“That smells good, mister,” Danielle said from above.
He felt an angry shout at his throat, a confusion of women, he knew. “Come and fucking get it,” he said grinning.
Ten
A HEAVY GUST set the windows whistling and seemed to pick up the roof, anyway, the storm made itself known, a chill wind straight through the inadequate building, an insistent banging and clanging, probably a section of the metal roof coming free. High winds made it a true blizzard, sudden image of himself lost and trying to survive the night in the woods up there: it could have been that way; it really could have been that bad.
“Nice candles,” Danielle said.
“Probably literally a dime a dozen.”
“But they’ve only got so many here. I should have bought some. And you really shouldn’t be using them up, fucker.” Said kindly. She put one of his logs on the fire, added a stick of kindling—they owned this fire together, the gesture said. She left the stove door open for a little more light, just as he would do. Her build was more arms and legs than he’d thought—all those loose clothes she’d been wearing—fancy mall jeans now, fake silver filigree on the thighs, once tight cloth covering her no longer secretly furry legs. Her hair she’d tucked under her Rasta cap. Her top was a kind of T-shirt but pleated a little in the bodice and with a wide neck that showed two sets of camisole straps, nothing warm enough. She was way too thin.
Eric blew out two of the candles, feeling petulant though she was right. The cabin fell a shade darker. Maybe he was just hungry. Still Danielle seemed pleased with him, retrieved the kerosene lamp from the puzzle table, lingered there a moment inspecting his castle roof, no comment, not a tease, not a word. The set of her shoulder was provocative, one strap pink, one strap black. Ghost, he shouldn’t forget, a wraith with a collection of words she spent quiet hours interchanging up in her loft, all that shuffling and muttering, zipper sounds. And of course there were the ectoplasmic, unreadable glances.
She stared at the pizzas like they were exhibits at a foods-of-the-mortals museum. “Nice,” she said.
“That poem was really good,” Eric said. “About the snow.”
“It’s Emily Dickinson.”
“Oh. I should have known.”
“It made you like me.”
“She was a kind of hermit, right?”
“Not completely. She fucked some minister that came to visit.”
Eric flinched, then laughed, but too provisionally. “I think that’s in dispute. That it was maybe more spiritual than physical?”
Danielle shook her head: Eric didn’t know shit. “Whatever,” she said. “But I like to imagine it. This ray of light in his life. Poems in envelopes forever after. With like blobs of sealing wax.”
“Can you recite any more?”
“I got a C. Actually. But there were a lot of them about flowers. And a lot about death. A lot.”
Eric reached for something to say, something beyond his flinching. “Another hermit was Thoreau.”
“Not really. Not him. A hermit, I mean. We studied him, too. Severely boring. He lived in that shack of his but he went into town all the time for meals and such. It was only a mile or something. My teacher said. She wasn’t a big fan. She called him Henry David.”
“Another person who never took a lover.”
“How do you know? I think she did. I’m sure she did. Always disheveled for this, like, afternoon class, yo, and her lipstick smeared.”
Eric grinned, all he could do not to laugh out loud. He said, “I meant Thoreau.”
But Danielle didn’t see the joke: “Oh, well. Henry David. Not exactly Larry Flynt. No, no. There was a woman. Like, his brother’s girlfriend. And she dumped the brother, so your little friend asked her to marry him. And she said no. And—this was in his diary, too—he wrote a poem about her. In his journals. And I remembered it and said it in class.”
“Quite a class,” Eric said.
“I loved that class. We talked about anything. And Henry David, he’s all heartbroken, and not even poetry is working, so he wrote down something like that the only remedy for love was to love more. Like love was a disease that cured itself.”
“He was quoting Ovid!” Eric said, proud of himself. “The Cure for Love. I read it in school, in Latin class. It’s racy. Mr. Tims used it because it would make us work harder, finding all the naughty stuff.”
“Ovid, pfft,” Danielle said.
