Wolf Point Page 6

  “Because of Lester?”

  “They couldn’t figure out where the hell we were.” She paused and took a breath, as if gathering her thoughts, then gave him a look that announced she was about to tell the story, and he should just relax and listen. “Lester,” she said, starting off slowly. “Lester, who’s never had an entrepreneurial notion in his life, hatches this plan to steal money from these monsters and then he’s going to buy coke and resell it and replace the money, and nobody’s ever going to know about it. Of course he gets ripped off, and when it dawns on him that he’s now a dead man, he comes to my house looking to borrow money so he can run to Canada.”

  “This is a few days ago,” T said.

  “Three days ago now,” she answered. “He’s not there two minutes, at my house— I mean, he just came in the door, a half-dozen bikes and cars come screaming down the drive. I have no idea what’s going on yet, but Lester’s panicked, so I hide him, us, in the wine cellar, which goes back to Prohibition. It’s hidden under a trapdoor under a fake boiler. They never found it, but they tore the house down looking for us. They’re like, We know they’re in here. We saw them go in; we didn’t see them go out. We can hear it all from the wine cellar, where we’re curled up like a couple of rats, scared to death. Eventually they decided we slipped out somehow. After they left, we gathered a few things and ran. We hitched a ride with a trucker into Virginia, and then a perv insurance salesman who couldn’t keep his hands off me took us to Tully, where we spent the last of the money we had between us on breakfast. Then we stood there by the side of the road all day until you picked us up.”

  When she finished her story, T looked away from her, into the fire, at the growing bed of embers, its pulsing red surface crisscrossed with crackling white rivers of heat. He wondered if she would ask him for the money they needed to get straight with the bad guys outright at this point, or if she’d wait for him to offer it. And if he offered right now, he wondered if she’d decline and wait for him to offer again in the morning, to offer perhaps several times, until he was practically begging her to let him help, and then, only then, finally, taking the money reluctantly. He looked into the embers and considered how much he could give her. He knew he’d give her something. He just didn’t know how much yet.

  “Oh my God,” she said, and she touched her mouth with two fingers, as if she might blow him a kiss. “Oh my God,” she repeated. “You don’t believe me. You don’t believe any of it.”

  T was surprised and embarrassed. He lied immediately. “No. Of course I believe you,” he said.

  Her face seemed to collapse, as if a huge tiredness had overcome her. She lay down in front of the fire and curled up inside the quilt. “All right,” she said. “I need to get some sleep.”

  T watched her as she closed her eyes and laid her cheek on the balled-up fabric of the quilt. Above her head, one of the bear’s dog-like ears stood up as if listening for what would happen next. The fire crackled and filled the room with the smell of wood smoke. He touched her shoulder and she opened her eyes to look up at him. He had the urge to tell her how beautiful she was. “Jenny,” he said. “I believe you.”

  She nodded, acknowledging his effort at kindness and at the same time signaling it had no effect. “You know what I’d like?” she whispered, her voice so drained even the volume was gone. “It was nice when you were holding me. Could you just do that for me, please? Could you just hold me till I fall asleep?”

  T gathered the pillows from the bed and crawled under the quilt with her, holding her as he had before, his arms around her, her head on his bicep, but with a pillow now between her head and his skin. She closed her eyes and then opened them again to watch the fire a while in silence, then closed them again. Tears seeped out from under her eyelashes, not drops, just a flow, a thick wetness seeping out, spreading to her cheek, pooling between her eye and the bridge of her nose. With a corner of his pillowcase he wiped the tears away, but said nothing and she said nothing.

  He supposed her story could be true, the whole implausible thing. He doubted it, but, really, he didn’t care. He looked down at the young woman wrapped up with him in a quilt and watched her a while with the palpable sense of holding a mystery in his arms. She twisted around, making herself comfortable, snuggling against his chest, and he saw that she was close to sleep, and then he put his own head down on a pillow on the bear’s head, and closed his eyes, and drifted toward darkness thinking of her as a foreign creature in bed with him, her breath against his chest, amazed—though it was a lesson he had already learned well—amazed still at how rapidly at least the outward circumstances of a life could change.

