Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (14 page)

They had twice in their marriage seen counselors, a practice Fielding found ridiculous, but he had thought lately about what the professionals might say. They would tell him to stay, because they were marriage counselors, conservative by nature, interested in preserving whatever stability people had patched together. In his mind, there was no argument he could make that would convince them he was doing the right thing. He cut into his steak, which was nicely pink at the center, rich and brown on the outside; he had taught Gavin well. His children had faith in marriage as a safe destination, and if he didn’t leave, they could go forth into love with their confidence intact.

But Eleanor. The sweetness of lying against her bare shoulder, the softness of everything about her. She was so pliable and willing, vulnerable where his wife was girded and bulletproof. That day in the hardware store, Eleanor was buying a nightlight with a motion detector and he had asked her why. She said she woke up at night.

“Are you worried?” he asked.

“Oh, sometimes,” she said.

“What do you do when you wake up?” He thought she would look as she did now: no makeup, her fine silky hair more mussed. He had wondered if she wore a nightgown.

“I lie awake thinking,” she said.

“About what?”

“Oh—everything.”

He had liked that
Oh
, the hesitation before the answer. It might be just a tic she had picked up, but it sounded thoughtful.

“Did you always worry?” he asked. “You seemed very cheery in the pool.”

“Oh, that pool,” she said, exasperated. “That’s how everyone thinks of me. I was seventeen, I knew nothing.”

“You seem very calm now.”

“It makes me less afraid, to act like I’m not.”

“What are you afraid of ?”

“So many things. Aren’t you afraid?”

“Sometimes,” he said.

“Yellowstone Park is a giant volcano,” she said. “It could explode any day.”

“The whole thing?”

“All of it. It would destroy all of the western states and the whole Midwest.”

He laughed, at the absurdity of the danger and the earnest look on her face. She had fine blond down near her ears, and freckles across her nose. He wanted to scoop her up in his arms and protect her. “Why tell me that?” he asked. “What good does it do me? When I wake up at night, I’m going to call you and complain. What else do you worry about?”

She smiled. “The usual things. The war, the climate. Flesh-eating bacteria. My parents’ health. I think about dumb things, too, stupid things I said. I’ll probably regret telling
you
all this. I barely remember your kids. Gavin and Meg, you said?”

The second time they met, in a truck-stop coffee shop beyond the east end of town, where neither of them would know anyone, she ducked her head in embarrassment as she sat down to the table. He told her how bold and brave she was to come.

“I’m not,” she said, shaking her head.

“But you’re here,” he said. “Do you wish you weren’t?”

She shook her head again: no.

When her embarrassment seemed to have reached a peak, with the waitress coming by and the big glass door opening every few minutes, when she was practically vibrating with nervousness, he said that he had a house at the lake that was empty and quiet, and they could go have a drink there. They went, and once they were alone, all her anxiety was gone. He had been so happy, with her lying naked and safe in his arms. All he wanted was to preserve that feeling, of the two of them alone together, and make all obstacles to it go away.

Raye was clearing the table now, and Gavin was washing the dishes. Meg had called, late, to check in. When his daughter said, “I love you,” before hanging up, Fielding felt a squeeze in his chest. Eleanor was going to want children, in spite of her fears. She was thirty-two, the age for the wanting. Fielding hadn’t really absorbed the idea until now. Jennie was right that he hadn’t thought it all through. The diapers, the sleeplessness, the willful tyrant two-year-olds, the teacher conferences and dance classes and soccer games. Gavin could teach them soccer moves, but would he want to? Even when Fielding had imagined his grown children being furious with him, he had not imagined it lasting very long, or including new children who would know that their older half-siblings resented their existence. He thought Gavin and Meg were more forgiving than that, but he couldn’t be sure. They had never been tested.

Gavin squeezed his father’s shoulder and announced he was going back to town. To look for Jennie? He was out the door. Raye took a blanket off the couch and said, “Are you coming outside? It’s so nice out.”

Fielding went, wondering what he might say to his wife, feeling that he was walking onto a stage without his lines. So there they were on the deck, on the old cushioned chaises longues they had bought together when they were young and too broke to be buying deck furniture. The stars were very clear. A bat flitted by overhead, chasing insects. Raye gave him half the blanket and he pulled it up to his chest, thinking about the nights they had lain like this in college, when he had pretended to look at the stars for a minute or two before diving to get into her pants. Defiant Raye in college, saving the world, going braless with her A-cups; if he went back in time, he couldn’t have resisted it.

