Shelter in Place (13 page)

Tess's eyes shone. With what? With ideas? No. With plans. With plans.

And I suppose that kind of sparkling look isn't quite calm, is it? Isn't quite peace. As we walked, Tess squeezing my hand tight, I couldn't have imagined what she was planning. I'm not sure she knew herself. Not yet, not really. But that's when it began. The seminal moment.

“I love her,” she said as I drove us up the prison road.

And this is what we want, is it not? The woman we love to love the first woman who ever loved us? Test passed. We may proceed. We may go on without difficulty. Or that kind of difficulty. So, why did it concern me? Why was I frightened by it?

This instant and severe consonance.

I think of Tess who had the future in her eyes as we rose out of the valley.

“I love her,” she said before the road cut the prison away.

It wasn't peace. Peace wasn't what she was after.

When we pulled up to the house and the engine was off, she said, “We should find our own place.”

Which meant many things. That she was staying, and so we were staying. That we would walk into my father's house, and tell him so. And he would look at us with such happiness, and the three of us would get drunk together on a bottle of Smirnoff from his freezer.

It meant that Lester's would deliver a pizza and we'd eat it together in celebration and Tess would tell the story of meeting my mother for the first time in the visitors' room of the prison at White Pine.

What she would not do is tell either of us what she was constructing. Because she did not yet know. Or because she did not have language for it yet. Or perhaps, unlike my father and very much like my mother, she demanded her secrets.

A
two-bedroom house ten minutes' walk up the hill from my father's. Salt-blasted, storm-struck, weather-beaten, peeling navy well on its way to grey. Two white-trimmed windows facing the street. Two windows side by side beneath a pitched roof, cedar-shingled. A child's drawing of a house. Redbrick chimney. A nice wide porch out front, and three steps down, a dead lawn and six cracked concrete pavers to the sidewalk, a sidewalk which takes you along a quiet street.

Ours was Mott. Named for who the fuck cares. Mott Street. 232. The house worse for wear, but not a dump. Room for improvement, which is what you want in a house. That's what houses are for. What arrives finished is for people without souls, without imagination. I trust nothing finished. Nothing that doesn't leave me some room for work.

Two bedrooms upstairs, windows on the street, and a bathroom in between. Downstairs a living room with a brick fireplace and brick mantle painted coats and coats of white, darts of char shooting up from within. A dining room. An old porcelain light fixture pointing at the floor, a white warhead at the end of a brass rod. Radiators that spoke in tongues. Beat-up wooden floors everywhere, except the kitchen, which was all yellow linoleum. White Formica counters edged in aluminum straight out of a 50s diner. Wood cabinetry painted yellow, a gas range—oven and burners, splintered enamel both, and a clock in the console, the old saw, telling perfect time twice a day. An angry fridge.

There was a yellow yard out back, home to two good apple trees, both behind a tall pine fence many years newer than the house itself.

All to say, we were happy.

The two of us at the Salvation Army, at Goodwill.

See Tess moving backwards up our porch steps? See the expression on her face?
You
ask her if she wants to trade places, if she wants a rest. I've learned my lesson. She takes no shortcuts. She takes no shit. She will not be helped. She is the bravest, toughest, fiercest. Strongest. Look at her face. Watch while that horrible green corduroy (the people's fabric of White Pine) couch slowly slips out of her hands. While she loses her grip, inch by inch. The sharp end of a wayward staple cuts the soft skin of the inside of her right arm. See the blood there? You tell her to drop it. You tell her to take a break. It's a single minute in a life, Tess. But she will not let go until the couch is inside and facing the fireplace.

It fits just right, just so. Like it was bench built for our new little world. The front door wide open and, outside, the tailgate down. Our brand-new plastic-wrapped mattress is piled with boxes of the cheapest shit the great town of White Pine has to offer. Tess's jacket left on the lawn, flung off in frustration. How dare it inhibit her. How dare it keep her warm when she wants to be cool.