  He woke to Jenny nuzzling blindly into him for warmth, throwing a leg over his thigh and seemingly attempting to glue the front of her body to the front of his. It took him a second to remember where he was. He had no idea of the time, only that the temperature had dropped significantly and the wind had picked up outside. He could hear a loud soughing in the trees. It felt late. It felt like the deepest hours of the night. In the moonlight through the window on the other side of the room, smoke drifted near the ceiling and moved from side to side with each loud gust of wind. The fire had burned down to quiet embers, and the fiercest gusts of wind were pushing smoke down the flue and into the bedroom. He seemed to remember from fireplaces in the past that this was not a big problem. Still, he thought he should probably open a window an inch or so, and he lifted himself up on one elbow, peeling away from Jenny, who then folded up her body like a child, pulling her knees toward her chest, clamping her legs around her clasped hands, and burrowing down into the layers of rugs.

  In the process of extricating himself from the tangled quilt, he caught a glimpse of Jenny’s body, her breasts framed between her arms, the tight flesh of her stomach, the triangle of her sex where her hands were pushed between her legs. She had shaved herself there in a narrow strip, which he had noticed before, when she had first come into the bedroom from the shower. He had wondered then, as he did again at this moment, why she would shave like that, given it wasn’t the time of year for bikinis. While contemplating her body, he was immensely pleased to feel his own body responding. He unbuttoned his jeans and looked down at a hard and arching erection with a feeling not unlike the pleasure of running unexpectedly into an old friend. It had been a very long time since he had experienced this degree of youthful readiness for sex, and for a moment he seriously considered initiating the act while she was still sleeping, remembering how Brooke had once told him there was nothing she loved better than waking up being fucked. He touched Jenny’s thigh lightly, but as soon as the thought of sex moved out of the realm of the hypothetical and toward the realm of the actual, a voice in the back of his head laughed at him and asked what the hell he thought he was doing. This girl was twenty-three, younger than his own daughter. Considerably younger. Did he believe for one second that she could be genuinely attracted to him? No, he didn’t. With that acknowledgment, his old friend waved good-bye and disappeared. T buttoned up, tucked the quilt around Jenny, and got up to open a window.

  Outside, the trees were trembling in a steady wind, and the river seethed under lines of white foam. He opened the window an inch and then stood a long time with his arms crossed on the windowsill looking out at the night. He tried hard to concentrate on the physical world, the world of trees and rocks, of wind and water. He tried to feel himself as a creature alive in the physical world, an animate being in the phenomenal world, someone to whom anything might happen and capable of setting into effect an infinite sequence of actions. Tom Walker, a human being alive for a stunningly brief span of years on a small planet circling a medium-sized star in an unimaginably massive universe. He tried hard to feel the gift of being alive right then at that moment—and he did. He felt it and was grateful, and was able to hold on to the feeling for a second or two before his thoughts shifted to Alicia, his most recent ex, whom he had met some twenty-four years ago when she was almost exactly the same age as the y
oung woman currently sleeping in front of the fire across the room from him. Moving from one mode of perception to the other, from the metaphysical to the personal, was like walking out of a beautiful countryside and into a prison, and yet he couldn’t help himself. He stared out a cabin window at the Saint Lawrence River on a windy and extraordinary night and thought his pedestrian thoughts about his own life.

