Off Course (33 page)

“You have to ask?”

In bed, they both wept; his wet cheeks glistened in the dark room. His beard was back, his hair long again. He'd gained weight, having stopped all cigarettes and all booze but beer. She went over his body, touching each scar, poked his new belly, stuck her nose up behind his ear, inhaled.

“How is it at home?” she said.

“Better, now that we're back on the mountain.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Exactly what you're doing.”

“Not exactly,” she said. He was there for the alleviation of pain. And she was still hoping to redeem what had been offered to her once, what seemed to sit there yet, waiting to be claimed, just out of reach.

 

Twenty-Four

She turned in whenever she saw his truck. He'd plant himself in her path and she couldn't pass him up. She'd perch on the stool beside him, and sometimes before they had one drink, they'd leave—he was more careful now about being seen with her in town. Once she came into Bob's Bar and he was talking to a man his own age, a trim tanned man in a blue sport shirt. The place was almost empty. She took her seat and waited while they continued their conversation. Quinn ignored her. She nursed a beer. His voice buzzed, but she couldn't quite hear what he and the blue sport shirt were talking about: who was building what in town, maybe. Who got county contracts. The man ordered another beer for himself and one for Quinn. Cress got up to leave then, and Quinn's hand shot out, touched her leg under the rim of the bar, and pushed her back into her seat.

*   *   *

In the Sawyer bakery on a crowded morning, the air hazed with coffee steam and vaporized grease from the doughnut fryer, he sat with Caleb and two other men at a coil table, while she and Donna occupied the next one. Neither brother looked at her. Leaving, he passed within inches without glancing down.

“You might have at least raised an eyebrow,” she said later.

“Half of Sawyer was in there watching,” he said. “To see what I'd do.”

“Even so, you could've been polite and not acted like I didn't exist.”

“When you're seeing a married man, you should expect that sort of thing.”

He didn't mean it the way it sounded. In fact, she understood: they had to be discreet; he had to keep up appearances so that this time Sylvia would think he was making a real effort to make their marriage work.

*   *   *

They drove slowly, pressed together, on the purgatorial grid of roads and orange groves. They sat in their familiar completeness and comfort in those small bars in far-flung places where a lurid canned sadness leaked from the jukeboxes and old men drank diligently till dinnertime, then came back to drink some more till bedtime.

Quinn phoned and she met him down by the lake and drove with him to Bakersfield, where he looked at a job in a treeless new housing development. She read a novel in the car while he talked to the foreman. Afterward, they bought a bottle and rented a motel room. “Now, this really feels like adultery,” she said.

Quinn winced, as she knew he would. “It's not like that,” he said.

“It's exactly like that,” she said.

“More like, I met the person I'm closest to twenty years after I handed my life over to someone else. When I'm not my own to give away.”

“Oh, sure you are.” She had less patience now for his formulations. “People get divorced every day.”

“People you know,” he said.

The next time, he went to bid finish work for an office complex in Visalia.

The hours together invigorated her. She learned to make use of this invigoration. She drove to L.A. for research. She sewed curtains, she read novels from the Sparkville public library, she wandered in the foothills, her morning walks lasting two or three hours. As the days passed, the effect of their last meeting wore off; she saddened and slowed; pain and the internal chatter built back up, quivering dark edges reappeared around objects, the telephone poles bled back into view. She spent afternoons in the barn again, in the cool trough, with a candle and wine, lying under the polka-dot comforter, counting backward, waking up to a leaping candle and radiant darkness.

*   *   *

He took a job in Redondo Beach and during the workweek stayed with his cousins there. Cress drove down to spend Wednesday nights with him at a motel. They ate at seafood restaurants, took walks on the sand. He'd told his cousins he had a weekly poker game in Glendale and drank too much beer to drive home. When she was leaving in the morning, he said, “Poker again next week?”

Three more times in the next three weeks, they met in Redondo, and then the job was finished.

