The Remedy for Love: A Novel

by Bill Roorbach

  “Probably Jimmy ravished you that night,” Eric said, one of those things you wish you could retract: Too true, for one thing. Vastly inappropriate, for another. So small, so pinched, so mean. And when, plainly, Danielle was about to cry.

  “Dick,” she said. And then she did cry, pretending not to, even producing a fake sneeze to cover.

  The coffee was very strong.

  Danielle hadn’t touched hers. After a long time she sighed and said, “He deployed to Afghanistan with his cast still on.”

  Eric couldn’t help the cross-examination, thoughts that circled the cavern of his mind like blood-sucking bats he couldn’t control, bad bats that flew from his mouth: “You left that out earlier. The cast.”

  She glanced at him miserably, no fight left in her: “I left a lot of stuff out. Eric.” She gulped her coffee as if it were medicine, burped with no particular notice, seemed to think of something, hurried to the ladder without a word and climbed up to the loft, favoring the hurt ankle yet oddly athletic, a kind of physical confidence that no amount of hair chopping or self-starvation could hide.

  Eric built up the fire, dropped one of the small pots boiling into the tub. The big pot was nearly ready, again, too. Danielle rummaged up there a long time, climbed back down with a stuffed FedEx mailer, sat with it in her seat, considered it. Eventually, she reached in, pulled out a precariously rubber-banded bundle of letters—very small paper and squares of cardboard—the backings for all the notepads Jim was apparently using. She neatened all the edges at length, checked them for order on her lap, found various mislaid pages, got it all organized, all the time in the world, a familiar undertaking, it looked like, a child sorting her penny collection.

  Her neck was long, without tension. Her face had changed yet again. Eric wanted just a single smile back. She was someone different when she had a project. She touched her nose, that soft addition, squashed it absently, pressed it sideways, pursed her lips the other direction, not very elastic, like she’d break something if she kept it up. He thought of her kisses. They had not been chaste, only a little passive, not like the bites: she’d been waiting for him, and he had done the right thing, exactly the right thing, which was nothing, and he was a good person, also lucky: Danielle would be nothing but trouble, and trouble you didn’t fuck, because then you owned it.

  “Here’s one of the first letters,” she said at last, having rejected the actual first and a couple more. She read with pride and ease and a little comedy and her mouth was free again: “ ‘Dear Ass Attack: This ain’t so bad as I said here. Errrr. In fact, it’s pretty okay shit. Still in base. A-plus. Good as you could hope. Wendy’s is here. Wendy’s, aight? It’s really like fucking home but zero foilage. I spent my whole pay stub on burgers. Beats a bag of nasty. Trojans in the PX for what? I thought it was Don’t Ask Don’t fucking Tell. Next what? Muslim Gerbils, right?’ ” She liked that joke, laughed with herself, but then dove noticeably inward, her mouth falling open. She read the rest of the letter to herself, her fingers tapping absently at those lips, which looked sore. And Eric had emphatically not kissed them, very good.

  Several former clients came to mind unbidden: Pinky Daub, oh god, Pinky Daub, crazy as they come, but built like a muse, diaphanous dress to the courthouse and a reprimand from Judge Brackett: “This is a place of business,” he’d said.

  “Your honor, I mean business,” she’d replied.

  Another plea deal out the window.

  No attraction.

  He’d declined to represent Mary Alice Mayhew in her divorce because he’d dated her. She still claimed to respect him for that. He couldn’t think why they’d broken up (way before Alison). Not a lot of heat there, generally speaking. You’d have trouble telling their fights from their conversations, deeply boring. She’d married the head of financial aid at the college, whose first name was Stratham, then cut Stratham loose.

  When Danielle was done with the long first letter, she stacked the tiny pages fastidiously, placed them under her leg. She pulled out the next, and after a quick review, again read aloud: “ ‘Dear Thing: Boredom galore. Bag of dicks. One-three-four mobilized and out yesterday . . .’ ” She held up the letter to show it had been scissors-redacted, continued cheerily: “ ‘So there go half the balls here. Kirkpatrick made two LARGE on poker last week, all these fobbits from Nebraskaway. If not for Monday Night Football (first thing Tuesday mornings!) I would go shitbasket. TV comes in perfect, better than home. And we had the cleaning crew in to watch. They totally get it. Last night balls to eight hundred I could not sleep. Making movies of ya, babe. I will write my wet name on you.’ ” She read the rest to herself, her throat pinkening with whatever he had to say, her cheeks flushing next, and more and more violently, not that Eric was watching.

