Mudwoman (5 page)

In the Neukirchen household, Konrad had been the one to carefully, painstakingly re-fold maps. Agatha had been totally incapable, vexed and anxious.

It feels like some kind of trick. It can’t be done!

M.R. saw: to the north and east of Tompkins County was Cortland County—beyond Cortland, Madison—then Herkimer, so curiously elongated among other, chunkier counties; beyond Herkimer, in the Adirondacks, the largest and least populated county in New York State, Beechum.

At the northwestern edge of Beechum County, the city of Carthage.

How many miles was it? How far could she drive, on a whim? It looked like less than two hundred miles, to the southernmost curve of the Black Snake River in Beechum County. Which computed to about three hours if she drove at sixty miles an hour. Of course, she wouldn’t have to drive as far as Carthage; she could simply drive, with no particular destination, see how far she got after two hours—then turn, and drive back.

How quickly her heart was beating!

M.R. calculated: it was just 1:08
P.M.
She’d been waiting for her hotel room for nearly twenty minutes. Surely in another few minutes, the desk clerk would summon her, and she could check into the room?

The reception began at 5:30
P.M.
—but no one would be on time. And then, at about 6
P.M.
, everyone would arrive at once, the room would be crammed with people, no one would notice if M.R. arrived late. Dinner was more essential of course since M.R. was seated at the speakers’ table—that wasn’t until 7
P.M.
And of course, the
keynote address
at 8
P.M
. . . .

There was time—or was there? Her brain balked at calculations like a faulty machine.

“Absurd. No. Just
stop
.”

The spell was broken by the cell phone ringing at M.R.’s elbow. The first stirring notes of Mozart’s
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

M.R. saw that the caller ID was
UNIVERSITY
—meaning the president’s office. Of course, they were waiting to hear from her there.

“Yes, I’ve arrived. Everything is fine. In a few minutes I’ll be checked in. And Carlos is on his way back home.”

It was a fact: Carlos had departed. M.R. had thanked him and dismissed him. Late in the afternoon of the third day of the conference Carlos would return, to drive M.R. back to the University.

Of course, M.R. had suggested that Carlos stay the night—this night—at the hotel—at the University’s expense—to avoid the strain of driving a second five-hour stretch in a single day. But Carlos politely demurred: Carlos didn’t seem to care much for this well-intentioned suggestion
.

It was a relief Carlos had left, M.R. thought. The driver had lingered in the lobby for a while as if uncertain whether to leave his distinguished passenger before she’d actually been summoned to her hotel room; he’d insisted upon carrying her suitcase into the hotel for her—this lightweight roller-suitcase M.R. could handle for herself and in fact preferred to handle herself, for she rested her heavy handbag on it as she rolled it along; but Carlos couldn’t bear the possibility of being observed—by other drivers?—in the mildest dereliction of his duty.

“Ma’am? Should I wait with you?”

“Carlos, thank you! But no. Of course not.”

“But if you need . . .”

“Carlos, really! The hotel has my reservation, obviously. It will be just another few minutes, I’m sure.”

Still he’d hesitated. M.R. couldn’t determine if it was professional courtesy or whether this dignified gentleman in his early sixties was truly concerned for her—perhaps it was both; he told her please call him on her cell phone if she needed anything, he would return to Ithaca as quickly as possible. But finally he’d left.

M.R. thought
Of course. His life is elsewhere. His life is not driving a car for me.

Questioned afterward Carlos Lopes would say
I asked her if I should stay—her room wasn’t ready yet in the hotel—she said no, I should leave—she was working in a room off the lobby—I said maybe she would need me like if they didn’t have a room for her and I could drive her to some other hotel and she laughed and said no Carlos! That is very kind of you but no—of course there will be a room.

As the desk clerk would say
Her room was ready for her at about 1
:
15
P.M.
She was gracious about waiting, she said it was no trouble. But then a few minutes later she called the front desk—I spoke with her—she asked about a car rental recommendation. Sometime after that she must have left the hotel. Nobody would’ve seen her, the lobby was so crowded. Her room was empty at 8
:
30
P.M.
when some people from the conference asked us to open it. There was no
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on the door. The lights were off. Her suitcase was on the bed opened but mostly unpacked and her laptop was on the bed, not opened. There weren’t any signs of anybody breaking into the room or anything disturbed and there was no note left behind.