“Do you think Jennie has a crush on Gavin?” she asked him now. “She said she came looking for him.”

“I was thinking that Gavin might have one on her.”

“
Really
?” she asked.

“Jennie’s an attractive girl,” he said. “And she’s smart.”

“They’re like siblings,” Raye said. “It would be very strange. He needs someone with a real spark.”

He had nothing to gain by extolling Jennie’s charms, so he didn’t. Raye turned on her side on the deck chair, her body curving toward him under the blanket.

“Do you know who I saw this afternoon?” she asked. “Do you remember Eleanor Lansing, who taught swimming lessons at the city pool?”

His heart froze. “Eleanor Lansing,” he repeated.

“Sturdy blond girl?” she said. “All the dads were in love with her, outside the fence. I bet you were, too, you’ve just forgotten. She’s moved back here to live, to be near her parents.”

“Hunh,” he said, his mind stumbling over the facts. Why hadn’t Eleanor called him the second she escaped the conversation? He wondered if seeing Raye in person had been too much reality, if it had made her rethink stealing Raye’s husband. Or if she had only been waiting for him to hear about it. He wanted to jump up from the deck chair and call her now; it was agony to be still.

“
She
had a spark,” Raye said, musingly. “I mean, she’s too old for Gavin, of course. She had great tits, my God.”

“She doesn’t anymore?” he asked. Almost anything he said might be held against him later on: anything that suggested that he hadn’t seen Eleanor could be construed as an outright lie. He had not expected to be talking about her tits.

“No, I guess she still does,” she said. “I just think of her as a teenager in a swimsuit. Like I still think of myself as fifteen years younger. I see myself in the mirror and I think,
Who is that, how did I get so old?
Don’t you do that?”

“Of course.” They had had this conversation before, and he had a pang of remorse about jumping ship on her in middle age, trying to swim to a younger boat.

“Eleanor’s parents were Republicans or something,” she said. “We didn’t know them.”

He could have told her they were only Lutherans, but didn’t. They might as well be Republicans.

“It’s funny she’s moved back,” Raye said. “If Gavin and Meg go away and wait fifteen years to move back, we’ll be
really
old.”

“They should do what they want.”

“But wouldn’t it be nice to have them stay?”

“Only if they’re happy here.”

“Ugh,” Raye said. “You should be more selfish, like I am.”

Fielding said nothing. Raye reached toward him, under the blanket. He was wearing thick corduroys, and she slipped her hand into his pocket, the thin cotton like a sock on her hand. He felt the usual stirrings, undiminished by the events of the day. He had imagined, very clearly, that he might leave his wife for Eleanor. But could he fuck his wife within minutes of pretending not to know Eleanor, and then leave her? He didn’t think he could. So could he tell Raye now? He had an opportunity; in a way, she had brought the subject up. But he would have to start talking, right now, and he couldn’t begin. So could he
not
fuck his wife, in order not to add insult to injury? She knew just what pressure to use, and now she loosened his belt and slipped her cool hand against his skin.

He opened his eyes and she smiled conspiratorially, and in the dark she looked briefly like the Raye of thirty years ago: the lanky, tender college girl, the wanton defender of the poor. Could he stay and be happy here? Three minutes ago he had been desperate to call Eleanor, to dissect her conversation with his wife, but now he had settled back into the habit of his marriage, of talking in the dark about the children, of his wife’s expert hands. He tried to determine if he was paralyzed with indecision or only mired in comfort. He tried to reconstruct his reasons for wanting to leave, but it was like trying, while heavy with sleep in a warm bed, to construct reasons for getting up into the cold.

“You there?” Raye said.

“Yes.”

She moved her hand up to his chest, her palm flat beneath his shirt. “What is it you’re thinking about doing?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure, that’s why I’m asking,” she said. “I keep feeling that you’re half somewhere else, like you’re about to bolt.”

“Really?”

“Your heart’s going crazy, since I asked,” she said. “I can feel it.”

He tried consciously to slow it down.

“I don’t know what’s happened,” she said. “And I don’t want to be a fool here. But for what it’s worth, I don’t want you to go.”