“The Larry Flynt of his times! He said the cure for love was to go find more lovers. Among other things. Like focusing on your lover’s flaws. Or farming.”
“Another ancient fucking asshole, and talking only to the males. Yoo-hoo, over here.”
“Okay,” Eric said quietly.
“And that quote is the only thing I like about Thoreau. Eric. And you wreck it.”
“No, I’m sure Henry meant it. Really meant it, that he was in love.”
“He told his sister when he was, like, on his deathbed, that he had always loved that woman. That he never stopped loving her, all right?”
“Okay. Shh. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“He never fucking stopped. More love. That’s what he said. And that’s what he did.”
“Okay. You’re right. You’re definitely right.”
“Love,” said Danielle.
They thought about that, the ideal last word.
After a while, Eric found a couple of plates and an absurd old meat cleaver, whacked the pizzas into big slices.
Danielle, meanwhile, still visibly riled, retrieved one of the bottles of Côtes du Rhône. She picked the foil off, gripped the bottle by the neck. She said, “This is how they do it in Kabul.” She raised the bottle high, as if in salute, suddenly slammed its concave bottom on the butcher’s block.
“Hey,” Eric cried.
But the cork had emerged perhaps a quarter inch. She slammed the bottle again, gained a half inch more. She flashed a sly look, seemed to be cheering herself up. “Hey, yourself, yo. Jimmy does it on fucking concrete and the cork pops right out.”
“He must smash a lot of bottles.”
“Almost never. But sometimes. Every tenth one, say. It’s like Russian roulette.”
Was she kidding? Impossible to tell. Slam. Another half inch. Slam. And the cork was ready for her teeth: mighty twist and tug, then caught in her smile. She found two thick old jelly jars, filled them neatly halfway, handed one to Eric—all his promises about not drinking aside—spat the cork at his feet.
“To the U.S. Army,” she said.
“To the Armies of Light,” Eric said, peacenik, and no Navy partisan, certainly not taking that bait.
They took short sips regarding one another, eye contact he was forced to break: that was no ghost back in there. He put slices of both types of pizza on their mismatched plates. Danielle stood across the butcher’s block from him, hip cocked. She bit the first slice as if she were biting him: red peppers, fragrant onions, flavorful eggplant, the beautiful raw-milk cheese. He tried not to seem like he was waiting for a compliment, but bit his own slice, the strange, sharp sweetness of the peppers. The crust he’d made was delectable, he thought, browned and toothsome from the heat of the firebrick, touch of maple smoke, yet soft enough under the sauce, damn.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You miss the tomato thing?”
“Oh, no, this? This is good. This is very good.” Then she seemed to pay attention to what she was tasting. “Fuck me, mister, it’s really good.” She took another bite, chewed thoughtfully.
The Côtes du Rhône handled the peppers and the rank and randy cheese pretty darn well, he thought. He saw his puzzle outlined on the table, the sky above Lichtenstein Castle on some specific day in the 1950s, a specific day with its specific clouds captured forever and cut to pieces. Alison, too, liked his pizza. He’d gotten good at it for her.
“Mister!” Danielle said, biting into the next piece. She seemed to mean it in the positive, bit again, repeated the
other compliment: “Fuck me.” She slugged her wine. “This is major,” she said after a while. “Majorly major.”
“Oh, well,” he said, his real smile, access of warmth.
From her that hot glower, that sudden, withering glance.
They fell into eating, most of both pizzas, most of the bottle of wine (Eric going easy), not another word between them.
Eleven
“WHAT KIND OF lawyer are you?” Danielle asked.
“Oh, small-town,” he said. They had repaired to the fire. Sat, that is, in front of the old Glenwood in the oaken chairs with the crisp-sounding cushions, the empty bottle of wine balanced between them on a log she’d upturned. “Wills, estates, divorces, deeds, property disputes, property tax, petty lawsuits, petty crime, vandalism, auto theft, occasional felony this or that, a lot of drunk driving, more than you’d think. Drug cases galore. Add the odd assault case. And domestic abuse lately—the police have finally got their radar up about it.”
