The Remedy for Love: A Novel

by Bill Roorbach

  “Shh.”

  “The kids adore Jimmy. Even the ones who weren’t athletic, even the schlumps. He’d let them pat his fuzzy head. They’d trace the tattoos on his arms, you know? Something about the tough guy with the kids all around him, very fucking sexy.”

  “Shh.”

  “He’s got like tree-stump legs with this long, long middle. We lived in this crappy old three-decker house full of tiny efficiency apartments. We’d sit on the steps with bottles of beer. He was too big to be indoors.”

  “And you’d wait for calls to substitute?”

  She cried more privately, not much drama to it anymore, a lot of moisture. Eric took her empty mug from her and stumbled to his feet and found the bucket and brought her water. She took it in both hands and sipped as he flopped back in his chair.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I think I want Advil, too.” He got the bottle, broke the seal, plucked the cotton out, handed her two, which she gobbled. Handed her one more, what the hell. That ankle.

  “Thank you, Nurse.”

  “You are most welcome.”

  “Treat me so nice.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “It will get you nowhere.”

  “That’s where I am right now!”

  Slightest smile.

  “So. You and Jimmy. You’d already met. When you went up there.”

  “His old man. His father. They had a tent thing. A revival. They would go to colleges. It looked inviting. And students can sign up. And pledge money and stuff, and make vows to the Lord and vows to help them find more college kids. There’s music. And they had pizza. And you could get baptized. Behind a curtain. I don’t know what got into me. I got in the line. And then Jimmy’s father says—”

  “He’s a preacher?”

  “I don’t know what he is. He sees me there in my shorts and legs and halter and stomps right to my face and says, ‘Satan is with us tonight. I have seen the face of Satan!’ And I mean, uh-oh, he’s talking about me. He’s like, ‘Satan is in this tent!’ And Jimmy, who I don’t know except he gave me the flyer earlier, comes up to me and starts shaking me and then he’s actually slapping me, and of course I’m shrieking and carrying on, and cursing and spitting and scratching and trying to get away—I wasn’t so tough then—so it looks very real because it is very real, and he’s dragging me back behind the screen and back there he starts laughing and he whispers that I’m great. And I keep screaming and he tugs me into their van and he’s got, like, tequila and he gives me a shot and I calm down and he closes the doors and gives me another, and he’s like, ‘Go for a drive?’ and, Eric, I fucking go. What about that? It was because I loved that they found out Satan was in me. Don’t check for your fucking phone. And so, he drives me down to the lot behind the movie theater on the river up there and I had never been kissed like that. I mean, kissed isn’t the word. I was schlooshed. I was eaten alive. You know bedbugs? I learned this in the public health class at the college. Disgusting. Every time I even see a white van I think of them. I don’t mean there were bedbugs in the van. I just, I mean there’s this fact I learned that the females have no, you know, no receptacle for the male’s penis, which is like this blade. So the males just stab it in through the female’s shell anyplace, and somehow that works. What I’m saying is that Jimmy was like that. It was freaking rough. I liked it. More or less. Or anyway that once.” She pulled her shirt hem up and over her face, hid there, her camisoles riding up, too, wiped her eyes. Her belly was concave, her navel an impossibly neat slit, piercing visible, no jewelry in place.

  Something cracked sharply outside—then a branch came down, muffled clout on the roof. Those gargantuan pine trees above. At the sound, Danielle emerged from her shirttails, listened closely. They both listened closely. She leaned and plucked her wine box off the floor, a practiced motion, drained a little into her mug, shook some last drops into his, tilted the box just so, got another splash out for him, then a little more. As she poured, the chimney stack began to vibrate, the wind around them to howl, the air in the room to shudder in their ears. The vibration only grew, the very walls of the cabin flexing and drumming, metallic hum from the stovepipe. If that were torn away, they’d be in terrible trouble, a room full of smoke and fire and cold wind. Eric planned in his head—you’d have to bank the fire fast, recover what pipe you could, redirect the stack somehow, perhaps just straight out the wall, which would mean making a hole. He felt he’d seen a keyhole saw in the shed. With a keyhole saw you could do it.