  She skipped the rest of that packet, opened the next, read lines randomly to herself, folded the letters quickly. Then she lingered, her voice different, channeling Jim: “ ‘Errrr. As warned, you will stop getting any letters. Dreaming of that big house we saw down by Proctor’s Store. Me pappy wrote and says it is still for sale. Me pappy says you are acting pretty dark shadows. What? You know you do not have to eat alone, baby. In that ass apartment. I got a whole pile of paper from you all at once, about sixteen letters from sixteen days running, nice. You don’t complain enough! Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Tell dat fuckbasket Mr. Clancy I will have a word wit him and his fucking brat. He is chickenshit, believe me. Show him this here. Your kisses I misses, like at the Kidd’s basement? Dat was some kiss. And about your little pants. Errrr.’ ” She read on silently, suddenly crushed the tiny letter into her lap.

  Eric tried to imagine talking to Alison that way. Alison would mock him, at best. Your little pants. Errrr. He drafted his e-mails to her endlessly just to eke out steamy sentiments like “I miss you when I don’t hear from you for two weeks, but of course I understand.” Then he’d go yell at a client, some slip of a druggie girl caught passed out in a church basement with the alms box in her arms.

  The fire was very high—their hot-water project in progress—and the outside was once again outside where it belonged, the wind howling wildly, their repair growing stronger by the minute, a wall of ice. Danielle read the next dozen letters to herself, put herself through a constricted but visible arc of emotion. Eric checked the water pots—two little ones boiling, so he dumped and refilled them in the increasingly warmer tub. He stayed at the stove, enjoying the heat, watched the three-gallon pot till it boiled, poured it into the tub, mixed the water, half of the big pot more. He built up the fire again, did some tidying in the kitchen, the buzz from the cheap wine moving into the headache range, fear returning: they were trapped, no egress, another night ahead, the hammer on the windowsill.

  Danielle receded, flipping expertly through the thick packet of small pages, staring over them (here and there Jim had made a rough drawing), then carefully searching out the words she wanted, an album of greatest hits, inward smiles and small laughs, hard blushes, a lot more puffs of breath and sighs and a kind of private squirming. No matter what she said, she loved this guy, a love that Eric must help protect: Jimmy LaRoque was all she had.

  With the fire so high and a cover it didn’t take long to boil three more gallons in the big pot, the littler pots all boiling twice in that time. He found himself enjoying the rhythm of the work, each pot on its own quickening schedule. The water in the slipper tub was plain hot: like compound interest, he thought, dipping out a little more.

  “You about ready?” he said, unaccountable wave of anger.

  Nothing from her, her brightened brown eyes skimming along whatever letter, from wherever, some bloody battle, more and more tender words no doubt as Jimmy marauded through the mountains of Pakistan, or wherever American military secrets had brought him.

  He said it again, a little too sharply: “Hot bath.”

  “Yes. Yes, thanks.” She read a little longer, then gathered her correspondence and climbed up to the loft where she rustled about the business of g
etting her clothes off, peed loudly into her pail. Eventually she descended in the big, filthy robe and equally filthy bare feet, difficult progress with that bruised ankle, stood by the tub. Eric poured new heat from one of the smaller pots, a couple of quarts hard boiling, stirred the tub, dipped the pot full again and back to the stove.

  She touched the water, swished it around with her long hand, picking her feet off the cold floor alternately. “We got it, mister,” she said. “Maybe a little too.”

  He could smell her, about half unpleasant. “You’re good to go,” he said. Really, he didn’t mean to be so curt. “Be careful. Your feet are cold—it’ll seem to burn.”

  She said, “No it will actually, really burn. Eric. Could you go on up? I’m feeling shy?”