“And you defend the abusers?”
“It has never yet come to that. What I do is make a plan with the abuser to get help, to quit drinking, to quit substances in general, to sit in therapy, to take anger-management class, to enter family therapy with the partner if she’s willing—and generally she is—all that kind of thing, which you bring before the judge and D.A.”
“Who are both friends of yours, of course.”
“In a manner of speaking, yes, friends of mine. And we try to come to a solution that benefits the miscreant, the family, the community.”
“You sound like a public-service announcement. Do you get guys coming back? Like these unloved kids who have to repeat fourth grade till they’re sixteen and can finally fucking quit?”
“No. No, no. I won’t take them for a second offense. There’s an office for that in Augusta—that’s all state court, state prison, I mean by the time they fuck up that badly.”
“Unless they have money.”
“Sadly, yes.” A public-service announcement! He tried to loosen up, failed: “The level of education does seem to play a role. Both in money terms and in terms of violence.”
“Like the mother-in-law answers the door and says, ‘Oh, there was some shouting, but they’ve made up now.’ And meanwhile the poor wife is back there with a broken nose and a hairy hand over her mouth.”
“Something to tell me?”
“So that’s where all the cash comes from? You taking care of the good old boys?”
“ ‘All the cash,’ ha. And good old boys? I’m not exactly, like, Foghorn Leghorn.”
“All this high-nose wine and cheese. Follow the cash. And don’t look at me like you think I won’t know who Foghorn Leghorn is.”
“Listen, Danielle. I buy very little fancy anything, believe me. The cheese and the wine, that was for a special occasion. And I hope you’re enjoying it. The money isn’t really anywhere. The money in a small practice is only in keeping busy, lots of little matters constantly. Which I’ve had almost none lately.”
“And you had to go to law school for this?”
“Vermont Law. A great, obscure program. I was interested in environmental law, and that was the place. Still am interested in environmental law, though there’s not much of that in Woodchuck. I’ve spent a lot of time lately advising the Maine legislature. Friend of the chamber, it’s called, no cash. It’s not a great period for environmental law. Jobs. People want jobs and it’s widely been spread that environmental legislation kills jobs, not true.”
“I’m still thinking of those domestic abusers you get off scot-free.”
“I’m still doubting you know who Foghorn Leghorn is.”
“He’s that, like, chicken.” Flicker of a smile.
She got up and found her box of red wine and slammed it a couple of times on the butcher’s block for a joke before opening it. Or maybe not a joke—she didn’t laugh. She poured his glass full from behind and above like someone taking a piss, foamy stuff, poured her own, used the box to push Alison’s bottle off the upturned log; it clonked on the floor and rolled until it was under the Glenwood. And she sat, maybe slightly closer to him. The storm lashed at the little cabin from all directions, total disorder. One of the hemlocks had apparently drooped under its load of snow and was resting on the roof, or anyway something was, ominous scraping and clawing sounds in the wind.
“Mister-mister-mister,” Danielle said affirmatively.
Eric sipped the wine. It was as thin and fruity as juice but not actually terrible.
Danielle slugged hers, pissed herself a refill, adjusted the fire. She was tall in her trousers, as Eric’s father liked to say, tall in general, the fitted T-shirt having been fitted to a more fulsome figure, one she no longer posessed. Eric was on the tall side, too. His last dinner with Alison, who was on the short side, had been almost six months before, he had to admit. The last time she’d kissed him, too, six months, perhaps even planned as a last kiss, a theory he’d developed and revisited in constant retrospect: Alison had come to say good-bye. Eric recalled the kiss very clearly, the abrupt end of one of their dinners, which had until then all ended sexually. “All” meaning the bicycle camping, only that. No shouting or anything, just Alison standing with an apology, kissing his mouth very hard, then taking her coat and leaving, nothing but the grinding sound of her car starting.
