Off Course (19 page)

“Sylvia who?” Cress decided on the spot to deny everything.

“Rick and I saw you two. And you're out every day, over hill and dale.”

“I have no idea what you think is going on, but you are way off the mark.” Cress's heart and thoughts thumped:
Over hill over dale we will hit the dusty trail …

“I called her once already, way back before Christmas. I told her, I said, Sylvia, if you want to hold on to your marriage, you'd better hightail it up here.”

“You
what?
”

“She was here the very next day. I'll call her again if I have to. And this time, I'll name names.”

“Call her! Why should I care? She knows we're friends.”

Julie's mouth snapped shut. Cress's heart was banging so hard, the whole high room pulsed and contracted.

Oh, right. The night the wives showed up with the pie and the panties.

“Rick won't stand for this behavior,” Julie went on. “Clearly Caleb couldn't, either. His leaving put us behind schedule on two jobs. If your parents complain, I'll have to tell them why their construction is taking a month longer.”

Cress's lips twitched and pressure bulged in her sinuses; she was about to cry. But she'd never give Julie the satisfaction.

“Rick and I sometimes wish we'd never met any of you Hartleys.” Julie lifted her coat off the hook. “But as someone who was once your friend, Cress, let me give you some advice. You should get into therapy ASAP.”

“I've been in therapy.”

“Then think about going back. You're—you're out of control!” Julie slid open the door. “Rick and I will be civil to you,” she said. “Obviously, you have free run of your parents' place. But you are not to set foot on our other jobsites.”

When the door shut, fat drops sprang from Cress's eyes. She disliked rebuke—who doesn't? Yes, yes, there was something wrong with her: she was insufficiently moved by—in fact, oddly impervious to—Sylvia Morrow's plight. But why should she be, when Sylvia was the one protected, the one in perpetual ascendance, whose rights and needs would always trump hers. Cress, in fact, had no rights! No protection!

How had she given the Garshes the benefit of the doubt? They'd repelled her from the start: Rick's finicky eating, fussy fires, and sly swindles; Julie's fringe and feathers, her too-rich cooking and sidling, peremptory intimacy.

Julie would never dare browbeat Ondine Streeter for cheating on Tom.

And this alleged solidarity of married people—did it extend only to wives? Did Julie scold Jakey about the husbands he cuckolded? Did she threaten to tell his parents? And hey—wasn't Rick married when Julie met him? Hadn't Julie demanded a divorce lawyer before their first date?

Hypocrisy always surprised Cress. Its transparency, its guilelessness. As if no one would ever notice.

*   *   *

“Julie says she'll call Sylvia about us.”

“She wouldn't dare,” said Quinn. “She knows I'd quit. Rick's already months behind and the Rodingers are in a swivet.”

 

Fifteen

Once the sky cleared and the plow pushed through, the berms rose high as hedgerows and the development was newly devoid of landmarks. Houses, now windowed white humps, had lost all distinguishing characteristics. Distance became elastic. Walking from the lodge, Cress thought she was almost home, only to find herself on the main highway, which she recognized by the few yards of broken yellow line scraped clear. Kevin, passing by in his truck, picked her up and, after numerous wrong turns, finally dropped her off at the A-frame. Jakey himself walked to check on a cabin and ended up at the Orlisses', two miles northwest of his destination.

Marvelous, this reconfigured, swallowed-up world: the cold, the glowing snow, the deep planetary blues of twilight. Stars, reflected, shed enough ancient light to ski by. The full moon made night as bright as an overcast day. Snow muffled and absorbed all sound, except for wind soughing through trees and the occasional rumbling crash, more felt than heard, as great loads slid from high branches to the ground.

“Snow weighs nineteen pounds a square foot,” Don Dare called to Cress as he shoveled off the roof of the new house. “Twenty-four pounds when it turns to ice. I now spend half my life raking it off the tent fly.”

She and Quinn skied out to the Crags, and to Globe Rock, where they ran into Tom Streeter hunting rabbits with a crossbow and surveying the snowy ridges through his huge Nikon binoculars, which he offered to Cress. “Saw a big old bear a few minutes ago. Probably the same one as strews trash down my slope. I'd like to make a rug out of him.”