Another bat shot by, a swift black shadow overhead. Fielding’s throat felt constricted. He was, even after so much planning, unprepared to speak.

“Babe?” she said.

“I’m not going anywhere.” It was the only thing he could say that wouldn’t change everything, and he didn’t know if he was buying time or if it was true.

“You aren’t?” she asked.

He hesitated. “I’m not.”

She watched him, his eminently intelligent wife. He pulled her closer to make the scrutiny stop, and feeling her head on his shoulder was reassuring. He was doomed to ambivalence and desire. A braver man, or a more cowardly one, would simply flee. A happier or more complacent man would stay and revel in the familiar, wrap it around him like an old bathrobe. He seemed to be none of those things, and could only deceive the people he loved, and then disappoint and worry them when they saw through him. There was a poem Meg had brought home from college, with the line “Both ways is the only way I want it.” The force with which he wanted it both ways made him grit his teeth. What kind of fool wanted it only one way?

It had started to grow cold, on the deck. The stars were impossibly clear. The bats were out in force. He held his wife and felt himself anchored to everything that was safe and sure, and kept for himself the knowledge of how quickly he could let go and drift free.

IT WAS A FINE TREE
, Everett’s daughter agreed. His wife said it was lopsided and looked like a bush. But that was part of its fineness—it was a tall, lopsided Douglas fir, bare on one side where it had crowded out its neighbor. The branchless side could go against the living room wall, the bushy side was for decorations, and now the crowded tree in the woods had room to grow. Everett dragged their find through the snow by the trunk, and Anne Marie, who was four, clung to the upper branches and rode on her stomach, shouting, “Faster, Daddy!”

Pam, his wife, followed with an armload of pine boughs and juniper branches. She seemed to have decided not to say anything more about the tree, which was fine with Everett.

The Jimmy was parked where the trail split off from the logging road, and Everett opened the back to throw the tools and boughs in, then roped the tree to the roof with nylon cords. Pam brushed off Anne Marie’s snowsuit and buckled her in the front so she wouldn’t get carsick. The smell of pine and juniper filled the car as they drove down the mountain.

“Chest
nuts
roasting on an open fire,” Everett sang, in his best lounge-singer croon. “Jack
Frost
nipping at your nose.” Here he reached over and nipped at Anne Marie’s, and she squealed. He stopped, forgetting the words.

Pam prompted: “Yuletide carols,” half-singing, shy about her voice.

“Being sung by a
choir
. . .” He reached for the high note.

That was when they saw the couple at the side of the road. Folks dressed up like Eskimos: Everett thought for a second that he had conjured them up with his song. The two of them stood in the snow, under the branches of a big lodgepole pine. The man wore a blue parka and held up a broken cross-country ski. The woman wore red gaiters over wool trousers, a man’s peacoat, and a fur hat. They waved, and Everett slowed to a stop and rolled down the window.

“Nice day for a ski,” he said.

“It was,” the man said bitterly. He was about Everett’s height and age, not yet pushing forty, with a day or two of bristle on his chin.

“I broke a ski and we’re lost—” the woman began.

“We’re not lost,” the man said.

“We are
completely
lost,” the woman said.

She was younger than the man, with high, pink cheekbones in the cold. Everett felt friendly and warm from the tree and the singing.

“Your car must be close,” he said. “You’re on the road.”

“The car is on a different road,” the woman said.

“Well, we’ll find it,” Everett said.

In the rearview mirror, he saw Pam’s eyes widen at him from the back seat. She was slight and dark-haired, and accused him of favoring the kind of blonde who held sorority car washes. It was a joke, but it was partly true. With a bucket and sponge this girl would fit right in. But arguing over giving them a ride would make everyone uncomfortable, and Pam would agree in the end. Everett got out of the car and untied a nylon cord to open the back hatch. Pam had sleds and jackets in the back seat with her, and he thought she would want some separation of family and hitchhikers. She wouldn’t look at him now.

“You’ll have to sit with the juniper boughs,” he told the couple.

“Better than freezing in a snowbank,” the blonde said, climbing into the way back. Even in the wool pants, she had a sweet figure, of the car-soaping type.

“We really appreciate this,” the man said.

Everett shut them all in, lashed on the skis, and tied the tree down. It made no sense for Pam to be angry.  This wasn’t country where you left people in the snow.  The man looked strong but not too strong; Everett could take him, if he needed to. Back in the driver’s seat, Everett pulled onto the road, as snow fell in clumps off the big pine the couple had stood under.

