Off Course (35 page)

“And do you feel whole and fulfilled there?” asked the therapist. “Would you be doing your life's work?”

“I don't have a life's work,” said Cress.

*   *   *

In dreams, endlessly proliferating obstacles—importuning friends, chasms in the road, vehicular disintegration—prevented their meeting. Once, she made it to his house and was welcomed by Sylvia—a burly, forceful Sylvia, who was bustling half-a-dozen children into a station wagon. “Upstairs, far bedroom,” this Sylvia called before driving off larkily, thrilled for a few hours of liberty. Quinn, when Cress found him, was a brain-damaged, mute invalid requiring constant supervision, which even an old rival could supply.

Only rarely did she meet him face-to-face in a dream. In one, Quinn appeared at her kitchen table, smiling and jaunty, wanting coffee. She asked him, “How much time do we have?” and he cheerfully replied, “Twenty minutes!” In another dream, they floated down a river together, fingers touching, their skin mottled, greenish and cool, like frogs'. She awoke to the faint, evaporating threads of exquisite, tender feelings, amazed that, by herself, she had conjured the nearly unbearable sweetness of being known and adored.

*   *   *

Cress wrote about art for Silas and about economic issues for Tillie at the
Times.
But the freelance life was wearing thin; she missed the camaraderie of Beech Creek. She applied for teaching jobs at two community colleges, but halfheartedly, never believing they'd want her, and indeed, nothing came of it. Tillie tried to give her more interesting assignments and sent her to write about an enormous steel plant in San Bernardino County whose owners
disastrously
filed for bankruptcy on the heels of a three-hundred-million-dollar expansion.

At the plant, among many government officials looking to salvage something from the wreckage, Cress ran into a man she knew from her college econ classes; while she'd been the class star, publishing a term paper in an academic journal, he had struggled to get Bs. Now he worked for the state's economic development agency and was here looking for ways to put the abandoned plant back to good use. After two lunches, he mentioned a job opening at his agency, an entry-level position—his position, in fact. He'd been promoted. Was she interested? They weren't necessarily looking for a Ph.D., but a trained economist would sure add to the team.

A civil servant. She'd had bigger, or at least different, ambitions back in grad school. But the pay was decent for government work, her coworkers proved diverse and intelligent, the work itself was environmentally protective, and she had to start somewhere. She spent her days reading, reviewing economic impact analyses and feasibility studies for proposed developments in the county. Never mind that her boss was Mr. B-minus himself.

She was aware now of the time she'd squandered, how much momentum she'd lost. Four years—and more!—she'd given to Quinn. What had held her there? Why hadn't she extracted herself earlier? And how little she had asked for in love! How little she'd been left with: one small, carved donkey with bright onyx eyes.

*   *   *

Years passed, and Cress met men, usually through friends: a studio musician (gamelan, xylophone), a ceramic artist, another carpenter; and with each one, she was excited at the start, but in eight, ten months, or a year, instead of her affections deepening, they began to recede, until she was alone again.

There was nothing wrong with any of these men, she admitted to her therapist, except she did not feel for them the way she had for Quinn. They didn't hold her attention. The connections weren't as close. “Maybe I'm essentially monogamous,” Cress said. “Maybe I mated once, and that's it.”

Emotional flexibility, the therapist pointed out carefully, was a desirable trait, one that Cress might cultivate. Would she consider letting go of certain closely held beliefs if they no longer served her? Perhaps she'd allow in some new ideas about love and happiness, and welcome different kinds of people into her life.

*   *   *

In her late thirties, it grew harder to meet single men. She agreed to the occasional fix-up, but nothing took. She went ahead—she needed the tax write-off—and bought a house in Pasadena on a pretty oak-shaded street overlooking the arroyo and right around the corner from Tillie's. (“At last, I have you where I want you,” Tillie said.)