  He had met Alicia a little more than a year after Brooke left him. He had an apartment downtown, just outside the old meat-packing district, with a view of the Hudson, and with the help of some friends he knew through Brooke, he had invested enough money in an Off-Broadway play to earn a producer listing, which in turn earned him the right to quietly observe rehearsals. He was still in his early thirties then, and hardly wealthy, but his various businesses were doing well, and to Alicia, he realized, he must have appeared to be rich. She was twenty-two, a little more than a year out of SUNY Purchase, with a BFA, an eight-month-old son, and no child support from the father, who was still in college. She lived with her parents in Massapequa, Long Island, and commuted into the city to work days in a coffee shop and nights on the play while leaving her son, Evan, to be raised by his grandparents. She was a tall woman, taller than T when she wore her hair up, and she had a dancer’s body, muscular and lithe. It wasn’t lost on T that physically she was Brooke’s opposite. The contrast with Brooke was striking in every way. Where Brooke was flighty and unstable, Alicia was focused and resolute. Where Brooke never seemed to know what she wanted or even why she should want anything, which T attributed to her coming from a wealthy family and inheriting wealth, Alicia was superb at focusing on a goal and doing whatever needed to be done to achieve it. When T met her, she was working eight-hour shifts at the coffee shop, grabbing a quick bite to eat and then taking the subway downtown, where she would rehearse all night, sometimes into the early hours of the morning, before catching a ride home with the director, who also lived out on the island. Once T got to know her a little, he started giving her rides home, and they quickly discovered the similarity of their circumstances. T was still principally living in Huntington, Long Island, and raising his six-year-old daughter, Maura, alone, with the help of his mother, who was only too glad to get involved since her husband, T’s father, had died suddenly a few years earlier. By opening night, T and Alicia were spending a couple of evenings a week together alone in his apartment, and most weekends together with the kids, eight-month-old Evan and six-year old Maura. By the time the play closed six months later, a qualified Off-Broadway success, they were married.

  And thus. That was the way his life flowed.

  Alicia, Evan, Maura, and T. For many, many years.

  Maura grew up and married and moved away.

  Evan grew up and went off to college.

  T worked hard. T made money. T grew more and more isolated in his work. He worked, and he worked, and he worked more. The money grew and grew.

  Alicia grew up too, and somewhere along the line, without T noticing, stopped loving him. In time she fell in love with someone else. Another actor. Several years younger. They must have fallen deeply in love. T had no clue. Not until long after his exile to Salem. Not until the papers were all signed and the documents certified and Alicia owned most of what they had previously both owned. Then he found out.

  Looking out the window at the Saint Lawrence, T’s thoughts skittered away from the day Alicia had driven down to Virginia to explain to him, furious and through tears, why he was responsible for all that had transpired, and then lingered on the early years, when her son, Evan, loved him as a father and his daughter, Maura, loved Alicia, if not completely as a mother, since Brooke was still in the picture, then at least as someone terribly important to her, someone she trusted and depended upon. He recalled those many years when the kids were still kids. He remembered the vacations they had taken together, to Greece and Italy, to the Scandinavian countries; he thought of the fjords and the Alps and the Mediterranean. He remembered, in particular, a summery night on Sea Island, off the coast of Georgia, during an August two-week family vacation, walking along the beach at night barefoot and hand in hand with Alicia while Evan ran in and out of the waves and Maura stuck close to Evan, looking after him; and for some reason he remembered the bicycles. Bicycling along the beach was one of the principal vacation activities there, and a bicycle or a group of bicycles would appear regularly in the moonlight, preceded by the sticky sound of tires spinning up sand. It was not a walk during which anything dramatic happened. It was not the night the four of them came across an alligator in the surf and called the Forest Service, and then watched as the creature was captured and hauled away in the back of an SUV. It was an uneventful night: just the four of them on a moonlight walk along a white-sand beach with bicyclists. He held Alicia’s hand. Both the children called him “Daddy.” Evan running back to him with a shell or some sea dreck saying, “Daddy? What’s this?” Maura complaining, “Daddy. Evan’s going in up to his knees!” How small they were then. How different the world.

