by Paul Monette
“What did you think you’d find up here?” she asked, not so much to change the subject as to start on firmer ground.
“They closed the place, did you know that?”
“No,” she said. It struck her she’d never heard of Carbon Mountain College, except for the fact that Jasper went there. That was its one distinction, somehow. “It’s all boarded up, is it?”
“Not exactly. It’s crawling with monks.”
“Catholics?”
“Crazies, more than likely. I didn’t ask them what they were into, beliefwise. I guess they keep a few bees. Mostly, they pray for us worldly types.”
He sounded very tired. Clearly, she thought, he’d hit a dead end. But no wonder—the past always covered its tracks. He ought to have known there wouldn’t be any concrete data left behind. No relics, no husks, and no abandoned campsites. Time didn’t have any patience for the leaving of human artifacts. Everything simply came and went.
“They don’t suspect a thing,” she said.
By “they,” she meant to diffuse the issue of who was guilty, parceling it out to Carl and Artie both, as if it were a conspiracy. She went to the mantel and stood above him. The fire made light of the silk.
“You couldn’t know there was nothing here till you came and found out for yourself,” she said.
Which was really quite expansive of her, but all he had to do was pick up the phone and call ahead, and they would have told him they weren’t in the education business anymore. Vivien persevered on the bright side. She didn’t like to see him full of second thoughts.
“Did I say I failed?” he asked in some surprise. “I guess I must project a lousy attitude. You don’t have to fret over me, you know. I got what I came for.”
Not a word about the cost. How they put him through half a day’s runaround, yesterday in the bitter cold. A slack-jawed second-rank priest had grilled him a full two hours to discover if he was worthy to see the joker who ran the show. Greg said he was Jasper Cokes’s brother—which elicited several pieties about the wages of dissipation. When at last he was ushered in, the man at the top turned out to be a jelly-eyed fanatic, who talked as if he were training a band of terrorists. Luckily, Greg had learned to filter out the nutcake gods, through years of walking among the messiahs of Hollywood Boulevard.
All for what? An hour and a half in the musty attic where the college records were locked away. Watched by a postulant booby, who picked his nose and sifted through a trunk full of academic hoods. In the end, Greg could come up with nothing more germane than Jasper’s transcript. A 2.8 overall average, with remedial work required in French and mathematics. Disciplinary action taken only once, to do with a snowman built on the desk of the freshman dean. Probable career: undecided.
“Like what?” she asked. A little too pugnacious.
“Artie was home that night,” said Greg. “Isn’t that right?”
She nodded—for the sake of argument only, since that was what everyone thought. In fact, of course, he’d been miles away, but she was the only one who knew.
“He says he heard Jasper and Harry come in,” said Greg in a methodological way. He stood and put his gimlet down on the mantel next to hers. She saw they were both quite even, having drunk them two-thirds down. “It seems they were falling all over each other to get to bed. Artie let them alone and went away to his room. He never saw Harry before, he says. About two hours later, he went for a walk, and there they were.” These were the barest facts as reported in the papers, minus the tears and hysterics. Greg droned over it now with no editorial comment. “So Artie’s the only one who ever saw them together. Nobody else—not even Carl.”
“Maybe they used to meet at Harry’s place,” she offered. “Jasper didn’t always bring them home.”
This wouldn’t do at all, she thought. She was coaxing him farther and farther in, as if she meant to go along. She simply had to tell him. Artie had made it all up about them coming in drunk and horny—to cover the fact that he was somewhere else. What held her back from saying so was wishing not to win.
“Anyway,” Greg continued after a moment, “this is the key, right here.”
When she looked toward him, not entirely sure she’d heard him right, she saw he was tossing an actual prop. A filigreed key, about four inches long. It must have weighed half a pound. He tossed it and caught it, over and over, like somebody bent on a dose of self-hypnosis.
“I’ll take you in tomorrow,” he said. “Unless you’ve got other plans.” For all he knew, she had leads of her own that needed following up.
“Whenever you say.”