  “Of course,” he said. “I mean, I was going.” He hadn’t heard her sound so modest, and it was appealing, chipped at his free-floating anger. He climbed the ladder and flopped on her bed and waited, privy to all the sounds of her getting into the tub: one foot at a time, a sloshing and sighing. He chanced a look and there she was with the robe pulled up around her slender thighs, warming her feet inch by inch, her legs very hairy, more like furred. He ducked back: of course he shouldn’t be looking and wouldn’t.

  He heard the wind and he heard her drop the robe over her chair. He pictured the snow mounting, drifting. He pictured her placing her hands on both sides of the high part of the tub and sinking herself into the hot water, heard her huge double sigh, heaved for his benefit no doubt, a kind of thanks, and heard the wind. He thought of her desecrated hair, thought of her strong shoulders—she must have been at one time or another a swimmer—heard her finally let herself all the way in. Something clonked on the roof.

  “Perfect gentleman,” she called.

  “Perfect,” he said.

  The FedEx envelope was at the side of the bed, one of the tiny letters on top. He didn’t touch it but read what had been left for anyone to see, blockish handwriting: “Your skin in my teeth, baby. Slippery girl, ass girl, the Jim he kiss you endlessly. Like dat. You know. The way you push-push on my teeth.” Well, it went on—it was what she’d just been reading—an act of lovemaking bluntly described, arousing in its privacy and not only in the pictures it evoked in his head, these starring Danielle and actually himself and not The Jim, just a long paragraph squeezed onto one of the little lined pages. He lay on his hand and read it again, dared after a third pass to flip the page over very quietly and read the backside. But the backside wasn’t as compelling—the guy had started to promise her a good hard pounding and something about pulling her ponytail (a ponytail that had now gone missing, but not difficult to imagine) and the pictures in Eric’s head turned to a lonely soldier stuffed with testosterone, wanking away desperate to come to orgasm before his fellows returned to quarters, or whatever they called it in the Army, using his pen to make his new wife complicit, nastier and nastier language, unpleasant. Well, all for the best: Eric shouldn’t be reading her mail. And he shouldn’t be getting himself all fired up, either. He flipped the letter back over, very precisely as he’d found it, flipped the FedEx package over, inadvertently uncovering the address:

  Ms. Inness O’Keefe LaRoque

  146 Spruce Street

  Presque Isle, Maine

  No doubt Danielle’s mother-in-law.

  “Need soap,” Danielle herself called.

  “Okay,” he called back. He rearranged the whole FedEx tableau, gave himself a moment more of the compound-interest discussion in his head to derail his undoubtedly too-obvious arousal, climbed down to her in his own good time.

  “Oh, thanks,” she said. “It’s in the cabinet over there, up over the flour bins. In a dish.”

  Lavender soap, pretty strong smelling, all but appealing, like the Walmart perfume aisle.

  “What were you reading?” she said as he delivered it.

  He blushed. “Love letters.”

  She didn’t take him seriously, one of the great functions of the truth, as certain lawyers know. “Oh, Eric,” she said suddenly fresh-voiced. “Sit here and talk with me.”

  She sank underwater, contorting herself in the slim tub to do so, and it was as if he himself had been dunked, that was how badly he wanted to get her hair underwater, that scalpy smell of hers. She stayed under, too. Her little breasts were plainly visible in the kerosene lamplight and it was very like the letters—you shouldn’t be looking but how not, left out like that for a person to see? She emerged suddenly and sat up high out of the tub, rubbing her head with the soap, rubbing her neck. She dunked again, emerged, fingered the water out of her eyes, all business.

  “I have nice tits,” she said.

  “Not that I noticed.”

  “They’re lively, as my auntie used to say. Which she meant in a negative way.”

  “She was jealous.”

  “I need more hot,” Danielle said.

  Eric said, “Okay.”

  “That’s about enough male gaze, mister,” she said, looking at his shoulder, it seemed to him, looking at his chest.