Cress raised the binoculars. The near ridge jumped at her; trees bristled with fine needles, she saw the thorn tips of pinecones—those inwardly curved, she now knew, were ponderosas; outwardly, Jeffreys—and the jigsaw of bark. Tom was an optician, of course he'd have good binoculars.

No telling what else he'd seen with them.

Once out of earshot, Cress murmured to Quinn, “Let's hope he doesn't make a rug out of Jakey!”

*   *   *

He thought of her all day, he said. He loved to recall her slender fingers and long, strong neck. How happy she was when skiing. Her energy. Her strength. He had never seen a woman's back as well muscled.

Her soul, that long, dry lakebed, slowly filled, and in all the years afterward, she prized her fingers, neck, and strong back because he had.

Quinn drove down to the pay phone at the lodge and called home every night. Cress said, “Oh, just call from here,” but he shook his head, and she didn't insist; why overhear endearments to the others? He went home every Friday afternoon in February and came back Sunday nights—ostensibly to get a head start on Monday mornings—straight to the A-frame.

A fire, a tumbler of bourbon, a lover's company. This was the heaven of her life.

*   *   *

Work was slow at Beech Creek; she was lucky to get a shift or two a week. She got out her dissertation again, but whole days passed when she didn't make it to the typewriter. Or easel. How much more gratifying it was to cut butter into flour, peel apples, pinch crust into pleasing points, and fill the A-frame with the aroma of baking sugar and cinnamon while Glenn Gould played the
Goldberg Variations
with his clear, chiming precision, or Lefty Frizzell sang his jaunty love-gone-wrong ballads. The pie cooled, and on the narrow window seat, Cress read
New Yorker
s from the 1970s, and waited for Quinn to stamp on the deck, rap on the thick glass. He'd offer to take her to the lodge, or to Hapsaw or Cloud Slope, so she wouldn't have to make dinner, but she liked the easy creativity of cooking, the immediate results. So he brought her bacon, steaks, and chops from his meat locker, and gave her money for beer or a bottle, then refused the change. She'd wonder, years down the road, what it was like for him, living in someone else's home with their directionless daughter playing housewife.

Quinn finished at the Rodinger house in the first week of March, then moved his tools and the trailer up to the Hartleys' new cabin. Cress brought him hot coffee mid-morning. “Inspector!” she called upon entering. He worked as he walked, skip-coating drywall or measuring a window bench with his usual grace and economy of movement. Did she want to help? He could use her, he said. So she hand-sanded and stained balustrades, took down measurements for a window seat as he rattled them off; she learned to use the chop saw and router. At three, they knocked off and skied into the woods.

He never bothered to level the little trailer in its new parking spot. They slept in the loft bedroom, on the unforgiving bed, with the window cracked for fresh air, the electric blanket humming.

*   *   *

On March 10, Don and Donna held a party at the tent to celebrate the syzygy. All the planets had lined up on the same side of the sun. “It's the most auspicious alignment for love,” Donna said when she called to invite them. “When soul mates find each other. When eternal love takes hold.”

“It better not take hold of me,” said Cress.

She and Quinn skied over. Don had cut steps in the snow, and a glassy-walled chute led to the tent's opening. The snow had melted back a few inches from the tent and formed a hard wall around it. The woodstove kept the place warm—too warm; one front flap stayed up.

“Brian and Franny were going to come, but they went to Ensenada to thaw out,” said Don. “So it's just us.”

Donna wore a rabbit-fur vest, a long skirt, and shearling mukluks. Her hair was in looped braids. “Isn't she the adorable Laplander?” said Don.

The tiny potbellied woodstove was vented through the wall of the tent. Stew bubbled on the hob. Two propane lanterns hissed valiantly, producing a trembling pale light. The canvas swelled and contracted in the night breezes. They sat on folding canvas campstools around an old wooden folding table.

The tent's ceiling was beginning to sag, so the two men went out to rake the snow off the fly and to tighten the tension lines.

“You and Mr. Morrow are awfully thick,” Donna whispered. “I was telling Don, it's too bad he's not single. I've never seen two people better suited. You brighten him, he sweetens you—you glow! He crazy-adores you.”