She understood the subject to be closed for now. She would have to hold off springing the news of the airline ticket. Still, she couldn’t figure why, if he’d broken the case wide open, he seemed so sorry underneath.
“There’s all this food,” she said. “You hungry?”
“Sure,” he said gently, and turned with her toward the groaning board.
Where, in these godforsaken mountains, had she found a wedge of brie? She had fifteen kinds of vegetables, razor-thin and raw, circling a bowl of sour cream and curry. He decided she probably had a deal. Some market in Beverly Hills sent along, at a dollar a radish, a chest of dainties wherever she went, packed in a fog of dry ice. He chewed on a couple of pea pods, smiling across at her benignly. Thinking: I bet we look like quite a pair. Him in his baggy overalls. Her in her Marc Bohan.
“You still feel nothing?” he asked.
She shrugged, as if to say, Who knew? “The last few days,” she said, “I haven’t had the time to notice. That usually means it’s passed. What about you? You still a loser?”
“Depends on what I’m losing,” he replied. He dipped a carrot and passed it across, since she made no move to feed herself. “Tell me, when did it change for you and Jasper? Did you used to get it on? Or was it always to each his own?”
Could they really ask each other questions no one else had ever been allowed? Artie wouldn’t have dreamed of putting it to her straight. Even assuming the light was green, could they talk this way without attendant rancor? Perhaps if they had no ulterior motives. None whatsoever. Though how could they ever be sure?
“Never. Not once,” she said precisely, without any trace of regret. “We’d had it with acting out, before we ever met. We didn’t have the stomach for charades. How is it you got to know Harry Dawes so well? Without sleeping with him, I mean.”
He plucked up a handful of vegetable bits and cut off a two-inch slice of cheese. He bore these back to his seat by the fire, like so many winter provisions.
“You mean, because gay men usually do their fucking first.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say gay,” she said. “These days, everyone fucks before they say hello.”
She walked to the hearth, where she reached down into a wide-mouthed basket. She brought up two birch logs. Deftly, she slung them onto the fire, first one and then the other. From a hook in the stone, she produced a crude straw broom and swept the hearth of ashes. Greg took note of her charwoman’s skills. No ersatz sawdust firewood in the royal suite, he thought.
“He came on so subtle, it went right by me,” Greg said finally. “I’m used to more explicit propositions.”
“But you see my point,” she said, and though he nodded, he didn’t see at all. The nodding was more like a wave of sleep. It took him the whole of the speech she spoke to figure this was the thing she’d been getting at all along. “Officially, we’re the two widows,” she said. “Isn’t it strange? We never got to first base with either one of them. I don’t know how many men you’ve had. Probably more than I, but then, they don’t put yours in the papers. Still, it’s safe to say we’re not exactly virgins. So how is it we’ve come all this way for the sake of these men we couldn’t love?”
Couldn’t?
The way she put it, it sounded strange enough. She said “widow” the night they met, he remembered, on the hillside by the grave. He’d bridled at it then, and he didn
’t much care for it now. Why did the woman insist on finding parallels in him and Harry? There was no particular story behind his missed connection. Not the way there was with Vivien and Jasper. It was as if she’d found out only now, with Jasper dead, that she couldn’t live with what they added up to. Nothing to show for the last eight years but a lot of coverage. Greg didn’t blame her a bit. He’d have felt the same himself, in her position. Which he wasn’t.
“See, if it was someone I really loved,” he said, “I’d never have come this far. I’d just quietly fall apart. I’d starve to death in my own apartment. If he was really my other half, I wouldn’t have gotten over it at all.”
“You ever have a man like that?”
He heaved a deep shrug, as if to say that was a very tall order. Then he took a deep breath and answered: “No.”
No, he thought suddenly, don’t get pissed at her. It isn’t to do with her at all.
“Me neither,” she admitted. “Maybe there’s no such thing.”
“That’s what I always tell myself, whenever I’m near a mirror. Doesn’t help. I’m always looking.”
“Like waiting for a break, huh?”