  As the wind peaked, something big smashed onto the roof. The cabin jerked with it—that heavy. They both jumped, cried out, reached for each other, held on tight.

  Sudden silence.

  “Talk about being in the moment!” Danielle cried.

  Fourteen

  LATER THEY SAT on cushions on opposite sides of his puzzle, looking for flower pieces, and there were a lot of flower pieces to find, a jumble of them to be piled in color groups, all the castle gardens foreground. It was way too cold in that corner of the cabin, and so Danielle had put the big coat on. The smelly coat. Eric was just shivering, his ruined jacket over his lap, but something about the project being literally between them had tamped down the emotion.

  “I always wanted to live in a castle,” Danielle said. “I always wanted stone walls.”

  “My house is stone.”

  She made a face: So what about his house? She said, “What insect would you be?”

  “In the castle?”

  “In bed. With Jimmy being the bedbug.”

  “Huh. I guess I haven’t thought about that.”

  “Dung beetle? Get the job done?”

  “Something nicer. Luna moth. Or maybe a luna moth caterpillar.”

  “So slinky and silky soft. And green.”

  “You’ve seen ’em. With these little horns. How about you?”

  “Black widow?”

  “Fair warning. I’ll tell the fellas.”

  “Jimmy’d be gone three and four days every month, which gave me time to think. Army Reserves. And do you know what I thought about? I thought about how I was going to get rid of him, that’s what I thought about. That and resting my various fucking sphincters. Flinch.” She began assembling a patch of puzzle roses—quick, deft fingers. “But he comes back Sunday night late with, like, mud in his hair and a big scrape across his cheek, forehead bruised, uniform all ripped to shreds, and, well.” Behind the roses as she built them was a patch of garden wall, and that was the clue they needed, together adding her chunk of the puzzle to the section Eric had been working on. She moved onto the daisies. “This one time? Coming home? He’s bought an engagement ring somewhere. He drops on his knee. He says he’s felt he’s loved me forever. Not ‘I love you’ but ‘I feel I have loved you.’ He hadn’t mentioned about love before. Took me by surprise.”

  “Well,” said Eric after a pause to search for more red. “Really, it’s nice.” He continued work on the wall with the roses, methodical, absorbed.

  She pressed daisies together, piece by piece, unnervingly quick. The wind was quiet. Everything was quiet, muffled. She said, “I dig talking with you. You sit there and listen. And you haven’t said one single stupid fucked-up thing for a while. Plus you flinch like a nun, which is trustworthy. And no hard-on, though you’re definitely a dick.”

  He flinched. Not so fast on the hard-on. Her camisoles up around her face, the perfection of her navel in the devastation. And of course the wind picked up again, and continued to mount. He said, “I like talking with you, too.”

  “Ask me questions. I like when you ask me questions. I like that you listen.”

  “Well, here’s the main one. How did you end up down here? In the cabin, I mean.”

  “Professor DeMarco. It’s hers. Or like her husband’s family’s. She said I could use it. I’d been talking with her on the phone and texting and so on and e-mails. She was always trying to get me back in school. Nice to be loved, yo.”

  Eric said, “Wel
l, yes, it is.”

  “You take everything so seriously. Daisies. Over there. I see some over there.” She looked a child suddenly, collecting her pieces as he picked them out for her, talking away: “She said if I needed I could come stay as long as I liked, stay the whole summer. She knew how hard everything had been with school and with Jim deployed. I thought I was going mental. She thought I needed a rest. And so I did come and stay here. She walked down twice to visit and she was pretty nice, but maybe a little overly, like, weird? We swam in the river. We talked and talked. I mean, it was nice. She was really nice. She swam naked, and she’s unbelievably fat. And I was supposed to go back to Presque Isle and be with Jim’s family and substitute teach again on some fucking random calendar date, and she and her husband came exactly then and helped me carry my stuff up and load my car. They were going to stay here. I just couldn’t go back. Not to Presque Isle. Not without Jimmy there. I stayed on the road for the two weeks the DeMarcos were down living here, slept in the car, drove up to, like, New Brunswick, Bay of Fundy, some campground up there, pretty dramatic, ate wild fresh salmon this craggy dude would catch and sell on the beach but that he just gave me free. And don’t think I fucked him, because I didn’t, not really. And I avoided everyone else. I barely noticed the beauty of the earth. Then I drove back down here, broke. So I sold the car to the dealer over on High Street? Moody’s Used Vickles? And then I came back down here to live till I could figure out the next thing. But I didn’t have a single dime to rub together, as my father would say.”

