Off Course (13 page)

*   *   *

Cress got up and put on her woolen bathrobe and her mother's ridiculous fluffy turquoise slippers and went downstairs to call Tillie.

First, she reclaimed the watery bourbon from under the wicker love seat. She sat and drank it staring into the fire. A married man. A man with a beautiful wife. A man willing to endanger his long marriage. For her. The compliment seemed enormous. Of course, Sylvia, with her heavy curls and little-girl voice, would never know. For all her loveliness, her flashing smile, Sylvia was a child. Who could blame Quinn for wanting intelligent conversation?

Cress could already imagine Tillie's vicarious excitement—
A married man! What's
that
like
?—but also her concern:
Aren't you afraid? Oh, be careful, Cress. Careful, careful
.

So maybe she wouldn't call Tillie. Not tonight, at any rate. Why not keep this moment close, close and sweet. Tillie could wait.

And Cress wasn't afraid. She'd handled Jakey when he turned out to be a compulsive philanderer. Once she knew the facts, a door had shut in her chest. The same grasp on reality would keep her safe with Quinn. If Caleb—so much funnier and more her style and closer to her age—had come after her, well, that might have been a different story. Cress glanced at the pinecone on her kitchen table, the perfect petalled symmetry, the jaunty outward curve of thorns. She could fall hard for Caleb. Quinn not so much. But she did feel for him. He cast sorrow and loneliness like trees cast shade. He was in dire need of comfort.

As it happened, she could use some companionship too.

 

Ten

Quinn had scars: a shiny white belly arc from an appendectomy at eleven. Under his right breast a puckering ridge of proud flesh and, on his back, a long slice over a shoulder blade where the skin, neatly parted, was imperfectly rejoined. Burn scars scalloped his forearms from years of feeding a wood-burning stove. “The word
scar
comes from the Greek for fireplace,” he said.

“Now, how do you know that?”

“Built a kitchen for a classics professor in Claremont,” he said.

“And this one?” Cress tapped the fat of his palm where a shiny white concavity the diameter of a pencil looked like an off-center stigmata, long healed.

He turned his hand over to show her the matching white dent below the pinky knuckle. “I was sanding a fir beam, bearing down, and before I knew it, a four-inch splinter'd went right through my hand. I'm screaming even as I'm trying to decide which way to pull it out.”

“And this?” Cress traced the white, scapular line.

He caught her hand, pinned it to the pillow. “So many questions.”

“So many scars. And I'm interested. Would you rather I wasn't?”

He was thirty-nine years old, ten and a half years older than she was—exactly the age gap between her parents, almost to the week. Quinn liked the slow drift of kissing, seemed at times to prefer it. He wasn't inclined to make love all over the forest, as was Jakey's wont. He preferred her too-firm bed, and darkness.

Afternoons, he came to walk smelling of sawdust and, faintly, sweat, the combination familiar from deep in her childhood, when her father was moonlighting as a carpenter and kissed her good night with sawdust in his eyebrows. At night, Quinn had washed and used a musky drugstore cologne—Matchabelli, he said. A gift. Cress didn't ask from whom. She was silently contemptuous of its cheap, chemical edge, although in time, one whiff launched a freefall of longing.

Although he was not an athletic or strenuous lover, or what she'd call an ecstatic lover (he did not tug and nudge her into odd positions, or hold back and go on forever like some virtuoso of intercourse), he was intense and attentive and profoundly well suited to her. He never had to ask (as John Bird had so often, it was like a tic) what she liked, what she wanted him to do that would make her happy. She and Quinn seemed to understand each other sexually. Currents of sympathy and intuition ran between them. Somehow she knew what pleased him. Or maybe everything pleased him. Maybe he was easy to please.

Her feelings for him seemed closest to the fierce allegiances she'd formed in elementary school with Jeff Dutro and Kathy Perrie: strong, unembarrassed attachments grounded in camaraderie, the joy of each other's company.

*   *   *

The day before Thanksgiving, Quinn came to tell her that he and Caleb were heading down the hill. His mother would be cooking turkey for twenty.

Her own parents, she said, were due up in a few hours.

