Danielle crossed her arms in front of her chest. “How did you think of that?” She’d already wiped the slipper tub clean with her soiled robe. More reason to leave—their resources in every category were getting used up. He felt dangerously close to her, danger all around him. He’d never been a person who liked to bend the rules. Nor had he ever been bold in love. Nor had he ever much sought adventur
e. That explained Alison, at least till it didn’t. And that’s what had led him to the Navy instead of, say, the Army fucking Rangers. And that’s why he hadn’t traveled to Nepal in college when his friends had—a four-month trek—but had picked the London semester. And small-town law: your own office, your daily lunch in town, the same judge always, the same two prosecutors, the same kind of trouble, client after client.
“Danielle,” he said too warmly, then explained the problem with the house.
She uncrossed her arms and reiterated what he himself had explained to her the night before: the place could only fall the width of the joists under there. The piers might pop through the floor, but the building would never go over the cliff, that was ridiculous.
“I’m worried about fire,” Eric said. “I mean, I’m very worried about what might happen with the stove in that situation, if the house falls off its piers.”
“I don’t see how we can leave,” she said. “I don’t see how I could make it out, even if you can. How would we do it? I’ve got a situation with my ankle. And that’s just one of our problems.”
He went to the window, peered out at the landscape of snow. He said, “Maybe I could go for help.”
She’d followed him, stood close behind him. “I don’t think I’ll do well left alone,” she said. “And what about you? One slip and no one knows what became of him.”
“We just have to keep thinking,” he said.
“Some things, you can’t think,” she said.
“Maybe that’s true,” he said.
She turned him forcibly away from the window, made him hold her eye. She was a very deep person, if you looked, like looking into a well. She said, “You cannot leave me alone. Eric. You can’t. I have been left alone before. It’s not a good idea.”
The Remedy for Love Page 17