  “How do you not really fuck someone?”

  “You just really don’t fuck them. Not for a fish.”

  “And you came down here.”

  “Yes, back down here.”

  “But you’d sold the car.”

  “Moody gave me like two thousand bucks for it, enough to pay it off and still have, like, three hundred dollars, which went faster than you’d think, like two trips for groceries and this trip today.”

  “And Professor DeMarco doesn’t know you’re here.”

  “Professor DeMarco doesn’t know. But she wouldn’t care.” Danielle made a Professor DeMarco face, hunched down, spoke in a high falsetto, what might have been comic in another setting: “She’d be so worried.”

  There was something he’d very much wanted to tell Danielle while she was talking about Jim, but he couldn’t quite get it in his head again as another gust rocked the house. So instead he said, “Maybe I can get you your car back, or at least a better deal. It’s not actually illegal to take advantage of people in distress, but it’s not hard to embarrass someone like that, like Myron Moody, get a positive result.”

  “You know him?”

  He knew him.

  Danielle pulled her Rasta cap off, scratching her head unhappily. Her hair was really very dirty and matted and clumped, not in dreads at all, the only style being neglect. “A positive result,” she said. “A positive result.” She was the girl from the grocery store checkout line again, lost in that coat, suspicious, that huge, smelly coat. “Fucking freezing,” she said, pulling it around her. She used the table to help her stand, pushing it toward him roughly, displacing the puzzle, one of the flower piles landing in his lap.

  “I’m not drunk,” she said. He noticed pine needles on her neck. And a phrase came to him, as if in a headline: YOUNG WOMAN ABANDONED.

  He struggled to his feet, too, followed her to the stove. She shed the coat, put it on its nail. Her skinny jeans, Eric noted, weren’t skinny enough to keep up with her anymore, hung off her hips (and would have fallen right down except for the heavily studded leather belt, which was like something from a tractor supply, or more like torture chamber), a pocket worn to threads by a cell phone that was no longer present, the seat worn by a full fanny gone missing. He’d like to feed her. He’d make her huge meals. He’d like to take her shopping, or let her take him. The smokestack shuddered, the cabin groaned, the wind spoke from every corner, these long gusts that only grew.

  She turned on him angrily: “Like I’m something you brought home from the shelter. ‘A positive result.’ You think I’m a rescue.” And before he could protest she collected the oil lamp, lurched to the ladder, climbed unsteadily. “Dick!” she said. “Lawyer! Phone addict! Loser! You can stay down there and ponder the legalities.” She shuffled and clanked and thumped up there a long time as Eric built up the fire. Then she threw down a blanket, next a pillow, finally pulled the ladder up behind her, blew out the light.

  Fifteen

  ERIC WIPED HIS teeth with a piece of paper towel, carefully getting to all the corners and swishing with boiled river water, taste of the very slime on the rocks, like summer. He picked up his bedding, what she’d thrown down, a lumpy pillow with no case, but a nice thick wool blanket, army green. The mission-oak couch was too short to lie on, so he tossed its hard cushions on the floor between the puzzle and a growing snowdrift blown in through merest crack, beautiful, depressing, a long, scalloped sculpture. In faint firelight he added the cushions from the chairs, made himself a little pad on the small carpet and lay down in his clothes, covered himself. Field bed. Too cold. He got back up, folded the blanket into a kind of sleeping bag or taco shell and climbed back in, much better. The pillow smelled of smoke and Ben-Gay and cough drops and mildew: the stench of isolation. His shoulder was very sore, now that he thought about it. He was the one who should have been taking Advil.

