“Bold.” She retrieved his five-pack of disposable razors from wherever she’d stashed them in the kitchen and collected the plywood cutting board. This, she placed across the low end of the tub over his knees and sat sideways to him but very close, also close to the fire, her foot up on the ash shelf of the stove, plenty warm. Carefully she bared a leg, examined it thoroughly, used the scissors to mow a while, harrowing patchy cuts and hair falling in little clumps on the floor around her, one leg then the next. She dipped a washcloth in their tub, wet her skin at length.
“This is the most intimate thing,” she said.
He dunked himself awkwardly. “A little too,” he said. And kept his eyes closed.
She said, “I mean the most intimate thing I can think of between people who aren’t squishing. We’re basically survivors down here. Right?”
“I think we’re better off than most survivors.”
“Refugees, then.”
He swiped a hand across his eyes, bolt of panic, death imminent, found her looking at him very softly, anodyne.
“ ‘Modesty flies out the window,’ ” she said, quoting whom?
Hotly he said, “But the window down here doesn’t open even when it’s not packed solidly with snow.”
She admired the razor in her hand: “Oh, cunning.” Easily, she drew it up the side of her calf, left a perfect, clean strip. Cunning, that was such a Maine word, something she’d learned from her in-laws, no doubt. She dipped the multiple blade in one of the small pots on the stove (she could just reach it, elegant once again, all gesture when she wanted), shaved another clean strip. “I have nice skin,” she said.
“I’m not paying any attention at all,” Eric said leaning back, sinking as best he could, his knees pressing up beneath her against the cutting board.
“Just no whacking off,” she said as he went under.
Twenty-Six
HER THIGHS WERE next. She didn’t seem in a hurry. She sat poised with the cunning razor in her hand. Her calves glistened in the lamplight. Eric felt he was losing his boundaries or, if not that, at least losing his moral compass. He felt himself falling for her, which he’d prefer not, altogether. He could already leap ahead to the pain: Jim would come back. Jim would come back soon. There’d be trouble, that was for sure, Danielle a woman for confessions, and Jim not one to hear such confessions calmly, at a guess. It was hard not to look at her.
She muttered, “But you still love her.”
He said, “And you’re still married.”
She finished the one leg, turned just so away from him, drapery of the cruddy robe, finished leisurely, finally stood, removed the plywood seat and retrieved the three-gallon pot, which was boiling audibly. “You better move, yo.”
He swung his legs as she had, but his were much longer than hers and it wasn’t going to work, his privates very much in the line of fire.
“Just fucking stand up,” she said.
“I’m embarrassed,” he said.
“No doubt,” she said.
He stood, turned away from her, made a little comedy of putting his hands over himself. Not that she could see, but surely she must know: he was rampant, rampant, and so close to her as she poured the water, and she poured it slowly, slowly.
“My god,” he said. “That is very hot.”
No mercy. No turning away. She said, “Jim was a fireplug in all respects. He was more like good engineering than anything beautiful. Eric. Can I say something? If you broke your dick off you’d be like a statue in ancient Greece.” She dipped the saucepan behind him, hefted it to the stove. “In fact, a little chop-chop might be a good idea.”
“That’s very nineteen-fifties of you.”
“No, more like three thousand B.C.”
“I mean the castration-complex stuff.”
“Nineteen-twenties then. Just sit.”
Eric eased back in the water, displaced it nearly to the rim, unduly pleased by the compliment on his corpus, very hot water, bring it on.
Behind him, one leg shaved, she put a log in the fire, much bumping and clanging. She put on her big socks, corner of his eye. Then she was splashing their mugs full of box wine, sliding to him across the wooden floor. She handed him the mug that had been hers, her robe falling open, not that he saw.
Their blanket thumped rhythmically, beat of the wind.
“Thanks,” he said. She’d switched those mugs on purpose, he thought, a kind of intertwining, a woman big on symbols. The wine was cold and tasted fine, better than the Côtes du Rhône, not so bloody thick, but he wasn’t going to say that.