*   *   *

Cress's body startled before she saw why: Sylvia Morrow was standing at the fish counter in Younts. She looked smaller than Cress remembered: a slight, petite woman in navy pants and a navy tunic—her work uniform. Her hair was dark and thick, a heavy pelt. Cress swiveled her own cart around and fled the width of the store, to the produce section, where she stood by the watermelons, four field boxes pushed together. Cress slapped a melon, the hollow smack satisfying, like the correct answer to a question. She wasn't afraid of a fight; Sylvia was too reserved and timid for any loud accusations, name-calling, nail-clawing. But why not spare them both the pain and embarrassment of a meeting? Cress shoved melons aside to thump the ones below. She'd thump until she calmed down and was sure Sylvia was out of the store.

A cart rolled up beside her. “Hello, Cress,” Sylvia said.

The aisle was wide enough that their shopping carts fit side by side. Sylvia's hair
was
weirdly massive and curled, the crimped mane of a country-and-western singer or a cocktail waitress with aspirations.

“How are you?” Sylvia said.

“Fine,” said Cress. “And you?”

Sylvia must have noticed Cress staring, because her hand rose to a clump of curls by her face. “I just got my hair done. I hate how she rats it up so poufy. I always get in the shower the second I get home to wash out all the spray.”

Stupefied, Cress nodded. Would they really stand here and talk hair like friends?

Sylvia put a hand on Cress's cart and left it, fingers curling slightly around the chrome. “I've been wanting to talk to you, Cress. So I'm glad we ran into each other. I wanted to say…” Sylvia glanced quickly into Cress's face, then down. “Well, I hope you're not staying around up here because you think Quinn's going to leave me and marry you. Because that's not going to happen, Cress. It never was, and it never will.” In her girlish tones twanged a wire of certainty. “Quinn and I are going to grow old together. We always were, and nothing's changed. If he got your hopes up for something else, he shouldn't of, and I'm sorry for that. I really am.”

Cress kept her face still, even as her heart went wild. Sylvia's self-possession was marvelous, but those clichés!

Up ahead of them, symmetrical stacks of waxy purple and green cabbages bulged with veins. The misters went on, spraying them, and in that hissing, Cress missed some of what Sylvia was saying next. She heard “… miscarriage last month, but the doctor says we can start trying again next week.”

So here was a real prisoners' dilemma, Cress thought. Should I continue to nod and simper? Or should I now tell Sylvia about the day before yesterday at the Motor Inn? The bottle of bourbon? The hours in bed?

But Quinn would never forgive her if she narc'ed.

*   *   *

“I'm glad she talked to you,” said Dalia. “Maybe now you can be done.”

Cress hoped so too. She would like to be done. Done and gone. But when she saw Quinn's truck at the Staghorn, she turned into the parking lot. His green eyes brightened at the sight of her; he was down at the end of the bar, where she'd met the yellow mother. His low voice sent a fast current through her system. He was hoping she'd come; he always felt better the moment he saw her warm, open face. Did she feel like a drive? A steak?

They drove and ate, and drowsy from meat and liquor, Cress, who had been trying to ascertain if Sylvia had reported their encounter, said, “Sylvia sees me around, on the road. Does she ever say anything? What does she think?”

“She thinks you have psychological problems.”

“Oh my. I suppose I do. What do you think?”

“I do wonder why you're still here.”

She saw then that they'd found a way to unite against her. That they'd agreed on a narrative: Quinn had made a mistake, opened a real can of worms. And now he was pursued by the mentally unstable.

On a recent trip to Pasadena, Tillie and Cress had gone to see a movie where a spurned mistress—who'd spent only one night with a married man—stalks the man relentlessly, tries all sorts of shenanigans to get his attention, and eventually boils his family's pet. Cress would never go a tenth that far, but her sympathies were definitely with the mistress, who was up against the blameless bland wife and family itself, that fortress of sanctified virtue. The pet boiler was truly deranged—but isn't it often the fringe, unhinged person who acts out the anger of her cohort? The pet boiler, Cress felt, had struck a blow for their kind. The discarded. The unchosen.

