She touched his knees with hersâshe was wearing a plaid cotton shirtwaist dress, and he wore his shirt and tie and dark brown suit pants (his jacket he had carefully hung in the closet on arriving home from the bank for lunch, which he preferred to fix for himself at home rather than spend the extra $475 a year he had calculated it would cost to eat lunch in town at the Copper Skillet). Then she reached forward between their chairs and touched his knees with the palms of her hands, running her fingertips up the insides of his legs, until she was touching his crotch. He reached out and took her by the shoulders and drew her forward and down, so that her face was laid against his tightening thigh. Then he unzipped his fly, and she drove both her hands in, working and massaging him until the red head of his penis was shoving its way past the folds of cloth toward her mouth.
Afterward, Leon hurriedly drew his crotch away from Doreen's mouth and said something about having to fix his lunch and get back to work on time, and Doreen had left his trailer in tears and had gone back to her own place and had vomited. As with Bruce, she felt dirty for about a month, although of course this time her guilt was not compounded by a fear of being pregnant, and then one morning she woke up, Buck was gone to work, and as she looked down her long, muscular legs to her feet and wiggled them deliciously, she felt fine again. It was a cold February morning, two weeks before the presidential primary, and when she went into the bathroom to shower, she discovered that during the night the cold water line to the shower had frozen solid. Water ran smoothly through all the other pipes, so she reasoned that, as the day warmed, the shower line would thaw on its own and probably was not frozen solidly enough to burst the pipe. She knew that by noon at the latest everything would be working properly again. But she also thought of Howie Leeke, the recently divorced plumber who was awfully good-looking and had a funny, raspy way of talking and quick gray eyes, so she called the plumber.
Howie liked to please women. “I always like to leave 'em crying for more,” he said with a grin (when asked how he did it, how he managed to have so many women calling him in the morning to come and fix pipes or blocked drains or broken appliances that, when he arrived, seemed to need little or no repair at all). In Doreen's case, however, Howie was unable to leave her crying for more. She very quickly discovered that she had too much of him, that his persistent, tireless weight was smothering her, and the longer they bounced and thrashed across her bed, onto the floor, on the coffee table in the living room, on and on and on, for what seemed to her like whole days and nights, the more she wished she had never called him, had never come to the door in her blue nightgown, had never leaned over behind him when he squatted down by the tub to try the faucets. When he finally left, which he would do only after she had moaned and cried out like an animal with its leg caught in a trap, she had shut the door on him with enormous relief and gratitude for his absence. He had said, as he stepped out the door, “I'll be back, don't worry,” and she had answered, “No, you can't. I love my husband,” and he had winked and strolled across the frozen ground to his pickup truck.
But Howie was a braggart, and it wasn't a week before Buck had got told by one of the kids who worked on his crew that Howie Leeke was making cracks about Doreen Tiede down at the Hawthorne House the other night. At first Buck couldn't believe it, that his wife, the teen-aged angel Doreen, had let that big-mouthed, nervous, skinny, twice-divorced plumber near her perfect body, that she had listened to his line, that she had seen his sex organ! That he had seen hers! That their sex organs had actually made contact with one another! Then, of course, he couldn't believe anything else, and he knew it was because Howie was a giant in bed, a titan, while he was a shrimp, a child, and, driving home from work, as the snow started falling, Buck began to cry, to sob, to groan, to call out her name, Doreen! Doreen! while his car slipped on the snow and skidded from side to side, drifting dangerously into long, slow slides coming down the long hill from Northwood to Catamount.
Most people can either only give love or receive it, rarely both, and there's nothing wrong with that, so long as you attach yourself to your opposite number, that is, so long as, if you are the one who can only give love, you attach yourself to someone who can only receive it. You will be able then to make each other happy. If, by the same token, you are like Doreen Tiede and can only receive love, if you have no vision of a person's needing you more than you need that person, then you had better not hook up with someone like Buck Tiede, or you will quickly end up as they ended upâwith Buck on his knees in front of his wife, snow-covered, for he had crashed his car at the turnoff from Old Road and had walked in from the road to the trailerpark, sobbing hysterically, blindly, all the way in.