She meant the Hollywood kind.
He nodded: “After a while, it drives you crazy. You get so you’ll take almost anything.”
On that note, as if to test him, the sky broke open. With a long moan of release, it flung down on the woodland lodge the storm it had been holding for the past two days. It probably started by degrees. While they talked by the hissing fire, there were probably spattered drops and gusts of icy wind. Doubtless, it overtook the land mountain by mountain. But somehow, they didn’t hear a peep till it fell in full Wagnerian force on top of them.
The water came in sheets and hit the barn like a tidal wave. They turned to the door to listen, though it pelted all over the roof like a drum of stones. The gods, it seemed, had had enough of moods. If they wanted to talk their feelings out, then let them take their cue from the seethe of nature. You didn’t come to Vermont to sit inside and castle the air with what you thought of love. You came to thrill to the wilderness. To throw your civilization off.
When they eyed each other again, it was with a certain measure of relief, she thought. They’d about used up their stock of naked questions. Drawing each other out like this, divulging all they could, they’d cut to the heart of things in record time. The rest was just a list of names.
Why bother? They had no use for chapter and verse. What they had to get to the bottom of was the whole idea of it all. Unless, she thought, it was only something she was partial to. She froze with a sudden pang of doubt, as they grinned at each other about the rain. Could it be that he had no theory of love?
“You want to go for a walk?” she asked.
“We’ll get wet,” he said, but as if the prospect were delightful. He only wished he had a change of overalls. He didn’t want to go back just yet to the pants he wore at home.
“Oh no we won’t,” exclaimed Vivien, laughing openly now. She took his hand and tugged him along to the bedroom end of the room. She flung open a closet door and gestured proudly. “Compliments of the management.”
She had enough rain gear hung inside to outfit a dory of fishermen. Hip boots and bright yellow slickers. Rain hats brimmed like firemen’s helmets. Amenities not included with his room, Greg thought, prickling slightly. It seemed like only the rich were allowed to go out in the rain.
He kicked off his field hand’s mud-warped shoes and pulled down a high black-rubber boot. Out of the corner of one eye, he could see her worming the gray silk over her head. She dropped it in a heap on the quilted bed. Naked, she went to the dresser and rifled a drawer for jeans and a sweater. He knew enough not to watch her. She’d gone ahead assuming it was no big deal, whether or not they closed the door to strip. He wouldn’t have tried the same with her, he thought as he wrestled the boot—in case he would seem to mock her with the specter of his indifference. She did right, he thought, to act so freely. They didn’t always have to think.
He hadn’t put on galoshes since he was a kid. The raincoat slumped about him like a tent, till only his fingertips showed at the sleeves. He felt like an astronaut crossed with a scarecrow. He squeaked across the floor, rubber against rubber, and laughed to get her attention. She stood at the mirror, pinning up her hair.
“Captain,” he said, “I’m going out on deck to batten down the hatches.”
And he tramped away to the door and threw it open. She begged him to wait. So he ventured only as far as the porch, while she threw on her outer gear. The force of the rain was loud as Niagara, though even as close as this, he couldn’t see six inches into the night. He put out the flat of one hand beyond the shelter of the eaves. The storm, alert to the least impertinence, slapped it so hard that he drew it right back in again and held it against his cheek.
How did the seedlings stand it? Of course, they were built to bend with things, he thought. Go with the flow. Do not go counter. He flipped his hand sideways and knifed it into the rain. It held steady. He stood there a moment, mesmerized by the icy cold.
When did they say, without stretching the point, that winter was done around here? Was the cold so deep in the land that it never let one year alone before it came round the next? If Vivien hadn’t bounded out toward him, leaping into the thick of it, he probably would have chickened out and rushed back in to the fire.
“Put on your hat!” she shouted out of the dark. “I’ll race you to the trees!”
He wasn’t in competition form, but he clamped the rain hat on his head and marched out into the whirlwind. He couldn’t run out on her now. The rain set in to pummel him fiercely, as he staggered forward toward her. Surely, he reasoned, they wouldn’t be out two minutes before they’d had their fill. Then they could brew up a proper toddy and talk about simpler matters—huddled close by the birchwood fire.