The middle of the afternoon. Warm despite the season. All the windows open. All the doors. House and truck. Our lives exposed to the world. And Tess, sitting on our corduroy, has me on my knees. One leg in her jeans, one leg out. One side bare, one side not. Her hands on the back of my head, she holds on tight. My fingers curling inside her—ring and middle—with my tongue pressed hard against her, no soft flicking, no light touch today. Today it's hard pressure, and her fingers tightening, tightening, she comes quickly the way she does. She comes hard. And after, she pulls me up, pulls me to her and kisses my mouth and says my name the way she did then, more than once and in all its variations. Sometimes Joey, sometimes Joseph, sometimes Joe.

“We're home, my love,” she says. “You and me.”

She laughs and returns her slender naked leg back to her jeans and runs into the sunlight singing to me one song or another.

And I am happy. The two of us, day after day filling that place, making it ours. Making it fortress and nest, stronghold and citadel.

A
fter we finished our work that first week, when nearly everything was in place, my father came for dinner. He arrived with a bottle of champagne and a half-cord of firewood in the back of his Wagoneer. Tess made chili.

“To your mother,” she said to me. “To your wife,” she said to him. “May she come home soon.”

We all raised our glasses and drank.

So it was like old times. Like the beginning in Cannon Beach. Me behind the bar, Tess out on the floor.

She picked up shifts at The Owl. Kerry, or Julie, or Amy, got pregnant, or flunked Marine Biology, or got arrested for selling Ecstasy, or just pitched it in and left town, or whatever happened, and like that, the way things go in the past, with such simplicity and ease, Tess was working right there alongside me just like in the good old days.

In that time of joy, we woke in our new bed, upon our new mattress, in our new sheets, in our new home, with sunlight in the trees. In my memory, in those mornings we made love always. And after, always, one of us would go downstairs to our new kitchen and make coffee. I can feel it. Standing still, looking out the kitchen window at our scruffy yard, waiting for the machine to do its work, listening to the ranting refrigerator, my feet against the cool linoleum.

Reaching through the cold air for the
White Pine Witness
. Red rubber band. Cardinal in the tree.

Paper under my arm, a mug in each hand as I climb the stairs. Our stairs. Those mornings, those days, that house, the seed of a dream perhaps only I maintained. Tess in bed sleepy and naked. The two of us reading that terrible paper, the crime blotter our favorite page. Tossing it and turning to the books we collected, which were everywhere. Which grew up from the floor in stacks, and extended along the shelves we built with cinder blocks and planks of pine my father cut for free. What else did we have to do those mornings but read, and make love, and drink coffee and fall back to sleep?

My father came by some afternoons to help with one project or another. In the evenings we went down to The Owl in my truck to provide alcohol to those who wanted it. To pay for our new life together, to earn our living.

Perform some task in return for currency, use that currency to wrap ourselves in clean white sheets, to keep ourselves warm and sheltered and fed. All we had to do was show up on time, pour alcohol into glasses, distribute those glasses. Do it fast. Keep things clean. Keep things organized.

In return, you may have this life. You may have your time of joy.

The problem is that we want other things. Some of us more than others, and after a while, after the castle has been built, fortified, and polished, we begin to look out the windows. We are restless. There are holes. There are desires we may only sense, a humming, a chill, a sensation impossible to understand, impossible to disregard.

Then there are two choices: bury it or change.

And it should be clear by now that Tess would bury nothing. So as those days passed, glorious in memory, glorious despite my mother, mornings in bed, nights at The Owl, dinners with my father, walks on the cold beach, all the desperate, savage, tender sex, through all those early days (infinite as they feel, how many were there really? Twenty? Thirty?), Tess had an eye to the window. And perhaps I did as well, knowing that the tar would return. Winter coming, days shortening, Tess drifting, nothing left to do with the house until spring, but sit and work and wait. With everything in its place there was nothing left to do but look outside. And we found that outside it was not like Cannon Beach.

In Cannon Beach there were no wars, no winter storms.

There my mother was not in prison.

After the home has been built, the firewood stacked, the bed made, the animal dressed, regardless of place and culture, whatever the quality of our food and shelter, in the quietest moments of our minds, relative as they may be, do we all look elsewhere?