His daughter turned around in her seat, as well as she could with her seatbelt on, and announced to the new passengers, “We have a CB radio.”

The warning tone in her voice came straight from Pam. It was identical in some technical, musical way to Pam’s
We’re going to be late
, and her
I’m not going to tell you again
.

“What’s your handle?” the man in the parka asked.

Anne Marie looked confused.

“Your name,” Everett explained. “On the radio.”

“Batgirl,” Anne Marie told the strangers, her cheeks flushing. Oh, he loved Anne Marie! Loved it when she blushed. There had been a rocky time when Pam was pregnant, when he had felt panicked and young and trapped, and slept with the wife of a friend. It had only been once, in 1974, after many beers at a co-ed softball game on the Fourth of July, but the girl had gone and told Pam. She said she needed to clear her conscience, which didn’t make any sense to Everett. He’d ended up driving Pam to the emergency room after a screaming fight, when she threw a shoe at him and started to have shooting pains in her abdomen. The doctors were worried: Pam was anemic, and if she lost the baby she might bleed to death. Everett spent the night in her hospital room, frozen with grief. The baby decided to stay put, and came along fine two months later, but the night in the hospital had scared him. He would never put his wife and child in danger again. He hadn’t put them in danger now, and he resented Pam’s eye-widened implication that he had.

“You got a handle?” he asked the hitchhikers in back.

“I’m Clyde,” the man said.

“Bonnie,” the woman said.

Everyone was silent for a moment.

“That’s really funny,” Everett finally said—though between his shoulder blades he felt a prick of worry. “You must have a CB, too.”

“No, those are our names,” the man said.

The CB crackled on. “What’s this ‘Continental Divide’?” a man’s voice asked.

Everett picked up the handset, still thinking about Bonnie and Clyde. “You mean, what is it?”

“Yeah,” the voice said.

So Everett said that the snow and rain on the west side of the mountains ran to the Pacific, and the water on the east side ran to the Gulf of Mexico.

“I never heard of such a thing,” the voice said.

“That’s what it is,” Everett said. He thought of something, the recruiting of a witness. “We just picked up some hitchhikers named Bonnie and Clyde,” he said. “How about that?”

A wheezing laugh came over the radio. “No kidding?” the voice asked. “You watch your back, then. So long.”

Everett hung up the handset. “So,” he said to his passengers, as if he hadn’t just acted out of fear of them. “Where’s your stolen jalopy?”

“We parked by Fire Creek.”

“You didn’t get far.”

“No,” Bonnie said.

“How’d you break the ski?”

Bonnie and Clyde both fell silent.

Everett drove. The windows were iced from everyone’s breathing, and he turned up the defrost. The fan seemed very loud. He took the road to Fire Creek, which was unpaved under the packed snow.

“This is it,” he said, stopping the Jimmy.

There was a place at the trailhead to park cars, but there were no cars. Just snow and trees, and the creek running under the ice. Everett didn’t look at his wife. He scanned the empty turnout and hoped this was not one of those times you look back on and wish you had done one thing different, though it had seemed perfectly natural to do what you did at the time.

“Where’s the car?” Bonnie asked.

“This is where we parked,” Clyde said.

They were genuinely surprised, and Everett almost laughed with relief. There was no con, no ambush. He untied the rope, and the couple climbed out and walked to where their car had been. The girl’s arm brushed against Everett’s when she passed, but he didn’t think she meant it. She was thinking about the missing car. He got in the Jimmy to let them discuss it. Pam reached into the way back to pull the saw and the ax from under the boughs Clyde and Bonnie had been sitting on, and she tucked the tools under her feet.

“What are we doing with these people in our car?” she asked.

“Can’t leave people in the snow.”

“We have a child, Everett.”

“And,” he said, with the confidence he had just now recovered, “we’re showing her that you don’t leave people in the snow. Right, Anne Marie?”

“Right,” Anne Marie said, but she watched them both.

Pam gave Everett a dark, unforgiving stare. He turned back in his seat and looked out the windshield at the arguing hitchhikers. The girl, Bonnie, stamped her foot on the ground, her bare hands in fists. He liked the peacoat and fur hat combination a lot. He guessed Pam knew that. But he didn’t like to be glowered at.