Danielle sipped, too, no comment, wine being wine, and no pretensions.
He’d have to get out of the tub soon: he felt almost queasy with the heat.
“This is a nice scene,” Danielle said slowly, sitting back down on her board in front of him. “Intimate.” She sipped at her wine. Then she repeated it, a whisper: “Intimate.” And fell into a revery. Finally, she said, “The shrink used to ask what I thought that meant.”
“What shrink was that?”
“Grief therapist. When I was, like, twelve. My father made me. The waiting room was always full of old men and magazines.” She sipped some more wine. “But the lady was really quite chill. Dr. Dewanji. You’d wait and wait and then her inner office was like going into the sunshine. I didn’t know why she asked. Intimacy. What the fuck did that mean? I wanted to tell her something smart, so she’d love me and would let me keep coming back, not that I knew that then. What I thought then was that she needed a definition for some other patient asking what the fuck she meant, that she’d just cop my answer and use it in the other room. I mean, we talked about it a lot, mister. What is intimacy? No, I’m asking you.”
Eric had been thinking about the very thing, recent weeks. “Not proximity,” he said. The wine stayed on your tongue. It stayed on your tongue a long time.
“Like you think I won’t know what that means.”
“Propinquity.”
“Now you got me.”
“Just a joke.”
“Closeness? Is that all?”
Eric said, “A kind of shared privacy.”
She said, “Loss of boundaries? That’s another thing Dr. Dewanji liked to talk about, boundaries.”
“No, no. I think that’s something different, less healthy? Real intimacy, I think, you’d keep the boundaries, but press them together.”
“Okay. Eric. I know what ‘boundaries’ means.” The cabin made a miserable groan. “Do you think the front wall will cave in?”
Which made him realize he’d been staring past her at their makeshift corner. “I don’t think so,” he said. Now the water felt perfect. “There’s a lot holding it up, when you think about it.”
Danielle looked, too. They admired their repair a long time. It was still moving with the wind, but stiff with ice. That was something they’d done together, something that had happened to them. The huge tree trunks pressed against the front of the house had settled, Eric reasoned, would surely serve as buttresses. She stared at her wine then, drank it down, stood up pulling the robe tight around her. She shuffled to the kitchen in her big socks, found the open pack of razors—a lot of crinkling of plastic—brought them all back to the tub in a fist, offered him one, which he took. She retrieved the wine box then, poured them both more, sat on her board. Sumptuously, she arranged herself in the lamplight and let the robe fall open, turned sideways to him, put a foot up on her chair, dipped the washcloth in his water.
“Hot,” she said.
He looked past her to the broken wall, began to shave, starting where he always started, upper lip. Watching him closely, she put the dripping cloth on her raised thigh, turned slightly further away from him—he still couldn’t look—stroked upwards neatly from her knee. “This is going to feel nice,” she said. Sip of wine. “Nice and smooth, yo.”
He felt his own razor’s path over his face with his fingers, tightening his chin, pulling down his lip, tried to make it lo
ok effortless.
“Smooth on smooth,” she said.
“I don’t think so.”
“I mean, on our date.”
“Our date that won’t happen.”
“Don’t you be so sure. Eric. Shit happens, including dates. I want to go to the beach. That’s what I want. To the beach at Phippsburg. For our date. That very private beach with the huge rocks. Of course you know it. With a picnic. On a day no one’s there—maybe say in June, or even May. The sun’s high, then, and it’s almost warm, we’ve got blankets. You have dared me to swim. Our skin is so salty. The sun is sparkling on the waves. That time of day —like late, but not sunset. A big pile of blankets, really nice blankets. Presents you bought for me. Like comforters and quilts and L.L. Bean blankets, those very thick wool ones. And I bet you made the bread. I bet you made the bread and brought some of your cheese and a thing of really nice, I don’t know, olives. And those really nice kinds of salami you get at your fancy stores down in Portland, all those stores you know about. And tomato slices, and salt, one of those cardboard salt shakers, lots of salt and like leaves from special plants and that kind of really good cheese—it’s salty, too. The theme of our date is salt, mister. And there’s a fancy inn up the way and they have a room and we say what the hell and for us it’s always these bathtubs and wine and all our blankets. And you’ll be like a puzzle and I’ll take off each little edge piece on one side of you and then all the edge pieces off one side of me, and we’ll see if, if like, if the puzzles fit together. Smooth on smooth. Eric.” Danielle swung herself back toward him, pulling the robe open, her thighs tight together and nicely shaven, pink from the scraping. She said, “I want to show you something.
