“Was she pretty?” Mary asked.
“Very, but fine, not necessarily sexy.”
“Like me,” Mary said.
“Yes.” Tim smiled and looked out over the river.
“Except for the fact that I’m also somewhat sexy.”
“Yes.” Tim looked at the orange water and remembered how he’d waded into it ahead of the woman. He’d been quiet about how it felt, knowing she would step into the sand herself, and it would feel to her a little more like a magical thing if he said nothing. The sun was just right. He hadn’t gone in until he was sure the light would be even with their shoulders, slowly pressing down into the water around their waists.
“But you were drunk?” Mary said.
“Right, but trying to do it well.”
“Of course,” Mary said. “If you can’t do it well…” She turned on her side listening to him. He was looking out at his story as if it were on the other side of the river. And she looked over to the far bank, at the birches and poplars and pine. There was a scrap of someone’s bright yellow tent peeking through the trees. It was the kind of yellow they always used in cartoons for the sun.
“I had the proverbial Volkswagen van.”
“Let me guess. Blue,” she said.
He laughed. “Red, I’m afraid. I would have liked blue, though.”
“Anyway, I’d met her at a festival, funky, very surreal, like Mardi Gras. And a friend of mine had just been talking about her. He’d just been telling me about this woman, someone he’d gone to school with, you know. She played the flute, orchestra employed. He went on and on—like she was this veritable paragon—about her impeccable character.”
“And you met her just a few minutes later.”
“Yeah, she’d been holding up one of these wonderful puppets, holding it up for someone in the parade. And when she gave it back, my friend, Ben, recognized her, but it was like I already knew who she was.”
“I wish you’d tell me what she looked like.”
“She was beautiful, good bones, good skin, good teeth. Ben said, ‘I can’t believe it,’ you know, and so on, but it didn’t matter. I was looking at her. I’d tipped some tequila just prior and, you know, there was charisma. I could feel it in my eyes.”
“Right, Tim.”
“Yes!” Tim turned to Mary and put his hand on her arm. “That does happen.”
And Mary felt reprimanded. “I know,” she said. And she did know, especially with tequila, she knew that brief peak, when you feel enlightened, more like marijuana, the illusion that light could be brimming over and coming out of your eyes.
“And you know,” Tim said, “there was that element of destiny present. Ben had just sung her praises, and there she was. Her face was so peaceful, and it was like she could feel my look, but she wasn’t going to take it any other way but within her own stride. She was with other people. We talked for maybe only a minute.”
“But how did you finally get together?”
They were interrupted by a motorboat clipping past, its wake behind it. It wasn’t long before it had rounded the bend, and they could only hear it. But the wake pushed the water up on the banks, almost covering their feet, and their bobbers were tossed on the reckless crest.
Mary pulled her legs away from the water.
It seemed to Tim that boats shouldn’t be allowed to travel so fast in this part of the river. He put his head back against the tree, waited for the roar of the motor to die away.
ST. CROIX STATE PARK—he pictured the sign posted at the entrance. He passed it every time he drove Highway 8, and he wondered if there was ever a time he passed it that he didn’t think to himself, If I could only.… What? That was always unclear. But the last time, he had decided he would bring Mary here. It was an almost half-hearted decision. Just a decision that had quietly culminated from all the times he had passed the sign and all the times he had begun to think, If I could only.…
“Bird-watching.” Once the motor’s noise had died, he was able to answer Mary’s question.
“What?” Mary was incredulous.
“It’s true,” he said. “The very next weekend. I’d crashed at a friend’s house. It was getting late, but we’d been on a toot. He’d been telling me that he had to knock it off, that he had to get up to go bird-watching with a friend, but I didn’t want to leave, you know, didn’t want to be alone.”
“What was his name?”
“I don’t know. I had such a multitude of friends back then. I was persuasive, as usual, and convinced him to stay up with me a little longer. I said I’d get up with him in the morning and go along.”
“And you sat up the rest of the night talking about birds?”
“I think we did, as a matter of fact.”
“I’m sure you were both quite expansive on the subject.”
“I’m sure,” Tim said. “But of course at that point I was blacked out. The next day my friend was horribly hung over, and he held me responsible. I had to wake him up. We both took showers. It was only 6 A.M. It was drizzling, and he’d thought maybe his bird-watching date wouldn’t want to go after all. So he called her, used her name, but I never made the connection.”
“Poor guy,” Mary said. “Obviously she was set on going.”
“Yeah. I drove his car. She was waiting outside her house wearing rain gear. I didn’t recognize her until she pushed her head in the car. She looked a little sleepy.”
“But more alive than the two of you, I’d expect.”
Tim smiled, remembering. “I reminded her of our meeting, and she just settled into the backseat, smiled a time, and said, ‘Yes.’”
“Yes, she already recognized you? Yes, she remembered now that you mentioned it?”