B
y 2
P.M.
she was in the rental car driving north of Ithaca.

Her lungs swelled with—relief? Exultation?

She’d told no one where she was going or even that she was going—somewhere.

Of course, M.R. was paying for the compact Toyota with her personal credit card.

Of course, M.R. knew that her behavior was impulsive but reasoned that since she’d arrived early at the conference, in fact hours before the conference officially began, this interlude—before 6
P.M.
, or 6:30
P.M.
—was a sort of free fall, like gravity-less space.

Once she’d asked her (secret) lover how an astronomer can bear the silence and vastness of the sky which is unbroken/unending/unfathomable and which yields nothing remotely
human
in fact rather makes a mockery of
human
and he’d said—
But darling! That is what draws the astronomer to his subject: silence, vastness.

Driving north to Beechum County she was driving into what felt like silence. For she’d left the radio off, and the wind whining and whistling at all the windows drained away all sound as in a vacuum leaving her brain blank.

Ancient time
her lover called the sky without end
predating every civilization on Earth that believed it was the be-all and end-all of Earth.

She’d resolved to drive for just an hour and a half in one direction. Three hours away would return her to the hotel by 5
P.M.
and well in time to change and prepare for the reception.

Except the driving was wind-buffeted. She’d rented a small car.

Not so very practical for driving at a relatively high speed on the interstate flanked and overtaken by tractor-trailers.

In high school driver’s education class, M.R. had been an exemplary student. Aged sixteen she’d learned to parallel park with such skill, her teacher used her as a model for other students. Approvingly he’d said of her
Meredith handles a car like a man.

Remembering how when she’d first begun driving she’d felt dizzy with excitement, happiness. That thrill of sheer power in the way the vehicle leaps when you press down on the gas pedal, turns when you turn the steering wheel, slows and stops when you
brake.

Remembering how she’d thought
This is something men know. A girl has to discover.

“ ‘Just to stretch my legs.’ No other reason.”

She laughed. Her laughter was hopeful. A thin dew of fever-dreams on her forehead, oily and prickling in her armpits. And some sort of snarl in her hair. As if in the night she’d been dreaming of—something like this.

She would have time to shower before the reception—wouldn’t she? Change into her chic presidential clothes.

As a girl—a big husky girl—a girl-athlete—M.R. had sweated like any boy, sweat-rivulets running down her sides, a torment at the nape of her neck beneath the bushy-springy hair. And in her crotch—a snaggle of even denser hair, exerting a sort of appalled fascination to the bearer—who was “Meredith”—in dread of this snaggle of hair being somehow known by others; as there were years—middle school, high school—of anxiety that her body would
smell
in such a way to be detected by others.

Of course, it had. Many times probably. For what could a husky girl
do
? Warm airless classroom-hours, sturdy thighs sticking/slapping together if you were not very careful.

As on certain days of the month, anxiety rose like the red column of mercury in a thermometer, in heat.

Having her period. Poor Meredith!

Everything shows in her face. Funny!

Early that morning before Carlos arrived—for M.R. had slept only intermittently through the night—she’d showered, of course, shampooed her hair. So long ago, seemed like another day.

And so another shower, back at the hotel. When she returned.

On the interstate M.R. was making good time in the compact little vehicle. Her speed held steady at just above sixty miles an hour which was a safe speed, even a cautious speed amid so many larger vehicles hurtling past her in the left lane as if with snorts of derision.

But—the beauty of this landscape! It required going away, and returning, to truly see it.

Farmland, hills. Wide swaths of farmland—cornfields, wheat—now harvested—rising in hills to the horizon. She caught her breath—those flame-flashes of sumac dark-red, fiery-orange by the roadside—amid darker evergreens, deciduous trees whose leaves hadn’t—yet—begun to die.