“No,” he said.
“Just look.”
Her belly was too thin, actually concave, her ribs too prominent, her belly button tidy as he’d seen, stretched tight by the way she was turned, a vertical slit, that abandoned piercing visible. She pointed lower, a further contortion: “Here.”
There.
As low as you could go and still call it belly. A tattoo—small lettering, plain black ink, very crisp, actually quite elegant, like a satin ribbon: Jimmy Tremonton LaRoque.
Twenty-Seven
DANIELLE QUICKLY PUSHED Jim’s letters into the FedEx envelope and tucked it under the bookshelf, hidden nook. They got into her cold bed, which smelled of old smoke and Ben-Gay. But that only made the new scent of her hair sweeter: Breck. They kissed lying face-to-face in the lamplight, a kiss borrowed unspoken from their future date, which might never happen, and so. And then another, and then what you could only call a soul kiss, a long, sweet, stirring communication. “Hold my ass,” she said into the midst of it.
“You said we’d just sleep.” The house muttered and groaned. Outside, the wind was roaring harder than ever, puffs of sweet cold air and pricks of moisture through the boards of the gable wall behind them. He kept his hand on her back, just loose.
“You lying there in your pants,” she said.
He said, “Is this really going to work?”
“It’s already working.”
In the loft, the wind could not be ignored, the thumps on the roof. How many hundreds of tons of snow pressed against the face of the building? They’d left clothes at the front window, boots, a Hannaford bag with the remains of their food, a roll of duct tape, the splitting maul. In a further emergency you’d smash the big window, dress fast, wrap up in the blankets, climb out and into the night, and hopefully not into the river. They listened a long time, their kiss having found its arc. How much more snow was coming down? After a long time, she turned away from him, pushed her butt into him. That was okay. It was all really going to be okay. He put his arm around her, held her breast. They’d invented a difference between sex and intimacy and it suited them both. Eric was glad he had his pants on, all philosophy regardless.
He put the lamp out, smell of kerosene after.
“Something I want to say,” Danielle murmured at length in the dark.
“Okay,” he said.
“Just. Okay. Just don’t fuck me in the night. I’ve got no protection. Okay? Though it’s not like I’ve been getting any monthlies. Too thin, way. But just don’t.”
He said, “Like I’d fuck anybody in the night.”
“I’m not anybody,” she said. “Remember?”
“Yes, yes you are.”
“Actually, I trust you,” she said, and pushed all the harder into him, both of them, he thought, full of the feeling that at any moment the cabin might collapse or slide off its piers.
Twenty-Eight
IN THE NIGHT he woke to her crying—no subtle tears or hidden sorrow but deep, desperate sobs and gasps and moans into their slack pillow, into the back of his neck, into the deep darkness of the cabin—they’d both turned over in sleep. He reached behind and put a hand on her side and she pulled herself very close to him, cried into his shoulders clutching him and wetting him thoroughly with her tears before she subsided under his awkward gentle backward patting and turned away from him. She fell again to sleep.