When he reached her side, they propped each other up as they crept ahead through the beaten grass. They couldn’t see what was the path and what wasn’t. One or the other slipped at every second step. But somehow, they didn’t go both at once, so no one fell. They kept a precarious balance and made a little headway. He had to admit he was bone dry, in his neat cocoon of waterproof stuff. Perhaps if he’d been alone he would have turned back by now, but going arm in arm was something else again. They shared it half and half. Though the mud was now up to their ankles, they slogged ahead.
Somehow, it got them started laughing. They probably couldn’t have said what the funny thing was, but it had to do with their expectations. They’d come a long, long way to front nature face to face. If they’d had any picture at all, it was sitting pensively on a rock, the view in all directions fifty miles, fixing a dreamy look on a daisy in their hands. What could they possibly contemplate here, stunned and giddy like this? They might have been in interplanetary space.
Dimly, up ahead, they could see the line of spruces bordering the woods. They ducked their heads against the sudden whip of the wind. With a tangible goal so near at hand, they made their way more resolutely—laughing all the way. They weren’t going to have to talk about it, for one thing. Rain was rain. It didn’t allow for a lot of contradictory theories.
Greg was beginning to tire. He had a sudden sense that this was how it went when one was drowning. He’d gotten so used to the buffeting wind and beat of the rain that, somewhere along the way, he’d started to drift. He no longer seemed to know how far afield they’d gone. Didn’t even, after a certain point, open his eyes to the little he could see. It was rather like being asleep, he thought. He gripped her closer around the waist and lurched ahead again. Like being asleep, he thought, in someone’s arms.
Then they bumped into the tree, hard.
His head and his knee cracked against it, both at once. Vivien struck one shoulder, wrenched to the side, and felt the pain root in her back. The situation was suddenly stood on its head. If they’d been alone here, and not so arm-in-arm, they might have stayed
on their feet. As it was, they went down in a tangle.
The mud was so thick they couldn’t get a foothold. They slopped around like pigs for a bit, then pulled themselves up by the bark of the tree. Greg lost his hat. By the time he retrieved it out of a puddle and stood erect again, he could feel the soak of the shirt against his skin. He looked over. Vivien’s poncho was turned so the hood was up around her face. He twisted it till it was right again.
They looked each other straight in the eye. Even now, with the aches and chills, there was something close to glee in the way they smiled. It was on his lips to say they ought to go back. Yet the rain was a good deal muted beneath the tree. Having made it as far as this, they might as well have a walk in the woods for their trouble.
Which course they agreed on without a word. They nodded and bowed and stepped around the offending tree. Meeting up on the other side, they walked along on a sponge of needles.
“Have you ever picked up a guy,” he called through the rain, “and a minute later you’re sorry? You just want to be alone, all of a sudden. But by then it’s too late. You have to go through with it.”
“What?” she bellowed back.
“I said, I met this boy this morning,” Greg sang out. Maybe loud like this was the only way. He told it statement by simple statement, coloring things as little as he could. “I was walking around the college,” he called. “He was some kind of student monk. Somebody must have told him I was Jasper’s brother.”
For a moment she seemed to miss a step, as if she’d sunk into a soft spot.
“That’s my cover,” Greg hastened to clarify. “He says he knows the place I’m looking for. Which throws me a bit, because I don’t. But see,”—and a throb came into his voice, like a trill in an aria—”I sort of had to lead him on. That’s how I got him to take me there.”
Was that the way it was? he thought. How could he get it across that a thing like this could happen without his choosing? Sometimes you met a man who’d held it in from the moment he broke through to puberty. There was this terrible need to try the darkness. You felt an obligation to it—like it needed space to thrive. So he flexed a little, as they sood and talked on the chapel steps, and hitched his pants and rubbed himself till they both were close to frantic. What he didn’t know how to tell Vivien was who the poor guy looked like.