Already she was beyond Bone Plain Road, Frozen Ocean State Park. Passing signs for Boontown, Forestport, Poland and Cold Brook—names not yet familiar to her from her girlhood in Beechum County.

These precious hours! If her parents knew, they’d have wanted to see her—they’d have been willing to drive to Ithaca for the evening.

They’d have wanted to hear her
keynote address
. For they were so very proud of her. And they loved her. And saw so little of her since she’d left Carthage on that remarkable scholarship to Cornell, it must have perplexed them.

“I should have. Why didn’t I!”

It was as if M.R. had not thought of the possibility at all. As if a part of her brain had ceased functioning.

That peculiar sort of blindness/amnesia in which objects simply vanish as they pass into the area monitored by the damaged brain. Not that one forgets but that experience itself has been blocked.

Now that M.R. had assistants, it was no trouble to make such arrangements. At the hotel, for instance. Or, if the conference hotel was booked solid, at another local hotel. Audrey would have been delighted to book a room for M.R.’s parents.

M.R.’s lover had heard her speak in public several times. He’d been surprised—impressed—by her ease before a large audience, when M.R. was so frequently uneasy in his company.

Well, not uneasy—excited. M.R. was frequently so
excited
in his company.

She couldn’t bring herself to confess to her (secret) lover that intimacy with him was so precious to her, it was a strain to which she hadn’t yet become accustomed. She’d said with a smile
No speaker makes eye contact with his audience. The larger the audience, the easier. That is the secret.

Her lover imagined her a far more composed and self-reliant individual than she was. It had long been a fiction of their relationship, that M.R. didn’t “need” a man in her life; she was of a
newer, more liberated generation
—for her lover was her senior by fourteen years, and often remarked upon this fact as if to absolve himself of any candidacy as the husband of a girl “so young.” Also, Andre was enmeshed in a painful marriage he liked to describe as resembling Laocoön and sons in the coils of the terrible sea-serpents.

M.R. laughed aloud. For Andre Litovik was so very funny, you might forget that his humor frequently masked a truth or a motive not-so-funny.

“Oh—God . . .”

Powerful air-suction from a passing/speeding trailer-truck made M.R.’s compact vehicle shudder. The trucker must have been driving at eighty miles an hour. M.R. braked her car, alarmed and frightened.

She’d been daydreaming, and not concentrating on her driving. She’d felt her mind
drift.

Better to exit the interstate onto a state highway. This was safer, if slower. Through acres of steeply hilly farmland she drove into Cortland County, and she drove into Madison County, and she drove into Herkimer County and into the foothills of the Adirondacks and at last into Beechum County where mountain peaks covered in evergreens stretched hazy and sawtoothed to the horizon like receding and diminishing dreams.

She’d planned to drive north for only an hour and a half before turning around but decided now that a few minutes more—a few miles more—would do no harm.

Wherever she found herself at—4:30
P.M.
?—she would stop at once, turn her car around and head back to Ithaca.

This was likely the first time in months that no one on M.R.’s staff knew where she was, at such an hour of a weekday. No friends knew, no colleagues. M.R. had passed into the blind side of the brain, she’d become invisible.

Was this a good thing, or—not so good? Both her parents had praised her as a girl for her maturity, her sense of “responsibility.” But this was something different, a mere interlude.

This was something different: no one would ever know.

She’d turned off her cell phone. More practical to take messages and answer them in sequence.

And what relief, to have left her laptop behind on the hotel bed! She was attached to the thing like a colostomy bag. Her senses reacted in panic if it appeared to be malfunctioning for just a few minutes. A flurry of e-mails buzzing in her wake like angry bees.

Belatedly M.R. remembered—she was supposed to meet with a prominent educator now chairing a national committee on bioethics who’d been asked to invite M.R. to join the committee. This was a committee M.R. wanted to join—nothing seemed to her more crucial than establishing guidelines on bioethics—yet somehow, she’d forgotten. In her haste to rent a car and drive up into Beechum County, she’d forgotten. And M.R. had scheduled their meeting-time herself—just before the reception, at 5
P.M.