  Behind him, Jenny made a soft, whimpering sound. She was wrapped up in a little ball, so near to the dead fire she was in danger of going up in flames should the quilt get pushed any closer to the embers. He picked her up easily, a hand under her shoulder and the other under her knees, placed her down gently on the bed, and then covered her with two thick green blankets, which he found on a shelf in the room’s only closet. From the wood carrier he took the last two split logs and placed them over the embers on the andiron. He used more of his New Yorker to get the fire going, then backed away from the hearth toward the middle of the room and took a second to look over the scene: Jenny asleep in a sleigh bed under a pile of blankets in the flickering firelight; the constant hum of the wind around the house and through the trees and over the water; the regular loud gusts of wind beginning as a soft moan and building to screams; the little cloud of smoke, thinner now but still there, hovering near the ceiling; the smell of wood smoke; the chill of cold air against his bare arms; the shadows; the moonlight through the window.

  He considered leaving. It seemed like a good moment to simply walk out of this story. Jenny and Lester go on with their lives. T goes on with his. Instead, he went to the kitchen for a drink of water, the fireplace heat and smoke having parched his throat, and found Lester sitting on the counter by the kitchen window huddled up inside one of the same deep-green blankets he had just put over Jenny. His back was against the wall, his knees were pulled to his chest, and he looked out the window and down to the water as if he hadn’t heard T walk into the kitchen, or the small gasp T made when he first saw the figure of a man wrapped in a blanket sitting on a kitchen counter.

  T said, “How long have you been here?”

  Lester didn’t acknowledge his presence. He stared out the window to the river in silence.

  T poured himself a glass of water from the kitchen sink and nearly choked on the first mouthful, which tasted thick with sulfur. He held the water glass under his nose and then jerked his head back from the unpalatable odor.

  “So,” Lester said, looking at T for the first time, “how was it?”

  “Water’s terrible,” he said. He put the glass down, leaned back against the sink facing Lester, and grasped the counter-top with the palms of his hands. “How was what?”

  “Jenny,” Lester said. “Sleeping with Jenny. How was it?”

  T met Lester’s eyes, which were narrow and glaring, and returned his hard gaze with one sleepy and comfortable.

  Lester turned back to the window. “She doesn’t like it, you know.”

  “Doesn’t like what?”

  “Sex,” he said. “She doesn’t like sex.”

  “She doesn’t? Ever? With anyone?”

  “She’d rather get a tooth pulled. Why? Did she do the whole act for you? Did she have an earthshaking orgasm?” Lester looked as though he were crouched inside his blanket, as if, should he want to, he could leap from the counter. “She did, didn’t she?” he
said, settling the matter. He touched his head back against the wall and looked up, in the direction of the moon. “Forget it,” he added. “It was an act. It hurts her, physically. Her vagina actually physically hurts when she has sex.”

  “She told you that?” T said. “What? Always? It’s always hurt her to have sex?”

  Lester said, “You think you know something about Jenny?” He shook his head, as if despairing of T’s ignorance.

  “I don’t think I know anything about Jenny.” T took a step toward Lester and then stood there awkwardly in the middle of the kitchen.

  “Fuck,” Lester said, as if too disgusted to continue the conversation. He covered his face with his hands. “I’m tired.”

  T watched him a moment longer, then started aimlessly out of the kitchen toward the living room before noticing the guitar case propped up against the wall. He touched the hard plastic shell, running his fingers over one of the metal snaps. “Are you a musician?” he asked.

  Lester shook his head.

  “What’s in the guitar case?”

  “Red guitar.” He took his hands away from his face. “It’s valuable.” He turned his back to the window and slid his legs off the counter. “I’ll sleep on the couch,” he said, and then paused a moment, thoughtfully. “I just wanted you to know about Jenny. I’m not bullshitting you. I lived with her for a year. I watched her go through all her stuff.”

  “All what stuff?”

  Lester pulled the blanket around him and hunched his shoulders as if he were cold. “Just— I know a little bit about her,” he said. “It hurts her to have sex. It’s one of the reasons we split up. I mean, she’d do it, for me, but I was like—” He slid down from the counter. “I just thought you should know.”

  T said, “I didn’t have sex with Jenny.”

  “Please.” Lester tugged at his blanket. “I got this out of your closet. I walked right past you.”