The Remedy for Love: A Novel

by Bill Roorbach

  “Haven’t got one,” Jack said, heavy Maine accent, swallowed syllables. Back in the dark house the bright voice of an excited weatherman. Jack would be the guy with batteries for his radio, of course, the guy without a phone. “Fastest accumulation in the records,” the old man said.

  Mildly, Eric said, “I’d heard that predicted.”

  “By jeezum crow,” Jack said.

  Behind the old man in the dimmest possible light Eric could make out piles of cardboard boxes and high stacks of newspapers and cat-litter stations, whatever you called them, encrusted cat turds strewn all around, stacks of soiled books, folded lawn chairs, bundles of firewood, stench of piss like the breath of the house, clogged passages through all the junk.

  But Jack wasn’t inviting him in: “So much for all this hockey-puck of yours about global warming!”

  “Hockey-puck,” Eric repeated.

  “They keep uppering the prediction. Now they says four feet!”

  “Four feet!”

  “Forty-eight inches! Just heard!”

  No phone.

  Whom had he been planning to call, anyway? He had had to let his secretary go months since, and she was still bitter. His best local friend, Carl, was in Nigeria for the year. Patty Cardinal, his church friend, didn’t drive anywhere after dark: all these private fears. Alison, be real, Alison was on permanent leave, it increasingly looked, and two hours away in any case, down in Portland, three in this weather, finally living the big life she’d always envisioned for herself, cute condo, high-pressure job, and the company of Ribbie their dog, who spent all day alone. His own house, a tidy little place he’d owned before Alison ever moved in, was on the other edge of downtown, a good five miles away, maybe six.

  Hardware-store Jack had all the time in the world, was introducing various cats as Eric stood in the open door, Tingle and Pete and Round-Eye and Pretty Miss and Little Hunger-Tum.

  Eric’s mind raced: his office. But that was no help, only slightly closer than home—four hours at the rate he’d been proceeding, and with the wind higher and the snow deeper every minute. The closest houses were at least two miles. A year back he might have called Jane and Bill or Drew and Sarah, these couples like friends of the marriage, but they had proven themselves aligned with Alison, or if they hadn’t they’d been neutral and that had irked him and he’d backed away, isolating himself. Alison liked to say. He started back down the list of his acquaintances, lots of whom might be helpful. Or, what the heck, call the police: he knew them all anyway from his work. They’d come and get him.

  If he had a goddamn phone.

  Some hell creature shrieked from back in the packed bowels of Jack’s castle. “Hunger-Tum!” the old man cried.

  Seven

  ERIC BANGED ON the cabin door this time, banged and called out. His own fresh tracks had already been thoroughly buried, and he was soaked to the skin, his wrists aching from falls, but he’d made it down and now it was dark, no going back.

  He was too miserable to stand on courtesy: when she didn’t answer (and why would she, even if she could hear his banging?), he took a deep breath, blew it out, grimaced, then shoved the old door, a desperate push. It fell open easily. “Halloo,” he said, though she was only at the big butcher’s block, hacking at something.

  She spun, startled: “Okay, no,” she said.

  “My car was towed.”

  More than startled: “You’re scaring me, mister.”

  “No, no. It’s not like that.”

  “You’re scaring me badly, mister! Get out! Out!”

  He held his hands up to show them empty. Also in case she came at him with the knife she’d been using, which it looked like she might. Quietly he said, “I’ve got nowhere else to go. Don’t be afraid. Please. You know me. I mean, I’m a nice local person. I just need help as you did. I throw myself at your mercy. All the power’s out up there. My phone was in the car.” He knew he had to up the ante: “The fucking vet bitch had it towed. And that place is like a fortress—I couldn’t kick the door in. I bruised my shoulder on it, I’m telling you, and I’m not exactly a shrimp. And I’m freezing. The snow is coming down like, like I don’t know what. Like an explosion, like a building coming down, okay? There’s not a car passing up there. Not one car. There’s like one house and the guy in there is completely nuts. That’s as far as I could get, all this time. And now it’s dark.” His voice broke, surprising him. Tears started to his eyes; he couldn’t help it.