“Really?”

“Completely gaga. Any plans to divorce the high-school sweetheart?”

“Oh God no,” said Cress. “That's why it's so idyllic. With no future, you don't care about things that'd drive you nuts over the long haul.”

“Like decades of wet towels on the floor?”

“For example.” In fact, Quinn was tidier than Cress. She was thinking more of his past participles. Tonight he'd said,
Have you wrote much lately?

“I still couldn't do what you're doing,” said Donna. “I have to be the first and only. I get too mad at these guys just taking whatever they want.”

“Quinn's not like that.”

“They're all like that, deep down. I could kill Brian. Franny thinks he'll marry her. Not a chance. She's just his round-the-way girl.”

“I think there's a chance.”

“Not a whisper of a chance.”

The men came back inside, finely frosted head-to-foot, as if pulled from a deep freeze.

*   *   *

In the A-frame, under the covers, in the cool blue darkness, Cress said, “Do you think Don and Donna will make it?”

“Make what?” said Quinn.

“You know. As a couple.”

“I have no idea.”

“Don't you wonder?” she said.

“Not about that.”

“Well, I wouldn't bet on it,” Cress said. “I've never gotten the feeling that she's too smitten with him. Have you?”

“Have I what?”

“Felt that Donna's really in love with Don.”

“Never thought about it.”

“You are no fun.” Cress threw her leg over his and grabbed his arm. “I'm not even going to ask what you think about Franny and Brian. I mean, if you aren't interested in the people around you, what are you interested in?”

“Fly fishing,” he said.

“Such a limited storyline!”

“Not if you do it right. It's very absorbing.”

Cress snorted, and he drew her close, kissed her eye, her cheekbone, her lips. She drowsed and drifted, half-dreaming of fishing, of ripples, gnats, angles of the sun. She recalled the deer devouring the trout, the thrashing of the bushes, birds flushing, and hunters. She pulled back from Quinn. “I keep thinking about Tom Streeter and those binoculars.”

“What about them?”

“I'm sure he's spying on Ondine,” Cress said. “You don't think he would ever shoot Jakey, do you?”

Quinn grabbed her arm and flipped her onto her back, then stretched over her. “Does that big, busy mind of yours ever give you a moment's rest?”

*   *   *

“What's going on? Are you mad at me?” Tillie hadn't even said hello.

Guilt panged near Cress's heart. “Why would I be mad at you?”

“Maybe I didn't leave our room clean enough when we left at New Year's? Maybe I hurt your feelings about something? Or you hated my
boeuf carbonnade
?”

“I'm—uh—” Cress couldn't say busy. She wasn't busy. “Snowed in, I guess.”

Tillie had a new job, at Maddie's magazine,
City and State
. Assistant art director. Full-time and a real salary. “And you? What's up? I've been calling and calling, all hours of the day, early, late.”

Cress had heard the phone pealing downstairs. Three or four nights in a row.

“So what's his name?” Tillie said.

“Does it always have to be a guy?”

“What's her name?”

“The thing is, you won't approve,” said Cress.

“I might surprise you,” said Tillie.

But she didn't.

*   *   *

Franny made fish tacos at the Crittenden family's Swiss-style château. They were the first fish tacos the others had ever eaten; Franny and Brian had had them in Baja, and Franny had watched how they were made: chunks of red snapper floured and fried, onions chopped with cilantro, fresh limes squeezed over all. She'd bought salsa at Younts: “I hung around the Mexican food aisle to see what Mexicans liked—Herdez, mostly.”

Brian patted Franny's hip as she served. She wore black stirrup pants and a crisp bright white shirt—new clothes, Cress saw. Good clothes. For the first time Franny's tiny body broadcast not a childhood of malnutrition but stylish, adult slenderness.

After dinner, Brian and Donna got out their guitars. “Come on, Fran,” Brian said. “Sing for 'em.” He winked at the others. “We've been practicing.”

Franny stood by his chair and, swaying a little, sang “Satin Sheets” in a sweet, thin twang; then “Almost Persuaded.”

“Dang girl, I'm gonna call you onstage next Family Night,” said Donna.