Off Course (31 page)

Her dress was ankle-length red rayon with tiny white flowers, worn with a lacy white shawl and white sandals, all thrift store finds.

About sixty people sat in the small sanctuary. Franny, tiny as a nine-year-old girl, stood perfectly still, with a serious, attentive look on her face. Her white sheath was short, simple, perfect. She clutched a spray of pink rosebuds in one hand, while Brian, red-faced in a dark suit, kneaded the fingers of her other.

A plump, flushed Donna sang “Some Enchanted Evening.” She was five months pregnant and single. (Young Scott had flown the coop; she'd already filed a paternity suit.)

Quinn held Cress's left hand, but he had pulled in deep. It was like sitting next to quicksand. During the vows, those nets of tenderness and promise, her eyes filled with tears, and she glanced at him.

“I shouldn't of come,” he whispered.

*   *   *

After Franny and Brian walked back down the aisle to applause and the trays of champagne circulated, Cress went in search of a bathroom.

“Over here,” Quinn said when she came out. He'd found a small side room with cribs in it and plastic toys in a box. Hangers and clothes were heaped about—here was where the bride had dressed. Quinn closed and locked both doors. A high transom allowed in a weak gray light, the distant hubbub and string quartet. “I can't force it, Cress,” he said, and drew her down to the floor. “But we got what we got, too.” He pushed her dress up, pulled off her panties.

“Nobody's forcing you, Quinn,” she said gently.

His face was dark, his gaze inward. He took off only his coat and pulled his pants down just to his thighs; the coarse wool abraded the skin inside her legs, and his belt buckle tore her knee; the carpet burned her arms and backside. He held her forearms pressed against the floor, as if she were struggling. Maybe he wanted her to struggle. His shirt smelled musty, like old wool. His roughness neither frightened nor particularly excited her. She went along with him and didn't protest or resist, because he clearly had something to work out, and maybe he'd feel better once he had.

He collapsed finally, with all his hot itchy weight on top of her, and breathed hoarsely into her ear. Absently, she patted his shoulder.

The wedding party had moved into the shady, Spanish-style courtyard, where tables had been set up around a gurgling fountain. Cress wore her shawl over her chafed and burning upper arms. She found their name cards at a table with Don Dare and Elise, River Bob and Freddy, where the talk was all about how Rick Garsh was being sued by the Streeters; apparently he exceeded his estimate for their kitchen remodel by more than 100 percent. The wedding supper was salmon on soft herbed lettuces, with steamed asparagus and roasted potatoes. Crème brûlée, then cake. Cress's banquet crew would have found nothing to mock.

At the hotel, she took a cool bath and sent Quinn out for antibiotic cream. He came back with Neosporin and a bottle of Wild Turkey. He made love to her again, in the same intense, punishing manner, and afterward he thrashed in his sleep and would not tell her his dreams, except to say that they were tangled up and disturbing. She had wanted to drive over to Braithway in the morning to visit Tillie, but his mood stayed dark and distant, and she didn't suggest it. They drove home instead, stopping in Bakersfield for gas. He remained withdrawn, and after a few efforts to get him talking, she left him alone.

*   *   *

He carried in her bag and washed his hands at her sink. He refused coffee, beer, and whiskey. There were things he needed to do at his mom's, he said, before the week started. He couldn't stay the night. He kissed her lightly in the kitchen, touched the rug burn on her arm. She never clung to him when he left—he would've hated nothing more—but today she wanted to grab on, pull him from whatever rabbit hole he'd tumbled down. She walked him outside. She'd already turned back toward her house when his truck's engine caught. A dark vein branched through her vision, like lightning, only black.

*   *   *

She drove to Sparkville for supplies on Monday, and was home by early afternoon. She cut up beef and browned it, added onions with cumin and chipotle peppers. The beef toughened and, after an hour, grew tender. The house smelled wonderfully of smoke and meat. He didn't come. She wasn't surprised. She ladled a bowl for herself but had to put it aside untouched.