Doreen was unmoved, but she stroked his head mechanically and listened to his cries, until after a while, his cries turned to wet, begging queries as to what, exactly, she had done with Howie. In her own words, he said, he wanted to hear it from her own lips. He didn't care how bad it was, he just wanted to hear it from her own lips. He knew, no matter how bad it was, no matter where it led, even if it led to her running off with Howie, he deserved it, for he had not been a good lover for her, he had been a weak and boyish man in bed, and she was a young woman who needed steady loving, just like all the sad songs said, so go ahead, give it to him straight, at least give him that much, so he could know the truth and wouldn't go around the rest of his life being laughed at because everyone knew what he didn't know.
“The rice is burning,” she said, and she pushed his head off her lap and got up. In a few seconds she came back from the stove and sat down again, and he put his head back on her lap, and she told him that she hadn't slept with Howie, she had only let him kiss her, once, and then she had felt awful and she had sent him away.
“Kissed you? That's all?”
“Yes.”
He didn't believe her, of course, and his despair turned suddenly to anger, for she was lying to him, lying so she could go out tomorrow as soon as he had gone to work and do all kinds of disgusting things with her and Howie Leeke's bodies. He saw them sweating against each other, naked and twined around each other, heads where genitals are supposed to be, genitals where heads are supposed to be, arms and hands where legs and feet should be, stomachs against backs, backs against stomachs, everything backward and upside-down, and the two of them laughing deliriously as they swallowed each other whole. “You whore, I'm going to shoot you dead,” he declared, and he got to his feet and stomped down the narrow hallway to their bedroom, returning a minute later, just as she lit a cigarette, with his .20 gauge shotgun. “You lying bitch, you deserve to die! You first, and then I'm going to shoot that sonofabitch Howie Leeke, and then I'm going to shoot myself!” He drew the gun up and aimed at her chest, which had begun to heave.
“Good,” she said. “I want you to shoot me. But don't shoot Howie, and please, Buck, don't shoot yourself. You're a good man, and it's not Howie's fault that he kissed me, it's mine. I'm everything you say I am, I deserve to be shot by a jealous husband, even if all I did was let another man kiss me, but you don't deserve to die. You're a good man, Buck, and someday you'll make something of yourself, someday you'll be running your own well-drilling business and you'll be just like Daddy and Grandpa, happy and with children and a good wife and all that a good man can wish for. But I'm a rotten wife, I haven't been good to you, I've let another man kiss me⦔ She got up from the chair and crossed the room slowly, evenly, until she drew near the barrel of the shotgun. “I let another man's lips touch mine.” She placed her chest lightly against the mouth of the gun barrel. “A strange man's lips were placed and pressed against mine, and I permitted it. I invited it.” Buck pulled the trigger.
They say that time stops, or goes away, and your body and the world's body cross into one another. You have no thoughts, for once, no memories and no plans for the future, they say it's like being born, though of course you have no memory of that and cannot know if the comparison is apt, and they say that it's like dying, but you have not quite done that either and so cannot know if they are right, and people who have died cannot come back and tell you what it was like to die, so you will just have to imagine what Doreen felt for that instant when Buck pulled the trigger and the hammer fell, and the only noise was a gasp from Doreen as she clamped her hands onto the barrel of the gun and pressed it as tightly as she could against the exact center of her chest and then collapsed into a pile on the floor, the shotgun clattering to the floor beside her, as Buck came forward toward her, his trousers already to his knees, his hands yanking at her clothing, drawing it away from her body, until he had her naked from the waist down, her legs spread wide on either side of him, and he was moving swiftly, sweetly, smoothly into her, the two of them crooning sly obscenities and gross compliments into each other's ears.