“I just worry,” he said, trying to adopt a musing tone, “that someday I could roll all your things into a ditch, or take up with your sister, and you wouldn’t have any looks left to give me. You’d have used them all up.”

Pam said nothing, but looked out the window.

Everett had once argued that his affair—if one drunken night could be called that—had saved their marriage. He had thought he wanted out, but he had seen that he was wrong, and had come back for good. Pam had not been convinced by that argument. The girl he’d slept with still gave him looks at parties, looks that suggested things might start up again. Even in her confessional fit, she hadn’t felt compelled to tell her husband what had happened, but Everett avoided him anyway, and the friendship had died.

Outside in the snow, Bonnie and Clyde’s voices rose a notch.

“You said we could leave the keys in it!” Bonnie said. “You said this was Montana, and that’s what people do!”

“That
is
what they do,” Clyde said.

“Then who the
fuck
stole our car?”

Snow off the trees drifted around them, and the two stood staring at each other for a minute, then Bonnie started to laugh. She had a throaty, movie-star laugh that rose into a series of uncontrolled giggles. Her husband shook his head at her in exasperation. Everett felt the opposite; he liked her even more. A woman who could laugh at her own stolen car, and who looked like that when she did it. She was still laughing when they started back to the car.

“
You
ask for a ride,” she told her husband, her voice not lowered enough.

Everett looked to Pam in the back seat; Pam frowned, then nodded. He got out of the Jimmy, and this time the girl did brush his arm on purpose, he was sure of it. When she and Clyde were bundled in the way back again, with the tree tied down, Everett called in the theft of the car on the CB.

“Do you think we should wait for the cops?” Clyde asked.

“
I’m
not waiting in the cold anymore,” Bonnie said. “Jesus, who steals a car at Christmas?”

“People do all kinds of things at Christmas,” Clyde said. No one had any response to that.

The road was empty and the sky was clear. Barbed-wire fences ran evenly beside the road, and the wooden posts ticked past as they drove. In the snowy fields beyond, yellow winter grass showed through in patches. Everett peered up through the windshield at the tip of the tree, which seemed stable on the roof. He wondered if Pam could ever laugh off a stolen car. He wondered if he could. Years ago, when Pam was still in school and they were broke, they had been evicted from an attic apartment near the train yard, with nowhere to go. They had gone out for burgers to celebrate their escape from the noisy, smelly trains. He couldn’t see them doing that now.

“Let’s sing a song,” Anne Marie said.

“Dashing through the snow,” Everett began, and Bonnie joined in from the way back. But then Everett caught Pam’s look in the mirror and stopped singing, and Anne Marie trailed out in shyness. Bonnie gamely finished, “laughing all the way,” in a clear voice, and then she stopped, too. Everett looked for antelope in the snow.  The fenceposts ticked past.

After a while, Bonnie asked, “What will you do with the boughs?”

“Make wreaths,” Pam said.

“I hope we’re not crushing them.”

“No.”

The two women settled back into a silence just hostile enough that Everett could feel it. There didn’t seem to be any antelope. There were hundreds in summer. The white-capped mountains in the east, beyond the low yellow hills, were lit up by the late sun through the clouds, and he was about to point them out to Anne Marie.

“I broke the ski,” Bonnie said, out of the blue.

Everett had forgotten he had asked.

“I was cold,” she said, “so we tried to take a shortcut through some fallen trees with snow on them. Clyde took his skis off, but the snow was deep and I tried to go over the logs. And the ski snapped right in half. Clyde, I’m so fucking sorry.”

“Bonnie, the kid,” he said.

“Sorry,” she said. “But Clyde, I am.”

“I know.”

The sunlight had faded on the mountains again, and Everett watched the road.

“He came up here to find himself,” Bonnie said. “From Arizona, where we live, and he met this woman. She reminds me of you, actually.”

Pam glanced at the woman in surprise.

“You’re totally his type,” Bonnie said.

“Bonnie,” Clyde said.

There was a long pause, and Everett wondered what Pam was thinking, if she was at all stirred by that.

“Anyway,” Bonnie went on, “she skis, and dives into glacial lakes, and canoes through rapids and what doesn’t she do. And he writes me and says the air is so high and clear up here that he understands everything, and he’s met his soul mate.”