She sat at her desk and read the notes for her second column. She started writing and worked until she needed to consult a book stored in a box in the barn. She went out with a flashlight, and when she shone the beam into the box, there was a papery rasp, a dark scurry: a small snake sprang out, a squiggle in midair, then disappeared, leaving its shadow. She recoiled, and understood: that shadow was skin. He'd jumped out of his skin.

She laughed at her shivering self, and wished that Quinn was there to see. Everything she saw, she stored for him.

 

Twenty-Three

In the week before she saw him again, they all moved to Noah Mountain. Quinn, Sylvia, and Evan. The Sparkville house was up for rent.

“Had to do it,” Quinn said. “Had to give it a real shot. I owe her that.”

“Why will this time be any different?” said Cress.

“I have to try. As many times as it takes to give it a real go. See if we can get along. Or I can't live with myself.”

“Haven't you tried that already, several times?”

His green eyes were dull and jumpy. “I could never give you up before.”

“And now you can?”

“We'll see,” he said.

“Get out,” she said.

It was eleven-something, not even noon. He left a cup of coffee untouched on her kitchen table, and his fly-tying vise was still clamped to the corner.

She emptied his cup in the sink. As his truck trundled down her driveway, she poured herself half a tumbler of bourbon—from the bottle he'd bought in Glendale—and took it outside to the porch facing the river, where she sat in a chair and waited for the pain to start.

*   *   *

In the mornings, she had a moment of pure bright emptiness before the truth broke over her again: Quinn and his wife now lived up the road in a double-wide aluminum home.

On the days she didn't work, she stayed in bed, drifting and periodically nosing her sheets for any scent of him. Food didn't interest her. She tried to take her morning walks but never made it down the driveway before she had to turn around and go back to bed.

It was a dry, hot summer. The hills crisped to the color of lions. The high whine of insects bore steadily through the air. The river, low this year, receded; the swimming hole was stagnant at its edges by mid-July. A dark flickering appeared in the corners of her eyes, and at first she didn't know what it was, but every day it seemed closer, stronger, closing in. If you found the one person you loved, and you couldn't lick his neck or stick your nose up under his hair, or fall asleep tangled in his limbs, what did you do? Her tears ran without warning, sudden sobs made her chest jump. A new line trembled on the horizon, a fine dark fissure opened between objects: the abyss, beckoning. She tried to pray:
Look, whoever's listening. Let them finish. Send him back. We won't survive apart
.

She wasn't making specific plans, but that hairline crack, she knew, could widen instantly to accommodate her, and day by day, its thin blackness grew less frightening, more logical and familiar, as if she could now walk right up, touch it with her fingertips, and, with a quick last smile over her shoulder at the fading world, slip right in. She was sorry. If she ever did, he'd mistake it for the meanest thing imaginable. But the natural outcome of abandonment was a failure to thrive, to survive.

She didn't see how she could continue much longer. Eating seemed senseless. At Younts, she passed up the two-pound Yuban special; she couldn't imagine living long enough to drink it all.

*   *   *

The first time she passed Sylvia in her blue Imperial on Noah Mountain Road, Cress felt as if she'd been squeezed like a sponge.

She took a box of winter clothes to the barn and was drawn into the old mechanic's bay, which was cool and smelled of dirt and oil. She crouched on the floor between oil spots, then sat for an hour. The next day, she swept it out, found carpet scraps that fit, and made a tiny, subterranean room. A thick round of cut pine served as a table. On this, she put a candle and the little donkey. She brought a pillow and her old down sleeping bag, and she would lie there, fingertips on each cool concrete wall. By remaining absolutely still, she could make an hour pass, then two hours, three. Any movement and the pain unfurled.

On Noah Mountain Road, a row of telephone poles planted in the left shoulder of a curve introduced themselves. All she'd have to do was not turn the steering wheel.

*   *   *

“If he was really going to leave her, he would've done it the first time round,” said Donna. Cress had stopped by to see the sycamore tree, the Hapsaw, the lilac bush once more.

“Of adulterers who leave their spouses,” Donna went on, “something like 95 percent do it in the first three months of the affair.”

