Wolf Point Page 4

  T was older now than Carolyn had been then, though not a lot older. She never had told him her exact age while they were together. It was only after she died and her obituary was written up in the alumni magazine that he figured out she had been in her early fifties during the college years of their affair, an affair that kept going on and off right up until a few days before he married Brooke, when Carolyn would have been fifty-seven, his age at the very moment, a moment in which he was looking out at the Saint Lawrence on a mild October night, gazing at a river full of memories of her. She was an extraordinary woman: brilliant, funny, compassionate, sexual, daring, loving. She knew she risked everything in having an affair with him. “An undergraduate!” she would say. “My God! Am I crazy?” She made him laugh. He was a long-haired kid posturing as a poet and artist, which was an amazingly common pose for the time. She was a poet and a scholar who knew everything there was to know about William Butler Yeats, and a lot of what there was to know about everything else. He wore sandals and jeans and wrinkled Ts in summer, and boots and jeans and wrinkled flannel shirts in winter. He went unshaven for days, occasionally grew a beard, and always looked ragged. She wore pressed khaki slacks and starched colored blouses, and always looked neat and well groomed. People who saw them together off campus assumed mother and wayward son. On campus, professor and student. No one would have dreamed they were lovers. Secrecy was the affair’s admission price. She had made that very clear, and though he would have loved to advertise to his handful of friends the fact that he was sleeping with one of the school’s most respected professors, he didn’t. He kept the secret all his life. Not his wives or children or friends, no one knew, then or now. Looking out at the river and remembering Carolyn Wald was like looking into himself and remembering a secret.

  After his arrest in September 2000, he had spent several more months in New York while his life unraveled— exploded is more accurate, it happened with such rapidity—and then moved to Salem, Virginia, after initialing a series of complex legal agreements by which he avoided incarceration; and after only a few weeks in his new home, Islamic terrorists flew two passenger planes into the World Trade Center’s twin towers. His first wife, Brooke, called him at 8:30 in the morning on September 11, waking him from a sound sleep. Brooke had always been unpredictable. A short, plump woman with limp brown hair and a pudgy face, she possessed an impressive intellect that seemed to do nothing but cause her trouble. She spent half her life going back and forth between therapists and doctors, and he spent most of his life with her waiting for whatever erratic and disruptive thing she’d do next. He had reconnected with her in the most intense period of publicity soon after the arrest. She had never stopped feeling guilty about walking out on him and their daughter a few days before Maura’s fifth birthday, simply disappearing one day and leaving him to figure out what the hell had happened. Reentering his life during a period when no one else wanted anything to do with him was her way of making amends. He appreciated it and probably talked to her more during those few months than in all the years of their marriage, so when she called that morning he was only mildly surprised.

  “Are you watching this?”she said.

  “What?” he said. “Watching what?” He was standing at the kitchen counter in his pajamas, looking out a bay window at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains aflame in fall red and orange. It was a beautiful autumn day, the sky a clear, crisp blue. “I was sleeping,” he said.

  She said, “Turn on the television. We’re under attack.”

  T’s first assumption was that Brooke had gone off her medication and was in the midst of another crisis. He turned on the television and there were the gleaming facades of the twin towers majestic against the same crisp and clear blue sky he saw out his own kitchen window, the top of the north tower blackened by smoke spilling out of an ugly gash. He put the phone down on the coffee table, not realizing he was hanging up on Brooke. He was in Salem, Virginia, a part of the world he had never even heard of until one of his lawyers had recommended it as a place where he might retreat and regroup and incidentally honor his legally binding promise to move out of New York. He was in Salem, Virginia, watching a televised attack on New York, with everyone he had ever loved far away from him or gone forever. Then, it seemed, he spent the next several months in front of the television set—the months of the anthrax attacks and the Afghan war—and during all that time he found himself thinking again and again of Carolyn Wald reading him poems as they floated along riverways lined with high weeds, listening to catbirds and sparrows while they fished for bass and pike and she read him her favorite poems by Hopkins and Yeats, Dickinson and Roethke and Stevens and scores of poets whose names he no longer remembered.

  Her favorite Yeats poem was “The Second Coming,” and the first time she had read it to him was at the very beginning of the affair. She had a house in the Syracuse countryside, a big, lovely, sprawling home three times the size any one person might need, filled with art and antiques and wall upon wall of hardcover books. On weekends she often had students out to the house for dinner parties, and it was after one of those parties, on a snowy winter night in front of her fireplace, on a soft-textured, thick-piled rug, that she had knelt over him and placed the flat of her hands on his chest while he was lying on his back watching the flames sputter and jump, everyone else gone, only the two of them in the house. She recited the opening lines of the poem and he offered her a pleasant smile in return, as if amused but really not knowing what to make of her behavior. She was his professor. He was half in love with her, in the way students fall in love with professors they both like and admire and who engagingly return their affection. He was twenty, in the midst of the third literature course he had taken with her, a veteran of a dozen of her dinner parties, the student who came early to help prepare and stayed late to help clean up. From the spot where he lay comfortably by the hearth, he could see the fire to the left of him, and to the right, through a bay window, snow floating fat and thick, bright flakes drifting down through the beam of an exterior light. She pushed his hair away from his eyes and recited the poem as she undid the buttons of his shirt and pushed his undershirt up to lay her hands flat against the hard muscles of his chest. “Things fall apart,” she said, and crossed her arms to grasp the bottom of her sweater and pull it off over her head, tousling her hair. She kissed him on the mouth then and proceeded to remove his clothes and her own and to make love to him there in front of the fire, without him ever moving off his back from the moment she lowered herself over him to the moment she fell against his chest, the top of her head under his chin. He held her against him, running his fingers over the waves of her spine, and innocently whispered that he loved her.