“I don’t know,” Tim said, but in fact he had always believed that she remembered him. They had driven to a kind of reserve. He would never remember the directions. The windshield wipers were going, an awkward squeaking against their silence in the car. His arms were heavy and his mind in a fog. But a special song had come on the radio, one that had been the theme song with a past lover, and that he still held very dear. The speakers were in the backseat just behind her head, so he’d felt that they were sharing a past, even if they didn’t speak, and he was comforted by the remote certainty that they would become intimate.
“The land we hiked on was by a river, because I remember seeing trout fishermen when our path crossed it.”
“And you saw birds?”
“Absolutely. But only the two of them had binoculars. I wasn’t used to listening for them or seeing them. She, on the other hand, had a lot of experience, had been all over the country with her father since she was a little girl. She would just stop on the path, point without saying a word. My friend would raise his binoculars. I’d stand next to her, and she’d pass her binoculars with the strap still around her neck. She’d tell me the name and things about the bird. We had to whisper.”
“Ooooh!” Mary said.
“Ooooh, yourself,” he said.
“No, really,” Mary said. “I love it: ‘suspended passion,’ the tension. Did your hand brush against hers when you were sharing the binoculars?”
“No,” Tim said. “I didn’t want to put her off in any way. And passion?” Tim said. “What if there was—would that have been so bad?”
He remembered how very quiet it had been on that path except for the light drizzle, the rustle of her rain jacket when she raised the glasses. He’d been wearing a trench coat, not the sort of thing one wears hiking. But he had had the collar up, and with the mist still rising from the ground, there was something right about that. He had felt that while she was showing him a world, he’d brought a slightly mysterious world of his own with him.
Mary thought back to their own courtship. How goodnaturedly he had stood out in her new circle of friends, how unquestionably handsome he was. She’d always been glad that she hadn’t met him in an AA meeting—that he hadn’t been put in the context of metal folding chairs and
Styrofoam coffee cups and the wash of rhetoric in some church basement.
The meetings had been necessary, but there was also a loss of feeling, a numbness that began at that time and even now lingered like an overdose of novocaine. She would listen to the others’ stories, like the mother who drank steadily from a bottle she kept hidden behind the clothes dryer. “People at parties were always surprised at how low my tolerance was to alcohol,” the woman would laugh. “Two drinks and I would be such an intense and passionate person. Sometimes it would take only one. One to upset the normal level in my blood. My husband always told them it was because I was so petite.” She’d laugh. “My son once drove me home early from a family reunion.” Her eyes would always fill with tears at this point. “He said I had kissed him on the mouth. He was nineteen.” She always said this with complete horror, as if she hadn’t already told them the story many times before. “And he never told me until years later when he was finished with school.”
“You have to forgive yourself,” people would tell the mother. Mary hoped no one in the group felt contempt for her, the way she sometimes felt toward this woman.
They all seemed to have their one special story. There was the insurance man who wore plastic gloves the whole first year they were in group together. He had disappeared for a week-long binge, telling his wife he had a convention. Then he came home on Monday night, lit the grill for dinner, and when the coals were white, picked them up in his hands and held them until he lost consciousness.
Mary often gazed at those gloves, which were a transparent green and always seemed to have some oozing substance bubbling under the surface of them. As grotesque as his story was, it didn’t seem to bother her as much as some of the others. It was cruel, but also clean—a clean break. Whenever he looked at his hands, they would be both then and now. He didn’t have to go deep back into his regrets to remind anyone what he was afraid of. His hands were always in front of him, horrible and simple.
Tim had been part of something clean and new the summer they first knew each other—picnics with a social group and bicycle trips. Like a teenager again, he seemed to throw himself into everything that was physical. He bought a sailboard and took it out every weekend, waving to them from the lake. He must have realized he was like an emblem for their whole experience, the sun glinting off his sail as it did, taking them back to a kind of adolescence where their possibilities were pure again.
Even their coming together had seemed unpremeditated and easy. He’d encouraged her to try the board, and she’d spent the afternoon out on the water, being dumped and swallowing lake water, bruising her legs against the board. But there was an elation, even in the pain, to be struggling with something so clean.
She finally had it sailing and took it for a distance, leaving him behind, laughing and treading water. But she couldn’t bring it about and fell again. He had swum after her. Her suit had come down when she started to hoist herself on the board again. He brought her back into the water. As she’d tried to cover her breasts, he’d taken her hand away. He pressed carefully against her in the water, fitting his chest against hers and wrapping her legs around his hips.
They had been careful as lovers, as if neither of them could bear to show how experienced they really were, as if they were starting over. There seemed a silent agreement that drinking and love had been an all-too-integrated passion. So they were afraid, sometimes a little stiff and, Mary had to admit, sometimes a little bored.
The whole sailing incident had rushed back to her mind one day when she’d broken an apple open. The first of the season, so white—she was startled, even humiliated, to remember how equally white her breasts had been that afternoon. And she often wondered if Tim would ever have thought of her as a lover, if he hadn’t seen them that one accidental moment. Maybe he had been as numb as she and had to be surprised into wanting someone again.