I
n the beginning, on nights we didn't work, Tess and I stayed home. We lit a fire, we made dinner. And then on one of those nights, after we'd eaten, Tess poured us glasses of bourbon, and we went out onto the porch. This simple change, this was the beginning, the true beginning. The simplest thing. Tess carried the drinks, and I brought the blanket we kept on the couch. Some generic Navajo pattern. Green diamonds inside of diamonds inside of diamonds on white wool. A gift from my father, which we loved and which was part of our early life in the way that stuffed animals are in the lives of children.

I followed Tess out the front door, turned off the porch light, sat next to her and pulled the blanket around our shoulders.

“Cheers,” she said and held her glass out not to me, but to the street, to the neighborhood, to the night. And I did the same, both of us facing forward. There may or may not have been a clink, but we certainly committed a drinking sin. No meeting of the eyes. I suppose it will come as no surprise that I am superstitious. What's stranger? The sense that I am inhabited by a long-taloned bird, that black tar spreads through my veins, or that I knock three times on wood whenever it occurs to me that Tess will never return home?

There was a streetlight on the corner, yellowing the sidewalk. There were all our neighbors' houses, each small like ours, and most in better states of repair. Across the street was a white house set farther back on the property than all the others on Mott. What space it lost in the backyard, it gained in the front. And in that space was a neat garden. Perfectly staked and rowed, flower beds framed with redwood planks. Paths made of wood chips. Nearly all of it was dead or dying that time of year on the north coast of Washington State, but it was clean and cared for, and held such promise for the spring.  

As we sat beneath the blanket, we watched a tall man appear. Or perhaps the better word here is
materialize
, because there was no arrival, no door opening and closing, no light coming on, no footsteps. He was just, all at once, present. He carried a plastic bucket, and walked the rows stopping here and there, kneeling to break a stem, or pull a weed. He was slightly stooped, with dark hair that fell into his face. Even Tess, who never hesitated to speak to strangers, said nothing. And the longer we were silent, the more it felt as if we were watching something we shouldn't have been. Observing some intimate ritual. As if we were spies, peering into the man's house, watching him bathe, or pray, or masturbate. Having not announced ourselves, having not called to him,
Hello, neighbor
, a simple courtesy, a warning: beware, you are not alone. A cough, even. Some gesture.

But we kept quiet. And after walking each row and filling his bucket, he upturned it onto a compost pile and disappeared around the side of the house.

So what? A man comes out to do a bit of gardening at night. Stranger things have happened. Yes, that's true. But Tess was thrilled by it, and so I was too. You should have seen her eyes when she turned to me.

“The night gardener,” she whispered.

She loved mystery. And so she made him a character. Even if he was no one to us, and, really, makes no difference here.

It's the most fundamental thing I know about being alive: Everything that lasts is invention followed by tenacious faith.

W
hat do you know so far? You have a man alone in a pretty house of glass and wood, an isolated house at the end of a long, unpaved, spruce-lined driveway.

Occasionally he walks to a town he refuses to name, but mostly he stays at home. At one time he lived here with a woman named Tess Wolff, but she is gone now.

Where has she gone?

Will she return?

Why did she leave?

All good questions, to which I do not have answers.

What else? This man we know in turns as Joe, Joey, Joseph March, when he was twenty-two years old, fell madly in love with Tess Wolff. I do not know a truer phrase than
fell madly in love
. To fall madly. To fall madly into love. It has been overused and corrupted by a world that destroys good phrases with overuse and commerce. A lazy, stupid, regressive world that beats the meaning from words, beats them to death, until they are only noise, only filler. And I know I sound like a crank, I know. Still, I'm saying take a second and consider the phrase, is all. Nowhere have I read a better description of what happened to me. I fell madly in. Pronoun, verb, adverb, preposition. Flawless. A mad falling. See what happens to me? Derailed again. My whole life derailed. The updraft, the downdraft. The drugs kick in, but there are no drugs. Without warning they come, these wild highs, this, the good madness, comes on like fast fire. And how do you expect me to stay on track when I'm alive like I am now? That's the point. I am always derailed. Forgive me, for today I am discursive. What a word that one, too, what sound, what meaning. Discursive, digressive and meandering. And baroque too. And absurd. But what can I do? It comes on and I am changed. Never believe in solidity of self.