Cress was not unhappy. She took a new job at a private environmental consulting firm, and now she specialized in “mitigations,” finding ways for companies to offset the environmental damage they caused. She arranged for a utility company, after a bad chlorine leak, to fund the town's new soccer field. She set it up so that a polluting refinery could purchase a thousand acres of protected habitat for the fringe-toed lizard. A commercial developer in Agoura funded a wildlife crossing under the freeway. She liked the practical and creative aspects of this work: nobody pretended that damage wasn't done, and ongoing—so what could balance it out, make up for it?

At home, Cress put in a large vegetable and flower garden, and walked every morning, starting out in the dark, up and down the arroyo with its steep rocky walls and shallow stream. One of her neighbors, a widower with three grown daughters, walked a little later than she did with his standard brown poodle, Mimi. Every day, around the time the sun was rising, they paused to chat. Eamon Cuddihy was fifty-three, an internist–turned–hospital director. A black-haired Black Irishman, born in County Cork, he spoke with a lovely lilt. His wife had been dead for four years.

To Eamon, Cress described her time in the mountains as
lost.
And because he had been companionably married for twenty-six years, she felt shame and trepidation in admitting that her longest romantic attachment had been with a married man.

“Ah, but you were young,” Eamon said.

Twenty-eight wasn't
that
young, but Cress didn't argue the point.

*   *   *

A week before Cress and Eamon's wedding, her therapist said, “You know, you really should be grateful to Quinn.”

“I should?” Cress gaped at the woman. Quinn's name still set off a systemwide alarm. “For what?”

“He got you started working through your father issues.”

“He did?”

Really, said the therapist, it was no mystery: Cress had acted out the oldest story, Oedipus-for-girls, if you will: push the mother out of the way, so you can have the father's attention all to yourself. “You were hardly subtle, Cress,” her therapist said. “Quinn's wife and your mom even had the same name. And didn't you say that your father, too, was at one time a carpenter?”

Cress covered her face with her hands, embarrassed by how obviously—how obliviously—she'd acted out the whole family romance.

From therapy and self-help books, she had learned many such terms:
family romance
, and also
attachment disorder
,
co-dependence
,
repetition compulsion
,
narcissistic wound
. But these were words, uttered or printed on a page, and no match—no match at all!—for the bright churning waves of memory.

*   *   *

Don Dare phoned her out of the blue. He was going climbing in Potrero Chico in Nuevo León and was coming down to Los Angeles the night before his flight. Would she and Eamon meet him for dinner out by the airport? Cress suggested a French Moroccan place in Culver City with a large patio. (Eamon tactfully bowed out: “You two catch up without me.”)

They were seated beside a gnarled pomegranate tree where two yellow canaries hopped and trilled in a cage. They laughed and insisted the other hadn't changed in the last twelve years. Don had gained some weight through his middle, but he had the same handsome, narrow, pitted face, the same shock of surfer blondness, if somewhat receded.

“You ever go back to Sawyer or the Meadows?” Cress asked.

“Just last weekend,” he said. “Elise and I took the boys climbing at the Crags.”

They'd camped at Spearmint Creek, too, on the site of the old tent. They'd gone to the lodge for Family Night, as well, and nothing had changed there, either, not really. Jakey's kids ran the place now, but Jakey was still very present, roaring at customers and giving his kids unasked-for advice. And guess who was singing?

“How to put this kindly…,” said Don. “She has grown, uh, quite stout.”

Over kebabs, he passed Cress photographs of four towheaded boys and the Tuscan-style villa he and Elise had built. One snapshot showed wooden cupboards and a rectangular white farm sink. “Quinn put in the kitchen for us.”

Spoken so casually, the name was a shock. Her heart zigzagged around her chest. She tried to sound offhand. “And how is Quinn?”

“Well, you heard he remarried,” Don said.

“I've heard nothing! What happened? Did Sylvia die?”

She left him, said Don Dare. She took the boy and moved to the coast. Long time ago. Right after Cress left.

“I assumed you knew all about it,” said Don.

After Sylvia split, Don said, Quinn became a fixture in the bars. Quite the town drunk, in fact. Then he got together with Jill Jurgensen, and she took him in hand.

