Off Course (23 page)

She echoed him, with her own pronunciation. “Divorce, Quinn? Really?” Who knew he'd ever consider it! But good. Maybe they could spend the night together again. Be together out in the open. Take trips. Santa Barbara, Mexico.

“It's been a long time coming,” he said.

Yes, and the divorces she knew about—of her friends' parents and her parents' friends—took a long time to happen, too. Lawyers were involved, and hard-to-get signatures, court appearances, shouting and sobbing. Her mother spent hours with Francine Davis listening, soothing, advising. Francine's daughter Jennie was Cress's good friend, and the two had crouched in the hall to hear Francine weep in her bedroom. Cress recalled, too, a sleepover at the father's new apartment, the empty beige rooms and mothball smell.

Even if Quinn passed through all that tumult, who's to say that he and she would care for each other on the far side?

“Are you there, Cress?” said Quinn. “I tried being home. I was out of my mind. I drove up here today and talked to my mom. I told her everything.”

His mother, who'd clonked the phone on some table just now? The bear-killing librarian? “That's good, Quinn, that you talked—”

“I'm going to dee-vorce Sylvia,” he said, “and marry you.”

“Oh now,” she said. “I mean, one thing at a time. Let's not—”

“Even before I left the mountain, Cress, I knew.”

She stood up straight, nose level with the punch pad on the pay phone. She had been disciplined. She had not allowed her affections to range so far afield. She'd held herself in check. Marry? She never let herself imagine it. Where would they live? And what about her friends—her Pasadena friends from childhood: What would they think of him, or he of them?

“If you will have me. Cress? Are you there?”

If you will have me.
The tremble in his voice hit low, like sex. “If it ever comes to that,” she said quickly, “yes, yes, of course,” because it was urgent to reassure him. And to keep the matter open so she could think it over at leisure, in private, because the slightest hesitation here might frighten him off. She wanted, at the very least, to prolong the incredible flattery of his offer, for it was an offer, wasn't it? And who had ever wanted her so much? Saying yes to him, yes of course, in an easy, offhand, contingent way, bought her time. Also, she was stunned, perhaps even in shock, the way people are when they win a lottery; they have to sit down, and sometimes they keel right over. She sagged against the booth's scratched graffited glass wall, the greasy receiver pressed against her ear. “But so much has to happen before we can even really … I mean, you might change your mind a hundred—”

“I've never been more sure of anything in my life.” His beautiful low voice coursed directly into her blood. “Or I never would of spoke of it.”

“Okay.” She was breathless. “Okay, Quinn.” He would have to be sure for both of them then.

“And even if you won't have me, I can't stay married to Sylvia. That's over. I'm done.”

The sun had dunked behind the industrial buildings across the street. Long shadows stretched over the asphalt. The sky was pale yellow. “What did your mom say?”

“That I have to do what I have to do. Whatever makes me happy.”

“You told her about me?”

“She knows there's someone.”

“And Sylvia? Have you talked to her?”

“I won't till Annette graduates,” he said. “I won't take away from Annette's big day.”

Oh. So nothing irrevocable had happened after all.

Except that he had asked her to marry him, and she had said yes.

She'd told him yes when he wasn't in any real position to ask.
Look me up after you've done all the hard stuff—
that's what she should've said. But it was too late. She'd already answered.

He was still talking. He was dying to see her. He wished they could meet right now. He wanted to hold her, to lay her down. His term:
lay her down.
It came from a country song, and his use of it embarrassed her, especially now. She didn't like to talk about sex. She preferred to be more oblique and private about it. But he couldn't see her, he was saying. Not tonight. He was tied up. There was a big family dinner at Caleb's house, Sylvia and the kids would be there, and he was taking his mother. He'd see Cress tomorrow, he'd phone her at work. They'd figure everything out. He loved her. She knew that, didn't she? He loved her more than anything else on earth. They'd have a long, happy life together.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay, Quinn.”