She did have psychological problems, Cress would be the first to admit it: obsession, depression, loss of affect, anhedonia. And—not to be melodramatic here—she couldn't quite locate herself anymore. She'd try to consult herself on matters large or small and she'd come up blank, except through the filter of him. She bought only the food that he might eat. When she shopped for clothes, she thought only in terms of his taste, or what she imagined his taste to be: lace at the neck, and tighter, tidier slacks. Upon entering any room full of men—a banquet, the magazine's newsroom, a bar—not one pricked her interest, they could all have been chairs or lamps, since none of them was Quinn. Although Cress duly researched and wrote the assignments Silas gave her—she was too afraid of displeasing him and Tillie to fail—she had no real interest in the magazine work, the stories about art and commerce. The single story she did pitch—one about clearcutting in the Spearmint watershed and the war between local loggers and environmentalists—was dismissed on the spot. (“Write it for the Sierra Club newsletter,” Tillie said.) As for her dissertation—well, that was like a small handkerchief tied to a tree so far away Cress glimpsed its listless flutter intermittently, seasonally.

A dissertation on art in the marketplace would do nothing to draw him nearer.

She understood that he was no longer listing in her direction. He had found a way back into his old life. His grief, the sadness and fury that sent him to her, had subsided, leaving her stranded here in the middle of a pasture. She should get out. It was time. Past time. And she wanted out, she really did. At least part of her did. More and more, it seemed, she was in a civil war with herself, the side that had dug in versus the side that wanted out. The dug-in side was like a steel I-beam sunk deep in unconscious muck. The wanting-out side was like that sheep of his uncle's, tangled deep in the brambles, bleating weakly for someone, anyone, to come and yank her free.

*   *   *

A motel in Reseda had thin, slippery sheets and hourly rates.

“Don Dare's in law school,” she told him.

“Caleb and Candy moved to South Carolina again; she wouldn't let Caleb take jobs away from home, and he couldn't find enough local work to keep them going.”

Two months later, she saw his truck at the Staghorn.

“Did you hear? Brian and Franny have twins! A boy and a girl!”

“Annette's transferring to Cal for her junior year,” he said.

“You remember my friend Tillie? She had a little girl and is now a features editor at
City and State.
”

Another time, they started at the Staghorn and ended up at the Dairyman's Inn out on the highway.

“Do you think we'll ever be together more than this?” she said.

“We shouldn't even be together like this,” he said.

On a warm May day, they drove once more through the cloying perfume of the blossoming orange groves. “If you and Sylvia had stayed split up from the start and we'd married a year later, we'd be nearing our second anniversary.”

“We'd be divorced,” he said flatly.

“What makes you say that?”

“We're too different,” he said. “We couldn't of pulled it off.”

But she would have adjusted, for better or worse, and made him a home, with log walls, plank floors, fine china, and a snarling bearskin—the one that still occupied the Saab's entire trunk. A moldering smell sometimes wafted into the car.

“One day you are going to know how terrible I've been, and you are going to get really angry,” he said.

She patted his thigh. “I look forward to that day.”

*   *   *

Two more months passed and she didn't see his truck parked anywhere. The next time she climbed into the cab beside him, she wept silently for two hours as he drove across the valley floor, past orange and lemon and olive groves; then farther west into sorghum, apricots, alfalfa. The tears plopped on her lap until her jeans were sodden.

He was working on a library down on Mulholland Drive for a television actor, he said. She should come down.

They rented a room at the Starlight Inn in Encino, four times in six weeks. The renewed frequency, their high humor, dinners at Jinky's, seemed a resurgence. Loving and close, they sat on the same side of booths. There was always news. Donna had finally won her paternity suit and had also become impregnated by and engaged to the Sparkville deputy marshal. Don Dare and Elise had two boys already—and Don was almost through law school on a two-year fast track. Tillie had moved over to the
Los Angeles Times
, where she was now second in command at the Sunday magazine.