Standing just inside the door, he took off his hat, rotated the brim in his hands. “And again. So you know. Ahh. To be clear. So there is no mistake,” he said. “I'll never leave Sylvia.”

Outside, the sky was flat, talc blue. “Yes, yes,” she said absently, having just noticed at eye level, on the sliding doors, all-new nose smears from the bear.

He came farther in and up to her. He set a fingertip over her heart, tapped. “I know why I'm doing this,” he said. “But why are you?”

She was surprised by the force of his gaze. “You and I get along.”

“That we do,” he said. “We do get along.”

The coming holiday must have stirred him up. She wanted to reassure him. “To me,” she said, “we're like childhood friends. How we walk all around looking at things. Telling each other stuff. Liking each other best.”

Quinn slid a hand around her neck, pulled her ear to his mouth. “You say things I feel but could never put into words.”

*   *   *

Her parents brought a blue aerogram from London, dated a month ago.

Dear Cress,

How's it going up in those Meadows? How's things with the King of the Mountain?

Sorry for using this irritating postal gram—or what my friend James calls an aerogami-gram. At least they are snoop-proof, ergo Mom-proof. And also very cheap to send! (That's my Dad-side talking.)

Yes—indeed I do remember Jakey Yates. I used to see him those times Mom guilted me up to the cabin for Thanksgiving and Christmas. (You were so smart to go to college far away.) Jakey once sold me a large package of Hydrox for fifteen cents, a kindness I haven't forgotten—though this was only five or six years ago. Being up there with Mom and Dad, I had regressed right back to adolescent binge eating.

Forty-nine does seem a little old for you. My therapist says that anything more than fifteen years is probably a father thing—though that shouldn't be surprising to you, given our dim stingy doofus old dad. Of course we'd try, unconsciously or not, to improve on HIM. I'm given to foreign men, which my shrink points out is my way of escaping the culture of our family. Long live exogamy! (My friend James says that foreign men are the first stage of lesbianism, but he's gay and sees gayness everywhere.)

FYI, I'm in sort of a fight with Mom and Dad—just a warning because they'll probably try to draw you in. It all started because I figured out that Mom must have gotten another pretty good inheritance when Grandpa Abe died last year—I mean, they're building a new cabin, right? Where did the cash for that come from? Anyway, I asked if they would give (or lend) me a small down payment for a flat here. Dad wrote me back—six marginless pages that looked insane, like knitting or what madmen nail on trees in the park. Most of it was about how broke he was as a kid, and how hard he's worked for everything that has ever come his way (no mention of those big infusions of cash that Mom has inherited). But all that was just buildup to the real reason they couldn't give me money, which was “single women are notoriously bad lending risks,” and if I lost my job and couldn't make my house payments, then their money would be gone. No credit for supporting myself for the last twelve years! I brought the letter in to my therapist, and while she was reading it, her hand kept reaching out for something on her little side table. This odd groping motion happened four or five times, and when she finally noticed what she was doing, she looked up at me and said, “I can't read this letter without reaching for a drink!”

After that letter, my therapist recommended that I try this process called “Rebirthing.” She'd just finished training for it, and will take me through it at a cut rate, since I'm her first client. Basically, you work through all the events that added trauma or tension to your life, starting from the present, then going back to your birth, which is supposed to be one of the biggest traumas of all! I'm a long way from that happy day, however: I'm still processing Cairo—Hafez, his horrible parents, and their prehistoric view of women! I am so glad to be out of that roasting shitpile!

At least London is fantastic!!! Work is easy; I have about fifteen students, and then I teach teachers about ten hours a week. I have tons of free time, most of which I'm spending at the Victoria and Albert Museum. You must come! Your couch is calling!!!

Love,

Sharon

*   *   *

Sylvia Hartley spent the morning clattering around the kitchen—her pan-banging and cupboard-slamming expressed annoyance for every item Cress had shifted or misplaced. Cress pretended to work upstairs, then skiied in the afternoon, alone and sweetly melancholy in the silent woods. When she got back, Sylvia had dinner on the table: Cornish game hens, yam casserole, creamed peas and onions. The phone rang while they ate. Sam answered, clutching his napkin. “Hello? Hello?” he bellowed. “I can barely hear you with the static. Can you hear me?” He frowned at Cress and his wife. “Who?” he yelled. “Who do you want? Cressida or Sylvia? This connection is terrible. Was that Sylvia? Or Cressida?” Sam finally pointed the phone at Cress.