  He turned to the stove, two pots boiling. He selected the smaller of them. “You’ll need to stand,” he said. “If you don’t want to get scalded. Use your robe, please. You learned something in college: ‘Male gaze.’ ”

  “Not just college. Eric. The eyeballs are everywhere.” She retrieved the robe, contrived to stand up into it, wrapped herself loosely, one breast free to the air. He just couldn’t help seeing it. Her shins were abominably hairy—dark sleek hair carried into rivulets by the water draining off them. He poured the new water in carefully, slowly.

  “Tell me if it’s getting too hot,” he said.

  “No, it’s nice,” she said, dancing.

  He stirred the water with his hand, added more, stirred. The leg hair was primal and off-putting, not that he had anything against the body natural, just that there was the hint of neglect about this particular display, of depression, terrible isolation. He poured more. “Still good?” he said.

  “I’m like Mrs. Bigfoot,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’ve been alone.”

  “I’m not staring,” he said: another thing certain lawyers knew, a corollary—state the opposite of the truth to own the truth. He poured carefully.

  “Okay, whoa up,” she cried. “That’s getting pretty very all-the-way fucking hot.” But she knelt, sank herself slowly back into the water, carefully managing the robe, covering her breast, suddenly shy again, always mercurial. She said, “My mom would sit and talk to me when I was in the bath.”

  He dipped the pot quickly just in front of her knees and put it on the fire, soap and dirt and all, took his chair, which was just slightly behind her.

  “I can’t tell you,” she said. “It’s been really months since I had an actual bath. Last time was, I don’t know. This is a lot of water. It was the river all summer, like YMCA camp, and okay right up till the last time, in, like, October. I tried again a couple or a few weeks ago—Christmas Eve, I’m pretty sure. When it was cold as shit, yo. I got pretty good at the sponge bath. Though my hair paid for it. And. Um. I got kind of freaked out one night and tried to cut it all off with a filet knife, a fishing knife, extra sharp. It was in the drawer. Yes, that’s what happened, Mr. Flinch. You’ve been pretty patient not to ask. It all ended in tears, as you can imagine. I cut myself and it bled and bled. I was just very fucking crazy from being alone. Also, hormonal.”

  “It’s not so bad. You look fine. Your ear. And I didn’t flinch.”

  “It’s very bad. Eric. And I don’t have a hairbrush. I don’t even have a comb. And you flinched. I can see you, in case you thought not. Female gaze. Not something you learn in school.”

  Eric felt himself flush, got busy with a pot on the stove. He said, “Is there any shampoo?”

  “Shampoo. I had a thing of Pantene. I was very proud of that. Pantene. First thing I bought with the car money. But I left it on the rocks down by the river that last time, conditioner, too, and towel and comb and bru
sh and you name it. And the water came up after that week of rain? Like a mini flood. Carried it all away.”

  “We’ll find it in the spring,” Eric said, which as an offer of extended friendship was pretty oblique, but the joke made her smile. He searched all the cabinets in the kitchen area (Lux dishwashing liquid, Murphy’s Oil Soap for floors, Windex with Ammonia D, all in ancient packaging, all potential havoc for her already beleaguered hair), searched the various nooks of the big room, boxes of this, shelves full of that, mountain of snow and sawdust in the middle, crashed tree and the iced blanket holding up the corner, no luck. In the tool shed by kerosene lamplight inside a stack of four unequal rolls of duct tape he found a bottle of dog shampoo, which in any other circumstances would have made a pretty good joke, picture of a happy collie on the label. But then in a line of another era’s spray-paint cans and wasp bombs and tubes of axle grease he spotted a (glass!) bottle he recognized despite the missing label as Breck shampoo, which his older sisters had used throughout their high school years and which by default he had used as well. The conditioner had been heartily electrical-taped to the shampoo, a length of chain attached, a man’s operation meant for the rustic bath in the river. Eric opened the (frozen) shampoo component of the clunky package, sniffed it luxuriously, and it was as if time itself had been trapped inside, how thoroughly his sisters leapt back to him, the fraught hour before the school bus came, Ellen and Tina, the steam in the family’s one bathroom, the creams and lotions and emollients and strange pads, the towels clutched around them, the rare peek at private skin, their lingering scents. He’d have to give them each a call when he finally got home. They’d love the story of the taped and chained Breck, something their dad might have done.