  She’d been cutting oranges, or so it smelled. The lantern light was reflected in her eyes as if it were they that burned and not the kerosene. Her big bag of tortilla chips was ripped open and half spilled on the butcher’s block. His groceries were on the floor where they’d fallen amid the ripped bags. She was still in the robe, had found her thick wool socks, still with the Rasta cap.

  She said, “You made a big mistake. You think you’re nice but you’re not. What you are is you’re an idiot. You’re an idiot to help me, and you’re an idiot to come back down here. Of course there are people up there. What do you want from me? What do you want?”

  He looked to the stove, the beautiful hot stove.

  She said, “Stay there. Right there. When Jim gets here? You’re grease. Do you understand me? Grease.”

  “Let me just warm up,” Eric said. He’d seen her soften. Just one tick, but something. Grease. That must be her husband talking. One of those solid guys on the road crew, say, or in Maxi’s garage, tough and funny, shaved heads and rough tattoos, tender inside if you didn’t cross them, though crossing them was hard to avoid. The fire had burned down but the air in the cabin was hot, at least in a layer starting at Eric’s face. The floor remained frosty. He slipped to the stove without her assent and felt how wet he was, and likely how close to hypothermia. He couldn’t think straight. If he’d been thinking straight he wouldn’t be back down here. He pulled the rain boots off and poured puddles from them to show her how bad it really was. “It’s getting colder,” he said. “They said it would get colder and the roads would freeze and they have. And anyway I was scared for you. They’re saying four feet. Apparently it really is the storm of the century. I was worried about your safety. I mean, I was truly worried about you.”

  She tapped the knife on the block. “Worried about me. Scared for you. Two stories equals a lie. That’s what Jimmy says.”

  He pressed close to the stove, felt the heat on the fronts of his legs, the cold at the back. “Listen,” he said, “I’m sorry. Relax, please chill. This is not better for me than for you.”

  “Chill? You chill, you liar.” She turned the knife, held it weapon style, Psycho style, took a menacing step toward him.

  He felt that grin rising in his cheeks, couldn’t stop it.

  “You’ll smile,” she said. “How does your car get towed in Woodchurch, Maine? Tell me that, mister. No one ever gets towed in Woodchurch.”

  Very softly: “You win a case against the veterinarian, I guess.”

  She wielded that knife, stalking closer. “You sued her? You sued the fucking nice old vet?”

  Even softer: “A client sued her. She killed his dog.”

  She feinted at him with the knife. “You’re a fucking lawyer?”

  He shrugged, grinned harder, backed away from the stove. “Easy,” he said.

  She said, “You’re not old enough to be a fucking lawyer.”

  He couldn’t stop the grinning. Same thing in court when he wasn’t sure of his case. “I’m old enough to be anything,” he said calmly. “But, yes, a fucking lawyer. Okay? As small town as they get.”

  Keeping her eye on him, knife still poised, she reached awkwardly across herself and pulled the long iron poker from its hook behind the stove, came at him as he shuffled backward, back into the cold, back toward the door, her weapons really more comic than menacing.

  He composed his face. “I’m just a nice person who helps others for small pay or even for free, or even gives away money, and wouldn’t hurt a fly. And I�
��ve got no way to leave.”

  She pushed the tip of the ancient poker against his chest, rested it there, too heavy to loft for long. She said, “Why don’t you call your wife?”

  “She’s not available. We’re separated. It’s bad. And it’s very bad out there in the storm. I was frightened. And my phone, it’s in the car.”

  Glimmer of compassion on Danielle’s face, knife still poised.

  Eric turned the ring on his finger, gazed at it, a poor thin thing from antimaterialist Alison, twenty-one dollars at Kay Jewelers. Danielle had seen it, good or bad. He’d never removed it for any reason, never since Alison had stuck it on his finger in her parents’ church. More sadly than he wanted, he tugged it off, stuffed it in his pants pocket. He said, “An artifact, I guess.”

  “Okay, so now it’s archeology.”