  In front of him, on the water, the big cargo ship slipped out of sight.

  “That you?” Jenny’s voice came from behind T.

  He jumped, but probably not enough for her to notice in the dark. She stood above him on a narrow ledge of rock, her arms thrust out like a tightrope walker. A gust of wind blew back her hair, and he was struck by the high, sloping curve of her forehead, the way her hairline started way up in her crown. The effect somehow made her look especially intelligent, which in turn made her all the more attractive balancing there like a girl playing on the rocks in moonlight.

  “You’re brooding,” she said, and climbed down to sit beside him. “It’s very romantic.”

  “I thought I’d let you sleep,” he said. “You both fell out like you hadn’t slept in days.”

  “Hadn’t,” she said. Her blouse was buttoned up to the neck. She grasped her shoulders with her hands, huddled into herself, and shivered. “Jeez,” she said. “I remember this little inlet like it was a mountain overlooking the ocean. It’s so small.”

  “I’d offer you my jacket if I had one. You look cold.”

  “I bet you that sweater’s warm,” she said.

  T started to take off the sweater, and Jenny touched his hand to stop him. “I’m only kidding with you,�
�� she said. “Don’t take me so seriously.”

  “Why wouldn’t I take you seriously?” He pulled the sweater off and then carefully pushed it over her head and onto her shoulders, holding his hands inside the neck hole and stretching it out so that it would go on easily. When he was close to her, leaning over her, once he had pushed the sweater over the thick profusion of her hair, she tossed her head a little to move the hair away from her eyes and leaned slightly toward him, as if expecting a kiss.

  T backed away. He had on a black cotton T. He rubbed his bare arms for warmth.

  “Thank you,” Jenny said. She touched his chest, laying a hand under his collar bone. “You’re really muscled,” she said. “You’ve got to be working out with weights.”

  “Used to,” he said. He looked back toward the line of cabins beyond the inlet. “So what’s the story with this place? I peeked in the window. It’s nice. Who’s Chuck?”

  “My uncle,” Jenny said. “How’d you know his name?”

  “Guy where I got directions. He said he hadn’t been here for a while.”

  “Wouldn’t’ve. Busy man.”

  “And?” T said. “It would be cruel and unusual not to unravel any of this for me. I mean, I’ve been a good guy, haven’t I? You’re not going to make me just drive away without—”

  “Why do you have to drive away?” she said. She pouted, dramatically. “Would you leave me here all alone with Lester?”

  “I thought that was the deal,” he said. “I deliver you, and—”

  “But you don’t have to,” she said. “There’s plenty of room.” She put her hand on his knee. “You could stay.”

  “You want me to stay?” T put his hand over hers. “You want me to spend the night here with you and Lester?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Okay,” she said, serious. “Because you have money. Because you have a car. Because we’re in trouble, and, honestly—” She hesitated a moment, apparently considering her words. “Maybe you were supposed to pick me up on the side of the road. You sure as hell wouldn’t have come into my life any other way.”

  T said, “You think that you were destined to meet me?”

  “Maybe.”

  T wasn’t at all sure what they were talking about anymore. “Let’s—” he pressed on. “Let’s get some things out of the way.”

  “Like?”

  “Why are you in trouble? What’s the life-threatening danger?”

  “That’s all Lester,” she said. “I swear. And it’s too long a story for out here.” She looked back to the car. “Let’s wake up Sleeping Idiot and I’ll tell you inside.”

  “How about a short version?” T said. “Anything. A few clues.”

  She stood up and offered him a hand. “Lester stole money from people you’d have to be crazy to steal money from— ‘axis-of-evil’ types. He came to my place and before he was in the house five minutes, the guys he was running from showed up. That was three days ago and we’ve been hiding and moving ever since.”

  T took her hand and pulled himself up. “But you—” he said. “You didn’t have anything to do with it?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I was getting myself back together after a whole bunch of my own trouble. I just bought my house. I was back in school.” She suddenly sounded angry. “Don’t let’s go through the whole thing right now,” she said. “There’s plenty of time.” She started up the rocky incline, leaving T to follow.

  At the Rover, T tried to wake Lester, gave up, and then turned his attention to finding a lightweight hooded jacket he knew was somewhere in the vehicle. He found it next to his suitcase and put it on.

  Jenny shouted in Lester’s ear. “Asshole!” she screamed. “Wake up!”