Walking back across the parking lot, exuberance, and something like triumph, welled in her chest. So much still had to happen, but who knew he'd come this far? He'd told his mother! Of course, telling Sylvia would make it real in a way he probably didn't anticipate. Even Cress knew this. Sylvia would not say,
Whatever makes you happy.
He really should not have proposed till he'd talked to Sylvia. And not over the phone. Cress had made a mistake, too, she thought, in answering him so quickly. She should have put him off. Or said something even more equivocal:
Let's talk about it when the time comes.
Or:
Let's not talk about it over the phone.
But what she'd said wasn't so terrible.
If it ever comes to that.

Despite her trepidation, jubilance kept bursting through. He did love her! She'd known it, of course, but hadn't permitted the words to form. Her own reticence, the stringency with which she'd held herself back, those thick old leather harness straps, had loosened once they came off the mountain, and now had fallen away. She could let herself go—or could no longer hold back. Of course she loved him. Allowed, love rippled retrospectively through their time together like a frisky zephyr, ruffling memories, sweetening and brightening all that had passed between them. She had been so firm and practical, she had built barriers of his faults, never once imagining
marriage
. Somehow, she'd played it just right. She felt clever, and carefully ecstatic, as if she'd coaxed a bull elk to nuzzle corn from her palm.

She went back inside Younts and bought the food he liked: pork chops, thick tortillas, jack cheese, eggs, thin breakfast steaks. She'd cook for him again, when the jumbo roommates weren't hogging the kitchen. Back in the Saab, she bumped over the train tracks on the outskirts of town in the hazy blue dusk. Engaged. Spoken for. Her hand was taken. It was a secret engagement, true. And bound to be a long one. A marriage had to end. Divorce filed for. A year must pass from the date of filing, and the filing itself could be weeks, even months away. She had time, at least, to get used to the idea. Or find a way out.

Since she was a little girl, she'd wondered whom she would marry, and now, it seemed, she knew. Quinn Morrow—was that even possible? He was not any of the husbands she'd imagined—not a bearish professor, jolly and loquacious, who was also an improbably good dancer. Not an intense, thin intellectual, a philosopher or historian, curly-haired, complicated, and probably Jewish. Not an artist, either, masculine, laconic, and moody—though Quinn was closest to that. A gloomy whittler! A handsome father of two, a skilled outdoorsman. A fine architectural woodworker, smart and agile and sad. Her heart lunged recalling his sadness. She would be his companion, yes.

The sudden constriction of possibilities also kicked up whiffs of disappointment—but wouldn't it always? Doesn't every choice eliminate all others, including some quite appealing? But choosing also spawned a hundred new possibilities: Where would they live? Who would work? Would they stay in the area? Could she bear that? If so, would she even need to finish her dissertation? Would there be babies? Maybe they'd live in the A-frame again—why not move back up tomorrow? Or rather, the day after Annette graduated. When was that? Cress had seen something on the schedule at work, a high-school graduation party later in May.

She'd missed her turn east and found herself in a dusty neighborhood along the train tracks. Body shops and salvage yards alternated with the occasional old farmhouse. Cress pulled into a dirt driveway to turn around. A hand-lettered sign by the mailbox said,
DATSIE PUPPIES FOR SALE.
On the porch a large, older woman in a pale yellow housedress rose from her metal chair, perhaps taking Cress for a dog shopper.

Quinn had no right. He was in no position to ask her. Divorce was just an idea of his, fragile and untested, a pale flower in a pitch-dark cave that might shrivel when brought to light. When he told Sylvia.

And he'd proposed on the phone. When he was married to someone else.

She shouldn't have answered him. She should've put him off. Or, changed the subject.
Hey! Those buckeyes bloom long on Noah Mountain?
She could have been sterner:
Now is not the time or place to discuss it.
Well, she'd blown it. At the first provocation, all that she'd held in check for months and months had boiled up and out. Impossible now to stuff it all back inside.

Sylvia, the few times Cress had seen her, had not seemed like a woman at dire odds with her husband. What if she didn't let him go? Or worse, what if his leaving pushed her over some edge? Guilt sloshed up, a tepid, brackish bath. Better nip the whole thing in the bud, before anyone got hurt.

Quinn phoned again as Cress was wedging meat packs into Donna's crammed-to-capacity freezer. He was whispering—his extended family was in the other room. “Maybe don't tell your parents just yet,” he said. “Let's wait till things are a little further along before we make any big announcements.”