  He woke abruptly in the night—the wine like a rat in his head—minutes or hours later, he couldn’t tell. He was freezing, though, that was sure. He pulled the blanket tight as he could, hopeless. The temperature outside had plummeted as the guy on News 5 had predicted, and so had the temperature inside. He turned this way, turned that way. The horsehair cushions crackled under him. He had to piss like a race car (as his father used to say). His head began to ache. His mouth was dry as hemlock twigs. He got up, thought to go outside, remembered the snow chest-high and who knew what drifts, crazy, the door entirely blocked. The wind had picked up again. Alison hated it when he farted. He peed in a pail he found with the pots and pans, emptied it quickly at the drain board, put it back. He’d have to swab it out with snow in the morning. Somewhere outside, of course, after he’d dug them an escape route. He built up the fire—maybe it had been hours—then moved his whole sleeping arrangement close to it, but on the floor it didn’t matter: perfectly fucking freezing. The wind was howling again, raging, suddenly shrieking through all the boards of the house, clattering the loose siding, dragging laden branches across the drifts on the roof, thumps and screeches and odd, muffled snaps, the cabin filled again with living air, dry and sharp and just very, very cold.

  Upstairs there was a rustling and a private sigh. Then the wind, again, building.

  “Eric.”

  “I woke you,” he said.

  She said, “I haven’t actually slept.”

  “I did. Some anyway. Maybe a couple of hours.”

  “Uh, no. More like a couple of fifteen minutes. You snore. Are you frozen?”

  “I’m okay. I’ll be okay.”

  “It’s warm up here. It’s fine up here. You’d better come up, mister. I’m in my sleeping bag. Bring your blanket. But don’t get any fucking ideas.”

  “Don’t worry. I haven’t had an idea in months.”

  “You had an idea earlier.”

  The ladder came down, seemingly on its own. Danielle struck a match, bright as sun. Then the lamplight. He gave her a moment to get back in under her covers, climbed the ladder dragging his bedding behind him like Linus. Simple truth: heat rises. Danielle in her Rasta cap helped arrange his blanket, carefully folding it to open away from her. Something startling in the shapes her clavicles made, not that he was looking. She’d startled him all day with her strange, retractable beauty, like a cat’s claws.

  “There,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “But take off your shirt.”

  “Better not.”

  “Ju
st take it off.”

  He unbuttoned it, pulled it off. Good idea, preserve some small corner of freshness for morning.

  “Your shoulder,” she said.

  It was bruised, he could see, and pretty badly. He shrugged.

  She said, “You really did try to smash down that door.”

  “At the vet’s, yes. It was armored in some way. I hurt my foot, too.”

  “It’s all the dog drugs they have in there.”

  “Heartworm.”

  “And take off your pants.”

  He did, and then his boxers, too (a kind of bravado), and slipped quickly into bed as she looked away. She blew out the light. He settled in with his back to her and they lay a long time like that, close enough to feel the heat between them.

  “Who sent you?” Danielle whispered seriously, suddenly.

  “Oprah,” Eric whispered back.

  “Would you please,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” Eric said.

  And they were silent. At length, she whispered, “I was smart to go for groceries. Somewhere in me I just knew.” She turned on her side behind him, put her arm over him, placed a hand on his chest. “I’m going to bite you.”

  “Well,” he said.

  “If you come here,” she murmured, pulling him closer.

  “Really,” he said. “Better not.”

  “We saved each other,” she said, oddly fervent, bubbling like a pot in a way he could feel, and not just through her hand. Heart-to-heart, as his mother used to say, soul-to-soul, too mystical for his taste.

  They listened to the storm, the muffled hits of who knew what on the roof.

  She kissed his hurt shoulder.

  “I don’t know,” he said, aroused.

  “But what?” she whispered, biting him, ten little bites across his bruises, rising up behind him and over him to bite his chest. She kissed his neck, stroked his belly, kissed his ear.

  “No,” he said.

  “Just what I was thinking,” she said. “No way.”