  Lester partially sat up. “All right, all right,” he mumbled. “Jesus. Give me a second.” Then he lay down again and closed his eyes.

  “The hell with him,” Jen said. “Let him sleep out here.” She slammed the door and started up the hill for the cabin, then turned around after a few steps and came back for her purse in the front seat. “Are you going to stand there looking at him?” she asked T, who had one foot up on the frame in the open back door and was looking down at Lester, trying to decide what to do with him.

  T closed the door and stood a moment in the dark watching Jenny as she started again to climb the hill. The red of her pants deepened to wine in the moonlight as she moved with long, angry steps through the black moon shadows of tree branches. His sweater was huge on her and hung loosely from her shoulders. Her pants were molded to her body. A gust of wind off the river ruffled her hair, and she turned around in a pool of moonlight. T was still standing by the Rover, watching her. She looked down at him for several long seconds, her hands on her hips at first, then crossed in front her, watching him watch her.

  T hesitated a second longer before he grabbed her backpack, and then went around the car and climbed the hill.

  “I must seem like a real bitch to you,” she said, turning to continue toward the cabin as he joined her, “the way I’m doing Les.”

  “Not really, “he said.

  She stopped at the top of the hill and looked out over the water. “It’s beautiful here. Isn’t it?” She gestured to the wide expanse of moonlit river below them.

  T stepped in front of her, closer to the ridge, and crouched down, touching the grass with his open hand as he looked below to the Saint Lawrence. “I used to come here as a young man,” he said. “When I was in college.”

  “Where’d you go?” she asked, then crouched alongside him and pointed down the hill. “Is that a boat?”

  T didn’t see the boat at first but then found it nestled between a pair of rocks, its bow snug against the shore. It was an old V-hull aluminum, fourteen-, maybe sixteen-footer. No oars, no engine. “Looks like it,” he said, and he stood and took her arm lightly, continuing toward the cabin.

  Jenny leaned into him, as if nuzzling against him for warmth. “So where’d you go to college?” she asked again.

  “Syracuse University,” T said. He put his arm around her.

  “You’re sweet,” she said.

  “I’m counting my blessings,” he answered cryptically, not sure himself exactly what he meant.

  At the cabin door, Jenny rummaged through her purse, found a key, and struggled with the lock for several seconds before the mechanism finally relented with a dull click. T reached around her, turned the knob, and pushed open the door.

  “Shit.” She flipped a light switch several times with no effect. “Too much to hope for,” she said. She looked back to T. “You bummed?”

  “About what? No electricity?” He moved past her into the living room and tossed her backpack onto the cushions of a rustic wood-frame couch, sending up a small mushroom cloud of dust.

  “Jesus Christ,” Jenny said, closing the door. “The place is filthy. And it’s cold.”

  “It’s not bad,” he said. “Why don’t you see if there’s blankets and bedding?” He went into the kitchen and tried the sink. “We’ve got running water,” he called as Jenny disappeared down the hallway.

  “Plenty of bedding,” her voice came back to him. Then she appeared in the kitchen doorway holding an armful of blankets and sheets. “Will you stay?”

  “Sure. Why not?” He turned the kitchen faucet on and off. “No hot water, though.”

  “Damn. I was looking forward to—” She looked at the counter. “Is that from mice?” she asked.

  “Afraid so.”

  “God,” she said. “I hate mice. I know it’s girly, but—You don’t think there’s rats?”

  “Just field mice, I’m sure,” T said. “They get in during winter.”

  Jenny looked suddenly and deeply unhappy.

  “Go make the beds,” T said. “I’ll clean up in here.” He knelt and opened the cabinets under the sink. “Look at this.” He pulled out a blue plastic pail overfl
owing with cleaning supplies. “We’re in business.”

  Jenny watched him quietly as he went about dampening a rag and wiping off the counters. She stood in the doorway piled down with bedding. “You don’t have to do that,” she said.

  He pushed the mouse droppings off the countertop and into the trash pail he had found under the sink. “I don’t mind,” he said, and then stopped when he realized she was standing with her arms full of bedding observing him as if amazed by his behavior and slightly wary, as if she were watching a large foreign animal in the kitchen and wasn’t at all sure it might not turn on her. He tried to reassure her. “I wasn’t going anyplace,” he said. “I’m having fun here.” He pointed toward the bedrooms. “Go. Go make the beds.”

  While she was busy in the bedrooms, T finished wiping down the counters and then dusted the furniture. He took the couch and chair cushions outside to bang them into each other and slap them with the handle of a broom he had found in the otherwise empty kitchen pantry, and then he went about sweeping the dusty floors. He liked cleaning. Something about the mindless, repetitive swirl of activity calmed him. Mornings, while the coffee brewed, he liked to wash the few plates and cups from the prior evening’s snacking. He liked the feel of warm water running over his hands while he turned a ceramic cup or plate, going over it with a soft, soapy sponge. He enjoyed doing things with an empty head, and cleaning was the right activity for that, requiring just enough attention to pass the time outside himself. And then, when he was done, there were results. Things were clean, and neat, and in order.