 

Eighteen

“I'll just get my degree and teach,” she said. “That will give us a good base income. We can still live up here. I can commute.”

He said, “I don't care where we live, so long as we're together.”

She was more marvelous than she knew.

“I'd like a little log cabin, in a meadow,” she said.

“Can do,” he said. But there were college towns he liked, too. Claremont, in the orange groves up against the mountains would do. Davis—the Sacramento Delta had some appeal. Even New York City, if they lived on Long Island, or the Jersey Shore. She wouldn't have to take any old job. Or any job at all. He'd support her. That, frankly, was his dream. To give her all she wanted. To take on her well-being as his responsibility. He'd be honored. The economy was picking up. He'd find work. Cabinetry or, if worst came to worst, framing.

*   *   *

Tillie said, “That's all very romantic and stirring, Cress, especially for you, given your stingy dad. But let's be practical. You will have to work. Because by the time your guy's paid his alimony and child support, there won't be much left for the two of you.”

“I don't care about all that,” Cress said. “Any of it.”

*   *   *

Sunday morning, Cress went with Donna to the Sparkville swap meet. In the dusty vacant lot across from Food King, she bought three big boxes of Limoges china, the pattern a simple rectilinear band in gold-on-white porcelain from the last century: platters, soup terrines, coffee and tea pots, plus place settings for twelve, all for sixty dollars—which was still the most she'd spent on any household item in her life. When she held a plate up to the sun, she could see the shadow of her fingers through the china. She imagined the gold rims drawing light on a long pine table within dark log walls. Once she hauled it back to Donna's, the china seemed presumptuous, ill-timed, and she was too shy to show it to Quinn, who didn't notice the boxes stacked atop all the other stuff in her room.

The next week, with Donna at the much larger Fresno swapper, a bearskin sprawled on the hood of a vendor's Chevy pickup, a large old pale-snouted black bear backed in billiard-green felt. A persistent slice of sunlight had striped one thick paw; otherwise, the fur was thick and shiny, the snarling head intact, the glass eyes a rich brown, the teeth yellowed with varnish, the tongue a genital-pink plaster hump. He—Cress assumed so large a specimen was male—could not have been her former hungry visitor; this skin was clearly old—but it might have been her fellow's grandpapa. She trembled, knowing she would buy it even before a price was named; this would be her engagement present to Quinn, handed over when he gave her a ring. (Engagement present! The very idea of an
engagement present
came to her at the exact moment she laid eyes on the bearskin—the term itself must have seeped up osmotically from the stacks of women's magazines beneath her bed.) The skin, she knew, would make him laugh. It would go, of course, in front of their fireplace. Their hearth. The vendor asked for three hundred dollars and took her check for two. He folded the skin ceremoniously into a tight package, felt side out, which he wrapped in heavy brown paper and tied with multiple loops of hairy twine. Cress and Donna carried it together, heaving it into the Saab's trunk. On the drive back to Sawyer, remorse set in for gutting her bank account. “Don't let me be so impulsive,” she told Donna. She left the bundle in the Saab's trunk, pending its presentation.

That was the fourth Sunday in May. Annette was graduating on Wednesday.

*   *   *

Beech Creek Country Club counted nine graduating seniors among its member families. The party was set up for a hundred. Tri-tip roasts were grilled on a big drum barbecue wheeled to the ninth hole. Bartenders poured unlimited soft drinks, which the kids fortified in the parking lot. After dinner and a short ceremony, a local rock band launched into “We've Gotta Get Out of This Place,” and the dance floor filled.

Cress watched this, as she did all such celebrations of provincial life, with a mixture of wonder and contempt. Her own high-school graduation had been marked by a long, boring commencement at the Rose Bowl—her mother left to finish dinner before Cress's name was called—and that night a lady's Timex in its clear plastic case appeared beside her place mat. The thin brushed-gold band was designed for another kind of girl, the sedate, pretty, jewelry-wearing daughter Sylvia Hartley would have preferred. The tiny watch face with its speck-like numerals was virtually unreadable. Cress feigned pleasure for the gift and never wore it. She noticed the watch was missing her sophomore year, no doubt stolen from her dorm room still twist-tied in its original packaging.