“Are you with me?” Tim laid his hand on hers. The sun had changed; it was shining right on the water closest to shore. The water was so clear in the shallows that she could see particles of light glinting from the sandy bottom. She could see where the river got deep farther out because it was a dark swath in comparison.
“Yes,” she said. “Now tell me how you went from bird-watching to being lovers?”
“Well, we weren’t ever lovers, not like you mean…”
This Mary had assumed and, somehow, now the story seemed more dangerous. It made her feel that it wasn’t finished for him. That he still wanted the other woman.
“You haven’t told me about the drinking. I thought this was a drinking story?”
“Just wait,” he said. He poured her some tea from the thermos next to him. She could tell just from looking at it that it was merely warm. Cinnamon tea—she couldn’t help associating it with their early romance. He had brought a package of it over on their second date. “Just smell this,” he said. “Isn’t it wonderful?” He’d brought candles, too, and put a tape on her stereo. Even then, so early on, it seemed he couldn’t begin to be with her until he had created a certain atmosphere. And today she felt his usual insistence in making their time a certain way. Their lines were in the river not as much to catch fish, she felt, but because there was something ideal in the posture of two people with fishing poles beside them.
He didn’t pour a cup for himself from the thermos, and and when the coals were white, picked them up in his hands and held them until he lost consciousness.
Mary often gazed at those gloves, which were a transparent green and always seemed to have some oozing substance bubbling under the surface of them. As grotesque as his story was, it didn’t seem to bother her as much as some of the others. It was cruel, but also clean—a clean break. Whenever he looked at his hands, they would be both then and now. He didn’t have to go deep back into his regrets to remind anyone what he was afraid of. His hands were always in front of him, horrible and simple.
Tim had been part of something clean and new the summer they first knew each other—picnics with a social group and bicycle trips. Like a teenager again, he seemed to throw himself into everything that was physical. He bought a sail-board and took it out every weekend, waving to them from the lake. He must have realized he was like an emblem for their whole experience, the sun glinting off his sail as it did, taking them back to a kind of adolescence where their possibilities were pure again.
Even their coming together had seemed unpremeditated and easy. He’d encouraged her to try the board, and she’d spent the afternoon out on the water, being dumped and swallowing lake water, bruising her legs against the board. But there was an elation, even in the pain, to be struggling with something so clean.
She finally had it sailing and took it for a distance, leaving him behind, laughing and treading water. But she couldn’t bring it about and fell again. He had swum after her. Her suit had come down when she started to hoist herself on the board again. He brought her back into the water. As she’d tried to cover her breasts, he’d taken her hand away. He pressed carefully against her in the water, fitting his chest against hers and wrapping her legs around his hips.
They had been careful as lovers, as if neither of them could bear to show how experienced they really were, as if they were starting over. There seemed a silent agreement that drinking and love had been an all-too-integrated passion. So they were afraid, sometimes a little stiff and, Mary had to admit, sometimes a little bored.
The whole sailing incident had rushed back to her mind one day when she’d broken an apple open. The first of the season, so white—she was startled, even humiliated, to remember how equally white her breasts had been that afternoon. And she often wondered if Tim would ever have thought of her as a lover, if he hadn’t seen them that one accidental moment. Maybe he had been as numb as she and had to be surprised into wanting someone again.
“Are you with me?” Tim laid his hand on hers. The sun had changed; it was shining right on the water closest to shore. The water was so clear in the shallows that she co
uld see particles of light glinting from the sandy bottom. She could see where the river got deep farther out because it was a dark swath in comparison.
“Yes,” she said. “Now tell me how you went from bird-watching to being lovers?”
“Well, we weren’t ever lovers, not like you mean…”
This Mary had assumed and, somehow, now the story seemed more dangerous. It made her feel that it wasn’t finished for him. That he still wanted the other woman.
“You haven’t told me about the drinking. I thought this was a drinking story?”
“Just wait,” he said. He poured her some tea from the thermos next to him. She could tell just from looking at it that it was merely warm. Cinnamon tea—she couldn’t help associating it with their early romance. He had brought a package of it over on their second date. “Just smell this,” he said. “Isn’t it wonderful?” He’d brought candles, too, and put a tape on her stereo. Even then, so early on, it seemed he couldn’t begin to be with her until he had created a certain atmosphere. And today she felt his usual insistence in making their time a certain way. Their lines were in the river not as much to catch fish, she felt, but because there was something ideal in the posture of two people with fishing poles beside them.
He didn’t pour a cup for himself from the thermos, and she decided there was no point telling him it was tepid. It didn’t matter; there was nothing he could do about it.
“So we went to breakfast after the hike,” he continued, “at a restaurant on the highway. We both sat across from her in the booth. My friend was feeling a little better by then, and it hadn’t occurred to me that he might be actually interested in her himself.”
“Good, Tim.”
“Right. But while he was feeling a little better, I was feeling a little worse. I was cooking off some of the alcohol, and I felt really hot. He was keeping the coffee cups filled, like he intended to stay. But I was so hot, I could feel the flush, and I was sweating. I finally told her.”
House of Heroes Page 19