“Tell me a story from lawyer land,” Danielle said. She hefted the wine box and dispensed more for both of them, pulled her chair in closer to the stove, which meant pulling it slightly again closer to him, elaborately folded her legs under herself and sat. She regarded him, not neutral, leaned to rub her ankle. “Look at us sitting here,” she said.
Eric said, “It’s pretty benign.”
“Jim would frenzy, ‘benign.’ And how you stare at me?” She patted her own chest.
He couldn’t help the grin, a different type altogether. He said, “I was looking at your clothes. I’m interested in clothes.”
She patted her own butt.
Guilty, that was what kind of grin. He said, “I don’t care about your posterior.”
“Liar again.”
“I particularly like those pants.”
“Well, then I won’t take them off.” She handed him a half slice of the pepper pizza, her bite marks in it, last piece. He took it and bit her bites away and kept going and it was good to the last crumb of crust.
She poured more wine. How much did those boxes hold? She put a stick in the fire, and a large split, poked it all expertly into the coals, maximum efficiency. She’d have run out of wood about now, Eric thought, imagined her trying to collect more in the dark, remembered the door, that the door was utterly blocked, so much snow against the house now that the storm seemed more distant, the wind intense but removed. No particular reason, he thought of a visit to La Jolla, where Alison had grown up, the two of them in law school far away and not allowed to share a room in her parents’ big house, views of the ocean. An outdoor deck connected the entire second floor, though, and he crept in the damp breeze at three in the morning past her dad’s library. The old man was a judge, took the law very seriously, but mostly as a cudgel against those who would mooch off the state, long discussion at dinner, more like a lecture, with Eric adding sour notes. Alison’s father was a humorless tyrant, and for the first time Eric knew that when Alison said she hated the man it was no figure of speech, though she loved him as well, a hundred stories of childhood joys. The deck was high—they lived on a cliff—and a light was on downstairs, Eric basically walking on top of the parents’ bedroom. He found Alison’s sliding deck door unlocked, slipped into her bed beside her, snuggled up, pressed close—she slept naked on the hot night—woke her with his ardor. “Buy me a ring,” she said as they began to make love, and said it again, and again.
“Tell me about Jim,” he said.
Danielle said, “Like, what about him?”
“Does he cook?”
“You’re funny.” The lamplight was in her eyes again,
her pupils enormous, vestiges of beauty there, that fund of intelligence.
“What does he do?”
“Army Rangers, I told you.” A fund of disdain, as well.
“Still?”
“Yes, still.”
“But he was a teacher with you, I thought you said.”
She turned back to the stove, clearly bugged. The Rasta cap was dirty, gave an outline to her profile, a girl on a coin. “He was in the reserves. He got called up. He was on the bus within a month. Ask me something more interesting.”
“Isn’t ‘frenzy’ a noun?”
She was glad for the joke, quick glance, quick grin. “No. Not always, mister. Sometimes it’s something you can do. Certainly something Jimmy could do.” She swallowed the last of her wine dramatically, filled her glass yet again, ignored his pointedly, took a long time, seemed to think past their conversation, anyway disappeared.
Eric filled his own glass.
“No drunken incidents,” Danielle told him.
“Jimmy,” he said.
“Jimmy is pretty broken-glassy around the edges. Especially on duty. On duty, he’s all edges. There’s nothing else. And he’s sudden, sudden. He finished college in three years because four was just too fucking slow. He’s a marksman in a strike unit, which in case you squids don’t know is how the Rangers operate.”
“Like the Navy Seals.”
“But without the fishes. It’s six guys: marksman, translator, doctor, munitions, navigator. And they’re all warriors, every one.”
“That was only five.”
“I forget the other. Strategist, maybe? Doesn’t matter, it’s secret.”
The Remedy for Love: A Novel Page 6