Louder than Cress intended: “
Who?
”

“You never met Jill?” Jill was a Sawyer girl, from an old, rich ranching family. “A friend of Donna's. That's when I first met her.”

“Never heard of her!” Cress was still absorbing
Took the boy. Moved to the coast.

A long, almost electrical chittering tone bore through her thoughts. One of the canaries singing.

“Jill must have moved back after you left,” Don was saying. “She teaches biology at Sparkville High. And she's a real jock. Still. A triathlete. A bicycler and jogger and—what's the third thing?”

“Swimming,” said Cress.

There were two little boys, too, Ace and Dalbert, Roman twins, nine months apart. “They must be six and seven now,” said Don Dare. Jill had brought them up to the house when Quinn was working on the kitchen. They were only two and three then. “A couple of little scamps.”

A plate of glass had gone up between Cress and the world beyond her. She could see and hear Don, but no longer take in what he was saying.

So there was no long shuffle
à deux
into old age. At least not with Sylvia.

But that alternate life Cress had tried to imagine was not so imaginary, after all: an energetic biology teacher named Jill Jurgensen was presently living it.

He had not come looking for her. She'd been waiting here with a listed number. For years. She'd made it easy for him to find her. But he must not have wanted to. Maybe it was never the same for him.

“To tell the truth,” Don was saying, “Jill reminds us a lot of you. She's around your age. Her hair is long and straight like yours, only white-blond. She's got a really great sense of humor like you. And she's smart, too. Not as smart as you, but she has a lot more on the ball than that first wife of his.”

A moth fluttered by, its wings ivory-white with ink-black dots. Cress's heart fluttered with it. With difficulty, she spoke over its frantic rhythm. “Did he ever—ahh—mention me?”

“Oh sure,” said Don. “He read all your work in the
Times
. He and Jill were both big fans.”

Don must have seen her paleness, her quivering lip. “Oh, Cress. I thought you were happy!” He waved a hand. “Your job, your husband.”

She was happy, she assured him. But that had nothing to do with this.

“Don't feel bad,” said Don. “Not about Quinn. I mean, I love the guy, but Jill puts up with a lot.”

Quinn had never really quit the bars, Don said. He might sober up for a year or so, but then Jill would start getting calls to haul him out of Bob's or the Staghorn, or bail him out of the Sparkville tank. Each cycle was a little worse. “He vanished off our job for two whole weeks. We were about to hire someone else when he dragged in looking like ten miles of rough road.”

So Cress was lucky, Don said. She'd dodged a bullet.

Yes, yes. Very lucky, no doubt.

But dodging a bullet, Cress thought, described a fleeting instant, as if she'd pulled her head aside in the nick of time when, in fact, no matter how often she'd put herself smack in the line of fire, she'd failed to get herself shot.

*   *   *

A sleepless night.

A constant ticking backward in time—to their last meetings at the Starlight Inn, where they had been so at ease and more cheerful than ever. Why hadn't he come back to that?

He'd probably needed money after Sylvia left. To buy her out. And along came a jolly, fit, rich girl.

Cress recalled something her own father said, way back when it was all starting. “Does he know you're an heiress?” Cress never had told Quinn that. Perhaps she should have. Perhaps it might have burrowed like a foxtail into Quinn's brain, so when Sylvia departed, he would have turned to her.

Cress would've loved to buy that land for him.

He'd probably been too afraid to call after so much cruel intermittency. Or he had moved on.

The memory of waiting—waiting to see him, waiting to touch him, waiting for him to make up his mind—was still visceral. Those years in Sawyer, she'd teetered on the edge, never knowing if she'd tip finally into exaltation or despair. Indeed, a part of her still waited like a girl sitting on a front stoop, watching the street for her love to arrive. Longing, that twisting needle, had been blunted by time and other happiness, but she felt it now, so painful and sweet and unendurable.

The young are better at withstanding such love.

By the time Sylvia finally left him, Quinn was probably ready for something novel and guilt-free, like a white-blond jock who could beat him up the mountain to Wanderwood and produce, in rapid succession, two small scamps.