Now he was the one awake, staring and mulling, a good honest talk with himself—he’d embarked on the care of a delicate psyche, gotten involved with a woman who, no matter what she said, was vulnerable. He’d taken advantage, or nearly. And if he did take advantage it would be something akin to getting tangled with a client. He’d come this far in blindness, because of wine, because he missed Alison, and not a little because Danielle was manipulating him, he suddenly thought: toxic, expert, needy, a pathological liar. Or because she was very appealing, and smarter, funnier, wiser, sexier, more careful—also older—than he’d been willing in his various layers of prejudice to understand. Or far from it: insane. Flowers from Jimmy. What a load of shit. Like the FTD man had walked down here! How had he managed to believe that? He wanted his phone. He hated his phone. He wanted to text Alison, unreasonably wanted to text her, composed a text in his mind, then another and another, just about the danger he was in. Or maybe it was that a gap was opening in his dependence on her. He thought of the things she’d said in their last conversation, already more than a month past, sentences that were warm enough but unmistakably valedictory in tone, her phone call, in fact, made just to cancel another dinner. No, Danielle, there hadn’t been any discussion of Senator Spruce Boughs or any other boyfriend or lover and Eric did not want to believe it of Alison. He was the one breaking their pact and breaking it with someone who’d wet the bed with tears and chopped her hair off with a fishing knife. But whom he’d only kissed, and that kiss in fondness, he told himself, mere fondness. Glad he had his pants on. He heard and saw several versions of Alison’s indictment in his head, offered his defense a dozen ways: text messages, e-mails, Facebook chats, on and on. He could see Alison’s golden face as it fell into rage: she was ugly when she was angry, all her flaws accentuated, and terrifying, too, worse than any judge he’d ever faced—adultery was serious. Her adultery, which somehow she always managed to bring back to him, convincing him that he’d opened a gap in her life almost purposefully through his passivity, and all she’d done was fill it. He could do it, he thought suddenly. He could quit her. She had left Eric, after all, and pretty emphatically—though she made it sound like his choice, made him believe it at times, or anyway he’d hear himself apologizing. Danielle’s heart thumped slowly at his back. The wind had died down. The cabin had ceased its complaining. Maybe the snow had stopped. He wondered if with your fingers you could feel a tattoo. He could hear the cookstove sucking air, that’s all, the fire quietly popping and sighing, very close to the end of their wood supply. His body was clean and felt perfectly delicious and pure. Hers, the same, and separately, no doubt about that, delicious and pure, with just the ribbon of lettering to call it all into question.
Next waking there was light, muted and blue and arctic. Danielle was on her back beside him dreaming—he lay there a while and watched her eyes moving under opaque lids, her lips half-forming myste
rious words, her shoulders square as architecture, a deep pool at the nexus of her clavicles, her jaw line strong as his own, her chin a little square, her skin shining. He was hard as the old marble hitching post outside the courthouse. But only, Your Honor, because he had to urinate. He’d have more to do to extricate himself from this situation than chop his way out of a remote cabin and forge a half-mile-long path up a steep hill through record snowfall. Gingerly, he disentangled himself from the warm but mangy blankets and sleeping bags atop him, slipped out of the spavined old bed, stood there tumid in his pants in the very cold loft. He thought of the weather maps he’d seen as the monstrous trio of weather systems had approached from their three directions, and the somber but clearly thrilled weatherman who’d pointed out the unusual convergences of warm and cool air masses, enough of a distraction from sexual thoughts that after a while he could use the thunder mug, as his grandpa would have called it. He unzipped and peed carefully against the metal so as to make as little noise as possible. His shirt and socks and actually underpants were downstairs with the hammer. The big window over the river was still completely blocked with snow, thickly covered, though that was where the light was coming from, a kind of glowing oval in the middle of the expanse of glass, the whale sleeping. It might be dawn, it might be noon, no way of telling. He’d avoided a terrible mistake, and was yet in the midst of it. He’d saved a life, however. That should stay clear: Danielle would not have survived without help, and that had been his only mission. He was Jimmy Tremonton LaRoque’s ally, nothing worse than that.
“Okay, mister,” Danielle croaked. She’d been watching him. “Planning your escape?”
“Planning yours, too,” he said.
“No favors,” she said. She was older than he’d thought and crabby again: “I’m already gone. I’m already escaped. You do what you got to do and leave me out of it.”
“I have an idea,” he said. “My friend Patty Cardinal has a room she rents.”
“Fuck. No.”
The Remedy for Love: A Novel Page 16