Doreen got pregnant that night, and both she and Buck knew it the instant it happened, or at least they claimed to know it afterward. But they did not live happily ever after. Their second year of marriage was worse than the first, and when the baby was born, a girl they named Maureen, Doreen stopped sleeping with Buck altogether, and he took to staying out late almost every night, usually at the Hawthorne House, where he would drink himself into a sullen stupor that often led him to beat his wife when he arrived home and found her sleeping peacefully alone. Doreen had three or four lengthy affairs over the next few years, none of them satisfactory to her, all of them resulting in an increased distance from her husband Buck. They were divorced in the fifth year of their marriage, when their little girl was four and right after Buck had been fired by Doreen's father and grandfather because she had been forced to call the police one night to stop him from beating her. Doreen and Buck never forgot that snowy night and the shotgun, however, and in later years, alone, they would wish they could speak of it to each other, but they never did speak of it to each other, not even the night that it happened.
I
T WAS THE THIRD DAY OF AN
A
UGUST HEAT WAVE
. Within an hour of the sun's rising above the spruce and pine trees that grew along the eastern hills, a blue-gray haze had settled over the lake and trailerpark, so that, from the short, sandy spit that served as a swimming place for the residents of the trailerpark, you couldn't see the far shore of the lake. Around seven, a man in plaid bathing trunks and white bathing cap, in his sixties but still straight and apparently in good physical condition, left one of the trailers and walked along the paved lane to the beach. He draped his white towel over the bow of a flaking, bottle-green rowboat that had been dragged onto the sand and walked directly into the water, and when the water was up to his waist, he began to swim, smoothly, slowly, straight out in the still water for two hundred yards or so, where he turned, treaded water for a few moments, and then started swimming back toward shore. When he reached the shore, he dried himself and walked back to his trailer and went inside. By the time he closed his door, the water was smooth again, a dark green plain beneath the thick, gray-blue sky. No birds moved or sang; even the insects were silent.
In the next few hours, people left their trailers to go to their jobs in town, those who had jobsâthe nurse, the bank teller, the carpenter, the woman who worked in the office at the tannery and her little girl who would spend the day with a babysitter in town. They moved slowly, heavily, as if with regret, even the child.
Time passed, and the trailerpark was silent again, while the sun baked the metal roofs and sides of the trailers, heating them up inside, so that by midmorning it would be cooler outside than in, and the people would come out and try to find a shady place to sit. First to appear was a middle-aged woman in large sunglasses, white shorts and halter, her head hidden by a floppy, wide-brimmed, cloth hat. She carried a book and sat on the shaded side of her trailer in an aluminum and plastic-webbing lawn chair and began to read her book. Then from his trailer came the man in the plaid bathing trunks, bare-headed now and shirtless and tanned to a chestnut color, his skin the texture of old leather. He wore rubber sandals and proceeded to hook up a garden hose and water the small, meticulously weeded vegetable garden on the slope behind his trailer. Every now and then he aimed the hose down and sprayed his boney feet. From the first trailer in from the road, where a sign that said
MANAGER
had been attached over the door, a tall, thick-bodied woman in her forties with cropped, graying hair, wearing faded jeans cut off at midthigh and a floppy tee shirt that had turned pink in the wash, walked slowly out to the main road, a half-mile, to get her mail. When she returned, she sat on her steps and read the letters and advertisements and the newspaper. About that time a blond boy in his late teens with shoulder-length hair, skinny, tanned, shirtless and barefoot in jeans, emerged from his trailer, sighed and sat down on the stoop and smoked a joint. At the last trailer in the park, the one next to the beach, an old man smoking a cob pipe and wearing a sleeveless undershirt and beltless khaki trousers slowly scraped paint from the bottom of an overturned rowboat. He ceased working and watched carefully as, walking slowly past him toward the dark green rowboat on the sand, there came a young black man with a fishing rod in one hand and a tackle box in the other. The man was tall and, though slender, muscular. He wore jeans and a pale blue, unbuttoned, shortsleeved shirt.