  “And even if she were home where she belongs, I’m not sure the roads are passable in any case. There’s not a car in sight. Nothing’s been plowed, nothing at all. Record rate of accumulation, they said. Please put the knife down.”

  Instead she feinted with it again, prodded him hard in the chest with the poker, once again indignant. “Who said? The pixies? The roads are passable, all right. Of course they’re passable. People have big four-by-four trucks around here. Nothing stops them. Don’t you have any friends? Aren’t the plow guys driving around? The tow-truck guys? The ones who towed your car, for example? But you come down here? You hide the ring and think it’s gone? I don’t know what you think you’re going to get out of this situation. Because you’re going to get nothing, except your teeth beaten through your lips when Jimmy gets here.”

  Eric pushed the poker away from his chest, held it away from his chest, ready to catch the wrist of her knife hand if necessary. But she just kept the knife poised, fought to pull the poker back away from his grip. She wasn’t strong.

  “Easy,” Eric said.

  “Let go!”

  “I’m not going to let go. You were hurting me. Kind of got me right between the ribs there. Easy now. Okay? You didn’t see the road. You didn’t see how much snow. That first wet stuff has frozen solid and now there’s another, I don’t know, almost a foot since you’ve seen it. Don’t scoff. It really is a foot. Just since we came down. As for my coming back, I was afraid of freezing. I didn’t want to come back down here. But there’s no one around. No one. And what I want out of the situation at this point, and what I wanted coming back down here, the only thing I wanted—okay?—is not to die. I mean, that’s how serious. A person could really die. I’m half frozen, and I’m stuck here, and it’s because I tried to help you. I did help you. You wouldn’t have made it halfway home without my help. Now it’s my turn. Why can’t it be my turn?” He couldn’t stop the shivering, stood in the freezing puddle his office socks made, thin silk.

  Danielle let her end of the poker go such that the heavy handle swung and hit Eric in the shin. She let the knife come down, too, scuffed in her nice wool socks back to the kitchen corner, resumed her position at the butcher’s block, exactly the tableau he’d walked in on, went back to her chore—there’d been no interruption, Eric didn’t exist—went back to cutting the orange, not in wedges but in slices, round slices like you’d do a tomato, every seed picked out with the tip of the sharp knife. Only when she was done did she return to the problem of him, gave him a long look, the new puddle at his feet seeming to get her pity.

  “Okay,” she said sharply, “my husband is an Army Ranger, you know what that means? It means if you do anything off-game he will kill you with his bare hands and he’ll stuff your body into the outhouse pit and we’ll fill it in with rocks and no one will ever know.”

  Outside the wind kicked up into a new intensity, whistling through every crack in the cabin, puffs of fine snow coming up through the floorboards. Something flapped and knocked on the roof. Eric sidled back to the stove on frozen feet. She’d moved the copper tub far from the fire. The unusably torn panties were draped over its edge along with her washcloths. Eric hopped around absurdly on the icy floor while trying to keep a serious demeanor—because it was very important she take him seriously, very important he not have to go back out into the storm.

  “One minute it’s a normal afternoon,” he said shivering more violently for trying not.

  “The floor is frozen. You’ll have to dry your socks. I only have my one pair. Sit down. Take your socks off and dry them. Then we’ll just see.”

  “Thank you,” Eric said sitting. He rolled his thin, soaked socks off, put his feet up on a warm ledge of the stove, stinging relief.

  She stabbed the knife into the butcher’s block, brought him a slice of orange, watched him tear it and eat it, delicious, fresh, wet. She dipped a pot of water out of a plastic bucket on the floor, put it on the stovetop to heat, collected another orange in the kitchen, cut that up, too, slowly, methodically. He hung his socks on the edge of the tub, not too close to her broken underwear. She brought him more orange, plopped the slices on the chair arm, ate her own, looming over him, licking her fingers. The warmth started to move into his feet. He noticed how wet his pants legs were, soaking wet around his ankles and up to his thighs.

  “How do you get your drinking water?” he asked, something to say.

  “Just quiet,” she said.