*   *   *

Somehow Cress went to work. She wouldn't desert Dalia and Lisette again, as she had last year. She clocked in and washed lettuce for the cook, hauled the tables around, flung starched white cloths over them, arranged silverware, built tall pyramids out of wide-mouth champagne glasses; she trayed out hors d'oeuvres, took cocktail orders. She spoke rarely and in a whisper. In this way, moment to moment, by turning to the next small task, by functioning as part of a larger mechanism, she kept on.

Dalia called her into the office. “Oh, Cress. We've all had our hearts broken, but you can't let it go on too long, and take it in too deep. You've got to save yourself—go see someone, try to meditate,
something
. Or you might never make it back.”

Back to where? Back to what? Her old life—school, econ—no longer existed. She could finish her dissertation, but where would that take her? There was no place she wanted to go, or could imagine ever wanting to go. She had to be where he could find her.

*   *   *

Somehow—perhaps because she was too polite and too intimidated by Silas not to return his calls or complete the next column she'd promised him (this one about art resale profits and commissions)—she did the research and wrote it. Her reporting was minimal; talking to people was the hardest part; she couldn't drum interest into her voice. She made do with a few meager facts and data she'd coaxed from a secretary at Sotheby's and one voluble gallery owner.
Of the eighty thousand dollars in increased value, the artist received 2 percent.

Change that:
an
appalling
2 percent.

*   *   *

She lost twelve pounds. She weighed what she had at fourteen. For her third column, Cress went south to interview an art consultant over lunch. She drove down the night before, to stay at Braithway. Tillie had promised to dress her.

Tillie said, “You may not see it right now, but it's really for the best. Also, Cress, you look like a model.”

She sent Cress off in a pencil skirt and the big-shouldered power jacket.

The consultant purchased art for corporations and hospitals, and also for actors and movie execs who didn't have the time—or the eye—to shop. “After they buy the BMW and take the trekking vacation,” the woman said, “these guys buy art.” The consultant had selected the restaurant for their meeting, and their two pretty, clean-tasting, hand-built salads cost fifty dollars.

Cress went from lunch to the magazine offices, where she finally met Silas, a tall, soft-looking man her age. Taking the lunch receipt, he said, “Ooh la la! Now there's a woman who is good at spending other people's money!” Column three's lede:
Maude Sweeney has a talent for spending other people's money.

*   *   *

Days passed. Work at Beech Creek slowed down. In the hot late afternoons after golf lady luncheons or the Rotarians, Cress took a glass of wine to the barn, into the cool trough. She lit a candle, drank the wine, and lay down on her sleeping bag. She counted her breaths backward from a hundred, a form of meditation she'd read about. She rarely remembered getting below the eighties. She woke up to a guttering flame, or utter darkness. That was when she knew it most keenly. He was coming back. He was on his way.

*   *   *

Cress drove south in early September for her fourth column, which was about an international art exposition at the convention center. Galleries from all over the world displayed paintings and sculptures in souklike warrens. The middle class had disposable income again, and goods were pouring in. Even Cress, whose arms felt like lead, who had no taste for life, was making money—not a lot, but more than she ever had: her own small share of the boom pot.

Driving to Los Angeles and back, always alone, her mind stayed busy with its own absorbing mix of memory and hope. She replayed their encounters, combing them for clues and meaning, as if their love was a great mystery or puzzle to be solved. Had he really gone back for good? She didn't believe it. He could no more give her up than she could forget him. He was struggling, too.

If only there was a way they could be together and not hurt anybody else.

She returned again and again to her little house in the tilted pasture: to her hard bed, her cool, tiny, secret room in the barn.

Trey Kidman, who hadn't seen her walking in weeks, came by bringing brownies with
some sparkle
. Was she okay? She looked so pale and sad—did she want him to rub her back?

“No, no. That's all right, thanks,” she said, moving away.

He left, and she threw the brownies in the trash.

*   *   *

Dalia and Lisette took her out for drinks after work, in hopes of cheering her up. They went to the Lakeview bar, the Sawyer Inn, and talked brightly, trying to interest Cress with confidences. Dalia told the story of her brutal five-year marriage. Lisette told them how she used to be the girlfriend of a famous rock star, but she'd hated that life and had to leave it. She was glad, because then she met her husband—after nine years they still made love every single day.