The old man said that it was too hot for fishing, they wouldn't feed in this weather, but the young man said he didn't care, it had to be cooler out on the lake than here on shore. The old man agreed with that, but why bother carrying your fishing rod and tackle box with you when you don't expect to catch any fish? Right, the young man said, smiling. Good question. Placing his box and the rod into the rowboat, he turned to wait for the young woman who was stepping away from the trailer where, earlier, the middle-aged woman in shorts, halter and floppy hat had come out and sat in the lawn chair to read. The young woman was a girl, actually, twenty or maybe twenty-one. She wore a lime-green terry cloth bikini and carried a large yellow towel in one hand and a fashion magazine and small brown bottle of tanning lotion in the other. Her long, honey-blond hair swung from side to side across her tanned shoulders and back as she walked down the lane to the beach, and both the young man and the old man watched her as she approached them. She made a brief remark about the heat to the old man, said good morning to the young man, placed her towel, magazine and tanning lotion into the dark green rowboat and helped the young man shove the boat off the hot sand into the water. Then she jumped into the boat and sat herself in the stern, and the man, barefoot, with the bottoms of his jeans rolled to his knees, waded out, got into the boat and began to row.
For a while, as the man rowed and the girl rubbed tanning lotion slowly over her arms and legs and across her shoulders and belly, they said nothing. While he pulled smoothly on the oars, the man watched the girl, and she examined her light brown skin and stroked it and rubbed the oily, sweet-smelling fluid onto it. Then, holding to the gunwales with her hands so that her entire body got exposed to the powerful sun, she leaned back, closed her eyes and stretched her legs toward the man, placing her small, white feet over his large, dark feet. The man studied the wedge of her crotch, then her navel, where a puddle of sweat was collecting, then the rise of her small breasts and her long throat glistening in the sunlight. The man was sweating from the effort of rowing now and he said he should have brought a hat. He stopped rowing, let the blades of the oars float in the water, and removed his shirt and wrapped it around his head like a turban. The girl, realizing that he had ceased rowing, looked up and smiled at him. “You look like an Arab. A sheik.”
“A galley slave, more likely.”
“No, really. Honestly.” She lay her head back again and closed her eyes, and the man took up the oars and resumed rowing. They were a long way out now, perhaps a half-mile from the trailerpark. The trailers looked like pastel-colored shoeboxes from here, six of them lined up on one side of the lane, six on the other, with a cleared bit of low ground and marsh off to one side and the outlet of the lake, the Catamount River it was called, on the other. The water was deep there, and below the surface and buried in the mud were blocks of stone and wooden lattices, the remains of fishing weirs the Indians had constructed here and used for centuries until the arrival of the Europeans. In the fall when the lake was low you could see the tops of the huge boulders the Indians had placed into the stream to make channels for their nets and traps. There were weirs like this all over northern New England, most of them considerably more elaborate than this, so no one here paid much attention to them, except perhaps to mention the fact of their existence to a visitor from Massachusetts or New York. It gave the place a history and a certain significance, when outsiders were present, that it did not otherwise seem to have.
The girl had lifted her feet away from the man's feet, drawing them back so that her knees pointed straight at his. She had turned slightly to one side and was stroking one cheekbone and her lower jaw with the fingertips and thumb of one hand, leaning her weight on the other forearm and hand. “I'm already putting on weight,” she said.
“It doesn't work that way. You're just eating too much.”
“I told Mother.”
The man stopped rowing and looked at her.
“I told Mother,” she repeated. Her eyes were closed and her face was directed toward the sun and she continued to stroke her cheekbone and lower jaw.
“When?”
“Last night.”
“And?”
“And nothing. I told her that I love you very much.”
“That's all?”
“No. I told her everything.”
“Okay. How'd she take it? As if I didn't already know.” He started rowing again, faster this time and not as smoothly as before. They were nearing a small, tree-covered island. Large, rounded rocks lay around the island, half-submerged in the shallow water, like the backs of huge, coal-colored pigs. The man peered over his shoulder and observed the distance to the island, then drew in the oars and lifted a broken chunk of cinderblock tied to a length of clothesline rope and slid it into the water. The rope went out swiftly and cleanly as the anchor sank, then suddenly stopped. The man opened his tackle box and started poking through it, searching for a deep-water spinner.
The girl was sitting up now, studying the island with her head canted to one side, as if planning a photograph. “Actually, Mother was a lot better than I'd expected her to be. If Daddy were alive, it would be different,” she said. “Daddy⦔
“Hated niggers.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“And Mother loves 'em.” He located the spinner and attached it to the line.