  They watched the firelight through the stove vents as the cabin darkened. The wind howled and whistled. Something landed on the roof with a startling thud, a branch, no doubt, a branch from one of the huge pine trees above. Slowly Eric’s shivering abated. He closed his eyes, felt his head nod, his neck go slack, his toes prickle and steam.

  Eight

  DANIELLE WAS BACK in the kitchen corner, hacking away with her knife at his block of Parmesan, light of a kerosene lamp. She’d dressed in grimy jeans and an overly large black T-shirt, those beautiful thick wool socks. She was even thinner than he’d thought. “Who buys such stale cheese?” she said.

  “Well,” he said. “A lot of people. It’s not that it’s stale.”

  “And disposable razors? Aren’t disposable razors a waste of dwindling resources? I would have thought you’d be the guy with a little precious antique straight razor and, like, strop. And so much flour? What do you do with flour? Paper mâché?” No smile. The words kept coming, grew indistinct.

  Eric sat up with a start. His pants were thoroughly dry. How long had he been asleep? His socks were dry, too, almost crisp. He struggled into them, said, “All that stuff. I was going to make dinner for someone.” He yawned compulsively. “For Alison.” And yawned again.

  Danielle wasn’t there. “You talking to somebody?” she said from above. “It’s okay. That stove takes every stinking molecule of oxygen out of the air. And who is Alison? The one with the ring? Why would you make dinner for her, someone who treats you like that? And anyway, I never trusted a boy who cooks.”

  “I haven’t seen her in months, actually. But we talk. I just talked to her last week. A few weeks ago, I should say. Or so.” He yawned again. “We had a long talk. September, I think. We’re separated.”

  “So you said.”

  “We meet once a month. It’s a ritual.”

  She quoted something: “ ‘A ritual to keep me from despair.’ ”

  He laughed abruptly, said, “ ‘Paper mâché.’ ”

  But she was not to be deflected: “I don’t understand people who break up and then hang out. I’m more full of hate and monstrosity. I mean, if the relationship was any good. But what would I know about that? I’m with Jimmy. And we don’t break up, and we don’t separate. And September is more than a month ago, mister. Are you awake?”

  “We’d just have these meals.”

  “I swear you were snoring.”

  “You can’t trust a boy who cooks. Where does that come from?”

  “From boys who cook.”

  “Anyway,” Eric said. “She’d relax and I’d relax and we’d get over whatever argument and it would be just like it ever was, only maybe fonder, you know
, absence and all of that.” A log collapsed in the fire, pushing hot coals against the very door. Eric opened it and tended things with her poker, so recently stuck in his ribcage. “Very nice, really. Maybe a way of acknowledging all we’ve been to one another.”

  “You mean you’d end up naked on the kitchen floor.”

  He felt himself flush, but because it wasn’t true, and then he lied: “On the couch, in point of fact.”

  “Breakup sex. And then she could go home immediately after and not feel like she owed you anything.”

  Eric said, “But not since September.”

  “Not since before September.”

  He craned to see Danielle in the loft, but her voice was disembodied—nothing to see up there, only the beams of the ceiling and the footboard of an old iron bed by lamplight, Danielle shuffling around, hard at work at something, dressing maybe, or making the bed.

  He said, “She had to go to work Monday mornings.”

  “You met on Sundays? Who designed that?”

  “It was in our separation agreement.”

  “How long has it really been?”

  “So that’s why I bought all this food.”

  “I’m this close to feeling sorry for you.”

  Eric said, “There’s such a term as ‘breakup sex’?”

  “Such a term, yes, very mainstream. They talk about it on Oprah. You should try it sometime. The term, I mean. The sex you’ve done. And where have you been? You don’t have a TV, I bet. Do you even know who Oprah is? You never heard of breakup sex? You buy dinner for someone who isn’t going to show up?”

  His cozy little tent crushed under them in firelight on the pond after biking all day. He said, “I wish you’d be nicer. I’m feeling pretty tender.”

  “You mean pretty asleep,” she said tenderly. And then she was climbing down the ladder from the loft. She came to him, right to his chair, same shining blue jeans, a different woman, Rasta cap pulled down hard around her face. She said, “Sorry. Honestly. You were nice to me today.”