Static crackled in her ear. “Hello?” she said.

“Who the hell was that?” said Quinn.

“My dad.”

“For a moment, I thought it was God.”

He'd made a beer run to Sawyer, he said, so he could call her from a pay phone. “I wanted to hear your voice. And say I'm thinking of you.”

She was pleased and surprised, although his call, she thought, crossed a line. She would never call him at his house when he was with his family.

*   *   *

Every night he was at the Meadows, Quinn walked first to the lodge's phone booth to call his wife and kids; then he walked to the A-frame. They either built up the fire and settled in or they drove out the back way, down to Family Night at Cloud Slope (Wednesday) or the Hapsaw Lodge (Tuesday), where they listened to live music and had a drink or two.

“Doesn't Caleb wonder where you are?” asked Cress.

“He's out, too, playing his harp where I can't complain about it.”

“For as long as this?”

“He thinks I got to drinking beer and telling stories down at the lodge, or at the Garshes'. Like I used to. Before you. He doesn't know that's changed.”

“You wouldn't ever tell him about us.”

“He wouldn't want to know.”

*   *   *

One too-bright dripping morning, Quinn stood at her glass door. “I'm on a tool run,” he said. “Want to come along?”

They took the back way out of the development. As they switchbacked down the hill, he pulled her close. She gripped his thigh to keep from pitching about. Fishing poles in tubes rattled in his gun rack.

They drove down through the seasons. The old snow freighting the branches melted as in a time-lapse film until, at 5,000 feet, the trees were clean, with soiled white patches only in the shade. Quinn stopped to take off his jacket and opened the door for room. Hundreds of feet below, the Hapsaw roared its fatted winter roar.

The boulder-strewn hills around Sawyer had greened with new grass. The trunks of oaks were black with moisture, the leaves shiny-clean. They drove by the golf course and stark, manmade Glory Lake, where white houseboats cluttered the water like so many floating carports.

“I spent far too many hours on that lake,” said Quinn. “Fishing. Skiing.”

“But it's so ugly!”

“Nicer once you're out on it.”

He needed certain router bits that he could only get at the big hardware store by the highway. Cress wandered aisles of power tools while he paid.

“Want to see the house? I'd like to pick up a sander there.

“Sylvia's at work,” he added.

Behind long cinder-block walls, the subdivision had wide streets and small lots, with modest stucco homes from the fifties. “Good sturdy little postwar houses,” Quinn said. “Wood-framed windows, oak floors.” The land had previously been citrus groves; you could trace the old rows of lemon and orange trees yard to yard. Quinn's house was white, with a picture window. The front yard was bleached Bermuda grass, with a lone, shaggy lemon tree. “Sylvia loves it here,” he said, as the garage door wobbled open. “But she's a city girl at heart.”

Cress thought that she, too, was probably a city girl at heart—a true city girl, of the large metropolitan variety—Los Angeles or San Francisco, say—and not the trifling ag-town kind.

From the dark garage, they entered the house though a laundry room to a bright white kitchen. Not a dish sat in the sink, or a sponge or cloth. Even the dish rack was stowed out of sight. Quinn grabbed a brown vinyl chairback. “My coffee-drinking station,” he said. The air here at sea level was heavy and thick with the false scents of lemon dish soap and Pine-Sol.

Cress recognized with a shock the maple living room set from the perennial sidewalk sale at Frank's Val U Mart downtown; on the upholstery, white water spilled from one quaint mill wheel to an identical mill wheel below in an infinite churning. Didn't they—Sylvia, but also Quinn—know that you could get beautiful and far more sturdy used sofas at countless thrift stores for a fraction of Frank's “rock-bottom” prices?

In the one bookcase, thick paperback best sellers took up one shelf; kids' sports trophies and school portraits filled the rest. The dark-haired girl and honey-haired boy both had their mother's dark eyes, their father's dark brow.