“My mother likes you. She's a decent woman, and she's tired and lonely. And she's not your enemy, any more than I am.”
“You're sure of that.” He made a long cast and dropped the spinner between two large rocks and started winding it back in. “No, I know your mamma's okay. I'm sorry. No kidding, I'm sorry. Tell me what she said about you and me.”
“She thought it was great. She likes you. I'm happy, and that's what is really important to her, and she likes you. She worries about me a lot, you know. She's afraid for me, she thinks I'm
fragile
. Especially now, because I've had some close calls. At least that's how she sees them.”
“Sees what?”
“Oh, you know. Depression.”
“Yeah.” He cast again, slightly to the left of where he'd put the spinner the first time.
“Listen, I don't know how to tell you this, but I might as well come right out and say it. I'm going in to do it this afternoon. Mother's coming with me. She called and set it up this morning.”
He kept reeling in the spinner, slowly, steadily, as if he hadn't heard her, until the spinner clunked against the side of the boat and he lifted it dripping from the water, and he said, “I hate this whole thing. Hate. Just know that much, will you?”
She reached out and placed a hand on his arm. “I know you do. So do I. But it'll be all right again afterward. I promise.”
“You can't promise that. No one can. It won't be all right again afterward. It'll be lousy.”
“I suppose you'd rather I just did nothing.”
“That's right.”
“Well. We've been through all this before. A hundred times.” She sat up straight and peered back at the trailerpark in the distance. “How long do you plan to fish?”
“An hour or so. Why? If you want to swim, I'll row you around to the other side of the island and drop you and come back and get you later.”
“No. No, that's all right, there are too many rocks anyhow. I'll go in when we get back to the beach. I have to be ready to go by three-thirty.”
“Yeah. I'll make sure you get there on time,” he said, and he made a long cast off to his right in deeper water.
“I love to sweat,” she said, lying back and showing herself once again to the full sun. “I love to just lie back and sweat.”
The man fished, and the girl sunbathed. The water was as slick as oil, the air thick and still. After a while, the man reeled in his line and removed the silvery spinner and went back to poking through his tackle box. “Where the hell is the damn plug?” he mumbled.
The girl sat up and watched him, his long, dark back twisted toward her, the vanilla bottoms of his feet, the fluttering muscles of his shoulders and arms, when suddenly he yelped and yanked his hand free of the box and put the meat of his hand directly into his mouth. He looked at the girl in rage.
“What? Are you all right?” She slid back in her seat and drew her legs up close to her and wrapped her arms around her knees.
In silence, still sucking on his hand, he reached with the other hand into the tackle box and came back with a pale green and scarlet plug with six double hooks attached to its sides and tail. He held it as if by the head delicately with thumb and forefinger and showed it to her.
The girl grimaced. “Ow! You poor thing.”
He took his hand from his mouth and clipped the plug to his line and cast it toward the island, dropping it about twenty feet from the rocky shore, a ways to the right of a pair of dog-sized boulders. The girl picked up her magazine and began to leaf through the pages, stopping every now and then to examine an advertisement or photograph. Again and again, the man cast the flashing plug into the water and drew it back to the boat, twitching its path from side to side to imitate the motions of an injured, fleeing, pale-colored animal.
Finally, lifting the plug from the water next to the boat, the man said, “Let's go. Old Merle was right, no sense fishing when the fish ain't feeding. The whole point is catching fish, right?” he said, and he removed the plug from the line and tossed it into his open tackle box.
“I suppose so. I don't like fishing anyhow.” Then after a few seconds, as if she were pondering the subject, “But I guess it's relaxing, even if you don't catch anything.”
The man was drawing up the anchor, pulling in the wet rope hand over hand, and finally with a splash he pulled the cinderblock free of the water and set it dripping behind him in the bow of the boat. They had drifted closer to the island now and were in the cooling shade of the thicket of oaks and birches that crowded together over the island. The water was suddenly shallow here, only a few feet deep, and they could see the rocky bottom clearly.